No More Learning

4


It was a little after eleven The day, which, like some overripe but hopeful
widow playing at seventeen, had been putting on           April airs, had
now remembered that it was August and settled down to be boiling hot
Dorothy rode into the hamlet of Fennelwick, a mile out of Knype Hill She
had delivered Mrs Lewm’s corn-plaster, and was dropping in to give old Mrs
Ptther that cutting from the Daily Mail about angelica tea for rheumatism
The sun, burning in the cloudless sky, scorched her back through her
gingham frock, and the dusty road quivered m the heat, and the hot, flat
meadows, over which even at this time of year numberless larks chirruped



A Clergyman 1 s Daughter 283

tiresomely, were so green that it hurt your eyes to look at them It was the kind
of day that is called ‘glorious’ by people who don’t have to work

Dorothy leaned her bicycle against the gate of the Pithers’cottage, and took
her handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her hands, which were sweating
from the handle-bars In the harsh sunlight her face looked pinched and
colourless She looked her age, and something over, at that hour of the
morning Throughout her day-and in general it was a seventeen-hour
day- she had regular, alternating periods of tiredness and energy, the middle of
the morning, when she was doing the first instalment of the day’s ‘visiting’,
was one of the tired periods

‘Visiting’, because of the distances she had to bicycle from house to house,
took up nearly half of Dorothy’s day Every day of her life, except on Sundays,
she made from half a dozen to a dozen visits at parishioners’ cottages She
penetrated into cramped interiors and sat on lumpy, dust-diffusmg chairs
gossiping with overworked, blowsy housewives, she spent hurried half-hours
giving a hand with the mending and the ironing, and read chapters from the
Gospels, and readjusted bandages on ‘bad legs’, and condoled with sufferers
from mornmg-sickness, she played nde-a-cock-horse with sour-smellmg
children who grimed the bosom of her dress with their sticky little fingers, she
gave advice about ailing aspidistras, and suggested names for babies, and
drank ‘nice cups of tea’ mnumerable-for the working women always wanted
her to have a ‘nice cup of tea’, out of the teapot endlessly stewing

Much of it was profoundly discouraging work Few, very few, of the women
seemed to have even a conception of the Christian life that she was trying to
help them to lead Some of them were shy and suspicious, stood on the
defensive, and made excuses when urged to come to Holy Communion, some
shammed piety for the sake of the tiny sums they could wheedle out of the
church alms box, those who welcomed her coming were for the most part the
talkative ones, who wanted an audience for complaints about the ‘goings on’ of
their husbands, or for endless mortuary tales (‘And he had to have glass chubes
let into his veins,’ etc , etc ) about the revolting diseases their relatives had died
of Quite half the women on her list, Dorothy knew, were at heart atheistical in
a vague unreasoning way She came up against it all day long-that vague,
blank disbelief so common in illiterate people, against which all argument is
powerless Do what she would, she could never raise the number of regular
communicants to more than a dozen or thereabouts Women would promise to
communicate, keep their promise for a month or two, and then fall away With
the younger women it was especially hopeless They would not even join the
local branches of the church leagues that were run for their benefit-Dorothy
was honorary secretary of three such leagues, besides being captain of the Girl
Guides, The Band of Hope and the Companionship of Marriage languished
almost memberless, and the Mothers’ Union only kept going because gossip
and unlimited strong tea made the weekly sewing-parties acceptable.