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The Altar Steps

by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #14739 · 745,189 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Altar Steps

Author: Compton MacKenzie


        
Release date: January 20, 2005 [eBook #14739]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR STEPS ***

THE ALTAR STEPS

BY

COMPTON MACKENZIE

_Author of "Carnival," "Youth's Encounter,"
"Poor Relations," etc._



NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1922




_The only portrait in this book is
of one who is now dead_




THIS BOOK, THE PRELUDE TO
_The Parson's Progress_

I INSCRIBE
WITH DEEPEST AFFECTION
TO MY MOTHER

_S. Valentine's Day, 1922._




CONTENTS

     I  The Bishop's Shadow

    II  The Lima Street Mission

   III  Religious Education

    IV  Husband and Wife

     V  Palm Sunday

    VI  Nancepean

   VII  Life at Nancepean

  VIII  The Wreck

    IX  Slowbridge

     X  Whit-Sunday

    XI  Meade Cantorum

   XII  The Pomeroy Affair

  XIII  Wych-on-the-Wold

   XIV  St. Mark's Day

    XV  The Scholarship

   XVI  Chatsea

  XVII  The Drunken Priest

 XVIII  Silchester College Mission

   XIX  The Altar for the Dead

    XX  Father Rowley

   XXI  Points of View

  XXII  Sister Esther Magdalene

 XXIII  Malford Abbey

  XXIV  The Order of St. George

   XXV  Suscipe Me, Domine

  XXVI  Addition

 XXVII  Multiplication

XXVIII  Division

  XXIX  Subtraction

   XXX  The New Bishop of Silchester

  XXXI  Silchester Theological College

 XXXII  Ember Days




THE ALTAR STEPS



CHAPTER I

THE BISHOP'S SHADOW


Frightened by some alarm of sleep that was forgotten in the moment of
waking, a little boy threw back the bedclothes and with quick heart and
breath sat listening to the torrents of darkness that went rolling by.
He dared not open his mouth to scream lest he should be suffocated; he
dared not put out his arm to search for the bell-rope lest he should be
seized; he dared not hide beneath the blankets lest he should be kept
there; he could do nothing except sit up trembling in a vain effort to
orientate himself. Had the room really turned upside down? On an impulse
of terror he jumped back from the engorging night and bumped his
forehead on one of the brass knobs of the bedstead. With horror he
apprehended that what he had so often feared had finally come to pass.
An earthquake had swallowed up London in spite of everybody's assurance
that London could not be swallowed up by earthquakes. He was going down
down to smoke and fire . . . or was it the end of the world? The quick
and the dead . . . skeletons . . . thousands and thousands of skeletons.
. . .

"Guardian Angel!" he shrieked.

Now surely that Guardian Angel so often conjured must appear. A shaft of
golden candlelight flickered through the half open door. The little boy
prepared an attitude to greet his Angel that was a compound of the
suspicion and courtesy with which he would have welcomed a new governess
and the admiring fellowship with which he would have thrown a piece of
bread to a swan.

"Are you awake, Mark?" he heard his mother whisper outside.

He answered with a cry of exultation and relief.

"Oh, Mother," he sighed, clinging to the soft sleeves of her
dressing-gown. "I thought it was being the end of the world."

"What made you think that, my precious?"

"I don't know. I just woke up, and the room was upside down. And first I
thought it was an earthquake, and then I thought it was the Day of
Judgment." He suddenly began to chuckle to himself. "How silly of me,
Mother. Of course it couldn't be the Day of Judgment, because it's
night, isn't it? It couldn't ever be the Day of Judgment in the night,
could it?" he continued hopefully.

Mrs. Lidderdale did not hesitate to reassure her small son on this
point. She had no wish to add another to that long list of nightly fears
and fantasies which began with mad dogs and culminated in the Prince of
Darkness himself.

"The room looks quite safe now, doesn't it?" Mark theorized.

"It is quite safe, darling."

"Do you think I could have the gas lighted when you really _must_ go?"

"Just a little bit for once."

"Only a little bit?" he echoed doubtfully. A very small illumination was
in its eerie effect almost worse than absolute darkness.

"It isn't healthy to sleep with a great deal of light," said his mother.

"Well, how much could I have? Just for once not a crocus, but a tulip.
And of course not a violet."

Mark always thought of the gas-jets as flowers. The dimmest of all was
the violet; followed by the crocus, the tulip, and the water-lily; the
last a brilliant affair with wavy edges, and sparkling motes dancing
about in the blue water on which it swam.

"No, no, dearest boy. You really can't have as much as that. And now
snuggle down and go to sleep again. I wonder what made you wake up?"

Mark seized upon this splendid excuse to detain his mother for awhile.

"Well, it wasn't ergzackly a dream," he began to improvise. "Because I
was awake. And I heard a terrible plump and I said 'what can that be?'
and then I was frightened and. . . ."

"Yes, well, my sweetheart, you must tell Mother in the morning."

Mark perceived that he had been too slow in working up to his crisis and
desperately he sought for something to arrest the attention of his
beloved audience.

"Perhaps my Guardian Angel was beside me all the time, because, look!
here's a feather."

He eyed his mother, hoping against hope that she would pretend to accept
his suggestion; but alas, she was severely unimaginative.

"Now, darling, don't talk foolishly. You know perfectly that is only a
feather which has worked its way out of your pillow."

"Why?"

The monosyllable had served Mark well in its time; but even as he fell
back upon this stale resource he knew it had failed at last.

"I can't stay to explain 'why' now; but if you try to think you'll
understand why."

"Mother, if I don't have any gas at all, will you sit with me in the
dark for a little while, a tiny little while, and stroke my forehead
where I bumped it on the knob of the bed? I really did bump it quite
hard--I forgot to tell you that. I forgot to tell you because when it
was you I was so excited that I forgot."

"Now listen, Mark. Mother wants you to be a very good boy and turn over
and go to sleep. Father is very worried and very tired, and the Bishop
is coming tomorrow."

"Will he wear a hat like the Bishop who came last Easter? Why is he
coming?"

"No darling, he's not that kind of bishop. I can't explain to you why
he's coming, because you wouldn't understand; but we're all very
anxious, and you must be good and brave and unselfish. Now kiss me and
turn over."

Mark flung his arms round his mother's neck, and thrilled by a sudden
desire to sacrifice himself murmured that he would go to sleep in the
dark.

"In the quite dark," he offered, dipping down under the clothes so as to
be safe by the time the protecting candle-light wavered out along the
passage and the soft closing of his mother's door assured him that come
what might there was only a wall between him and her.

"And perhaps she won't go to sleep before I go to sleep," he hoped.

At first Mark meditated upon bishops. The perversity of night thoughts
would not allow him to meditate upon the pictures of some child-loving
bishop like St. Nicolas, but must needs fix his contemplation upon a
certain Bishop of Bingen who was eaten by rats. Mark could not remember
why he was eaten by rats, but he could with dreadful distinctness
remember that the prelate escaped to a castle on an island in the middle
of the Rhine, and that the rats swam after him and swarmed in by every
window until his castle was--ugh!--Mark tried to banish from his mind
the picture of the wicked Bishop Hatto and the rats, millions of them,
just going to eat him up. Suppose a lot of rats came swarming up Notting
Hill and unanimously turned to the right into Notting Dale and ate him?
An earthquake would be better than that. Mark began to feel thoroughly
frightened again; he wondered if he dared call out to his mother and put
forward the theory that there actually was a rat in his room. But he had
promised her to be brave and unselfish, and . . . there was always the
evening hymn to fall back upon.

    _Now the day is over,_
    _Night is drawing nigh,_
    _Shadows of the evening_
    _Steal across the sky._

Mark thought of a beautiful evening in the country as beheld in a Summer
Number, more of an afternoon really than an evening, with trees making
shadows right across a golden field, and spotted cows in the foreground.
It was a blissful and completely soothing picture while it lasted; but
it soon died away, and he was back in the midway of a London night with
icy stretches of sheet to right and left of him instead of golden
fields.

    _Now the darkness gathers,_
      _Stars begin to peep,_
    _Birds and beasts and flowers_
      _Soon will be asleep._

But rats did not sleep; they were at their worst and wake-fullest in the
night time.

    _Jesu, give the weary_
      _Calm and sweet repose,_
    _With thy tenderest blessing_
      _May mine eyelids close._

Mark waited a full five seconds in the hope that he need not finish the
hymn; but when he found that he was not asleep after five seconds he
resumed:

    _Grant to little children_
      _Visions bright of Thee;_
    _Guard the sailors tossing_
      _On the deep blue sea._

Mark envied the sailors.

    _Comfort every sufferer_
      _Watching late in pain._

This was a most encouraging couplet. Mark did not suppose that in the
event of a great emergency--he thanked Mrs. Ewing for that long and
descriptive word--the sufferers would be able to do much for him; but
the consciousness that all round him in the great city they were lying
awake at this moment was most helpful. At this point he once more
waited five seconds for sleep to arrive. The next couplet was less
encouraging, and he would have been glad to miss it out.

    _Those who plan some evil_
      _From their sin restrain._

Yes, but prayers were not always answered immediately. For instance he
was still awake. He hurried on to murmur aloud in fervour:

    _Through the long night watches_
      _May Thine Angels spread_
    _Their white wings above me,_
      _Watching round my bed._

A delicious idea, and even more delicious was the picture contained in
the next verse.

    _When the morning wakens,_
      _Then may I arise_
    _Pure, and fresh, and sinless_
      _In Thy Holy Eyes._

    _Glory to the Father,_
      _Glory to the Son,_
    _And to thee, blest Spirit,_
      _Whilst all ages run. Amen._

Mark murmured the last verse with special reverence in the hope that by
doing so he should obtain a speedy granting of the various requests in
the earlier part of the hymn.

In the morning his mother put out Sunday clothes for him.

"The Bishop is coming to-day," she explained.

"But it isn't going to be like Sunday?" Mark inquired anxiously. An
extra Sunday on top of such a night would have been hard to bear.

"No, but I want you to look nice."

"I can play with my soldiers?"

"Oh, yes, you can play with your soldiers."

"I won't bang, I'll only have them marching."

"No, dearest, don't bang. And when the Bishop comes to lunch I want you
not to ask questions. Will you promise me that?"

"Don't bishops like to be asked questions?"

"No, darling. They don't."

Mark registered this episcopal distaste in his memory beside other facts
such as that cats object to having their tails pulled.




CHAPTER II

THE LIMA STREET MISSION


In the year 1875, when the strife of ecclesiastical parties was bitter
and continuous, the Reverend James Lidderdale came as curate to the
large parish of St. Simon's, Notting Hill, which at that period was
looked upon as one of the chief expositions of what Disraeli called
"man-millinery." Inasmuch as the coiner of the phrase was a Jew, the
priests and people of St. Simon's paid no attention to it, and were
proud to consider themselves an outpost of the Catholic Movement in the
Church of England. James Lidderdale was given the charge of the Lima
Street Mission, a tabernacle of corrugated iron dedicated to St.
Wilfred; and Thurston, the Vicar of St. Simon's, who was a wise,
generous and single-hearted priest, was quick to recognize that his
missioner was capable of being left to convert the Notting Dale slum in
his own way.

"If St. Simon's is an outpost of the Movement, Lidderdale must be one of
the vedettes," he used to declare with a grin.

The Missioner was a tall hatchet-faced hollow-eyed ascetic, harsh and
bigoted in the company of his equals whether clerical or lay, but with
his flock tender and comprehending and patient. The only indulgence he
accorded to his senses was in the forms and ceremonies of his ritual,
the vestments and furniture of his church. His vicar was able to give
him a free hand in the obscure squalor of Lima Street; the
ecclesiastical battles he himself had to fight with bishops who were
pained or with retired military men who were disgusted by his own
conduct of the services at St. Simon's were not waged within the hearing
of Lima Street. There, year in, year out for six years, James Lidderdale
denied himself nothing in religion, in life everything. He used to
preach in the parish church during the penitential seasons, and with
such effect upon the pockets of his congregation that the Lima Street
Mission was rich for a long while afterward. Yet few of the worshippers
in the parish church visited the object of their charity, and those that
did venture seldom came twice. Lidderdale did not consider that it was
part of the Lima Street religion to be polite to well-dressed explorers
of the slum; in fact he rather encouraged Lima Street to suppose the
contrary.

"I don't like these dressed up women in my church," he used to tell his
vicar. "They distract my people's attention from the altar."

"Oh, I quite see your point," Thurston would agree.

"And I don't like these churchy young fools who come simpering down in
top-hats, with rosaries hanging out of their pockets. Lima Street
doesn't like them either. Lima Street is provoked to obscene comment,
and that just before Mass. It's no good, Vicar. My people are savages,
and I like them to remain savages so long as they go to their duties,
which Almighty God be thanked they do."

On one occasion the Archdeacon, who had been paying an official visit to
St. Simon's, expressed a desire to see the Lima Street Mission.

"Of which I have heard great things, great things, Mr. Thurston," he
boomed condescendingly.

The Vicar was doubtful of the impression that the Archdeacon's gaiters
would make on Lima Street, and he was also doubtful of the impression
that the images and prickets of St. Wilfred's would make on the
Archdeacon. The Vicar need not have worried. Long before Lima Street was
reached, indeed, halfway down Strugwell Terrace, which was the main road
out of respectable Notting Hill into the Mission area, the comments upon
the Archdeacon's appearance became so embarrassing that the dignitary
looked at his watch and remarked that after all he feared he should not
be able to spare the time that afternoon.

"But I am surprised," he observed when his guide had brought him safely
back into Notting Hill. "I am surprised that the people are still so
uncouth. I had always understood that a great work of purification had
been effected, that in fact--er--they were quite--er--cleaned up."

"In body or soul?" Thurston inquired.

"The whole district," said the Archdeacon vaguely. "I was referring to
the general tone, Mr. Thurston. One might be pardoned for supposing that
they had never seen a clergyman before. Of course one is loath--very
loath indeed--to criticize sincere effort of any kind, but I think that
perhaps almost the chief value of the missions we have established in
these poverty-stricken areas lies in their capacity for civilizing the
poor people who inhabit them. One is so anxious to bring into their drab
lives a little light, a little air. I am a great believer in education.
Oh, yes, Mr. Thurston, I have great hopes of popular education. However,
as I say, I should not dream of criticizing your work at St. Wilfred's."

"It is not my work. It is the work of one of my curates. And," said the
Vicar to Lidderdale, when he was giving him an account of the projected
visitation, "I believe the pompous ass thought I was ashamed of it."

Thurston died soon after this, and, his death occurring at a moment when
party strife in the Church was fiercer than ever, it was considered
expedient by the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift the living was, to
appoint a more moderate man than the late vicar. Majendie, the new man,
when he was sure of his audience, claimed to be just as advanced as
Thurston; but he was ambitious of preferment, or as he himself put it,
he felt that, when a member of the Catholic party had with the exercise
of prudence and tact an opportunity of enhancing the prestige of his
party in a higher ecclesiastical sphere, he should be wrong to neglect
it. Majendie's aim therefore was to avoid controversy with his
ecclesiastical superiors, and at a time when, as he told Lidderdale, he
was stepping back in order to jump farther, he was anxious that his
missioner should step back with him.

"I'm not suggesting, my dear fellow, that you should bring St. Wilfred's
actually into line with the parish church. But the Asperges, you know. I
can't countenance that. And the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday.
I really think that kind of thing creates unnecessary friction."

Lidderdale's impulse was to resign at once, for he was a man who found
restraint galling where so much passion went to his belief in the truth
of his teaching. When, however, he pondered how little he had done and
how much he had vowed to do, he gave way and agreed to step back with
his vicar. He was never convinced that he had taken the right course at
this crisis, and he spent hours in praying for an answer by God to a
question already answered by himself. The added strain of these hours of
prayer, which were not robbed from his work in the Mission, but from the
already short enough time he allowed himself for sleep, told upon his
health, and he was ordered by the doctor to take a holiday to avoid a
complete breakdown of health. He stayed for two months in Cornwall, and
came back with a wife, the daughter of a Cornish parson called Trehawke.
Lidderdale had been a fierce upholder of celibacy, and the news of his
marriage astonished all who knew him.

Grace Lidderdale with her slanting sombre eyes and full upcurving lips
made the pink and white Madonnas of the little mission church look
insipid, and her husband was horrified when he found himself criticizing
the images whose ability to lure the people of Lima Street to worship in
the way he believed to be best for their souls he had never doubted.
Yet, for all her air of having _trafficked for strange webs with Eastern
merchants_, Mrs. Lidderdale was only outwardly Phoenician or Iberian or
whatever other dimly imagined race is chosen for the strange types that
in Cornwall more than elsewhere so often occur. Actually she was a
simple and devout soul, loving husband and child and the poor people
with whom they lived. Doubtless she had looked more appropriate to her
surroundings in the tangled garden of her father's vicarage than in the
bleak Mission House of Lima Street; but inasmuch as she never thought
about her appearance it would have been a waste of time for anybody to
try to romanticize her. The civilizing effect of her presence in the
slum was quickly felt; and though Lidderdale continued to scoff at the
advantages of civilization, he finally learnt to give a grudging
welcome to her various schemes for making the bodies of the flock as
comfortable as her husband tried to make their souls.

When Mark was born, his father became once more the prey of gloomy
doubt. The guardianship of a soul which he was responsible for bringing
into the world was a ceaseless care, and in his anxiety to dedicate his
son to God he became a harsh and unsympathetic parent. Out of that
desire to justify himself for having been so inconsistent as to take a
wife and beget a son Lidderdale redoubled his efforts to put the Lima
Street Mission on a permanent basis. The civilization of the slum, which
was attributed by pious visitors to regular attendance at Mass rather
than to Mrs. Lidderdale's gentleness and charm, made it much easier for
outsiders to explore St. Simon's parish as far as Lima Street. Money for
the great church he designed to build on a site adjoining the old
tabernacle began to flow in; and five years after his marriage
Lidderdale had enough money subscribed to begin to build. The
rubbish-strewn waste-ground overlooked by the back-windows of the
Mission House was thronged with workmen; day by day the walls of the new
St. Wilfred's rose higher. Fifteen years after Lidderdale took charge of
the Lima Street Mission, it was decided to ask for St. Wilfred's,
Notting Dale, to be created a separate parish. The Reverend Aylmer
Majendie had become a canon residentiary of Chichester and had been
succeeded as vicar by the Reverend L. M. Astill, a man more of the type
of Thurston and only too anxious to help his senior curate to become a
vicar, and what is more cut £200 a year off his own net income in doing
so.

But when the question arose of consecrating the new St. Wilfred's in
order to the creation of a new parish, the Bishop asked many questions
that were never asked about the Lima Street Mission. There were Stations
of the Cross reported to be of an unusually idolatrous nature. There was
a second chapel apparently for the express purpose of worshipping the
Virgin Mary.

"He writes to me as if he suspected me of trying to carry on an
intrigue with the Mother of God," cried Lidderdale passionately to his
vicar.

"Steady, steady, dear man," said Astill. "You'll ruin your case by such
ill-considered exaggeration."

"But, Vicar, these cursed bishops of the Establishment who would rather
a whole parish went to Hell than give up one jot or one tittle of their
prejudice!" Lidderdale ejaculated in wrath.

Furthermore, the Bishop wanted to know if the report that on Good Friday
was held a Roman Catholic Service called the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified
followed by the ceremony of Creeping to the Cross was true. When
Majendie departed, the Lima Street Missioner jumped a long way forward
in one leap. There were many other practices which he (the Bishop) could
only characterize as highly objectionable and quite contrary to the
spirit of the Church of England, and would Mr. Lidderdale pay him a
visit at Fulham Palace as soon as possible. Lidderdale went, and he
argued with the Bishop until the Chaplain thought his Lordship had heard
enough, after which the argument was resumed by letter. Then Lidderdale
was invited to lunch at Fulham Palace and to argue the whole question
over again in person. In the end the Bishop was sufficiently impressed
by the Missioner's sincerity and zeal to agree to withhold his decision
until the Lord Bishop Suffragan of Devizes had paid a visit to the
proposed new parish. This was the visit that was expected on the day
after Mark Lidderdale woke from a nightmare and dreamed that London was
being swallowed up by an earthquake.




CHAPTER III

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION


When Mark was grown up and looked back at his early childhood--he was
seven years old in the year in which his father was able to see the new
St. Wilfred's an edifice complete except for consecration--it seemed to
him that his education had centered in the prevention of his acquiring a
Cockney accent. This was his mother's dread and for this reason he was
not allowed to play more than Christian equality demanded with the boys
of Lima Street. Had his mother had her way, he would never have been
allowed to play with them at all; but his father would sometimes break
out into fierce tirades against snobbery and hustle him out of the house
to amuse himself with half-a-dozen little girls looking after a dozen
babies in dilapidated perambulators, and countless smaller boys and
girls ragged and grubby and mischievous.

