Rotting Hill (6 page)

    Soon all clergymen in this country will have vows of poverty thrust upon them as I have already suggested, and a new type of ministry will come into being. Quite probably it is the
only
way to secure a truly Christian Church. It may after all be God’s will. In His great wisdom it would not be likely to escape Him that a penniless clergyman is better than one who rides to hounds. Then the country people will have to bring gifts of food—a fowl, bread, pickles, a tin of sardines, pig’s-trotters, apricots and greengages in season, as the moujiks once would do to their holy men. Otherwise the clergy quite literally will die out. An unpleasant transition is at present in progress. But people have so little sense of the future. The majority are completely defective in this sense. They fail to realize the significance of a process until life is suddenly quite different to what it was. They then adjust themselves at a disadvantage. The clergy should prepare themselves for penury; else quite unprepared they will find themselves the poorest class of men. Fasts would not be amiss. And they should accustom their parishioners to the idea that their sacred calling must reduce them to great poverty.

    In the meantime we find Rymer, for a start, without clothes to his back, or only a travesty of clothes; and there is no other class of man that must go in rags, except the vagabond. I told him that I should come down in a year or so and discover him walking through Bagwick in a loin-cloth: what would Jacko say to that? How would Mrs. Rossiter react? It is one of those cracks that have an uncomfortably prophetic ring. Heaven avert the omen. Rymer still feels too much “the gentleman”, of course, as his forebears were fine parsons in plump livings. He is a
master
type, of his own accord he will never go
the whole way
to the new model, to the country-clergyman-in-the-loin-cloth: soliciting alms in the name of God, or sitting near the altar of his church as people lay their gifts on the steps—sleeping on a camp-bed in the vestry—I am not saying that will happen tomorrow: and Rymer was heroic, in the way a prophet is, as clothed in tatters he went poker-faced to meet his fate and that of all his kind. For the village dogs will not care much for the New Model man-of-God and the villagers not improbably may stone them.

    That Rymer has the seeds of heroism I hope by now is plain. If need be he would sit naked at the foot of the Cross (though it might be with the superior glint of the
Have-not
in his glazing eye) and die if he was not fed.

    During lunch food—or its absence—was not discussed as invariably it is at any mealtime in England today. One felt that something vaguely was the matter. Then one realized what it was: a
certain topic
was conspicuously absent.

    One soon discovered, however, that the difficulty of getting enough to eat was only one of a large class of topics under an interdict. Eleanor Rymer happened to refer to the difficulty of obtaining a proper supply of reading-matter—of books. But at the word
difficulty
Rymer blustered into action, with that inimitable imitation of automatism of his, which his large wooden poker-face facilitated.

    “Difficulty? Nonsense. There is no more difficulty today than five, ten, or fifteen, years ago.”

    “How about the petrol, in the first place?” Eleanor retorted with a show of fight, which of course was indispensable. “I cannot get books at Bagwick.”

    He pounced on
petrol
like a cat on an unwary tom-tit.

    “Petrol? There is all the petrol that
I
can use.” (He might have added
can afford.
) “There’s plenty of petrol.”

    “Excuse me…” his wife began, laughing.

    But he swiftly intervened.

    “I know what you are going to say,” he told her, “that you haven’t got all the petrol that
you
can use. Before the war you took out the car once a fortnight at the outside. Now you feel you want it every day. You never went to Cockridge unless you could help it.
Now
you are always thinking of things in Cockridge or in Storby that you must have this minute.” He turned to me. “Because there is a
ration,
a limit, people imagine they are short of something they never had so much of before, or perhaps never
heard
of before. To hear them talk you would think that formerly they covered hundreds of miles every day in their car, ate enormous porterhouse steaks daily, chain-smoked from the time they got out of bed to the time they got into it again, bought a box of chocolates every morning after breakfast and another just before tea.”

    “I know a number of people just like that,” Eleanor agreed. But I felt Rymer must not be allowed to get away with everything.

    “There are shortages,” I remarked.

    “Shortages,” he retorted, “yes, if you want the earth. People today have as much food as is good for them—some, more than is good for them. People are putting on fat. I am. They have as many cigarettes or as much tobacco, as much beer as is necessary.”

    “As many clothes?” I enquired.

    He stopped and eyed me blankly for a few seconds, as if holding a conference behind his poker-face.

    “Clothes,” he said slowly, “are not rationed.”

    Had he been dressed in the less formal of his two suits he would, I felt, at this point have stroked his black patch.

    His wife was intelligent as well as beautiful, and addressed herself to the consumption of her piece of offal. (Why should the butcher, or, rather, the Food Office, employ this ghastly word?) She was accustomed, it was obvious, to being halted, turned back, and admonished upon the threshold of certain topics. Rymer would allow no one to grumble. No criticism of conditions under socialism passed unchallenged. He did not demand the quality of the bacon to be extolled (just eat it, would be the idea, and think of something else, such as how happy our grandchildren would be in a world from which
all
capital—small as well as great, had been banished): he did not require ecstasies at the mention of the Purchase Tax (some day there won’t be much left to purchase, so there won’t be any
tax
)—no, all Rymer exacted was
silence
about conditions under socialism. The Government are at war with Capital, it is total war: war conditions naturally prevail. Therefore, silence! Shut that great gap! Enemy ears are listening! All criticism aids capitalism.

