“Oh, no, you won’t!” said Mr. Warburton cheerfully. “Not a bit of it! I’ll come with you.”
As she wheeled her bicycle down the street he marched at her side, still talking, with his large chest well forward and his stick tucked under his arm. He was a difficult man to shake off, and though Dorothy counted him as a friend, she did sometimes wish, he being the town scandal and she the Rector’s daughter, that he would not always choose the most public places to talk to her in. At this moment, however, she was rather grateful for his company, which made it appreciably easier to pass Cargill’s shop—for Cargill was still on his doorstep and was regarding her with a sidelong, meaning gaze.
“It was a bit of luck my meeting you this morning,” Mr. Warburton went on. “In fact, I was looking for you. Who do you think I’ve got coming to dinner with me to-night? Bewley—Ronald Bewley. You’ve heard of him, of course?”
“Ronald Bewley? No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“Why, dash it! Ronald Bewley, the novelist. Author of Fishpools and Concubines. Surely you’ve read Fishpools and Concubines?”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t. In fact, I’d never even heard of it.”
“My dear Dorothy! You have been neglecting yourself. You certainly ought to read Fishpools and Concubines. It’s hot stuff, I assure you—real high-class pornography. Just the kind of thing you need to take the taste of the Girl Guides out of your mouth.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t say such things!” said Dorothy, looking away uncomfortably, and then immediately looking back again because she had all but caught Cargill’s eye. “Where does this Mr. Bewley live?” she added. “Not here, surely, does he?”
“No. He’s coming over from Ipswich for dinner, and perhaps to stay the night. That’s why I was looking for you. I thought you might like to meet him. How about your coming to dinner to-night?”
“I can’t possibly come to dinner,” said Dorothy. “I’ve got Father’s supper to see to, and thousands of other things. I shan’t be free till eight o’clock or after.”
“Well, come along after dinner, then. I’d like you to know Bewley. He’s an interesting fellow—very au fait with all the Bloomsbury scandal, and all that. You’ll enjoy meeting him. It’ll do you good to escape from the church hen-coop for a few hours.”
Dorothy hesitated. She was tempted. To tell the truth, she enjoyed her occasional visits to Mr. Warburton’s house extremely. But of course they were very occasional—once in three or four months at the oftenest; it so obviously didn’t do to associate too freely with such a man. And even when she did go to his house she was careful to make sure beforehand that there was going to be at least one other visitor.
Two years earlier, when Mr. Warburton had first come to Knype Hill (at that time he was posing as a widower with two children; a little later, however, the housekeeper suddenly gave birth to a third child in the middle of the night), Dorothy had met him at a tea-party and afterwards called on him. Mr. Warburton had given her a delightful tea, talked amusingly about books, and then, immediately after tea, sat down beside her on the sofa and begun making love to her, violently, outrageously, even brutally. It was practically an assault. Dorothy was horrified almost out of her wits, though not too horrified to resist. She escaped from him and took refuge on the other side of the sofa, white, shaking and almost in tears. Mr. Warburton, on the other hand, was quite unashamed and even seemed rather amused.
“Oh, how could you, how could you?” she sobbed.
“But it appears that I couldn’t,” said Mr. Warburton.
“Oh, but how could you be such a brute?”
“Oh, that? Easily, my child, easily. You will understand that when you get to my age.”
In spite of this bad beginning, a sort of friendship had grown up between the two, even to the extent of Dorothy being “talked about” in connection with Mr. Warburton. It did not take much to get you “talked about” in Knype Hill. She only saw him at long intervals and took the greatest care never to be alone with him, but even so he found opportunities of making casual love to her. But it was done in a gentlemanly fashion; the previous disagreeable incident was not repeated. Afterwards, when he was forgiven, Mr. Warburton had explained that he “always tried it on” with every presentable woman he met.
“Don’t you get rather a lot of snubs?” Dorothy could not help asking him.
“Oh, certainly. But I get quite a number of successes as well, you know.”
People wondered sometimes how such a girl as Dorothy could consort, even occasionally, with such a man as Mr. Warburton; but the hold that he had over her was the hold that the blasphemer and evil-liver always has over the pious. It is a fact—you have only to look about you to verify it—that the pious and the immoral drift naturally together. The best brothel-scenes in literature have been written, without exception, by pious believers or pious unbelievers. And of course Dorothy, born into the twentieth century, made a point of listening to Mr. Warburton’s blasphemies as calmly as possible; it is fatal to flatter the wicked by letting them see that you are shocked by them. Besides, she was genuinely fond of him. He teased her and distressed her, and yet she got from him, without being fully aware of it, a species of sympathy and understanding which she could not get elsewhere. For all his vices he was distinctly likeable, and the shoddy brilliance of his conversation—Oscar Wilde seven times watered—which she was too inexperienced to see through, fascinated while it shocked her. Perhaps, too, in this instance, the prospect of meeting the celebrated Mr. Bewley had its effect upon her; though certainly Fishpools and Concubines sounded like the kind of book that she either didn’t read or else set herself heavy penances for reading. In London, no doubt, one would hardly cross the road to see fifty novelists; but these things appear differently in places like Knype Hill.
“Are you sure Mr. Bewley is coming?” she said.
“Quite sure. And his wife’s coming as well, I believe. Full chaperonage. No Tarquin and Lucrece business this evening.”
“All right,” said Dorothy finally; “thanks very much. I’ll come round—about half past eight, I expect.”
“Good. If you can manage to come while it is still daylight, so much the better. Remember that Mrs. Semprill is my next-door neighbour. We can count on her to be on the qui vive any time after sundown.”
Mrs. Semprill was the town scandalmonger—the most eminent, that is, of the town’s many scandalmongers. Having got what he wanted (he was constantly pestering Dorothy to come to his house more often), Mr. Warburton said au revoir and left Dorothy to do the remainder of her shopping.
In the semi-gloom of Solepipe’s shop, she was just moving away from the counter with her two and a half yards of casement cloth, when she was aware of a low, mournful voice at her ear. It was Mrs. Semprill. She was a slender woman of forty, with a lank, sallow, distinguished face, which, with her glossy dark hair and air of settled melancholy, gave her something the appearance of a Van Dyck portrait. Entrenched behind a pile of cretonnes near the window, she had been watching Dorothy’s conversation with Mr. Warburton. Whenever you were doing something that you did not particularly want Mrs. Semprill to see you doing, you could trust her to be somewhere in the neighbourhood. She seemed to have the power of materialising like an Arabian jinneeyeh at any place where she was not wanted. No indiscretion, however small, escaped her vigilance. Mr. Warburton used to say that she was like the four beasts of the Apocalypse—“They are full of eyes, you remember, and they rest not night nor day.”
“Dorothy dearest,” murmured Mrs. Semprill in the sorrowful, affectionate voice of someone breaking a piece of bad news as gently as possible. “I’ve been so wanting to speak to you. I’ve something simply dreadful to tell you—something that will really horrify you!”
“What is it?” said Dorothy resignedly, well knowing what was coming—for Mrs. Semprill had only one subject of conversation.
They