"You leave that kebbidge-stalk be, Elfie!"

"Ethel! Jew hear your ma calling you, you naughty girl?"

"Stanlee! will you give over fishing in that puddle, this sminute. I'll
give you such a slepping, you see if I don't."

"Come here, Maybel, and let me blow your nose. Daisy Hawkins, lend us
your henkerchif, there's a love! Our Maybel wants to blow her nose. Oo,
she is a sight! Come here, Maybel, do, and leave off sucking that orange
peel. There's the Father's little boy looking at you. Hold your head up,
do."

Mark would stand gravely to attention while Mabel Williams' toilet was
adjusted, and as gravely follow the shrill raucous procession to watch
pavement games like Hop Scotch or to help in gathering together enough
sickly greenery from the site of the new church to make the summer
grotto, which in Lima Street was a labour of love, since few of the
passers by in that neighbourhood could afford to remember St. James'
grotto with a careless penny.

The fact that all the other little boys and girls called the Missioner
Father made it hard for Mark to understand his own more particular
relationship to him, and Lidderdale was so much afraid of showing any
more affection to one child of his flock than to another that he was
less genial with his own son than with any of the other children. It was
natural that in these circumstances Mark should be even more dependent
than most solitary children upon his mother, and no doubt it was through
his passion to gratify her that he managed to avoid that Cockney accent.
His father wanted his first religious instruction to be of the communal
kind that he provided in the Sunday School. One might have thought that
he distrusted his wife's orthodoxy, so strongly did he disapprove of her
teaching Mark by himself in the nursery.

"It's the curse of the day," he used to assert, "this pampering of
children with an individual religion. They get into the habit of
thinking God is their special property and when they get older and find
he isn't, as often as not they give up religion altogether, because it
doesn't happen to fit in with the spoilt notions they got hold of as
infants."

Mark's bringing up was the only thing in which Mrs. Lidderdale did not
give way to her husband. She was determined that he should not have a
Cockney accent, and without irritating her husband any more than was
inevitable she was determined that he should not gobble down his
religion as a solid indigestible whole. On this point she even went so
far as directly to contradict the boy's father and argue that an
intelligent boy like Mark was likely to vomit up such an indigestible
whole later on, although she did not make use of such a coarse
expression.

"All mothers think their sons are the cleverest in the world."

"But, James, he _is_ an exceptionally clever little boy. Most observant,
with a splendid memory and plenty of imagination."

"Too much imagination. His nights are one long circus."

"But, James, you yourself have insisted so often on the personal Devil;
you can't expect a little boy of Mark's sensitiveness not to be
impressed by your picture."

"He has nothing to fear from the Devil, if he behaves himself. Haven't I
made that clear?"

Mrs. Lidderdale sighed.

"But, James dear, a child's mind is so literal, and though I know you
insist just as much on the reality of the Saints and Angels, a child's
mind is always most impressed by the things that have power to frighten
it."

"I want him to be frightened by Evil," declared James. "But go your own
way. Soften down everything in our Holy Religion that is ugly and
difficult. Sentimentalize the whole business. That's our modern method
in everything."

This was one of many arguments between husband and wife about the
religious education of their son.

Luckily for Mark his father had too many children, real children and
grown up children, in the Mission to be able to spend much time with his
son; and the teaching of Sunday morning, the clear-cut uncompromising
statement of hard religious facts in which the Missioner delighted, was
considerably toned down by his wife's gentle commentary.

Mark's mother taught him that the desire of a bad boy to be a good boy
is a better thing than the goodness of a Jack Horner. She taught him
that God was not merely a crotchety old gentleman reclining in a blue
dressing-gown on a mattress of cumulus, but that He was an Eye, an
all-seeing Eye, an Eye capable indeed of flashing with rage, yet so
rarely that whenever her little boy should imagine that Eye he might
behold it wet with tears.

"But can God cry?" asked Mark incredulously.

"Oh, darling. God can do everything."

"But fancy crying! If I could do everything I shouldn't cry."

Mrs. Lidderdale perceived that her picture of the wise and compassionate
Eye would require elaboration.

"But do you only cry, Mark dear, when you can't do what you want? Those
are not nice tears. Don't you ever cry because you're sorry you've been
disobedient?"

"I don't think so, Mother," Mark decided after a pause. "No, I don't
think I cry because I'm sorry except when you're sorry, and that
sometimes makes me cry. Not always, though. Sometimes I'm glad you're
sorry. I feel so angry that I like to see you sad."

"But you don't often feel like that?"

"No, not often," he admitted.

"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some poor dog or cat
being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to cry?"

"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me, and I want to
kick the people who is doing it."

"Well, now you can understand why God sometimes gets angry. But even if
He gets angry," Mrs. Lidderdale went on, for she was rather afraid of
her son's capacity for logic, "God never lets His anger get the better
of Him. He is not only sorry for the poor dog, but He is also sorry for
the poor person who is ill-treating the dog. He knows that the poor
person has perhaps never been taught better, and then the Eye fills with
tears again."

"I think I like Jesus better than God," said Mark, going off at a
tangent. He felt that there were too many points of resemblance between
his own father and God to make it prudent to persevere with the
discussion. On the subject of his father he always found his mother
strangely uncomprehending, and the only times she was really angry with
him was when he refused out of his basic honesty to admit that he loved
his father.

"But Our Lord _is_ God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.

Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal
puzzle.

"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?"

Mark sighed.

"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in Kensington
Gardens?"

"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"

"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I want you to think
about the Holy Trinity."

"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he protested.

"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great mystery."

"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled
him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant
when she could not find her rolling-pin.

"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.

Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about
a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been
corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora
about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery
stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:"
Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity,
had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense
tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed
in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Cæsar
landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was
asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had
landed.

"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."

It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies
huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.

But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were
the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter
whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not
matter you were able to remember so much more easily. He could have
listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their
pods when the donkey was trotting with the boy Christ and His mother and
St. Joseph far away from cruel Herod into Egypt and how the noise of the
rattling seeds nearly betrayed their flight and how the plant was cursed
for evermore and made as hungry as a wolf. And the story of how the
robin tried to loosen one of the cruel nails so that the blood from the
poor Saviour drenched his breast and stained it red for evermore, and of
that other bird, the crossbill, who pecked at the nails until his beak
became crossed. He could listen for ever to the tale of St. Cuthbert who
was fed by ravens, of St. Martin who cut off his cloak and gave it to a
beggar, of St. Anthony who preached to the fishes, of St. Raymond who
put up his cowl and floated from Spain to Africa like a nautilus, of St.
Nicolas who raised three boys from the dead after they had been killed
and cut up and salted in a tub by a cruel man that wanted to eat them,
and of that strange insect called a Praying Mantis which alighted upon
St. Francis' sleeve and sang the _Nunc Dimittis_ before it flew away.

These were all stories that made bedtime sweet, stories to remember and
brood upon gratefully in the darkness of the night when he lay awake and
when, alas, other stories less pleasant to recall would obtrude
themselves.

Mark was not brought up luxuriously in the Lima Street Mission House,
and the scarcity of toys stimulated his imagination. All his toys were
old and broken, because he was only allowed to have the toys left over
at the annual Christmas Tree in the Mission Hall; and since even the
best of toys on that tree were the cast-offs of rich little children
whose parents performed a vicarious act of charity in presenting them to
the poor, it may be understood that Mark's share of these was not
calculated to spoil him. His most conspicuous toy was a box of mutilated
grenadiers, whose stands had been melted by their former owner in the
first rapture of discovering that lead melts in fire and who in
consequence were only able to stand up uncertainly when stuck into
sliced corks.

Luckily Mark had better armies of his own in the coloured lines that
crossed the blankets of his bed. There marched the crimson army of St.
George, the blue army of St. Andrew, the green army of St. Patrick, the
yellow army of St. David, the rich sunset-hued army of St. Denis, the
striped armies of St. Anthony and St. James. When he lay awake in the
golden light of the morning, as golden in Lima Street as anywhere else,
he felt ineffably protected by the Seven Champions of Christendom; and
sometimes even at night he was able to think that with their bright
battalions they were still marching past. He used to lie awake,
listening to the sparrows and wondering what the country was like and
most of all the sea. His father would not let him go into the country
until he was considered old enough to go with one of the annual school
treats. His mother told him that the country in Cornwall was infinitely
more beautiful than Kensington Gardens, and that compared with the sea
the Serpentine was nothing at all. The sea! He had heard it once in a
prickly shell, and it had sounded beautiful. As for the country he had
read a story by Mrs. Ewing called _Our Field_, and if the country was
the tiniest part as wonderful as that, well . . . meanwhile Dora brought
him back from the greengrocer's a pot of musk, which Mark used to sniff
so enthusiastically that Dora said he would sniff it right away if he
wasn't careful. Later on when Lima Street was fetid in the August sun he
gave this pot of musk to a little girl with a broken leg, and when she
died in September her mother put it on her grave.




CHAPTER IV

HUSBAND AND WIFE


Mark was impressed by the appearance of the Bishop of Devizes; a portly
courtly man, he brought to the dingy little Mission House in Lima Street
that very sense of richness and grandeur which Mark had anticipated. The
Bishop's pink plump hands of which he made such use contrasted with the
lean, scratched, and grimy hands of his father; the Bishop's hair white
and glossy made his father's bristly, badly cut hair look more bristly
and worse cut than ever, and the Bishop's voice ripe and unctuous grew
more and more mellow as his father's became harsher and more assertive.
Mark found himself thinking of some lines in _The Jackdaw of Rheims_
about a cake of soap worthy of washing the hands of the Pope. The Pope
would have hands like the Bishop's, and Mark who had heard a great deal
about the Pope looked at the Bishop of Devizes with added interest.

"While we are at lunch, Mr. Lidderdale, you will I am sure pardon me for
referring again to our conversation of this morning from another point
of view--the point of view, if I may use so crude an expression, the
point of view of--er--expediency. Is it wise?"

"I'm not a wise man, my lord."

"Pardon me, my dear Mr. Lidderdale, but I have not completed my
question. Is it right? Is it right when you have an opportunity to
consolidate your great work . . . I use the adjective advisedly and with
no intention to flatter you, for when I had the privilege this morning
of accompanying you round the beautiful edifice that has been by your
efforts, by your self-sacrifice, by your eloquence, and by your devotion
erected to the glory of God . . . I repeat, Mr. Lidderdale, is it right
to fling all this away for the sake of a few--you will not
misunderstand me--if I call them a few excrescences?"

The Bishop helped himself to the cauliflower and paused to give his
rhetoric time to work.

"What you regard, my lord, as excrescences I regard as fundamentals of
our Holy Religion."

"Come, come, Mr. Lidderdale," the Bishop protested. "I do not think that
you expect to convince me that a ceremony like the--er--Asperges is a
fundamental of Christianity."

"I have taught my people that it is," said the Missioner. "In these days
when Bishops are found who will explain away the Incarnation, the
Atonement, the Resurrection of the Body, I hope you'll forgive a humble
parish priest who will explain away nothing and who would rather resign,
as I told you this morning, than surrender a single one of these
excrescences."

"I do not admit your indictment, your almost wholesale indictment of the
Anglican episcopate; but even were I to admit at lunch that some of my
brethren have been in their anxiety to keep the Man in the Street from
straying too far from the Church, have been as I was saying a little too
ready to tolerate a certain latitude of belief, even as I said just now
were that so, I do not think that you have any cause to suspect me of
what I should repudiate as gross infidelity. It was precisely because
the Bishop of London supposed that I should be more sympathetic with
your ideals that he asked me to represent him in this perfectly
informal--er--"

"Inquest," the Missioner supplied with a fierce smile.

The Bishop encouraged by the first sign of humour he had observed in the
bigoted priest hastened to smile back.

"Well, let us call it an inquest, but not, I hope, I sincerely and
devoutly hope, Mr. Lidderdale, not an inquest upon a dead body." Then
hurriedly he went on. "I may smile with the lips, but believe me, my
dear fellow labourer in the vineyard of Our Lord Jesus Christ, believe
me that my heart is sore at the prospect of your resignation. And the
Bishop of London, if I have to go back to him with such news, will be
pained, bitterly grievously pained. He admires your work, Mr.
Lidderdale, as much as I do, and I have no doubt that if it were not
for the unhappy controversies that are tearing asunder our National
Church, I say I do not doubt that he would give you a free hand. But how
can he give you a free hand when his own hands are tied by the
necessities of the situation? May I venture to observe that some of you
working priests are too ready to criticize men like myself who from no
desire of our own have been called by God to occupy a loftier seat in
the eyes of the world than many men infinitely more worthy. But to
return to the question immediately before us, let me, my dear Mr.
Lidderdale, do let me make to you a personal appeal for moderation. If
you will only consent to abandon one or two--I will not say excrescences
since you object to the word--but if you will only abandon one or two
purely ceremonial additions that cannot possibly be defended by any
rubric in the Book of Common Prayer, if you will only consent to do this
the Bishop of London will, I can guarantee, permit you a discretionary
latitude that he would scarcely be prepared to allow to any other priest
in his diocese. When I was called to be Bishop Suffragan of Devizes, Mr.
Lidderdale, do you suppose that I did not give up something? Do you
suppose that I was anxious to abandon some of the riches to which by my
reading of the Ornaments Rubric we are entitled? But I felt that I could
do something to help the position of my fellow priests struggling
against the prejudice of ignorance and the prey of political moves. In
twenty years from now, Mr. Lidderdale, you will be glad you took my
advice. Ceremonies that to-day are the privilege of the few will then be
the privilege of the many. Do not forget that by what I might almost
describe as the exorbitance of your demands you have gained more freedom
than any other priest in England. Be moderate. Do not resign. You will
be inhibited in every diocese; you will have the millstone of an unpaid
debt round your neck; you are a married man."

"That has nothing . . ." Lidderdale interrupted angrily.

"Pray let me finish. You are a married man, and if you should seek
consolation, where several of your fellow priests have lately sought it,
in the Church of Rome, you will have to seek it as a layman. I do not
pretend to know your private affairs, and I should consider it
impertinent if I tried to pry into them at such a moment. But I do know
your worth as a priest, and I have no hesitation in begging you once
more with a heart almost too full for words to pause, Mr. Lidderdale, to
pause and reflect before you take the irreparable step that you are
contemplating. I have already talked too much, and I see that your good
wife is looking anxiously at my plate. No more cauliflower, thank you,
Mrs. Lidderdale, no more of anything, thank you. Ah, there is a pudding
on the way? Dear me, that sounds very tempting, I'm afraid."

The Bishop now turned his attention entirely to Mrs. Lidderdale at the
other end of the table; the Missioner sat biting his nails; and Mark
wondered what all this conversation was about.

While the Bishop was waiting for his cab, which, he explained to his
hosts, was not so much a luxury as a necessity owing to his having to
address at three o'clock precisely a committee of ladies who were
meeting in Portman Square to discuss the dreadful condition of the
London streets, he laid a fatherly arm on the Missioner's threadbare
cassock.

"Take two or three days to decide, my dear Mr. Lidderdale. The Bishop of
London, who is always consideration personified, insisted that you were
to take two or three days to decide. Once more, for I hear my
cab-wheels, once more let me beg you to yield on the following points.
Let me just refer to my notes to be sure that I have not omitted
anything of importance. Oh, yes, the following points: no Asperges, no
unusual Good Friday services, except of course the Three Hours. _Is_ not
that enough?"

"The Three Hours I _would_ give up. It's a modern invention of the
Jesuits. The Adoration of the Cross goes back. . . ."

"Please, please, Mr. Lidderdale, my cab is at the door. We must not
embark on controversy. No celebrations without communicants. No direct
invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Saints. Oh, yes, and on
this the Bishop is particularly firm: no juggling with the _Gloria in
Excelsis_. Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale, good-bye, Mrs. Lidderdale. Many
thanks for your delicious luncheon. Good-bye, young man. I had a little
boy like you once, but he is grown up now, and I am glad to say a
soldier."

The Bishop waved his umbrella, which looked much like a pastoral staff,
and lightly mounted the step of his cab.

"Was the Bishop cross with Father?" Mark inquired afterward; he could
find no other theory that would explain so much talking to his father,
so little talking by his father.

"Dearest, I'd rather you didn't ask questions about the Bishop," his
mother replied, and discerning that she was on the verge of one of those
headaches that while they lasted obliterated the world for Mark, he was
silent. Later in the afternoon Mr. Astill, the Vicar, came round to see
the Missioner and they had a long talk together, the murmur of which now
softer now louder was audible in Mark's nursery where he was playing by
himself with the cork-bottomed grenadiers. His instinct was to play a
quiet game, partly on account of his mother's onrushing headache, which
had already driven her to her room, partly because he knew that when his
father was closeted like this it was essential not to make the least
noise. So he tiptoed about the room and disposed the cork-bottomed
grenadiers as sentinels before the coal-scuttle, the washstand, and
other similar strongholds. Then he took his gun, the barrel of which,
broken before it was given to him, had been replaced by a thin bamboo
curtain-rod, and his finger on the trigger (a wooden match) he waited
for an invader. After ten minutes of statuesque silence Mark began to
think that this was a dull game, and he wished that his mother had not
gone to her room with a headache, because if she had been with him she
could have undoubtedly invented, so clever was she, a method of invading
the nursery without either the attackers or the defenders making any
noise about it. In her gentle voice she would have whispered of the
hordes that were stealthily creeping up the mountain side until Mark and
his vigilant cork-bottomed grenadiers would have been in a state of
suppressed exultation ready to die in defence of the nursery, to die
stolidly and silently at their posts with nobody else in the house aware
of their heroism.

"Rorke's Drift," said Mark to himself, trying to fancy that he heard in
the distance a Zulu _impi_ and whispering to his cork-bottomed
grenadiers to keep a good look-out. One of them who was guarding the
play-cupboard fell over on his face, and in the stillness the noise
sounded so loud that Mark did not dare cross the room to put him up
again, but had to assume that he had been shot where he stood. It was no
use. The game was a failure; Mark decided to look at _Battles of the
British Army_. He knew the pictures in every detail, and he could have
recited without a mistake the few lines of explanation at the bottom of
each page; but the book still possessed a capacity to thrill, and he
turned over the pages not pausing over Crecy or Poitiers or Blenheim or
Dettingen; but enjoying the storming of Badajoz with soldiers impaled on
_chevaux de frise_ and lingering over the rich uniforms and plumed
helmets in the picture of Joseph Bonaparte's flight at Vittoria. There
was too a grim picture of the Guards at Inkerman fighting in their
greatcoats with clubbed muskets against thousands of sinister dark green
Russians looming in the snow; and there was an attractive picture of a
regiment crossing the Alma and eating the grapes as they clambered up
the banks where they grew. Finally there was the Redan, a mysterious
wall, apparently of wickerwork, with bombs bursting and broken
scaling-ladders and dead English soldiers in the open space before it.

Mark did not feel that he wanted to look through the book again, and he
put it away, wondering how long that murmur of voices rising and falling
from his father's study below would continue. He wondered whether Dora
would be annoyed if he went down to the kitchen. She had been
discouraging on the last two or three occasions he had visited her, but
that had been because he could not keep his fingers out of the currants.
Fancy having a large red jar crammed full of currants on the floor of
the larder and never wanting to eat one! The thought of those currants
produced in Mark's mouth a craving for something sweet, and as quietly
as possible he stole off downstairs to quench this craving somehow or
other if it were only with a lump of sugar. But when he reached the
kitchen he found Dora in earnest talk with two women in bonnets, who
were nodding away and clicking their tongues with pleasure.

"Now whatever do you want down here?" Dora demanded ungraciously.

"I wanted," Mark paused. He longed to say "some currants," but he had
failed before, and he substituted "a lump of sugar." The two women in
bonnets looked at him and nodded their heads and clicked their tongues.

"Did you ever?" said one.

"Fancy! A lump of sugar! Goodness gracious!"

"What a sweet tooth!" commented the first.