    Even Rymer would deny the existence of any obstacles in the path of socialism-in-our-time: his view of the socialist government’s prospects are blindingly sunny. When he is foretelling an unprecedented export-boom, if (in the interests of sanity) one should mention the fact that the United States can supply itself with everything it requires, which it manufactures far more efficiently than any other country is capable of doing (
vide
Mr. Lippmann), Rymer pooh-poohs such a statement. He describes it as ridiculous. American goods, he will assert, are of very poor quality: the Americans would be jolly glad to get ours if they had a chance. We market our stuff badly over there to begin with. “But believe me once our industry is on its feet again our exports will soar, you see if they don’t.” Rymer has never been to the United States and has not the remotest idea what American goods are like, so he is not cramped in these patriotic flights by first-hand knowledge. His boundless optimism is firmly based in the most blissful ignorance. Should you speak anxiously of Great Britain’s situation, living as she does upon a massive dole from the United States, he will say that
that
is our fault for having anything to do with the U.S., with Wall Street. Were we to arrange to receive a dole from Russia instead—say a billion or two, marrying the pound sterling to the rouble—we should soon be out of the wood! If we had the guts to cut ourselves loose from the Yankee capitalists, stopped spending money on an army which we didn’t need, and had a pact with Russia, we should be as right as rain.

    Eleanor now brusquely changed the subject. She selected one quite free of political entanglements. The unprecedented the sumptuous summer weather—that had nothing to do with a planned economy or the redistribution of wealth. No one was to blame if the weather was bad, no one had to be thanked except God if it was fine. And then she went on to say how perfect the weather had been up in London, where she had been on a visit to relatives. She thought nostalgically of London, and I asked her if she had been to any shows. No, she said, no:
just shops.
But she continued—with great inadvertence—to complain how difficult it had been to shop. There were such dense herds of people. Where on earth did they all come from!

    Rymer waited until she had finished, and then he struck:

    “Where do
you
come from, my dear, there is always that.” The slightly Johnsonian answer to her conundrum his wife received with a wry smile, having detected her
faux pas
too late. “Those people are the masses of women…”

    “They weren’t all women!” she laughed.

    “Women,” he said firmly. “They come in their millions from the suburbs and the slums and the slums and suburbs of other cities. The pavements are impassable. It is like cutting one’s way through a dense and rubbery undergrowth.”

    “What an excellent description!” his wife exclaimed.

    “I agree they are
dense,
” he went on. “Of course they are. For the first time in their lives they have sufficient time and money to go shopping in the most luxurious stores—where they could not go before.”

    Here I joined in with alacrity.

    “Could not go,” I said, “because of their
class
—without being followed around by store-detectives, stared out of countenance by shopgirls from behind counters, asked every minute by a shopwalker what articles they required. Any charlady now can go in, try on a mink coat or two, then fling them down and say she thinks she’ll wait till next season when they may have a better assortment. Harrods is jammed with charladies. The working-class throng Selfridges like Woolworths at Christmastime. That really
is
socialism. Observe that in Moscow the slums are barred from any but the slum shops.”

    We returned to the drawing-room after we had eaten and sat talking for a long time; it is a very peaceful spot, but in Rymer there is no peace. My hostess was washing up the dishes. She was absent at least and there was no one else in the house. The knuckly proliferation of the polygonum waved beyond the window-sill, the yellow leaves tumbled past from a tree, a wasp appeared on his way from the larder where he had been able to find no jam, no honey—nothing sweet, because the English had won the war and consequently are not allowed to grow sugar in their West Indian islands, and there is not enough beet sugar to go round. Also I noticed a sick-looking bird. The crumbs put out for it were, of course, full of bran and chalk. I suppose it was constipated. It should have pecked off as much corn as it wanted before it was cut, making a rule to touch no human food. The corn gone, why not fly off to some more sensible country? What are wings for?

    I think that politics and poetry are what interest Rymer almost exclusively. At that moment politics were uppermost in his mind because the question of communism (at his instigation) was coming up the following week at the diocesan conference, and he was of course to speak, or hoped he would be able to. Communism is with him something quite unreal, for he certainly is not a communist. He is of the generation of the great fellow-travellers of the ’twenties, who painted the universities pink. But it was a solemn rag, a generational badge, and meant no more than a painter’s stunt, painting for a little
all red
or
all blue,
to make a “period” with. Rymer like scores of thousands of others, had had his “pink period”. It shocked all the aunts of the time terribly, and scandalized his clergyman-father. It was revolt—it symbolized
Youth
—his most glamorous moments had been pink.

    Youth past, these
redmen
of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges forgot all about it—real life began, dressing-up was at an end, the minarets of Moscow faded on the horizon. And in any case Soviet Russia had proved a somewhat tough and embarrassing comrade to “travel” with. On the other hand, because Rymer had been buried in the depths of the country ever since Oxford he lived in the past a lot, and continued to potter around with Karl Marx, like a mascot of his youth rather, and he still got a kick out of it. That was
part
of the story of Rymer and the Kremlin. The rest of it was traceable to professional religion: the frivolous sizar and the fakir must be mixed.

    When I asked him what he was going to say next week to the crowd of clergymen he said he would point out that in the contemporary world communism, or marxism, was, because of the huge development of Soviet Russia, too great a factor in world-affairs for the Church to ignore, as it had been disposed to do up to now. “Let us put aside our prejudices,” he would invite them, “let us examine this controversial theory of the state, and let us ask ourselves if there is anything in it which we as Christians should endorse.” He and Herbert Stoner the “red” Storby parson, had succeeded in “winning over” several of their colleagues. He named others who would have nothing to do with it—who asserted that the Church should set its face against “this atheistic creed” and all its works. These were he told me the “place-seekers”, clergymen on the climb, who dreamed of deaneries and bishoprics. The only imaginable consideration which would impel clergymen to feel other than sympathetic towards communism was self-interest. Such was his extraordinary view. As this was absurd I thought I would help him to dispel from his mind so foolish an error.