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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton MacKenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Altar Steps
+
+Author: Compton MacKenzie
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2005 [EBook #14739]
+[Last updated: April 3, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR STEPS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven desJardins and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+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 spending a certain amount of money on him. Once more Mark
+opened his mouth to repay his debt by offering Uncle Henry Eternal Life.
+But Uncle Henry fancied himself already in possession of Eternal Life.
+He definitely labelled himself Evangelical. And again Mark prepared one
+of his unanswerable questions.
+
+"Mark," said Mr. Lidderdale. "If you can't keep from yawning you'd
+better get off to bed. Don't forget school begins to-morrow, and you
+must make the most of your last term."
+
+Mark abandoned for ever the task of converting Uncle Henry, and pondered
+his chance of doing something with Aunt Helen. There instead of
+exsiccation he was confronted by a dreadful humidity, an infertile ooze
+that seemed almost less susceptible to cultivation than the other.
+
+"And I really don't owe _her_ anything," he thought. "Besides, it isn't
+that I want to save people from damnation. I want people to be happy.
+And it isn't quite that even. I want them to understand how happy I am.
+I want people to feel fond of their pillows when they turn over to go to
+sleep, because next morning is going to be what? Well, sort of
+exciting."
+
+Mark suddenly imagined how splendid it would be to give some of his
+happiness to Esther Ogilvie; but a moment later he decided that it would
+be rather cheek, and he abandoned the idea of converting Esther Ogilvie.
+He fell back on wishing again that Mr. Spaull had not died; in him he
+really would have had an ideal subject.
+
+In the end Mark fixed upon a boy of his own age, one of the many sons of
+a Papuan missionary called Pomeroy who was glad to have found in Mr.
+Lidderdale a cheap and evangelical schoolmaster. Cyril Pomeroy was a
+blushful, girlish youth, clever at the routine of school work, but in
+other ways so much undeveloped as to give an impression of stupidity.
+The notion of pointing out to him the beauty and utility of the Catholic
+religion would probably never have occurred to Mark if the boy himself
+had not approached him with a direct complaint of the dreariness of home
+life. Mark had never had any intimate friends at Haverton House; there
+was something in its atmosphere that was hostile to intimacy. Cyril
+Pomeroy appealed to that idea of romantic protection which is the common
+appendage of adolescence, and is the cause of half the extravagant
+affection at which maturity is wont to laugh. In the company of Cyril,
+Mark felt ineffably old than which upon the threshold of sixteen there
+is no sensation more grateful; and while the intercourse flattered his
+own sense of superiority he did feel that he had much to offer his
+friend. Mark regarded Cyril's case as curable if the right treatment
+were followed, and every evening after school during the veiled summer
+of a fine October he paced the Slowbridge streets with his willing
+proselyte, debating the gravest issues of religious practice, the
+subtlest varieties of theological opinion. He also lent Cyril suitable
+books, and finally he demanded from him as a double tribute to piety and
+friendship that he should prove his metal by going to Confession.
+Cyril, who was incapable of refusing whatever Mark demanded, bicycled
+timorously behind him to Meade Cantorum one Saturday afternoon, where he
+gulped out the table of his sins to Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had fetched
+from the Vicarage with the urgency of one who fetches a midwife. Nor was
+he at all abashed when Mr. Ogilvie was angry for not having been told
+that Cyril's father would have disapproved of his son's confession. He
+argued that the priest was applying social standards to religious
+principles, and in the end he enjoyed the triumph of hearing Mr. Ogilvie
+admit that perhaps he was right.
+
+"I know I'm right. Come on, Cyril. You'd better get back home now. Oh,
+and I say, Mr. Ogilvie, can I borrow for Cyril some of the books you
+lent me?"
+
+The priest was amused that Mark did not ask him to lend the books to his
+friend, but to himself. However, when he found that the neophyte seemed
+to flourish under Mark's assiduous priming, and that the fundamental
+weakness of his character was likely to be strengthened by what, though
+it was at present nothing more than an interest in religion, might later
+on develop into a profound conviction of the truths of Christianity,
+Ogilvie overlooked his scruples about deceiving parents and encouraged
+the boy as much as he could.
+
+"But I hope your manipulation of the plastic Cyril isn't going to turn
+_you_ into too much of a ritualist," he said to Mark. "It's splendid of
+course that you should have an opportunity so young of proving your
+ability to get round people in the right way. But let it be the right
+way, old man. At the beginning you were full of the happiness, the
+secret of which you burnt to impart to others. That happiness was the
+revelation of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as He dwells in all
+Christian souls. I am sure that the eloquent exposition I lately
+overheard of the propriety of fiddle-backed chasubles and the
+impropriety of Gothic ones doesn't mean that you are in any real danger
+of supposing chasubles to be anything more important relatively than,
+say, the uniform of a soldier compared with his valour and obedience
+and selflessness. Now don't overwhelm me for a minute or two. I haven't
+finished what I want to say. I wasn't speaking sarcastically when I said
+that, and I wasn't criticizing you. But you are not Cyril. By God's
+grace you have been kept from the temptations of the flesh. Yes, I know
+the subject is distasteful to you. But you are old enough to understand
+that your fastidiousness, if it isn't to be priggish, must be
+safeguarded by your humility. I didn't mean to sandwich a sermon to you
+between my remarks on Cyril, but your disdainful upper lip compelled
+that testimony. Let us leave you and your virtues alone. Cyril is weak.
+He's the weak pink type that may fall to women or drink or anything in
+fact where an opportunity is given him of being influenced by a stronger
+character than his own. At the moment he's being influenced by you to go
+to Confession, and say his rosary, and hear Mass, and enjoy all the
+other treats that our holy religion gives us. In addition to that he's
+enjoying them like the proverbial stolen fruit. You were very severe
+with me when I demurred at hearing his confession without authority from
+his father; but I don't like stolen fruit, and I'm not sure even now if
+I was right in yielding on that point. I shouldn't have yielded if I
+hadn't felt that Cyril might be hurt in the future by my scruples. Now
+look here, Mark, you've got to see that I don't regret my surrender. If
+that youth doesn't get from religion what I hope and pray he will get
+. . . but let that point alone. My scruples are my own affair. Your
+convictions are your own affair. But Cyril is our joint affair. He's
+your convert, but he's my penitent; and Mark, don't overdecorate your
+building until you're sure the foundations are well and truly laid."
+
+Mark was never given an opportunity of proving the excellence of his
+methods by the excellence of Cyril's life, because on the morning after
+this conversation, which took place one wet Sunday evening in Advent he
+was sent for by his uncle, who demanded to know the meaning of This.
+This was a letter from the Reverend Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+     The Limes,
+
+     38, Cranborne Road,
+
+     Slowbridge.
+
+     December 9.
+
+     Dear Mr. Lidderdale,
+
+     My son Cyril will not attend school for the rest of this term.
+     Yesterday evening, being confined to the house by fever, I went up
+     to his bedroom to verify a reference in a book I had recently lent
+     him to assist his divinity studies under you. When I took down the
+     book from the shelf I noticed several books hidden away behind, and
+     my curiosity being aroused I examined them, in case they should be
+     works of an unpleasant nature. To my horror and disgust, I found
+     that they were all works of an extremely Popish character, most of
+     them belonging to a clergyman in this neighbourhood called Ogilvie,
+     whose illegal practices have for several years been a scandal to
+     this diocese. These I am sending to the Bishop that he may see with
+     his own eyes the kind of propaganda that is going on. Two of the
+     books, inscribed Mark Lidderdale, are evidently the property of
+     your nephew to whom I suppose my son is indebted for this wholesale
+     corruption. On questioning my son I found him already so sunk in
+     the mire of the pernicious doctrines he has imbibed that he
+     actually defied his own father. I thrashed him severely in spite of
+     my fever, and he is now under lock and key in his bedroom where he
+     will remain until he sails with me to Sydney next week whither I am
+     summoned to the conference of Australasian missionaries. During the
+     voyage I shall wrestle with the demon that has entered into my son
+     and endeavour to persuade him that Jesus only is necessary for
+     salvation. And when I have done so, I shall leave him in Australia
+     to earn his own living remote from the scene of his corruption. In
+     the circumstances I assume that you will deduct a proportion of his
+     school fees for this term. I know that you will be as much
+     horrified and disgusted as I was by your nephew's conduct, and I
+     trust that you will be able to wrestle with him in the Lord and
+     prove to him that Jesus only is necessary to salvation.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+     P.S. I suggest that instead of £6 6s. 0d. I should pay £5 5s. 0d.
+     for this term, plus, of course, the usual extras.
+
+The pulse in Mr. Lidderdale's temple had never throbbed so remarkably
+as while Mark was reading this letter.
+
+"A fine thing," he ranted, "if this story gets about in Slowbridge. A
+fine reward for all my kindness if you ruin my school. As for this man
+Ogilvie, I'll sue him for damages. Don't look at me with that expression
+of bestial defiance. Do you hear? What prevents my thrashing you as you
+deserve? What prevents me, I say?"
+
+But Mark was not paying any attention to his uncle's fury; he was
+thinking about the unfortunate martyr under lock and key in The Limes,
+Cranborne Road, Slowbridge. He was wondering what would be the effect of
+this violent removal to the Antipodes and how that fundamental weakness
+of character would fare if Cyril were left to himself at his age.
+
+"I think Mr. Pomeroy is a ruffian," said Mark. "Don't you, Uncle Henry?
+If he writes to the Bishop about Mr. Ogilvie, I shall write to the
+Bishop about him. I hate Protestants. I hate them."
+
+"There's your father to the life. You'd like to burn them, wouldn't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I would," Mark declared.
+
+"You'd like to burn me, I suppose?"
+
+"Not you in particular."
+
+"Will you listen to him, Helen," he shouted to his sister. "Come here
+and listen to him. Listen to the boy we took in and educated and clothed
+and fed, listen to him saying he'd like to burn his uncle. Into Mr.
+Hitchcock's office you go at once. No more education if this is what it
+leads to. Read that letter, Helen, look at that book, Helen. _Catholic
+Prayers for Church of England People by the Reverend A.H. Stanton._ Look
+at this book, Helen. _The Catholic Religion by Vernon Staley._ No wonder
+you hate Protestants, you ungrateful boy. No wonder you're longing to
+burn your uncle and aunt. It'll be in the _Slowbridge Herald_ to-morrow.
+Headlines! Ruin! They'll think I'm a Jesuit in disguise. I ought to have
+got a very handsome sum of money for the good-will. Go back to your
+class-room, and if you have a spark of affection in your nature, don't
+brag about this to the other boys."
+
+Mark, pondering all the morning the best thing to do for Cyril,
+remembered that a boy called Hacking lived at The Laurels, 36, Cranborne
+Road. He did not like Hacking, but wishing to utilize his back garden
+for the purpose of communicating with the prisoner he made himself
+agreeable to him in the interval between first and second school.
+
+"Hullo, Hacking," he began. "I say, do you want a cricket bat? I shan't
+be here next summer, so you may as well have mine."
+
+Hacking looked at Mark suspicious of some hidden catch that would make
+him appear a fool.
+
+"No, really I'm not ragging," said Mark. "I'll bring it round to you
+after dinner. I'll be at your place about a quarter to two. Wait for me,
+won't you?"
+
+Hacking puzzled his brains to account for this generous whim, and at
+last decided that Mark must be "gone" on his sister Edith. He supposed
+that he ought to warn Edith to be about when Mark called; if the bat was
+not forthcoming he could easily prevent a meeting. The bat however
+turned out to be much better than he expected, and Hacking was on the
+point of presenting Cressida to Troilus when Troilus said:
+
+"That's your garden at the back, isn't it?"
+
+Hacking admitted that it was.
+
+"It looks rather decent."
+
+Hacking allowed modestly that it wasn't bad.
+
+"My father's rather dead nuts on gardening. So's my kiddy sister," he
+added.
+
+"I vote we go out there," Mark suggested.
+
+"Shall I give a yell to my kiddy sister?" asked Pandarus.
+
+"Good lord, no," Mark exclaimed. "Don't the Pomeroys live next door to
+you? Look here, Hacking, I want to speak to Cyril Pomeroy."
+
+"He was absent this morning."
+
+Mark considered Hacking as a possible adjutant to the enterprise he was
+plotting. That he finally decided to admit Hacking to his confidence was
+due less to the favourable result of the scrutiny than to the fact that
+unless he confided in Hacking he would find it difficult to communicate
+with Cyril and impossible to manage his escape. Mark aimed as high as
+this. His first impulse had been to approach the Vicar of Meade
+Cantorum, but on second thoughts he had rejected him in favour of Mr.
+Dorward, who was not so likely to suffer from respect for paternal
+authority.
+
+"Look here, Hacking, will you swear not to say a word about what I'm
+going to tell you?"
+
+"Of course," said Hacking, who scenting a scandal would have promised
+much more than this to obtain the details of it.
+
+"What will you swear by?"
+
+"Oh, anything," Hacking offered, without the least hesitation. "I don't
+mind what it is."
+
+"Well, what do you consider the most sacred thing in the world?"
+
+If Hacking had known himself, he would have said food; not knowing
+himself, he suggested the Bible.
+
+"I suppose you know that if you swear something on the Bible and break
+your oath you can be put in prison?" Mark demanded sternly.
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+The oath was administered, and Hacking waited goggle-eyed for the
+revelation.
+
+"Is that all?" he asked when Mark stopped.
+
+"Well, it's enough, isn't it? And now you've got to help him to escape."
+
+"But I didn't swear I'd do that," argued Hacking.
+
+"All right then. Don't. I thought you'd enjoy it."
+
+"We should get into a row. There'd be an awful shine."
+
+"Who's to know it's us? I've got a friend in the country. And I shall
+telegraph to him and ask if he'll hide Pomeroy."
+
+Mark was not sufficiently sure of Hacking's discretion or loyalty to
+mention Dorward's name. After all this business wasn't just a rag.
+
+"The first thing is for you to go out in the garden and attract
+Pomeroy's attention. He's locked in his bedroom."
+
+"But I don't know which is his bedroom," Hacking objected.
+
+"Well, you don't suppose the whole family are locked in their bedrooms,
+do you?" asked Mark scornfully.
+
+"But how do you know his bedroom is on this side of the house?"
+
+"I don't," said Mark. "That's what I want to find out. If it's in the
+front of the house, I shan't want your help, especially as you're so
+funky."
+
+Hacking went out into the garden, and presently he came back with the
+news that Pomeroy was waiting outside to talk to Mark over the wall.
+
+"Waiting outside?" Mark repeated. "What do you mean, waiting outside?
+How can he be waiting outside when he's locked in his bedroom?"
+
+"But he's not," said Hacking.
+
+Sure enough, when Mark went out he found Cyril astride the party wall
+between the two gardens waiting for him.
+
+"You can't let your father drag you off to Australia like this," Mark
+argued. "You'll go all to pieces there. You'll lose your faith, and take
+to drink, and--you must refuse to go."
+
+Cyril smiled weakly and explained to Mark that when once his father had
+made up his mind to do something it was impossible to stop him.
+
+Thereupon Mark explained his scheme.
+
+"I'll get an answer from Dorward to-night and you must escape to-morrow
+afternoon as soon as it's dark. Have you got a rope ladder?"
+
+Cyril smiled more feebly than ever.
+
+"No, I suppose you haven't. Then what you must do is tear up your sheets
+and let yourself down into the garden. Hacking will whistle three times
+if all's clear, and then you must climb over into his garden and run as
+hard as you can to the corner of the road where I'll be waiting for you
+in a cab. I'll go up to London with you and see you off from Waterloo,
+which is the station for Green Lanes where Father Dorward lives. You
+take a ticket to Galton, and I expect he'll meet you, or if he doesn't,
+it's only a seven mile walk. I don't know the way, but you can ask when
+you get to Galton. Only if you could find your way without asking it
+would be better, because if you're pursued and you're seen asking the
+way you'll be caught more easily. Now I must rush off and borrow some
+money from Mr. Ogilvie. No, perhaps it would rouse suspicions if I were
+absent from afternoon school. My uncle would be sure to guess,
+and--though I don't think he would--he might try to lock me up in my
+room. But I say," Mark suddenly exclaimed in indignation, "how on earth
+did you manage to come and talk to me out here?"
+
+Cyril explained that he had only been locked in his bedroom last night
+when his father was so angry. He had freedom to move about in the house
+and garden, and, he added to Mark's annoyance, there would be no need
+for him to use rope ladders or sheets to escape. If Mark would tell him
+what time to be at the corner of the road and would wait for him a
+little while in case his father saw him going out and prevented him, he
+would easily be able to escape.
+
+"Then I needn't have told Hacking," said Mark. "However, now I have told
+him, he must do something, or else he's sure to let out what he knows. I
+wish I knew where to get the money for the fare."
+
+"I've got a pound in my money box."
+
+"Have you?" said Mark, a little mortified, but at the same time relieved
+that he could keep Mr. Ogilvie from being involved. "Well, that ought to
+be enough. I've got enough to send a telegram to Dorward. As soon as I
+get his answer I'll send you word by Hacking. Now don't hang about in
+the garden all the afternoon or your people will begin to think
+something's up. If you could, it would be a good thing for you to be
+heard praying and groaning in your room."
+
+Cyril smiled his feeble smile, and Mark felt inclined to abandon him to
+his fate; but he decided on reflection that the importance of
+vindicating the claims of the Church to a persecuted son was more
+important than the foolishness and the feebleness of the son.
+
+"Do you want me to do anything more?" Hacking asked.
+
+Mark suggested that Hacking's name and address should be given for Mr.
+Dorward's answer, but this Hacking refused.
+
+"If a telegram came to our house, everybody would want to read it. Why
+can't it be sent to you?"
+
+Mark sighed for his fellow-conspirator's stupidity. To this useless clod
+he had presented a valuable bat.
+
+"All right," he said impatiently, "you needn't do anything more except
+tell Pomeroy what time he's to be at the corner of the road to-morrow."
+
+"I'll do that, Lidderdale."
+
+"I should think you jolly well would," Mark exclaimed scornfully.
+
+Mark spent a long time over the telegram to Dorward; in the end he
+decided that it would be safer to assume that the priest would shelter
+and hide Cyril rather than take the risk of getting an answer. The final
+draft was as follows:--
+
+     Dorward Green Lanes Medworth Hants
+
+     Am sending persecuted Catholic boy by 7.30 from Waterloo Tuesday
+     please send conveyance Mark Lidderdale.
+
+Mark only had eightpence, and this message would cost tenpence. He took
+out the _am_, changed _by 7.30 from Waterloo_ to _arriving 9.35_ and
+_send conveyance_ to _meet_. If he had only borrowed Cyril's sovereign,
+he could have been more explicit. However, he flattered himself that he
+was getting full value for his eightpence. He then worked out the cost
+of Cyril's escape.
+
+                                                s.   d.
+Third Class single to Paddington                1    6
+Third Class return to Paddington (for self)     2    6
+Third Class single Waterloo to Galton           3   11
+Cab from Paddington to Waterloo                 3    6?
+Cab from Waterloo to Paddington (for self)      3    6?
+Sandwiches for Cyril and Self                   1    0
+Ginger-beer for Cyril and Self (4 bottles)           8
+                                               ________
+Total                                          16    7
+
+The cab of course might cost more, and he must take back the eightpence
+out of it for himself. But Cyril would have at least one and sixpence
+in his pocket when he arrived, which he could put in the offertory at
+the Mass of thanksgiving for his escape that he would attend on the
+following morning. Cyril would be useful to old Dorward, and he (Mark)
+would give him some tips on serving if they had an empty compartment
+from Slowbridge to Paddington. Mark's original intention had been to
+wait at the corner of Cranborne Road in a closed cab like the proverbial
+postchaise of elopements, but he discarded this idea for reasons of
+economy. He hoped that Cyril would not get frightened on the way to the
+station and turn back. Perhaps after all it would be wiser to order a
+cab and give up the ginger-beer, or pay for the ginger-beer with the
+money for the telegram. Once inside a cab Cyril was bound to go on.
+Hacking might be committed more completely to the enterprise by waiting
+inside until he arrived with Cyril. It was a pity that Cyril was not
+locked in his room, and yet when it came to it he would probably have
+funked letting himself down from the window by knotted sheets. Mark
+walked home with Hacking after school, to give his final instructions
+for the following day.
+
+"I'm telling you now," he said, "because we oughtn't to be seen together
+at all to-morrow, in case of arousing suspicion. You must get hold of
+Pomeroy and tell him to run to the corner of the road at half-past-five,
+and jump straight into the fly that'll be waiting there with you
+inside."
+
+"But where will you be?"
+
+"I shall be waiting outside the ticket barrier with the tickets."
+
+"Supposing he won't?"
+
+"I'll risk seeing him once more. Go and ask if you can speak to him a
+minute, and tell him to come out in the garden presently. Say you've
+knocked a ball over or something and will Master Cyril throw it back. I
+say, we might really put a message inside a ball and throw it over. That
+was the way the Duc de Beaufort escaped in _Twenty Years After_."
+
+Hacking looked blankly at Mark.
+
+"But it's dark and wet," he objected. "I shouldn't knock a ball over on
+a wet evening like this."
+
+"Well, the skivvy won't think of that, and Pomeroy will guess that
+we're trying to communicate with him."
+
+Mark thought how odd it was that Hacking should be so utterly blind to
+the romance of the enterprise. After a few more objections which were
+disposed of by Mark, Hacking agreed to go next door and try to get the
+prisoner into the garden. He succeeded in this, and Mark rated Cyril for
+not having given him the sovereign yesterday.
+
+"However, bunk in and get it now, because I shan't see you again till
+to-morrow at the station, and I must have some money to buy the
+tickets."
+
+He explained the details of the escape and exacted from Cyril a promise
+not to back out at the last moment.
+
+"You've got nothing to do. It's as simple as A B C. It's too simple,
+really, to be much of a rag. However, as it isn't a rag, but serious, I
+suppose we oughtn't to grumble. Now, you are coming, aren't you?"
+
+Cyril promised that nothing but physical force should prevent him.
+
+"If you funk, don't forget that you'll have betrayed your faith and
+. . ."
+
+At this moment Mark in his enthusiasm slipped off the wall, and after
+uttering one more solemn injunction against backing out at the last
+minute he left Cyril to the protection of Angels for the next
+twenty-four hours.
+
+Although he would never have admitted as much, Mark was rather
+astonished when Cyril actually did present himself at Slowbridge station
+in time to catch the 5.47 train up to town. Their compartment was not
+empty, so that Mark was unable to give Cyril that lesson in serving at
+the altar which he had intended to give him. Instead, as Cyril seemed in
+his reaction to the excitement of the escape likely to burst into tears
+at any moment, he drew for him a vivid picture of the enjoyable life to
+which the train was taking him.
+
+"Father Dorward says that the country round Green Lanes is ripping. And
+his church is Norman. I expect he'll make you his ceremonarius. You're
+an awfully lucky chap, you know. He says that next Corpus Christi, he's
+going to have Mass on the village green. Nobody will know where you
+are, and I daresay later on you can become a hermit. You might become a
+saint. The last English saint to be canonized was St. Thomas Cantilupe
+of Hereford. But of course Charles the First ought to have been properly
+canonized. By the time you die I should think we should have got back
+canonization in the English Church, and if I'm alive then I'll propose
+your canonization. St. Cyril Pomeroy you'd be."
+
+Such were the bright colours in which Mark painted Cyril's future; when
+he had watched him wave his farewells from the window of the departing
+train at Waterloo, he felt as if he were watching the bodily assumption
+of a saint.
+
+"Where have you been all the evening?" asked Uncle Henry, when Mark came
+back about nine o'clock.
+
+"In London," said Mark.
+
+"Your insolence is becoming insupportable. Get away to your room."
+
+It never struck Mr. Lidderdale that his nephew was telling the truth.
+
+The hue and cry for Cyril Pomeroy began at once, and though Mark
+maintained at first that the discovery of Cyril's hiding-place was due
+to nothing else except the cowardice of Hacking, who when confronted by
+a detective burst into tears and revealed all he knew, he was bound to
+admit afterward that, if Mr. Ogilvie had been questioned much more, he
+would have had to reveal the secret himself. Mark was hurt that his
+efforts to help a son of Holy Church should not be better appreciated by
+Mr. Ogilvie; but he forgave his friend in view of the nuisance that it
+undoubtedly must have been to have Meade Cantorum beleaguered by half a
+dozen corpulent detectives. The only person in the Vicarage who seemed
+to approve of what he had done was Esther; she who had always seemed to
+ignore him, even sometimes in a sensitive mood to despise him, was full
+of congratulations.
+
+"How did you manage it, Mark?"
+
+"Oh, I took a cab," said Mark modestly. "One from the corner of
+Cranborne Road to Slowbridge, and another from Paddington to Waterloo.
+We had some sandwiches, and a good deal of ginger-beer at Paddington
+because we thought we mightn't be able to get any at Waterloo, but at
+Waterloo we had some more ginger-beer. I wish I hadn't told Hacking. If
+I hadn't, we should probably have pulled it off. Old Dorward was up to
+anything. But Hacking is a hopeless ass."
+
+"What does your uncle say?"
+
+"He's rather sick," Mark admitted. "He refused to let me go to school
+any more, which as you may imagine doesn't upset me very much, and I'm
+to go into Hitchcock's office after Christmas. As far as I can make out
+I shall be a kind of servant."
+
+"Have you talked to Stephen about it?"
+
+"Well, he's a bit annoyed with me about this kidnapping. I'm afraid I
+have rather let him in for it. He says he doesn't mind so much if it's
+kept out of the papers."
+
+"Anyway, I think it was a sporting effort by you," said Esther. "I
+wasn't particularly keen on you until you brought this off. I hate pious
+boys. I wish you'd told me beforehand. I'd have loved to help."
+
+"Would you? I say, I am sorry. I never thought of you," said Mark much
+disappointed at the lost opportunity. "You'd have been much better than
+that ass Hacking. If you and I had been the only people in it, I'll bet
+the detectives would never have found him."
+
+"And what's going to happen to the youth now?"
+
+"Oh, his father's going to take him to Australia as he arranged. They
+sail to-morrow. There's one thing," Mark added with a kind of gloomy
+relish. "He's bound to go to the bad, and perhaps that'll be a lesson to
+his father."
+
+The hope of the Vicar of Meade Cantorum and equally it may be added the
+hope of Mr. Lidderdale that the affair would be kept out of the papers
+was not fulfilled. The day after Mr. Pomeroy and his son sailed from
+Tilbury the following communication appeared in _The Times_:
+
+     Sir,--The accompanying letter was handed to me by my friend the
+     Reverend Eustace Pomeroy to be used as I thought fit and subject to
+     only one stipulation--that it should not be published until he and
+     his son were out of England. As President of the Society for the
+     Protection of the English Church against Romish Aggression I feel
+     that it is my duty to lay the facts before the country. I need
+     scarcely add that I have been at pains to verify the surprising and
+     alarming accusations made by a clergyman against two other
+     clergymen, and I earnestly request the publicity of your columns
+     for what I venture to believe is positive proof of the dangerous
+     conspiracy existing in our very midst to romanize the Established
+     Church of England. I shall be happy to produce for any of your
+     readers who find Mr. Pomeroy's story incredible at the close of the
+     nineteenth century the signed statements of witnesses and other
+     documentary evidence.
+
+     I am, Sir,
+
+     Your obedient servant,
+
+     Danvers.
+
+
+     The Right Honble. the Lord Danvers, P.C.
+
+     President of the Society for the Protection of the English Church
+     against Romish Aggression.
+
+     My Lord,
+
+     I have to bring to your notice as President of the S.P.E. C.R.A.
+     what I venture to assert is one of the most daring plots to subvert
+     home and family life in the interests of priestcraft that has ever
+     been discovered. In taking this step I am fully conscious of its
+     seriousness, and if I ask your lordship to delay taking any
+     measures for publicity until the unhappy principal is upon the high
+     seas in the guardianship of his even more unhappy father, I do so
+     for the sake of the wretched boy whose future has been nearly
+     blasted by the Jesuitical behaviour of two so-called Protestant
+     clergymen.
+
+     Four years ago, my lord, I retired from a lifelong career as a
+     missionary in New Guinea to give my children the advantages of
+     English education and English climate, and it is surely hard that I
+     should live to curse the day on which I did so. My third son Cyril
+     was sent to school at Haverton House, Slowbridge, to an educational
+     establishment kept by a Mr. Henry Lidderdale, reputed to be a
+     strong Evangelical and I believe I am justified in saying rightly
+     so reputed. At the same time I regret that Mr. Lidderdale, whose
+     brother was a notorious Romanizer I have since discovered, should
+     not have exercised more care in the supervision of his nephew, a
+     fellow scholar with my own son at Haverton House. It appears that
+     Mr. Lidderdale was so lax as to permit his nephew to frequent the
+     services of the Reverend Stephen Ogilvie at Meade Cantorum, where
+     every excess such as incense, lighted candles, mariolatry and
+     creeping to the cross is openly practised. The Revd. S. Ogilvie I
+     may add is a member of the S.S.C., that notorious secret society
+     whose machinations have been so often exposed and the originators
+     of that filthy book "The Priest in Absolution." He is also a member
+     of the Guild of All Souls which has for its avowed object the
+     restoration of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory with all its
+     attendant horrors, and finally I need scarcely add he is a member
+     of the Confraternity of the "Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly
+     to popularize the idolatrous and blasphemous cult of the Mass.
+
+     Young Lidderdale presumably under the influence of this disloyal
+     Protestant clergyman sought to corrupt my son, and was actually so
+     far successful as to lure him to attend the idolatrous services at
+     Meade Cantorum church, which of course he was only able to do by
+     inventing lies and excuses to his father to account for his absence
+     from the simple worship to which all his life he had been
+     accustomed. Not content with this my unhappy son was actually
+     persuaded to confess his sins to this self-styled "priest"! I
+     wonder if he confessed the sin of deceiving his own father to
+     "Father" Ogilvie who supplied him with numerous Mass books, several
+     of which I enclose for your lordship's inspection. You will be
+     amused if you are not too much horrified by these puerile and
+     degraded works, and in one of them, impudently entitled "Catholic
+     Prayers for Church of England People" you will actually see in cold
+     print a prayer for the "Pope of Rome." This work emanates from that
+     hotbed of sacerdotal disloyalty, St. Alban's, Holborn.
+
+     These vile books I discovered by accident carefully hidden away in
+     my son's bedroom. "Facilis descensus Averni!" You will easily
+     imagine the humiliation of a parent who, having devoted his life to
+     bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen, finds that his own
+     son has fallen as low as the lowest savage. As soon as I made my
+     discovery, I removed him from Haverton House, and warned the
+     proprietor of the risk he was running by not taking better care of
+     his pupils. Having been summoned to a conference of missionaries in
+     Sydney, N.S.W., I determined to take my son with me in the hope
+     that a long voyage in the company of a loving parent, eager to help
+     him back to the path of Truth and Salvation from which he had
+     strayed, might cure him of his idolatrous fancies, and restore him
+     to Jesus.
+
+     What followed is, as I write this, scarcely credible to myself;
+     but however incredible, it is true. Young Lidderdale, acting no
+     doubt at the instigation of "Father" Ogilvie (as my son actually
+     called him to my face, not realizing the blasphemy of according to
+     a mortal clergyman the title that belongs to God alone), entered
+     into a conspiracy with another Romanizing clergyman, the Reverend
+     Oliver Dorward, Vicar of Green Lanes, Hants, to abduct my son from
+     his own father's house, with what ultimate intention I dare not
+     think. Incredible as it must sound to modern ears, they were so far
+     successful that for a whole week I was in ignorance of his
+     whereabouts, while detectives were hunting for him up and down
+     England. The abduction was carried out by young Lidderdale, with
+     the assistance of a youth called Hacking, so coolly and skilfully
+     as to indicate that the abettors behind the scenes are USED TO SUCH
+     ABDUCTIONS. This, my lord, points to a very grave state of affairs
+     in our midst. If the son of a Protestant clergyman like myself can
+     be spirited away from a populous but nevertheless comparatively
+     small town like Slowbridge, what must be going on in great cities
+     like London? Moreover, everything is done to make it attractive for
+     the unhappy youth who is thus lured away from his father's hearth.
+     My own son is even now still impenitent, and I have the greatest
+     fears for his moral and religious future, so rapid has been the
+     corruption set up by evil companionship.
+
+     These, my lord, are the facts set out as shortly as possible and
+     written on the eve of my departure in circumstances that militate
+     against elegance of expression. I am, to tell the truth, still
+     staggered by this affair, and if I make public my sorrow and my
+     shame I do so in the hope that the Society of which your lordship
+     is President, may see its way to take some kind of action that will
+     make a repetition of such an outrage upon family life for ever
+     impossible.
+
+     Believe me to be,
+
+     Your lordship's obedient servant,
+
+     Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+The publication of this letter stirred England. _The Times_ in a leading
+article demanded a full inquiry into the alleged circumstances. _The
+English Churchman_ said that nothing like it had happened since the days
+of Bloody Mary. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, and
+finally when it became known that Lord Danvers would ask a question in
+the House of Lords, Mr. Ogilvie took Mark to see Lord Hull who wished to
+be in possession of the facts before he rose to correct some
+misapprehensions of Lord Danvers. Mark also had to interview two
+Bishops, an Archdeacon, and a Rural Dean. He did not realize that for a
+few weeks he was a central figure in what was called THE CHURCH CRISIS.
+He was indignant at Mr. Pomeroy's exaggeration and perversions of fact,
+and he was so evidently speaking the truth that everybody from Lord Hull
+to a reporter of _The Sun_ was impressed by his account of the affair,
+so that in the end the Pomeroy Abduction was decided to be less
+revolutionary than the Gunpowder Plot.
+
+Mr. Lidderdale, however, believed that his nephew had deliberately tried
+to ruin him out of malice, and when two parents seized the opportunity
+of such a scandal to remove their sons from Haverton House without
+paying the terminal fees, Mr. Lidderdale told Mark that he should recoup
+himself for the loss out of the money left by his mother.
+
+"How much did she leave?" his nephew asked.
+
+"Don't ask impertinent questions."
+
+"But it's my money, isn't it?"
+
+"It will be your money in another six years, if you behave yourself.
+Meanwhile half of it will be devoted to paying your premium at the
+office of my friend Mr. Hitchcock."
+
+"But I don't want to be a solicitor. I want to be a priest," said Mark.
+
+Uncle Henry produced a number of cogent reasons that would make his
+nephew's ambition unattainable.
+
+"Very well, if I can't be a priest, I don't want the money, and you can
+keep it yourself," said Mark. "But I'm not going to be a solicitor."
+
+"And what are you going to be, may I inquire?" asked Uncle Henry.
+
+"In the end I probably _shall_ be a priest," Mark prophesied. "But I
+haven't quite decided yet how. I warn you that I shall run away."
+
+"Run away," his uncle echoed in amazement. "Good heavens, boy, haven't
+you had enough of running away over this deplorable Pomeroy affair?
+Where are you going to run to?"
+
+"I couldn't tell you, could I, even if I knew?" Mark asked as tactfully
+as he was able. "But as a matter of fact, I don't know. I only know that
+I won't go into Mr. Hitchcock's office. If you try to force me, I shall
+write to _The Times_ about it."
+
+Such a threat would have sounded absurd in the mouth of a schoolboy
+before the Pomeroy business; but now Mr. Lidderdale took it seriously
+and began to wonder if Haverton House would survive any more of such
+publicity. When a few days later Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had consulted
+about his future, wrote to propose that Mark should live with him and
+work under his superintendence with the idea of winning a scholarship at
+Oxford, Mr. Lidderdale was inclined to treat his suggestion as a
+solution of the problem, and he replied encouragingly:
+
+     Haverton House,
+
+     Slowbridge.
+
+     Jan. 15.
+
+     Dear Sir,
+
+     Am I to understand from your letter that you are offering to make
+     yourself responsible for my nephew's future, for I must warn you
+     that I could not accept your suggestion unless such were the case?
+     I do not approve of what I assume will be the trend of your
+     education, and I should have to disclaim any further responsibility
+     in the matter of my nephew's future. I may inform you that I hold
+     in trust for him until he comes of age the sum of £522 8s. 7d.
+     which was left by his mother. The annual interest upon this I have
+     used until now as a slight contribution to the expense to which I
+     have been put on his account; but I have not thought it right to
+     use any of the capital sum. This I am proposing to transfer to you.
+     His mother did not execute any legal document and I have nothing
+     more binding than a moral obligation. If you undertake the
+     responsibility of looking after him until such time as he is able
+     to earn his own living, I consider that you are entitled to use
+     this money in any way you think right. I hope that the boy will
+     reward your confidence more amply than he has rewarded mine. I need
+     not allude to the Pomeroy business to you, for notwithstanding your
+     public denials I cannot but consider that you were as deeply
+     implicated in that disgraceful affair as he was. I note what you
+     say about the admiration you had for my brother. I wish I could
+     honestly say that I shared that admiration. But my brother and I
+     were not on good terms, for which state of affairs he was entirely
+     responsible. I am more ready to surrender to you all my authority
+     over Mark because I am only too well aware how during the last year
+     you have consistently undermined that authority and encouraged my
+     nephew's rebellious spirit. I have had a great experience of boys
+     during thirty-five years of schoolmastering, and I can assure you
+     that I have never had to deal with a boy so utterly insensible to
+     kindness as my nephew. His conduct toward his aunt I can only
+     characterize as callous. Of his conduct towards me I prefer to say
+     no more. I came forward at a moment when he was likely to be sunk
+     in the most abject poverty, and my reward has been ingratitude. I
+     pray that his dark and stubborn temperament may not turn to vice
+     and folly as he grows older, but I have little hope of its not
+     doing so. I confess that to me his future seems dismally black. You
+     may have acquired some kind of influence over his emotions, if he
+     has any emotions, but I am not inclined to suppose that it will
+     endure.