The sugar happened to be close to Dora's hand on the kitchen-table, and
she gave him two lumps with the command to "sugar off back upstairs as
fast as you like." The craving for sweetness was allayed; but when Mark
had crunched up the two lumps on the dark kitchen-stairs, he was as
lonely as he had been before he left the nursery. He wished now that he
had not eaten up the sugar so fast, that he had taken it back with him
to the nursery and eked it out to wile away this endless afternoon. The
prospect of going back to the nursery depressed him; and he turned aside
to linger in the dining-room whence there was a view of Lima Street,
down which a dirty frayed man was wheeling a barrow and shouting for
housewives to bring out their old rags and bottles and bones. Mark felt
the thrill of trade and traffick, and he longed to be big enough to open
the window and call out that he had several rags and bottles and bones
to sell; but instead he had to be content with watching two
self-important little girls chaffer on behalf of their mothers, and go
off counting their pennies. The voice of the rag-and-bone man, grew
fainter and fainter round corners out of sight; Lima Street became as
empty and uninteresting as the nursery. Mark wished that a knife-grinder
would come along and that he would stop under the dining-room window so
that he could watch the sparks flying from the grindstone. Or that a
gipsy would sit down on the steps and begin to mend the seat of a chair.
Whenever he had seen those gipsy chair-menders at work, he had been out
of doors and afraid to linger watching them in case he should be stolen
and his face stained with walnut juice and all his clothes taken away
from him. But from the security of the dining-room of the Mission House
he should enjoy watching them. However, no gipsy came, nor anybody else
except women with men's caps pinned to their skimpy hair and little
girls with wrinkled stockings carrying jugs to and from the public
houses that stood at every corner.

Mark turned away from the window and tried to think of some game that
could be played in the dining-room. But it was not a room that fostered
the imagination. The carpet was so much worn that the pattern was now
scarcely visible and, looked one at it never so long and intently, it
was impossible to give it an inner life of its own that gradually
revealed itself to the fanciful observer. The sideboard had nothing on
it except a dirty cloth, a bottle of harvest burgundy, and half a dozen
forks and spoons. The cupboards on either side contained nothing edible
except salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, and oil. There was a plain deal
table without a drawer and without any interesting screws and levers to
make it grow smaller or larger at the will of the creature who sat
beneath it. The eight chairs were just chairs; the wallpaper was like
the inside of the bath, but alas, without the water; of the two
pictures, the one over the mantelpiece was a steel-engraving of the Good
Shepherd and the one over the sideboard was an oleograph of the Sacred
Heart. Mark knew every fly speck on their glasses, every discoloration
of their margins. While he was sighing over the sterility of the room,
he heard the door of his father's study open, and his father and Mr.
Astill do down the passage, both of them still talking unceasingly.
Presently the front door slammed, and Mark watched them walk away in the
direction of the new church. Here was an opportunity to go into his
father's study and look at some of the books. Mark never went in when
his father was there, because once his mother had said to his father:

"Why don't you have Mark to sit with you?"

And his father had answered doubtfully:

"Mark? Oh yes, he can come. But I hope he'll keep quiet, because I
shall be rather busy."

Mark had felt a kind of hostility in his father's manner which had
chilled him; and after that, whenever his mother used to suggest his
going to sit quietly in the study, he had always made some excuse not to
go. But if his father was out he used to like going in, because there
were always books lying about that were interesting to look at, and the
smell of tobacco smoke and leather bindings was grateful to the senses.
The room smelt even more strongly than usual of tobacco smoke this
afternoon, and Mark inhaled the air with relish while he debated which
of the many volumes he should pore over. There was a large Bible with
pictures of palm-trees and camels and long-bearded patriarchs surrounded
by flocks of sheep, pictures of women with handkerchiefs over their
mouths drawing water from wells, of Daniel in the den of lions and of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The frontispiece
was a coloured picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surrounded
by amiable lions, benevolent tigers, ingratiating bears and leopards and
wolves. But more interesting than the pictures were some pages at the
beginning on which, in oval spaces framed in leaves and flowers, were
written the names of his grandfather and grandmother, of his father and
of his father's brother and sister, with the dates on which they were
born and baptized and confirmed. What a long time ago his father was
born! 1840. He asked his mother once about this Uncle Henry and Aunt
Helen; but she told him they had quarrelled with his father, and she had
said nothing more about them. Mark had been struck by the notion that
grown-up people could quarrel: he had supposed quarrelling to be
peculiar to childhood. Further, he noticed that Henry Lidderdale had
married somebody called Ada Prewbody who had died the same year; but
nothing was said in the oval that enshrined his father about his having
married anyone. He asked his mother the reason of this, and she
explained to him that the Bible had belonged to his grandfather who had
kept the entries up to date until he died, when the Bible came to his
eldest son who was Mark's father.

"Does it worry you, darling, that I'm not entered?" his mother had asked
with a smile.

"Well, it does rather," Mark had replied, and then to his great delight
she took a pen and wrote that James Lidderdale had married Grace Alethea
Trehawke on June 28th, 1880, at St. Tugdual's Church, Nancepean,
Cornwall, and to his even greater delight that on April 25th, 1881, Mark
Lidderdale had been born at 142 Lima Street, Notting Dale, London, W.,
and baptized on May 21st, 1881, at St. Wilfred's Mission Church, Lima
Street.

"Happy now?" she had asked.

Mark had nodded, and from that moment, if he went into his father's
study, he always opened the Family Bible and examined solemnly his own
short history wreathed in forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley.

This afternoon, after looking as usual at the entry of his birth and
baptism written in his mother's pretty pointed handwriting, he searched
for Dante's _Inferno_ illustrated by Gustave Doré, a large copy of which
had recently been presented to his father by the Servers and Choir of
St. Wilfred's. The last time he had been looking at this volume he had
caught a glimpse of a lot of people buried in the ground with only their
heads sticking out, a most attractive picture which he had only just
discovered when he had heard his father's footsteps and had closed the
book in a hurry.

Mark tried to find this picture, but the volume was large and the
pictures on the way of such fascination that it was long before he found
it. When he did, he thought it even more satisfying at a second glance,
although he wished he knew what they were all doing buried in the ground
like that. Mark was not satisfied with horrors even after he had gone
right through the Dante; in fact, his appetite was only whetted, and he
turned with relish to a large folio of Chinese tortures, in the coloured
prints of which a feature was made of blood profusely outpoured and
richly tinted. One picture of a Chinaman apparently impervious to the
pain of being slowly sawn in two held him entranced for five minutes.
It was growing dusk by now, and as it needed the light of the window to
bring out the full quality of the blood, Mark carried over the big
volume, propped it up in a chair behind the curtains, and knelt down to
gloat over these remote oriental barbarities without pausing to remember
that his father might come back at any moment, and that although he had
never actually been forbidden to look at this book, the thrill of
something unlawful always brooded over it. Suddenly the door of the
study opened and Mark sat transfixed by terror as completely as the
Chinaman on the page before him was transfixed by a sharpened bamboo;
then he heard his mother's voice, and before he could discover himself a
conversation between her and his father had begun of which Mark
understood enough to know that both of them would be equally angry if
they knew that he was listening. Mark was not old enough to escape
tactfully from such a difficult situation, and the only thing he could
think of doing was to stay absolutely still in the hope that they would
presently go out of the room and never know that he had been behind the
curtain while they were talking.

"I didn't mean you to dress yourself and come downstairs," his father
was saying ungraciously.

"My dear, I should have come down to tea in any case, and I was anxious
to hear the result of your conversation with Mr. Astill."

"You can guess, can't you?" said the husband.

Mark had heard his father speak angrily before; but he had never heard
his voice sound like a growl. He shrank farther back in affright behind
the curtains.

"You're going to give way to the Bishop?" the wife asked gently.

"Ah, you've guessed, have you? You've guessed by my manner? You've
realized, I hope, what this resolution has cost me and what it's going
to cost me in the future. I'm a coward. I'm a traitor. _Before the cock
crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice._ A coward and a traitor."

"Neither, James--at any rate to me."

"To you," the husband scoffed. "I should hope not to you, considering
that it is on your account I am surrendering. Do you suppose that if I
were free, as to serve God I ought to be free, do you suppose then that
I should give up my principles like this? Never! But because I'm a
married priest, because I've a wife and family to support, my hands are
tied. Oh, yes, Astill was very tactful. He kept insisting on my duty to
the parish; but did he once fail to rub in the position in which I
should find myself if I did resign? No bishop would license me; I should
be inhibited in every diocese--in other words I should starve. The
beliefs I hold most dear, the beliefs I've fought for all these years
surrendered for bread and butter! _Woman, what have I to do with thee?_
Our Blessed Lord could speak thus even to His Blessed Mother. But I! _He
that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he
that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of
me._"

The Missioner threw himself into his worn armchair and stared into the
unlighted grate. His wife came behind him and laid a white hand upon his
forehead; but her touch seemed to madden him, and he sprang away from
her.

"No more of that," he cried. "If I was weak when I married you I will
never be weak again. You have your child. Let that be enough for your
tenderness. I want none of it myself. Do you hear? I wish to devote
myself henceforth to my parish. My parish! The parish of a coward and a
traitor."

Mark heard his mother now speaking in a voice that was strange to him,
in a voice that did not belong to her, but that seemed to come from far
away, as if she were lost in a snowstorm and calling for help.

"James, if you feel this hatred for me and for poor little Mark, it is
better that we leave you. We can go to my father in Cornwall, and you
will not feel hampered by the responsibility of having to provide for
us. After what you have said to me, after the way you have looked at me,
I could never live with you as your wife again."

"That sounds a splendid scheme," said the Missioner bitterly. "But do
you think I have so little logic that I should be able to escape from my
responsibilities by planting them on the shoulders of another? No, I
sinned when I married you. I did not believe and I do not believe that a
priest ought to marry; but having done so I must face the situation and
do my duty to my family, so that I may also do my duty to God."

"Do you think that God will accept duty offered in that spirit? If he
does, he is not the God in Whom I believe. He is a devil that can be
propitiated with burnt offerings," exclaimed the woman passionately.

"Do not blaspheme," the priest commanded.

"Blaspheme!" she echoed. "It is you, James, who have blasphemed nature
this afternoon. You have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
may you be forgiven by your God. I can never forgive you."

"You're becoming hysterical."

"How dare you say that? How dare you? I have loved you, James, with all
the love that I could give you. I have suffered in silence when I saw
how you regarded family life, how unkind you were to Mark, how utterly
wrapped up in the outward forms of religion. You are a Pharisee, James,
you should have lived before Our Lord came down to earth. But I will not
suffer any longer. You need not worry about the evasion of your
responsibilities. You cannot make me stay with you. You will not dare
keep Mark. Save your own soul in your own way; but Mark's soul is as
much mine as yours to save."

During this storm of words Mark had been thinking how wicked it was of
his father to upset his mother like that when she had a headache. He had
thought also how terrible it was that he should apparently be the cause
of this frightening quarrel. Often in Lima Street he had heard tales of
wives who were beaten by their husbands and now he supposed that his own
mother was going to be beaten. Suddenly he heard her crying. This was
too much for him; he sprang from his hiding place and ran to put his
arms round her in protection.

"Mother, mother, don't cry. You are bad, you are bad," he told his
father. "You are wicked and bad to make her cry."

"Have you been in the room all this time?" his father asked.

Mark did not even bother to nod his head, so intent was he upon
consoling his mother. She checked her emotion when her son put his arms
round her neck, and whispered to him not to speak. It was almost dark in
the study now, and what little light was still filtering in at the
window from the grey nightfall was obscured by the figure of the
Missioner gazing out at the lantern spire of his new church. There was a
tap at the door, and Mrs. Lidderdale snatched up the volume that Mark
had let fall upon the floor when he emerged from the curtains, so that
when Dora came in to light the gas and say that tea was ready, nothing
of the stress of the last few minutes was visible. The Missioner was
looking out of the window at his new church; his wife and son were
contemplating the picture of an impervious Chinaman suspended in a cage
where he could neither stand nor sit nor lie.




CHAPTER V

PALM SUNDAY


Mark's dream from which he woke to wonder if the end of the world was at
hand had been a shadow cast by coming events. So far as the world of
Lima Street was concerned, it was the end of it. The night after that
scene in his father's study, which made a deeper impression on him than
anything before that date in his short life, his mother came to sleep in
the nursery with him, to keep him company so that he should not be
frightened any more, she offered as the explanation of her arrival. But
Mark, although of course he never said so to her, was sure that she had
come to him to be protected against his father.

Mark did not overhear any more discussions between his parents, and he
was taken by surprise when one day a week after his mother had come to
sleep in his room, she asked him how he should like to go and live in
the country. To Mark the country was as remote as Paradise, and at first
he was inclined to regard the question as rhetorical to which a
conventional reply was expected. If anybody had asked him how he should
like to go to Heaven, he would have answered that he should like to go
to Heaven very much. Cows, sheep, saints, angels, they were all equally
unreal outside a picture book.

"I would like to go to the country very much," he said. "And I would
like to go to the Zoological Gardens very much. Perhaps we can go there
soon, can we, mother?"

"We can't go there if we're in the country."

Mark stared at her.

"But really go in the country?"

"Yes, darling, really go."

"Oh, mother," and immediately he checked his enthusiasm with a sceptical
"when?"

"Next Monday."

"And shall I see cows?"

"Yes."

"And donkeys? And horses? And pigs? And goats?"

To every question she nodded.

"Oh, mother, I will be good," he promised of his own accord. "And can I
take my grenadiers?"

"You can take everything you have, darling."

"Will Dora come?" He did not inquire about his father.

"No."

"Just you and me?"

She nodded, and Mark flung his arms round her neck to press upon her
lips a long fragrant kiss, such a kiss as only a child can give.

On Sunday morning, the last Sunday morning he would worship in the
little tin mission church, the last Sunday morning indeed that any of
the children of Lima Street would worship there, Mark sat close beside
his mother at the children's Mass. His father looking as he always
looked, took off his chasuble, and in his alb walked up and down the
aisle preaching his short sermon interspersed with questions.

"What is this Sunday called?"

There was a silence until a well-informed little girl breathed through
her nose that it was called Passion Sunday.

"Quite right. And next Sunday?"

"Palm Sunday," all the children shouted with alacrity, for they looked
forward to it almost more than to any Sunday in the year.

"Next Sunday, dear children, I had hoped to give you the blessed palms
in our beautiful new church, but God has willed otherwise, and another
priest will come in my place. I hope you will listen to him as
attentively as you have listened to me, and I hope you will try to
encourage him by your behaviour both in and out of the church, by your
punctuality and regular attendance at Mass, and by your example to other
children who have not had the advantage of learning all about our
glorious Catholic faith. I shall think about you all when I am gone and
I shall never cease to ask our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ to guard you
and keep you safe for Him. And I want you to pray to Our Blessed Lady
and to our great patron Saint Wilfred that they will intercede for you
and me. Will you all do this?"

There was a unanimous and sibilant "Yes, father," from the assembled
children, and then one little girl after being prodded by her companions
on either side of her spoke up and asked the Missioner why he was going.

"Ah, that is a very difficult question to answer; but I will try to
explain it to you by a parable. What is a parable?"

"Something that isn't true," sang out a too ready boy from the back of
the church.

"No, no, Arthur Williams. Surely some other boy or girl can correct
Arthur Williams? How many times have we had that word explained to us! A
parable is a story with a hidden meaning. Now please, every boy and
girl, repeat that answer after me. A parable is a story with a hidden
meaning."

And all the children baa'd in unison:

"A parable is a story with a hidden meaning."

"That's better," said the Missioner. "And now I will tell you my
parable. Once upon a time there was a little boy or a little girl, it
doesn't matter which, whose father put him in charge of a baby. He was
told not to let anybody take it away from him and he was told to look
after it and wheel it about in the perambulator, which was a very old
one, and not only very old but very small for the baby, who was growing
bigger and bigger every day. Well, a lot of kind people clubbed together
and bought a new perambulator, bigger than the other and more
comfortable. They told him to take this perambulator home to his father
and show him what a beautiful present they had made. Well, the boy
wheeled it home and his father was very pleased with it. But when the
boy took the baby out again, the nursemaid told him that the baby had
too many clothes on and said that he must either take some of the
clothes off or else she must take away the new perambulator. Well, the
little boy had promised his father, who had gone far away on a journey,
that nobody should touch the baby, and so he said he would not take off
any of the clothes. And when the nurse took away the perambulator the
little boy wrote to his father to ask what he should do and his father
wrote to him that he would put one of his brothers in charge who would
know how to do what the nurse wanted." The Missioner paused to see the
effect of his story. "Now, children, let us see if you can understand my
parable. Who is the little boy?"

A concordance of opinion cried "God."

"No. Now think. The father surely was God. And now once more, who was
the little boy?"

Several children said "Jesus Christ," and one little boy who evidently
thought that any connexion between babies and religion must have
something to do with the Holy Innocents confidently called out "Herod."

"No, no, no," said the Missioner. "Surely the little boy is myself. And
what is the baby?"

Without hesitation the boys and girls all together shouted "Jesus
Christ."

"No, no. The baby is our Holy Catholic Faith. For which we are ready if
necessary to--?"

There was no answer.

"To do what?"

"To be baptized," one boy hazarded.

"To die," said the Missioner reproachfully.

"To die," the class complacently echoed.

"And now what is the perambulator?"

This was a puzzle, but at last somebody tried:

"The Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ."

"No, no. The perambulator is our Mission here in Lima Street. The old
perambulator is the Church where we are sitting at Mass and the new
perambulator is--"

"The new church," two children answered simultaneously.

"Quite right. And now, who is the nursemaid? The nursemaid is the Bishop
of London. You remember that last Sunday we talked about bishops. What
is a bishop?"

"A high-priest."

"Well, that is not a bad answer, but don't you remember we said that
bishop meant 'overseer,' and you all know what an overseer is. Any of
your fathers who go out to work will tell you that. So the Bishop like
the nursemaid in my parable thought he knew better what clothes the baby
ought to wear in the new perambulator, that is to say what services we
ought to have in the new St. Wilfred's. And as God is far away and we
can only speak to Him by prayer, I have asked Him what I ought to do,
and He has told me that I ought to go away and that He will put a
brother in charge of the baby in the new perambulator. Who then is the
brother?"

"Jesus Christ," said the class, convinced that this time it must be He.

"No, no. The brother is the priest who will come to take charge of the
new St. Wilfred's. He will be called the Vicar, and St. Wilfred's,
instead of being called the Lima Street Mission, will become a parish.
And now, dear children, there is no time to say any more words to you.
My heart is sore at leaving you, but in my sorrow I shall be comforted
if I can have the certainty that you are growing up to be good and loyal
Catholics, loving Our Blessed Lord and His dear Mother, honouring the
Holy Saints and Martyrs, hating the Evil One and all his Spirits and
obeying God with whose voice the Church speaks. Now, for the last time
children, let me hear you sing _We are but little children weak_."

They all sang more loudly than usual to express a vague and troubled
sympathy:

    _There's not a child so small and weak_
    _But has his little cross to take,_
    _His little work of love and praise_
    _That he may do for Jesus' sake._

And they bleated a most canorous _Amen_.

Mark noticed that his mother clutched his hand tightly while his father
was speaking, and when once he looked up at her to show how loudly he
too was singing, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

The next morning was Monday.

"Good-bye, Mark, be a good boy and obedient to your mother," said his
father on the platform at Paddington.

"Who is that man?" Mark whispered when the guard locked them in.

His mother explained, and Mark looked at him with as much awe as if he
were St. Peter with the keys of Heaven at his girdle. He waved his
handkerchief from the window while the train rushed on through tunnels
and between gloomy banks until suddenly the world became green, and
there was the sun in a great blue and white sky. Mark looked at his
mother and saw that again there were tears in her eyes, but that they
sparkled like diamonds.




CHAPTER VI

NANCEPEAN


The Rhos or, as it is popularly written and pronounced, the Rose is a
tract of land in the south-west of the Duchy of Cornwall, ten miles long
and six at its greatest breadth, which on account of its remoteness from
the railway, its unusual geological formation, and its peninsular shape
possesses both in the character of its inhabitants and in the peculiar
aspects of the natural scene all the limitations and advantages of an
island. The main road running south to Rose Head from Rosemarket cuts
the peninsula into two unequal portions, the eastern and by far the
larger of which consists of a flat tableland two or three hundred feet
above the sea covered with a bushy heath, which flourishes in the
magnesian soil and which when in bloom is of such a clear rosy pink,
with nothing to break the level monochrome except scattered drifts of
cotton grass, pools of silver water and a few stunted pines, that
ignorant observers have often supposed that the colour gave its name to
the whole peninsula. The ancient town of Rosemarket, which serves as the
only channel of communication with the rest of Cornwall, lies in the
extreme north-west of the peninsula between a wide creek of the Roseford
river and the Rose Pool, an irregular heart-shaped water about four
miles in circumference which on the west is only separated from the
Atlantic by a bar of fine shingle fifty yards across.

