“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.
VI
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.
“What!” said Mr. Warburton, halting in mock surprise. “Surely you don’t mean to say that there’s hope for me yet?”
“Of course there is. It’s only those horrid Predestination people who pretend that you go to Hell whether you repent or not. You don’t think the Church of England are Calvinists, do you?”
“I suppose there’s always the chance of getting off on a plea of Invincible Ignorance,” said Mr. Warburton reflectively; and then, more confidentially: “Do you know, Dorothy, I’ve a sort of feeling that even now, after knowing me two years, you’ve still half an idea you can make a convert of me. A lost sheep—brand plucked from the burning, and all that. I believe you still hope against hope that one of these days my eyes will be opened and you’ll meet me at Holy Communion at seven o’clock on some damned cold winter morning. Don’t you?”
“Well——” said Dorothy, again uncomfortably. She did, in fact, entertain some such hope about Mr. Warburton, though he was not exactly a promising case for conversion. It was not in her nature to see a fellow-being in a state of unbelief without making some effort to reclaim him. What hours she had spent, at different times, earnestly debating with vague village atheists who could not produce a single intelligible reason for their unbelief! “Yes,” she admitted finally, not particularly wanting to make the admission, but not wanting to prevaricate.
Mr. Warburton laughed delightedly.
“You’ve a hopeful nature,” he said. “But you aren’t afraid, by any chance, that I might convert you? ‘The dog it was that died,’ you may remember.”
At this Dorothy merely smiled. “Don’t let him see he’s shocking you”—that was always her maxim when she was talking to Mr. Warburton. They had been arguing in this manner, without coming to any kind of conclusion, for the past hour, and might have gone on for the rest of the night if Dorothy had been willing to stay; for Mr. Warburton delighted in teasing her about her religious beliefs. He had that fatal cleverness that so often goes with unbelief, and in their arguments, though Dorothy was always right, she was not always victorious. They were sitting, or rather Dorothy was sitting and Mr. Warburton was standing, in a large agreeable room, giving on a moonlit lawn, that Mr. Warburton called his “studio”—not that there was any sign of any work ever having been done in it. To Dorothy’s great disappointment, the celebrated Mr. Bewley had not turned up. (As a matter of fact, neither Mr. Bewley, nor his wife, nor his novel entitled Fishpools and Concubines, actually existed. Mr. Warburton had invented all three of them on the spur of the moment, as a pretext for inviting Dorothy to his house, well knowing that she would never come unchaperoned.) Dorothy had felt rather uneasy on finding that Mr. Warburton was alone. It had occurred to her, indeed she had felt perfectly certain, that it would be wiser to go home at once; but she had stayed, chiefly because she was horribly tired and the leather armchair into which Mr. Warburton had thrust her the moment she entered the house was too comfortable to leave. Now, however, her conscience was pricking her. It didn’t do to stay too late at his house—people would talk if they heard of it. Besides, there was a multitude of jobs that she ought to be doing and that she had neglected in order to come here. She was so little used to idleness that even an hour spent in mere talking seemed to her vaguely sinful.
She made an effort, and straightened herself in the too-comfortable chair. “I think, if you don’t mind, it’s really time I was getting home,” she said.
“Talking of Invincible Ignorance,” went on Mr. Warburton, taking no notice of Dorothy’s remark, “I forget whether I ever told you that