+
+     On hearing from you that you persist in your offer to assume
+     complete responsibility for my nephew, I will hand him over to your
+     care at once. I cannot pretend that I shall be sorry to see the
+     last of him, for I am not a hypocrite. I may add that his clothes
+     are in rather a sorry state. I had intended to equip him upon his
+     entering the office of my old friend Mr. Hitchcock and with that
+     intention I have been letting him wear out what he has. This, I may
+     say, he has done most effectually.
+
+     I am, Sir,
+
+     Yours faithfully,
+
+     Henry Lidderdale.
+
+To which Mr. Ogilvie replied:
+
+     The Vicarage,
+
+     Meade Cantorum,
+
+     Bucks.
+
+     Jan. 16.
+
+     Dear Mr. Lidderdale,
+
+     I accept full responsibility for Mark and for Mark's money. Send
+     both of them along whenever you like. I'm not going to embark on
+     another controversy about the "rights" of boys. I've exhausted
+     every argument on this subject since Mark involved me in his
+     drastic measures of a month ago. But please let me assure you that
+     I will do my best for him and that I am convinced he will do his
+     best for me.
+
+     Yours truly,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WYCH-ON-THE-WOLD
+
+
+Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went to live at Meade
+Cantorum; and the break was made complete soon afterward when the living
+of Wych-on-the-Wold was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that
+he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five years later;
+Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where she took up palmistry
+and became indispensable to the success of charitable bazaars in East
+Sussex.
+
+Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was actually in
+Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that all the windows looked
+down into Gloucestershire, except those in the Rectory; they looked out
+across a flat country of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing
+spire in Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a high
+windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of the numbers of
+pigeons that were always circling round the church tower. There was
+hardly a house in Wych that did not have its pigeon-cote, from the great
+round columbary in the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of
+some steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as most
+Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford in the vale
+below, that was because the exposed position had kept its successive
+builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was
+an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape
+whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old
+wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient
+observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing
+with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the
+inmates was a succession of blank spaces of freestone that delighted
+the eye with an effect of strength and leisure, of cleanliness and
+tranquillity.
+
+The Rectory, dating from the reign of Charles II, did not arrogate to
+itself the right to retire behind trees from the long line of the single
+village street; but being taller than the other houses it brought the
+street to a dignified conclusion, and it was not unworthy of the noble
+church which stood apart from the village, a landmark for miles, upon
+the brow of the rolling wold. There was little traffic on the road that
+climbed up from Wychford in the valley of the swift Greenrush five miles
+away, and there was less traffic on the road beyond, which for eight
+miles sent branch after branch to remote farms and hamlets until itself
+became no more than a sheep track and faded out upon a hilly pasturage.
+Yet even this unfrequented road only bisected the village at the end of
+its wide street, where in the morning when the children were at school
+and the labourers at work in the fields the silence was cloistral, where
+one could stand listening to the larks high overhead, and where the
+lightest footstep aroused curiosity, so that one turned the head to peep
+and peer for the cause of so strange a sound.
+
+Mr. Ogilvie's parish had a large superficial area; but his parishioners
+were not many outside the village, and in that country of wide pastures
+the whole of his cure did not include half-a-dozen farms. There was no
+doctor and no squire, unless Will Starling of Rushbrooke Grange could be
+counted as the squire.
+
+Halfway to Wychford and close to the boundary of the two parishes an
+infirm signpost managed with the aid of a stunted hawthorn to keep
+itself partially upright and direct the wayfarer to Wych Maries. Without
+the signpost nobody would have suspected that the grassgrown track thus
+indicated led anywhere except over the top of the wold.
+
+"You must go and explore Wych Maries," the Rector had said to Mark soon
+after they arrived. "You'll find it rather attractive. There's a disused
+chapel dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. My
+predecessor took me there when we drove round the parish on my first
+visit; but I haven't yet had time to go again. And you ought to have a
+look at the gardens of Rushbrooke Grange. The present squire is away. In
+the South Seas, I believe. But the housekeeper, Mrs. Honeybone, will
+show you round."
+
+It was in response to this advice that Mark and Esther set out on a
+golden May evening to explore Wych Maries. Esther had continued to be
+friendly with Mark after the Pomeroy affair; and when he came to live at
+Meade Cantorum she had expressed her pleasure at the prospect of having
+him for a brother.
+
+"But you'll keep off religion, won't you?" she had demanded.
+
+Mark promised that he would, wondering why she should suppose that he
+was incapable of perceiving who was and who was not interested in it.
+
+"I suppose you've guessed my fear?" she had continued. "Haven't you?
+Haven't you guessed that I'm frightened to death of becoming religious?"
+
+The reassuring contradiction that one naturally gives to anybody who
+voices a dread of being overtaken by some misfortune might perhaps have
+sounded inappropriate, and Mark had held his tongue.
+
+"My father was very religious. My mother is more or less religious.
+Stephen is religious. Miriam is religious. Oh, Mark, and I sometimes
+feel that I too must fall on my knees and surrender. But I won't.
+Because it spoils life. I shall be beaten in the end of course, and I'll
+probably get religious mania when I am beaten. But until then--" She did
+not finish her sentence; only her blue eyes glittered at the challenge
+of life.
+
+That was the last time religion was mentioned between Mark and Esther,
+and since both of them enjoyed the country they became friends. On this
+May evening they stood by the signpost and looked across the shimmering
+grass to where the sun hung in his web of golden haze above the edge of
+the wold.
+
+"If we take the road to Wych Maries," said Mark, "we shall be walking
+right into the sun."
+
+Esther did not reply, but Mark understood that she assented to his
+truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed
+them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge
+of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the
+brow, but which grew denser down the slope with many dark evergreens
+interspersed, and in the valley below became a jungle. After the bare
+upland country this volume of May verdure seemed indescribably rich and
+the valley beyond, where the Greenrush flowed through kingcups toward
+the sun, indescribably alluring. Esther and Mark forgot that they were
+exploring Wych Maries and thinking only of reaching that wide valley
+they ran down through the wood, rejoicing in the airy green of the
+ash-trees above them and shouting as they ran. But presently cypresses
+and sombre yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych
+Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and their
+whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more. At the bottom of
+the hill the trees increased in number and variety; the sun shone
+through pale oak-leaves and the warm green of sycamores. Nevertheless a
+sadness haunted the wood, where the red campions made only a mist of
+colour with no reality of life and flowers behind.
+
+"This wood's awfully jolly, isn't it?" said Mark, hoping to gain from
+Esther's agreement the dispersal of his gloom.
+
+"I don't care for it much," she replied. "There doesn't seem to be any
+life in it."
+
+"I heard a cuckoo just now," said Mark.
+
+"Yes, out of tune already."
+
+"Mm, rather out of tune. Mind those nettles," he warned her.
+
+"I thought Stephen said he drove here."
+
+"Perhaps we've come the wrong way. I believe the road forked by the ash
+wood above. Anyway if we go toward the sun we shall come out in the
+valley, and we can walk back along the banks of the river to Wychford."
+
+"We can always go back through the wood," said Esther.
+
+"Yes, if you don't mind going back the way you came."
+
+"Come on," she snapped. She was not going to be laughed at by Mark, and
+she dared him to deny that he was not as much aware as herself of an
+eeriness in the atmosphere.
+
+"Only because it seems dark in here after that dazzling sunlight on the
+wold. Hark! I hear the sound of water."
+
+They struggled through the undergrowth toward the sound; soon from a
+steep wooded bank they were gazing down into a millpool, the surface of
+which reflected with a gloomy deepening of their hue the colour but not
+the form of the trees above. Water was flowing through a rotten sluice
+gate down from the level of the stream upon a slimy water-wheel that
+must have been out of action for many years.
+
+"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of Weir!" Mark
+exclaimed. "Don't you love _Ulalume_? I think it's about my favourite
+poem."
+
+"Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently. He might have taken
+advantage of this confession to give her a lecture on poetry, if the
+millpool and the melancholy wood had not been so affecting as to make
+the least attempt at literary exposition impertinent.
+
+"And there's the chapel," Mark exclaimed, pointing to a ruined edifice
+of stone, the walls of which were stained with the damp of years rising
+from the pool. "But how shall we reach it? We must have come the wrong
+way."
+
+"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering to the
+command of an intuition that overcame her pride. "This place is
+unlucky."
+
+Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that came so early in
+this overshadowed place, was half inclined to turn round at her behest;
+but at that moment he perceived a possible path through the nettles and
+briers at the farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the
+Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych Maries he
+called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully at first; but
+gradually regaining her composure she emerged on the other side as cool
+and scornful as the Esther with whom he was familiar.
+
+"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing on a grassgrown
+road that wound through a rank pasturage browsed on by a solitary black
+cow and turned the corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building,
+the presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.
+
+"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.
+
+"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I say, this chapel is
+rather ripping, isn't it?"
+
+But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow, where her
+meditative form made the solitary black cow look lonelier than ever.
+Mark turned aside to examine the chapel. He had been warned by the
+Rector to look at the images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary
+Magdalene that had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they
+were tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history of the
+chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as to suggest that it was
+a chantry; but there was no historical justification for linking its
+fortunes with the Starlings who owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was
+no record of any lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might
+show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold; it lay
+about midway between the two, and in days gone by there had been
+controversy on this point between the two parishes. The question had
+been settled by a squire of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth
+century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by
+some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record
+neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk
+worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of
+bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that
+covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its
+floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of
+the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six
+hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the
+place and speculated upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy
+that covered the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit
+of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two
+austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that
+enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom
+from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed
+upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the
+chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which
+marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly
+assured that he would neither marry nor beget children. He was
+astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had
+never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor
+even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite
+purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be
+considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of
+mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to
+illuminate with reason's eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to
+the stone an illusion of life's bloom.
+
+"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from the field beyond
+the black cow lowed a melancholy negative. Whether the stone had spoken
+or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour,
+and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the
+place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.
+
+"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field,
+and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led
+round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.
+
+"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.
+
+They were standing before the house.
+
+"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it
+seems later than it really is."
+
+Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average
+Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building it occupied a large
+superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the
+outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation
+that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of
+this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as
+if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the
+trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had
+never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had
+grown smaller with each succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous
+author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose
+ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There was indeed nothing of
+interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of
+armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, when the squire's wife and two little girls were
+murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag
+Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much inclined to
+blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange
+under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther
+perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her
+excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a
+pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with
+the scent of apple blossom.
+
+"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while the echoes of the
+bell died away on the silence within the house and they waited for the
+footsteps that should answer their summons. The answer came from a
+window above the porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in
+wistaria, looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with alarm
+who was there.
+
+"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.
+
+"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You have no business
+to go ringing the bell at this time of the evening. It frightened me to
+death."
+
+"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.
+
+Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her brother as an
+excuse to visit the house and he was still more surprised by hearing her
+speak so politely, so ingratiatingly, it seemed, to this grim woman
+embowered in wistaria.
+
+"We lost our way," Esther explained, "and that's why we're so late. The
+Rector told me about the water-lily pool, and I should so much like to
+see it."
+
+Mrs. Honeybone debated with herself for a moment, until at last with a
+grunt of disapproval she came downstairs and opened the front door. The
+lily pool, now a lily pool only in name, for it was covered with an
+integument of duckweed which in twilight took on the texture of velvet,
+was an attractive place set in an enclosure of grass between high grey
+walls.
+
+"That's all there is to see," said Mrs. Honeybone.
+
+"Mr. Starling is abroad?" Esther asked.
+
+The housekeeper nodded.
+
+"And when is he coming back?" she went on.
+
+"That's for him to say," said the housekeeper disagreeably. "He might
+come back to-night for all I know."
+
+Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth the hall bell jangled,
+and a distant voice shouted:
+
+"Nanny, Nanny, hurry up and open the door!"
+
+Mrs. Honeybone could not have looked more startled if the voice had been
+that of a ghost. Mark began to talk of going until Esther cut him short.
+
+"I don't think Mr. Starling will mind our being here so much as that,"
+she said.
+
+Mrs. Honeybone had already hurried off to greet her master; and when she
+was gone Mark looked at Esther, saw that her face was strangely flushed,
+and in an instant of divination apprehended either that she had already
+met the squire of Rushbrooke Grange or that she expected to meet him
+here to-night; so that, when presently a tall man of about thirty-five
+with brick-dust cheeks came into the close, he was not taken aback when
+Esther greeted him by name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was
+he astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks should
+deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with recognition,
+and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a moment its immobility and
+gape, yes, gape, in the amazement of meeting somebody whom he never
+could have expected to meet at such an hour in such a place.
+
+"You," he exclaimed. "You here!"
+
+By the way he quickly looked behind him as if to intercept a prying
+glance Mark knew that, whatever the relationship between Esther and the
+squire had been in the past, it had been a relationship in which
+secrecy had played a part. In that moment between him and Will Starling
+there was enmity.
+
+"You couldn't have expected him to make a great fuss about a boy," said
+Esther brutally on their way back to the Rectory.
+
+"I suppose you think that's the reason why I don't like him," said Mark.
+"I don't want him to take any notice of me, but I think it's very odd
+that you shouldn't have said a word about knowing him even to his
+housekeeper."
+
+"It was a whim of mine," she murmured. "Besides, I don't know him very
+well. We met at Eastbourne once when I was staying there with Mother."
+
+"Well, why didn't he say 'How do you do, Miss Ogilvie?' instead of
+breathing out 'you' like that?"
+
+Esther turned furiously upon Mark.
+
+"What has it got to do with you?"
+
+"Nothing whatever to do with me," he said deliberately. "But if you
+think you're going to make a fool of me, you're not. Are you going to
+tell your brother you knew him?"
+
+Esther would not answer, and separated by several yards they walked
+sullenly back to the Rectory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ST. MARK'S DAY
+
+
+Mark tried next day to make up his difference with Esther; but she
+repulsed his advances, and the friendship that had blossomed after the
+Pomeroy affair faded and died. There was no apparent dislike on either
+side, nothing more than a coolness as of people too well used to each
+other's company. In a way this was an advantage for Mark, who was having
+to apply himself earnestly to the amount of study necessary to win a
+scholarship at Oxford. Companionship with Esther would have meant
+considerable disturbance of his work, for she was a woman who depended
+on the inspiration of the moment for her pastimes and pleasures, who was
+impatient of any postponement and always avowedly contemptuous of Mark's
+serious side. His classical education at Haverton House had made little
+of the material bequeathed to him by his grandfather's tuition at
+Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of
+a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the
+other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical
+facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of
+Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair
+the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to
+Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark
+had been reading with him six months he did find a really first-class
+scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of Little Fairfield. Mark worked
+steadily, and existence in Oxfordshire went by without any great
+adventures of mind, body, or spirit. Life at the Rectory had a kind of
+graceful austerity like the well-proportioned Rectory itself. If Mark
+had bothered to analyze the cause of this graceful austerity, he might
+have found it in the personality of the Rector's elder sister Miriam.
+Even at Meade Cantorum, when he was younger, Mark had been fully
+conscious of her qualities; but here they found a background against
+which they could display themselves more perfectly. When they moved from
+Buckinghamshire and the new rector was seeing how much Miriam
+appreciated the new surroundings, he sold out some stock and presented
+her with enough ready money to express herself in the outward beauty of
+the Rectory's refurbishing. He was luckily not called upon to spend a
+great deal on the church, both his predecessors having maintained the
+fabric with care, and the fabric itself being sound enough and
+magnificent enough to want no more than that. Miriam, though shaking one
+of those capable and well-tended fingers at her beloved brother's
+extravagance, accepted the gift with an almost childish determination to
+give full value of beauty in return, so that there should not be a
+servant's bedroom nor a cupboard nor a corridor that did not display the
+evidence of her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over
+to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures bloomed
+there like one of her own favourite peonies, rosy of face and fragrant,
+ample of girth, golden-hearted.
+
+Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with Richard Ford, the
+son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with whom he went to work in the
+autumn after his arrival in Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for
+Richard, who was a year or two older than himself and a student at
+Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer bound for
+India, was one of those entirely admirable young men who succeed in
+being saintly without any rapture or righteousness.
+
+Mark said one day:
+
+"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only for goodness'
+sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be furious."
+
+The Rector stopped humming a joyful _Miserere_ to give Mark an assurance
+of his discretion. But Mark having said so much in praise of Richard
+could say no more, and indeed he would have found it hard to express in
+words what he felt about his friend.
+
+Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford Rectory where in
+this fortunate corner of England existed a third perfect family. Richard
+was deeply in love with Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark
+had ever been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen in
+love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.
+
+"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down
+the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies
+on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like
+her cheek."
+
+"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.
+
+Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities
+of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his
+imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic,
+somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced
+partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all,
+it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds
+imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing
+appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do
+not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not
+living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices
+lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and
+aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.
+
+Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good fortune had set
+him as the natural expression of an inward orderliness, a traditional
+respect for beauty like the ritual of Christian worship. That the three
+daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who
+failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
+him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other
+standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected
+to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to
+him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but
+it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of
+wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the
+age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when
+they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his
+youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
+form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from
+the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for
+those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the
+utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of
+those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home, the
+Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all Richard Ford at
+Fairfield gave him in a few months the poise he would have received more
+gradually from a public school education.
+
+So Mark read Greek with the Vicar of Little Fairfield and Latin with the
+Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold, who, amiable and holy man, had to work
+nearly twice as hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of
+instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was
+home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at
+Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to
+enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach and Brahms.
+
+"You're like three Saint Cecilias," he told them. "Monica is by Luini
+and Margaret is by Perugino and Pauline. . . ."
+
+"Oh, who am I by?" Pauline exclaimed, clapping her hands.
+
+"I give it up. You're just Saint Cecilia herself at fourteen."
+
+"Isn't Mark foolish?" Pauline laughed.
+
+"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mark, "so I'm allowed to be foolish."
+
+"It's my birthday in a week," said Pauline. "And as I'm two years
+younger than you I can be two years more foolish."
+
+Mark looked at her, and he was filled with wonder at the sanctity of her
+maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating upon the Annunciation he should
+always clothe Pauline in a robe of white samite and set her in his
+mind's eye for that other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy
+maids in Florence or Perugia for their bright mysteries.
+
+While Mark was walking back to Wych and when on the brow of the first
+rise of the road he stood looking down at Wychford in the valley below,
+a chill lisping wind from the east made him shiver and he thought of the
+lines in Keats' _Eve of St. Mark_:
+
+    _The chilly sunset faintly told_
+    _Of unmatured green vallies cold,_
+    _Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,_
+    _Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,_
+    _Of primroses by shelter'd rills,_
+    _And daisies on the aguish hills._
+
+The sky in the west was an unmatured green valley tonight, where Venus
+bloomed like a solitary primrose; and on the dark hills of Heaven the
+stars were like daisies. He turned his back on the little town and set
+off up the hill again, while the wind slipped through the hedge beside
+him in and out of the blackthorn boughs, lisping, whispering, snuffling,
+sniffing, like a small inquisitive animal. He thought of Monica,
+Margaret, and Pauline playing in their warm, candle-lit room behind him,
+and he thought of Miriam reading in her tall-back chair before dinner,
+for Evensong would be over by now. Yes, Evensong would be over, he
+remembered penitently, and he ought to have gone this evening, which was
+the vigil of St. Mark and of his birthday. At this moment he caught
+sight of the Wych Maries signpost black against that cold green sky. He
+gave a momentary start, because seen thus the signpost had a human look;
+and when his heart beat normally it was roused again, this time by the
+sight of a human form indeed, the form of Esther, the wind blowing her
+skirts before her, hurrying along the road to which the signpost so
+crookedly pointed. Mark who had been climbing higher and higher now felt
+the power of that wind full on his cheeks. It was as if it had found
+what it wanted, for it no longer whispered and lisped among the boughs
+of the blackthorn, but blew fiercely over the wide pastures, driving
+Esther before it, cutting through Mark like a sword. By the time he had
+reached the signpost she had disappeared in the wood.
+
+Mark asked himself why she was going to Rushbrooke Grange.
+
+"To Rushbrooke Grange," he said aloud. "Why should I think she is going
+to Rushbrooke Grange?"
+
+Though even in this desolate place he would not say it aloud, the answer
+came back from this very afternoon when somebody had mentioned casually
+that the Squire was come home again. Mark half turned to follow Esther,
+but in the moment of turning he set his face resolutely in the direction
+of home. If Esther were really on her way to meet Will Starling, he
+would do more harm than good by appearing to pry.
+
+Esther was the flaw in Mark's crystal clear world. When a year ago they
+had quarrelled over his avowed dislike of Will Starling, she had gone
+back to her solitary walks and he conscious, painfully conscious, that
+she regarded him as a young prig, had with that foolish pride of youth
+resolved to be so far as she was concerned what she supposed him to be.
+His admiration for the Greys and the Fords had driven her into jeering
+at them; throughout the year Mark and she had been scarcely polite to
+each other even in public. The Rector and Miriam probably excused Mark's
+rudeness whenever he let himself give way to it, because their sister
+did not spare either of them, and they were made aware with exasperating
+insistence of the dullness of the country and of the dreariness of
+everybody who lived in the neighbourhood. Yet, Mark could never achieve
+that indifference to her attitude either toward himself or toward other
+people that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he should
+have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because in his thoughts
+about her she always appeared to him like the wind, restlessly sighing
+and fluttering round a comfortable house. However steady the
+candle-light, however bright the fire, however absorbing the book,
+however secure one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there;
+and throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been most
+unmistakably there.
+
+In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion. It was a
+strangely calm morning; through the unstained windows of the clerestory
+the sun sloped quivering ladders of golden light. He looked round with
+half a hope that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and
+throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit across the
+cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his imagination, so that
+for all the rich peace of this interior he was troubled in spirit, and
+the intention to make this Mass upon his seventeenth birthday another
+spiritual experience was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping
+mechanically, and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to
+make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began to apprehend
+how he was asking fresh favours from God without having moved a step
+forward to deserve them.
+
+"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think I'm
+suffering from spiritual pride. I think. . . ."
+
+He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an intuition that God
+was about to play some horrible trick on him. Mark discussed with the
+Rector the theological aspects of this intuition.
+
+"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps you are
+leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your
+intuition is your soul's perception of this. Indeed, once or twice
+lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get
+into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world
+so gentle as here."
+
+"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite long enough
+at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here."
+
+"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House it was a passive
+ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty. After our Lord had fasted
+forty days in the desert, accumulating reserves of spiritual energy,
+just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves
+of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He
+was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on
+earth. The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed
+of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual
+perfection displays the same phenomena. In the action and reaction of
+experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of
+the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm. No, I
+fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those
+movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."
+
+Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He
+wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of
+spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh
+seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear
+to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector
+was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a
+horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an
+academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
+probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some
+hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone
+Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own
+troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been
+and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
+brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or
+if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till
+nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark,
+remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a
+moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe
+that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to
+wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night. Did Mrs.
+Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in
+perplexity at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their
+attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips,
+Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing. He
+debated now the notion of warning Miriam in veiled language about her
+sister; but such an idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and
+horrible nightmare. Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill that
+would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes. Besides, what right
+had he on the little he knew to involve Esther with her family?
+Superficially he might count himself her younger brother; but if he
+presumed too far, with what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his
+claim. Most certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he
+intervened bravely and directly. Mark shook his head at the prospect of
+doing that. He could not imagine anybody's tackling Esther directly on
+such a subject. Seventeen to-day! He looked out of the window and felt
+that he was bearing upon his shoulders the whole of that green world
+outspread before him.
+
+The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and Mark who had
+intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying every moment of it had
+allowed the best of the hours to slip away in a stupor of indecision.
+More and more the vision of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt
+that he could not go and see the Greys as he had intended. He could not
+bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of Esther on
+his mind. He decided to walk over to Little Fairfield and persuade
+Richard to make a journey of exploration up the Greenrush in a canoe. He
+would ask Richard his opinion of Will Starling. What a foolish notion!
+He knew perfectly well Richard's opinion of the Squire, and to lure him
+into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.
+
+"Well, I must go somewhere to-day," Mark shouted at himself. He secured
+a packet of sandwiches from the Rectory cook and set out to walk away
+his worries.
+
+"Why shouldn't I go down to Wych Maries? I needn't meet that chap. And
+if I see him I needn't speak to him. He's always been only too jolly
+glad to be offensive to me."
+
+Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked signpost and took
+the same path down under the ash-trees as he had taken with Esther for
+the first time nearly a year ago. Spring was much more like Spring in
+these wooded hollows; the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was
+murmurous as limes in June. Mark congratulated himself on the spot in
+which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day robbed from
+time like the day of a dream. He ate his lunch by the old mill dam,
+feeding the roach with crumbs until an elderly pike came up from the
+deeps and frightened the smaller fish away. He searched for a
+bullfinch's nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the
+birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples
+they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after
+speculating idly for a little while upon its former state he fell as he
+usually did when he visited Wych Maries into a contemplation of the two
+images of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a
+hummock of grass before the old West doorway he received an impression
+that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased to be
+mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved from ruin, but
+that they had somehow regained their importance. It was not that he
+discerned in them any miraculous quality of living, still less of
+winking or sweating as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the
+faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them
+thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the
+point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well
+aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the
+rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he
+climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel,
+that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed
+by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of fancy and
+discover why they should give him this impression of having regained
+their utility, yes, that was the word, utility, not importance. They
+were revitalized not from within, but from without; and even as his mind
+leapt at this explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the
+shadowy yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that
+hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself been sitting.
+
+For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation of the
+strange impression the images had made upon him, Mark supposed that she
+was come there for a tryst. This vanished almost at once in the
+conviction that Esther's soul waited there either in question or appeal.
+He restrained an impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt
+that he was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy
+the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that Esther's pride
+would be so deeply outraged at having been discovered in a moment of
+weakness thus upon her knees, for she had by now fallen upon her knees
+in prayer, that it might easily happen she would never in all her life
+pray more. There was no escape for Mark without disturbing her, and he
+sat breathless in the yew-tree, thinking that soon she must perceive his
+glittering eye in the depths of the dark foliage as in passing a
+hedgerow one may perceive the eye of a nested bird. From his position he
+could see the images, and out of the spiritual agony of Esther kneeling
+there, the force of which was communicated to himself, he watched them
+close, scarcely able to believe that they would not stoop from their
+pedestals and console the suppliant woman with benediction of those
+stone hands now clasped aspiringly to God, themselves for centuries
+suppliant like the woman at their feet. Mark could think of nothing
+better to do than to turn his face from Esther's face and to say for her
+many _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. At first he thought that he was praying
+in a silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his position
+began to affect his concentration, and he found that he was saying the
+words mechanically, listening the while to the voices of birds. He
+compelled his attention to the prayers; but the birds were too loud. The
+_Paternosters_ and the _Aves_ were absorbed in their singing and
+chirping and twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a
+rosary to help his feeble attention. Yet could he have used a rosary
+without falling out of the yew-tree? He took his hands from the bough
+for a moment and nearly overbalanced. _Make not your rosary of yew
+berries_, he found himself saying. Who wrote that? _Make not your rosary
+of yew berries._ Why, of course, it was Keats. It was the first line of
+the _Ode to Melancholy_. Esther was still kneeling out there in the
+sunlight. And how did the poem continue? _Make not your rosary of yew
+berries._ What was the second line? It was ridiculous to sit astride a
+bough and say _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. He could not sit there much
+longer. And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw that
+Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling was standing in
+the doorway of the chapel looking at her, not speaking but waiting for
+her to speak, while he wound a strand of ivy round his fingers and
+unwound it again, and wound it round again until it broke and he was
+saying:
+
+"I thought we agreed after your last display here that you'd give this
+cursed chapel the go by?"
+
+"I can't escape from it," Esther cried. "You don't understand, Will,
+what it means. You never have understood."
+
+"Dearest Essie, I understand only too well. I've paid pretty handsomely
+in having to listen to reproaches, in having to dry your tears and stop
+your sighs with kisses. Your damned religion is a joke. Can't you grasp
+that? It's not my fault we can't get married. If I were really the
+scoundrel you torment yourself into thinking I am, I would have married
+and taken the risk of my strumpet of a wife turning up. But I've treated
+you honestly, Essie. I can't help loving you. I went away once. I went
+away again. And a third time I went just to relieve your soul of the sin
+of loving me. But I'm sick of suffering for the sake of a myth, a
+superstition."
+
+Esther had moved close to him, and now she put a hand upon his arm.
+
+"To you, Will. Not to me."
+
+"Look here, Essie," said her lover. "If you knew that you were liable to
+these dreadful attacks of remorse and penitence, why did you ever
+encourage me?"
+
+"How dare you say I encouraged you?"
+
+"Now don't let your religion make you dishonest," he stabbed. "No man
+seduces a woman of your character without as much goodwill as deserves
+to be called encouragement, and by God _is_ encouragement," he went on
+furiously. "Let's cut away some of the cant before we begin arguing
+again about religion."
+
+"You don't know what a hell you're making for me when you talk like
+that," she gasped. "If I did encourage you, then my sin is a thousand
+times blacker."
+
+"Oh, don't exaggerate, my dear girl," he said wearily. "It isn't a sin
+for two people to love each other."
+
+"I've tried my best to think as you do, but I can't. I've avoided going
+to church. I've tried to hate religion, I've mocked at God . . ." she
+broke off in despair of explaining the force of grace, against the gift
+of which she had contended in vain.
+
+"I always thought you were brave, Essie. But you're a real coward. The
+reason for all this is your fear of being pitchforked into a big bonfire
+by a pantomime demon with horns and a long tail." He laughed bitterly.
+"To think that you, my adored Essie, should really have the soul of a
+Sunday school teacher. You, a Bacchante of passion, to be puling about
+your sins. You! You! Girl, you're mad! I tell you there is no such thing
+as damnation. It's a bogey invented by priests to enchain mankind. But
+if there is and if that muddle-headed old gentleman you call God really
+exists and if he's a just God, why then let him damn me and let him give
+you your harp and your halo while I burn for both. Essie, my mad foolish
+frightened Essie, can't you understand that if you give me up for this
+God of yours you'll drive me to murder. If I must marry you to hold you,
+why then I'll kill that cursed wife of mine. . . ."
+
+It was his turn now to break off in despair of being able to express his
+will to keep Esther for his own, and because argument seemed so hopeless
+he tried to take her in his arms, whereupon Mark who was aching with the
+effort to maintain himself unobserved upon the bough of the yew-tree
+said his _Paternosters_ and _Aves_ faster than ever, that she might have
+the strength to resist that scoundrel of Rushbrooke Grange. He longed to
+have the eloquence to make some wonderful prayer to the Blessed Virgin
+and St. Mary Magdalene so that a miracle might happen and their images
+point accusing hands at the blasphemer below.
+
+And then it seemed as if a miracle did happen, for out of the jangle of
+recriminations and appeals that now signified no more than the noise of
+trees in a storm he heard the voice of Esther gradually gain its right
+to be heard, gradually win from its rival silence until the tale was
+told.
+
+"I know that I am overcome by the saving grace of God," she was saying.
+"And I know that I owe it to them." She pointed to the holy women above
+the door. The squire shook his fist; but he still kept silence. "I have
+run away from God since I knew you, Will. I have loved you as much as
+that. I have gone to church only when I had to go for my brother's sake,
+but I have actually stuffed my ears with cotton wool so that no word
+there spoken might shake my faith in my right to love you. But it was
+all to no purpose. You know that it was you who told me always to come
+to our meetings through the wood and past the chapel. And however fast I
+went and however tight I shut myself up in thoughts of you and your love
+and my love I have always felt that these images spoke to me
+reproachfully in passing. It's not mere imagination, Will. Why, before
+we came to Wych-on-the-Wold when you went away to the Pacific that I
+might have peace of mind, I used always to be haunted by the idea that
+God was calling me back to Him, and I would run, yes, actually run
+through the woods until my legs have been torn by brambles."
+
+"Madness! Madness!" cried Starling.
+
+"Let it be madness. If God chooses to pursue a human soul with madness,
+the pursuit is not less swift and relentless for that. And I shook Him
+off. I escaped from religion; I prayed to the Devil to keep me wicked,
+so utterly did I love you. Then when my brother was offered
+Wych-on-the-Wold I felt that the Devil had heard my prayer and had
+indeed made me his own. That frightened me for a moment. When I wrote to
+you and said we were coming here and you hurried back, I can't describe
+to you the fear that overcame me when I first entered this hollow where
+you lived. Several times I'd tried to come down before you arrived here,
+but I'd always been afraid, and that was why the first night I brought
+Mark with me."
+
+"That long-legged prig and puppy," grunted the squire.
+
+Mark could have shouted for joy when he heard this, shouted because he
+was helping with his _Paternosters_ and his _Aves_ to drive this
+ruffian out of Esther's life for ever, shouted because his long legs
+were strong enough to hold on to this yew-tree bough.
+
+"He's neither a prig nor a puppy," Esther said. "I've treated him badly
+ever since he came to live with us, and I treated him badly on your
+account, because whenever I was with him I found it harder to resist the
+pursuit of God. Now let's leave Mark out of this. Everything was in your
+favour, I tell you. I was sure that the Devil. . . ."
+
+"The Devil!" Starling interrupted. "Your Devil, dear Essie, is as
+ridiculous as your God. It's only your poor old God with his face
+painted black like the bogey man of childhood."
+
+"I was sure that the Devil," Esther repeated without seeming to hear the
+blasphemy, "had taken me for his own and given us to each other. You to
+me. Me to you, my darling. I didn't care. I was ready to burn in Hell
+for you. So, don't call me coward, for mad though you think me I was
+ready to be damned for you, and _I_ believe in damnation. You don't. Yet
+the first time I passed by this chapel on my way to meet you again after
+that endless horrible parting I had to run away from the holy influence.
+I remember that there was a black cow in the field near the gates of the
+Grange, and I waited there while Mark poked about in this chapel, waited
+in the twilight afraid to go back and tell him to hurry in case I should
+be recaptured by God and meet you only to meet you never more."
+
+"I suppose you thought my old Kerry cow was the Devil, eh?" he sneered.
+
+She paid no attention, but continued enthralled by the passion of her
+spiritual adventure.
+
+"It was no use. I couldn't come by here every day and not go back. Why,
+once I opened the Bible at hazard just to show my defiance and I read
+_Her sins which are many are forgiven for she loved much._ This must be
+the end of our love, my lover, for I can't go on. Those two stone Maries
+have brought me back to God. No more with you, my own beloved. No more,
+my darling, no more. And yet if even now with one kiss you could give me
+strength to sin I should rejoice. But they have made my lips as cold as
+their own, and my arms that once knew how to clasp you to my heart they
+have lifted up to Heaven like their own. I am going into a convent at
+once, where until I die I shall pray for you, my own love."
+
+The birds no longer sang nor twittered nor cheeped in the thickets
+around, but all passion throbbed in the voice of Esther when she spoke
+these words. She stood there with her hair in disarray transfigured like
+a tree in autumn on which the sunlight shines when the gale has died,
+but from which the leaves will soon fall because winter is at hand. Yet
+her lover was so little moved by her ordeal that he went back to
+mouthing his blasphemies.
+
+"Go then," he shouted. "But these two stone dolls shall not have power
+to drive my next mistress into folly. Wasn't Mary Magdalene a sinner?
+Didn't she fall in love with Christ? Of course, she did! And I'll make
+an example of her just as Christians make an example of all women who
+love much."
+
+The squire pulled himself up by the ivy and struck the image of St. Mary
+Magdalene on the face.
+
+"When you pray for me, dear Essie, in your convent of greensick women,
+don't forget that your patron saint was kicked from her pedestal by your
+lover."
+
+Starling was as good as his word; but the effort he made to overthrow
+the saint carried him with it; his foot catching in the ivy fell head
+downward and striking upon a stone was killed.
+
+Mark hesitated before he jumped down from his bough, because he dreaded
+to add to Esther's despair the thought of his having overheard all that
+went before. But seeing her in the sunlight now filled again with the
+voices of birds, seeing her blue eyes staring in horror and the nervous
+twitching of her hands he felt that the shock of his irruption might
+save her reason and in a moment he was standing beside her looking down
+at the dead man.
+
+"Let me die too," she cried.
+
+Mark found himself answering in a kind of inspiration:
+
+"No, Esther, you must live to pray for his soul."
+
+"He was struck dead for his blasphemy. He is in Hell. Of what use to
+pray for his soul?"
+
+"But Esther while he was falling, even in that second, he had time to
+repent. Live, Esther. Live to pray for him."
+
+Mark was overcome with a desire to laugh at the stilted way in which he
+was talking, and, from the suppression of the desire, to laugh wildly at
+everything in the scene, and not least at the comic death of Will
+Starling, even at the corpse itself lying with a broken neck at his
+feet. By an effort of will he regained control of his muscles, and the
+tension of the last half hour finding no relief in bodily relaxation was
+stamped ineffaceably upon his mind to take its place with that afternoon
+in his father's study at the Lima Street Mission which first inspired
+him with dread of the sexual relation of man to woman, a dread that was
+now made permanent by what he had endured on the bough of that yew-tree.
+
+Thanks to Mark's intervention the business was explained without
+scandal; nobody doubted that the squire of Rushbrooke Grange died a
+martyr to his dislike of ivy's encroaching upon ancient images. Esther's
+stormy soul took refuge in a convent, and there it seemed at peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SCHOLARSHIP
+
+
+The encounter between Esther and Will Starling had the effect of
+strengthening Mark's intention to be celibate. He never imagined himself
+as a possible protagonist in such a scene; but the impression of that
+earlier encounter between his mother and father which gave him a horror
+of human love was now renewed. It was renewed, moreover, with the light
+of a miracle to throw it into high relief. And this miracle could not be
+explained away as a coincidence, but was an old-fashioned miracle that
+required no psychical buttressing, a hard and fast miracle able to
+withstand any criticism. It was a pity that out of regard for Esther he
+could not publish it for the encouragement of the faithful and the
+confusion of the unbelievers.