The parish of Nancepean, of which Mark's grandfather the Reverend
Charles Elphinstone Trehawke had been vicar for nearly thirty years, ran
southward from the Rose Pool between the main road and the sea for three
miles. It was a country of green valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of
small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing
wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became
shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open
pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of
heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the
last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came to an end.

The actual village of Nancepean, set in a hollow about a quarter of a
mile from the sea, consisted of a smithy, a grocer's shop, a parish hall
and some two dozen white cottages with steep thatched roofs lying in
their own gardens on either side of the unfrequented road that branched
from the main road to follow the line of the coast. Where this road made
the turn south a track strewn with grey shingle ran down between the
cliffs, at this point not much more than grassy hummocks, to Nancepean
beach which extended northward in a wide curve until it disappeared two
miles away in the wooded heights above the Rose Pool. The metalled coast
road continued past the Hanover Inn, an isolated house standing at the
head of a small cove, to make the long ascent of Pendhu Cliff three
hundred and fifty feet high, from the brow of which it descended between
banks of fern past St. Tugdual's Church to the sands of Church Cove,
whence it emerged to climb in a steep zigzag the next headland, beyond
which it turned inland again to Lanyon and rejoined the main road to
Rose Head. The church itself had no architectural distinction; but the
solitary position, the churchyard walls sometimes washed by high spring
tides, the squat tower built into the rounded grassy cliff that
protected it from the direct attack of the sea, and its impressive
antiquity combined to give it more than the finest architecture could
give. Nowhere in the surrounding landscape was there a sign of human
habitation, neither on the road down from Pendhu nor on the road up
toward Lanyon, not on the bare towans sweeping from the beach to the sky
in undulating waves of sandy grass, nor in the valley between the towans
and Pendhu, a wide green valley watered by a small stream that flowed
into the cove, where it formed a miniature estuary, the configuration of
whose effluence changed with every tide.

The Vicarage was not so far from the church as the church was from the
village, but it was some way from both. It was reached from Nancepean by
a road or rather by a gated cart-track down one of the numerous valleys
of the parish, and it was reached from the church by another cart-track
along the valley between Pendhu and the towans. Probably it was an
ancient farmhouse, and it must have been a desolate and austere place
until, as at the date when Mark first came there, it was graced by the
perfume and gold of acacias, by wistaria and jasmine and honeysuckle, by
the ivory goblets of magnolias, by crimson fuchsias, and where formerly
its grey walls grew mossy north and east by pink and white camelias and
the waxen bells of lapagerias. The garden was a wilderness of scarlet
rhododendrons from the thickets of which innumerable blackbirds and
thrushes preyed upon the peas. The lawns were like meadows; the lily
ponds were marbled with weeds; the stables were hardly to be reached on
account of the tangle of roses and briers that filled the abandoned
yard. The front drive was bordered by evergreen oaks, underneath the
shade of which blue hydrangeas flowered sparsely with a profusion of
pale-green foliage and lanky stems.

Mark when he looked out of his window on the morning after his arrival
thought that he was in fairyland. He looked at the rhododendrons; he
looked at the raindrops of the night sparkling in the morning sun; he
looked at the birds, and the blue sky, and across the valley to a
hillside yellow with gorse. He hardly knew how to restrain himself from
waking his mother with news of the wonderful sights and sounds of this
first vision of the country; but when he saw a clump of daffodils
nodding in the grass below, it was no longer possible to be considerate.
Creeping to his mother's door, he gently opened it and listened. He
meant only to whisper "Mother," but in his excitement he shouted, and
she suddenly roused from sleep by his voice sat up in alarm.

"Mother, there are seven daffodils growing wild under my window."

"My darling, you frightened me so. I thought you'd hurt yourself."

"I don't know how my voice came big like that," said Mark
apologetically. "I only meant it to be a whisper. But you weren't
dreadfully frightened? Or were you?"

His mother smiled.

"No, not dreadfully frightened."

"Well, do you think I might dress myself and go in the garden?"

"You mustn't disturb grandfather."

"Oh, mother, of course not."

"All right, darling. But it's only six o'clock. Very early. And you must
remember that grandfather may be tired. He had to wait an hour for us at
Rosemarket last night."

"He's very nice, isn't he?"

Mark did not ask this tentatively; he really did think that his
grandfather was very nice, although he had been puzzled and not a little
frightened by his bushy black eyebrows slanting up to a profusion of
white hair. Mark had never seen such eyebrows, and he wondered whatever
grandfather's moustache would be like if it were allowed to grow.

"He's a dear," said Mrs. Lidderdale fervidly. "And now, sweetheart, if
you really intend to dress yourself run along, because Mother wants to
sleep a little longer if she can."

The only difficulty Mark had was with his flannel front, because one of
the tapes vanished like a worm into its hole, and nothing in his armoury
was at once long enough and pointed enough to hook it out again. Finally
he decided that at such an early hour of the morning it would not matter
if he went out exposing his vest, and soon he was wandering in that
enchanted shrubbery of rhododendrons, alternating between imagining it
to be the cave of Aladdin or the beach where Sinbad found all the
pebbles to be precious stones. He wandered down hill through the
thicket, listening with a sense of satisfaction to the increasing
squelchiness of the peaty soil and feeling when the blackbirds fled at
his approach with shrill quack and flapping wings much more like a
hunter than he ever felt in the nursery at Lima Street. He resolved to
bring his gun with him next time. This was just the place to find a
hippopotamus, or even a crocodile. Mark had reached the bottom of the
slope and discovered a dark sluggish stream full of decayed vegetable
matter which was slowly oozing on its course. Or even a crocodile, he
thought again; and he looked carefully at a half-submerged log. Or even
a crocodile . . . yes, but people had often thought before that logs
were not crocodiles and had not discovered their mistake until they were
half way down the crocodile's throat. It had been amusing to fancy the
existence of crocodiles when he was still close to the Vicarage, but
suppose after all that there really were crocodiles living down here?
Feeling a little ashamed of his cowardice, but glossing it over with an
assumption of filial piety, Mark turned to go back through the
rhododendrons so as not to be late for breakfast. He would find out if
any crocodiles had been seen about here lately, and if they had not, he
would bring out his gun and . . . suddenly Mark was turned inside out by
terror, for not twenty yards away there was without any possibility of
self-deception a wild beast something between an ant-eater and a
laughing hyena that with nose to the ground was evidently pursuing him,
and what was worse was between him and home. There flashed through
Mark's mind the memories of what other hunters had done in such
situations, what ruses they had adopted if unarmed, what method of
defence if armed; but in the very instant of the panoramic flash Mark
did what countless uncelebrated hunters must have done, he ran in the
opposition direction from his enemy. In this case it meant jumping over
the stream, crocodile or not, and tearing his away through snowberries
and brambles until he emerged on the moors at the bottom of the valley.

It was not until he had put half a dozen small streams between himself
and the unknown beast that Mark paused to look round. Behind him the
valley was lost in a green curve; before him another curve shut out the
ultimate view. On his left the slope of the valley rose to the sky in
tiers of blazing yellow gorse; to his right he could see the thickets
through which he had emerged upon this verdant solitude. But beyond the
thickets there was no sign of the Vicarage. There was not a living thing
in sight; there was nothing except the song of larks high up and
imperceptible against the steady morning sun that shed a benign warmth
upon the world, and particularly upon the back of Mark's neck when he
decided that his safest course was to walk in the direction of the
valley's gradual widening and to put as many more streams as he could
between him and the beast. Having once wetted himself to the knees, he
began to take a pleasure in splashing through the vivid wet greenery. He
wondered what he should behold at the next curve of the valley; without
knowing it he began to walk more slowly, for the beauty of the day was
drowsing his fears; the spell of earth was upon him. He walked more
slowly, because he was passing through a bed of forget-me-nots, and he
could not bear to blind one of those myriad blue eyes. He chose most
carefully the destination of each step, and walking thus he did not
notice that the valley would curve no more, but was opening at last. He
looked up in a sudden consciousness of added space, and there serene as
the sky above was spread the sea. Yesterday from the train Mark had had
what was actually his first view of the sea; but the rain had taken all
the colour out of it, and he had been thrilled rather by the word than
by the fact. Now the word was nothing, the fact was everything. There it
was within reach of him, blue as the pictures always made it. The
streams of the valley had gathered into one, and Mark caring no more
what happened to the forget-me-nots ran along the bank. This morning
when the stream reached the shore it broke into twenty limpid rivulets,
each one of which ploughed a separate silver furrow across the
glistening sand until all were merged in ocean, mighty father of streams
and men. Mark ran with the rivulets until he stood by the waves' edge.
All was here of which he had read, shells and seaweed, rocks and cliffs
and sand; he felt like Robinson Crusoe when he looked round him and saw
nothing to break the solitude. Every point of the compass invited
exploration and promised adventure. That white road running northward
and rising with the cliffs, whither did it lead, what view was outspread
where it dipped over the brow of the high table-land and disappeared
into the naked sky beyond? The billowy towans sweeping up from the beach
appeared to him like an illimitable prairie on which buffaloes and
bison might roam. Whither led the sandy track, the summit of whose long
diagonal was lost in the brightness of the morning sky? And surely that
huddled grey building against an isolated green cliff must be
grandfather's church of which his mother had often told him. Mark walked
round the stone walls that held up the little churchyard and, entering
by a gate on the farther side, he looked at the headstones and admired
the feathery tamarisks that waved over the tombs. He was reading an
inscription more legible than most on a headstone of highly polished
granite, when he heard a voice behind him say:

"You mind what you're doing with that grave. That's my granfa's grave,
that is, and if you touch it, I'll knock 'ee down."

Mark looked round and beheld a boy of about his own age and size in a
pair of worn corduroy knickerbockers and a guernsey, who was regarding
him from fierce blue eyes under a shock of curly yellow hair.

"I'm not touching it," Mark explained. Then something warned him that he
must assert himself, if he wished to hold his own with this boy, and he
added:

"But if I want to touch it, I will."

"Will 'ee? I say you won't do no such a thing then."

Mark seized the top of the headstone as firmly as his small hands would
allow him and invited the boy to look what he was doing.

"Lev go," the boy commanded.

"I won't," said Mark.

"I'll make 'ee lev go."

"All right, make me."

The boy punched Mark's shoulder, and Mark punched blindly back, hitting
his antagonist such a little way above the belt as to lay himself under
the imputation of a foul blow. The boy responded by smacking Mark's face
with his open palm; a moment later they were locked in a close struggle,
heaving and panting and pushing until both of them tripped on the low
railing of a grave and rolled over into a carefully tended bed of
primroses, whence they were suddenly jerked to their feet, separated,
and held at arm's length by an old man with a grey beard and a small
round hole in the left temple.

"I'll learn you to scat up my tombs," said the old man shaking them
violently. "'Tisn't the first time I've spoken to you, Cass Dale, and
who's this? Who's this boy?"

"Oh, my gosh, look behind 'ee, Mr. Timbury. The bullocks is coming into
the churchyard."

Mr. Timbury loosed his hold on the two boys as he turned, and Cass Dale
catching hold of Mark's hand shouted:

"Come on, run, or he'll have us again."

They were too quick for the old man's wooden leg, and scrambling over
the wall by the south porch of the church they were soon out of danger
on the beach below.

"My gosh, I never heard him coming. If I hadn't have thought to sing out
about the bullocks coming, he'd have laid that stick round us sure
enough. He don't care where he hits anybody, old man Timbury don't. I
belong to hear him tap-tapping along with his old wooden stump, but darn
'ee I never heard 'un coming this time."

The old man was leaning over the churchyard wall, shaking his stick and
abusing them with violent words.

"That's fine language for a sexton," commented Cass Dale. "I'd be
ashamed to swear like that, I would. You wouldn't hear my father swear
like that. My father's a local preacher."

"So's mine," said Mark.

"Is he? Where to?"

"London."

"A minister, is he?"

"No, he's a priest."

"Does he kiss the Pope's toe? My gosh, if the Pope asked me to kiss his
toe, I'd soon tell him to kiss something else, I would."

"My father doesn't kiss the Pope's toe," said Mark.

"I reckon he does then," Cass replied. "Passon Trehawke don't though.
Passon Trehawke's some fine old chap. My father said he'd lev me go
church of a morning sometimes if I'd a mind. My father belongs to come
himself to the Harvest Home, but my granfa never came to church at all
so long as he was alive. 'Time enough when I'm dead for that' he used to
say. He was a big man down to the Chapel, my granfa was. Mostly when he
did preach the maids would start screeching, so I've heard tell. But he
were too old for preaching when I knawed 'un."

"My grandfather is the priest here," said Mark.

"There isn't no priest to Nancepean. Only Passon Trehawke."

"My grandfather's name is Trehawke."

"Is it, by gosh? Well, why for do 'ee call him a priest? He isn't a
priest."

"Yes, he is."

"I say he isn't then. A parson isn't a priest. When I'm grown up I'm
going to be a minister. What are you going to be?"

Mark had for some time past intended to be a keeper at the Zoological
Gardens, but after his adventure with the wild beast in the thicket and
this encounter with the self-confident Cass Dale he decided that he
would not be a keeper but a parson. He informed Cass of his intention.

"Well, if you're a parson and I'm a minister," said Cass, "I'll bet
everyone comes to listen to me preaching and none of 'em don't go to
hear you."

"I wouldn't care if they didn't," Mark affirmed.

"You wouldn't care if you had to preach to a parcel of empty chairs and
benches?" exclaimed Cass.

"St. Francis preached to the trees," said Mark. "And St. Anthony
preached to the fishes."

"They must have been a couple of loonies."

"They were saints," Mark insisted.

"Saints, were they? Well, my father doesn't think much of saints. My
father says he reckons saints is the same as other people, only a bit
worse if anything. Are you saved?"

"What from?" Mark asked.

"Why, from Hell of course. What else would you be saved from?"

"You might be saved from a wild beast," Mark pointed out. "I saw a wild
beast this morning. A wild beast with a long nose and a sort of grey
colour."

"That wasn't a wild beast. That was an old badger."

"Well, isn't a badger a wild beast?"

Cass Dale laughed scornfully.

"My gosh, if that isn't a good one! I suppose you'd say a fox was a wild
beast?"

"No, I shouldn't," said Mark, repressing an inclination to cry, so much
mortified was he by Cass Dale's contemptuous tone.

"All the same," Cass went on. "It don't do to play around with badgers.
There was a chap over to Lanbaddern who was chased right across the Rose
one evening by seven badgers. He was in a muck of sweat when he got
home. But one old badger isn't nothing."

Mark had been counting on his adventure with the wild beast to justify
his long absence should he be reproached by his mother on his return to
the Vicarage. The way it had been disposed of by Cass Dale as an old
badger made him wonder if after all it would be accepted as such a good
excuse.

"I ought to be going home," he said. "But I don't think I remember the
way."

"To Passon Trehawke's?"

Mark nodded.

"I'll show 'ee," Cass volunteered, and he led the way past the mouth of
the stream to the track half way up the slope of the valley.

"Ever eat furze flowers?" asked Cass, offering Mark some that he had
pulled off in passing. "Kind of nutty taste they've got, I reckon. I
belong to eat them most days."

Mark acquired the habit and agreed with Cass that the blossoms were
delicious.

"Only you don't want to go eating everything you see," Cass warned him.
"I reckon you'd better always ask me before you eat anything. But furze
flowers is all right. I've eaten thousands. Next Friday's Good Friday."

"I know," said Mark reverently.

"We belong to get limpets every Good Friday. Are you coming with me?"

"Won't I be in church?" Mark inquired with memories of Good Friday in
Lima Street.

"Yes, I suppose they'll have some sort of a meeting down Church," said
Cass. "But you can come afterward. I'll wait for 'ee in Dollar Cove.
That's the next cove to Church Cove on the other side of the Castle
Cliff, and there's some handsome cave there. Years ago my granfa knawed
a chap who saw a mermaid combing out her hair in Dollar Cove. But
there's no mermaids been seen lately round these parts. My father says
he reckons since they scat up the apple orchards and give over drinking
cider they won't see no more mermaids to Nancepean. Have you signed the
pledge?"

"What's that?" Mark asked.

"My gosh, don't you know what the pledge is? Why, that's when you put a
blue ribbon in your buttonhole and swear you won't drink nothing all
your days."

"But you'd die," Mark objected. "People must drink."

"Water, yes, but there's no call for any one to drink anything only
water. My father says he reckons more folk have gone to hell from drink
than anything. You ought to hear him preach about drink. Why, when it
gets known in the village that Sam Dale's going to preach on drink there
isn't a seat down Chapel. Well, I tell 'ee he frightened me last time I
sat under him. That's why old man Timbury has it in for me whenever he
gets the chance."

Mark looked puzzled.

"Old man Timbury keeps the Hanover Inn. And he reckons my pa's preaching
spoils his trade for a week. That's why he's sexton to the church. 'Tis
the only way he can get even with the chapel folk. He used to be in the
Navy, and he lost his leg and got that hole in his head in a war with
the Rooshians. You'll hear him talking big about the Rooshians
sometimes. My father says anybody listening to old Steve Timbury would
think he'd fought with the Devil, instead of a lot of poor leary
Rooshians."

Mark was so much impressed by the older boy's confident chatter that
when he arrived back at the Vicarage and found his mother at breakfast
he tried the effect of an imitation of it upon her.

"Darling boy, you mustn't excite yourself too much," she warned him. "Do
try to eat a little more and talk a little less."

"But I can go out again with Cass Dale, can't I, mother, as soon as I've
finished my breakfast? He said he'd wait for me and he's going to show
me where we might find some silver dollars. He says they're five times
as big as a shilling and he's going to show me where there's a fox's
hole on the cliffs and he's . . ."

"But, Mark dear, don't forget," interrupted his mother who was feeling
faintly jealous of this absorbing new friend, "don't forget that I can
show you lots of the interesting things to see round here. I was a
little girl here myself and used to play with Cass Dale's father when he
was a little boy no bigger than Cass."

Just then grandfather came into the room and Mark was instantly dumb; he
had never been encouraged to talk much at breakfast in Lima Street. He
did, however, eye his grandfather from over the top of his cup, and he
found him less alarming in the morning than he had supposed him to be
last night. Parson Trehawke kept reaching across the table for the
various things he wanted until his daughter jumped up and putting her
arms round his neck said:

"Dearest father, why don't you ask Mark or me to pass you what you
want?"

"So long alone. So long alone," murmured Parson Trehawke with an
embarrassed smile and Mark observed with a thrill that when he smiled he
looked exactly like his mother, and had Mark but known it exactly like
himself.

"And it's so wonderful to be back here," went on Mrs. Lidderdale, "with
everything looking just the same. As for Mark, he's so happy that--Mark,
do tell grandfather how much you're enjoying yourself."

Mark gulped several times, and finally managed to mutter a confirmation
of his mother's statement.

"And he's already made friends with Cass Dale."

"He's intelligent but like his father he thinks he knows more than he
does," commented Parson Trehawke. "However, he'll make quite a good
companion for this young gentleman."

As soon as breakfast was over Mark rushed out to join Cass Dale, who
sitting crosslegged under an ilex-tree was peeling a pithy twig for a
whistle.




CHAPTER VII

LIFE AT NANCEPEAN


For six years Mark lived with his mother and his grandfather at
Nancepean, hearing nothing of his father except that he had gone out as
a missionary to the diocese of some place in Africa he could never
remember, so little interested was he in his father. His education was
shared between his two guardians, or rather his academic education; the
real education came either from what he read for himself in his
grandfather's ancient library of from what he learnt of Cass Dale, who
was much more than merely informative in the manner of a sixpenny
encyclopædia. The Vicar, who made himself responsible for the Latin and
later on for the Greek, began with Horace, his own favourite author,
from the rapid translation aloud of whose Odes and Epodes one after
another he derived great pleasure, though it is doubtful if his grandson
would have learnt much Latin if Mrs. Lidderdale had not supplemented
Horace with the Primer and Henry's Exercises. However, if Mark did not
acquire a vocabulary, he greatly enjoyed listening to his grandfather's
melodious voice chanting forth that sonorous topography of Horace, while
the green windows of the study winked every other minute from the flight
past of birds in the garden. His grandfather would stop and ask what
bird it was, because he loved birds even better than he loved Horace.
And if Mark was tired of Latin he used to say that he wasn't sure, but
that he thought it was a lesser-spotted woodpecker or a shrike or any
one of the birds that experience taught him would always distract his
grandfather's attention from anything that he was doing in order that he
might confirm or contradict the rumour. People who are much interested
in birds are less sociable than other naturalists. Their hobby demands a
silent and solitary pursuit of knowledge, and the presence of human
beings is prejudicial to their success. Parson Trehawke found that
Mark's company was not so much of a handicap as he would have supposed;
on the contrary he began to find it an advantage, because his grandson's
eyes were sharp and his observation if he chose accurate: Parson
Trehawke, who was growing old, began to rely upon his help. It was only
when Mark was tired of listening to the translation of Horace that he
called thrushes shrikes: when he was wandering over the cliffs or
tramping beside his grandfather across the Rhos, he was severely
sceptical of any rarity and used to make short work of the old
gentleman's Dartford warblers and fire-crested wrens.

