“I’ve hardly looked at a paper for ages. Who brought an action for libel? Not my father, surely?”
“Good gracious, no! Clergymen can’t bring actions for libel. It was the bank manager. Do you remember her favourite story about him—how he was keeping a woman on the bank’s money, and so forth?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“A few months ago she was foolish enough to put some of it in writing. Some kind friend—some female friend, I presume—took the letter round to the bank manager. He brought an action—Mrs. Semprill was ordered to pay a hundred and fifty pounds damages. I don’t suppose she paid a halfpenny, but still, that’s the end of her career as a scandalmonger. You can go on blackening people’s reputations for years, and everyone will believe you, more or less, even when it’s perfectly obvious that you’re lying. But once you’ve been proved a liar in open court, you’re disqualified, so to speak. Mrs. Semprill’s done for, so far as Knype Hill goes. She left the town between days—practically did a moonlight flit, in fact. I believe she’s inflicting herself on Bury St. Edmunds at present.”
“But what has all that got to do with the things she said about you and me?”
“Nothing—nothing whatever. But why worry? The point is that you’re reinstated; and all the hags who’ve been smacking their chops over you for months past are saying, ‘Poor, poor Dorothy, how shockingly that dreadful woman has treated her!’ ”
“You mean they think that because Mrs. Semprill was telling lies in one case she must have been telling lies in another?”
“No doubt that’s what they’d say if they were capable of reasoning it out. At any rate, Mrs. Semprill’s in disgrace, and so all the people she’s slandered must be martyrs. Even my reputation is practically spotless for the time being.”
“And do you think that’s really the end of it? Do you think they honestly believe that it was all an accident—that I only lost my memory and didn’t elope with anybody?”
“Oh, well, I wouldn’t go as far as that. In these country places there’s always a certain amount of suspicion knocking about. Not suspicion of anything in particular, you know; just generalised suspicion. A sort of instinctive rustic dirty-mindedness. I can imagine its being vaguely rumoured in the bar parlour of the Dog and Bottle in ten years’ time that you’ve got some nasty secret in your past, only nobody can remember what. Still, your troubles are over. If I were you I wouldn’t give any explanations till you’re asked for them. The official theory is that you had a bad attack of flu and went away to recuperate. I should stick to that. You’ll find they’ll accept it all right. Officially, there’s nothing against you.”
Presently they got to London, and Mr. Warburton took Dorothy to lunch at a restaurant in Coventry Street, where they had a young chicken, roasted, with asparagus and tiny, pearly-white potatoes that had been ripped untimely from their mother earth, and also treacle tart and a nice warm bottle of Burgundy; but what gave Dorothy the most pleasure of all, after Mrs. Creevy’s lukewarm watery tea, was the black coffee they had afterwards. After lunch they took another taxi to Liverpool Street station and caught the 2.45. It was a four-hour journey to Knype Hill.
Mr. Warburton insisted on travelling first-class, and would not hear of Dorothy paying her own fare; he also, when Dorothy was not looking, tipped the guard to let them have a carriage to themselves. It was one of those bright cold days which are spring or winter according as you are indoors or out. From behind the shut windows of the carriage the too-blue sky looked warm and kind, and all the slummy wilderness through which the train was rattling—the labyrinths of little dingy-coloured houses, the great chaotic factories, the miry canals and derelict building lots littered with rusty boilers and overgrown by smoke-blackened weeds—all were redeemed and gilded by the sun. Dorothy hardly spoke for the first half-hour of the journey. For the moment she was too happy to talk. She did not even think of anything in particular, but merely sat there luxuriating in the glass-filtered sunlight, in the comfort of the padded seat and the feeling of having escaped from Mrs. Creevy’s clutches. But she was aware that this mood could not last very much longer. Her contentment, like the warmth of the wine that she had drunk at lunch, was ebbing away, and thoughts either painful or difficult to express were taking shape in her mind. Mr. Warburton had been watching her face, more observantly than was usual with him, as though trying to gauge the changes that the past eight months had worked in her.
“You look older,” he said finally.
“I am older,” said Dorothy.
“Yes; but you look—well, more completely grown up. Tougher. Something has changed in your face. You look—if you’ll forgive the expression—as though the Girl Guide had been exorcised from you for good and all. I hope seven devils haven’t entered into you instead?” Dorothy did not answer, and he added: “I suppose, as a matter of fact, you must have had the very devil of a time?”
“Oh, beastly! Sometimes too beastly for words. Do you know that sometimes——”
She paused. She had been about to tell him how she had had to beg for her food; how she had slept in the streets; how she had been arrested for begging and spent a night in the police cells; how Mrs. Creevy had nagged at her and starved her. But she stopped, because she had suddenly realised that these were not the things that she wanted to talk about. Such things as these, she perceived, are of no real importance; they are mere irrelevant accidents, not essentially different from catching a cold in the head or having to wait two hours at a railway junction. They are disagreeable, but they do not matter. The truism that all real happenings are in the mind struck her more forcibly than ever before, and she said:
“Those things don’t really matter. I mean, things like having no money and not having enough to eat. Even when you’re practically starving—it doesn’t change anything inside you.”
“Doesn’t it? I’ll take your word for it. I should be very sorry to try.”
“Oh, well, it’s beastly while it’s happening, of course; but it doesn’t make any real difference; it’s the things that happen inside you that matter.”
“Meaning?” said Mr. Warburton.
“Oh—things change in your mind. And then the whole world changes, because you look at it differently.”
She was still looking out of the window. The train had drawn clear of the eastern slums and was running at gathering speed past willow-bordered streams and low-lying meadows upon whose hedges the first buds made a faint soft greenness, like a cloud. In a field near the line a month-old calf, flat as a Noah’s Ark animal, was bounding stiff-legged after its mother, and in a cottage garden an old labourer, with slow, rheumatic movements, was turning over the soil beneath a pear tree covered with ghostly bloom. His spade flashed in the sun as the train passed. The depressing hymn-line “Change and decay in all around I see” moved through Dorothy’s mind. It was true what she had said just now. Something had happened in her heart, and the world was a little emptier, a little poorer from that minute. On such a day as this, last spring or any earlier spring, how joyfully, and how unthinkingly, she would have thanked God for the first blue skies and the first flowers of the reviving year! And now, seemingly, there was no God to thank, and nothing—not a flower or a stone or a blade of grass—nothing in the universe would ever be the same again.
“Things change in your mind,” she repeated. “I’ve lost my faith,” she added, somewhat abruptly, because she found herself half ashamed to utter the words.
“You’ve lost your what?” said Mr. Warburton, less accustomed than she to this kind of phraseology.
“My faith. Oh, you know what I mean! A few months ago, all of a sudden, it seemed as if my whole mind had