+
+The miracle of St. Mary Magdalene's intervention on his seventeenth
+birthday was the last violent impression of Mark's boyhood.
+Thenceforward life moved placidly through the changing weeks of a
+country calendar until the date of the scholarship examination held by
+the group of colleges that contained St. Mary's, the college he aspired
+to enter, but for which he failed to win even an exhibition. Mr. Ogilvie
+was rather glad, for he had been worried how Mark was going to support
+himself for three or four years at an expensive college like St. Mary's.
+But when Mark was no more successful with another group of colleges, his
+tutors began to be alarmed, wondering if their method of teaching Latin
+and Greek lacked the tradition of the public school necessary to
+success.
+
+"Oh, no, it's obviously my fault," said Mark. "I expect I go to pieces
+in examinations, or perhaps I'm not intended to go to Oxford."
+
+"I beg you, my dear boy," said the Rector a little irritably, "not to
+apply such a loose fatalism to your career. What will you do if you
+don't go to the University?"
+
+"It's not absolutely essential for a priest to have been to the
+University," Mark argued.
+
+"No, but in your case I think it's highly advisable. You haven't had a
+public school education, and inasmuch as I stand to you _in loco
+parentis_ I should consider myself most culpable if I didn't do
+everything possible to give you a fair start. You haven't got a very
+large sum of money to launch yourself upon the world, and I want you to
+spend what you have to the best advantage. Of course, if you can't get a
+scholarship, you can't and that's the end of it. But, rather than that
+you should miss the University I will supplement from my own savings
+enough to carry you through three years as a commoner."
+
+Tears stood in Mark's eyes.
+
+"You've already been far too generous," he said. "You shan't spend any
+more on me. I'm sorry I talked in that foolish way. It was really only a
+kind of affectation of indifference. I'm feeling pretty sore with myself
+for being such a failure; but I'll have another shot and I hope I shall
+do better."
+
+Mark as a last chance tried for a close scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall
+for the sons of clergymen.
+
+"It's a tiny place of course," said the Rector. "But it's authentic
+Oxford, and in some ways perhaps you would be happier at a very small
+college. Certainly you'd find your money went much further."
+
+The examination was held in the Easter vacation, and when Mark arrived
+at the college he found only one other candidate besides himself. St.
+Osmund's Hall with its miniature quadrangle, miniature hall, miniature
+chapel, empty of undergraduates and with only the Principal and a couple
+of tutors in residence, was more like an ancient almshouse than an
+Oxford college. Mark and his rival, a raw-boned youth called Emmett who
+was afflicted with paroxysms of stammering, moved about the precincts
+upon tiptoe like people trespassing from a high road.
+
+On their first evening the two candidates were invited to dine with the
+Principal, who read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner, only
+pausing from their perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr.
+Lidderdale or Mr. Emmett would not take another glass of wine. After
+dinner they sat in his library where the Principal addressed himself to
+the evidently uncongenial task of estimating the comparative fitness of
+his two guests to receive Mr. Tweedle's bounty. The Reverend Thomas
+Tweedle was a benevolent parson of the eighteenth century who by his
+will had provided the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman
+for four years. Mark was shy enough under the Principal's courtly
+inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each time he was asked the
+simplest question about his tastes or his ambitions. His tongue
+appearing like a disturbed mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an
+agonized endeavour to give utterance to such familiar words as "yes" or
+"no." Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back at all
+and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest of his life with it
+protruding before him or submit it to amputation and become a mute. When
+the ordeal with the Principal was over and the two guests were strolling
+back across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally and
+without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer must have had
+upon the Principal. Mark did his best to reassure poor Emmett.
+
+"Really," he said, "it was scarcely noticeable to anybody else. You
+noticed it, because you felt your tongue getting wedged like that
+between your teeth; but other people would hardly have noticed it at
+all. When the Principal asked you if you were going to take Holy Orders
+yourself, I'm sure he only thought you hadn't quite made up your mind
+yet."
+
+"But I'm sure he did notice something," poor Emmett bewailed. "Because
+he began to hum."
+
+"Well, but he was always humming," said Mark. "He hummed all through
+dinner while he was reading those book catalogues."
+
+"It's very kind of you, Lidderdale," said Emmett, "to make the best of
+it for me, but I'm not such a fool as I look, and the Principal
+certainly hummed six times as loud whenever he asked me a question as
+he did over those catalogues. I know what I look like when I get into
+one of those states. I once caught sight of myself in a glass by
+accident, and now whenever my tongue gets caught up like that I'm
+wondering all the time why everybody doesn't get up and run out of the
+room."
+
+"But I assure you," Mark persisted, "that little things like that--"
+
+"Little things like that!" Emmett interrupted furiously. "It's all very
+well for you, Lidderdale, to talk about little things like that. If you
+had a tongue like mine which seems to get bigger instead of smaller
+every year, you'd feel very differently."
+
+"But people always grow out of stammering," Mark pointed out.
+
+"Thanks very much," said Emmett bitterly, "but where shall I be by the
+time I've grown out of it? You don't suppose I shall win this
+scholarship, do you, after they've seen me gibbering and mouthing at
+them like that? But if only I could manage somehow to get to Oxford I
+should have a chance of being ordained, and--" he broke off, perhaps
+unwilling to embarrass his rival by any more lamentations.
+
+"Do forget about this evening," Mark begged, "and come up to my room and
+have a talk before you turn in."
+
+"No, thanks very much," said Emmett. "I must sit up and do some work.
+We've got that general knowledge paper to-morrow morning."
+
+"But you won't be able to acquire much more general knowledge in one
+evening," Mark protested.
+
+"I might," said Emmett darkly. "I noticed a Whitaker's almanack in the
+rooms I have. My only chance to get this scholarship is to do really
+well in my papers; and though I know it's no good and that this is my
+last chance, I'm not going to neglect anything that could possibly help.
+I've got a splendid memory for statistics, and if they'll only ask a few
+statistics in the general knowledge paper I may have some luck
+to-morrow. Good-night, Lidderdale, I'm sorry to have inflicted myself on
+you like this."
+
+Emmett hurried away up the staircase leading to his room and left his
+rival standing on the moonlit grass of the quadrangle. Mark was turning
+toward his own staircase when he heard a window open above and Emmett's
+voice:
+
+"I've found another Whitaker of the year before," it proclaimed. "I'll
+read that, and you'd better read this year's. If by any chance I did win
+this scholarship, I shouldn't like to think I'd taken an unfair
+advantage of you, Lidderdale."
+
+"Thanks very much, Emmett," said Mark. "But I think I'll have a shot at
+getting to bed early."
+
+"Ah, you're not worrying," said Emmett gloomily, retiring from the
+window.
+
+When Mark was sitting by the fire in his room and thinking over the
+dinner with the Principal and poor Emmett's stammering and poor Emmett's
+words in the quad afterwards, he began to imagine what it would mean to
+poor Emmett if he failed to win the scholarship. Mark had not been so
+successful himself in these examinations as to justify a grand
+self-confidence; but he could not regard Emmett as a dangerous
+competitor. Had he the right in view of Emmett's handicap to accept this
+scholarship at his expense? To be sure, he might urge on his own behalf
+that without it he should himself be debarred from Oxford. What would
+the loss of it mean? It would mean, first of all, that Mr. Ogilvie would
+make the financial effort to maintain him for three years as a commoner,
+an effort which he could ill afford to make and which Mark had not the
+slightest intention of allowing him to make. It would mean, next, that
+he should have to occupy himself during the years before his ordination
+with some kind of work among people. He obviously could not go on
+reading theology at Wych-on-the-Wold until he went to Glastonbury. Such
+an existence, however attractive, was no preparation for the active life
+of a priest. It would mean, thirdly, a great disappointment to his
+friend and patron, and considering the social claims of the Church of
+England it would mean a handicap for himself. There was everything to be
+said for winning this scholarship, nothing to be said against it on the
+grounds of expediency. On the grounds of expediency, no, but on other
+grounds? Should he not be playing the better part if he allowed Emmett
+to win? No doubt all that was implied in the necessity for him to win a
+scholarship was equally implied in the necessity for Emmett to win one.
+It was obvious that Emmett was no better off than himself; it was
+obvious that Emmett was competing in a kind of despair. Mark remembered
+how a few minutes ago his rival had offered him this year's Whitaker,
+keeping for himself last year's almanack. Looked at from the point of
+view of Emmett who really believed that something might be gained at
+this eleventh hour from a study of the more recent volume, it had been a
+fine piece of self-denial. It showed that Emmett had Christian talents
+which surely ought not to be wasted because he was handicapped by a
+stammer.
+
+The spell that Oxford had already cast on Mark, the glamour of the
+firelight on the walls and raftered ceiling of this room haunted by
+centuries of youthful hope, did not persuade him how foolish it was to
+surrender all this. On the contrary, this prospect of Oxford so
+beautiful in the firelight within, so fair in the moonlight without,
+impelled him to renounce it, and the very strength of his temptation to
+enjoy all this by winning the scholarship helped him to make up his mind
+to lose it. But how? The obvious course was to send in idiotic answers
+for the rest of his papers. Yet examinations were so mysterious that
+when he thought he was being most idiotic he might actually be gaining
+his best marks. Moreover, the examiners might ascribe his answers to ill
+health, to some sudden attack of nerves, especially if his papers to-day
+had been tolerably good. Looking back at the Principal's attitude after
+dinner that night, Mark could not help feeling that there had been
+something in his manner which had clearly shown a determination not to
+award the scholarship to poor Emmett if it could possibly be avoided.
+The safest way would be to escape to-morrow morning, put up at some
+country inn for the next two days, and go back to Wych-on-the-Wold; but
+if he did that, the college authorities might write to Mr. Ogilvie to
+demand the reason for such extraordinary behaviour. And how should he
+explain it? If he really intended to deny himself, he must take care
+that nobody knew he was doing so. It would give him an air of
+unbearable condescension, should it transpire that he had deliberately
+surrendered his scholarship to Emmett. Moreover, poor Emmett would be so
+dreadfully mortified if he found out. No, he must complete his papers,
+do them as badly as he possibly could, and leave the result to the
+wisdom of God. If God wished Emmett to stammer forth His praises and
+stutter His precepts from the pulpit, God would know how to manage that
+seemingly so intractable Principal. Or God might hear his prayers and
+cure poor Emmett of his impediment. Mark wondered to what saint was
+entrusted the patronage of stammerers; but he could not remember. The
+man in whose rooms he was lodging possessed very few books, and those
+few were mostly detective stories.
+
+It amused Mark to make a fool of himself next morning in the general
+knowledge paper. He flattered himself that no candidate for a
+scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall had ever shown such black ignorance of
+the facts of every-day life. Had he been dropped from Mars two days
+before, he could scarcely have shown less knowledge of the Earth. Mark
+tried to convey an impression that he had been injudiciously crammed
+with Latin and Greek, and in the afternoon he produced a Latin prose
+that would have revolted the easy conscience of a fourth form boy.
+Finally, on the third day, in an unseen passage set from the Georgics he
+translated _tonsisque ferunt mantelia villis_ by _having pulled down the
+villas (i. e. literally shaved) they carry off the mantelpieces_ which
+he followed up with translating _Maeonii carchesia Bacchi_ as the _lees
+of Maeonian wine (i.e. literally carcases of Maeonian Bacchus)_.
+
+"I say, Lidderdale," said Emmett, when they came out of the lecture room
+where the examination was being held. "I had a tremendous piece of luck
+this afternoon."
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"Yes, I've just been reading the fourth Georgics last term, and I don't
+think I made a single mistake in that unseen."
+
+"Good work," said Mark.
+
+"I wonder when they'll let us know who's got the scholarship," said
+Emmett. "But of course you've won," he added with a sigh.
+
+"I did very badly both yesterday and to-day."
+
+"Oh, you're only saying that to encourage me," Emmett sighed. "It sounds
+a dreadful thing to say and I ought not to say it because it'll make you
+uncomfortable, but if I don't succeed, I really think I shall kill
+myself."
+
+"All right, that's a bargain," Mark laughed; and when his rival shook
+hands with him at parting he felt that poor Emmett was going home to
+Rutland convinced that Mark was just as hard-hearted as the rest of the
+world and just as ready to laugh at his misfortune.
+
+It was Saturday when the examination was finished, and Mark wished he
+could be granted the privilege of staying over Sunday in college. He had
+no regrets for what he had done; he was content to let this experience
+be all that he should ever intimately gain of Oxford; but he should like
+to have the courage to accost one of the tutors and to tell him that
+being convinced he should never come to Oxford again he desired the
+privilege of remaining until Monday morning, so that he might
+crystallize in that short space of time an impression which, had he been
+successful in gaining the scholarship, would have been spread over four
+years. Mark was not indulging in sentiment; he really felt that by the
+intensity of the emotion with which he would live those twenty-four
+hours he should be able to achieve for himself as much as he should
+achieve in four years. So far as the world was concerned, this
+experience would be valueless; for himself it would be beyond price. So
+far as the world was concerned, he would never have been to Oxford; but
+could he be granted this privilege, Oxford would live for ever in his
+heart, a refuge and a meditation until the grave. Yet this coveted
+experience must be granted from without to make it a perfect experience.
+To ask and to be refused leave to stay till Monday would destroy for him
+the value of what he had already experienced in three days' residence;
+even to ask and to be granted the privilege would spoil it in
+retrospect. He went down the stairs from his room and stood in the
+little quadrangle, telling himself that at any rate he might postpone
+his departure until twilight and walk the seven miles from Shipcot to
+Wych-on-the-Wold. While he was on his way to notify the porter of the
+time of his departure he met the Principal, who stopped him and asked
+how he had got on with his papers. Mark wondered if the Principal had
+been told about his lamentable performance and was making inquiries on
+his own account to find out if the unsuccessful candidate really was a
+lunatic.
+
+"Rather badly, I'm afraid, sir."
+
+"Well, I shall see you at dinner to-night," said the Principal
+dismissing Mark with a gesture before he had time even to look
+surprised. This was a new perplexity, for Mark divined from the
+Principal's manner that he had entirely forgotten that the scholarship
+examination was over and that the candidates had already dined with him.
+He went into the lodge and asked the porter's advice.
+
+"The Principal's a most absent-minded gentleman," said the porter. "Most
+absent-minded, he is. He's the talk of Oxford sometimes is the
+Principal. What do you think he went and did only last term. Why, he was
+having some of the senior men to tea and was going to put some coal on
+the fire with the tongs and some sugar in his cup. Bothered if he didn't
+put the sugar in the fire and a lump of coal in his cup. It didn't so
+much matter him putting sugar in the fire. That's all according, as they
+say. But fancy--well, I tell you we had a good laugh over it in the
+lodge when the gentlemen came out and told me."
+
+"Ought I to explain that I've already dined with him?" Mark asked.
+
+"Are you in any what you might call immediate hurry to get away?" the
+porter asked judicially.
+
+"I'm in no hurry at all. I'd like to stay a bit longer."
+
+"Then you'd better go to dinner with him again to-night and stay in
+college over the Sunday. I'll take it upon myself to explain to the Dean
+why you're still here. If it had been tea I should have said 'don't
+bother about it,' but dinner's another matter, isn't it? And he always
+has dinner laid for two or more in case he's asked anybody and
+forgotten."
+
+Thus it came about that for the second time Mark dined with the
+Principal, who disconcerted him by saying when he arrived:
+
+"I remember now that you dined with me the night before last. You should
+have told me. I forget these things. But never mind, you'd better stay
+now you're here."
+
+The Principal read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner just
+as he had done two nights ago, and he only interrupted his perusal to
+inquire in courtly tones if Mark would take another glass of wine. The
+only difference between now and the former occasion was the absence of
+poor Emmett and his paroxysms. After dinner with some misgivings if he
+ought not to leave his host to himself Mark followed him upstairs to the
+library. The principal was one of those scholars who live in an
+atmosphere of their own given off by old calf-bound volumes and who
+apparently can only inhale the air of the world in which ordinary men
+move when they are smoking their battered old pipes. Mark sitting
+opposite to him by the fireside was tempted to pour out the history of
+himself and Emmett, to explain how he had come to make such a mess of
+the examination. Perhaps if the Principal had alluded to his papers Mark
+would have found the courage to talk about himself; but the Principal
+was apparently unaware that his guest had any ambitions to enter St.
+Osmund's Hall, and whatever questions he asked related to the ancient
+folios and quartos he took down in turn from his shelves. A clock struck
+ten in the moonlight without, and Mark rose to go. He felt a pang as he
+walked from the cloudy room and looked for the last time at that tall
+remote scholar, who had forgotten his guest's existence at the moment he
+ceased to shake his hand and who by the time he had reached the doorway
+was lost again in the deeps of the crabbed volume resting upon his
+knees. Mark sighed as he closed the library door behind him, for he knew
+that he was shutting out a world. But when he stood in the small silver
+quadrangle Mark was glad that he had not given way to the temptation of
+confiding in the Principal. It would have been a feeble end to his first
+denial of self. He was sure that he had done right in surrendering his
+place to Emmett, for was not the unexpected opportunity to spend these
+few more hours in Oxford a sign of God's approval? _Bright as the
+glimpses of eternity to saints accorded in their mortal hour._ Such was
+Oxford to-night.
+
+Mark sat for a long while at the open window of his room until the moon
+had passed on her way and the quadrangle was in shadow; and while he sat
+there he was conscious of how many people had inhabited this small
+quadrangle and of how they too had passed on their way like the moon,
+leaving behind them no more than he should leave behind from this one
+hour of rapture, no more than the moon had left of her silver upon the
+dim grass below.
+
+Mark was not given to gazing at himself in mirrors, but he looked at
+himself that night in the mirror of the tiny bedroom, into which the
+April air came up sweet and frore from the watermeadows of the Cherwell
+close at hand.
+
+"What will you do now?" he asked his reflection. "Yet, you have such a
+dark ecclesiastical face that I'm sure you'll be a priest whether you go
+to Oxford or not."
+
+Mark was right in supposing his countenance to be ecclesiastical. But it
+was something more than that: it was religious. Even already, when he
+was barely eighteen, the high cheekbones and deepset burning eyes gave
+him an ascetic look, while the habit of prayer and meditation had added
+to his expression a steadfast purpose that is rarely seen in people as
+young as him. What his face lacked were those contours that come from
+association with humanity; the ripeness that is bestowed by long
+tolerance of folly, the mellowness that has survived the icy winds of
+disillusion. It was the absence of these contours that made Mark think
+his face so ecclesiastical; however, if at eighteen he had possessed
+contours and soft curves, they would have been nothing but the contours
+and soft curves of that rose, youth; and this ecclesiastical bonyness
+would not fade and fall as swiftly as that.
+
+Mark turned from the glass in sudden irritation at his selfishness in
+speculating about his appearance and his future, when in a short time he
+should have to break the news to his guardian that he had thrown away
+for a kindly impulse the fruit of so many months of diligence and care.
+
+"What am I going to say to Ogilvie?" he exclaimed. "I can't go back to
+Wych and live there in pleasant idleness until it's time to go to
+Glastonbury. I must have some scheme for the immediate future."
+
+In bed when the light was out and darkness made the most fantastic
+project appear practical, Mark had an inspiration to take the habit of a
+preaching friar. Why should he not persuade Dorward to join him?
+Together they would tramp the English country, compelling even the
+dullest yokels to hear the word of God . . . discalced . . . over hill,
+down dale . . . telling stories of the saints and martyrs in remote inns
+. . . deep lanes . . . the butterflies and the birds . . . Dorward
+should say Mass in the heart of great woods . . . over hill, down dale
+. . . discalced . . . preaching to men of Christ. . . .
+
+Mark fell asleep.
+
+In the morning Mark heard Mass at the church of the Cowley Fathers, a
+strengthening experience, because the Gregorian there so strictly and so
+austerely chanted without any consideration for sentimental humanity
+possessed that very effect of liberating and purifying spirit held in
+the bonds of flesh which is conveyed by the wind blowing through a grove
+of pines or by waves quiring below a rocky shore.
+
+If Mark had had the least inclination to be sorry for himself and
+indulge in the flattery of regret, it vanished in this music. Rolling
+down through time on the billows of the mighty Gregorian it were as
+grotesque to pity oneself as it were for an Arctic explorer to build a
+snowman for company at the North Pole.
+
+Mark came out of St. John's, Cowley, into the suburban prettiness of
+Iffley Road, where men and women in their Sunday best tripped along in
+the April sunlight, tripped along in their Sunday best like newly
+hatched butterflies and beetles. Mark went in and out of colleges all
+day long, forgetting about the problem of his immediate future just as
+he forgot that the people in the sunny streets were not really
+butterflies and beetles. At twilight he decided to attend Evensong at
+St. Barnabas'. Perhaps the folk in the sunny April streets had turned
+his thoughts unconsciously toward the simple aspirations of simple
+human nature. He felt when he came into the warm candle-lit church like
+one who has voyaged far and is glad to be at home again. How everybody
+sang together that night, and how pleasant Mark found this
+congregational outburst. It was all so jolly that if the organist had
+suddenly turned round like an Italian organ-grinder and kissed his
+fingers to the congregation, his action would have seemed perfectly
+appropriate. Even during the _Magnificat_, when the altar was being
+censed, the tinkling of the thurible reminded Mark of a tambourine; and
+the lighting and extinction of the candles was done with as much
+suppressed excitement as if the candles were going to shoot red and
+green stars or go leaping and cracking all round the chancel.
+
+It happened this evening that the preacher was Father Rowley, that
+famous priest of the Silchester College Mission in the great naval port
+of Chatsea. Father Rowley was a very corpulent man with a voice of such
+compassion and with an eloquence so simple that when he ascended into
+the pulpit, closed his eyes, and began to speak, his listeners
+involuntarily closed their eyes and followed that voice whithersoever it
+led them. He neither changed the expression of his face nor made use of
+dramatic gestures; he scarcely varied his tone, yet he could keep a
+congregation breathlessly attentive for an hour. Although he seemed to
+be speaking in a kind of trance, it was evident that he was unusually
+conscious of his hearers, for if by chance some pious woman coughed or
+turned the pages of a prayer-book he would hold up the thread of his
+sermon and without any change of tone reprove her. It was strange to
+watch him at such a moment, his eyes still tightly shut and yet giving
+the impression of looking directly at the offending member of the
+congregation. This evening he was preaching about a naval disaster which
+had lately occurred, the sinking of a great battleship by another great
+battleship through a wrong signal. He was describing the scene when the
+news reached Chatsea, telling of the sweethearts and wives of the lost
+bluejackets who waited hoping against hope to hear that their loved ones
+had escaped death and hearing nearly always the worst news.
+
+"So many of our own dear bluejackets and marines, some of whom only
+last Christmas had been eating their plum duff at our Christmas dinner,
+so many of my own dear boys whom I prepared for Confirmation, whose
+first Confession I had heard, and to whom I had given for the first time
+the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
+
+He spoke too of what it meant in the future of material suffering on top
+of their mental agony. He asked for money to help these women
+immediately, and he spoke fiercely of the Admiralty red tape and of the
+obstruction of the official commission appointed to administer the
+relief fund.
+
+The preacher went on to tell stories from the lives of these boys,
+finding in each of them some illustration of a Christian virtue and
+conveying to his listeners a sense of the extraordinary preciousness of
+human life, so that there was no one who heard him but was fain to weep
+for those young bluejackets and marines taken in their prime. He
+inspired in Mark a sense of shame that he had ever thought of people in
+the aggregate, that he had ever walked along a crowded street without
+perceiving the importance of every single human being that helped to
+compose its variety. While he sat there listening to the Missioner and
+watching the large tears roll slowly down his cheeks from beneath the
+closed lids, Mark wondered how he could have dared to suppose last night
+that he was qualified to become a friar and preach the Gospel to the
+poor. While Father Rowley was speaking, he began to apprehend that
+before he could aspire to do that he must himself first of all learn
+about Christ from those very poor whom he had planned to convert.
+
+This sermon was another milestone in Mark's religious life. It
+discovered in him a hidden treasure of humility, and it taught him to
+build upon the rock of human nature. He divined the true meaning of Our
+Lord's words to St. Peter: _Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build
+my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it._ John was
+the disciple whom Jesus loved, but he chose Peter with all his failings
+and all his follies, with his weakness and his cowardice and his vanity.
+He chose Peter, the bedrock of human nature, and to him he gave the keys
+of Heaven.
+
+Mark knew that somehow he must pluck up courage to ask Father Rowley to
+let him come and work under him at Chatsea. He was sure that if he could
+only make him grasp the spirit in which he would offer himself, the
+spirit of complete humility devoid of any kind of thought that he was
+likely to be of the least use to the Mission, Father Rowley might accept
+his oblation. He would have liked to wait behind after Evensong and
+approach the Missioner directly, so that before speaking to Mr. Ogilvie
+he might know what chance the offer had of being accepted; but he
+decided against this course, because he felt that Father Rowley's
+compassion might be embarrassed if he had to refuse his request, a point
+of view that was characteristic of the mood roused in him by the sermon.
+He went back to sleep for the last time in an Oxford college, profoundly
+reassured of the rightness of his action in giving up the scholarship to
+Emmett, although, which was characteristic of his new mood, he had by
+this time begun to tell himself that he had really done nothing at all
+and that probably in any case Emmett would have been the chosen scholar.
+
+If Mark had still any doubts of his behaviour, they would have vanished
+when on getting into the train for Shipcot he found himself in an
+otherwise empty third-class smoking carriage opposite Father Rowley
+himself, who with a small black bag beside him, so small that Mark
+wondered how it could possibly contain the night attire of so fat a man,
+was sitting back in the corner with a large pipe in his mouth. He was
+wearing one of those square felt hats sometimes seen on the heads of
+farmers, and if one had only seen his head and hat without the grubby
+clerical attire beneath one might have guessed him to be a farmer. Mark
+noticed now that his eyes of a limpid blue were like a child's, and he
+realized that in his voice while he was preaching there had been the
+same sweet gravity of childhood. Just at this moment Father Rowley
+caught sight of someone he knew on the platform and shouting from the
+window of the compartment he attracted the attention of a young man
+wearing an Old Siltonian tie.
+
+"My dear man," he cried, "how are you? I've just made a most idiotic
+mistake. I got it into my head that I should be preaching here on the
+first Sunday in term and was looking forward to seeing so many
+Silchester men. I can't think how I came to make such a muddle."
+
+Father Rowley's shoulders filled up all the space of the window, so that
+Mark only heard scattered fragments of the conversation, which was
+mostly about Silchester and the Siltonians he had hoped to see at
+Oxford.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear man, good-bye," the Missioner shouted, as the train
+moved out of the station. "Come down and see us soon at Chatsea. The
+more of you men who come, the more we shall be pleased."
+
+Mark's heart leapt at these words, which seemed of good omen to his own
+suit. When Father Rowley was ensconced in his corner and once more
+puffing away at his pipe, Mark thought how ridiculous it would sound to
+say that he had heard him preach last night at St. Barnabas' and that,
+having been much moved by the sermon, he was anxious to be taken on at
+St. Agnes' as a lay helper. He wished that Father Rowley would make some
+remark to him that would lead up to his request, but all that Father
+Rowley said was:
+
+"This is a slow train to Birmingham, isn't it?"
+
+This led to a long conversation about trains, and slow though this one
+might be it was going much too fast for Mark, who would be at Shipcot in
+another twenty minutes without having taken any advantage of his lucky
+encounter.
+
+"Are you up at Oxford?" the priest at last inquired.
+
+It was now or never; and Mark took the opportunity given him by that one
+question to tell Father Rowley twenty disjointed facts about his life,
+which ended with a request to be allowed to come and work at Chatsea.
+
+"You can come and see us whenever you like," said the Missioner.
+
+"But I don't want just to come and pay a visit," said Mark. "I really do
+want to be given something to do, and I shan't be any expense. I only
+want to keep enough money to go to Glastonbury in four years' time. If
+you'd only see how I got on for a month. I don't pretend I can be of any
+help to you. I don't suppose I can. But I do so tremendously want you
+to help me."
+
+"Who did you say your father was?"
+
+"Lidderdale, James Lidderdale. He was priest-in-charge of the Lima
+Street Mission, which belonged to St. Simon's, Notting Hill, in those
+days. St. Wilfred's, Notting Dale, it is now."
+
+"Lidderdale," Father Rowley echoed. "I knew him. I knew him well. Lima
+Street. Viner's there now, a dear good fellow. So you're Lidderdale's
+son?"
+
+"I say, here's my station," Mark exclaimed in despair, "and you haven't
+said whether I can come or not."
+
+"Come down on Tuesday week," said Father Rowley. "Hurry up, or you'll
+get carried on to the next station."
+
+Mark waved his farewell, and he knew, as he drove back on the omnibus
+over the rolling wold to Wych that he had this morning won something
+much better than a scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+CHATSEA
+
+
+When Mark had been exactly a week at Chatsea he celebrated his
+eighteenth birthday by writing a long letter to the Rector of Wych:
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     St. Mark's Day.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     Thank you very much for sending me the money. I've handed it over
+     to a splendid fellow called Gurney who keeps all the accounts
+     (private or otherwise) in the Mission House. Poor chap, he's
+     desperately ill with asthma, and nobody thinks he can live much
+     longer. He suffers tortures, particularly at night, and as I sleep
+     in the next room I can hear him.
+
+     You mustn't think me inconsiderate because I haven't written
+     sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had seen a bit of this place
+     before I wrote to you so that you might have some idea what I was
+     doing and be able to realize that it is the one and only place
+     where I ought to be at the moment.
+
+     But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I want to try
+     to express a little of what your kindness has meant to me during
+     the last two years. I look back at myself just before my sixteenth
+     birthday when I was feeling that I should have to run away to sea
+     or do something mad in order to escape that solicitor's office, and
+     I simply gasp! What and where should I be now if it hadn't been for
+     you? You have always made light of the burden I must have been, and
+     though I have tried to show you my gratitude I'm afraid it hasn't
+     been very successful. I'm not being very successful now in putting
+     it into words. I know my failure to gain a scholarship at Oxford
+     has been a great disappointment to you, especially after you had
+     worked so hard yourself to coach me. Please don't be anxious about
+     my letting my books go to the wall here. I had a talk about this
+     with Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to do
+     in the district must only be done when I have a good morning's work
+     with my books behind me. I quite realize the importance of a
+     priest's education. One of the assistant priests here, a man called
+     Snaith, took a good degree at Cambridge both in classics and
+     theology, so I shall have somebody to keep me on the lines. If I
+     stay here three years and then have two years at Glastonbury I
+     don't honestly think that I shall start off much handicapped by
+     having missed both public school and university. I expect you're
+     smiling to read after one week of my staying here three years! But
+     I assure you that the moment I sat down to supper on the evening of
+     my arrival I felt at home. I think at first they all thought I was
+     an eager young Ritualist, but when they found that they didn't get
+     any rises out of ragging me, they shut up.
+
+     This house is a most extraordinary place. It is an old
+     Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has been made
+     into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty or ever likely
+     to be empty so far as I can see! I should think it must be rather
+     like what the guest house of a monastery used to be like in the old
+     days before the Reformation. The ground floor of the chapel has
+     been turned into a gymnasium, and twice a week the apparatus is
+     cleared away and we have a dance. Every other evening it's used
+     furiously by Father Rowley's "boys." They're such a jolly lot, and
+     most of them splendid gymnasts. Quite a few have become
+     professional acrobats since they opened the gymnasium. The first
+     morning after my arrival I asked Father Rowley if he'd got anything
+     special for me to do and he told me to catalogue the books in his
+     library. Everybody laughed at this, and I thought at first that
+     some joke was intended, but when I got to his room I found it
+     really was in utter confusion with masses of books lying about
+     everywhere. So I set to work pretty hard and after about three days
+     I got them catalogued and in good order. When I told him I had
+     finished he looked very surprised, and a solemn visit of inspection
+     was ordered. As the room was looking quite tidy at last, I didn't
+     mind. I've realized since that Father Rowley always sets people the
+     task of cataloguing and arranging his books when he doubts if they
+     are really worth their salt, and now he complains that I have
+     spoilt one of his best ordeals for slackers. I said to him that he
+     needn't be afraid because from what I could see of the way he
+     treated books they would be just as untidy as ever in another week.
+     Everybody laughed, though I was afraid at first they might consider
+     it rather cheek my talking like this, but you've got to stand up
+     for yourself here because there never was such a place for turning
+     a man inside out. It's a real discipline, and I think if I manage
+     to deserve to stay here three years I shall have the right to feel
+     I've had the finest training for Holy Orders anybody could possibly
+     have.
+
+     You know enough about Father Rowley yourself to understand how
+     impossible it would be for me to give any impression of his
+     personality in a letter. I have never felt so strongly the absolute
+     goodness of anybody. I suppose that some of the great mediæval
+     saints like St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua must have been
+     like that. One reads about them and what they did, but the facts
+     one reads don't really tell anything. I always feel that what we
+     really depend on is a kind of tradition of their absolute
+     saintliness handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose
+     in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't
+     matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries
+     to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was
+     God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met
+     Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes
+     with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good
+     because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't
+     have ever been anything else but good, but I always feel that
+     people like him remain practically out of reach of the ordinary
+     person and that the goodness is all their own and dies with them
+     just as it was born with them. What I feel about a man like Father
+     Rowley is that he probably had a tremendous fight to be good. Of
+     course, I may be perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at
+     all. I know one of the people at the Mission House told me that,
+     though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or more
+     enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up both at St.
+     Agnes merely to set an example to weak people. I feel that his
+     goodness was with such energy fought for that it now exists as a
+     kind of complete thing and will go on existing when Father Rowley
+     himself is dead. I begin to understand the doctrine of the treasury
+     of merit. I remember you once told me how grateful I ought to be to
+     God because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack
+     most boys. I am grateful; but at the same time I can't claim any
+     merit for it! The only time in my life when I might have acquired
+     any merit was when I was at Haverton House. Instead of doing that,
+     I just dried up, and if I hadn't had that wonderful experience at
+     Whitsuntide in Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I
+     should be spiritually dead by now.
+
+     This is a very long letter, and I don't seem to have left myself
+     any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It reminds me of my
+     father's mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new
+     church is being built almost next door just as one was being built
+     in Lima Street. I went to the children's Mass last Sunday, and I
+     seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I
+     thought to myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for
+     his soul. Will you do so now next time you say a black Mass? This
+     is a wretched letter, and it doesn't succeed in the least in
+     expressing what I owe to you and what I already owe to Father
+     Rowley. I used to think that the Sacred Heart was a rather material
+     device for attracting the multitude, but I'm beginning to realize
+     in the atmosphere of St. Agnes' that it is a gloriously simple
+     devotion and that it is human nature's attempt to express the
+     inexpressible. I'll write to you again next week. Please give my
+     love to everybody at the Rectory.
+
+     Always your most affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+Father Rowley had been at St. Agnes' seven or eight years when Mark
+found himself attached to the Mission, in which time he had transformed
+the district completely. It was a small parish (actually of course it
+was not a parish at all, although it was fast qualifying to become one)
+of something over a thousand small houses, few of which were less than a
+century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after
+bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque
+quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but
+heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of
+its overcrowded and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness
+of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets
+and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always in view, and the windows of
+the pawnbrokers were filled with the relics of long voyages, with idols
+and large shells, with savage weapons and the handiwork of remote
+islands.
+
+When Mark came to live in Keppel Street, most of the brothels and many
+of the public houses had been eliminated from the district, and in their
+place flourished various clubs and guilds. The services in the church
+were crowded: there was a long roll of communicants; the civilization of
+the city of God was visible in this Chatsea slum. One or two of the lay
+helpers used to horrify Mark with stories of early days there, and when
+he seemed inclined to regret that he had arrived so late upon the scene,
+they used to tease him about his missionary spirit.
+
+"If he can't reform the people," said Cartwright, one of the lay
+helpers, a tall thin young man with a long nose and a pleasant smile,
+"he still has us to reform."
+
+"Come along, Mark Anthony," said Warrender, another lay helper, who
+after working for seven years among the poor had at last been charily
+accepted by the Bishop for ordination. "Come along. Why don't you try
+your hand on us?"
+
+"You people seem to think," said Mark, "that I've got a mania for
+reforming. I don't mean that I should like to see St. Agnes' where it
+was merely for my own personal amusement. The only thing I'm sorry about
+is that I didn't actually see the work being done."
+
+Father Rowley came in at this moment, and everybody shouted that Mark
+was going to preach a sermon.
+
+"Splendid," said the Missioner whose voice when not moved by emotion was
+rich in a natural unction that encouraged everyone round to suppose he
+was being successfully humorous, such a savour did it add to the most
+innutritious chaff. Those who were privileged to share his ordinary life
+never ceased to wonder how in the pulpit or in the confessional or at
+prayer this unction was replaced by a remote beauty of tone, a plangent
+and thrilling compassion that played upon the hearts of all who heard
+him.
+
+"Now really, Father Rowley," Mark protested. "Do I preach a great deal?
+I'm always being chaffed by Cartwright and Warrender about an alleged
+mania for reforming people, which only exists in their imagination."