It was usually over birds if ever Parson Trehawke quarrelled with his
parishioners. Few of them attended his services, but they spoke well of
him personally, and they reckoned that he was a fine old boy was Parson.
They would not however abandon their beastly habit of snaring wildfowl
in winter with fish-hooks, and many a time had Mark seen his grandfather
stand on the top of Pendhu Cliff, a favourite place to bait the hooks,
cursing the scattered white houses of the village below as if it were
one of the cities of the plain.

Although the people of Nancepean except for a very few never attended
the services in their church they liked to be baptized and married
within its walls, and not for anything would they have been buried
outside the little churchyard by the sea. About three years after Mark's
arrival his grandfather had a great fight over a burial. The blacksmith,
a certain William Day, died, and although he had never been inside St.
Tugdual's Church since he was married, his relations set great store by
his being buried there and by Parson Trehawke's celebrating the last
rites.

"Never," vowed the Parson. "Never while I live will I lay that
blackguard in my churchyard."

The elders of the village remonstrated with him, pointing out that
although the late Mr. Day was a pillar of the Chapel it had ever been
the custom in Nancepean to let the bones of the most obstinate Wesleyan
rest beside his forefathers.

"Wesleyan!" shouted the Parson. "Who cares if he was a Jew? I won't have
my churchyard defiled by that blackguard's corpse. Only a week before he
died, I saw him with my own eyes fling two or three pieces of white-hot
metal to some ducks that were looking for worms in the ditch outside his
smithy, and the wretched birds gobbled them down and died in agony. I
cursed him where he stood, and the judgment of God has struck him low,
and never shall he rest in holy ground if I can keep him out of it."

The elders of the village expressed their astonishment at Mr. Trehawke's
unreasonableness. William Day had been a God-fearing and upright man all
his life with no scandal upon his reputation unless it were the rumour
that he had got with child a half lunatic servant in his house, and that
was never proved. Was a man to be refused Christian burial because he
had once played a joke on some ducks? And what would Parson Trehawke
have said to Jesus Christ about the joke he played on the Gadarene
swine?

There is nothing that irritates a Kelt so much as the least
consideration for any animal, and there was not a man in the whole of
the Rhos peninsula who did not sympathize with the corpse of William
Day. In the end the dispute was settled by a neighbouring parson's
coming over and reading the burial service over the blacksmith's grave.
Mark apprehended that his grandfather resented bitterly the compromise
as his fellow parson called it, the surrender as he himself called it.
This was the second time that Mark had witnessed the defeat of a
superior being whom he had been taught to regard as invincible, and it
slightly clouded that perfect serenity of being grown up to which, like
most children, he looked forward as the end of life's difficulties. He
argued the justification of his grandfather's action with Cass Dale, and
he found himself confronted by the workings of a mind naturally
nonconformist with its rebellion against authority, its contempt of
tradition, its blend of self-respect and self-importance. When Mark
found himself in danger of being beaten in argument, he took to his
fists, at which method of settling a dispute Cass Dale proved equally
his match; and the end of it was that Mark found himself upside down in
a furze bush with nothing to console him but an unalterable conviction
that he was right and, although tears of pain and mortification were
streaming down his cheeks, a fixed resolve to renew the argument as soon
as he was the right way up again, and if necessary the struggle as well.

Luckily for the friendship between Mark and Cass, a friendship that was
awarded a mystical significance by their two surnames, Lidderdale and
Dale, Parson Trehawke, soon after the burial episode, came forward as
the champion of the Nancepean Fishing Company in a quarrel with those
pirates from Lanyon, the next village down the coast. Inasmuch as a
pilchard catch worth £800 was in dispute, feeling ran high between the
Nancepean Daws and the Lanyon Gulls. All the inhabitants of the Rhos
parishes were called after various birds or animals that were supposed
to indicate their character; and when Parson Trehawke's championship of
his own won the day, his parishioners came to church in a body on the
following Sunday and put one pound five shillings and tenpence halfpenny
in the plate. The reconciliation between the two boys took place with
solemn preliminary handshakes followed by linking of arms as of old
after Cass reckoned audibly to Mark who was standing close by that
Parson Trehawke was a grand old chap, the grandest old chap from
Rosemarket to Rose Head. That afternoon Mark went back to tea with Cass
Dale, and over honey with Cornish cream they were brothers again. Samuel
Dale, the father of Cass, was a typical farmer of that part of the
country with his fifty or sixty acres of land, the capital to work which
had come from fish in the fat pilchard years. Cass was his only son, and
he had an ambition to turn him into a full-fledged minister. He had lost
his wife when Cass was a baby, and it pleased him to think that in
planning such a position for the boy he was carrying out the wishes of
the mother whom outwardly he so much resembled. For housekeeper Samuel
Dale had an unmarried sister whom her neighbours accused of putting on
too much gentility before her nephew's advancement warranted such airs.
Mark liked Aunt Keran and accepted her hospitality as a tribute to
himself rather than to his position as the grandson of the Vicar. Miss
Dale had been a schoolmistress before she came to keep house for her
brother, and she worked hard to supplement what learning Cass could get
from the village school before, some three years after Mark came to
Nancepean, he was sent to Rosemarket Grammar School.

Mark was anxious to attend the Grammar School with Cass; but Mrs.
Lidderdale's dread nowadays was that her son would acquire a West
country burr, and it was considered more prudent, economically and
otherwise, to let him go on learning with his grandfather and herself.
Mark missed Cass when he went to school in Rosemarket, because there was
no such thing as playing truant there, and it was so far away that Cass
did not come home for the midday meal. But in summertime, Mark used to
wait for him outside the town, where a lane branched from the main road
into the unfrequented country behind the Rose Pool and took them the
longest way home along the banks on the Nancepean side, which were low
and rushy unlike those on the Rosemarket side, which were steep and
densely wooded. The great water, though usually described as
heart-shaped, was really more like a pair of Gothic arches, the green
cusp between which was crowned by a lonely farmhouse, El Dorado of Mark
and his friend, and the base of which was the bar of shingle that kept
out the sea. There was much to beguile the boys on the way home, whether
it was the sight of strange wildfowl among the reeds, or the exploration
of a ruined cottage set in an ancient cherry-orchard, or the sailing of
paper boats, or even the mere delight of lying on the grass and
listening above the murmur of insects to the water nagging at the sedge.
So much indeed was there to beguile them that, if after sunset the Pool
had not been a haunted place, they would have lingered there till
nightfall. Sometimes indeed they did miscalculate the distance they had
come and finding themselves likely to be caught by twilight they would
hurry with eyes averted from the grey water lest the kelpie should rise
out of the depths and drown them. There were men and women now alive in
Nancepean who could tell of this happening to belated wayfarers, and it
was Mark who discovered that such a beast was called a kelpie. Moreover,
the bar where earlier in the evening it was pleasant to lie and pluck
the yellow sea-poppies, listening to tales of wrecks and buried treasure
and bygone smuggling, was no place at all in the chill of twilight;
moreover, when the bar had been left behind and before the coastguards'
cottages came into sight there was a two-mile stretch of lonely cliff
that was a famous haunt of ghosts. Drowned light dragoons whose bodies
were tossed ashore here a hundred years ago, wreckers revisiting the
scene of their crimes, murdered excisemen . . . it was not surprising
that the boys hurried along the narrow path, whistling to keep up their
spirits and almost ready to cry for help if nothing more dangerous than
a moth fanned their pale cheeks in passing. And after this Mark had to
undo alone the nine gates between the Vicarage and Nancepean, though
Cass would go with him as far along his road as the last light of the
village could be seen, and what was more stay there whistling for as
long as Mark could hear the heartening sound.

But if these adventures demanded the companionship of Cass, the
inspiration of them was Mark's mother. Just as in the nursery games of
Lima Street it had always been she who had made it worth while to play
with his grenadiers, which by the way had perished in a troopship like
their predecessors the light dragoons a century before, sinking one by
one and leaving nothing behind except their cork-stands bobbing on the
waves.

Mrs. Lidderdale knew every legend of the coast, so that it was thrilling
to sit beside her and turn over the musty pages of the church registers,
following from equinox to equinox in the entries of the burials the
wrecks since the year 1702:

     The bodies of fifteen seamen from the brigantine _Ann Pink_ wrecked
     in Church Cove, on the afternoon of Dec. 19, 1757.

     The body of a child washed into Pendhu Cove from the high seas
     during the night of Jan. 24, 1760.

     The body of an unknown sailor, the breast tattooed with a heart and
     the initials M. V. found in Hanover Cove on the morning of March 3,
     1801.

Such were the inscriptions below the wintry dates of two hundred years,
and for each one Mark's mother had a moving legend of fortune's malice.
She had tales too of treasure, from the golden doubloons of a Spanish
galleon wrecked on the Rose Bar in the sixteenth century to the silver
dollars of Portugal, a million of them, lost in the narrow cove on the
other side of the Castle Cliff in the lee of which was built St.
Tugdual's Church. At low spring tides it was possible to climb down and
sift the wet sand through one's fingers on the chance of finding a
dollar, and when the tide began to rise it was jolly to climb back to
the top of the cliff and listen to tales of mermaids while a gentle wind
blew the perfume of the sea-campion along the grassy slopes. It was here
that Mark first heard the story of the two princesses who were wrecked
in what was now called Church Cove and of how they were washed up on the
cliff and vowed to build a church in gratitude to God and St. Tugdual on
the very spot where they escaped from the sea, of how they quarrelled
about the site because each sister wished to commemorate the exact spot
where she was saved, and of how finally one built the tower on her spot
and the other built the church on hers, which was the reason why the
church and the tower were not joined to this day. When Mark went home
that afternoon, he searched among his grandfather's books until he found
the story of St. Tugdual who, it seemed, was a holy man in Brittany, so
holy that he was summoned to be Pope of Rome. When he had been Pope for
a few months, an angel appeared to him and said that he must come back
at once to Brittany, because since he went to Rome all the women were
become barren.

"But how am I to go back all the way from Rome to Brittany?" St. Tugdual
asked.

"I have a white horse waiting for you," the angel replied.

And sure enough there was a beautiful white horse with wings, which
carried St. Tugdual back to Brittany in a few minutes.

"What does it mean when a woman becomes barren?" Mark inquired of his
mother.

"It means when she does not have any more children, darling," said Mrs.
Lidderdale, who did not believe in telling lies about anything.

And because she answered her son simply, her son did not perplex himself
with shameful speculations, but was glad that St. Tugdual went back home
so that the women of Brittany were able to have children again.

Everything was simple at Nancepean except the parishioners; but Mark was
still too young and too simple himself to apprehend their complicacy.
The simplest thing of all was the Vicar's religion, and at an age when
for most children religion means being dressed up to go into the
drawing-room and say how d'you do to God, Mark was allowed to go to
church in his ordinary clothes and after church to play at whatever he
wanted to play, so that he learned to regard the assemblage of human
beings to worship God as nothing more remarkable than the song of birds.
He was too young to have experienced yet a personal need of religion;
but he had already been touched by that grace of fellowship which is
conferred upon a small congregation, the individual members of which are
in church to please themselves rather than to impress others. This was
always the case in the church of Nancepean, which had to contend not
merely with the popularity of methodism, but also with the situation of
the Chapel in the middle of the village. On the dark December evenings
there would be perhaps not more than half a dozen worshippers, each one
of whom would have brought his own candle and stuck it on the shelf of
the pew. The organist would have two candles for the harmonium; the
choir of three little boys and one little girl would have two between
them; the altar would have two; the Vicar would have two. But when all
the candle-light was put together, it left most of the church in shadow;
indeed, it scarcely even illuminated the space between the worshippers,
so that each one seemed wrapped in a golden aura of prayer, most of all
when at Evensong the people knelt in silence for a minute while the
sound of the sea without rose and fell and the noise of the wind
scuttling through the ivy on the walls was audible. When the
congregation had gone out and the Vicar was standing at the churchyard
gate saying "good night," Mark used to think that they must all be
feeling happy to go home together up the long hill to Pendhu and down
into twinkling Nancepean. And it did not matter whether it was a night
of clear or clouded moonshine or a night of windy stars or a night of
darkness; for when it was dark he could always look back from the valley
road and see a company of lanthorns moving homeward; and that more than
anything shed upon his young spirit the grace of human fellowship and
the love of mankind.




CHAPTER VIII

THE WRECK


One wild night in late October of the year before he would be thirteen,
Mark was lying awake hoping, as on such nights he always hoped, to hear
somebody shout "A wreck! A wreck!" A different Mark from that one who
used to lie trembling in Lima Street lest he should hear a shout of
"Fire! or Thieves!"

And then it happened! It happened as a hundred times he had imagined its
happening, so exactly that he could hardly believe for a moment he was
not dreaming. There was the flash of a lanthorn on the ceiling, a
thunderous, knocking on the Vicarage door. Mark leapt out of bed;
flinging open his window through which the wind rushed in like a flight
of angry birds, he heard voices below in the garden shouting "Parson!
Parson! Parson Trehawke! There's a brig driving in fast toward Church
Cove." He did not wait to hear more, but dashed along the passage to
rouse first his grandfather, then his mother, and then Emma, the Vicar's
old cook.

"And you must get soup ready," he cried, standing over the old woman in
his flannel pyjamas and waving his arms excitedly, while downstairs the
cuckoo popped in and out of his door in the clock twelve times. Emma
blinked at him in terror, and Mark pulled off all the bedclothes to
convince the old woman that he was not playing a practical joke. Then he
rushed back to his own room and began to dress for dear life.

"Mother," he shouted, while he was dressing, "the Captain can sleep in
my bed, if he isn't drowned, can't he?"

"Darling, do you really want to go down to the sea on such a night?"

"Oh, mother," he gasped, "I'm practically dressed. And you will see
that Emma has lots of hot soup ready, won't you? Because it'll be much
better to bring all the crew back here. I don't think they'd want to
walk all that way over Pendhu to Nancepean after they'd been wrecked, do
you?"

"Well, you must ask grandfather first before you make arrangements for
his house."

"Grandfather's simply tearing into his clothes; Ernie Hockin and Joe
Dunstan have both got lanthorns, and I'll carry ours, so if one blows
out we shall be all right. Oh, mother, the wind's simply shrieking
through the trees. Can you hear it?"

"Yes, dearest, I certainly can. I think you'd better shut your windows.
It's blowing everything about in your room most uncomfortably."

Mark's soul expanded in gratitude to God when he found himself neither
in a dream nor in a story, but actually, and without any possibility of
self-deception hurrying down the drive toward the sea beside Ernie and
Joe, who had come from the village to warn the Vicar of the wreck and
were wearing oilskins and sou'westers, thus striking the keynote as it
were of the night's adventure. At first in the shelter of the holm-oaks
the storm seemed far away overhead; but when they turned the corner and
took the road along the valley, the wind caught them full in the face
and Mark was blown back violently against the swinging gate of the
drive. The light of the lanthorns shining on a rut in the road showed a
field-mouse hurrying inland before the rushing gale. Mark bent double to
force himself to keep up with the others, lest somebody should think, by
his inability to maintain an equal pace that he ought to follow the
field-mouse back home. After they had struggled on for a while a bend of
the valley gave them a few minutes of easy progress and Mark listened
while Ernie Hockin explained to the Vicar what had happened:

"Just before dark Eddowes the coastguard said he reckoned there was a
brig making very heavy weather of it and he shouldn't be surprised if
she come ashore tonight. Couldn't seem to beat out of the bay noways, he
said. And afterwards about nine o'clock when me and Joe here and some
of the chaps were in the bar to the Hanover, Eddowes come in again and
said she was in a bad way by the looks of her last thing he saw, and he
telephoned along to Lanyon to ask if they'd seen her down to the
lifeboat house. They reckoned she was all right to the lifeboat, and old
man Timbury who do always go against anything Eddowes do say shouted
that of course she was all right because he'd taken a look at her
through his glass before it grew dark. Of course she was all right.
'She's on a lee shore,' said Eddowes. 'It don't take a coastguard to
tell that,' said old man Timbury. And then they got to talking one
against the other the same as they belong, and they'd soon got back to
the same old talk whether Jackie Fisher was the finest admiral who ever
lived or no use at all. 'What's the good in your talking to me?' old man
Timbury was saying. 'Why afore you was born I've seen' . . . and we all
started in to shout 'ships o' the line, frigates, and cavattes,' because
we belong to mock him like that, when somebody called 'Hark, listen,
wasn't that a rocket?' That fetched us all outside into the road where
we stood listening. The wind was blowing harder than ever, and there was
a parcel of sea rising. You could hear it against Shag Rock over the
wind. Eddowes, he were a bit upset to think he should have been talking
and not a-heard the rocket. But there wasn't a light in the sky, and
when we went home along about half past nine we saw Eddowes again and he
said he'd been so far as Church Cove and should walk up along to the
Bar. No mistake, Mr. Trehawke, he's a handy chap is Eddowes for the
coastguard job. And then about eleven o'clock he saw two rockets close
in to Church Cove and he come running back and telephoned to Lanyon, but
they said no one couldn't launch a boat to-night, and Eddowes he come
banging on the doors and windows shouting 'A Wreck' and some of us took
ropes along with Eddowes, and me and Joe here come and fetched you
along. Eddowes said he's afeard she'll strike in Dollar Cove unless
she's lucky and come ashore in Church Cove."

"How's the tide?" asked the Vicar.

"About an hour of the ebb," said Ernie Hockin. "And the moon's been up
this hour and more."

Just then the road turned the corner, and the world became a waste of
wind and spindrift driving inland. The noise of the gale made it
impossible for anybody to talk, and Mark was left wondering whether the
ship had actually struck or not. The wind drummed in his ears, the
flying grit and gravel and spray stung his face; but he struggled on
hoping that this midnight walk would not come to an abrupt end by his
grandfather's declining to go any farther. Above the drumming of the
wind the roar of the sea became more audible every moment; the spume was
thicker; the end of the valley, ordinarily the meeting-place of sand and
grass and small streams with their yellow flags and forget-me-nots, was
a desolation of white foam beyond which against the cliffs showing black
in the nebulous moonlight the breakers leapt high with frothy tongues.
Mark thought that they resembled immense ghosts clawing up to reach the
summit of the cliff. It was incredible that this hell-broth was Church
Cove.

"Hullo!" yelled Ernie Hockin. "Here's the bridge."

It was true. One wave at the moment of high tide had swept snarling over
the stream and carried the bridge into the meadow beyond.

"We'll have to get round by the road," shouted the Vicar.

They turned to the right across a ploughed field and after scrambling
through the hedge emerged in the comparative shelter of the road down
from Pendhu.

"I hope the churchyard wall is all right," said the Vicar. "I never
remember such a night since I came to Nancepean."

"Sure 'nough, 'tis blowing very fierce," Joe Dunstan agreed. "But don't
you worry about the wall, Mr. Trehawke. The worst of the water is broken
by the Castle and only comes in sideways, as you might say."

When they drew near the gate of the churchyard, the rain of sand and
small pebbles was agonizing, as it swept across up the low sandstone
cliffs on that side of the Castle. Two or three excited figures shouted
for them to hurry because she was going to strike in Dollar Cove, and
everybody began to scramble up the grassy slope, clutching at the
tuffets of thrift to aid their progress. It was calm here in the lee;
and Mark panting up the face thought of those two princesses who were
wrecked here ages ago, and he understood now why one of them had
insisted on planting the tower deep in the foundation of this green
fortress against the wind and weather. While he was thinking this, his
head came above the sky line, his breath left him at the assault of the
wind, and he had to crawl on all fours toward the sea. He reached the
edge of the cliff just as something like the wings of a gigantic bat
flapped across the dim wet moonlight, and before he realized that this
was the brig he heard the crashing of her spars. The watchers stood up
against the wind, battling with it to fling lines in the vain hope of
saving some sailor who was being churned to death in that dreadful
creaming of the sea below. Yes, and there were forms of men visible on
board; two had climbed the mainmast, which crashed before they could
clutch at the ropes that were being flung to them from land, crashed and
carried them down shrieking into the surge. Mark found it hard to
believe that last summer he had spent many sunlit hours dabbling in the
sand for silver dollars of Portugal lost perhaps on such a night as this
a hundred years ago, exactly where these two poor mariners were lost. A
few minutes after the mainmast the hull went also; but in the nebulous
moonlight nothing could be seen of any bodies alive or dead, nothing
except wreckage tossing upon the surge. The watchers on the cliff turned
away from the wind to gather new breath and give their cheeks a rest
from the stinging fragments of rock and earth. Away up over the towans
they could see the bobbing lanthorns of men hurrying down from Chypie
where news of the wreck had reached; and on the road from Lanyon they
could see lanthorns on the other side of Church Cove waiting until the
tide had ebbed far enough to let them cross the beach.

