George Orwell - The Essential Works of George Orwell

“My dear Dorothy, you ought to have been a Nonconformist. You really ought. A Plymouth Brother—or a Plymouth Sister or whatever it’s called. I think your favourite hymn must be Number 567, ‘O my God I fear Thee, Thou art very High!’ ”

“Yours is Number 231, ‘I nightly pitch my moving tent a day’s march nearer Rome!’ ” retorted Dorothy, winding the thread round the fourth and last button.

The argument continued for several minutes while Dorothy adorned a Cavalier’s beaver hat (it was an old black felt school hat of her own) with plume and ribbons. She and Victor were never long together without being involved in an argument upon the question of “ritualism.” In Dorothy’s opinion Victor was of a kind to “go over to Rome” if not prevented, and she was very likely right. But Victor was not yet aware of his probable destiny. At present the fevers of the Anglo-Catholic movement, with its ceaseless exciting warfare on three fronts at once—Protestants to right of you, Modernists to left of you, and, unfortunately, Roman Catholics to rear of you and always ready for a sly kick in the pants—filled his mental horizon. Scoring off Dr. Major in the Church Times meant more to him than any of the serious business of life. But for all his churchiness he had not an atom of real piety in his constitution. It was essentially as a game that religious controversy appealed to him—the most absorbing game ever invented, because it goes on for ever and because just a little cheating is allowed.

“Thank goodness, that’s done!” said Dorothy, twiddling the Cavalier’s beaver hat round on her hand and then putting it down. “Oh dear, what piles of things there are still to do, though! I wish I could get those wretched jackboots off my mind. What’s the time, Victor?”

“It’s nearly five to one.”

“Oh, good gracious! I must run. I’ve got three omelettes to make. I daren’t trust them to Ellen. And, oh, Victor! Have you got anything you can give us for the jumble sale? If you had an old pair of trousers you could give us, that would be best of all, because we can always sell trousers.”

“Trousers? No. But I tell you what I have got, though. I’ve got a copy of the The Pilgrim’s Progress and another of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that I’ve been wanting to get rid of for years. Beastly Protestant trash! An old dissenting aunt of mine gave them to me.—Doesn’t it make you sick, all this cadging for pennies? Now, if we only held our services in a proper, Catholic way, so that we could get up a proper congregation, don’t you see, we shouldn’t need——”

“That’ll be splendid,” said Dorothy. “We always have a stall for books—we charge a penny for each book, and nearly all of them get sold. We simply must make that jumble sale a success, Victor! I’m counting on Miss Mayfill to give us something really nice. What I’m specially hoping is that she might give us that beautiful old Lowestoft china tea service of hers, and we could sell it for five pounds at least. I’ve been making special prayers all the morning that she’ll give it to us.”

“Oh?” said Victor, less enthusiastically than usual. Like Proggett earlier in the morning, he was embarrassed by the word “prayer.” He was ready to talk all day long about a point of ritual; but the mention of private devotions struck him as slightly indecent. “Don’t forget to ask your father about the procession,” he said, getting back to a more congenial topic.

“All right, I’ll ask him. But you know how it’ll be. He’ll only get annoyed and say it’s Roman Fever.”

“Oh, damn Roman Fever!” said Victor, who, unlike Dorothy, did not set himself penances for swearing.

Dorothy hurried to the kitchen, discovered that there were only five eggs to make omelettes for three people, and decided to make one large omelette and swell it out a bit with the cold boiled potatoes left over from yesterday. With a short prayer for the success of the omelette (for omelettes are so dreadfully apt to get broken when you take them out of the pan), she whipped up the eggs, while Victor made off down the drive, half wistfully and half sulkily humming “Hail thee, Festival Day,” and passing on his way a disgusted-looking manservant carrying the two handleless chamber-pots which were Miss Mayfill’s contribution to the jumble sale.

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It was a little after ten o’clock. Various things had happened—nothing, however, of any particular importance; only the usual round of parish jobs that filled up Dorothy’s afternoon and evening. Now, as she had arranged earlier in the day, she was at Mr. Warburton’s house, and was trying to hold her own in one of those meandering arguments in which he delighted to entangle her.

They were talking—but indeed, Mr. Warburton never failed to manœuvre the conversation towards this subject—about the question of religious belief.

“My dear Dorothy,” he was saying argumentatively, as he walked up and down with one hand in his coat pocket and the other manipulating a Brazilian cigar. “My dear Dorothy, you don’t seriously mean to tell me that at your age—twenty-seven, I believe—and with your intelligence, you still retain your religious beliefs more or less in toto?”

“Of course I do. You know I do.”

“Oh, come, now! The whole bag of tricks? All that nonsense that you learned at your mother’s knee—surely you’re not going to pretend to me that you still believe in it? But of course you don’t! You can’t! You’re afraid to own up, that’s all it is. No need to worry about that here, you know. The Rural Dean’s wife isn’t listening, and I won’t give the show away.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘all that nonsense,’ ” began Dorothy, sitting up straighter in her chair, a little offended.

“Well, let’s take an instance. Something particularly hard to swallow—Hell, for instance. Do you believe in Hell? When I say believe, mind you, I’m not asking whether you believe it in some milk and water metaphorical way like these Modernist bishops young Victor Stone gets so excited about. I mean do you believe in it literally? Do you believe in Hell as you believe in Australia?”

“Yes, of course I do,” said Dorothy, and she endeavoured to explain to him that the existence of Hell is much more real and permanent than the existence of Australia.

“Hm,” said Mr. Warburton, unimpressed. “Very sound in its way, of course. But what always makes me so suspicious of you religious people is that you’re so deucedly cold-blooded about your beliefs. It shows a very poor imagination, to say the least of it. Here am I, an infidel and blasphemer and neck deep in at least six out of the Seven Deadly, and obviously doomed to eternal torment. There’s no knowing that in an hour’s time I mayn’t be roasting in the hottest part of Hell. And yet you can sit there talking to me as calmly as though I’d nothing the matter with me. Now, if I’d merely got cancer or leprosy or some other bodily ailment, you’d be quite distressed about it—at least, I like to flatter myself that you would. Whereas, when I’m going to sizzle on the grid throughout eternity, you seem positively unconcerned about it.”

“I never said you were going to Hell,” said Dorothy somewhat uncomfortably, and wishing that the conversation would take a different turn. For the truth was, though she was not going to tell him so, that the point Mr. Warburton had raised was one with which she herself had had certain difficulties. She did indeed believe in Hell, but she had never been able to persuade herself that anyone actually went there. She believed that Hell existed, but that it was empty. Uncertain of the orthodoxy of this belief, she preferred to keep it to herself. “It’s never certain that anyone is going to Hell,” she said more firmly, feeling that here at least she was on sure ground.