+
+Indeed Mark had long ago grown out of the desire to reform or to convert
+anybody, although had he wished to keep his hand in, he could have had
+plenty of practice among the guests of the Mission House. Nobody had
+ever succeeded in laying down the exact number of casual visitors that
+could be accommodated therein. However full it appeared, there was
+always room for one more. Taking an average, day in, day out through the
+year, one might fairly say that there were always eight or nine casual
+guests in addition to the eight or nine permanent residents, of whom
+Mark was soon glad to be able to count himself one. The company was
+sufficiently mixed to have been offered as a proof to the sceptical that
+there was something after all in simple Christianity. There would
+usually be a couple of prefects from Silchester, one or two 'Varsity
+men, two or three bluejackets or marines, an odd soldier or so, a naval
+officer perhaps, a stray priest sometimes, an earnest seeker after
+Christian example often, and often a drunkard who had been dumped down
+at the door of St. Agnes' Mission House in the hope that where everybody
+else had failed Father Rowley might succeed. Then there were the tramps,
+some who had heard of a comfortable night's lodging, some who came
+whining and cringing with a pretence of religion. This last class was
+discouraged as much as possible, for one of the first rules of the
+Mission House was to show no favour to any man who claimed to be
+religious, it being Father Rowley's chief dread to make anybody's
+religion a paying concern. Sometimes a jailbird just released from
+prison would find in the Mission House an opportunity to recover his
+self-respect. But whoever the guest was, soldier, sailor, tinker,
+tailor, apothecary, ploughboy, or thief, he was judged at the Mission
+House as a man. Some of the visitors repaid their host by theft or
+fraud; but when they did, nobody uttered proverbs or platitudes about
+mistaken kindness. If one lame dog bit the hand that was helping him
+over the stile, the next dog that came limping along was helped over
+just as freely.
+
+"What right has one miserable mortal to be disillusioned by another
+miserable mortal?" Father Rowley demanded. "Our dear Lord when he was
+nailed to the cross said 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what
+they do.' He did not say, 'I am fed up with these people I have come
+down from Heaven to save. I've had enough of it. Send an angel with a
+pair of pincers to pull out these nails.'"
+
+If the Missioner's patience ever failed, it was when he had to deal with
+High Church young men who made pilgrimages to St. Agnes' because they
+had heard that this or that service was conducted there with a finer
+relish of Romanism than anywhere else at the moment in England. On one
+occasion a pietistic young creature, who brought with him his own lace
+cotta but forgot to bring his nightshirt, begged to be allowed the joy
+of serving Father Rowley at early Mass next morning. When they came back
+and were sitting round the breakfast table, this young man simpered in a
+ladylike voice:
+
+"Oh, Father, couldn't you keep your fingers closed when you give the
+_Dominus vobiscum_?"
+
+"Et cum spiritu tuo," shouted Father Rowley. "I can keep my fingers
+closed when I box your ears."
+
+And he proved it.
+
+It was a real box on the ears, so hard a blow that the ladylike young
+man burst into tears to the great indignation of a Chief Petty Officer
+staying in the Mission House, who declared that he was half in a mind to
+catch the young swab such a snitch on the conk as really would give him
+something to blubber about. Father Rowley evidently had no remorse for
+his violence, and the young man went away that afternoon saying how
+sorry he was that the legend of the good work being done at St. Agnes'
+had been so much exaggerated.
+
+Mark wrote an account of this incident, which had given him intense
+pleasure, to Mr. Ogilvie. Perhaps the Rector was afraid that Mark in his
+ambition to avoid "churchiness" was inclining toward the opposite
+extreme; or perhaps, charitable and saintly man though he was, he felt a
+pang of jealousy at Mark's unbounded admiration of his new friend; or
+perhaps it was merely that the east wind was blowing more sharply than
+usual that morning over the wold into the Rectory garden. Whatever the
+cause, his answering letter made Mark feel that the Rector did not
+appreciate Father Rowley as thoroughly as he ought.
+
+     The Rectory,
+
+     Wych-on-the-Wold.
+
+     Oxon.
+
+     Dec. 1.
+
+     My dear Mark,
+
+     I was glad to get your long and amusing letter of last week. I am
+     delighted to think that as the months go by you are finding work
+     among the poor more and more congenial. I would not for the world
+     suggest your coming back here for Christmas after what you tell me
+     of the amount of extra work it will entail for everybody in the
+     Mission House; at the same time it would be useless to pretend that
+     we shan't all be disappointed not to see you until the New Year.
+
+     On reading through your last letter again I feel just a little
+     worried lest, in the pleasure you derive from Father Rowley's
+     treatment of what was no doubt a very irritating young man, you may
+     be inclined to go to the opposite extreme and be too ready to laugh
+     at real piety when it is not accompanied by geniality and good
+     fellowship, or by an obvious zeal for good works. I know you will
+     acquit me of any desire to defend extreme "churchiness," and I have
+     no doubt you will remember one or two occasions in the past when I
+     was rather afraid that you were tending that way yourself. I am not
+     in the least criticizing Father Rowley's method of dealing with it,
+     but I am a trifle uneasy at the inordinate delight it seems to have
+     afforded you. Of course, it is intolerable for any young man
+     serving a priest at Mass to watch his fingers all the time, but I
+     don't think you have any right to assume because on this occasion
+     the young man showed himself so sensitive to mere externals that he
+     is always aware only of externals. Unfortunately a very great deal
+     of true and fervid piety exists under this apparent passion for
+     externals. Remember that the ordinary criticism by the man in the
+     street of Catholic ceremonies and of Catholic methods of worship
+     involves us all in this condemnation. I suppose that you would
+     consider yourself justified, should the circumstances permit (which
+     in this case of course they do not), in protesting against a
+     priest's not taking the Eastward Position when he said Mass. I was
+     talking to Colonel Fraser the other day, and he was telling me how
+     much he had enjoyed the ministrations of the Reverend Archibald
+     Tait, the Leicestershire cricketer, who throughout the "second
+     service" never once turned his back on the congregation, and, so
+     far as I could gather from the Colonel's description, conducted
+     this "second service" very much as a conjuror performs his tricks.
+     When I ventured to argue with the Colonel, he said to me: "That is
+     the worst of you High Churchmen, you make the ritual more important
+     than the Communion itself." All human judgments, my dear Mark, are
+     relative, and I have no doubt that this unpleasant young man (who,
+     as I have already said, was no doubt justly punished by Father
+     Rowley) may have felt the same kind of feeling in a different
+     degree that I should feel if I assisted at the jugglery of the
+     Reverend Archibald Tait. At any rate you, my dear boy, are bound to
+     credit this young man with as much sincerity as yourself, otherwise
+     you commit a sin against charity. You must acquire at least as much
+     toleration for the Ritualist as I am glad to notice you are
+     acquiring for the thief. When you are a priest yourself, and in a
+     comparatively short time you will be a priest, I do hope you won't,
+     without his experience, try to imitate Father Rowley too closely in
+     his summary treatment of what I have already I hope made myself
+     quite clear in believing to be in this case a most insufferable
+     young man. Don't misunderstand this letter. I have such great hopes
+     of you in the stormy days to come, and the stormy days are coming,
+     that I should feel I was wrong if I didn't warn you of your
+     attitude towards the merest trifles, for I shall always judge you
+     and your conduct by standards that I should be very cautious of
+     setting for most of my penitents.
+
+     Your ever affectionate,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+
+     My mother and Miriam send you much love. We miss you greatly at
+     Wych. Esther seems happy in her convent and will soon be clothed as
+     a novice.
+
+When Mark read this letter, he was prompt to admit himself in the
+wrong; but he could not bear the least implied criticism of Father
+Rowley.
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     Dec. 3.
+
+     My dear Mr. Ogilvie,
+
+     I'm afraid I must have expressed myself very badly in my last
+     letter if I gave you the least idea that Father Rowley was not
+     always charity personified. He had probably come to the conclusion
+     that the young man was not much good and no doubt he deliberately
+     made it impossible for him to stay on at the Mission House. We do
+     get an awful lot of mere loafers here; I don't suppose that anybody
+     who keeps open house can avoid getting them. After all, if the
+     young man had been worth anything he would have realized that he
+     had made a fool of himself and by the way he took his snubbing have
+     re-established himself. What he actually did was to sulk and clear
+     out with a sneer at the work done here. I'm sorry I gave you the
+     impression that I was triumphing so tremendously over his
+     discomfiture. By writing about it I probably made the incident
+     appear much more important than it really was. I've no doubt I did
+     triumph a little, and I'm afraid I shall never be able not to feel
+     rather glad when a fellow like that is put in his place. I am not
+     for a moment going to try to argue that you can carry Christian
+     charity too far. The more one meditates on the words, and actions
+     of Our Lord, the more one grasps how impossible it is to carry
+     charity too far. All the same, one owes as much charity to Father
+     Rowley as to the young man. This sounds now I have written it down
+     as if I were getting in a hit at you, and that is the worst of
+     writing letters to justify oneself. What I am trying to say is that
+     if I were to have taken up arms for the young man and supposed him
+     to be ill-used or misjudged I should be criticizing Father Rowley.
+     I think that perhaps you don't quite realize what a saint he is in
+     every way. This is my fault, no doubt, because in my letters to you
+     I have always emphasized anything that would bring into relief his
+     personality. I expect that I've been too much concerned to draw a
+     picture of him as a man, in doing which I've perhaps been
+     unsuccessful in giving you a picture of him as a priest. It's
+     always difficult to talk or write about one's intimate religious
+     feelings, and you've been the only person to whom I ever have been
+     able to talk about them. However much I admire and revere Father
+     Rowley I doubt if I could talk or write to him about myself as I do
+     to you.
+
+     Until I came here I don't think I ever quite realized all that the
+     Blessed Sacrament means. I had accepted the Sacrifice of the Mass
+     as one accepts so much in our creed, without grasping its full
+     implication. If anybody were to have put me through a catechism
+     about the dogma I should have answered with theological exactitude,
+     without any appearance of misapprehending the meaning of it; but it
+     was not until I came here that its practical reality--I don't know
+     if I'm expressing myself properly or not, I'm pretty sure I'm not;
+     I don't mean practical application and I don't mean any kind of
+     addition to my faith; perhaps what I mean is that I've learnt to
+     grasp the mystery of the Mass outside myself, outside that is to
+     say my own devotion, my own awe, as a practical fact alive to these
+     people here. Sometimes when I go to Mass I feel as people who
+     watched Our Lord with His disciples and followers must have felt. I
+     feel like one of those people who ran after Him and asked Him what
+     they could do to be saved. I feel when I look at what has been done
+     here as if I must go to each of these poor people in turn and beg
+     them to bring me to the feet of Christ, just as I suppose on the
+     shores of the sea of Galilee people must have begged St. Peter or
+     St. Andrew or St. James or St. John to introduce them, if one can
+     use such a word for such an occasion. This seems to me the great
+     work that Father Rowley has effected in this parish. I have only
+     had one rather shy talk with him about religion, and in the course
+     of it I said something in praise of what his personality had
+     effected.
+
+     "My personality has effected nothing," he answered. "Everything
+     here is effected by the Blessed Sacrament."
+
+     That is why he surely has the right without any consideration for
+     the dignity of churchy young men to box their ears if they question
+     his outward respect for the Blessed Sacrament. Even Our Lord found
+     it necessary at least on one occasion to chase the buyers and
+     sellers out of the Temple, and though it is not recorded that He
+     boxed the ears of any Pharisee, it seems to me quite permissible to
+     believe that He did! He lashed them with scorn anyway.
+
+     To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry of the
+     so-called Evangelical party "Jesus only"? Well, Father Rowley has
+     really managed to make out of what was becoming a sort of
+     ecclesiastical party cry something that really is evangelical and
+     at the same time Catholic. These people are taught to make the
+     Blessed Sacrament the central fact of their lives in a way that I
+     venture to say no Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has
+     ever made Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts,
+     because with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them, Which
+     is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures. I could fill a
+     book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls.
+     The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has
+     such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that
+     by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his
+     flock. Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly
+     that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not
+     believe, and I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any
+     use without Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of
+     Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed
+     Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural service.
+     Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself, so
+     that the poor people may flock round Him. He does not go round
+     arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their
+     lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every
+     difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers
+     them the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a great
+     use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who
+     considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions
+     revolve round that one great fact. "Jesus Christ is what you need,"
+     he says, "and Jesus Christ is here in your church, here upon your
+     altar."
+
+     You can't go into the little church without finding fifty people
+     praying before the Blessed Sacrament. The other day when the "King
+     Harry" was sunk by the "Trafalgar," the people here subscribed I
+     forget how many pounds for the widows and children of the
+     bluejackets and marines of the Mission who were drowned, and when
+     it was finished and the subscription list was closed, they
+     subscribed all over again to erect an altar at which to say Masses
+     for the dead. And the old women living in Father Rowley's free
+     houses that were once brothels gave up their summer outing so that
+     the money spent on them might be added to the fund. When the Bishop
+     of Silchester came here last week for Confirmation he asked Father
+     Rowley what that altar was.
+
+     "That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," he said. But when
+     Father Rowley told him about the poor people and the old women who
+     had no money of their own, he said: "That is the most beautiful
+     thing I've ever heard."
+
+     I am beginning to write as if it was necessary to convince you of
+     the necessity of making the Blessed Sacrament the central feature
+     of the religious life to-day and for ever until the end of the
+     world. But, I know you won't think I'm doing anything of the kind,
+     for really I am only trying to show you how much my faith has been
+     strengthened and how much my outlook has deepened and how much more
+     than ever I long to be a priest to be able to give poor people
+     Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE DRUNKEN PRIEST
+
+
+Gradually, Mark found to his pleasure and his pride that he was
+becoming, if not indispensable to Father Rowley (the Missioner found no
+human being indispensable) at any rate quite evidently useful. Perhaps
+Father Rowley though that in allowing himself to rely considerably upon
+Mark's secretarial talent he was indulging himself in a luxury to which
+he was not entitled. That was Father Rowley's way. The moment he
+discovered himself enjoying anything too much, whether it was a cigar or
+a secretary, he cut himself off from it, and this not in any spirit of
+mortification for mortification's sake, but because he dreaded the
+possibility of putting the slightest drag upon his freedom to criticize
+others. He had no doubt at all in his own mind that he was perfectly
+justified in making use of Mark's intelligence and energy. But in a
+place like the Mission House, where everybody from lay helper to casual
+guest was supposed to stand on his own feet, the Missioner himself felt
+that he must offer an example of independence.
+
+"You're spoiling me, Mark Anthony," he said one day. "There's nothing
+for me to do this evening."
+
+"I know," Mark agreed contentedly. "I want to give you a rest for once."
+
+"Rest?" the priest echoed. "You don't seriously expect a fat man like me
+to sit down in an armchair and rest, do you? Besides, you've got your
+own reading to do, and you didn't come to Chatsea as my punkah walla."
+
+Mark insisted that he was getting along in his own way quite fast
+enough, and that he had plenty of time on his hands to keep Father
+Rowley's correspondence in some kind of order.
+
+"All these other people have any amount to do," said Mark. "Cartwright
+has his boys every evening and Warrender has his men."
+
+"And Mark Anthony has nothing but a fat, poverty-stricken, slothful
+mission priest," Father Rowley gurgled.
+
+"Yes, and you're more trouble than all the rest put together. Look here,
+I've written to the Bishop's chaplain about that confirmation; I
+explained why we wanted to hold a special confirmation for these two
+boys we are emigrating, and he has written back to say that the Bishop
+has no objection to a special confirmation's being held by the Bishop of
+Matabeleland when he comes to stay here next week. At the same time, he
+says the Bishop doesn't want it to become a precedent."
+
+"No. I can quite understand that," Father Rowley chuckled. "Bishops are
+haunted by the creation of precedents. A precedent in the life of a
+bishop is like an illegitimate child in the life of a respectable
+churchwarden. No, the only thing I fear is that if I devour all your
+spare time you won't get quite what you wanted to get by coming to live
+with us."
+
+He laid a fat hand on Mark's shoulder.
+
+"Please don't bother about me," said Mark. "I get all I want and more
+than I expected if I can be of the least use to you. I know I'm rather
+disappointing you by not behaving like half the people who come down
+here and want to get up a concert on Monday, a dance on Tuesday, a
+conjuring entertainment on Wednesday, a street procession on Thursday, a
+day of intercession on Friday, and an amateur dramatic entertainment on
+Saturday, not to mention acting as ceremonarius on Sunday. I know you'd
+like me to propose all sorts of energetic diversions, so that you could
+have the pleasure of assuring me that I was only proposing them to
+gratify my own vanity, which of course would be perfectly true. Luckily
+I'm of a retiring disposition, and I don't want to do anything to help
+the ten thousand benighted parishioners of Saint Agnes', except
+indirectly by striving to help in my own feeble way the man who really
+is helping them. Now don't throw that inkpot at me, because the room's
+quite dirty enough already, and as I've made you sit still for five
+minutes I've achieved something this evening that mighty few people
+have achieved in Keppel Street. I believe the only time you really rest
+is in the confessional box."
+
+"Mark Anthony, Mark Anthony," said the priest, "you talk a great deal
+too much. Come along now, it's bedtime."
+
+One of the rules of the Mission House was that every inmate should be in
+bed by ten o'clock and all lights out by a quarter past. The day began
+with Mass at seven o'clock at which everybody was expected to be
+present; and from that time onward everybody was so fully occupied that
+it was essential to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Guests who came down
+for a night or two were often apt to forget how much the regular workers
+had to do and what a tax it put upon the willing servants to manage a
+house of which nobody could say ten minutes before a meal how many would
+sit down to it, nor even until lights out for how many people beds must
+be made. In case any guest should forget this rule by coming back after
+ten o'clock, Father Rowley made a point of having the front door bell to
+ring in his bedroom, so that he might get out of bed at any hour of the
+night and admit the loiterer. Guests were warned what would be the
+effect of their lack of consideration, and it was seldom that Father
+Rowley was disturbed.
+
+Among the guests there was one class of which a representative was
+usually to be found at the Mission House. This was the drunken
+clergyman, which sounds as if there was at this date a high proportion
+of drunken clergymen in the Church of England; but which means that when
+one did come to St. Agnes' he usually stayed for a long time, because he
+would in most cases have been sent there when everybody else had
+despaired of him to see what Father Rowley could effect.
+
+About the time when Mark was beginning to be recognized as Father
+Rowley's personal vassal, it happened that the Reverend George Edward
+Mousley who had been handed on from diocese to diocese during the last
+five years had lately reached the Mission House. For more than two
+months now he had spent his time inconspicuously reading in his own
+room, and so well had he behaved, so humbly had he presented himself to
+the notice of his fellow guests, that Father Rowley was moved one
+afternoon to dictate a letter about him to Mark, who felt that the
+Missioner by taking him so far into his confidence had surrendered to
+his pertinacity and that thenceforth he might consider himself
+established as his private secretary.
+
+"The letter is to the Lord Bishop Suffragan of Warwick, St. Peter's
+Rectory, Warwick," Father Rowley began. "My dear Bishop of Warwick, I
+have now had poor Mousley here for two months. It is not a long time in
+which to effect a lasting reformation of one who has fallen so often and
+so grievously, but I think you know me well enough not to accuse me of
+being too sanguine about drunken priests. I have had too many of them
+here for that. In his case however I do feel justified in asking you to
+agree with me in letting him have an opportunity to regain the respect
+due to himself and the reverence due to his priesthood by being allowed
+once more to the altar. I should not dream of allowing him to officiate
+without your permission, because his sad history has been so much a
+personal burden to yourself. I'm afraid that after the many
+disappointments he has inflicted upon you, you will be doubtful of my
+judgment. Yet I do think that the critical moment has arrived when by
+surprising him thus we might clinch the matter of his future behaviour
+once and for all. His conduct here has been so humble and patient and in
+every way exemplary that my heart bleeds for him. Therefore, my dear
+Bishop of Warwick, I hope you will agree to what I firmly trust will be
+the completion of his spiritual cure. I am writing to you quite
+impersonally and informally, as you see, so that in replying to me you
+will not be involving yourself in the affairs of another diocese. You
+will, of course, put me down as much a Jesuit as ever in writing to you
+like this, but you will equally, I know, believe me to be, Yours ever
+affectionately in Our Blessed Lord.
+
+"And I'll sign it as soon as you can type it out," Father Rowley wound
+up.
+
+"Oh, I do hope he will agree," Mark exclaimed.
+
+"He will," the Missioner prophesied. "He will because he is a wise and
+tender and godly man and therefore will never be more than a Bishop
+Suffragan as long as he lives. Mark!"
+
+Mark looked up at the severity of the tone.
+
+"Mark! Correct me when I fall into the habit of sneering at the
+episcopate."
+
+That night Father Rowley was attending a large temperance demonstration
+in the Town Hall for the purpose of securing if possible a smaller
+proportion of public houses than one for every eighty of the population,
+which was the average for Chatsea. The meeting lasted until nearly ten
+o'clock; and it had already struck the hour when Father Rowley with Mark
+and two or three others got back to Keppel Street. There was nothing
+Father Rowley disliked so much as arriving home himself after ten, and
+he hurried up to his room without inquiring if everybody was in.
+
+Mark's window looked out on Keppel Street; and the May night being warm
+and his head aching from the effects of the meeting, he sat for nearly
+an hour at the open window gazing down at the passers by. There was not
+much to see, nothing more indeed than couples wandering home, a
+bluejacket or two, an occasional cat, and a few women carrying jugs of
+beer. By eleven o'clock even this slight traffic had ceased, and there
+was nothing down the silent street except a salt wind from the harbour
+that roused a memory of the beach at Nancepean years ago when he had sat
+there watching the glow-worm and decided to be a lighthouse-keeper
+keeping his lamps bright for mariners homeward bound. It was of streets
+like Keppel Street that they would have dreamed, with the Stag Light
+winking to port, and the west wind blowing strong astern. What a
+lighthouse-keeper Father Rowley was! How except by the grace of God
+could one explain such goodness as his? Fashions in saintliness might
+change, but there was one kind of saint that always and for every creed
+spoke plainly of God's existence, such saints as St. Francis of Assisi
+or St. Anthony of Padua, who were manifestly the heirs of Christ. With
+what a tender cynicism Our Lord had called St. Peter to be the
+foundation stone of His Church, with what a sorrowful foreboding of the
+failure of Christianity. Such a choice appeared as the expression of
+God's will not to be let down again as He was let down by Adam. Jesus
+Christ, conscious at the moment of what He must shortly suffer at the
+hands of mankind, must have been equally conscious of the failure of
+Christianity two thousand years beyond His Agony and Bloody Sweat and
+Crucifixion. Why, within a short time after His life on earth it was
+necessary for that light from heaven to shine round about Saul on the
+Damascus road, because already scoffers, while the disciples were still
+alive, may have been talking about the failure of Christianity. It must
+have been another of God's self-imposed limitations that He did not give
+to St. John that capacity of St. Paul for organization which might have
+made practicable the Christianity of the master Who loved him. _Woman,
+behold thy son! Behold thy mother!_ That dying charge showed that Our
+Lord considered John the most Christlike of His disciples, and he
+remained the most Christlike man until twelve hundred years later St.
+Francis was born at Assisi. St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Dominic, if
+Christianity could only produce mighty individualists of Faith like
+them, it could scarcely have endured as it had endured. _And now abideth
+faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is
+charity._ There was something almost wistful in those words coming from
+the mouth of St. Paul. It was scarcely conceivable that St. John or St.
+Francis could ever have said that; it would scarcely have struck either
+that the three virtues were separable.
+
+Keppel Street was empty now. Mark's headache had been blown away by the
+night wind with his memories and the incoherent thoughts which had
+gathered round the contemplation of Father Rowley's character. He was
+just going to draw away from the window and undress when he caught sight
+of a figure tacking from one pavement to the other up Keppel Street.
+Mark watched its progress, amused at the extraordinary amount of trouble
+it was giving itself, until one tack was brought to a sharp conclusion
+by a lamp-post to which the figure clung long enough to be recognized as
+that of the Reverend George Edward Mousley, who had been tacking like
+this to make the harbour of the Mission House. Mark, remembering the
+letter which had been written to the Bishop of Warwick, wondered if he
+could not at any rate for to-night spare Father Rowley the
+disappointment of knowing that his plea for re-instatement was already
+answered by the drunken priest himself. He must make up his mind
+quickly, because even with the zigzag course Mousley was taking he would
+soon be ringing the bell of the Mission House, which meant that Father
+Rowley would be woken up and go down to let him in. Of course, he would
+have to know all about it in the morning, but to-night when he had gone
+to bed tired and full of hope for temperance in general and the
+reformation of Mousley in particular it was surely right to let him
+sleep in ignorance. Mark decided to take it upon himself to break the
+rules of the house, to open the door to Mousley, and if possible to get
+him upstairs to bed quietly. He went down with a lighted candle, crept
+across the gymnasium, and opened the door. Mousley was still tacking
+from pavement to pavement and making very little headway against a
+strong current of drink. Mark thought he had better go out and offer his
+services as pilot, because Mousley was beginning to sing an
+extraordinary song in which the tune and the words of _Good-bye, Dolly,
+I must leave you_, had got mixed up with _O happy band of pilgrims_.
+
+"Look here, Mr. Mousley, you mustn't sing now," said Mark taking hold of
+the arm with which the drunkard was trying to beat time. "It's after
+eleven o'clock, and you're just outside the Mission House."
+
+"I've been just outside the Mission House for an hour and three
+quarters, old chap," said Mr. Mousley solemnly. "Most incompatible thing
+I've ever known. I got back here at a quarter past nine, and I was just
+going to walk in when the house took two paces to the rear, and I've
+been walking after it the whole evening. Most incompatible thing I've
+ever known. Most incompatible thing that's ever happened to me in my
+life, Lidderdale. If I were a superstitious man, which I'm not, I should
+say the house was bewitched. If I had a moment to spare, I should sit
+down at once and write an account of my most incompatible experience to
+the Society of Psychical Research, if I were a superstitious man, which
+I'm not. Yes. . . ."
+
+Mr. Mousley tried to focus his glassy eyes upon the arcana of
+spiritualism, rocking ambiguously the while upon the kerb. Mark murmured
+something more about the need for going in quietly.
+
+"It's very kind of you to come out and talk to me like this," the
+drunken priest went on. "But what you ought to have done was to have
+kept hold of the house for a minute or two so as to give me time to get
+in quietly. Now we shall probably both be out here all night trying to
+get in quietly. It's impossible to keep warm by this lamp-post. Most
+inadequate heating arrangement. It is a lamp-post, isn't it? Yes, I
+thought it was. I had a fleeting impression that it was my bedroom
+candle, but I see now that I was mistaken, I see now perfectly clearly
+that it is a lamp-post, if not two. Of course, that may account for my
+not being able to get into the Mission House. I was trying to decide
+which front door I should go in by, and while I was waiting I think I
+must have gone in by the wrong one, for I hit my nose a most severe blow
+on the nose. One has to remember to be very careful with front doors. Of
+course, if it was my own house I should have used a latch-key instanter;
+for I inevitably, I mean invariably, carry a latch-key about with me and
+when it won't open my front door I use it to wind my watch. You know,
+it's one of those small keys you can wind up watches with, if you know
+the kind of key I mean. I'd draw you a picture of it if I had a pencil,
+but I haven't got a pencil."
+
+"Now don't stay talking here," Mark urged. "Come along back, and do try
+to come quietly. I keep telling you it's after eleven o'clock, and you
+know Father Rowley likes everybody to be in by ten."
+
+"That's what I've been saying to myself the whole evening," said Mr.
+Mousley. "Only what happened, you see, was that I met the son of a man
+who used to know my father, a very nice fellow indeed, a very
+intellectual fellow. I never remember spending a more intellectual
+evening in my life. A feast of reason and a flowing bowl, I mean soul,
+s-o-u-l, not b-o-u-l. Did I say bowl? Soul. . . . Soul. . . ."
+
+"All right," said Mark. "But if you've had such a jolly evening, come in
+now and don't make a noise."
+
+"I'll come in whenever you like," Mr. Mousley offered. "I'm at your
+disposition entirely. The only request I have to make is that you will
+guarantee that the house stays where it was built. It's all very fine
+for an ordinary house to behave like this, but when a mission house
+behaves like this I call it disgraceful. I don't know what I've done to
+the house that it should conceive such a dislike to me. I say,
+Lidderdale, have they been taking up the drains or something in this
+street? Because I distinctly had an impression just then that I put my
+foot into a hole."
+
+"The street's perfectly all right," said Mark. "Nothing has been done to
+it."
+
+"There's no reason why they shouldn't take up the drains if they want
+to, I'm not complaining. Drains have to be taken up and I should be the
+last man to complain; but I merely asked a question, and I'm convinced
+that they have been taking up the drains. Yes, I've had a very
+intellectual evening. My head's whirling with philosophy. We've talked
+about everything. My friend talked a good deal about Buddhism. And I
+made rather a good joke about Confucius being so confusing, at which I
+laughed inordinately. Inordinately, Lidderdale. I've had a very keen
+sense of humour ever since I was a baby. I say, Lidderdale, you
+certainly know your way about this street. I'm very much obliged to me
+for meeting you. I shall get to know the street in time. You see, my
+object was to get beyond the house, because I said to myself 'the house
+is in Keppel Street, it can dodge about _in_ Keppel Street, but it can't
+be in any other street,' so I thought that if I could dodge it into the
+corner of Keppel Street--you follow what I mean? I may be talking a bit
+above your head, we've been talking philosophy all the evening, but if
+you concentrate you'll follow my meaning."
+
+"Here we are," said Mark, for by this time he had persuaded Mr. Mousley
+to put his foot upon the step of the front door.
+
+"You managed the house very well," said the clergyman. "It's
+extraordinary how a house will take to some people and not to others.
+Now I can do anything I like with dogs, and you can do anything you like
+with houses. But it's no good patting or stroking a house. You've got to
+manage a house quite differently to that. You've got to keep a house's
+accounts. You haven't got to keep a dog's accounts."
+
+They were in the gymnasium by now, which by the light of Mark's small
+candle loomed as vast as a church.
+
+"Don't talk as you go upstairs," Mark admonished.
+
+"Isn't that a dog I see there?"
+
+"No, no, no," said Mark. "It's the horse. Come along."
+
+"A horse?" Mousley echoed. "Well, I can manage horses too. Come here,
+Dobbin. If I'd known we were going to meet a horse I should have brought
+back some sugar with me. I suppose it's too late to go back and buy some
+sugar now?"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mark impatiently. "Much too late. Come along."
+
+"If I had a piece of sugar he'd follow us upstairs. You'll find a horse
+will go anywhere after a piece of sugar. It is a horse, isn't it? Not a
+donkey? Because if it was a donkey he would want a thistle, and I don't
+know where I can get a thistle at this time of night. I say, did you
+prod me in the stomach then with anything?" asked Mr. Mousley severely.
+
+"No, no," said Mark. "Come along, it was the parallel bars."
+
+"I've not been near any bars to-night, and if you are suggesting that
+I've been in bars you're making an insinuation which I very much resent,
+an insinuation which I resent most bitterly, an insinuation which I
+should not allow anybody to make without first pointing out that it was
+an insinuation."
+
+"Do come down off that ladder," Mark said.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Lidderdale. I was under the impression for the
+moment that I was going upstairs. I have really been so confused by
+Confucius and by the extraordinary behaviour of the house to-night,
+recoiling from me as it did, that for the moment I was under the
+impression that I was going upstairs."
+
+At this moment Mr. Mousley fell from the ladder, luckily on one of the
+gymnasium mats.
+
+"I do think it's a most ridiculous habit," he said, "not to place a
+doormat in what I might describe as a suitable cavity. The number of
+times in my life that I've fallen over doormats simply because people
+will not take the trouble to make the necessary depression in the floor
+with which to contain such a useful domestic receptacle you would
+scarcely believe. I must have fallen over thousands of doormats in my
+life," he shouted at the top of his voice.
+
+"You'll wake everybody up in the house," Mark exclaimed in an agony.
+"For heaven's sake keep quiet."
+
+"Oh, we are in the house, are we?" said Mr. Mousley. "I'm very much
+relieved to hear you say that, Lidderdale. For a brief moment, I don't
+know why, I was almost as confused as Confucius as to where we were."
+
+At this moment, candle in hand, and in a white flannel nightgown looking
+larger than ever, Father Rowley appeared in the gallery above and
+leaning over demanded who was there.
+
+"Is that Father Rowley?" Mr. Mousley inquired with intense courtesy. "Or
+do my eyes deceive me? You'll excuse me from replying to your apparently
+simple question, Father Rowley, but I have met such a number of people
+to-night including the son of a man who used to know my father that I
+really don't know who _is_ there, although I'm inclined to think that
+_I_ am here. But I've had a series of such a remarkable series of
+adventures to-night that I should like your advice about them. I've been
+spending a very intellectual evening, Father Rowley."
+
+"Go to bed," said the mission priest severely. "I'll speak to you in the
+morning."
+
+"Father Rowley isn't annoyed with me, is he?" Mr. Mousley asked.
+
+"I think he's rather annoyed at your being so late," said Mark.
+
+"Late for what?"
+
+"Is that you, Mark, down there?" asked the Missioner.
+
+"I'm lighting Mr. Mousley across the gymnasium," Mark explained. "I
+think I'd better take him up to his room."
+
+"If your young friend is as clever at managing rooms as he is at
+managing houses we shall get on splendidly, Father Rowley. I have
+perfect confidence in his manner with rooms. He soothed this house in
+the most remarkable way. It was jumping about like a pea in a pod till
+he caught hold of the reins."
+
+"Mark, go to bed. I will see Mr. Mousley to his room."
+
+"Several years ago," said the drunken priest. "I went with an old friend
+to see Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. The resemblance between Father
+Rowley and Miss Ellen Terry is very remarkable. Good-night, Lidderdale,
+I am perfectly comfortable on this mat. Good-night."
+
+In the gallery above Mark, who had not dared to disobey Father Rowley's
+orders, asked him what was to be done to get Mr. Mousley to bed.
+
+"Go and wake Cartwright and Warrender to help me to get him upstairs,"
+the Missioner commanded.
+
+"I can help you. . . ." Mark began.
+
+"Do what I say," said the Missioner curtly.
+
+In the morning Father Rowley sent for Mark to give his account of what
+had happened the night before, and when Mark had finished his tale, the
+priest sat for a while in silence.
+
+"Are you going to send him away?" Mark asked.
+
+"Send him away?" Father Rowley repeated. "Where would I send him? If he
+can't keep off drink in this house and in these surroundings where else
+will he keep off drink? No, I'm only amused at my optimism."
+
+There was a knock on the door.
+
+"I expect that is Mr. Mousley," said Mark. "I'll leave you with him."
+
+"No, don't go away," said the Missioner. "If Mousley didn't mind your
+seeing him as he was last night, there's no reason why this morning he
+should mind your hearing my comments upon his behaviour."
+
+The tap on the door was repeated.
+
+"Come in, come in, Mousley, and take a seat."
+
+Mr. Mousley walked timidly across the room and sat on the very edge of
+the chair offered him by Father Rowley. He was a quiet, rather drab
+little man, the kind of little man who always loses his seat in a
+railway carriage and who always gets pushed further up in an omnibus,
+one of life's pawns. The presence of Mark did not seem to affect him,
+for no sooner was he seated than he began to apologize with suspicious
+rapidity, as if by now his apologies had been reduced to a formula.
+
+"I really must apologize, Father Rowley, for my lateness last night and
+for coming in, I fear, slightly the worse for liquor. The fact is I had
+a little headache and went to the chemist for a pick-me-up, on top of
+which I met an old college friend, and though I don't think I had more
+than two glasses of beer I may have had three. They didn't seem to go
+very well with the pick-me-up. I assure you--"
+
+"Stop," said Father Rowley. "The only assurance of any value to me will
+be your behaviour in the future."
+
+"Oh, then I'm not to leave this morning?" Mr. Mousley gasped with open
+mouth.
+
+"Where would you go if you left here?"
+
+"Well, to tell you the truth," Mr. Mousley admitted, "I have been rather
+worried over that little problem ever since I woke up this morning. I
+scarcely expected that you would tolerate my presence any longer in this
+house. You will excuse me, Father Rowley, but I am rather overwhelmed
+for the moment by your kindness. I scarcely know how to express what I
+feel. I have usually found people so very impatient of my weakness. Do
+you seriously mean I needn't go away this morning?"
+
+"You have already been sufficiently punished, I hope," said the
+Missioner, "by the humiliations you have inflicted on yourself both
+outside and inside this house."
+
+"My thoughts are always humiliating," said Mr. Mousley. "I think perhaps
+that nowadays these humiliating thoughts are my chief temptation to
+drink. Since I have been here and shared in your hospitality I have felt
+more sharply than ever my disgrace. I have several times been on the
+point of asking you to let me be given some kind of work, but I have
+always been too much ashamed when it came to the point to express my
+aspirations in words."
+
+"Only yesterday afternoon," said Father Rowley, "I wrote to the Bishop
+of Warwick, who has continued to interest himself in you notwithstanding
+the many occasions you have disappointed him, yes, I wrote to the Bishop
+of Warwick to say that since you came to St. Agnes' your behaviour had
+justified my suggesting that you should once again be allowed to say
+Mass."
+
+"You wrote that yesterday afternoon?" Mr. Mousley exclaimed. "And the
+instant afterwards I went out and got drunk?"
+
+"You mean you took a pick-me-up and two glasses of beer," corrected
+Father Rowley.
+
+"No, no, no, it wasn't a pick-me-up. I went out and got drunk on brandy
+quite deliberately."
+
+Father Rowley looked quickly across at Mark, who hastily left the two
+priests together. He divined from the Missioner's quick glance that he
+was going to hear Mr. Mousley's confession. A week later Mr. Mousley
+asked Mark if he would serve at Mass the next morning.
+
+"It may seem an odd request," he said, "but inasmuch as you have seen
+the depths to which I can sink, I want you equally to see the heights to
+which Father Rowley has raised me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SILCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION
+
+
+It was never allowed to be forgotten at St. Agnes' that the Mission was
+the Silchester College Mission; and there were few days in the year on
+which it was possible to visit the Mission House without finding there
+some member of the College past or present. Every Sunday during term two
+or three prefects would sit down to dinner; masters turned up during the
+holidays; even the mighty Provost himself paid occasional visits, during
+which he put off most of his majesty and became as nearly human as a
+facetious judge. Nor did Father Rowley allow Silchester to forget that
+it had a Mission. He was not at all content with issuing a half yearly
+report of progress and expenses, and he had no intention of letting St.