Suddenly the Vicar shouted:

"I can see a poor fellow hanging on to a ledge of rock. Bring a rope!
Bring a rope!"

Eddowes the coastguard took charge of the operation, and Mark with
beating pulses watched the end of the rope touch the huddled form below.
But either from exhaustion or because he feared to let go of the
slippery ledge for one moment the sailor made no attempt to grasp the
rope. The men above shouted to him, begged him to make an effort; but he
remained there inert.

"Somebody must go down with the rope and get a slip knot under his
arms," the Vicar shouted.

Nobody seemed to pay attention to this proposal, and Mark wondered if he
was the only one who had heard it. However, when the Vicar repeated his
suggestion, Eddowes came forward, knelt down by the edge of the cliff,
shook himself like a bather who is going to plunge into what he knows
will be very cold water, and then vanished down the rope. Everybody
crawled on hand and knees to see what would happen. Mark prayed that
Eddowes, who was a great friend of his, would not come to any harm, but
that he would rescue the sailor and be given the Albert medal for saving
life. It was Eddowes who had made him medal wise. The coastguard
struggled to slip the loop under the man's shoulders along his legs; but
it must have been impossible, for presently he made a signal to be
raised.

"I can't do it alone," he shouted. "He's got a hold like a limpet."

Nobody seemed anxious to suppose that the addition of another rescuer
would be any more successful.

"If there was two of us," Eddowes went on, "we might do something."

The people on the cliff shook their heads doubtfully.

"Isn't anybody coming down along with me to have a try?" the coastguard
demanded at the top of his voice.

Mark did not hear his grandfather's reply; he only saw him go over the
cliff's edge at the end of one rope while Eddowes went down on another.
A minute later the slipknot came untied (or that was how the accident
was explained) and the Vicar went to join the drowned mariners,
dislodging as he fell the man whom he had tried to save, so that of the
crew of the brig _Happy Return_ not one ever came to port.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect upon Mark Lidderdale of
that night. He was twelve years old at the time; but the years in
Cornwall had retarded that precocious development to which he seemed
destined by the surroundings of his early childhood in Lima Street, and
in many ways he was hardly any older than he was when he left London. In
after years he looked back with gratitude upon the shock he received
from what was as it were an experience of the material impact of death,
because it made him think about death, not morbidly as so many children
and young people will, but with the apprehension of something that
really does come in a moment and for which it is necessary for every
human being to prepare his soul. The platitudes of age may often be for
youth divine revelations, and there is nothing so stimulating as the
unaided apprehension of a great commonplace of existence. The awe with
which Mark was filled that night was too vast to evaporate in sentiment,
and when two days after this there came news from Africa that his father
had died of black-water fever that awe was crystallized indeed. Mark
looking round at his small world perceived that nobody was safe.
To-morrow his mother might die; to-morrow he might die himself. In any
case the death of his grandfather would have meant a profound change in
the future of his mother's life and his own; the living of Nancepean
would fall to some other priest and with it the house in which they
lived. Parson Trehawke had left nothing of any value except Gould's
_Birds of Great Britain_ and a few other works of ornithology. The
furniture of the Vicarage was rich neither in quality nor in quantity.
Three or four hundred pounds was the most his daughter could inherit.
She had spoken to Mark of their poverty, because in her dismay for the
future of her son she had no heart to pretend that the dead man's money
was of little importance.

"I must write and ask your father what we ought to do." . . . She
stopped in painful awareness of the possessive pronoun. Mark was
unresponsive, until there came the news from Africa, which made him
throw his arms about his mother's neck while she was still alive. Mrs.
Lidderdale, whatever bitterness she may once have felt for the ruin of
her married life, shed fresh tears of sorrow for her husband, and
supposing that Mark's embrace was the expression of his sympathy wept
more, as people will when others are sorry for them, and then still more
because the future for Mark seemed hopeless. How was she to educate him?
How clothe him? How feed him even? At her age where and how could she
earn money? She reproached herself with having been too ready out of
sensitiveness to sacrifice Mark to her own pride. She had had no right
to leave her husband and live in the country like this. She should have
repressed her own emotion and thought only of the family life, to the
maintenance of which by her marriage she had committed herself. At first
it had seemed the best thing for Mark; but she should have remembered
that her father could not live for ever and that one day she would have
to face the problem of life without his help and his hospitality. She
began to imagine that the disaster of that stormy night had been
contrived by God to punish her, and she prayed to Him that her
chastisement should not be increased, that at least her son might be
spared to her.

Mrs. Lidderdale was able to stay on at the Vicarage for several weeks,
because the new Vicar of Nancepean was not able to take over his charge
immediately. This delay gave her time to hold a sale of her father's
furniture, at which the desire of the neighbours to be generous fought
with their native avarice, so that in the end the furniture fetched
neither more nor less than had been expected, which was little enough.
She kept back enough to establish herself and Mark in rooms, should she
be successful in finding some unfurnished rooms sufficiently cheap to
allow her to take them, although how she was going to live for more than
two years on what she had was a riddle of which after a month of
sleepless nights she had not found the solution.

In the end, and as Mrs. Lidderdale supposed in answer to her prayers,
the solution was provided unexpectedly in the following letter:

     Haverton House,

     Elmhurst Road,

     Slowbridge.

     November 29th.

     Dear Grace,

     I have just received a letter from James written when he was at the
     point of death in Africa. It appears that in his zeal to convert
     the heathen to Popery he omitted to make any provision for his wife
     and child, so that in the event of his death, unless either your
     relatives or his relatives came forward to support you I was given
     to understand that you would be destitute. I recently read in the
     daily paper an account of the way in which your father Mr. Trehawke
     lost his life, and I caused inquiries to be made in Rosemarket
     about your prospects. These my informant tells me are not any too
     bright. You will, I am sure, pardon my having made these inquiries
     without reference to you, but I did not feel justified in offering
     you and my nephew a home with my sister Helen and myself unless I
     had first assured myself that some such offer was necessary. You
     are probably aware that for many years my brother James and myself
     have not been on the best of terms. I on my side found his
     religious teaching so eccentric as to repel me; he on his side was
     so bigoted that he could not tolerate my tacit disapproval. Not
     being a Ritualist but an Evangelical, I can perhaps bring myself
     more easily to forgive my brother's faults and at the same time
     indulge my theories of duty, as opposed to forms and ceremonies,
     theories that if carried out by everybody would soon transform our
     modern Christianity. You are no doubt a Ritualist, and your son has
     no doubt been educated in the same school. Let me hasten to give
     you my word that I shall not make the least attempt to interfere
     either with your religious practices or with his. The quarrel
     between myself and James was due almost entirely to James'
     inability to let me and my opinions alone.

     I am far from being a rich man, in fact I may say at once that I am
     scarcely even "comfortably off" as the phrase goes. It would
     therefore be outside my capacity to undertake the expense of any
     elaborate education for your son; but my own school, which while it
     does not pretend to compete with some of the fashionable
     establishments of the time is I venture to assert a first class
     school and well able to send your son into the world at the age of
     sixteen as well equipped, and better equipped than he would be if
     he went to one of the famous public schools. I possess some
     influence with a firm of solicitors, and I have no doubt that when
     my nephew, who is I believe now twelve years old, has had the
     necessary schooling I shall be able to secure him a position as an
     articled clerk, from which if he is honest and industrious he may
     be able to rise to the position of a junior partner. If you have
     saved anything from the sale of your father's effects I should
     advise you to invest the sum. However small it is, you will find
     the extra money useful, for as I remarked before I shall not be
     able to afford to do more than lodge and feed you both, educate
     your son, find him in clothes, and start him in a career on the
     lines I have already indicated. My local informant tells me that
     you have kept back a certain amount of your father's furniture in
     order to take lodgings elsewhere. As this will now be unnecessary I
     hope that you will sell the rest. Haverton House is sufficiently
     furnished, and we should not be able to find room for any more
     furniture. I suggest your coming to us next Friday. It will be
     easiest for you to take the fast train up to Paddington when you
     will be able to catch the 6.45 to Slowbridge arriving at 7.15. We
     usually dine at 7.30, but on Friday dinner will be at 8 p.m. in
     order to give you plenty of time. Helen sends her love. She would
     have written also, but I assured her that one letter was enough,
     and that a very long one.

     Your affectionate brother-in-law,

     Henry Lidderdale.

Mrs. Lidderdale would no doubt have criticized this letter more sharply
if she had not regarded it as inspired, almost actually written by the
hand of God. Whatever in it was displeasing to her she accepted as the
Divine decree, and if anybody had pointed out the inconsistency of some
of the opinions therein expressed with its Divine authorship, she would
have dismissed the objection as made by somebody who was incapable of
comprehending the mysterious action of God.

"Mark," she called to her son. "What do you think has happened? Your
Uncle Henry has offered us a home. I want you to write to him like a
dear boy and thank him for his kindness." She explained in detail what
Uncle Henry intended to do for them; but Mark would not be enthusiastic.
He on his side had been praying to God to put it into the mind of Samuel
Dale to offer him a job on his farm; Slowbridge was a poor substitute
for that.

"Where is Slowbridge?" he asked in a gloomy voice.

"It's a fairly large place near London," his mother told him. "It's near
Eton and Windsor and Stoke Poges where Gray wrote his Elegy, which we
learned last summer. You remember, don't you?" she asked anxiously, for
she wanted Mark to cut a figure with his uncle.

"Wolfe liked it," said Mark. "And I like it too," he added ungraciously.
He wished that he could have said he hated it; but Mark always found it
difficult to tell a lie about his personal feelings, or about any facts
that involved him in a false position.

"And now before you go down to tea with Cass Dale, you will write to
your uncle, won't you, and show me the letter?"

Mark groaned.

"It's so difficult to thank people. It makes me feel silly."

"Well, darling, mother wants you to. So sit down like a dear boy and get
it done."

"I think my nib is crossed."

"Is it? You'll find another in my desk."

"But, mother, yours are so thick."

"Please, Mark, don't make any more excuses. Don't you want to do
everything you can to help me just now?"

"Yes, of course," said Mark penitently, and sitting down in the window
he stared out at the yellow November sky, and at the magpies flying
busily from one side of the valley to the other.

     The Vicarage,

     Nancepean,

     South Cornwall.

     My dear Uncle Henry,

     Thank you very much for your kind invitation to come and live with
     you. We should enjoy it very much. I am going to tea with a friend
     of mine called Cass Dale who lives in Nancepean, and so I must stop
     now. With love,

     I remain,

     Your loving nephew,

     Mark.

And then the pen must needs go and drop a blot like a balloon right over
his name, so that the whole letter had to be copied out again before his
mother would say that she was satisfied, by which time the yellow sky
was dun and the magpies were gone to rest.

Mark left the Dales about half past six, and was accompanied by Cass to
the brow of Pendhu. At this point Cass declined to go any farther in
spite of Mark's reminder that this would be one of the last walks they
would take together, if it were not absolutely the very last.

"No," said Cass. "I wouldn't come up from Church Cove myself not for
anything."

"But I'm going down by myself," Mark argued. "If I hadn't thought you'd
come all the way with me, I'd have gone home by the fields. What are you
afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of nothing, but I don't want to walk so far by myself.
I've come up the hill with 'ee. Now 'tis all down hill for both of us,
and that's fair."

"Oh, all right," said Mark, turning away in resentment at his friend's
desertion.

Both boys ran off in opposite directions, Cass past the splash of light
thrown across the road by the windows of the Hanover Inn, and on toward
the scattered lights of Nancepean, Mark into the gloom of the deep lane
down to Church Cove. It was a warm and humid evening that brought out
the smell of the ferns and earth in the high banks on either side, and
presently at the bottom of the hill the smell of the seaweed heaped up
in Church Cove by weeks of gales. The moon, about three days from the
full, was already up, shedding her aqueous lustre over the towans of
Chypie, which slowly penetrated the black gulfs of shadow in the
countryside until Mark could perceive the ghost of a familiar landscape.
There came over him, whose emotion had already been sprung by the
insensibility of Cass, an overwhelming awareness of parting, and he
gave to the landscape the expression of sentiment he had yearned to give
his friend. His fear of seeing the spirits of the drowned sailors, or as
he passed the churchyard gate of perceiving behind that tamarisk the
tall spectre of his grandfather, which on the way down from Pendhu had
seemed impossible to combat, had died away; and in his despair at losing
this beloved scene he wandered on past the church until he stood at the
edge of the tide. On this humid autumnal night the oily sea collapsed
upon the beach as if it, like everything else in nature, was overcome by
the prevailing heaviness. Mark sat down upon some tufts of samphire and
watched the Stag Light occulting out across St. Levan's Bay, distant
forty miles and more, and while he sat he perceived a glow-worm at his
feet creeping along a sprig of samphire that marked the limit of the
tide's advance. How did the samphire know that it was safe to grow where
it did, and how did the glow-worm know that the samphire was safe?

Mark was suddenly conscious of the protection of God, for might not he
expect as much as the glow-worm and the samphire? The ache of separation
from Nancepean was assuaged. That dread of the future, with which the
impact of death had filled him, was allayed.

"Good-night, sister glow-worm," he said aloud in imitation of St.
Francis. "Good-night, brother samphire."

A drift of distant fog had obliterated the Stag Light; but of her
samphire the glow-worm had made a moonlit forest, so brightly was she
shining, yes, a green world of interlacing, lucid boughs.

_Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works,
and glorify your Father which is in heaven._

And Mark, aspiring to thank God Who had made manifest His protection,
left Nancepean three days later with the determination to become a
lighthouse-keeper, to polish well his lamp and tend it with care, so
that men passing by in ships should rejoice at his good works and call
him brother lighthouse-keeper, and glorify God their Father when they
walked again upon the grass, harking to the pleasant song of birds and
the hum of bees.




CHAPTER IX

SLOWBRIDGE


When Mark came to live with Uncle Henry Lidderdale at Slowbridge, he was
large for his age, or at any rate he was so loosely jointed as to appear
large; a swart complexion, prominent cheek-bones, and straight lank hair
gave him a melancholic aspect, the impression of which remained with the
observer until he heard the boy laugh in a paroxysm of merriment that
left his dark blue eyes dancing long after the outrageous noise had died
down. If Mark had occasion to relate some episode that appealed to him,
his laughter would accompany the narrative like a pack of hounds in full
cry, would as it were pursue the tale to its death, and communicate its
zest to the listener, who would think what a sense of humour Mark had,
whereas it was more truly the gusto of life.

Uncle Henry found this laughter boisterous and irritating; if his nephew
had been a canary in a cage, he would have covered him with a
table-cloth. Aunt Helen, if she was caught up in one of Mark's
narratives, would twitch until it was finished, when she would rub her
forehead with an acorn of menthol and wrap herself more closely in a
shawl of soft Shetland wool. The antipathy that formerly existed between
Mark and his father was much sharper between Mark and his uncle. It was
born in the instant of their first meeting, when Uncle Henry bent over,
his trunk at right angles to his legs, so that one could fancy the
pelvic bones to be clicking like the wooden joints of a monkey on a
stick, and offered his nephew an acrid whisker to be saluted.

"And what is Mark going to be?" Uncle Henry inquired.

"A lighthouse-keeper."

"Ah, we all have suchlike ambitions when we are young. I remember that
for nearly a year I intended to be a muffin-man," said Uncle Henry
severely.

Mark hated his uncle from that moment, and he fixed upon the throbbing
pulse of his scraped-out temples as the feature upon which that dislike
should henceforth be concentrated. Uncle Henry's pulse seemed to express
all the vitality that was left to him; Mark thought that Our Lord must
have felt about the barren fig-tree much as he felt about Uncle Henry.

Aunt Helen annoyed Mark in the way that one is annoyed by a cushion in
an easy chair. It is soft and apparently comfortable, but after a minute
or two one realizes that it is superfluous, and it is pushed over the
arm to the floor. Unfortunately Aunt Helen could not be treated like a
cushion; and there she was soft and comfortable in appearance, but
forever in Mark's way. Aunt Helen was the incarnation of her own
drawing-room. Her face was round and stupid like a clock's; she wore
brocaded gowns and carpet slippers; her shawls resembled antimacassars;
her hair was like the stuff that is put in grates during the summer; her
caps were like lace curtains tied back with velvet ribbons; cameos leant
against her bosom as if they were upon a mantelpiece. Mark never
overcame his dislike of kissing Aunt Helen, for it gave him a sensation
every time that a bit of her might stick to his lips. He lacked that
solemn sense of relationship with which most children are imbued, and
the compulsory intimacy offended him, particularly when his aunt
referred to little boys generically as if they were beetles or mice. Her
inability to appreciate that he was Mark outraged his young sense of
personality which was further dishonoured by the manner in which she
spoke of herself as Aunt Helen, thus seeming to imply that he was only
human at all in so far as he was her nephew. She continually shocked his
dignity by prescribing medicine for him without regard to the presence
of servants or visitors; and nothing gave her more obvious pleasure than
to get Mark into the drawing-room on afternoons when dreary mothers of
pupils came to call, so that she might bully him under the appearance of
teaching good manners, and impress the parents with the advantages of a
Haverton House education.

As long as his mother remained alive, Mark tried to make her happy by
pretending that he enjoyed living at Haverton House, that he enjoyed his
uncle's Preparatory School for the Sons of Gentlemen, that he enjoyed
Slowbridge with its fogs and laburnums, its perambulators and
tradesmen's carts and noise of whistling trains; but a year after they
left Nancepean Mrs. Lidderdale died of pneumonia, and Mark was left
alone with his uncle and aunt.

"He doesn't realize what death means," said Aunt Helen, when Mark on the
very afternoon of the funeral without even waiting to change out of his
best clothes began to play with soldiers instead of occupying himself
with the preparation of lessons that must begin again on the morrow.

"I wonder if you will play with soldiers when Aunt Helen dies?" she
pressed.

"No," said Mark quickly, "I shall work at my lessons when you die."

His uncle and aunt looked at him suspiciously. They could find no fault
with the answer; yet something in the boy's tone, some dreadful
suppressed exultation made them feel that they ought to find severe
fault with the answer.

"Wouldn't it be kinder to your poor mother's memory," Aunt Helen
suggested, "wouldn't it be more becoming now to work harder at your
lessons when your mother is watching you from above?"

Mark would not condescend to explain why he was playing with soldiers,
nor with what passionate sorrow he was recalling every fleeting
expression on his mother's face, every slight intonation of her voice
when she was able to share in his game; he hated his uncle and aunt so
profoundly that he revelled in their incapacity to understand him, and
he would have accounted it a desecration of her memory to share his
grief with them.

Haverton House School was a depressing establishment; in after years
when Mark looked back at it he used to wonder how it had managed to
survive so long, for when he came to live at Slowbridge it had actually
been in existence for twenty years, and his uncle was beginning to look
forward to the time when Old Havertonians, as he called them, would be
bringing their sons to be educated at the old place. There were about
fifty pupils, most of them the sons of local tradesmen, who left when
they were about fourteen, though a certain number lingered on until they
were as much as sixteen in what was called the Modern Class, where they
were supposed to receive at least as practical an education as they
would have received behind the counter, and certainly a more genteel
one. Fine fellows those were in the Modern Class at Haverton House,
stalwart heroes who made up the cricket and football teams and strode
about the playing fields of Haverton House with as keen a sense of their
own importance as Etonians of comparable status in their playing fields
not more than two miles away. Mark when everything else in his school
life should be obliterated by time would remember their names and
prowess. . . . Borrow, Tull, Yarde, Corke, Vincent, Macdougal, Skinner,
they would keep throughout his life some of that magic which clings to
Diomed and Deiphobus, to Hector and Achilles.