+Agnes' exist as a subject for an occasional school sermon or a religious
+tax levied on parents. From the first moment he had put foot in Chatsea
+he had done everything he could to make St. Agnes' be what it was
+supposed to be--the Silchester College Mission. He was particularly
+anxious that the new church should be built and beautified with money
+from Silchester sources, even if he also accepted money for this purpose
+from outside. Soon after Mark had become recognized as Father Rowley's
+confidential secretary, he visited Silchester for the first time in his
+company.
+
+It was the custom during the summer for the various guilds and clubs
+connected with the parish to be entertained in turn at the College. It
+had never happened that Mark had accompanied any of these outings, which
+in the early days of St. Agnes' had been regarded with dread by the
+College authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was
+stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions as you
+could wish to see. Mark's first visit to Silchester was on the occasion
+of Father Rowley's terminal sermon in the June after he was nineteen. He
+found the experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough to
+have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed through the ordeal
+either of a first term at a public school or of a first term at the
+University. Boys are always critical, and at Silchester with the
+tradition of six hundred years to give them a corporate self-confidence,
+the judgment of outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world,
+unless it might be in the New Hebrides. Added to their critical regard
+was a chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence
+appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of
+the Houyhnms. These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so
+condescending, appalled him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who
+came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they,
+without their background were themselves a little shy, although their
+shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease. Here,
+however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints,
+row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended
+more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he
+found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of
+respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete.
+The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive
+conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society;
+he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously
+when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without
+being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying at
+a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a
+tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the
+Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master. It was difficult
+for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a
+standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address
+their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline. Yet
+everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that
+delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and
+curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be
+called anything else except Jex.
+
+For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of
+St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his
+surrender of the scholarship to Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had
+his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have
+brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or
+five men in whose charge he had been left. He was tired of being
+continually rescued from drowning in their conversation. Their
+intentional courtesy galled him. He felt like a negro chief being shown
+the sights of England by a tired equerry. It was a fine summer day, and
+he went down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match. He sat
+down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the
+mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side
+was in. Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the
+sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than
+a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees and towers of
+Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, the cattle in
+the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated Mark with his inability to
+put himself in the picture. The grass beneath the oak was scattered with
+a treasury of small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens
+and silver disks that Mark set himself to count.
+
+"Trying not to yearn and trying not to yawn," he muttered. "Forty-four,
+forty-five, forty-six."
+
+"You're ten out," said a voice. "We want fifty-six to tie, fifty-seven
+to win."
+
+Mark looked up and saw that a Silchester man whom he remembered seeing
+once at the Mission was preparing to sit down beside him. He was a tall
+youth, fair and freckled and clear cut, perfectly self-possessed, but
+lacking any hint of condescension in his manner.
+
+"Didn't you come over with Rowley?" he inquired.
+
+Mark was going to explain that he was working at the Mission when it
+struck him that a Silchester man might have the right to resent that,
+and he gave no more than a simple affirmative.
+
+"I remember seeing you at the Mission," he went on. "My name's Hathorne.
+Oh, well hit, sir, well hit!"
+
+Hathorne's approbation of the batsman made the match appear even more
+remote. It was like the comment of a passer-by upon a well-designed
+figure in a tapestry. It was an expression of his own æsthetic pleasure,
+and bore no relation to the player he applauded.
+
+"I've only been down to the Mission once," he continued, turning to
+Mark. "I felt rather up against it there."
+
+"Well, I feel much more up against it in Silchester," replied Mark.
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," Hathorne nodded. "But you're only up
+against form: I was up against matter. It struck me when I was down
+there what awful cheek it was for me to be calmly going down to Chatsea
+and supposing that I had a right to go there, because I had contributed
+a certain amount of money belonging to my father, to help spiritually a
+lot of people who probably need spiritual help much less than I do
+myself. Of course, with anybody else except Rowley in charge the effect
+would be damnable. As it is, he manages to keep us from feeling as if
+we'd paid to go and look at the Zoo. You're a lucky chap to be working
+there without the uncomfortable feeling that you're just being tolerated
+because you're a Siltonian."
+
+"I was thinking," said Mark, "that I was only being tolerated here
+because I happened to come with Rowley. It's impossible to visit a place
+like this and not regret that one must remain an outsider."
+
+"It depends on what you want to do," said Hathorne. "I want to be a
+parson. I'm going up to the Varsity in October, and I am beginning to
+wonder what on earth good I shall be at the end of it all."
+
+He gave Mark an opportunity to comment on this announcement; but Mark
+did not know what to say and remained silent.
+
+"I see you're not in the mood to be communicative," Hathorne went on
+with a smile. "I don't blame you. It's impossible to be communicative in
+this place; but some time, when I'm down at the Mission again, I'd like
+to have what is called a heart-to-heart talk. That was a good boundary.
+We shall win quite comfortably. So long!"
+
+The tall, fair youth passed on; and although Mark never had that
+heart-to-heart talk with him in the Mission, because he was killed in a
+mountaineering accident in Switzerland that August, the memory of him
+sitting there under the oak tree on that fine summer afternoon remained
+with Mark for ever; and after that brief conversation he lost most of
+his shyness, so that he came to enjoy his visits to Silchester as much
+as the Missioner himself did.
+
+As the new church drew near its completion, Mark apprehended why Father
+Rowley attached so much importance to as much of the money for it as
+possible coming directly from Silchester. He apprehended how the
+Missioner felt that he was building Silchester in a Chatsea slum; and
+from that moment that landscape like a mirage of the sunlight, that
+landscape into which he had been unable to fit himself when he first
+beheld it became his own, for now beyond the chimneypots he could always
+see the bald hills of Berkshire and the trees and towers of Silchester,
+and at the end of all the meanest alleys there were cattle in the
+meadows and birds in the air above.
+
+Silchester was not the only place that Mark visited with Father Rowley.
+It became a recognized custom for him to travel up to London whenever
+the Missioner was preaching, and in London he was once more struck by
+the variety of Father Rowley's worldly knowledge and secular friends.
+One week-end will serve as a specimen of many. They left Chatsea on a
+Saturday morning travelling up to town in a third class smoker full of
+bluejackets and soldiers on leave. None of them happened to know the
+Missioner, and for a time they talked surlily in undertones, evidently
+viewing with distaste the prospect of having a Holy Joe in their
+compartment all the way to London; but when Father Rowley pulled out his
+pipe, for always when he was away from St. Agnes' he allowed himself the
+privilege of smoking, and began to talk to them about their ships and
+their regiments with unquestionable knowledge, they unbent, so that long
+before Waterloo was reached it must have been the jolliest compartment
+in the whole train. It was all done so easily, and yet without any of
+that deliberate descent from a pedestal, which is the democratic manner
+of so many parsons; there was none of that Friar Tuck style of
+aggressive laymanhood, nor that subtler way of denying Christ (of course
+with the best intentions) which consists of salting the conversation
+with a few "damns" and peppering it with a couple of "bloodies" to show
+that a parson may be what is called human. Father Rowley was simply
+himself; and a month later two of the bluejackets in that compartment
+and one of the soldiers were regular visitors to the Mission House, and
+what is more regular visitors to the Blessed Sacrament.
+
+They reached London soon after midday and went to lunch at a restaurant
+in Jermyn Street famous for a Russian salad that Father Rowley sometimes
+spoke of with affection in Chatsea. After lunch they went to a matinée
+of _Pelleas and Mélisande_, the Missioner having been given two stalls
+by an actor friend. Mark enjoyed the play and was being stirred by the
+imagination of old, unhappy, far off things until his companion began to
+laugh. Several clever women who looked as if they had been dragged
+through a hedge said "Hush!"; even Mark, compassionate of the players'
+feelings should they hear Father Rowley laugh at the poignant nonsense
+they were uttering on the stage, begged him to control himself.
+
+"But this is most unending rubbish," he said. "I've never heard anything
+so ridiculous in my life. Terrible."
+
+The curtain fell on the act at this moment, so that Father Rowley was
+able to give louder voice to his opinions.
+
+"This is unspeakable bosh," he repeated. "I can't understand anything at
+all that is going on. People run on and run off again and make the most
+idiotic remarks. I really don't think I can stand any more of this."
+
+The clever women rattled their beads and writhed their necks like angry
+snakes without effect upon the Missioner.
+
+"I don't think I can stand any more of this," he repeated. "I shall
+have apoplexy if this goes on."
+
+The clever women hissed angrily about the kind of people that came to
+theatres nowadays.
+
+"This man Maeterlinck must have escaped from an asylum," Father Rowley
+went on. "I never heard such deplorable nonsense in my life."
+
+"I shall ask an attendant if we can change our seats," snapped one of
+the clever women in front. "That's the worst of coming to a Saturday
+afternoon performance, such extraordinary people come up to town on
+Saturdays."
+
+"There you are," exclaimed Father Rowley loudly, "even that poor woman
+in front thinks they're extraordinary."
+
+"She's talking about you," said Mark, "not about the people in the
+play."
+
+"My good woman," said Father Rowley, leaning over and tapping her on the
+shoulder. "You don't think that you really enjoy this rubbish, do you?"
+
+One of her friends who was near the gangway called out to a programme
+seller:
+
+"Attendant, attendant, is it possible for my friends and myself to move
+into another row? We are being pestered with a running commentary by
+that stout clergyman behind that lady in green."
+
+"Don't disturb yourselves, you foolish geese," said Father Rowley
+rising. "I'm not going to sit through another act. Come along, Mark,
+come along, come along. I am not happy. I am not happy," he cried in an
+absurd falsetto.
+
+Then roaring with laughter at his own imitation of Mélisande, he went
+rolling out of the theatre and sniffed contentedly the air of the
+Strand.
+
+"I told Lady Pechell we shouldn't arrive till tea-time, so we'd better
+go and ride on the top of a bus as far as the city."
+
+It was an exhilarating ride, although Mark found that Father Rowley
+occupied much more than half of the seat for two. About five o'clock
+they came to the shadowy house in Portman Square in which they were to
+stay till Monday. The Missioner was as much at home here as he was at
+Silchester College or in a railway compartment full of bluejackets. He
+knew as well how to greet the old butler as Lady Pechell and her sister
+Mrs. Mannakay, to all of whom equally his visit was an obvious delight.
+Not even Father Rowley's bulk could dwarf the proportions of that double
+drawing-room or of that heavy Victorian furniture. He took his place
+among the cases of stuffed humming birds and glass-topped tables of
+curios, among the brocade curtains with shaped vallances and golden
+tassels, among the chandeliers and lacquered cabinets and cages of
+avadavats, sitting there like a great Buddha while he chatted to the two
+old ladies of a society that seemed to Mark as remote as the people in
+_Pelleas and Mélisande_. From time to time one of the old ladies would
+try to draw Mark into the conversation; but he preferred listening and
+let them think that his monosyllabic answers signified a shyness that
+did not want to be conspicuous. Soon they appeared to forget his
+existence. Deep in the lap of an armchair covered with a glazed chintz
+of Sèvres roses and sable he was enthralled by that chronicle of
+phantoms, that frieze of ghosts passing before his eyes, while the
+present faded away upon the growing quiet of the London evening and
+became remote as the distant roar of the traffic, which itself was
+remote as the sound of the sea in a shell. Fox-hunting squires caracoled
+by with the air of paladins; and there was never a lady mentioned that
+did not take the fancy like a princess in an old tale.
+
+"He's universal," Mark thought. "And that's one of the secrets of being
+a great priest. And that's why he can talk about Heaven and make you
+feel that he knows what he's talking about. And if I can discern what he
+is," Mark went on to himself, "I can be what he is. And I will be," he
+vowed in the rapture of a sudden revelation.
+
+On Sunday morning Father Rowley preached in the fashionable church of
+St. Cyprian's, South Kensington, after which they lunched at the
+vicarage. The Reverend Drogo Mortemer was a dapper little bachelor (it
+would be inappropriate to call such a worldly little fellow a celibate)
+who considered himself the leader of the most advanced section of the
+Catholic Party in the Church of England. He certainly had a finger in
+the pie of every well-cooked intrigue, knew everybody worth knowing in
+London, and had the private ears of several bishops. No more skilful
+place-finder existed, and any member of the advanced section who wanted
+a place for himself or for a friend had recourse to Mortemer.
+
+"But the little man is all right," Father Rowley had told Mark. "Many
+people would have used his talents to further himself. He has every
+qualification for the episcopate except one--he believes in the
+Sacraments."
+
+Mr. Mortemer was the only son of James Mortimer of the famous firm of
+Hadley and Mortimer. His father had become rich before he married the
+youngest daughter of an ancient but impoverished house, and soon after
+his marriage he died. Mrs. Mortemer brought up her son to forget that
+his father had been a tradesman and to remember that he was rich. In
+order to dissociate herself from a partnership which now existed only in
+name above the plate glass of the enormous shop in Oxford Street Mrs.
+Mortemer took to spelling her name with an "e," which as she pointed out
+was the original spelling. She had already gratified her romantic fancy
+by calling her son Drogo. Harrow and Cambridge completed what Mrs.
+Mortemer began, and if Drogo had not developed what his mother spoke of
+as a "mania for religion" there is no reason to suppose that he would
+not one day have been a cabinet minister. However, as it was, Mrs.
+Mortemer died cherishing with her last breath a profound conviction that
+her son would soon be a bishop. That he was not likely to become a
+bishop was due to the fact that with all his worldliness, with all his
+wealth, with all his love of wire-pulling, with all his respect for rank
+he held definite opinions and was not afraid to belong to a minority
+unpopular in high places. He had too a simple piety that made his church
+a power in spite of fashionable weddings and exorbitant pew rents.
+
+"The sort of thing we're trying to do here in a small way," he said to
+Father Rowley at lunch, "is what the Jesuits are doing at Farm Street.
+My two assistant priests are both rather brilliant young people, and I'm
+always on the look out to get more young men of the right type."
+
+"You'd better offer Lidderdale a title when he's ready to be ordained."
+
+"Why, of course I will," said the dapper little vicar with a courteous
+smile for Mark. "Do take some more claret, Father Rowley. It's rather a
+specialty of ours here. We have a friend in Bordeaux who buys for us."
+
+It was typical of Mr. Mortemer to use the plural.
+
+"There you are, Mark Anthony. I've secured you a title."
+
+"Mr. Mortemer is only being polite," said Mark.
+
+"No, no, my dear boy, on the contrary I meant absolutely what I said."
+
+He seemed worried by Mark's distrust of his sincerity, and for the rest
+of lunch he laid himself out to entertain his less important guest,
+talking with a slight excess of charm about the lack of vitality, loss
+of influence, and oriental barbarism of the Orthodox Church.
+
+"_Enfin_, Asiatic religion," he said. "Don't you agree with me, Mr.
+Lidderdale? And our Philorthodox brethren who would like to bring about
+reunion with such a Church . . . the result would be dreadful . . .
+Eurasian . . . yes, I must confess that sometimes I sympathize with the
+behaviour of the Venetians in the Fourth Crusade."
+
+Father Rowley looked at his watch and announced that it was time to
+start for Poplar, where he was to address a large gathering of
+Socialists in the Town Hall. Mr. Mortemer made a _moue_.
+
+"Nevertheless I'm bound to admit that you have a strong case. Perhaps
+I'm like the young man with large possessions," he burst out with a
+sudden intense gravity. "Perhaps after all the St. Cyprian's religion
+isn't Christianity at all. Just Catholicism. Nothing else."
+
+"You'd better come down to Poplar with Mark and me," Father Rowley
+suggested.
+
+But Mr. Mortemer shook his head with a smile.
+
+The Poplar meeting was crowded. In an atmosphere of good fellowship one
+speaker after another got up and denounced the present order. It was
+difficult to follow the arguments of the speakers, because the audience
+cheered so many isolated statements. A number of people shook hands
+with Father Rowley when he had finished his speech and wished that
+there were more parsons like him. Father Rowley had not indulged in
+political attacks, but had contented himself with praise of the poor. He
+had spoken movingly, but Mark was not moved by his words. He had a vague
+feeling that Father Rowley was being exploited. He was dazed by the
+exuberance of the meeting and was glad when it was over and he was back
+in Portman Square talking to Lady Pechell and Mrs. Mannakay while Father
+Rowley rested for an hour before he walked round the corner to preach in
+old Jamaica Chapel, a galleried Georgian conventicle that was now the
+Church of the Visitation, but was still generally known as Jamaica
+Chapel. Evensong was half over when the preacher arrived, and the church
+being full Mark was given a chair by the sidesman in a dark corner,
+which presently became darker when Father Rowley went up into the
+pulpit, for all the lights were lowered except those above the
+preacher's head, and nothing was visible in the church except the
+luminous crucifix upon the High Altar. The warmth and darkness brought
+out the scent of the many women gathered together; the atmosphere was
+charged with human emotion so that Mark sitting in his corner could
+fancy that he was lost in the sensuous glooms behind some _Mater
+Addolorata_ of the seventeenth century. He longed to be back in Chatsea.
+He was dismayed at the prospect of one day perhaps having to cope with
+this quality of devotion. He shuddered at the thought, and for the first
+time he wondered if he had not a vocation for the monastic life. But was
+it a vocation if one longed to escape the world? Must not a true
+vocation be a longing to draw nearer to God? Oh, this nauseating bouquet
+of feminine perfumes . . . it was impossible to pay attention to the
+sermon.
+
+Mark went to bed early with a headache; but in the morning he woke
+refreshed with the knowledge that they were going back to Chatsea,
+although before they reached home the journey had to be broken at High
+Thorpe whither Father Rowley had been summoned to an interview by the
+Bishop of Silchester on account of refusing to communicate some people
+at the mid-day celebration. Dr. Crawshay was at that time so ill that
+he received the Chatsea Missioner in bed, and on hearing that he was
+accompanied by a young man who hoped to take Holy Orders the Bishop sent
+word for Mark to come up to his bedroom, where he gave him his blessing.
+Mark never forgot the picture of the Bishop lying there under a
+chequered coverlet looking like an old ivory chessman, a white bishop
+that had been taken in the game and put off the board.
+
+"And now, Mr. Rowley," Dr. Crawshay began when he had motioned Mark to a
+chair. "To return to the subject under discussion between us. How can
+you justify by any rubric of the Book of Common Prayer non-communicating
+attendance?"
+
+"I don't justify it by any rubric," the Missioner replied.
+
+"Oh, you don't, don't you?"
+
+"I justify it by the needs of human nature," the Missioner continued.
+"In order to provide the necessary three communicants for the mid-day
+Mass. . . ."
+
+"One moment, Mr. Rowley," the Bishop interrupted. "I beg you most
+earnestly to avoid that word. You know my old-fashioned Protestant
+notions," he added, and his eyes so tired with pain twinkled for a
+moment. "To me there is always something distasteful about that word."
+
+"What shall I substitute, my lord?" the Missioner asked. "Do you object
+to the word 'Eucharist'?"
+
+"No, I don't object to that, though why you should want a Greek name
+when we have a beautiful English name like the Lord's Supper, why you
+should want to employ such a barbarism as 'Eucharist' I don't know.
+However, if you must use Eucharist, use Eucharist. And now, by wandering
+off into a discussion of terminology I forget where we were. Oh yes, you
+were on the point of justifying non-communicating attendance by the
+needs of human nature."
+
+"I am afraid, my lord, that in a district like St. Agnes' it is
+impossible always to ensure communicants for sometimes as many as four
+early Lord's Suppers said by visiting priests."
+
+The Bishop's eyes twinkled again.
+
+"Yes, there you rather have me, Mr. Rowley. Four early Lord's Suppers
+does sound, I must admit, a little odd."
+
+"Four early Eucharists followed by another for children at half-past
+nine, and the parochial sung Mass--sung Eucharist."
+
+"Children?" Dr. Crawshay repeated. "You surely don't let children go to
+the Celebration?"
+
+"_Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven_," Father Rowley reminded the Bishop.
+
+"Yes, yes, I happen to have heard that text before. But the devil, Mr.
+Rowley, can cite Scripture to his purpose."
+
+"In the last letter I wrote to your lordship about the services at St.
+Agnes' I particularly mentioned our children's Eucharist."
+
+"Did you, Mr. Rowley, did you? I had quite forgotten that."
+
+Father Rowley turned to Mark for verification.
+
+"Oh, if Mr. Rowley remembers that he did write, there is no need to call
+witnesses. I have had to complain a good deal of him, but I have never
+had to complain of his frankness. It must be my fault, but I certainly
+hadn't understood that there was definitely a children's Eucharist. This
+then, I fancy, must be the service at which those three ladies
+complained of your treatment of them."
+
+"What three ladies?" asked the priest.
+
+"Dear me, I'm growing very unbusinesslike, I'm afraid. I thought I had
+enclosed you a copy of their letter to me when I wrote to invite an
+explanation of your high-handed action."
+
+The Bishop sighed. The details of these ecclesiastical squabbles
+distracted him at a time when he should soon leave this fretful earth
+behind him. He continued wearily:
+
+"These were the three ladies who were refused communion by you at, as I
+understood, the mid-day Celebration, which now turns out to be what you
+call the children's Eucharist."
+
+"It is perfectly true, my lord," Father Rowley admitted, "that on Sunday
+week three women did present themselves from a neighbouring parish."
+
+"Ah, they were not parishioners?"
+
+"Certainly not, my lord."
+
+"Which is a point in your favour."
+
+"Throughout the service they sat looking through opera-glasses at Snaith
+who was officiating, and greatly scandalizing the children, who are not
+used to such behaviour in church."
+
+"Such behaviour was certainly most objectionable," the Bishop agreed.
+
+"I happened to be sitting at the back of the church, thinking out my
+sermon, and their behaviour annoyed me so much that I sent for the
+sacristan to go and order a cab. I then went up and whispered to them
+that inasmuch as they were strangers it would be better if they went and
+made their Communion in the next parish where the service would be more
+lenient to their theory of worship. I took one of them by the arm, led
+her gently down the aisle and out into the street, and handed her into
+the cab. Her two companions followed her; I paid the cabman; and that
+was the end of the matter."
+
+The Bishop lay back on the pillows and thought for a moment or two in
+silence.
+
+"Yes," he said finally, "I think that in this case you were justified.
+At the same time your justification by the Book of Common Prayer lay in
+the fact that these women did not give you notice beforehand of their
+intention to communicate. I think I must insist that in future you make
+some arrangement with your workers and helpers to secure the requisite
+minimum of communicants for every celebration. Personally, I think six
+on a Sunday and four on a week-day far too many. I think the repetition
+has a tendency to cheapen the Sacrament."
+
+"_By Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God
+continually_," Father Rowley quoted from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
+
+"Yes, yes, I know," said the Bishop. "But I wish you wouldn't drag in
+these texts. They really have nothing whatever to do with the point in
+question. Please realize, Mr. Rowley, that I allow you a great deal of
+latitude at St. Agnes' because I am aware of what a great influence for
+good you have been among these poor people."
+
+"Your lordship has always been consideration itself."
+
+"If that be your opinion, I want you to obey my ruling in this small
+matter. I am continually being involved in correspondence on your
+account with Vigilance Societies of the type of the Protestant Alliance,
+and I shall give myself the pleasure of answering their complaints
+without at the same time not, as I hope, impeding your splendid work. I
+wish also, if God allows me to leave this bed again, to take the next
+Confirmation in St. Agnes' myself. My presence there will afford you a
+measure of official support which will not, I venture to believe, be a
+disadvantage to your work. I do not expect you to modify your method of
+conducting the service too much. That would savour of hypocrisy, both on
+your side and on mine. But there are one or two things which I should
+prefer not to see again. Last time you dressed a number of your
+choir-boys in red cassocks."
+
+"The servers, you mean, my lord?"
+
+"Whatever you call them, they wear red cassocks, red slippers, and red
+skull caps. That I really cannot stand. You must put them into black
+cassocks and leave their caps and slippers in the vestry cupboard.
+Further, I do not wish that most conspicuous processional crucifix to be
+carried about in front of me wherever I go."
+
+"Would you like the crucifix to be taken down from the altar as well?"
+Father Rowley asked.
+
+"No, that can stay: I shan't see that one."
+
+"What date will suit your lordship for the Confirmation?"
+
+"Ought not the question to have been rather what date will suit you, for
+I have never yet been fortunate enough, and I never hope to be fortunate
+enough, to fix upon a date straight off that will suit you, Mr. Rowley.
+Let me know that later. In any case, my presence must depend, alas, upon
+the state of my health. Now, how are you getting on with your new
+church?"
+
+"We shall be ready to open it in the spring of next year if all goes
+well. Do you think that a new licence will be required? The new St.
+Agnes' is joined to the present church by the sacristy."
+
+The Bishop considered the question for a moment.
+
+"No, I think that the old licence will serve. There is no prospect yet
+of making St. Agnes' into a parish, and I would rather take advantage of
+the technicality, all things being considered. Good-bye, Mr. Rowley. God
+bless you."
+
+The Bishop raised his thin arm.
+
+"God bless your lordship."
+
+"You are always in my prayers, Mr. Rowley. I think much about you lying
+here on the threshold of Eternal Life."
+
+The Bishop turned to Mark who knelt beside the bed.
+
+"Young man, I would fain be spared long enough to ordain you to the
+service of Almighty God, but you are still young and I am very near to
+death. You could not have before you a better example of a Christian
+gentleman than your friend and my friend Mr. Rowley. I shall say nothing
+about his example as a clergyman of the Church of England. Remember me,
+both of you, in your prayers."
+
+The Bishop sank back exhausted, and his visitors went quietly out of the
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE ALTAR FOR THE DEAD
+
+
+All went as well with the new St. Agnes' as the Bishop had hoped.
+Columns of red brick were covered in marble and alabaster by the votive
+offerings of individuals or the subscriptions of different Silchester
+Houses; the baldacchino was given by one rich old lady, the pavement of
+the church by another; the Duke of Birmingham contributed a thurible;
+Oxford Old Siltonians decorated the Lady Chapel; Cambridge Old
+Siltonians found the gold mosaic for the dome of the apse. Father Rowley
+begged money for the fabric far and wide, and the architect, the
+contractors, and the workmen, all Chatsea men, gave of their best and
+asked as little as possible in return. The new church was to be opened
+on Easter morning. But early in Lent the Bishop of Silchester died in
+the bed from which he had never risen since the day Father Rowley and
+Mark received his blessing. The diocese mourned him, for he was a gentle
+scholar, wise in his knowledge of men, simple and pious in his own life.
+
+Dr. Harvard Cheesman, the new Bishop, was translated from the see of
+Ipswich to which he had been preferred from the Chapel Royal in the
+Savoy. Bishop Cheesman possessed all the episcopal qualities. He had the
+hands of a physician and the brow of a scholar. He was filled with a
+sense of the importance of his position, and in that perhaps was
+included a sense of the importance of himself. He was eloquent in
+public, grandiloquent in private. To him Father Rowley wrote shortly
+after his enthronement.
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     March 24.
+
+     My Lord Bishop,
+
+     I am unwilling to trouble you at a moment when you must be
+     unusually busy; but I shall be glad to hear from you about the
+     opening of the new church of the Silchester College Mission, which
+     was fixed for Easter Sunday. Your predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, did
+     not think that any new licence would be necessary, because the new
+     St. Agnes' is joined by the sacristy to the old mission church.
+     There is no idea at present of asking you to constitute St. Agnes'
+     a parish and therefore the question of consecration does not arise.
+     I regret to say that Bishop Crawshay thoroughly disapproved of our
+     services and ritual, and I think he may have felt unwilling to
+     commit himself to endorsing them by the formal grant of a new
+     licence. May I hear from you at your convenience, and may I
+     respectfully add that your lordship has the prayers of all my
+     people?
+
+     I am your lordship's obedient servant,
+
+     John Rowley.
+
+To which the Lord Bishop of Silchester replied as follows:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     March 26.
+
+     Dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     As my predecessor Bishop Crawshay did not think a new licence would
+     be necessary I have no doubt that you can go ahead with your plan
+     of opening the new St. Agnes' on Easter Sunday. At the same time I
+     cannot help feeling that a new licence would be desirable and I am
+     asking Canon Whymper as Rural Dean to pay a visit and make the
+     necessary report. I have heard much of your work, and I pray that
+     it may be as blessed in my time as it was in the time of my
+     predecessor. I am grateful to your people for their prayers and I
+     am, my dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Harvard Silton.
+
+Canon Whymper, the Rector of Chatsea and Rural Dean, visited the new
+church on the Monday of Passion week. On Saturday Father Rowley received
+the following letter from the Bishop:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     April 9.
+
+     Dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     I have just received Canon Whymper's report upon the new church of
+     the Silchester College Mission, and I think before you open the
+     church on Easter Sunday I should like to talk over one or two
+     comparatively unimportant details with you personally. Moreover, it
+     would give me pleasure to make your acquaintance and hear something
+     of your method of work at St. Agnes'. Perhaps you will come to High
+     Thorpe on Monday. There is a train which arrives at High Thorpe at
+     2.36. So I shall expect you at the Castle at 2.42.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Harvard Silton.
+
+Mark paid his second visit to High Thorpe Castle on one of those serene
+April mornings that sail like swans across the lake of time. The
+episcopal standard on the highest turret hung limp; the castle quivered
+in the sunlight; the lawns wearing their richest green seemed as far
+from being walked upon as the blue sky above them. Whether it was that
+Mark was nervous about the result of the coming interview or whether it
+was that his first visit to High Thorpe had been the climax of so many
+new experiences, he was certainly much more sharply aware on this
+occasion of what the Castle stood for. Looking back to the morning when
+he and Father Rowley sat with Bishop Crawshay in his bedroom, he
+realized how much the personality of the dead bishop had dominated his
+surroundings and how little all this dignity and splendour, which must
+have been as imposing then as it was now, had impressed his imagination.
+There came over Mark, when he and Father Rowley were walking silently
+along the drive, such a foreboding of the result of this visit that he
+almost asked the priest why they bothered to continue their journey, why
+they did not turn round immediately and take the next train back to
+Chatsea. But before he had time to say anything Father Rowley had pulled
+the chain of the door bell, the butler had opened the door, and they
+were waiting the Bishop's pleasure in a room that smelt of the best
+leather and the best furniture polish. It was a room that so long as Dr.
+Cheesman held the see of Silchester would be given over to the
+preliminary nervousness of the diocesan clergy, who would one after
+another look at that steel engraving of Jesus Christ preaching by the
+Sea of Galilee, and who when they had finished looking at that would
+look at those two oil paintings of still life, those rich and sombre
+accumulations of fish, fruit and game, that glowed upon the walls with a
+kind of sinister luxury. Waiting rooms are all much alike, the doctor's,
+the dentist's, the bishop's, the railway-station's; they may differ
+slightly in externals, but they all possess the same atmosphere of
+transitory discomfort. They have all occupied human beings with the
+perusal of books they would never otherwise have dreamed of opening,
+with the observation of pictures they would never otherwise have thought
+of regarding twice.
+
+"Would you step this way," the butler requested. "His lordship is
+waiting for you in the library."
+
+The two culprits, for by this time Mark was oblivious of every other
+emotion except one of profound guilt, guilt of what he could not say,
+but most unmistakably guilt, walked along toward the Bishop's
+library--Father Rowley like a fat and naughty child who knows he is
+going to be reproved for eating too many tarts.
+
+There was a studied poise in the attitude of the Bishop when they
+entered. One shapely leg trailed negligently behind his chair ready at
+any moment to serve as the pivot upon which its owner could swing round
+again into the every-day world; the other leg firmly wedged against the
+desk supported the burden of his concentration. The Bishop swung round
+on the shapely leg in attendance, and in a single sweeping gesture
+blotted the last page of the letter he had been writing and shook Father
+Rowley by the hand.
+
+"I am delighted to have an opportunity of meeting you, Mr. Rowley," he
+began, and then paused a moment with an inquiring look at Mark.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't mind, my lord, if I brought with me young
+Lidderdale, who is reading for Holy Orders and working with us at St.
+Agnes'. I am apt to forget sometimes exactly to what I have and have not
+committed myself and I thought your lordship would not object. . . ."
+
+"To a witness?" interposed the Bishop in a tone of courtly banter.
+"Come, come, Mr. Rowley, had I known you were going to be so suspicious
+of me I should have asked my domestic chaplain to be present on my
+side."
+
+Mark, supposing that the Bishop was annoyed by his presence at the
+interview, made a movement to retire, whereupon the Bishop tapped him
+paternally upon the shoulder and said:
+
+"Nonsense, non-sense, I was merely indulging in a mild pleasantry. Sit
+down, Mr. Rowley. Mr. Lidderdale I think you will find that chair quite
+comfortable. Well, Mr. Rowley," he began, "I have heard much of you and
+your work. Our friend Canon Whymper spoke of it with enthusiasm. Yes,
+yes, with enthusiasm. I often regret that in the course of my ministry I
+have never had the good fortune to be called to work among the poor, the
+real poor. You have been privileged, Mr. Rowley, if I may be allowed to
+say so, greatly, immensely privileged. You find a wilderness, and you
+make of it a garden. Wonderful. Wonderful."
+
+Mark began to feel uncomfortable, and he thought by the way Father
+Rowley was puffing his cheeks that he too was beginning to feel
+uncomfortable. The Missioner looked as if he was blowing away the lather
+of the soap that the Bishop was using upon him so prodigally.
+
+"Some other time, Mr. Rowley, when I have a little leisure . . . I
+perceive the need of making myself acquainted with every side of my new
+diocese--a little leisure, yes . . . sometime I should like to have a
+long talk with you about all the details of your work at Chatsea, of
+which as I said Canon Whymper has spoken to me most enthusiastically.
+The question, however, immediately before us this morning is the licence
+of your new church. Since writing to you first I have thought the matter
+over most earnestly. I have given the matter the gravest consideration.
+I have consulted Canon Whymper and I have come to the conclusion that
+bearing all the circumstances in mind it will be wiser for you to apply,
+and I hope be granted, a new licence. With this decision in my mind I
+asked Canon Whymper in his capacity as Rural Dean to report upon the new
+church. Mr. Rowley, his report is extremely favourable. He writes to me
+of the noble fabric, noble is the actual epithet he employs, yes, the
+very phrase. He expresses his conviction that you are to be
+congratulated, most warmly congratulated, Mr. Rowley, upon your vigorous
+work. I believe I am right in saying that all the money necessary to
+erect this noble edifice has been raised by yourself?"
+
+"Not all of it," said Father Rowley. "I still owe £3,000."
+
+"A mere trifle," said the Bishop, dismissing the sum with the airy
+gesture of a conjurer who palms a coin. "A mere trifle compared with
+what you have already raised. I know that at the moment there is no
+question of constituting as a parish what is at present merely a
+district; but such a contingency must be borne in mind by both of us,
+and inasmuch as that would imply consecration by myself I am unwilling
+to prejudice any decision I might have to take later, should the
+necessity for consecration arise, by allowing you at the moment a wider
+latitude than I might be prepared to allow you in the future. Yes, Canon
+Whymper writes most enthusiastically of the noble fabric." The Bishop
+paused, drummed with his fingers on the arm of his chair as if he were
+testing the pitch of his instrument, and then taking a deep breath
+boomed forth: "But Mr. Rowley, in his report he informs me that in the
+middle of the south aisle exists an altar or Holy Table expressly and
+exclusively designed for what he was told are known as masses for the
+dead."
+
+"That is perfectly true," said Father Rowley.
+
+"Ah," said the Bishop, shaking his head gravely. "I did not indeed
+imagine that Canon Whymper would be misinformed about such an important
+feature; but I did not think it right to act without ascertaining first
+from you that such is indeed the case. Mr. Rowley, it would be difficult
+for me to express how grievously it pains me to have to seem to
+interfere in the slightest degree with the successful prosecution of
+your work among the poor of Chatsea, especially to make such
+interference one of the first of my actions in a new diocese; but the
+responsibilities of a bishop are grave. He cannot lightly endorse a
+condition of affairs, a method of services which in his inmost heart
+after the deepest confederation he feels is repugnant to the spirit of
+the Church Of England. . . ."
+
+"I question that opinion, my lord," said the Missioner.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, pray allow me to finish. We have little time at our
+disposal for a theological argument which would in any case be
+fruitless, for as I told you I have already examined the question with
+the deepest consideration from every standpoint. Though I may respect
+your opinions in my private capacity, for I do not wish to impugn for
+one moment the sincerity of your beliefs, in my episcopal, or what I may
+call my public character, I can only condemn them utterly. Utterly, Mr.
+Rowley, and completely."
+
+"But this altar, my lord," shouted Father Rowley, springing to his feet,
+to the alarm of Mark, who thought he was going to shake his fist in the
+Bishop's face, "this altar was subscribed for by the poor of St. Agnes',
+by all the poor of St. Agnes', as a memorial of the lives of sailors and
+marines of St. Agnes' lost in the sinking of the _King Harry_. Your
+predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, knew of its existence, actually saw it and
+commented on its ugliness; yet when I told him the circumstances in
+which it had been erected he was deeply moved by the beautiful idea.
+This altar has been in use for nearly three years. Masses for the dead
+have been said there time after time. This altar is surrounded by
+memorials of my dead people. It is one of the most vital factors in my
+work there. You ask me to remove it, before you have been in the diocese
+a month, before you have had time to see with your own eyes what an
+influence for good it has on the daily lives of the poor people who
+built it. My lord, I will not remove the altar."
+
+While Father Rowley was speaking the Bishop of Silchester had been
+looking like a man on a railway platform who has been ambushed by a
+whistling engine.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley," he said, "I pray you to control yourself. I
+beg you to understand that this is not a mere question of red tape, if I
+may use the expression, of one extra altar or Holy Table, but it is a
+question of the services said at that altar or Holy Table."
+
+"That is precisely what I am trying to point out to your lordship,"
+said Father Rowley angrily.
+
+"You yourself told me when you wrote to me that Bishop Crawshay
+disapproved of much that was done at St. Agnes'. It was you who put it
+into my head at the beginning of our correspondence that you were not
+asking me formally to open the new church, because you were doubtful of
+the effect your method of worship might have upon me. I don't wish for a
+moment to suggest that you were trying to bundle on one side the
+question of the licence, before I had had a moment to look round me in
+my new diocese, I say I do _not_ think this for a moment; but inasmuch
+as the question has come before me officially, as sooner or later it
+must have come before me officially, I cannot allow my future action to
+be prejudiced by giving you liberties now that I may not be prepared to
+allow you later on. Suppose that in three years' time the question of
+consecrating the new St. Agnes' arises and the legality of this third
+altar or Holy Table is questioned, how should I be able to turn round
+and forbid then what I have not forbidden now?"
+
+"Your lordship prefers to force me to resign?"
+
+"Force you to resign, Mr. Rowley?" the Bishop repeated in aggrieved
+accents. "What can I possibly have said that could lead you to suppose
+for one moment that I was desirous of forcing you to resign? I make
+allowance for your natural disappointment. I make every allowance.
+Otherwise Mr. Rowley I should be tempted to characterize such a
+statement as cruel. As cruel, Mr. Rowley."
+
+"What other alternative have I?"
+
+"I should have said, Mr. Rowley, that you have one other very obvious
+alternative, and that is to accept my ruling upon the subject of this
+third altar or Holy Table. When I shall receive an assurance that you
+will do so, I shall with pleasure, with great pleasure, give you a new
+licence."
+
+"I could not possibly do that," said the Missioner. "I could not
+possibly go back to my people to-night and tell them this Holy Week that
+what I have been teaching them for ten years is a lie. I would rather
+resign a thousand times."
+
+"That is a far more accurate statement than your previous assertion
+that I was forcing you to resign."
+
+"When will you have found a priest to take my place temporarily?" the
+Missioner asked in a chill voice. "It is unlikely that the Silchester
+College authorities will find another missioner at once, and I think it
+rests with your lordship to find a locum tenens. I do not wish to
+disappoint my people about the date of the opening of their new church.
+They have been looking forward to this Easter for so long now. Poor
+dears!"
+
+Father Rowley sighed out the last ejaculation to himself, and his sigh
+ran through the Bishop's opulent library like a dull wind. Mark had a
+mad impulse to tell the Bishop the story of his father and the Lima
+Street Mission. His father had resigned on Palm Sunday. Oh, this ghastly
+dream. . . . Father Rowley leave Chatsea! It was unimaginable. . . .
+
+But the Bishop was overthrowing the work of ten years with apparently as
+little consciousness of the ruin he was creating as a boar that has
+rooted up an ant-heap with his snout.
+
+"Quite so. Quite so, Mr. Rowley. I certainly see your point," the Bishop
+declared. "I will do my best to secure a priest, but meanwhile . . . let
+me see. I need scarcely say how painful your decision has been, what
+pain it has caused me. Let me see, yes, in the circumstances I agree
+with you that it would be inadvisable to postpone the opening. I think
+from every point of view it would be wisest to proceed according to
+schedule. Could not this altar or Holy Table be railed off temporarily,
+I do not say muffled up, but could not some indication be given of the
+fact that I do not sanction its use? In that case I should have no
+objection, indeed on the contrary I should be only too happy for you to
+carry on with your work either until I can find a temporary substitute
+or until the Silchester College authorities can appoint a new missioner.
+Dear me, this is dreadfully painful for me."
+
+Father Rowley stared at the Bishop in astonishment.
+
+"You want me to continue?" he asked. "Really, my lord, you will excuse
+my plain speaking if I tell you that I am amazed at your point of view.
+A moment ago you told me that I must either remove this altar or
+resign."
+
+"Pardon me, Mr. Rowley. I did not mention the word 'resign.'"
+
+"And now," the Missioner went on without paying any attention to the
+interruption. "You are ready to let me stay at St. Agnes' until a
+successor can conveniently be found. If my teaching is as pernicious as
+you think, I cannot understand your lordship's tolerating my officiating
+for another hour in your diocese."
+
+"Mr. Rowley, you are introducing into this unhappy affair a great deal
+of extraneous feeling. I do not reproach you. I know that you are
+labouring under the stress of strong emotion. I overlook the manner
+which you have adopted towards me. I overlook it, Mr. Rowley. Before we
+close this interview, which I must once more assure you is as painful
+for me as for you, I want you to understand how deeply I regret having
+been forced to take the action I have. I ask your prayers, Mr. Rowley,
+and please be sure that you always have and always will have my prayers.
+Have you anything more you would like to say? Do not let me give you the
+impression from my alluding to the heavy work of entering upon the
+duties and responsibilities of a new diocese that I desire to hurry you
+in any way this afternoon. You will want to catch the 4.10 back to
+Chatsea I have no doubt. Too early perhaps for tea. Good-bye, Mr.
+Rowley. Good-bye, Mr. . . ." the Bishop paused and looked inquiringly at
+Mark. "Lidderdale, ah, yes," he said. "For the moment I forgot.
+Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale. A simple railing will, I think be sufficient
+for the altar in question, Mr. Rowley. I perfectly appreciate your
+motive in asking the Bishop of Barbadoes to officiate at the opening. I
+quite see that you did not wish to commit me to an approval of a ritual
+which might be more advanced than I might consider proper in my diocese.
+. . . Good-bye, good-bye."
+
+Father Rowley and Mark found themselves once more in the drive. The
+episcopal standard floated in the wind, which had sprung up while they
+were with the Bishop. They walked silently to the railway station under
+a fast clouding sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FATHER ROWLEY
+
+
+The first episcopal act of the Bishop of Silchester drove many poor
+souls away from God. It was a time of deep emotional stress for all the
+St. Agnes' workers, and Father Rowley could not show himself in Keppel
+Street without being surrounded by a crowd of supplicants who with tears
+and lamentations begged him to give up the new St. Agnes' and to remain
+in the old mission church rather than be lost to them for ever. There
+were some who even wished him to surrender the Third Altar; but in his
+last sermon preached on the Sunday night before he left Chatsea, he
+spoke to them and said:
+
+"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
+The 15th verse of the 21st Chapter of the Holy Gospel according to Saint
+John: _Feed my lambs._
+
+"It is difficult for me, dear people, to preach to you this evening for
+the last time as your missioner, to preach, moreover, the last sermon
+that will ever be preached in this little mission church which has meant
+so much to you and so much to me. By the mercy of God man does not
+realize at the moment all that is implied by an occasion like this. He
+speaks with his mouth words of farewell; but his heart still beats to
+what was and what is, rather than to what will be.
+
+"When I took as my text to-night those three words of Our Lord to St.
+Peter, _Feed my Lambs_, I took them as words that might be applied,
+first to the Lord Bishop of this diocese, secondly to the priest who
+will take my place in this Mission, and thirdly and perhaps most
+poignantly of all to myself. I cannot bring myself to suppose that in
+this moment of grief, in this moment of bitterness, almost of despair I
+am able to speak fairly of the Bishop of Silchester's action in
+compelling me to resign what has counted for all that is most precious
+in my life on earth. And already, in saying that the Bishop has
+compelled me to resign, I am not speaking with perfect accuracy,
+inasmuch as if I had been willing to surrender what I considered one of
+the essential articles of our belief, the Bishop would have been glad to
+licence the new St. Agnes' and to give his countenance and his support
+to me, the unworthy priest in charge of it.
+
+"I want you therefore, dear people, to try to look at the matter from
+the standpoint of the Bishop. I want you to try to understand that in
+objecting to our little altar for the dead he is objecting not so much
+to the altar itself as to the services said at that altar. If it had
+merely been a question between us of a third altar, whether here or in
+the new St. Agnes', I should have found it possible, however
+unwillingly, to ask you--you, who out of your hard-earned savings built
+that altar--to allow it to be removed. Yes, I should have been selfish
+enough to ask you to make that great sacrifice on my account. But when
+the Bishop insisted that I and the priests who have borne with me and
+worked with me and preached with me and prayed with me all these years
+should abstain from saying those Masses which we believe and which you
+believe help our dear ones waiting for the Day of Judgment--why, then, I
+felt that my surrender would have been a denial of our dear Lord, such a
+denial as St. Peter himself uttered in the hall of the high-priest's
+house. But the Bishop does not believe that our prayers here below have
+any efficacy or can in any way help the blessed dead. He does not
+believe in such prayers, and he believes that those who do believe in
+such prayers are wrong, not merely according to the teaching of the
+Prayer Book, but also according to the revelation of Almighty God. I do
+not want you to say, as you will be tempted to say, that the Bishop of
+Silchester in condemning our method of services at St. Agnes' is
+condemning them with an eye to public opinion or to political advantage.
+Alas, I have myself been tempted to say bitter words about him, to think
+bitter thoughts; but at this moment, with that last _Nunc Dimittis_
+ringing in my ears, _Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace_,
+I realize that the Bishop is acting honestly and sincerely, however
+much he may be acting wrongly and hastily. It is dreadful for me at this
+moment of parting to feel that some of you here to-night may be turned
+from the face of God because you are angered against one of God's
+ministers. If any poor words of mine have power to touch your hearts, I
+beg you to believe that in giving us this great trial of our faith God
+is acting with that mysterious justice and omniscience of which we speak
+idly without in the least apprehending what He means. I shall say no
+more in defence and explanation of the Bishop's action, and if he should
+consider my defence and explanation of it a piece of presumption I send
+him at this solemn moment of farewell a message that I shall never cease
+to pray that he may long guide you on the way that leads up to eternal
+happiness.
+
+"I can speak more freely of what your attitude should be towards Father
+Hungerford, the priest who is coming to take my place and who is going
+with God's help to do far more for you here than ever I have been able
+to do. I want you all to put yourselves in his place; I want you all to
+think of him to-night wondering, fearing, doubting, hoping, and praying.
+I want you to imagine how difficult he must be feeling the situation is
+for him. He will come here to-morrow conscious that there is nobody in
+this district of ours who does not feel, whether he be a communicant or
+not, that the Bishop had no right to intervene so soon and without
+greater knowledge of his new diocese in a district like ours. I cannot
+help knowing how much I myself am to blame in this particular; but, my
+dear people, it has been very hard for me during these last two weeks
+always to be brave and hopeful. Often I have found those entreaties on
+my doorstep almost more than I could endure to hear, those letters on my
+desk almost more than I could bear to read. So, if you want to do the
+one thing that can comfort me in this bitter hour of mine I entreat you
+to show Father Hungerford that your faith and your hope and your love do
+not depend on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that
+deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There is only one
+way in which you can show Father Hungerford that Jesus Christ lives in
+your hearts, and that is by going to Confession and to Communion and by
+hearing Mass as you have done all this time. Show him by your behaviour
+in the street, by your kindness and consideration at home, by your
+devotion and reverence in church, that you appreciate the mercies of
+God, that you appreciate what it means to have Jesus Christ upon your
+altar, that you are, in a word, Christians.
+
+"And now at last I must think of those words of our dear Lord as they
+apply to myself: _Feed my lambs._ And as I repeat them, I ask myself
+again if I have done right, for I am troubled in spirit, and I wonder if
+I ought to have given up that third altar and to have remained here. But
+even as I wonder this, even as at this moment I stand in this pulpit for
+the last time, a voice within me forbids me to doubt. No, my clear folk,
+I cannot surrender that altar. I cannot come to you and say that what I
+have been teaching for ten years was of so little value, of so little
+importance, of so little worth, that for the sake of policy it can be
+abandoned with a stroke of the pen or a nod of the head. I stand here
+looking out into the future, hearing like angelic trumpets those three
+words sounding and resounding upon the great void of time: _Feed my
+lambs!_ I ask myself what work lies before me, what lambs I shall have
+to feed elsewhere; I ask myself in my misery whether God has found me
+unworthy of the trust He gave me. I feel that if I leave St. Agnes'
+to-morrow with the thought that you still cherish angry and resentful
+feelings I shall sink to a lower depth of humiliation and depression
+than I have yet reached. But if I can leave St. Agnes' with the
+assurance that my work here will go steadily forward to the glory of God
+from the point at which I renounced it, I shall know that God must have
+some other purpose for the remainder of my life, some other mission to
+which He intends to call me. To you, my dear people, to you who have
+borne with me patiently, to you who have tolerated so sweetly my
+infirmities, to you who have been kind to my failings, to you who have
+taught me so much more of our dear Lord Jesus Christ than I have been
+able to teach you, to you I say good-bye. I cannot harrow your feelings
+or my own by saying any more. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
+and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
+
+Notwithstanding these words, the first episcopal act of the Bishop of
+Silchester drove many poor souls away from God.
+
+The effect upon Mark, had his religion been merely a pastime of
+adolescence, would have been disastrous. Owing to human nature's respect
+for the conspicuous there is nothing so demoralizing to faith as the
+failure of a leader of religion to set forth in his own actions the word
+of God. Mark, however, looked at the whole business more from an
+ecclesiastical angle. He had reason to condemn the Bishop for
+unchristian behaviour; but he preferred to condemn him for uncatholic
+behaviour. Dr. Cheesman and the many other Dr. Cheesmans of whom the
+Anglican episcopate was at this period composed never succeeded in
+shaking his belief in Christ; they did succeed in shaking for a short
+time his belief in the Church of England. There are few Anglo-Catholics,
+whether priests or laymen, who have never doubted the right of their
+Church to proclaim herself a branch of the Holy Catholic Church. This
+phase of doubt is indeed so common that in ecclesiastical circles it has
+come to be regarded as a kind of mental chicken-pox, not very alarming
+if it catches the patient when young, but growing more dangerous in
+proportion to the lateness of its attack. Mark had his attack young.
+When Father Rowley left Chatsea, he was anxious to accompany him on what
+he knew would be an exhausting time of travelling round to preach and
+collect the necessary money to pay off what was actually a personal
+debt. It seemed that there must be something fundamentally wrong with a
+Church that allowed a man to perambulate England in an endeavour to pay
+off the debt upon a building from ministrating in which he had been
+debarred. This debt, moreover, was presumably going to be paid by people
+who fully subscribed to teaching which had been officially condemned.
+
+When Mark commented on this, Father Rowley pointed out that as a matter
+of fact a great deal of money had been sent by people who admired the
+practical side, or what they would have called the practical side of his
+work among the poor, but who at the same time thoroughly disapproved of
+its ecclesiastical form.
+
+"In justice to the poor old Church of England," he said to Mark, "it
+must be pointed out that a good deal of this money has been given by
+devout Anglicans under protest."
+
+"Yes, but that doesn't seriously affect the argument," said Mark. "You
+collect I don't know how many thousands of pounds to put up a
+magnificent church from which the Bishop of Silchester sees fit to turn
+you out, but for the debt on which you are still personally responsible.
+It's fantastic!"
+
+"Mark Anthony," the priest said with a laugh, "you lack the legal mind.
+The Bishop did not turn me out. The Bishop can perfectly well say I
+turned myself out."
+
+"It is all too subtle for me," said Mark. "But I'm not going to worry
+you with any more arguments. You've had enough of them to last you for
+ever. I do wish you'd let me stick to you personally and help you in any
+way possible."
+
+"No, Mark Anthony," the priest replied. "I've done my work at St.
+Agnes', and you've done yours. Your business now is to take advantage of
+what has happened and to get back to your books, which whatever you may
+say have been more and more neglected lately. You'll find it of enormous
+help to be a good theologian. I have never ceased to regret my own
+shortcomings in that respect. Besides, I think you ought to spend a
+certain amount of time with Ogilvie before you go to Glastonbury. There
+is quite a lot of work to do if you look for it in a country parish
+like--what's the name of the place? Wych. Oh, yes, quite a lot of work.
+Don't bother your head about Anglican Orders and Roman Claims and the
+Catholicity of the Church of England. Your business is to save souls,
+your own included. Go back and read and get to know the people in
+Ogilvie's parish. Anybody can tackle a district like St. Agnes'; anybody
+that is who has the suitable personality. How many people can tackle an
+English country parish? I hardly know one. I should like to have you
+with me. I'm fond of you, and you're useful; but at your age to travel
+round from town to town listening to my begging would be all wrong. I
+might even go to America. I've had most cordial invitations from several
+American bishops, and if I can't raise the money in England I shall
+have to go there. If God has any more work for me to do I shall be
+offered a cure some day somewhere. I want you to be one of my assistant
+priests, and if you're going to be useful to me as an assistant priest,
+you really must have some theology behind you. These bishops get more
+and more difficult to deal with every year. Now, it's no good arguing.
+My mind's made up. I won't take you with me."
+
+So Mark went back to Wych-on-the-Wold and brooded upon the non-Catholic
+aspects of the Anglican Church.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+POINTS OF VIEW
+
+
+Mark did not find that his guardian was much disturbed by his doubts of
+the validity of Anglican Orders nor much alarmed by his suspicion that
+the Establishment had no right to be considered a branch of the Holy
+Catholic Church.
+
+"The crucial point in the Roman position is their doctrine of
+intention," said Mr. Ogilvie. "It always seems to me that this doctrine
+is a particularly dangerous one for them to play with and one that may
+recoil at any moment upon their own heads. There has been a great deal
+of super-subtle dividing of intentions into actual, virtual, habitual,
+and interpretative; but if you are going to take your stand on logic you
+must be ready to face a logical conclusion. Let us agree for a moment
+that Barlow and the other bishops who consecrated Matthew Parker had no
+intention of consecrating him as a bishop for the purpose of ordaining
+priests in the sense in which Catholics understand the word priest. Do
+the Romans expect us to believe that all their prelates in the time of
+the Renaissance had a perfect intention when they were consecrating? Or
+leave on one side for a moment the sacrament of Orders; the validity of
+other sacraments is affected by their extension of the doctrine beyond
+the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas. However improbable it may be
+that at one moment all the priests of the Catholic Church should lack
+the intention let us say of absolution, it _is_ a _logical_ possibility,
+in which case all the faithful would logically speaking be damned. It
+was in order to guard against this kind of logical catastrophe that the
+first split between an actual intention and a virtual intention was
+made. The Roman Church teaches that the virtual intention is enough; but
+if we argue that a virtual intention might be ascribed to the bishops
+who consecrated Parker, the Roman controversialists present us with
+another subdivision--the habitual intention, which is one that formerly
+existed, but of the present continuance of which there is no trace. Now
+really, my dear Mark, you must admit that we've reached a point very
+near to nonsense if this kind of logical subtlety is to control Faith."
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "I don't think I should ever want to
+'vert over the question of the validity of Anglican Orders. I haven't
+any doubts now of their validity, and I think it's improbable that I
+shall have any doubts after I'm ordained. At the same time, there _is_
+something wrong with the Church of England if a situation like that in
+Chatsea can be created by the whim of a bishop. Our unhappy union
+between Church and State has created a class of bishops which has no
+parallel anywhere else in Christendom. In order to become a bishop in
+England, at any rate of the kind that has a seat in the House of Lords,
+it is necessary to be a gentleman, or rather to have the outward and
+visible signs of being a gentleman, to be a scholar, or to be a
+diplomat. Of course, there will be exceptions; but if you look at almost
+all our bishops, you will find they have reached their dignity by social
+attainments or by political utility or sometimes by intellectual
+distinction, but hardly ever by religious fervour, or spiritual honesty,
+or fearless opinion. I can sympathize with the dissenters of the
+seventeenth century in blaming the episcopate for all spiritual
+maladies. I expect there were a good many Dr. Cheesmans in the days of
+Defoe. Look back and see how the bishops have always voted in the House
+of Lords with enthusiastic unanimity against every proposal of reform
+that was ever put forward. I wonder what will happen when they are
+called upon to face a real national crisis."
+
+"I'm perfectly ready to agree with everything you say about bishops,"
+the Rector volunteered. "But more or less, I'm sorry to add, it is a
+criticism that can be applied to all the orders of the priesthood
+everywhere in Christendom. What can we, what dare we say in favour of
+priests when we remember Our Lord?"
+
+"When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more closely than
+the rest," Mark raged, "the bishops down him. They exist to maintain the
+safety of their class. They have reached their present position by
+knowing the right people, by condemning the wrong people, and by
+balancing their fat bottoms on fences. Sometimes when their political
+patrons quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is either
+very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed as a stop-gap."
+
+"Yes," the Rector agreed. "But our present bishops are only one more
+aspect of Victorian materialism. The whole of contemporary society can
+be criticized in the same way. After all, we get the bishops we deserve,
+just as we get the politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve
+and the painters we deserve."
+
+"I don't think that's any excuse for the bishops. I sometimes dream of
+worming myself up and stopping at nothing in order to be made a bishop,
+and then when I have the mitre at last of appearing in my true colours."
+
+"Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our right reverend
+fathers in God do now," the Rector laughed.
+
+These discussions might have continued for ever without taking Mark any
+further. His failure to experience Oxford had deprived him of the
+opportunity to whet his opinions upon the grindstone of debate, and
+there had been no time for academic argument in the three years of
+Keppel Street. In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do
+but argue. It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather of seeing
+destroyed, a society that was obviously performing useful work and
+returning to a society that, so far as Mark could observe performed no
+kind of work whatever. He was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt
+that he was moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to a
+chasm in which he would be spiritually lost. He seemed to be taking his
+priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be content with gratifying his
+own desire to worship Almighty God without troubling about his
+parishioners. Mark did not like to make any suggestions about parochial
+work, because he was afraid of the Rector's retorting with an implied
+criticism of St. Agnes'; and that would have involved him in a bitter
+argument for which he would afterward be sorry. Nor was it only in his
+missionary duties that he felt his old friend was allowing himself to
+rust. Three years ago the Rector had said a daily Mass. Now he was
+content with one on Thursdays except on festivals. Mark began to take
+walks far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of
+the life round him rather than the expression of an interest in the life
+beyond. On one of these walks he found himself at Wield in the diocese
+of Kidderminster thirty miles or more away from home. He had spent the
+night in a remote Cotswold village, and all the morning he had been
+travelling through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time
+of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line, monotonously
+green, prosperous and complacent. While he was eating his bread and
+cheese at the public bar of the principal inn, he picked up one of the
+local newspapers and reading it, as one so often reads in such
+surroundings, with much greater particularity than the journal of a
+metropolis, he came upon the following letter:
+
+     To the Editor of the WIELD OBSERVER AND SOUTH WORCESTERSHIRE
+     COURANT,
+
+     SIR,--The leader in your issue of last Tuesday upon my sermon in
+     St. Andrew's Church on the preceding Sunday calls for some
+     corrections. The action of the Bishop of Kidderminster in
+     inhibiting Father Rowley from accepting an invitation to preach in
+     my church is due either to his ignorance of the facts of the case,
+     to his stupidity in appreciating them, or, I must regretfully add,
+     to his natural bias towards persecution. These are strong words for
+     a parish priest to use about his diocesan; but the Bishop of
+     Kidderminster's consistent support of latitudinarianism and his
+     consistent hostility towards any of his clergy who practise the
+     forms of worship which they feel they are bound to practise by the
+     rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer call for strong words. The
+     Bishop in correspondence with me declined to give any reason for
+     his inhibition of Father Rowley beyond a general disapproval of his
+     teaching. I am informed privately that the Bishop is suffering from
+     a delusion that Father Rowley disobeyed the Bishop of Silchester,
+     which is of course perfectly untrue and which is only one more sign
+     of how completely out of accord our bishops are with what is going
+     on either in their own diocese or in any other. My own inclination
+     was frankly to defy his Lordship and insist upon Father Rowley's
+     fulfilling his engagement. I am not sure that I do not now regret
+     that I allowed my church-wardens to overpersuade me on this point.
+     I take great exception to your statement that the offertories both
+     in the morning and in the evening were sent by me to Father Rowley
+     regardless of the wishes of my parishioners. That there are certain
+     parishioners of St. Andrew's who objected I have no doubt. But when
+     I send you the attached list of parishioners who subscribed no less
+     than £18 to be added to the two collections, you will I am sure
+     courteously admit that in this case the opinion of the parishioners
+     of St. Andrew's was at one with the opinion of their Vicar.--I am,
+     Sir, your obedient servant,
+
+     ADRIAN FORSHAW.
+
+Mark was so much delighted by this letter that he went off at once to
+call on Mr. Forshaw, but did not find him at home; he was amused to hear
+from the housekeeper that his reverence had been summoned to an
+interview with the Bishop of Kidderminster. Mark fancied that it would
+be the prelate who would have the unpleasant quarter of an hour.
+Presently he began to ponder what it meant for such a letter to be
+written and published; his doubts about the Church of England returned;
+and in this condition of mind he found himself outside a small Roman
+Catholic church dedicated to St. Joseph, where hopeful of gaining the
+Divine guidance within he passed through the door. It may be that he was
+in a less receptive mood than he thought, for what impressed him most
+was the Anglican atmosphere of this Italian outpost. The stale perfume
+of incense on stone could not eclipse that authentic perfume of
+respectability which has been acquired by so many Roman Catholic
+churches in England. There were still hanging on the pillars the framed
+numbers of Sunday's hymns. Mark pictured the choir boy who must have
+slipped the cards in the frame with anxious and triumphant and
+immemorial Anglican zeal; and while he was contemplating this symbolical
+hymn-board, over his shoulder floated an authentic Anglican voice, a
+voice that sounded as if it was being choked out of the larynx by the
+clerical collar. It was the Rector, a stumpy little man with the purple
+stock of a monseigneur, who showed the stranger round his church and
+ended by inviting him to lunch. Mark, wondering if he had reached a
+crossroad in his progress, accepted the invitation, and prepared himself
+reverently to hear the will of God. Monseigneur Cripps lived in a little
+Gothic house next to St. Joseph's, a trim little Gothic house covered
+with the oiled curls of an ampelopsis still undyed by autumn's henna.
+
+"You've chosen a bad day to come to lunch," said Monseigneur with a
+warning shake of the head. "It's Friday, you know. And it's hard to get
+decent fish away from the big towns."
+
+While his host went off to consult the housekeeper about the extra place
+for lunch, a proceeding which induced him to make a joke about extra
+'plaice' and extra 'place,' at which he laughed heartily, Mark
+considered the most tactful way of leading up to a discussion of the
+position of the Anglican Church in regard to Roman claims. It should not
+be difficult, he supposed, because Monseigneur at the first hint of his
+guest's desire to be converted would no doubt welcome the topic. But
+when Monseigneur led the way to his little Gothic dining-room full of
+Arundel prints, Mark soon apprehended that his host had evidently not
+had the slightest notion of offering an _ad hoc_ hospitality. He paid no
+attention to Mark's tentative advances, and if he was willing to talk
+about Rome, it was only because he had just paid a visit there in
+connexion with a school of which he was a trustee and out of which he
+wanted to make one kind of school and the Roman Catholic Bishop of
+Dudley wanted to make another.
+
+"I had to take the whole question to headquarters," Monseigneur
+explained impressively. "But I was disappointed by Rome, oh yes, I was
+very disappointed. When I was a young man I saw it _couleur de rose_. I
+did enjoy one thing though, and that was going round the Vatican. Yes,
+they looked remarkably smart, the Papal Guards; as soon as they saw I
+was _Monsignore_, they turned out and presented arms. I'm bound to admit
+that I _was_ impressed by that. But on the way down I lost my pipe in
+the train. And do you think I could buy a decent pipe in Rome? I
+actually had to pay five _lire_--or was it six?--for this inadequate
+tube."
+
+He produced from his pocket the pipe he had been compelled to buy, a
+curved briar all varnish and gold lettering.
+
+"I've been badly treated in Wield. Certainly, they made me Monseigneur.
+But then they couldn't very well do less after I built this church.
+We've been successful here. And I venture to think popular. But the
+Bishop is in the hands of the Irish. He cannot grasp that the English
+people will not have Irish priests to rule them. They don't like it, and
+I don't blame them. You're not Irish, are you?"
+
+Mark reassured him.
+
+"This plaice isn't bad, eh? I ordered turbot, but you never get the fish
+you order in these Midland towns. It always ends in my having plaice,
+which is good for the soul! Ha-ha! I hate the Irish myself. This school
+of which I am the chief trustee was intended to be a Catholic
+reformatory. That idea fell through, and now my notion is to turn it
+into a decent school run by secular clergy. All the English Catholic
+schools are in the hands of the regular clergy, which is a mistake. It
+puts too much power in the hands of the Benedictines and the Jesuits and
+the rest of them. After all, the great strength of the Catholic Church
+in England will always be the secular clergy. And what do we get now? A
+lot of objectionable Irishmen in Trilby hats. Last time I saw the Bishop
+I gave him my frank opinion of his policy. I told him my opinion to his
+face. He won't get me to kowtow to him. Yes, I said to him that, if he
+handed over this school to the Dominicans, he was going to spoil one of
+the finest opportunities ever presented of educating the sons of decent
+English gentlemen to be simple parish priests. But the Bishop of Dudley
+is an Irishman himself. He can't think of anything educationally better
+than Ushaw. And, as I was telling you, I saw there was nothing for it
+but to take the whole matter right up to headquarters, that is to Rome.
+Did I tell you that the Papal Guards turned out and presented arms? Ah,
+I remember now, I did mention it. I was extraordinarily impressed by
+them. A fine body. But generally speaking, Rome disappointed me after
+many years. Of course we English Catholics don't understand that way of
+worshipping. I'm not criticizing it. I realize that it suits the
+Italians. But suppose I started clearing my throat in the middle of
+Mass? My congregation would be disgusted, and rightly. It's an
+astonishing thing that I couldn't buy a good pipe in Rome, don't you
+think? I must have lost mine when I got out of the carriage to look at
+the leaning tower of Pisa, and my other one got clogged up with some
+candle grease. I couldn't get the beastly stuff out, so I had to give
+the pipe to a porter. They're keen on English pipes, those Italian
+porters. Poor devils, I'm not surprised. Of course, I need hardly say
+that in Rome they promised to do everything for me; but you can't trust
+them when your back is turned, and I need hardly add that the Bishop was
+pulling strings all the time. They showed me one of his letters, which
+was a tissue of mis-statements--a regular tissue. Now, suppose you had a
+son and you wanted him to be a priest? You don't necessarily want him to
+become a Jesuit or a Benedictine or a Dominican. Where can you send him
+now? Stonyhurst, Downside, Beaumont. There isn't a single decent school
+run by the secular clergy. You know what I mean? A school for the sons
+of gentlemen--a public school. We've got magnificent buildings, grounds,
+everything you could wish. I've been promised all the money necessary,
+and then the Bishop of Dudley steps in and says that these Dominicans
+ought to take it on."
+
+"I'm afraid I've somehow given you a wrong impression," Mark interposed
+when Monseigneur Cripps at last filled his mouth with plaice. "I'm not a
+Roman Catholic."
+
+"Oh, aren't you?" said Monseigneur indifferently. "Never mind, I expect
+you see my point about the necessity for the school to be run by secular
+clergy. Did I tell you how I got the land for my church here? That's
+rather an interesting story. It belonged to Lord Evesham who, as perhaps
+you may know, is very anti-Catholic, but a thorough good sportsman. We
+always get on capitally together. Well, one day I said to his agent,
+Captain Hart: 'What about this land, Hart? Don't you think you could get
+it out of his lordship?' 'It's no good, Father Cripps,' said Hart--I
+wasn't Monseigneur then of course--'It's no good,' he said, 'his
+lordship absolutely declines to let his land be used for a Catholic
+church.' 'Come along, Hart,' I said, 'let's have a round of golf.' Well,
+when we got to the eighteenth hole we were all square, and we'd both of
+us gone round three better than bogie and broken our own records. I was
+on the green with my second shot, and holed out in three. 'My game,' I
+shouted because Hart had foozled his drive and wasn't on the green. 'Not
+at all,' he said. 'You shouldn't be in such a hurry. I may hole out in
+one,' he laughed. 'If you do,' I said, 'you ought to get Lord Evesham to
+give me that land.' 'That's a bargain,' he said, and he took his mashie.
+Will you believe it? He did the hole in two, sir, won the game, and beat
+the record for the course! And that's how I got the land to build my
+church. I was delighted! I was delighted! I've told that story
+everywhere to show what sportsmen are. I told it to the Bishop, but of
+course he being an Irishman didn't see anything funny in it. If he could
+have stopped my being made Monseigneur, he'd have done so. But he
+couldn't."
+
+"You seem to have as much trouble with your bishops as we do with ours
+in the Anglican Church," said Mark.
+
+"We shouldn't, if we made the right men bishops," said Monseigneur. "But
+so long as they think at Westminster that we're going to convert England
+with a tagrag and bobtail mob of Irish priests, we never shall make the
+right men. You were looking round my church just now. Didn't it remind
+you of an English church?"
+
+Mark agreed that it did very much.
+
+"That's my secret: that's why I've been the most successful mission
+priest in this diocese. I realize as an Englishman that it is no use to
+give the English Irish Catholicism. When I was in Rome the other day I
+was disgusted, I really was. I was disgusted. I thoroughly sympathize
+with Protestants who go there and are disgusted. You cannot expect a
+decent English family to confess to an Irish peasant. It's not
+reasonable. We want to create an English tradition."
+
+"What between the Roman party in the Anglican Church and the Anglican
+party in the Roman Church," said Mark, "It seems a pity that some kind
+of reunion cannot be effected."
+
+"So it could," Monseigneur declared. "So it could, if it wasn't for the
+Irish. Look at the way we treat our English converts. The clergy, I
+mean. Why? Because the Irish do not want England to be converted."
+
+Mark did not raise with Monseigneur Cripps the question of his doubts.
+Indeed, before the plaice had been taken away he had decided that they
+no longer existed. It became clear to him that the English Church was
+England; and although he knew in his heart that Monseigneur Cripps was
+suffering from a sense of grievance and that his criticism of Roman
+policy was too obviously biased, it pleased him to believe that it was a
+fair criticism.
+
+Mark thanked Monseigneur Cripps for his hospitality and took a friendly
+leave of him. An hour later he was walking back through the pleasant
+vale of Wield toward the Cotswolds. As he went his way among the green
+orchards, he thought over his late impulse to change allegiance,
+marvelling at it now and considering it irrational, like one astonished
+at his own behaviour in a dream. There came into his mind a story of
+George Fox who drawing near to the city of Lichfield took off his shoes
+in a meadow and cried three times in a loud voice "Woe unto the bloody
+city of Lichfield," after which he put on his shoes again and proceeded
+into the town. Mark looked back in amazement at his lunch with
+Monseigneur Cripps and his own meditated apostasy. To his present mood
+that intention to forsake his own Church appeared as remote from
+actuality as the malediction of George Fox upon the city of Lichfield.
+
+Here among these green orchards in the heart of England Roman
+Catholicism presented itself to Mark's imagination as an exotic. The two
+words "Roman Catholicism" uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave
+him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an
+apple-tree. People who talked about bringing the English Church into
+line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of history.
+Apart from the question whether the English Church before the
+Reformation had accepted the pretensions of the Papacy, it was absurd
+to suppose that contemporary Romanism had anything in common with
+English Catholicism of the early sixteenth century. English Catholicism
+long before the Reformation had been a Protestant Catholicism, always in
+revolt against Roman claims, always preserving its insularity. It was
+idle to question the Catholic intentions of a priesthood that could
+produce within a century of the Reformation such prelates as Andrews and
+Ken. It was ridiculous at the prompting of the party in the ascendancy
+at Westminster to procure a Papal decision against English Orders when
+two hundred and fifty years ago there was a cardinal's hat waiting for
+Laud if he would leave the Church of England. And what about Paul IV and
+Elizabeth? Was he not willing to recognize English Orders if she would
+recognize his headship of Christendom?
+
+But these were controversial arguments, and as Mark walked along through
+the pleasant vale of Wield with the Cotswold hills rising taller before
+him at every mile he apprehended that his adhesion to the English Church
+had been secured by the natural scene rather than by argument.
+Nevertheless, it was interesting to speculate why Romanism had not made
+more progress in England, why even now with a hierarchy and with such a
+distinguished line of converts beginning with Newman it remained so
+completely out of touch with the national life of the country. While the
+Romans converted one soul to Catholicism, the inheritors of the Oxford
+Movement were converting twenty. Catholicism must be accounted a
+disposition of mind, an attitude toward life that did not necessarily
+imply all that was implied by Roman Catholicism. What was the secret of
+the Roman failure? Everywhere else in the world Roman Catholicism had
+known how to adapt itself to national needs; only in England did it
+remain exotic. It was like an Anglo-Indian magnate who returns to find
+himself of no importance in his native land, and who but for the flavour
+of his curries and perhaps a black servant or two would be utterly
+inconspicuous. He tries to fit in with the new conditions of his
+readopted country, but he remains an exotic and is regarded by his
+neighbours as one to whom the lesson must be taught that he is no
+longer of importance. What had been the cause of this breach in the
+Roman Catholic tradition, this curious incompetency, this Anglo-Indian
+conservatism and pretentiousness? Perhaps it had begun when in the
+seventeenth century the propagation of Roman Catholicism in England was
+handed over to the Jesuits, who mismanaged the country hopelessly. By
+the time Rome had perceived that the conversion of England could not be
+left to the Jesuits the harm was done, so that when with greater
+toleration the time was ripe to expand her organization it was necessary
+to recruit her priests in Ireland. What the Jesuits had begun the Irish
+completed. It had been amusing to listen to the lamentations of
+Monseigneur Cripps; but Monseigneur Cripps had expressed, however
+ludicrous his egoism, the failure of his Church in England.
+
+Mark's statement of the Anglican position with nobody to answer his
+arguments except the trees and the hedgerows seemed flawless. The level
+road, the gentle breeze in the orchards on either side, the scent of the
+grass, and the busy chirping of the birds coincided with the main point
+of his argument that England was most inexpressibly Anglican and that
+Roman Catholicism was most unmistakably not. His arguments were really
+hasty foot-notes to his convictions; if each one had separately been
+proved wrong, that would have had no influence on the point of view he
+had reached. He forgot that this very landscape that was seeming
+incomparable England herself had yesterday appeared complacent and
+monotonous. In fact he was as bad as George Fox, who after taking off
+his shoes to curse the bloody city of Lichfield should only have put
+them on again to walk away from it.