Apart from these heroic names the atmosphere of Haverton House was not
inspiring. It reduced the world to the size and quality of one of those
scratched globes with which Uncle Henry demonstrated geography. Every
subject at Haverton House, no matter how interesting it promised to be,
was ruined from an educative point of view by its impedimenta of dates,
imports, exports, capitals, capes, and Kings of Israel and Judah.
Neither Uncle Henry nor his assistants Mr. Spaull and Mr. Palmer
believed in departing from the book. Whatever books were chosen for the
term's curriculum were regarded as something for which money had been
paid and from which the last drop of information must be squeezed to
justify in the eyes of parents the expenditure. The teachers considered
the notes more important than the text; genealogical tables were exalted
above anything on the same page. Some books of history were adorned with
illustrations; but no use was made of them by the masters, and for the
pupils they merely served as outlines to which, were they the outlines
of human beings, inky beards and moustaches had to be affixed, or were
they landscapes, flights of birds.

Mr. Spaull was a fat flabby young man with a heavy fair moustache, who
was reading for Holy Orders; Mr. Palmer was a stocky bow-legged young
man in knickerbockers, who was good at football and used to lament the
gentle birth that prevented his becoming a professional. The boys called
him Gentleman Joe; but they were careful not to let Mr. Palmer hear
them, for he had a punch and did not believe in cuddling the young. He
used to jeer openly at his colleague, Mr. Spaull, who never played
football, never did anything in the way of exercise except wrestle
flirtatiously with the boys, while Mr. Palmer was bellowing up and down
the field of play and charging his pupils with additional vigour to
counteract the feebleness of Mr. Spaull. Poor Mr. Spaull, he was
ordained about three years after Mark came to Slowbridge, and a week
later he was run over by a brewer's dray and killed.




CHAPTER X

WHIT-SUNDAY


Mark at the age of fifteen was a bitter, lonely, and unattractive boy.
Three years of Haverton House, three years of Uncle Henry's desiccated
religion, three years of Mr. Palmer's athletic education and Mr.
Spaull's milksop morality, three years of wearing clothes that were too
small for him, three years of Haverton House cooking, three years of
warts and bad haircutting, of ink and Aunt Helen's confident purging had
destroyed that gusto for life which when Mark first came to Slowbridge
used to express itself in such loud laughter. Uncle Henry probably
supposed that the cure of his nephew's irritating laugh was the
foundation stone of that successful career, which it would soon be time
to discuss in detail. The few months between now and Mark's sixteenth
birthday would soon pass, however dreary the restrictions of Haverton
House, and then it would be time to go and talk to Mr. Hitchcock about
that articled clerkship toward the fees for which the small sum left by
his mother would contribute. Mark was so anxious to be finished with
Haverton House that he would have welcomed a prospect even less
attractive than Mr. Hitchcock's office in Finsbury Square; it never
occurred to him that the money left by his mother could be spent to
greater advantage for himself. By now it was over £500, and Uncle Henry
on Sunday evenings when he was feeling comfortably replete with the
day's devotion would sometimes allude to his having left the interest to
accumulate and would urge Mark to be up and doing in order to show his
gratitude for all that he and Aunt Helen had conferred upon him. Mark
felt no gratitude; in fact at this period he felt nothing except a kind
of surly listlessness. He was like somebody who through the carelessness
of his nurse or guardian has been crippled in youth, and who is
preparing to enter the world with a suppressed resentment against
everybody and everything.

"Not still hankering after a lighthouse?" Uncle Henry asked, and one
seemed to hear his words snapping like dry twigs beneath the heavy tread
of his mind.

"I'm not hankering after anything," Mark replied sullenly.

"But you're looking forward to Mr. Hitchcock's office?" his uncle
proceeded.

Mark grunted an assent in order to be left alone, and the entrance of
Mr. Palmer who always had supper with his headmaster and employer on
Sunday evening, brought the conversation to a close.

At supper Mr. Palmer asked suddenly if the headmaster wanted Mark to go
into the Confirmation Class this term.

"No thanks," said Mark.

Uncle Henry raised his eyebrows.

"I fancy that is for me to decide."

"Neither my father nor my mother nor my grandfather would have wanted me
to be confirmed against my will," Mark declared. He was angry without
knowing his reasons, angry in response to some impulse of the existence
of which he had been unaware until he began to speak. He only knew that
if he surrendered on this point he should never be able to act for
himself again.

"Are you suggesting that you should never be confirmed?" his uncle
required.

"I'm not suggesting anything," said Mark. "But I can remember my
father's saying once that boys ought to be confirmed before they are
thirteen. My mother just before she died wanted me to be confirmed, but
it couldn't be arranged, and now I don't intend to be confirmed till I
feel I want to be confirmed. I don't want to be prepared for
confirmation as if it was a football match. If you force me to go to the
confirmation I'll refuse to answer the Bishop's questions. You can't
make me answer against my will."

"Mark dear," said Aunt Helen, "I think you'd better take some Eno's
Fruit Salts to-morrow morning." In her nephew's present mood she did not
dare to prescribe anything stronger.

"I'm not going to take anything to-morrow morning," said Mark angrily.

"Do you want me to thrash you?" Uncle Henry demanded.

Mr. Palmer's eyes glittered with the zeal of muscular Christianity.

"You'll be sorry for it if you do," said Mark. "You can of course, if
you get Mr. Palmer to help you, but you'll be sorry if you do."

Mr. Palmer looked at his chief as a terrier looks at his master when a
rabbit is hiding in a bush. But the headmaster's vanity would not allow
him to summon help to punish his own nephew, and he weakly contented
himself with ordering Mark to be silent.

"It strikes me that Spaull is responsible for this sort of thing," said
Mr. Palmer. "He always resented my having any hand in the religious
teaching."

"That poor worm!" Mark scoffed.

"Mark, he's dead," Aunt Helen gasped. "You mustn't speak of him like
that."

"Get out of the room and go to bed," Uncle Henry shouted.

Mark retired with offensive alacrity, and while he was undressing he
wondered drearily why he had made himself so conspicuous on this Sunday
evening out of so many Sunday evenings. What did it matter whether he
were confirmed or not? What did anything matter except to get through
the next year and be finished with Haverton House?

He was more sullen than ever during the week, but on Saturday he had the
satisfaction of bowling Mr. Palmer in the first innings of a match and
in the second innings of hitting him on the jaw with a rising ball.

The next day he rose at five o'clock on a glorious morning in early June
and walked rapidly away from Slowbridge. By ten o'clock he had reached a
country of rolling beech-woods, and turning aside from the high road he
wandered over the bare nutbrown soil that gave the glossy leaves high
above a green unparagoned, a green so lambent that the glimpses of the
sky beyond seemed opaque as turquoises amongst it. In quick succession
Mark saw a squirrel, a woodpecker, and a jay, creatures so perfectly
expressive of the place, that they appeared to him more like visions
than natural objects; and when they were gone he stood with beating
heart in silence as if in a moment the trees should fly like
woodpeckers, the sky flash and flutter its blue like a jay's wing, and
the very earth leap like a squirrel for his amazement. Presently he came
to an open space where the young bracken was springing round a pool. He
flung himself down in the frondage, and the spice of it in his nostrils
was as if he were feeding upon summer. He was happy until he caught
sight of his own reflection in the pool, and then he could not bear to
stay any longer in this wood, because unlike the squirrel and the
woodpecker and the jay he was an ugly intruder here, a scarecrow in
ill-fitting clothes, round the ribbon of whose hat like a chain ran the
yellow zigzag of Haverton House. He became afraid of the wood,
perceiving nothing round him now except an assemblage of menacing
trunks, a slow gathering of angry and forbidding branches. The silence
of the day was dreadful in this wood, and Mark fled from it until he
emerged upon a brimming clover-ley full of drunken bees, a merry
clover-ley dancing in the sun, across which the sound of church bells
was being blown upon a honeyed wind. Mark welcomed the prospect of
seeing ugly people again after the humiliation inflicted upon him by the
wood; and he followed a footpath at the far end of the ley across
several stiles, until he stood beneath the limes that overhung the
churchyard gate and wondered if he should go inside to the service. The
bells were clanging an agitated final appeal to the worshippers; and
Mark, unable to resist, allowed himself to flow toward the cool dimness
within. There with a thrill he recognized the visible signs of his
childhood's religion, and now after so many years he perceived with new
eyes an unfamiliar beauty in the crossings and genuflexions, in the
pictures and images. The world which had lately seemed so jejune was
crowded like a dream, a dream moreover that did not elude the
recollection of it in the moment of waking, but that stayed with him
for the rest of his life as the evidence of things not seen, which is
Faith.

It was during the Gospel that Mark began to realize that what was being
said and done at the Altar demanded not merely his attention but also
his partaking. All the services he had attended since he came to
Slowbridge had demanded nothing from him, and even when he was at
Nancepean he had always been outside the sacred mysteries. But now on
this Whit-sunday morning he heard in the Gospel:

_Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world
cometh and hath nothing in me._

And while he listened it seemed that Jesus Christ was departing from
him, and that unless he were quick to offer himself he should be left to
the prince of this world; so black was Mark's world in those days that
the Prince of it meant most unmistakably the Prince of Darkness, and the
prophecy made him shiver with affright. With conviction he said the
Nicene Creed, and when the celebrating priest, a tall fair man, with a
gentle voice and of a mild and benignant aspect, went up into the pulpit
and announced that there would be a confirmation in his church on the
Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mark felt in this
newly found assurance of being commanded by God to follow Him that
somehow he must be confirmed in this church and prepared by this kindly
priest. The sermon was about the coming of the Holy Ghost and of our
bodies which are His temple. Any other Sunday Mark would have sat in a
stupor, while his mind would occasionally have taken flights of
activity, counting the lines of a prayer-book's page or following the
tributaries in the grain of the pew in front; but on this Sunday he sat
alert, finding every word of the discourse applicable to himself.

On other Sundays the first sentence of the Offertory would have passed
unheeded in the familiarity of its repetition, but this morning it took
him back to that night in Church Cove when he saw the glow-worm by the
edge of the tide and made up his mind to be a lighthouse-keeper.

_Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works,
and glorify your Father which is in heaven._

"I will be a priest," Mark vowed to himself.

_Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all Bishops and Curates that they may
both by their life and doctrines set forth thy true and lively word, and
rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments._

"I will, I will," he vowed.

_Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that
truly turn to him. Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden,
and I will refresh you._

Mark prayed that with such words he might when he was a priest bring
consolation.

_Through Jesus Christ our Lord; according to whose most true promise,
the Holy Ghost came down as at this time from heaven with a sudden great
sound, as it had been a mighty wind, in the likeness of fiery tongues,
lighting upon the Apostles, to teach them and to lead them to all
truth;_

The red chasuble of the priest glowed with Pentecostal light.

_giving them both the gift of divers languages, and also boldness with
fervent seal constantly to preach the Gospel unto all nations; whereby
we have been brought out of darkness and error into the clear light and
true knowledge of thee, and of thy Son Jesus Christ._

And when after this proper preface of Whit-sunday, which seemed to Mark
to be telling him what was expected of his priesthood by God, the quire
sang the Sanctus, _Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all
the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore
praising thee, and saying, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven
and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.
Amen_, that sublime proclamation spoke the fullness of his aspiring
heart.

Mark came out of church with the rest of the congregation, and walked
down the road toward the roofs of the little village, on the outskirts
of which he could not help stopping to admire a small garden full of
pinks in front of two thatched cottages that had evidently been made
into one house. While he was standing there looking over the trim
quickset hedge, an old lady with silvery hair came slowly down the road,
paused a moment by the gate before she went in, and then asked Mark if
she had not seen him in church. Mark felt embarrassed at being
discovered looking over a hedge into somebody's garden; but he managed
to murmur an affirmative and turned to go away.

"Stop," said the old lady waving at him her ebony crook, "do not run
away, young gentleman. I see that you admire my garden. Pray step inside
and look more closely at it."

Mark thought at first by her manner of speech that she was laughing at
him; but soon perceiving that she was in earnest he followed her inside,
and walked behind her along the narrow winding paths, nodding with an
appearance of profound interest when she poked at some starry clump and
invited his admiration. As they drew nearer the house, the smell of the
pinks was merged in the smell of hot roast beef, and Mark discovered
that he was hungry, so hungry indeed that he felt he could not stay any
longer to be tantalized by the odours of the Sunday dinner, but must go
off and find an inn where he could obtain bread and cheese as quickly as
possible. He was preparing an excuse to get away, when the garden wicket
clicked, and looking up he saw the fair priest coming down the path
toward them accompanied by two ladies, one of whom resembled him so
closely that Mark was sure she was his sister. The other, who looked
windblown in spite of the serene June weather, had a nervous energy that
contrasted with the demeanour of the other two, whose deliberate pace
seemed to worry her so that she was continually two yards ahead and
turning round as if to urge them to walk more quickly.

The old lady must have guessed Mark's intention, for raising her stick
she forbade him to move, and before he had time to mumble an apology and
flee she was introducing the newcomers to him.

"This is my daughter Miriam," she said pointing to one who resembled her
brother. "And this is my daughter Esther. And this is my son, the Vicar.
What is your name?"

Mark told her, and he should have liked to ask what hers was, but he
felt too shy.

"You're going to stay and have lunch with us, I hope?" asked the Vicar.

Mark had no idea how to reply. He was much afraid that if he accepted he
should be seeming to have hung about by the Vicarage gate in order to be
invited. On the other hand he did not know how to refuse. It would be
absurd to say that he had to get home, because they would ask him where
he lived, and at this hour of the morning he could scarcely pretend that
he expected to be back in time for lunch twelve miles and more from
where he was.

"Of course he's going to stay," said the old lady.

And of course Mark did stay; a delightful lunch it was too, on chairs
covered with blue holland in a green shadowed room that smelt of dryness
and ancientry. After lunch Mark sat for a while with the Vicar in his
study, which was small and intimate with its two armchairs and
bookshelves reaching to the ceiling all round. He had not yet managed to
find out his name, and as it was obviously too late to ask as this stage
of their acquaintanceship he supposed that he should have to wait until
he left the Vicarage and could ask somebody in the village, of which by
the way he also did not know the name.

"Lidderdale," the Vicar was saying meditatively, "Lidderdale. I wonder
if you were a relative of the famous Lidderdale of St. Wilfred's?"

Mark flushed with a mixture of self-consciousness and pleasure to hear
his father spoken of as famous, and when he explained who he was he
flushed still more deeply to hear his father's work praised with such
enthusiasm.

"And do you hope to be a priest yourself?"

"Why, yes I do rather," said Mark.

"Splendid! Capital!" cried the Vicar, his kindly blue eye beaming with
approval of Mark's intention.

Presently Mark was talking to him as though he had known him for years.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't be confirmed here," the Vicar said.
"No reason at all. I'll mention it to the Bishop, and if you like I'll
write to your uncle. I shall feel justified in interfering on account of
your father's opinions. We all look upon him as one of the great
pioneers of the Movement. You must come over and lunch with us again
next Sunday. My mother will be delighted to see you. She's a dear old
thing, isn't she? I'm going to hand you over to her now and my youngest
sister. My other sister and I have got Sunday schools to deal with. Have
another cigarette? No. Quite right. You oughtn't to smoke too much at
your age. Only just fifteen, eh? By Jove, I suppose you oughtn't to have
smoked at all. But what rot. You'd only smoke all the more if it was
absolutely forbidden. Wisdom! Wisdom! Wisdom with the young! You don't
mind being called young? I've known boys who hated the epithet."

Mark was determined to show his new friend that he did not object to
being called young, and he could think of no better way to do it than by
asking him his name, thus proving that he did not mind if such a
question did make him look ridiculous.

"Ogilvie--Stephen Ogilvie. My dear boy, it's we who ought to be ashamed
of ourselves for not having had the gumption to enlighten you. How on
earth were you to know without asking? Now, look here, I must run. I
expect you'll be wanting to get home, or I'd suggest your staying until
I get back, but I must lie low after tea and think out my sermon. Look
here, come over to lunch on Saturday, haven't you a bicycle? You could
get over from Slowbridge by one o'clock, and after lunch we'll have a
good tramp in the woods. Splendid!"

Then chanting the _Dies Irae_ in a cheerful tenor the Reverend Stephen
Ogilvie hurried off to his Sunday School. Mark said good-bye to Mrs.
Ogilvie with an assured politeness that was typical of his new found
ease; and when he started on his long walk back to Slowbridge he felt
inclined to leap in the air and wake with shouts the slumberous Sabbath
afternoon, proclaiming the glory of life, the joy of living.

Mark had not expected his uncle to welcome his friendship with the Vicar
of Meade Cantorum; but he had supposed that after a few familiar sneers
he should be allowed to go his own way with nothing worse than silent
disapproval brooding over his perverse choice. He was surprised by the
vehemence of his uncle's opposition, and it must be added that he
thoroughly enjoyed it. The experience of that Whit-sunday had been too
rich not to be of enduring importance to his development in any case;
but the behaviour of Uncle Henry made it more important, because all
this criticism helped Mark to put his opinions into shape, consolidated
the position he had taken up, sharpened his determination to advance
along the path he had discovered for himself, and gave him an immediate
target for arrows that might otherwise have been shot into the air until
his quiver was empty.

"Mr. Ogilvie knew my father."

"That has nothing to do with the case," said Uncle Henry.

"I think it has."

"Do not be insolent, Mark. I've noticed lately a most unpleasant note in
your voice, an objectionably defiant note which I simply will not
tolerate."

"But do you really mean that I'm not to go and see Mr. Ogilvie?"

"It would have been more courteous if Mr. Ogilvie had given himself the
trouble of writing to me, your guardian, before inviting you out to
lunch and I don't know what not besides."

"He said he would write to you."

"I don't want to embark on a correspondence with him," Uncle Henry
exclaimed petulantly. "I know the man by reputation. A bigoted
Ritualist. A Romanizer of the worst type. He'll only fill your head with
a lot of effeminate nonsense, and that at a time when it's particularly
necessary for you to concentrate upon your work. Don't forget that this
is your last year of school. I advise you to make the most of it."

"I've asked Mr. Ogilvie to prepare me for confirmation," said Mark, who
was determined to goad his uncle into losing his temper.

"Then you deserve to be thrashed."

"Look here, Uncle Henry," Mark began; and while he was speaking he was
aware that he was stronger than his uncle now and looking across at his
aunt he perceived that she was just a ball of badly wound wool lying in
a chair. "Look here, Uncle Henry, it's quite useless for you to try to
stop my going to Meade Cantorum, because I'm going there whenever I'm
asked and I'm going to be confirmed there, because you promised Mother
you wouldn't interfere with my religion."

"Your religion!" broke in Mr. Lidderdale, scornful both of the pronoun
and the substantive.

"It's no use your losing your temper or arguing with me or doing
anything except letting me go my own way, because that's what I intend
to do."

Aunt Helen half rose in her chair upon an impulse to protect her brother
against Mark's violence.

"And you can't cure me with Gregory Powder," he said. "Nor with Senna
nor with Licorice nor even with Cascara."

"Your behaviour, my boy, is revolting," said Mr. Lidderdale. "A young
Mohawk would not talk to his guardians as you are talking to me."

"Well, I don't want you to think I'm going to obey you if you forbid me
to go to Meade Cantorum," said Mark. "I'm sorry I was rude, Aunt Helen.
I oughtn't to have spoken to you like that. And I'm sorry, Uncle Henry,
to seem ungrateful after what you've done for me." And then lest his
uncle should think that he was surrendering he quickly added: "But I'm
going to Meade Cantorum on Saturday." And like most people who know
their own minds Mark had his own way.




CHAPTER XI

MEADE CANTORUM


Mark did not suffer from "churchiness" during this period. His interest
in religion, although it resembled the familiar conversions of
adolescence, was a real resurrection of emotions which had been stifled
by these years at Haverton House following upon the paralyzing grief of
his mother's death. Had he been in contact during that time with an
influence like the Vicar of Meade Cantorum, he would probably have
escaped those ashen years, but as Mr. Ogilvie pointed out to him, he
would also never have received such evidence of God's loving kindness as
was shown to him upon that Whit-sunday morning.

"If in the future, my dear boy, you are ever tempted to doubt the wisdom
of Almighty God, remember what was vouchsafed to you at a moment when
you seemed to have no reason for any longer existing, so black was your
world. Remember how you caught sight of yourself in that pool and shrank
away in horror from the vision. I envy you, Mark. I have never been
granted such a revelation of myself."

"You were never so ugly," said Mark.

"My dear boy, we are all as ugly as the demons of Hell if we are allowed
to see ourselves as we really are. But God only grants that to a few
brave spirits whom he consecrates to his service and whom he fortifies
afterwards by proving to them that, no matter how great the horror of
their self-recognition, the Holy Ghost is within them to comfort them. I
don't suppose that many human beings are granted such an experience as
yours. I myself tremble at the thought of it, knowing that God considers
me too weak a subject for such a test."

"Oh, Mr. Ogilvie," Mark expostulated.

"I'm not talking to you as Mark Lidderdale, but as the recipient of the
grace of God, to one who before my own unworthy eyes has been lightened
by celestial fire. _Mine eyes have seen thy salvation, O Lord._ As for
yourself, my dear boy, I pray always that you may sustain your part,
that you will never allow the memory of this Whitsuntide to be obscured
by the fogs of this world and that you will always bear in mind that
having been given more talents by God a sharper account will be taken of
the use you make of them. Don't think I'm doubting your steadfastness,
old man, I believe in it. Do you hear? I believe in it absolutely. But
Catholic doctrine, which is the sum of humanity's knowledge of God and
than which nothing more can be known of God until we see Him face to
face, insists upon good works, demanding as it were a practical
demonstration to the rest of the world of the grace of God within you.
You remember St. Paul? _Faith, Hope, and Love. But the greatest of these
is Love._ The greatest because the least individual. Faith will move
mountains, but so will Love. That's the trouble with so many godly
Protestants. They are inclined to stay satisfied with their own
godliness, although the best of them like the Quakers are examples that
ought to make most of us Catholics ashamed of ourselves. And one thing
more, old man, before we get off this subject, don't forget that your
experience is a mercy accorded to you by the death of our Lord Jesus
Christ. You owe to His infinite Love your new life. What was granted to
you was the visible apprehension of the fact of Holy Baptism, and don't
forget St. John the Baptist's words: _I indeed baptize you with water
unto repentance, but he that cometh after me is mightier than I. He
shall baptise you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: whose fan is in
his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat
into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire._
Those are great words for you to think of now, and during this long
Trinitytide which is symbolical of what one might call the humdrum of
religious life, the day in day out sticking to it, make a resolution
never to say mechanically _The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the
love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all
evermore. Amen._ If you always remember to say those wonderful words
from the heart and not merely with the lips, you will each time you say
them marvel more and more at the great condescension of Almighty God in
favouring you, as He has favoured you, by teaching you the meaning of
these words Himself in a way that no poor mortal priest, however
eloquent, could teach you it. On that night when you watched beside the
glow-worm at the sea's edge the grace of our Lord gave you an
apprehension, child as you were, of the love of God, and now once more
the grace of our Lord gives you the realization of the fellowship of the
Holy Ghost. I don't want to spoil your wonderful experience with my
parsonic discoursing; but, Mark, don't look back from the plough."

Uncle Henry found it hard to dispose of words like these when he
deplored his nephew's collapse into ritualism.

"You really needn't bother about the incense and the vestments," Mark
assured him. "I like incense and vestments; but I don't think they're
the most important things in religion. You couldn't find anybody more
evangelical than Mr. Ogilvie, though he doesn't call himself
evangelical, or his party the Evangelical party. It's no use your trying
to argue me out of what I believe. I know I'm believing what it's right
for me to believe. When I'm older I shall try to make everybody else
believe in my way, because I should like everybody else to feel as happy
as I do. Your religion doesn't make you feel happy, Uncle Henry!"

"Leave the room," was Mr. Lidderdale's reply. "I won't stand this kind
of talk from a boy of your age."

Although Mark had only claimed from his uncle the right to believe what
it was right for him to believe, the richness of his belief presently
began to seem too much for one. His nature was generous in everything,
and he felt that he must share this happiness with somebody else. He
regretted the death of poor Mr. Spaull, for he was sure that he could
have persuaded poor Mr. Spaull to cut off his yellow moustache and
become a Catholic. Mr. Palmer was of course hopeless: Saint Augustine of
Hippo, St. Paul himself even, would have found it hard to deal with Mr.
Palmer; as for the new master, Mr. Blumey, with his long nose and long
chin and long frock coat and long boots, he was obviously absorbed by
the problems of mathematics and required nothing more.

Term came to an end, and during the holidays Mark was able to spend most
of his time at Meade Cantorum. He had always been a favourite of Mrs.
Ogilvie since that Whit-sunday nearly two months ago when she saw him
looking at her garden and invited him in, and every time he revisited
the Vicarage he had devoted some of his time to helping her weed or
prune or do whatever she wanted to do in her garden. He was also on
friendly terms with Miriam, the elder of Mr. Ogilvie's two sisters, who
was very like her brother in appearance and who gave to the house the
decorous loving care he gave to the church. And however enthralling her
domestic ministrations, she had always time to attend every service;
while, so well ordered was her manner of life, her religious duties
never involved the household in discomfort. She never gave the
impression that so many religious women give of going to church in a
fever of self-gratification, to which everything and everybody around
her must be subordinated. The practice of her religion was woven into
her life like the strand of wool on which all the others depend, but
which itself is no more conspicuous than any of the other strands. With
so many women religion is a substitute for something else; with Miriam
Ogilvie everything else was made as nearly and as beautifully as it
could be made a substitute for religion. Mark was intensely aware of her
holiness, but he was equally aware of her capable well-tended hands and
of her chatelaine glittering in and out of a lawn apron. One tress of
her abundant hair was grey, which stood out against the dark background
of the rest and gave her a serene purity, an austere strength, but yet
like a nun's coif seemed to make the face beneath more youthful, and
like a cavalier's plume more debonair. She could not have been over
thirty-five when Mark first knew her, perhaps not so much; but he
thought of her as ageless in the way a child thinks of its mother, and
if any woman should ever be able to be to him something of what his
mother had been, Mark thought that Miss Ogilvie might.

Esther Ogilvie the other sister was twenty-five. She told Mark this
when he imitated the villagers by addressing her as Miss Essie and she
ordered him to call her Esther. He might have supposed from this that
she intended to confer upon him a measure of friendliness, even of
sisterly affection; but on the contrary she either ignored him
altogether or gave him the impression that she considered his frequent
visits to Meade Cantorum a nuisance. Mark was sorry that she felt like
that toward him, because she seemed unhappy, and in his desire for
everybody to be happy he would have liked to proclaim how suddenly and
unexpectedly happiness may come. As a sister of the Vicar of the parish,
she went to church regularly, but Mark did not think that she was there
except in body. He once looked across at her open prayer book during the
_Magnificat_, and noticed that she was reading the Tables of Kindred and
Affinity. Now, Mark knew from personal experience that when one is
reduced to reading the Tables of Kindred and Affinity it argues a mind
untouched by the reality of worship. In his own case, when he sat beside
his uncle and aunt in the dreary Slowbridge church of their choice, it
had been nothing more than a sign of his own inward dreariness to read
the Tables of Kindred and Affinity or speculate upon the Paschal full
moons from the year 2200 to the year 2299 inclusive. But St. Margaret's,
Meade Cantorum, was a different church from St. Jude's, Slowbridge, and
for Esther Ogilvie to ignore the joyfulness of worshipping there in
order to ponder idly the complexities of Golden Numbers and Dominical
Letters could not be ascribed to inward dreariness. Besides, she wasn't
dreary. Once Mark saw her coming down a woodland glade and almost turned
aside to avoid meeting her, because she looked so fay with her wild blue
eyes and her windblown hair, the colour of last year's bracken after
rain. She seemed at once the pursued and the pursuer, and Mark felt that
whichever she was he would be in the way.

"Taking a quick walk by myself," she called out to him as they passed.

No, she was certainly not dreary. But what was she?

Mark abandoned the problem of Esther in the pleasure of meeting the
Reverend Oliver Dorward, who arrived one afternoon at the Vicarage with
a large turbot for Mrs. Ogilvie, and six Flemish candlesticks for the
Vicar, announcing that he wanted to stay a week before being inducted to
the living of Green Lanes in the County of Southampton, to which he had
recently been presented by Lord Chatsea. Mark liked him from the first
moment he saw him pacing the Vicarage garden in a soutane, buckled
shoes, and beaver hat, and he could not understand why Mr. Ogilvie, who
had often laughed about Dorward's eccentricity, should now that he had
an opportunity of enjoying it once more be so cross about his friend's
arrival and so ready to hand him over to Mark to be entertained.

"Just like Ogilvie," said Dorward confidentially, when he and Mark went
for a walk on the afternoon of his arrival. "He wants spiking up. They
get very slack and selfish, these country clergy. Time he gave up Meade
Cantorum. He's been here nearly ten years. Too long, nine years too
long. Hasn't been to his duties since Easter. Scandalous, you know. I
asked him, as soon as I'd explained to the cook about the turbot, when
he went last, and he was bored. Nice old pussy cat, the mother. Hullo,
is that the _Angelus_? Damn, I knelt on a thistle."

"It isn't the _Angelus_," said Mark quietly. "It's the bell on that
cow."

But Mr. Dorward had finished his devotion before he answered.

"I was half way through before you told me. You should have spoken
sooner."

"Well, I spoke as soon as I could."

"Very cunning of Satan," said Dorward meditatively. "Induced a cow to
simulate the _Angelus_, and planted a thistle just where I was bound to
kneel. Cunning. Cunning. Very cunning. I must go back now and confess to
Ogilvie. Good example. Wait a minute, I'll confess to-morrow before
Morning Prayer. Very good for Ogilvie's congregation. They're stuffy,
very stuffy. It'll shake them. It'll shake Ogilvie too. Are you staying
here to-night?"

"No, I shall bicycle back to Slowbridge and bicycle over to Mass
to-morrow."

"Ridiculous. Stay the night. Didn't Ogilvie invite you?"

Mark shook his head.

"Scandalous lack of hospitality. They're all alike these country clergy.
I'm tired of this walk. Let's go back and look after the turbot. Are you
a good cook?"

"I can boil eggs and that sort of thing," said Mark.

"What sort of things? An egg is unique. There's nothing like an egg.
Will you serve my Mass on Monday? Saying Mass for Napoleon on Monday."

"For whom?" Mark exclaimed.

"Napoleon, with a special intention for the conversion of the present
government in France. Last Monday I said a Mass for Shakespeare, with a
special intention for an improvement in contemporary verse."

Mark supposed that Mr. Dorward must be joking, and his expression must
have told as much to the priest, who murmured:

"Nothing to laugh at. Nothing to laugh at."

"No, of course not," said Mark feeling abashed. "But I'm afraid I
shouldn't be able to serve you. I've never had any practice."

"Perfectly easy. Perfectly easy. I'll give you a book when we get back."

Mark bicycled home that afternoon with a tall thin volume called _Ritual
Notes_, so tall that when it was in his pocket he could feel it digging
him in the ribs every time he was riding up the least slope. That night
in his bedroom he practised with the help of the wash-stand and its
accessories the technique of serving at Low Mass, and in his enthusiasm
he bicycled over to Meade Cantorum in time to attend both the Low Mass
at seven said by Mr. Dorward and the Low Mass at eight said by Mr.
Ogilvie. He was able to detect mistakes that were made by the village
boys who served that Sunday morning, and he vowed to himself that the
Monday Mass for the Emperor Napoleon should not be disfigured by such
inaccuracy or clumsiness. He declined the usual invitation to stay to
supper after Evening Prayer that he might have time to make perfection
more perfect in the seclusion of his own room, and when he set out about
six o'clock of a sun-drowsed morning in early August, apart from a faint
anxiety about the _Lavabo_, he felt secure of his accomplishment. It was
only when he reached the church that he remembered he had made no
arrangement about borrowing a cassock or a cotta, an omission that in
the mood of grand seriousness in which he had undertaken his
responsibility seemed nothing less than abominable. He did not like to
go to the Vicarage and worry Mr. Ogilvie who could scarcely fail to be
amused, even contemptuously amused at such an ineffective beginning.
Besides, ever since Mr. Dorward's arrival the Vicar had been slightly
irritable.

While Mark was wondering what was the best thing to do, Miss Hatchett, a
pious old maid who spent her nights in patience and sleep, her days in
worship and weeding, came hurrying down the churchyard path.

"I am not late, am I?" she exclaimed. "I never heard the bell. I was so
engrossed in pulling out one of those dreadful sow-thistles that when my
maid came running out and said 'Oh, Miss Hatchett, it's gone the five
to, you'll be late,' I just ran, and now I've brought my trowel and left
my prayer book on the path. . . ."

"I'm just going to ring the bell now," said Mark, in whom the horror of
another omission had been rapidly succeeded by an almost unnatural
composure.

"Oh, what a relief," Miss Hatchett sighed. "Are you sure I shall have
time to get my breath, for I know Mr. Ogilvie would dislike to hear me
panting in church?"

"Mr. Ogilvie isn't saying Mass this morning."

"Not saying Mass?" repeated the old maid in such a dejected tone of
voice that, when a small cloud passed over the face of the sun, it
seemed as if the natural scene desired to accord with the chill cast
upon her spirit by Mark's announcement.

"Mr. Dorward is saying Mass," he told her, and poor Miss Hatchett must
pretend with a forced smile that her blank look had been caused by the
prospect of being deprived of Mass when really. . . .

But Mark was not paying any more attention to Miss Hatchett. He was
standing under the bell, gazing up at the long rope and wondering what
manner of sound he should evoke. He took a breath and pulled; the rope
quivered with such an effect of life that he recoiled from the new force
he had conjured into being, afraid of his handiwork, timid of the
clamour that would resound. No louder noise ensued than might have been
given forth by a can kicked into the gutter. Mark pulled again more
strongly, and the bell began to chime, irregularly at first with
alternations of sonorous and feeble note; at last, however, when the
rhythm was established with such command and such insistence that the
ringer, looking over his shoulder to the south door, half expected to
see a stream of perturbed Christians hurrying to obey its summons. But
there was only poor Miss Hatchett sitting in the porch and fanning
herself with a handkerchief.

Mark went on ringing. . . .

Clang--clang--clang! All the holy Virgins were waving their palms.
Clang--clang--clang! All the blessed Doctors and Confessors were
twanging their harps to the clanging. Clang--clang--clang! All the holy
Saints and Martyrs were tossing their haloes in the air as schoolboys
toss their caps. Clang--clang--clang! Angels, Archangels, and
Principalities with faces that shone like brass and with forms that
quivered like flames thronged the noise. Clang--clang--clang! Virtues,
Powers, and Dominations bade the morning stars sing to the ringing.
Clang--clang--clang! The ringing reached up to the green-winged Thrones
who sustain the seat of the Most High. Clang--clang--clang! The azure
Cherubs heard the bells within their contemplation: the scarlet Seraphs
felt them within their love. Clang--clang--clang! The lidless Eye of God
looked down, and Miss Hatchett supposing it to be the sun crossed over
to the other side of the porch.

Clang--clang--clang--clang--clang--clang--clang--clang. . . .

"Hasn't Dorward come in yet? It's five past eight already. Go on
ringing for a little while. I'll go and see how long he'll be."

Mark in the absorption of ringing the bell had not noticed the Vicar's
approach, and he was gone again before he remembered that he wanted to
borrow a cassock and a cotta. Had he been rude? Would Mr. Ogilvie think
it cheek to ring the bell without asking his permission first? But
before these unanswered questions had had time to spoil the rhythm of
his ringing, the Vicar came back with Mr. Dorward, and the congregation,
that is to say Miss Hatchett and Miss Ogilvie, was already kneeling in
its place.

Mark in a cassock that was much too long for him and in a cotta that was
in the same ratio as much too short preceded Mr. Dorward from the
sacristy to the altar. A fear seized him that in spite of all his
practice he was kneeling on the wrong side of the priest; he forgot the
first responses; he was sure the Sanctus-bell was too far away; he
wished that Mr. Dorward would not mutter quite so inaudibly. Gradually,
however, the meetness of the gestures prescribed for him by the ancient
ritual cured his self-consciousness and included him in its pattern, so
that now for the first time he was aware of the significance of the
preface to the Sanctus: _It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty,
that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O
Lord, Holy Father, Almighty Everlasting God._

Twenty minutes ago when he was ringing the church bell Mark had
experienced the rapture of creative noise, the sense of individual
triumph over time and space; and the sound of his ringing came back to
him from the vaulted roof of the church with such exultation as the
missal thrush may know when he sits high above the fretted boughs of an
oak and his music plunges forth upon the January wind. Now when Mark was
ringing the Sanctus-bell, it was with a sense of his place in the scheme
of worship. If one listens to the twitter of a single linnet in open
country or to the buzz of a solitary fly upon a window pane, how
incredible it is that myriads of them twittering and buzzing together
should be the song of April, the murmur of June. And this Sanctus-bell
that tinkled so inadequately, almost so frivolously when sounded by a
server in Meade Cantorum church, was yet part of an unimaginable volume
of worship that swelled in unison with Angels and Archangels lauding and
magnifying the Holy Name. The importance of ceremony was as deeply
impressed upon Mark that morning as if he had been formally initiated to
great mysteries. His coming confirmation, which had been postponed from
July 2nd to September 8th seemed much more momentous now than it seemed
yesterday. It was no longer a step to Communion, but was apprehended as
a Sacrament itself, and though Mr. Ogilvie was inclined to regret the
ritualistic development of his catechumen, Mark derived much strength
from what was really the awakening in him of a sense of form, which more
than anything makes emotion durable. Perhaps Ogilvie may have been a
little jealous of Dorward's influence; he also was really alarmed at the
prospect, as he said, of so much fire being wasted upon poker-work. In
the end what between Dorward's encouragement of Mark's ritualistic
tendencies and the "spiking up" process to which he was himself being
subjected, Ogilvie was glad when a fortnight later Dorward took himself
off to his own living, and he expressed a hope that Mark would perceive
Dorward in his true proportions as a dear good fellow, perfectly
sincere, but just a little, well, not exactly mad, but so eccentric as
sometimes to do more harm than good to the Movement. Mark was shrewd
enough to notice that however much he grumbled about his friend's visit
Mr. Ogilvie was sufficiently influenced by that visit to put into
practice much of the advice to which he had taken exception. The
influence of Dorward upon Mark did not stop with his begetting in him an
appreciation of the value of form in worship. When Mark told Mr. Ogilvie
that he intended to become a priest, Mr. Ogilvie was impressed by the
manifestation of the Divine Grace, but he did not offer many practical
suggestions for Mark's immediate future. Dorward on the contrary
attached as much importance to the manner in which he was to become a
priest.

"Oxford," Mr. Dorward pronounced. "And then Glastonbury."

"Glastonbury?"

"Glastonbury Theological College."

Now to Mark Oxford was a legendary place to which before he met Mr.
Dorward he would never have aspired. Oxford at Haverton House was merely
an abstraction to which a certain number of people offered an illogical
allegiance in order to create an excuse for argument and strife.
Sometimes Mark had gazed at Eton and wondered vaguely about existence
there; sometimes he had gazed at the towers of Windsor and wondered what
the Queen ate for breakfast. Oxford was far more remote than either of
these, and yet when Mr. Dorward said that he must go there his heart
leapt as if to some recognized ambition long ago buried and now abruptly
resuscitated.

"I've always been Oxford," he admitted.

When Mr. Dorward had gone, Mark asked Mr. Ogilvie what he thought about
Oxford.

"If you can afford to go there, my dear boy, of course you ought to go."

"Well, I'm pretty sure I can't afford to. I don't think I've got any
money at all. My mother left some money, but my uncle says that that
will come in useful when I'm articled to this solicitor, Mr. Hitchcock.
Oh, but if I become a priest I can't become a solicitor, and perhaps I
could have that money. I don't know how much it is . . . I think five
hundred pounds. Would that be enough?"

"With care and economy," said Mr. Ogilvie. "And you might win a
scholarship."

"But I'm leaving school at the end of this year."

Mr. Ogilvie thought that it would be wiser not to say anything to his
uncle until after Mark had been confirmed. He advised him to work hard
meanwhile and to keep in mind the possibility of having to win a
scholarship.

The confirmation was held on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed
Virgin. Mark made his first Confession on the vigil, his first Communion
on the following Sunday.




CHAPTER XII

THE POMEROY AFFAIR


Mark was so much elated to find himself a fully equipped member of the
Church Militant that he looked about him again to find somebody whom he
could make as happy as himself. He even considered the possibility of
converting his uncle, and spent the Sunday evening before term began in
framing inexpugnable arguments to be preceded by unanswerable questions;
but always when he was on the point of speaking he was deterred by the
lifelessness of his uncle. No eloquence could irrigate his arid creed
and make that desert blossom now. And yet, Mark thought, he ought to
remember that in the eyes of the world he owed his uncle everything.
What did he owe him in the sight of God? Gratitude? Gratitude for what?
Gratitude for 

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