+
+The grey road was by now beginning to climb the foothills of the
+Cotswolds; a yellow-hammer, keeping always a few paces ahead, twittered
+from quickset boughs nine encouraging notes that drowned the echoes of
+ancient controversies. In such a countryside no claims papal or
+episcopal possessed the least importance; and Mark dismissed the subject
+from his mind, abandoning himself to the pleasure of the slow ascent.
+Looking back after a while he could see the town of Wield riding like a
+ship in a sea of verdure, and when he surveyed thus England asleep in
+the sunlight, the old ambition to become a preaching friar was kindled
+again in his heart. He would re-establish the extinct and absolutely
+English Order of St. Gilbert so that there should be no question of
+Roman pretensions. Doubtless, St. Francis himself would understand a
+revival of his Order without reference to existing Franciscans; but
+nobody else would understand, and it would be foolish to insist upon
+being a Franciscan if the rest of the Order disowned him and his
+followers. If anybody had asked Mark at that moment why he wanted to
+restore the preaching friars, he might have found it difficult to
+answer. He was by no means imbued with the missionary spirit just then;
+his experience at Chatsea had made him pessimistic about missionary
+effort in the Church of England. If a man like Father Rowley had failed
+to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed
+more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should
+be successful. The ambition to become a friar was revived by an
+incomprehensible, or if not incomprehensible, certainly by an
+inexplicable impulse to put himself in tune with the landscape, to
+proclaim as it were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down
+there in the flowery Vale of Wield: _God rest you merry gentlemen, let
+nothing you dismay!_ There was revealed to him with the assurance of
+absolute faith that all the sorrows, all the ugliness, all the
+soullessness (no other word could be found) of England in the first year
+of the twentieth century was due to the Reformation; the desire to
+become a preaching friar was the dramatic expression of this inspired
+conviction. Before his journey through the Vale of Wield Mark in any
+discussion would have been ready to argue the mistake of the
+Reformation: but now there was no longer room for argument. What
+formerly he thought now he knew. The song of the yellow-hammer was
+louder in the quickset hedge; the trees burned with a sharper green; the
+road urged his feet.
+
+"If only everybody in England could move as I am moving now," he
+thought. "If only I could be granted the power to show a few people, so
+that they could show others, and those others show all the world. How
+confidently that yellow-hammer repeats his song! How well he knows that
+his song is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the
+linnet envies him! The fools that talk of nature's cruelty, the blind
+fatuous sentimental coxcombs!"
+
+Thus apostrophizing, Mark came to a wayside inn; discovering that he was
+hungry, he took his seat at a rustic table outside and called for bread
+and cheese and beer. While he was eating, a vehicle approached from the
+direction in which he would soon be travelling. He took it at first for
+a caravan of gipsies, but when it grew near he saw that it was painted
+over with minatory texts and was evidently the vehicle of itinerant
+gospellers. Two young men alighted from the caravan when it pulled up
+before the door of the inn. They were long-nosed sallow creatures with
+that expression of complacency which organized morality too often
+produces, and in this quiet countryside they gave an effect of being
+overgrown Sunday-school scholars upon their annual outing. Having cast a
+censorious glance in the direction of Mark's jug of ale, they sat down
+at the farther end of the bench and ordered food.
+
+"The preaching friars of to-day," Mark thought gloomily.
+
+"Excuse me," said one of the gospellers. "I notice you've been looking
+very hard at our van. Excuse me, but are you saved?"
+
+"No, are you?" Mark countered with an angry blush.
+
+"We are," the gospeller proclaimed. "Or I and Mr. Smillie here," he
+indicated his companion, "wouldn't be travelling round trying to save
+others. Here, read this tract, my friend. Don't hurry over it. We can
+wait all day and all night to bring one wandering soul to Jesus."
+
+Mark looked at the young men curiously; perceiving that they were
+sincere, he accepted the tract and out of courtesy perused it. The tale
+therein enfolded reminded him of a narrative testifying to the efficacy
+of a patent medicine. The process of conversation followed a stereotyped
+formula.
+
+_For three and a half years I was unable to keep down any sins for more
+than five minutes after I had committed the last one. I had a dizzy
+feeling in the heart and a sharp pain in the small of the soul. A friend
+of mine recommended me to try the good minister in the slum. . . . After
+the first text I was able to keep down my sins for six minutes . . .
+after twenty-two bottles I am as good as I ever was. . . . I ascribe my
+salvation entirely to_. . . . Mark handed back the tract with a smile.
+
+"Do you convert many people with this literature?" he asked.
+
+"We don't often convert a soul right off," said Mr. Smillie. "But we sow
+the good seed, if you follow my meaning; and we leave the rest to Jesus.
+Mr. Bullock and I have handed over seven hundred tracts in three weeks,
+and we know that they won't all fall on stony ground or be choked by
+tares and thistles."
+
+"Do you mind my asking you a question?" Mark said.
+
+The gospel bearers craned their necks like hungry fowls in their
+eagerness to peck at any problems Mark felt inclined to scatter before
+them. A ludicrous fancy passed through his mind that much of the good
+seed was pecked up by the scatterers.
+
+"What are you trying to convert people to?" Mark solemnly inquired.
+
+"What are we trying to convert people to?" echoed Mr. Bullock and Mr.
+Smillie in unison. Then the former became eloquent. "We're trying to
+wash ignorant people in the blood of the Lamb. We're converting them
+from the outer darkness, where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing
+of teeth, to be rocked safe for ever in the arms of Jesus. If you'd have
+read that tract I handed you a bit more slowly and a bit more carefully,
+you wouldn't have had any call to ask a question like that."
+
+"Perhaps I framed my question rather badly," Mark admitted. "I
+understand that you want to bring people to believe in Our Lord; but
+when by a tract or by a personal exhortation or by an emotional appeal
+you've induced them to suppose that they are converted, or as you put it
+saved, what more do you give them?"
+
+"What more do we give them?" Mr. Smillie shrilled. "What more can we
+give them after we've given them Christ Jesus? We're sitting here
+offering you Christ Jesus at this moment. You're sitting there mocking
+at us. But Mr. Bullock and me don't mind how much you mock. We're ready
+to stay here for hours if we can bring you safe to the bosom of
+Emmanuel."
+
+"Yes, but suppose I told you that I believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ
+without any persuasion from you?" Mark inquired.
+
+"Well, then you're saved," said Mr. Bullock decidedly. "And you can ask
+the landlord for our bill, Mr. Smillie."
+
+"But is nothing more necessary?" Mark persisted.
+
+"_By faith are ye justified_," Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie shouted
+simultaneously.
+
+Mark paused for a moment to consider whether argument was worth while,
+and then he returned to the attack.
+
+"I'm afraid I think that people like you do a great deal of damage to
+Christianity. You only flatter human conceit. You get hold of some
+emotional creature and work upon his feelings until in an access of
+self-absorption he feels that the universe is standing still while the
+necessary measures are taken to secure his personal salvation. You
+flatter this poor soul, and then you go away and leave him to work out
+his own salvation."
+
+"If you're dwelling in Christ Jesus and Christ Jesus is dwelling in you,
+you haven't got to work out your own salvation. He worked out your
+salvation on the Cross," said Mr. Bullock contemptuously.
+
+"And you think that nothing more is necessary from a man? It seems to me
+that the religion you preach is fatal to human character. I'm not trying
+to be offensive when I tell you that it's the religion of a tapeworm.
+It's a religion for parasites. It's a religion which ignores the Holy
+Ghost."
+
+"Perhaps you'll explain your assertion a little more fully?" Mr. Bullock
+invited with a scowl.
+
+"What I mean is that, if Our Lord's Atonement removed all responsibility
+from human nature, there doesn't seem much for the Holy Ghost to do,
+does there?"
+
+"Well, as it happens," said Mr. Bullock sarcastically, "Mr. Smillie and
+I here do most of our work with the help of the Holy Ghost, so you've
+hit on a bad example to work off your sneers on."
+
+"I'm not trying to sneer," Mark protested. "But strangely enough just
+before you came along I was thinking to myself how much I should like to
+travel over England preaching about Our Lord, because I think that
+England has need of Him. But I also think, now you've answered my
+question, that _you_ are doing more harm than good by your
+interpretation of the Holy Ghost."
+
+"Mr. Smillie," interrupted Mr. Bullock in an elaborately off-hand voice,
+"if you've counted the change and it's all correct, we'd better get a
+move on. Let's gird up our loins, Mr. Smillie, and not sit wrestling
+here with infidels."
+
+"No, really, you must allow me," Mark persisted. "You've had it so much
+your own way with your tracts and your talks this last few weeks that by
+now you must be in need of a sermon yourselves. The gospel you preach is
+only going to add to the complacency of England, and England is too
+complacent already. All Northern nations are, which is why they are
+Protestant. They demand a religion which will truckle to them, a
+religion which will allow them to devote six days of the week to what is
+called business and on the seventh day to rest and praise God that they
+are not as other men."
+
+"_Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's and unto God the things
+that are God's_," said Mr. Smillie, putting the change in his pocket and
+untying the nosebag from the horse.
+
+"_Ye cannot serve God and mammon_," Mark retorted. "And I wish you'd let
+me finish my argument."
+
+"Mr. Smillie and I aren't touring the Midlands trying to find grapes on
+thorns and figs on thistles," said Mr. Bullock scathingly. "We'd have
+given you a chance, if you'd have shown any fruits of the Spirit."
+
+"You've just said you weren't looking for grapes or figs," Mark laughed.
+"I'm sorry I've made you so cross. But you began the argument by asking
+me if I was saved. Think how annoyed you would have been if I had begun
+a conversation by asking you if you were washed."
+
+"My last words to you is," said Mr. Bullock solemnly, looking out of
+the caravan window, "my last words to you are," he corrected himself,
+"is to avoid beer. You can touch up the horse, Mr. Smillie."
+
+"I'll come and touch you up, you big-mouthed Bible thumpers," a rich
+voice shouted from the inn door. "Yes, you sit outside my public-house
+and swill minerals when you're so full of gas already you could light a
+corporation gasworks. Avoid beer, you walking bellows? Step down out of
+that travelling menagerie, and I'll give you 'avoid beer.' You'll avoid
+more than beer before I've finished with you."
+
+But the gospel bearers without paying any attention to the tirade went
+on their way; and Mark who did not wait to listen to the innkeeper's
+abuse of all religion and all religious people went on his way in the
+opposite direction.
+
+Swinging homeward over the Cotswolds Mark flattered himself on a victory
+over heretics, and he imagined his adversaries entering Wield that
+afternoon, the prey of doubt and mortification. At the highest point of
+the road he even ventured to suppose that they might find themselves at
+Evensong outside St. Andrew's Church and led within by the grace of the
+Holy Spirit that they might renounce their errors before the altar.
+Indeed, it was not until he was back in the Rectory that the futility of
+his own bearing overwhelmed him with shame. Anxious to atone for his
+self-conceit, Mark gave the Rector an account of the incident.
+
+"It seems to me that I behaved very feebly, don't you think?"
+
+"That kind of fellow is a hard nut to crack," the Rector said
+consolingly. "And you can't expect just by quoting text against text to
+effect an instant conversion. Don't forget that your friends are in
+their way as great enthusiasts probably as yourself."
+
+"Yes, but it's humiliating to be imagining oneself leading a revival of
+the preaching friars and then to behave like that. What strikes me now,
+when it's too late, is that I ought to have waited and taken the
+opportunity to tackle the innkeeper. He was just the ordinary man who
+supposes that religion is his natural enemy. You must admit that I
+missed a chance there."
+
+"I don't want to check your missionary zeal," said the Rector. "But I
+really don't think you need worry yourself about an omission of that
+kind so long before you are ordained. If I didn't know you as well as I
+do, I might even be inclined to consider such a passion for souls at
+your age a little morbid. I wish with all my heart you'd gone to
+Oxford," he added with a sigh.
+
+"Well, really, do you know," said Mark, "I don't regret that. Whatever
+may be the advantages of a public school and university, the education
+hampers one. One becomes identified with a class; and when one has
+finished with that education, the next two or three years have to be
+spent in discovering that public school and university men form a very
+small proportion of the world's population. Sometimes I almost regret
+that my mother did not let me acquire that Cockney accent. You can say a
+lot of things in a Cockney accent which said without any accent sound
+priggish. You must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale of
+the gospellers and the innkeeper is 'Dear me! I am afraid Mark's turning
+into a prig.'"
+
+"No, no. I laid particular stress on the point that if I didn't know you
+as well as I do I might perhaps have thought that," the Rector
+protested.
+
+"I don't think I am a prig," Mark went on slowly. "I don't think I have
+enough confidence in myself to be a prig. I think the way I argued with
+Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie was a bit priggish, because at the back of
+my head all the time I was talking I felt in addition to the arrogance
+of faith a kind of confounded snobbishness; and this sense of
+superiority came not from my being a member of the Church, but from
+feeling myself more civilized than they were. Looking back now at the
+conversation, I can remember that actually at the very moment I was
+talking of the Holy Ghost I was noticing how Mr. Bullock's dicky would
+keep escaping from his waistcoat. I wonder if the great missionary
+saints of the middle ages had to contend with this accumulation of
+social conventions with which we are faced nowadays. It seems to me
+that in everything--in art, in religion, in mere ordinary everyday life
+and living--man is adding daily to the wall that separates him from
+God."
+
+"H'm, yes," said the Rector, "all this only means that you are growing
+up. The child is nearer to God than the man. Wordsworth said it better
+than I can say it. Similarly, the human race must grow away from God as
+it takes upon itself the burden of knowledge. That surely is inherent in
+the fall of man. No philosopher has yet improved upon the first chapter
+of Genesis as a symbolical explanation of humanity's plight. When man
+was created--or if you like to put it evolved--there must have been an
+exact moment at which he had the chance of remaining where he was--in
+other words, in the Garden of Eden--or of developing further along his
+own lines with free will. Satan fell from pride. It is natural to assume
+that man, being tempted by Satan, would fall from the same sin, though
+the occasion, of his fall might be the less heroic sin of curiosity.
+Yes, I think that first chapter of Genesis, as an attempt to sum up the
+history of millions of years, is astoundingly complete. Have you ever
+thought how far by now the world would have grown away from God without
+the Incarnation?"
+
+"Yes," said Mark, "and after nineteen hundred years how little nearer it
+has grown."
+
+"My dear boy," said the Rector, "if man has not even yet got rid of
+rudimentary gills or useless paps he is not going to grow very visibly
+nearer to God in nineteen hundred years after growing away from God for
+ninety million. Yet such is the mercy of our Father in Heaven that,
+infinitely remote as we have grown from Him, we are still made in His
+image, and in childhood we are allowed a few years of blessed innocency.
+To some children--and you were one of them--God reveals Himself more
+directly. But don't, my dear fellow, grow up imagining that these
+visions you were accorded as a boy will be accorded to you all through
+your life. You may succeed in remaining pure in act, but you will find
+it hard to remain pure in heart. To me the most frightening beatitude is
+_Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God._ What your
+present state of mind really amounts to is lack of hope, for as soon as
+you find yourself unable to be as miraculously eloquent as St. Anthony
+of Padua you become the prey of despair."
+
+"I am not so foolish as that," Mark replied. "But surely, Rector, it
+behoves me during these years before my ordination to criticize myself
+severely."
+
+"As severely as you like," the Rector agreed, "provided that you only
+criticize yourself, and don't criticize Almighty God."
+
+"But surely," Mark went on, "I ought to be asking myself now that I am
+twenty-one how I shall best occupy the next three years?"
+
+"Certainly," the Rector assented. "Think it over, and be sure that, when
+you have thought it over and have made your decision with the help of
+prayer, I shall be the first to support that decision in every way
+possible. Even if you decide to be a preaching friar," he added with a
+smile. "And now I have some news for you. Esther arrives here tomorrow
+to stay with us for a fortnight before she is professed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+SISTER ESTHER MAGDALENE
+
+
+Esther's novitiate in the community of St. Mary Magdalene, Shoreditch,
+had lasted six months longer than was usual, because the Mother Superior
+while never doubting her vocation for the religious life had feared for
+her ability to stand the strain of that work among penitents to which
+the community was dedicated. In the end, her perseverance had been
+rewarded, and the day of her profession was at hand.
+
+During the whole of her nearly four years' novitiate Esther had not been
+home once; although Mark and she had corresponded at long intervals,
+their letters had been nothing more than formal records of minor events,
+and on St. John's eve he drove with the dogcart to meet her, wondering
+all the way how much she would have changed. The first thing that struck
+him when he saw her alight from the train on Shipcot platform was her
+neatness. In old days with windblown hair and clothes flung on anyhow
+she had belonged so unmistakably to the open air. Now in her grey habit
+and white veil of the novice she was as tranquil as Miriam, and for the
+first time Mark perceived a resemblance between the sisters. Her
+complexion, which formerly was flushed and much freckled by the open
+air, was now like alabaster; and although her auburn hair was hidden
+beneath the veil Mark was aware of it like a hidden fire. He had in the
+very moment of welcoming her a swift vision of that auburn hair lying on
+the steps of the altar a fortnight hence, and he was filled with a wild
+desire to be present at her profession and gathering up the shorn locks
+to let them run through his fingers like flames. He had no time to be
+astonished at himself before they were shaking hands.
+
+"Why, Esther," he laughed, "you're carrying an umbrella."
+
+"It was raining in London," she said gravely.
+
+He was on the point of exclaiming at such prudence in Esther when he
+blushed in the remembrance that she was a nun. During the drive back
+they talked shyly about the characters of the village and the Rectory
+animals.
+
+"I feel as if you'd just come back from school for the holidays," he
+said.
+
+"Yes, I feel as if I'd been at school," she agreed. "How sweet the
+country smells."
+
+"Don't you miss the country sometimes in Shoreditch?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head and looked at him with puzzled eyes.
+
+"Why should I miss anything in Shoreditch?"
+
+Mark was abashed and silent for the rest of the drive, because he
+fancied that Esther might have supposed that he was referring to the
+past, rather than give which impression he would have cut out his
+tongue. When they reached the Rectory, Mark was moved almost to tears by
+the greetings.
+
+"Dear little sister," Miriam murmured. "How happy we are to have you
+with us again."
+
+"Dear child," said Mrs. Ogilvie. "And really she does look like a nun."
+
+"My dearest girl, we have missed you every moment of these four years,"
+said the Rector, bending to kiss her. "How cold your cheek is."
+
+"It was quite chilly driving," said Mark quickly, for there had come
+upon him a sudden dismay lest they should think she was a ghost. He was
+relieved when Miriam announced tea half an hour earlier than usual in
+honour of Esther's arrival; it seemed to prove that to her family she
+was still alive.
+
+"After tea I'm going to Wych Maries to pick St. John's wort for the
+church. Would you like to walk as far?" Mark suggested, and then stood
+speechless, horrified at his want of tact. He had the presence of mind
+not to excuse himself, and he was grateful to Esther when she replied in
+a calm voice that she should like a walk after tea.
+
+When the opportunity presented itself, Mark apologized for his
+suggestion.
+
+"By why apologize?" she asked. "I assure you I'm not at all tired and I
+really should like to walk to Wych Maries."
+
+He was amazed at her self-possession, and they walked along with
+unhastening conventual steps to where the St. John's wort grew amid a
+tangle of ground ivy in the open spaces of a cypress grove, appearing
+most vividly and richly golden like sunlight breaking from black clouds
+in the western sky.
+
+"Gather some sprays quickly, Sister Esther Magdalene," Mark advised.
+"And you will be safe against the demons of this night when evil has
+such power."
+
+"Are we ever safe against the demons of the night?" she asked solemnly.
+"And has not evil great power always?"
+
+"Always," he assented in a voice that trembled to a sigh, like the
+uncertain wind that comes hesitating at dusk in the woods. "Always," he
+repeated.
+
+As he spoke Mark fell upon his knees among the holy flowers, for there
+had come upon him temptation; and the sombre trees standing round
+watched him like fiends with folded wings.
+
+"Go to the chapel," he cried in an agony.
+
+"Mark, what is the matter?"
+
+"Go to the chapel. For God's sake, Esther, don't wait."
+
+In another moment he felt that he should tear the white veil from her
+forehead and set loose her auburn hair.
+
+"Mark, are you ill?"
+
+"Oh, do what I ask," he begged. "Once I prayed for you here. Pray for me
+now."
+
+At that moment she understood, and putting her hands to her eyes she
+stumbled blindly toward the ruined church of the two Maries, heavily
+too, because she was encumbered by her holy garb. When she was gone and
+the last rustle of her footsteps had died away upon the mid-summer
+silence, Mark buried his body in the golden flowers.
+
+"How can I ever look any of them in the face again?" he cried aloud.
+"Small wonder that yesterday I was so futile. Small wonder indeed! And
+of all women, to think that I should fall in love with Esther. If I had
+fallen in love with her four years ago . . . but now when she is going
+to be professed . . . suddenly without any warning . . . without any
+warning . . . yet perhaps I did love her in those days . . . and was
+jealous. . . ."
+
+And even while Mark poured forth his horror of himself he held her image
+to his heart.
+
+"I thought she was a ghost because she was dead to me, not because she
+was dead to them. She is not a ghost to them. And is she to me?"
+
+He leapt to his feet, listening.
+
+"Should she come back," he thought with beating heart. "Should she come
+back . . . I love her . . . she hasn't taken her final vows . . . might
+she not love me? No," he shouted at the top of his voice. "I will not do
+as my father did . . . I will not . . . I will not. . . ."
+
+Mark felt sure of himself again: he felt as he used to feel as a little
+boy when his mother entered on a shaft of light to console his childish
+terrors. When he came to the ruined chapel and saw Esther standing with
+uplifted palms before the image of St. Mary Magdalene long since put
+back upon the pedestal from which it had been flung by the squire of
+Rushbrooke Grange, Mark was himself again.
+
+"My dear," Esther cried, impulsively taking his hand. "You frightened
+me. What was the matter?"
+
+He did not answer for a moment or two, because he wanted her to hold his
+hand a little while longer, so much time was to come when she would
+never hold it.
+
+"Whenever I dip my hand in cold water," he said at last, "I shall think
+of you. Why did you say that about the demons of the night?"
+
+She dropped his hand in comprehension.
+
+"You're disgusted with me," he murmured. "I'm not surprised."
+
+"No, no, you mustn't think of me like that. I'm still a very human
+Esther, so human that the Reverend Mother has made me wait an extra year
+to be professed. But, Mark dear, can't you understand, you who know what
+I endured in this place, that I am sometimes tempted by memories of
+him, that I sometimes sin by regrets for giving him up, my dead lover
+so near to me in this place. My dead love," she sighed to herself, "to
+whose memory in my pride of piety I thought I should be utterly
+indifferent."
+
+A spasm of jealousy had shaken Mark while Esther was speaking, but by
+the time she had finished he had fought it down.
+
+"I think I must have loved you all this time," he told her.
+
+"Mark dear, I'm ten years older than you. I'm going to be a nun for what
+of my life remains. And I can never love anybody else. Don't make this
+visit of mine a misery to me. I've had to conquer so much and I need
+your prayers."
+
+"I wish you needed my kisses."
+
+"Mark!"
+
+"What did I say? Oh, Esther, I'm a brute. Tell me one thing."
+
+"I've already told you more than I've told anyone except my confessor."
+
+"Have you found happiness in the religious life?"
+
+"I have found myself. The Reverend Mother wanted me to leave the
+community and enter a contemplative order. She did not think I should be
+able to help poor girls."
+
+"Esther, what a stupid woman! Why surely you would be wonderful with
+them?"
+
+"I think she is a wise woman," said Esther. "I think since we came
+picking St. John's wort I understand how wise she is."
+
+"Esther, dear dear Esther, you make me feel more than ever ashamed of
+myself. I entreat you not to believe what the Reverend Mother says."
+
+"You have only a fortnight to convince me," said Esther.
+
+"And I will convince you."
+
+"Mark, do you remember when you made me pray for his soul telling me
+that in that brief second he had time to repent?"
+
+Mark nodded grimly.
+
+"You still do think that, don't you?"
+
+"Of course I do. He must have repented."
+
+She thanked him with her eyes; and Mark looking into their depths of
+hope unfathomable put away from him the thought that the damned soul of
+Will Starling was abroad to-night with power of evil. Yes, he put this
+thought behind him; but carrying an armful of St. John's wort to hang in
+sprays above the doors of the church he could not rid himself of the
+fancy that his arms were filled with Esther's auburn hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+MALFORD ABBEY
+
+
+Mark left Wych-on-the-Wold next day; although he did not announce that
+he should be absent from home so long, he intended not to return until
+Esther had gone back to Shoreditch. He hoped that he was not being
+cowardly in thus running away; but after having assured Esther that she
+could count on his behaving normally for the rest of her visit, he found
+his sleep that night so profoundly disturbed by feverish visions that
+when morning came he dreaded his inability to behave as both he would
+wish himself and she would wish him to behave. Flight seemed the only
+way to find peace. He was shocked not so much by being in love with
+Esther, but by the suddenness with which his desires had overwhelmed
+him, desires which had never been roused since he was born. If in an
+instant he could be turned upside down like that, could he be sure that
+upon the next occasion, supposing that he fell in love with somebody
+more suitable, he should be able to escape so easily? His father must
+have married his mother out of some such violent impulse as had seized
+himself yesterday afternoon, and resentiment about his weakness had
+spoilt his whole life. And those dreams! How significant now were the
+words of the Compline hymn, and how much it behoved a Christian soul to
+vanquish these ill dreams against beholding which the defence of the
+Creator was invoked. He had vowed celibacy; yet already, three months
+after his twenty-first birthday, after never once being troubled with
+the slightest hint that the vow he had taken might be hard to keep, his
+security had been threatened. How right the Rector had been about that
+frightening beatitude.
+
+Mark had taken the direction of Wychford, and when he reached the
+bridge at the bottom of the road from Wych-on-the-Wold he thought he
+would turn aside and visit the Greys whom he had not seen for a long
+time. He was conscious of a curiosity to know if the feelings aroused by
+Esther could be aroused by Monica or Margaret or Pauline. He found the
+dear family unchanged and himself, so far as they were concerned,
+equally unchanged and as much at his ease as he had ever been.
+
+"And what are you going to do now?" one of them asked.
+
+"You mean immediately?"
+
+Mark could not bring himself to say that he did not know, because such a
+reply would have seemed to link him with the state of mind in which he
+had been thrown yesterday afternoon.
+
+"Well, really, I was thinking of going into a monastery," he announced.
+
+Pauline clapped her hands.
+
+"Now I think that is just what you ought to do," she said.
+
+Then followed questions about which Order he proposed to join; and Mark
+ashamed to go back on what he had said lest they should think him
+flippant answered that he thought of joining the Order of St. George.
+
+"You know--Father Burrowes, who works among soldiers."
+
+When Mark was standing by the cross-roads above Wychford and was
+wondering which to take, he decided that really the best thing he could
+do at this moment was to try to enter the Order of St. George. He might
+succeed in being ordained without going to a theological college, or if
+the Bishop insisted upon a theological course and he found that he had a
+vocation for the religious life, he could go to Glastonbury and rejoin
+the Order when he was a priest. It was true that Father Rowley
+disapproved of Father Burrowes; but he had never expressed more than a
+general disapproval, and Mark was inclined to attribute his attitude to
+the prejudice of a man of strong personality and definite methods
+against another man of strong personality and definite methods working
+on similar lines among similar people. Mark remembered now that there
+had been a question at one time of Father Burrowes' opening a priory in
+the next parish to St. Agnes'. Probably that was the reason why Father
+Rowley disapproved of him. Mark had heard the monk preach on one
+occasion and had liked him. Outside the pulpit, however, he knew nothing
+more of him than what he had heard from soldiers staying in the Keppel
+Street Mission House, who from Aldershot had visited Malford Abbey, the
+mother house of the Order. The alternative to Malford was Clere Abbey on
+the Berkshire downs where Dom Cuthbert Manners ruled over a small
+community of strict Benedictines. Had Mark really been convinced that he
+was likely to remain a monk for the rest of his life, he would have
+chosen the Benedictines; but he did not feel justified in presenting
+himself for admission to Clere on what would seem impulse. He hoped that
+if he was accepted by the Order of St. George he should be given an
+opportunity to work at one of the priories in Aldershot or Sandgate, and
+that the experience he might expect to gain would help him later as a
+parish priest. He could not confide in the Rector his reason for wanting
+to subject himself to monastic discipline, and he expected a good deal
+of opposition. It might be better to write from whatever village he
+stayed in to-night and make the announcement without going back at all.
+And this is what in the end he decided to do.
+
+     The Sun Inn,
+
+     Ladingford.
+
+     June 24.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I expect you gathered from our talk the day before yesterday that I
+     was feeling dissatisfied with myself, and you must know that the
+     problem of occupying my time wisely before I am ordained has lately
+     been on my mind. I don't feel that I could honestly take up a
+     profession to which I had no intention of sticking, and though
+     Father Rowley recommended me to stay at home and work with the
+     village people I don't feel capable of doing that yet. If it was a
+     question of helping you by taking off your shoulders work that I
+     could do it would be another matter. But you've often said to me
+     that you had more time on your hands than you cared for since you
+     gave up coaching me for an Oxford scholarship, and so I don't think
+     I'm wrong in supposing that you would find it hard to discover for
+     me any parochial routine work. I'm not old enough yet to fish for
+     souls, and I have no confidence in my ability to hook them.
+     Besides, I think it would bore you if I started "missionizing" in
+     Wych-on-the-Wold.
+
+     I've settled therefore to try to get into the Order of St. George.
+     I don't think you know Father Burrowes personally, but I've always
+     heard that he does a splendid work among soldiers, and I'm hoping
+     that he will accept me as a novice.
+
+     Latterly, in fact since I left Chatsea, I've been feeling the need
+     of a regular existence, and, though I cannot pretend that I have a
+     vocation for the monastic life in the highest sense, I do feel that
+     I have a vocation for the Order of St. George. You will wonder why
+     I have not mentioned this to you, but the fact is--and I hope
+     you'll appreciate my frankness--I did not think of the O.S.G. till
+     this morning. Of course they may refuse to have me. But I shall
+     present myself without a preliminary letter, and I hope to persuade
+     Father Burrowes to have me on probation. If he once does that, I'm
+     sure that I shall satisfy him. This sounds like the letter of a
+     conceited clerk. It must be the fault of this horrible inn pen,
+     which is like writing with a tooth-pick dipped in a puddle! I
+     thought it was best not to stay at the Rectory, with Esther on the
+     verge of her profession. It wouldn't be fair to her at a time like
+     this to make my immediate future a matter of prime importance. So
+     do forgive my going off in this fashion. I suppose it's just
+     possible that some bishop will accept me for ordination from
+     Malford, though no doubt it's improbable. This will be a matter to
+     discuss with Father Burrowes later.
+
+     Do forgive what looks like a most erratic course of procedure. But
+     I really should hate a long discussion, and if I make a mistake I
+     shall have had a lesson. It really is essential for me to be
+     tremendously occupied. I cannot say more than this, but I do beg
+     you to believe that I'm not taking this apparently unpremeditated
+     step without a very strong reason. It's a kind of compromise with
+     my ambition to re-establish in the English Church an order of
+     preaching friars. I haven't yet given up that idea, but I'm sure
+     that I ought not to think about it seriously until I'm a priest.
+
+     I'm staying here to-night after a glorious day's tramp, and
+     to-morrow morning I shall take the train and go by Reading and
+     Basingstoke to Malford. I'll write to you as soon as I know if I'm
+     accepted. My best love to everybody, and please tell Esther that I
+     shall think about her on St. Mary Magdalene's Day.
+
+     Yours always affectionately,
+
+     Mark.
+
+To Esther he wrote by the same post:
+
+     My dear Sister Esther Magdalene,
+
+     Do not be angry with me for running away, and do not despise me for
+     trying to enter a monastery in such a mood. I'm as much the prey of
+     religion as you are. And I am really horrified by the revelation of
+     what I am capable of. I saw in your eyes yesterday the passion of
+     your soul for Divine things. The memory of them awes me. Pray for
+     me, dear sister, that all my passion may be turned to the service
+     of God. Defend me to your brother, who will not understand my
+     behaviour.
+
+     Mark.
+
+Three days later Mark wrote again to the Rector:
+
+     The Abbey,
+
+     Malford,
+
+     Surrey.
+
+     June 27th.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I do hope that you're not so much annoyed with me that you don't
+     want to hear anything about my monastic adventures. However, if you
+     are you can send back this long letter unopened. I believe that is
+     the proper way to show one's disapproval by correspondence.
+
+     I reached Malford yesterday afternoon, and after a jolly walk
+     between high hazel hedges for about two miles I reached the Abbey.
+     It doesn't quite fulfil one's preconceived ideas of what an abbey
+     should look like, but I suppose it is the most practicable building
+     that could be erected with the amount of money that the Order had
+     to spare for what in a way is a luxury for a working order like
+     this. What it most resembles is three tin tabernacles put together
+     to form three sides of a square, the fourth and empty side of which
+     is by far the most beautiful, because it consists of a glorious
+     view over a foreground of woods, a middle-distance of park land,
+     and on the horizon the Hampshire downs.
+
+     I am an authority on this view, because I had to gaze at it for
+     about a quarter of an hour while I was waiting for somebody to open
+     the Abbey door. At last the porter, Brother Lawrence, after taking
+     a good look at me through the grill, demanded what I wanted. When I
+     said that I wanted to be a monk, he looked very alarmed and hurried
+     away, leaving me to gaze at that view for another ten minutes. He
+     came back at last and let me in, informing me in a somewhat
+     adenoidish voice that the Reverend Brother was busy in the garden
+     and asking me to wait until he came in. Brother Lawrence has a
+     large, pock-marked face, and while he is talking to anybody he
+     stands with his right hand in his left sleeve and his left hand in
+     his right sleeve like a Chinese mandarin or an old washer-woman
+     with her arms folded under her apron. You must make the most of my
+     descriptions in this letter, because if I am accepted as a
+     probationer I shan't be able to indulge in any more personalities
+     about my brethren.
+
+     The guest-room like everything else in the monastery is
+     match-boarded; and while I was waiting in it the noise was
+     terrific, because some corrugated iron was being nailed on the roof
+     of a building just outside. I began to regret that Brother Lawrence
+     had opened the door at all and that he had not left me in the
+     cloisters, as by the way I discovered that the space enclosed by
+     the three tin tabernacles is called! There was nothing to read in
+     the guest-room except one sheet of a six months' old newspaper
+     which had been spread on the table presumably for a guest to mend
+     something with glue. At last the Reverend Brother, looking most
+     beautiful in a white habit with a zucchetto of mauve velvet, came
+     in and welcomed me with much friendliness. I was surprised to find
+     somebody so young as Brother Dunstan in charge of a monastery,
+     especially as he said he was only a novice as yet. It appears that
+     all the bigwigs--or should I say big-cowls?--are away at the moment
+     on business of the Order and that various changes are in the
+     offing, the most important being the giving up of their branch in
+     Malta and the consequent arrival of Brother George, of whom
+     Brother Dunstan spoke in a hushed voice. Father Burrowes, or the
+     Reverend Father as he is called, is preaching in the north of
+     England at the moment, and Brother Dunstan tells me it is quite
+     impossible for him to say anything, still less to do anything,
+     about my admission. However, he urged me to stay on for the present
+     as a guest, an invitation which I accepted without hesitation. He
+     had only just time to show me my cell and the card of rules for
+     guests when a bell rang and, drawing his cowl over his head, he
+     hurried off.
+
+     After perusing the rules, I discovered that this was the bell which
+     rings a quarter of an hour before Vespers for solemn silence. I
+     hadn't the slightest idea where the chapel was, and when I asked
+     Brother Lawrence he glared at me and put his finger to his mouth. I
+     was not to be discouraged, however, and in the end he showed me
+     into the ante-chapel which is curtained off from the quire. There
+     was only one other person in the ante-chapel, a florid,
+     well-dressed man with a rather mincing and fussy way of
+     worshipping. The monks led by Brother Lawrence (who is not even a
+     novice yet, but a postulant and wears a black habit, without a
+     hood, tied round the waist with a rope) passed from the refectory
+     through the ante-chapel into the quire, and Vespers began. They
+     used an arrangement called "The Day Hours of the English Church,"
+     but beyond a few extra antiphons there was very little difference
+     from ordinary Evening Prayer. After Vespers I had a simple and
+     solemn meal by myself, and I was wondering how I should get hold of
+     a book to pass away the evening, when Brother Dunstan came in and
+     asked me if I'd like to sit with the brethren in the library until
+     the bell rang for simple silence a quarter of an hour before
+     Compline at 9.15, after which everybody--guests and monks--are
+     expected to go to bed in solemn silence. The difference between
+     simple silence and solemn silence is that you may ask necessary
+     questions and get necessary replies during simple silence; but as
+     far as I can make out, during solemn silence you wouldn't be
+     allowed to tell anybody that you were dying, or if you did tell
+     anybody, he wouldn't be able to do anything about it until solemn
+     silence was over.
+
+     The other monks are Brother Jerome, the senior novice after Brother
+     Dunstan, a pious but rather dull young man with fair hair and a
+     squashed face, and Brother Raymond, attractive and bird-like, and
+     considered a great Romanizer by the others. There is also Brother
+     Walter, who is only a probationer and is not even allowed wide
+     sleeves and a habit like Brother Lawrence, but has to wear a very
+     moth-eaten cassock with a black band tied round it. Brother Walter
+     had been marketing in High Thorpe (I wonder what the Bishop of
+     Silchester thought if he saw him in the neighbourhood of the
+     episcopal castle!) and having lost himself on the way home he had
+     arrived back late for Vespers and was tremendously teased by the
+     others in consequence. Brother Walter is a tall excitable awkward
+     creature with black hair that sticks up on end and wide-open
+     frightened eyes. His cassock is much too short for him both in the
+     arms and in the legs; and as he has very large hands and very large
+     feet, his hands and feet look still larger in consequence. They
+     didn't talk about much that was interesting during recreation.
+     Brother Dunstan and Brother Raymond were full of monkish jokes, at
+     all of which Brother Walter laughed in a very high voice--so loudly
+     once that Brother Jerome asked him if he would mind making less
+     noise, as he was reading Montalembert's Monks of the West, at which
+     Brother Walter fell into an abashed gloom.
+
+     I asked who the visitor in the ante-chapel was and was told that he
+     was a Sir Charles Horner who owns the whole of Malford and who has
+     presented the Order with the thirty acres on which the Abbey is
+     built. Sir Charles is evidently an ecclesiastically-minded person
+     and, I should imagine, rather pleased to be able to be the patron
+     of a monastic order.
+
+     I will write you again when I have seen Father Burrowes. For the
+     moment I'm inclined to think that Malford is rather playing at
+     being monks; but as I said, the bigwigs are all away. Brother
+     Dunstan is a delightful fellow, yet I shouldn't imagine that he
+     would make a successful abbot for long.
+
+     I enjoyed Compline most of all my experiences during the day, after
+     which I retired to my cell and slept without turning till the bell
+     rang for Lauds and Prime, both said as one office at six o'clock,
+     after which I should have liked a conventual Mass. But alas, there
+     is no priest here and I have been spending the time till breakfast
+     by writing you this endless letter.
+
+     Yours ever affectionately,
+
+     Mark.
+
+     P.S. They don't say Mattins, which I'm inclined to think rather
+     slack. But I suppose I oughtn't to criticize so soon.
+
+To those two letters of Mark's, the Rector replied as follows:
+
+     The Rectory,
+
+     Wych-on-the-Wold,
+
+     Oxon.
+
+     June 29th.
+
+     My dear Mark,
+
+     I cannot say frankly that I approve of your monastic scheme. I
+     should have liked an opportunity to talk it over with you first of
+     all, and I cannot congratulate you on your good manners in going
+     off like that without any word. Although you are technically
+     independent now, I think it would be a great mistake to sink your
+     small capital of £500 in the Order of St. George, and you can't
+     very well make use of them to pass the next two or three years
+     without contributing anything.
+
+     The other objection to your scheme is that you may not get taken at
+     Glastonbury. In any case the Glastonbury people will give the
+     preference to Varsity men, and I'm not sure that they would be very
+     keen on having an ex-monk. However, as I said, you are independent
+     now and can choose yourself what you do. Meanwhile, I suppose it is
+     possible that Burrowes may decide you have no vocation, in which
+     case I hope you'll give up your monastic ambitions and come back
+     here.
+
+     Yours affectionately,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+Mark who had been growing bored in the guest-room of Malford Abbey
+nearly said farewell to it for ever when he received the Rector's
+letter. His old friend and guardian was evidently wounded by his
+behaviour, and Mark considering what he owed him felt that he ought to
+abandon his monastic ambitions if by doing so he could repay the Rector
+some of his kindness. His hand was on the bell that should summon the
+guest-brother (when the bell was working and the guest-brother was not)
+in order to tell him that he had been called away urgently and to ask if
+he might have the Abbey cart to take him to the station; but at that
+moment Sir Charles Horner came in and began to chat affably to Mark.
+
+"I've been intending to come up and see you for the last three days. But
+I've been so confoundedly busy. They wonder what we country gentlemen do
+with ourselves. By gad, they ought to try our life for a change."
+
+Mark supposed that the third person plural referred to the whole body of
+Radical critics.
+
+"You're the son of Lidderdale, I hear," Sir Charles went on without
+giving Mark time to comment on the hardship of his existence. "I visited
+Lima Street twenty-five years ago, before you were born that was. Your
+father was a great pioneer. We owe him a lot. And you've been with
+Rowley lately? That confounded bishop. He's our bishop, you know. But he
+finds it difficult to get at Burrowes except by starving him for
+priests. The fellow's a time-server, a pusher . . ."
+
+Mark began to like Sir Charles; he would have liked anybody who would
+abuse the Bishop of Silchester.
+
+"So you're thinking of joining my Order," Sir Charles went on without
+giving Mark time to say a word. "I call it my Order because I set them
+up here with thirty acres of uncleared copse. It gives the Tommies
+something to do when they come over here on furlough from Aldershot.
+You've never met Burrowes, I hear."
+
+Mark thought that Sir Charles for a busy man had managed to learn a
+great deal about an unimportant person like himself.
+
+"Will Father Burrowes be here soon?" Mark inquired.
+
+"'Pon my word, I don't know. Nobody knows when he'll be anywhere. He's
+preaching all over the place. He begs the deuce of a lot of money, you
+know. Aren't you a friend of Dorward's? You were asking Brother Dunstan
+about him. His parish isn't far from here. About fifteen miles, that's
+all. He's an amusing fellow, isn't he? Has tremendous rows with his
+squire, Philip Iredale. A pompous ass whose wife ran away from him a
+little time ago. Served him right, Dorward told me in confidence. You
+must come and have lunch with me. There's only Lady Landells. I can't
+afford to live in the big place. Huge affair with Doric portico and all
+that, don't you know. It's let to Lord Middlesborough, the shipping man.
+I live at Malford Lodge. Quite a jolly little place I've made of it.
+Suits me better than that great gaunt Georgian pile. You'd better walk
+down with me this morning and stop to lunch."
+
+Mark, who was by now growing tired of his own company in the guest-room,
+accepted Sir Charles' invitation with alacrity; and they walked down
+from the Abbey to the village of Malford, which was situated at the
+confluence of the Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the
+Wey, which itself is not a mighty stream.
+
+"A rather charming village, don't you think?" said Sir Charles, pointing
+with his tasselled cane to a particularly attractive rose-hung cottage.
+"It was lucky that the railway missed us by a couple of miles; we should
+have been festering with tin bungalows by now on any available land,
+which means on any land that doesn't belong to me. I don't offer to show
+you the church, because I never enter it."
+
+Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate, supposing that
+with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should be of unusual interest.
+
+"My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the Simeon Trustees, it
+being the only part of my inheritance he could alienate from me, whom he
+loathed. He knew nothing would enrage me more than that, and the result
+is that I've got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has
+evening communion twice a month. That is why I took such pleasure in
+planting a monastery in the parish; and if only that old time-server the
+Bishop of Silchester would licence a chaplain to the community, I should
+get my Sunday Mass in my own parish despite my uncle's simeony, as I
+call it. As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I don't
+get a Mass at the Abbey and I have to go to the next parish, which is
+four miles away and appears highly undignified for the squire."
+
+"And you can't get him out?" said Mark.
+
+"If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another one just as
+bad. The Simeon Trustees only appoint people of the stamp of Mr.
+Choules, my present enemy. He's a horrid little man with a gaunt wife
+six feet high who beats her children and, if village gossip be true, her
+husband as well. Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to
+Middlesborough, as I told you."
+
+Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns and cedars and
+gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns. He had seen many of these great
+houses in the course of his tramping; but he had never thought of them
+before except as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people
+could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home as the small
+houses in which Mark had spent his life came over him now with a sense
+of novelty.
+
+"Ghastly affair, isn't it?" said the owner contemptuously. "I'd let it
+stand empty rather than live in it myself. It reeks of my uncle's
+medicine and echoes with his gouty groans. Besides what is there in it
+that's really mine?"
+
+Mark who had been thinking what an easy affair life must be for Sir
+Charles was struck by his tone of disillusionment. Perhaps all people
+who inherited old names and old estates were affected by their awareness
+of transitory possession. Sir Charles could not alienate even a piece of
+furniture. A middle-aged bachelor and a cosmopolitan, he would have
+moved about the corridors and halls of that huge house with less
+permanency than Lord Middlesborough who paid him so well to walk about
+in it in his stead, and who was no more restricted by the terms of his
+lease than was his landlord by the conditions of the entail. Mark began
+to feel sorry for him; but without cause, for when Sir Charles came in
+sight of Malford Lodge where he lived, he was full of enthusiasm. It was
+indeed a pretty little house of red brick, dating from the first quarter
+of the nineteenth century and like so many houses of that period built
+close to the road, surrounded too on three sides by a verandah of iron
+and copper in the pagoda style, thoroughly ugly, but by reason of the
+mellow peacock hues time had given its roof, full of personality and
+charm. They entered by a green door in the brick wall and crossed a
+lawn sloping down to the little river to reach the shade of a tulip tree
+in full bloom, where seated in one of those tall wicker garden chairs
+shaped like an alcove was an elderly lady as ugly as Priapus.
+
+"There's Lady Landells, who's a poetess, you know," said Sir Charles
+gravely.
+
+Mark accepted the information with equal gravity. He was still
+unsophisticated enough to be impressed at hearing a woman called a
+poetess.
+
+"Mr. Lidderdale is going to have lunch with us, Lady Landells," Sir
+Charles announced.
+
+"Oh, is he?" Lady Landells replied in a cracked murmur of complete
+indifference.
+
+"He's a great admirer of your poems," added Sir Charles, hearing which
+Lady Landells looked at Mark with her cod's eyes and by way of greeting
+offered him two fingers of her left hand.
+
+"I can't read him any of my poems to-day, Charles, so pray don't ask me
+to do so," the poetess groaned.
+
+"I'm going to show Mr. Lidderdale some of our pictures before lunch,"
+said Sir Charles.
+
+Lady Landells paid no attention; Mark, supposing her to be on the verge
+of a poetic frenzy, was glad to leave her in that wicker alcove under
+the tulip tree and to follow Sir Charles into the house.
+
+It was an astonishing house inside, with Gothic carving everywhere and
+with ancient leaded casements built inside the sashed windows of the
+exterior.
+
+"I took an immense amount of trouble to get this place arranged to my
+taste," said Sir Charles; and Mark wondered why he had bothered to
+retain the outer shell, since that was all that was left of the
+original. In every room there were copies, excellently done of pictures
+by Botticelli and Mantegna and other pre-Raphaelite painters; the walls
+were rich with antique brocades and tapestries; the ceilings were gilded
+or elaborately moulded with fan traceries and groining; great
+candlesticks stood in every corner; the doors were all old with
+floriated hinges and huge locks--it was the sort of house in which
+Victor Hugo might have put on his slippers and said, "I am at home."
+
+"I admit nothing after 1520," said Sir Charles proudly.
+
+Mark wondered why so fastidious a medievalist allowed the Order of St.
+George to erect those three tin tabernacles and to matchboard the
+interior of the Abbey. But perhaps that was only another outer shell
+which would gradually be filled.
+
+Lunch was a disappointment, because when Sir Charles began to talk about
+the monastery, which was what Mark had been wanting to talk about all
+the morning, Lady Landells broke in:
+
+"I am sorry, Charles, but I'm afraid that I must beg for complete
+silence at lunch, as I'm in the middle of a sonnet."
+
+The poetess sighed, took a large mouthful of food, and sighed again.
+
+After lunch Sir Charles took Mark to see his library, which reminded him
+of a Rossetti interior and lacked only a beautiful long-necked creature,
+full-lipped and auburn-haired, to sit by the casement languishing over a
+cithern or gazing out through bottle-glass lights at a forlorn and
+foreshortened landscape of faerie land.
+
+"Poor Lady Landells was a little tiresome at lunch," said Sir Charles
+half to himself. "She gets moods. Women seem never to grow out of
+getting moods. But she has always been most kind to me, and she insists
+on giving me anything I want for my house. Last year she was good enough
+to buy it from me as it stands, so it's really her house, although she
+has left it back to me in her will. She took rather a fancy to you by
+the way."
+
+Mark, who had supposed that Lady Landells had regarded him with aversion
+and scorn, stared at this.
+
+"Didn't she give you her hand when you said good-bye?" asked Sir
+Charles.
+
+"Her left hand," said Mark.
+
+"Oh, she never gives her right hand to anybody. She has some fad about
+spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or something. Now, what about a
+walk?"
+
+Mark said he should like to go for a walk very much, but wasn't Sir
+Charles too busy?
+
+"Oh, no, I've nothing to do at all."
+
+Yet only that morning he had held forth to Mark at great length on the
+amount of work demanded for the management of an estate.
+
+"Now, why do you want to join Burrowes?" Sir Charles inquired presently.
+
+"Well, I hope to be a priest, and I think I should like to spend the
+next two years out of the world."
+
+"Yes, that is all very well," said Sir Charles, "but I don't know that I
+altogether recommend the O.S.G. I'm not satisfied with the way things
+are being run. However, they tell me that this fellow Brother George has
+a good deal of common-sense. He has been running their house in Malta,
+where he's done some good work. I gave them the land to build a mother
+house so that they could train people for active service, as it were;
+but Burrowes keeps chopping and changing and sending untrained novices
+to take charge of an important branch like Sandgate, and now since
+Rowley left he talks of opening a priory in Chatsea. That's all very
+well, and it's quite right of him to bear in mind that the main object
+of the Order is to work among soldiers; but at the same time he leaves
+this place to run itself, and whenever he does come down here he plans
+some hideous addition, to pay for which he has to go off preaching for
+another three months, so that the Abbey gets looked after by a young
+novice of twenty-five. It's ridiculous, you know. I was grumbling at the
+Bishop; but really I can understand his disinclination to countenance
+Burrowes. I have hopes of Brother George, and I shall take an early
+opportunity of talking to him."
+
+Mark was discouraged by Sir Charles' criticism of the Order; and that it
+could be criticized like this through the conduct of its founder
+accentuated for him the gulf that lay between the English Church and the
+rest of Catholic Christendom.
+
+It was not much solace to remember that every Benedictine community was
+an independent congregation. One could not imagine the most independent
+community's being placed in charge of a novice of twenty-five. It made
+Mark's proposed monastic life appear amateurish; and when he was back in
+the matchboarded guest-room the impulse to abandon his project was
+revised. Yet he felt it would be wrong to return to Wych-on-the-Wold.
+The impulse to come here, though sudden, had been very strong, and to
+give it up without trial might mean the loss of an experience that one
+day he should regret. The opinion of Sir Charles Horner might or might
+not be well founded; but it was bound to be a prejudiced opinion,
+because by constituting himself to the extent he had a patron of the
+Order he must involuntarily expect that it should be conducted according
+to his views. Sir Charles himself, seen in perspective, was a tolerably
+ridiculous figure, too much occupied with the paraphernalia of worship,
+too well pleased with himself, a man of rank and wealth who judged by
+severe standards was an old maid, and like all old maids critical, but
+not creative.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE ORDER OF ST. GEORGE
+
+
+The Order of St. George was started by the Reverend Edward Burrowes six
+years before Sir Charles Horner's gift of land for a Mother House led
+him to suppose that he had made his foundation a permanent factor in the
+religious life of England.
+
+Edward Burrowes was the only son of a band-master in the Royal Artillery
+who at an impressionable moment in the life of his son was stationed at
+Malta. The religious atmosphere of Malta combined with the romantic
+associations of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the
+boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated by his son's
+ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much church-going argued an
+unhealthy preoccupation, and as for Edward's rhapsodies about the
+Auberge of Castile, which sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery
+and the Royal Engineers, they made him sick, to use his own expression.
+
+"You make me sick, Ted," he used to declare. "The sooner I get quit of
+Malta and quartered at Woolwich again, the better I shall be pleased."
+
+When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he hoped that the
+effect of such prosaic surroundings would put an end to Ted's mooning,
+and that he would settle down to a career more likely to reward him in
+this world rather than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his
+dreams aspired. Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who had so
+far submitted to his father's wishes as to be working in a solicitor's
+office, found that the effect of being banished from Malta was to
+stimulate him into a practical attempt to express his dreams of
+religious devotion. He hired a small room over a stable in a back street
+and started a club for the sons of soldiers. The band-master would not
+have minded this so much, especially when he was congratulated on his
+son's enterprise by the wife of the Colonel. Unfortunately this was not
+enough for Edward, who having got the right side of an unscrupulously
+romantic curate persuaded him to receive his vows of a Benedictine
+oblate. The band-master, proud and fond though he might be of his own
+uniform, objected to his son's arriving home from business and walking
+about the house in a cassock. He objected equally to finding that his
+own musical gifts had with his son degenerated into a passion for
+playing Gregorian chants on a vile harmonium. It was only consideration
+for his delicate wife that kept the band-master from pitching both
+cassock and harmonium into the street. The amateur oblate regretted his
+father's hostility; but he persevered with the manner of life he had
+marked out for himself, finding much comfort and encouragement in
+reading the lives of the saintly founders of religious orders.
+
+At last, after a long struggle against the difficulties that friends and
+father put in his way, Edward Burrowes managed at the age of
+twenty-seven to get ordained in Canada, whither, in despair of escaping
+otherwise from the solicitor's office, he had gone to seek his own
+fortune. He took with him the oblate's cassock; but he left behind the
+harmonium, which his father kicked to pieces in rage at not being able
+to kick his son. Burrowes worked as a curate in a dismal lakeside town
+in Ontario, consoling himself with dreams of monasticism and chivalry,
+and gaining a reputation as a preacher. His chief friend was a young
+farmer, called George Harvey, whom he succeeded in firing with his own
+enthusiasm and whom he managed to persuade--which shows that Burrowes
+must have had great powers of persuasion--to wear the habit of a
+Benedictine novice, when he came to spend Saturday night to Monday
+morning with his friend. By this time Burrowes had passed beyond the
+oblate stage, for having found a Canadian bishop willing to dispense him
+from that portion of the Benedictine rule which was incompatible with
+his work as a curate in Jonesville, Ontario, he got himself clothed as a
+novice. About this period a third man joined Burrowes and Harvey in
+their spare-time monasticism. This was John Holcombe, who had emigrated
+from Dorsetshire after an unfortunate love affair and who had been taken
+on by George Harvey as a carter. Holcombe was the son of a yeoman farmer
+that owned several hundred acres of land. He had been educated at
+Sherborne, and soon by his capacity and attractive personality he made
+himself so indispensable to his employer that George Harvey's farm was
+turned into a joint concern. No doubt Harvey's example was the immediate
+cause of Holcombe's associating himself with the little community: but
+it still says much for Burrowes' powers of persuasion that he should
+have been able to impress this young Dorset farmer with the serious
+possibility of leading the monastic life in Ontario.
+
+When another year had passed, an opportunity arose of acquiring a better
+farm in Alberta. It was the Bishop of Alberta who had been so
+sympathetic with Burrowes' monastic aspirations; and, when Harvey and
+Holcombe decided to move to Moose Rib, Burrowes gave up his curacy to
+lead a regular monastic life, so far as one could lead a regular
+monastic life on a farm in the North-west.
+
+Two more years had gone by when a letter arrived from England to tell
+George Harvey that he was the heir to £12,000. Burrowes had kept all his
+influence over the young farmer, and he was actually able to persuade
+Harvey to devote this fortune to founding the Order of St. George for
+mission work among soldiers. There was some debate whether Father
+Burrowes, Brother George, and Brother Birinus should take their final
+vows immediately; but in the end Father Burrowes had his way, and they
+were all three professed by the sympathetic Bishop of Alberta, who
+granted them a constitution subject to the ratification of the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. Father Burrowes was elected Father Superior,
+Brother George was made Assistant Superior, and Brother Birinus had to
+concentrate in his person various monastic offices just as on the Moose
+Rib Farm he had combined in his person the duties of the various hands.
+
+The immediate objective of the new community was Malta, where it was
+proposed to open their first house and where, in despite of the
+outraged dignity of innumerable real monks already there, they made a
+successful beginning. A second house was opened at Gibraltar and put in
+charge of Brother Birinus. Neither Malta nor Gibraltar provided much of
+a field for reinforcing the Order, which, if it was to endure, required
+additional members. Father Burrowes proposed that he should go to
+England and open a house at Aldershot, and that, if he could obtain a
+hearing as a preacher, he should try to raise enough funds for a house
+at Sandgate as well. Brother George and Brother Birinus in a solemn
+chapter of three accepted the proposal; the house at Gibraltar was given
+up; the Father Superior went to seek the fortunes of the Order in
+England, while the other two remained at their work in Malta. Father
+Burrowes was even more successful as a preacher than he hoped; ascribing
+the steady flow of offertories to Divine favour, he instituted during
+the next four years, priories at Aldershot and Sandgate. He began to
+feel the need of a Mother House, having now more than enough candidates
+for the Order of Saint George, where the novices could be suitably
+trained to meet the stress of active mission work. One of his moving
+appeals for this object was heard by Sir Charles Horner who, for reasons
+he had already explained to Mark and because underneath all his
+ecclesiasticism there did exist a genuine desire for the glory of God,
+had presented the land at Malford to the Order. Father Burrowes preached
+harder than ever, addressed drawing-room meetings, and started a monthly
+magazine called _The Dragon_ to raise the necessary money to build a
+mighty abbey. Meanwhile, he had to be contented with those three tin
+tabernacles. Brother George, who had remained all these years in Malta,
+suggested that it was time for somebody else to take his place out
+there, and the Father Superior, although somewhat unwillingly, had
+agreed to his coming to Malford. Not having heard of anybody whom at the
+moment he considered suitable to take charge of what was now a distant
+outpost of the Order, he told Brother George to close the house. It was
+at this stage in the history of the Order that Mark presented himself as
+a candidate for admission.
+
+Father Burrowes arrived unexpectedly two days after the lunch at
+Malford Lodge; and presently Brother Dunstan came to tell Mark that the
+Reverend Father would see him in the Abbott's Parlour immediately after
+Nones. Mark thought that Sir Charles might have given a mediæval lining
+to this room at least, which with its roll-top desk looked like the
+office of the clerk of the works.
+
+"So you want to be a monk?" said Father Burrowes contemptuously. "Want
+to dress up in a beautiful white habit, eh?"
+
+"I really don't mind what I wear," said Mark, trying not to appear
+ruffled by the imputation of wrong motives. "But I do want to be a monk,
+yes."
+
+"You can't come here to play at it," said the Superior, looking keenly
+at Mark from his bright blue eyes and lighting up a large pipe.
+
+"Curiously enough," said Mark, who had forgotten the Benedictine
+injunction to discourage newcomers that seek to enter a community, "I
+wrote to my guardian a few days ago that my impression of Malford Abbey
+was rather that it was playing at being monks."
+
+The Superior flushed to a vivid red. He was a burly man of fair
+complexion, inclined to plumpness, and with a large mobile mouth
+eloquent and sensual. His hands were definitely fat, the backs of them
+covered with golden hairs and freckles.
+
+"So you're a critical young gentleman, are you? I suppose we're not
+Catholic enough for you. Well," he snapped, "I'm afraid you won't suit
+us. We don't want you. Sorry."
+
+"I'm sorry too," said Mark. "But I thought you would prefer frankness.
+If you will spare me a few minutes, I'll explain why I want to join the
+Order of St. George. If when you've heard what I have to say you still
+think that I'm not suitable, I shall recognize your right to be of that
+opinion from your experience of many young men like myself who have been
+tried and found wanting."
+
+"Did you learn that speech by heart?" the Superior inquired, raising his
+eyebrows mockingly.
+
+"I see you're determined to find fault," Mark laughed. "But, Reverend
+Father, surely you will listen to my reasons before deciding against
+them or me?"
+
+"My instinct tells me you'll be no good to us. But if you insist on
+wasting my time, fire ahead. Only please remember that, though I may be
+a monk, I'm a very busy man."
+
+Mark gave a full account of himself until the present and wound up by
+saying:
+
+"I don't think I have any sentimental reasons for wanting to enter a
+monastery. I like working among soldiers and sailors. I am ready to put
+down £200 and I hope to be of use. I wish to be a priest, and if you
+find or I find that when the time comes for me to be ordained I shall
+make a better secular priest, at any rate, I shall have had the
+advantage of a life of discipline and you, I promise, will have had a
+novice who will have regarded himself as such, but yet will have learnt
+somehow to have justified your confidence."
+
+The Superior looked down at his desk pondering. Presently he opened a
+letter and threw a quick suspicious glance at Mark.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me that you had an introduction from Sir Charles
+Horner?"
+
+"I didn't know that I had," Mark answered in some astonishment. "I only
+met him here a few days ago for the first time. He invited me to lunch,
+and he was very pleasant; but I never asked him to write to you, nor did
+he suggest doing so."
+
+"Have you any vices?" Father Burrowes asked abruptly.
+
+"I don't think--what do you mean exactly?" Mark inquired.
+
+"Drink?"
+
+"No, certainly not."
+
+"Women?"
+
+Mark flushed.
+
+"No." He wondered if he should speak of the episode of St. John's eve
+such a short time ago; but he could not bring himself to do so, and he
+repeated the denial.
+
+"You seem doubtful," the Superior insisted.
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "since you press this point I ought
+to tell you that I took a vow of celibacy when I was sixteen."
+
+Father Burrowes looked at him sharply.
+
+"Did you indeed? That sounds very morbid. Don't you like women?"
+
+"I don't think a priest ought to marry. I was told by Sir Charles that
+you vowed yourself to the monastic life when you were not much more than
+seventeen. Was that morbid?"
+
+The Superior laughed boisterously, and Mark glad to have put him in a
+good humour laughed with him. It was only after the interview was over
+that the echo of that laugh sounded unpleasantly in the caves of memory,
+that it rang false somehow like a denial of himself.
+
+"Well, I suppose we must try you as a probationer at any rate," said the
+Superior. And suddenly his whole manner changed. He became affectionate
+and sentimental as he put his hand on Mark's shoulder.
+
+"I hope, dear lad, that you will find a vocation to serve our dear Lord
+in the religious life. God bless you and give you endurance in the path
+you have chosen."
+
+Mark reproached himself for his inclination to dislike the Reverend
+Father to whom he now owed filial affection, piety, and respect, apart
+from what he owed him as a Christian of Christian charity. He should
+gain but small spiritual benefit from his self-chosen experiment if this
+was the mood in which he was beginning his monastic life; and when
+Brother Jerome, who was acting novice-master, began to instruct him in
+his monastic duty, he made up his mind to drive out that demon of
+criticism or rather to tame it to his own service by criticizing
+himself. He wrote on markers for his favourite devotional books:
+
+_Observe at every moment of the day the good in others, the evil in
+thyself; and when thou liest awake in the night remember only what good
+thou hast found in others, what evil in thyself._
+
+This was Mark's addition to Thomas a Kempis, to Mother Juliana of
+Norwich, to Jeremy Taylor and William Law; this was Mark's sprout of
+holy wisdom among the Little Flowers of Saint Francis.
+
+The Rule of Malford was not a very austere adaptation of the Rule of
+Saint Benedict; and, with the Reverend Father departing after Mark had
+been admitted as a probationer and leaving the administration of the
+Abbey to the priority of Brother Dunstan, a good deal of what austerity
+had been retained was now relaxed.
+
+The Night Office was not said at Malford, where the liturgical worship
+of the day began with Lauds and Prime at six. On Mark devolved the duty
+of waking the brethren in the morning, which was done by striking the
+door of each cell with a hammer and saying: _The Lord be with you_,
+whereupon the sleeping brother must rise from his couch and open the
+door of his cell to make the customary response. After Lauds and Prime,
+which lasted about half an hour, the brethren retired to their cells to
+put them in order for the day and to meditate until seven o'clock,
+unless they had been given tasks out of doors. At seven o'clock, if
+there was a priest in the monastery, Mass was said; otherwise meditation
+and study was prolonged until eight o'clock, when breakfast was eaten.
+Those who had work in the fields or about the house departed after
+breakfast to their tasks. At nine Terce was said, which was not attended
+by the brethren working out of doors; at twelve Sext was said attended
+by all the brethren, and at twelve-fifteen dinner was eaten. After
+dinner, the brethren retired to their cells and meditated until one
+o'clock, when their various duties were resumed, interrupted only in the
+case of those working indoors by the office of None at three o'clock. At
+a quarter to five the bell rang for tea. Simple silence was relaxed, and
+the brethren enjoyed their recreation until six-fifteen when the bell
+rang for a quarter of an hour's solemn silence before Vespers. Supper
+was eaten after Vespers, and after supper, which was finished about
+eight o'clock, there was reading and recreation until the bell rang for
+Compline at nine-fifteen. This office said, solemn silence was not
+broken until the response to the _dominus vobiscum_ in the morning. The
+rule of simple silence was not kept very strictly at this period. Two
+brethren working in the garden in these hot July days found that
+permitted conversation about the immediate matter in hand, say the
+whereabouts of a trowel or a hoe, was easily extended into observations
+about the whereabouts of Brother So-and-So during Terce or the way
+Brother Somebody-else was late with the antiphon. From the little
+incidents of the Abbey's daily round the conversation was easily
+extended into a discussion of the policy of the Order in general.
+Speculations where the Reverend Father was preaching that evening or
+that morning and whether his offertories would be as large during the
+summer as they had been during the spring were easily amplified from
+discussions about the general policy of the Order into discussions about
+the general policy of Christendom, the pros and cons of the Roman
+position, the disgraceful latitudinarianism of bishops and deans; and
+still more widely amplified from remarks upon the general policy of
+Christendom into arguments about the universe and the great philosophies
+of humanity. Thus Mark, who was an ardent Platonist, would find himself
+at odds with Brother Jerome who was an equally ardent Aristotelian,
+while the weeds, taking advantage of the philosophic contest, grew
+faster than ever.
+
+Whatever may have been Brother Dunstan's faults of indulgence, they
+sprang from a debonair and kindly personality which shone like a sun
+upon the little family and made everybody good-humoured, even Brother
+Lawrence, who was apt to be cross because he had been kept a postulant
+longer than he expected. But perhaps the happiest of all was Brother
+Walter, who though still a probationer was now the senior probationer, a
+status which afforded him the most profound satisfaction and gave him a
+kindly feeling toward Mark who was the cause of promotion.
+
+"And the Reverend Father has promised me that I shall be clothed as a
+postulant on August 10th when Brother Lawrence is to be clothed as a
+novice. The thought makes me so excited that I hardly know what to do
+sometimes, and I still don't know what saint's name I'm going to take.
+You see, there was some mystery about my birth, and I was called Walter
+because I was found by a policeman in Walter Street, and as ill-luck
+would have it there's no St. Walter. Of course, I know I have a very
+wide choice of names, but that is what makes it so difficult. I had
+rather a fancy to be Peter, but he's such a very conspicuous saint that
+it struck me as being a little presumptuous. Of course, I have no doubt
+whatever that St. Peter would take me under his protection, for if you
+remember he was a modest saint, a very modest saint indeed who asked to
+be crucified upside down, not liking to show the least sign of
+competition with our dear Lord. I should very much like to call myself
+Brother Paul, because at the school I was at we were taken twice a year
+to see St. Paul's Cathedral and had toffee when we came home. I look
+back to those days as some of the happiest of my life. There again it
+does seem to be putting yourself up rather to take the name of a great
+saint like St. Paul. Then I thought of taking William after the little
+St. William of Norwich who was murdered by the Jews. That seems going to
+the other extreme, doesn't it, for though I know that out of the mouths
+of babes and sucklings shall come forth praise, one would like to feel
+one had for a patron saint somebody a little more conspicuous than a
+baby. I wish you'd give me a word of advice. I think about this problem
+until sometimes my head's in a regular whirl, and I lose my place in the
+Office. Only yesterday at Sext, I found myself saying the antiphon
+proper to St. Peter a fortnight after St. Peter's day had passed and
+gone, which seems to show that my mind is really set upon being Brother
+Peter, doesn't it? And yet I don't know. He is so very conspicuous all
+through the Gospels, isn't he?"
+
+"Then why don't you compromise," suggested Mark, "and call yourself
+Brother Simon?"
+
+"Oh, what a splendid idea!" Brother Walter exclaimed, clapping his
+hands. "Oh, thank you, Brother Mark. That has solved all my
+difficulties. Oh, do let me pull up that thistle for you."
+
+Brother Walter the probationer resumed his weeding with joyful ferocity
+of purpose, his mind at peace in the expectation of shortly becoming
+Brother Simon the postulant.
+
+What Mark enjoyed most in his personal relations with the community were
+the walks on Sunday afternoons. Sir Charles Horner made a habit of
+joining these to obtain the Abbey gossip and also because he took
+pleasure in hearing himself hold forth on the management of his estate.
+Most of his property was woodland, and the walks round Malford possessed
+that rich intimacy of the English countryside at its best. Mark was not
+much interested in what Sir Charles had to ask or in what Sir Charles
+had to tell or in what Sir Charles had to show, but to find himself
+walking with his monastic brethren in their habits down glades of mighty
+oaks, or through sparse plantations of birches, beneath which grew
+brakes of wild raspberries that would redden with the yellowing corn,
+gave him as assurance of that old England before the Reformation to
+which he looked back as to a Golden Age. Years after, when much that was
+good and much that was bad in his monastic experience had been
+forgotten, he held in his memory one of these walks on a fine afternoon
+at July's end within the octave of St. Mary Magdalene. It happened that
+Sir Charles had not accompanied the monks that Sunday; but in his place
+was an old priest who had spent the week-end as a guest in the Abbey and
+who had said Mass for the brethren that morning. This had given Mark
+deep pleasure, because it was the Sunday after Esther's profession, and
+he had been able to make his intention her present joy and future
+happiness. He had been silent throughout the walk, seeming to listen in
+turn to Brother Dunstan's rhapsodies about the forthcoming arrival of
+Brother George and Brother Birinus with all that it meant to him of
+responsibility more than he could bear removed from his shoulders; or to
+Brother Raymond's doubts if it should not be made a rule that when no
+priest was in the Abbey the brethren ought to walk over to Wivelrod, the
+church Sir Charles attended four miles away, or to Brother Jerome's
+disclaimer of Roman sympathies in voicing his opinion that the Office
+should be said in Latin. Actually he paid little attention to any of
+them, his thoughts being far away with Esther. They had chosen Hollybush
+Down for their walk that Sunday, because they thought that the view over
+many miles of country would please the ancient priest. Seated on the
+short aromatic grass in the shade of a massive hawthorn full-berried
+with tawny fruit, the brethren looked down across a slope dotted with
+junipers to the view outspread before them. None spoke, for it had been
+warm work in their habits to climb the burnished grass. It would have
+been hard to explain the significance of that group, unless it were due
+to some haphazard achievement of perfect form; yet somehow for Mark that
+moment was taken from time and placed in eternity, so that whenever
+afterward in his life he read about the Middle Ages he was able to be
+what he read, merely by re-conjuring that monkish company in the shade
+of that hawthorn tree.
+
+On their way back to the Abbey Mark found himself walking with Mr.
+Lamplugh, the ancient priest, who turned out to have known his father.
+
+"Dear me, are you really the son of James Lidderdale? Why, I used to go
+and preach at Lima Street in old days long before your father married.
+And so you're Lidderdale's son. Now I wonder why you want to be a monk."
+
+Mark gave an account of himself since he left school and tried to give
+some good reasons why he was at Malford.
+
+"And so you were with Rowley? Well, really you ought to know something
+about missions by now. But perhaps you're tired of mission work
+already?" the old priest inquired with a quick glance at Mark as if he
+would see how much of the real stuff existed underneath that
+probationer's cassock.
+
+"This is an active Order, isn't it?" Mark countered. "Of course, I'm not
+tired of mission work. But after being with Father Rowley and being kept
+busy all the time I found that being at home in the country made me
+idle. I told the Reverend Father that I hoped to be ordained as a
+secular priest and that I did not imagine I had any vocation for the
+contemplative life. I have as a matter of fact a great longing for it.
+But I don't think that twenty-one is a good age for being quite sure if
+that longing is not mere sentiment. I suppose you think I'm just
+indulging myself with the decorative side of religion, Father Lamplugh?
+I really am not. I can assure you that I'm far too much accustomed to
+the decorative side to be greatly influenced by it."
+
+The old priest laid a thin hand on Mark's sleeve.
+
+"To tell the truth, my dear boy, I was on the verge of violating the
+decencies of accepted hospitality by criticizing the Order of which you
+have become a probationer. I am just a little doubtful about the
+efficacy of its method of training young men. However, it really is not
+my business, and I hope that I am wrong. But I _am_ a little doubtful if
+all these excellent young brethren are really desirous . . . no, I'll
+not say another word, I've already disgracefully exceeded the
+limitations to criticism that courtesy alone demands of me. I was
+carried away by my interest in you when I heard whose son you were. What
+a debt we owe to men like your father and Rowley! And here am I at
+seventy-six after a long and useless life presuming to criticize other
+people. God forgive me!" The old man crossed himself.
+
+That afternoon and evening recreation was unusually noisy, and during
+Vespers one or two of the brethren were seized with an attack of giggles
+because Brother Lawrence, who was in a rapt condition of mind owing to
+the near approach of St. Lawrence's day when he was to be clothed as a
+novice, tripped while he was holding back the cope during the censing of
+the _Magnificat_ and falling on his knees almost upset Father Lamplugh.
+There was no doubt that the way Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw
+when he was self-conscious was very funny; but Mark wished that the
+giggling had not occurred in front of Father Lamplugh. He wished too
+that during recreation after supper Brother Raymond would be less
+skittish and Brother Dunstan less arch in the manner of reproving him.
+
+"Holy simplicity is all very well," Mark thought. "But holy imbecility
+is a great bore, especially when there is a stranger present."
+
+Luckily Father Burrowes came back the following week, and Mark's
+deepening impression of the monastery's futility was temporarily
+obliterated by the exciting news that the Bishop of Alberta whom the
+brethren were taught to reverence as a second founder would be the guest
+of the Order on St. Lawrence's day and attend the profession of Brother
+Anselm. Mark had not yet seen Brother Anselm, who was the brother in
+charge of the Aldershot priory, and he welcomed the opportunity of
+witnessing those solemn final vows. He felt that he should gain much
+from meeting Brother Anselm, whose work at Aldershot was considered
+after the Reverend Father's preaching to be the chief glory of the
+Order. Brother Lawrence was a little jealous that his name day, on which
+he was to be clothed in Chapter as a novice, should be chosen for the
+much more important ceremony, and he spoke sharply to poor Brother
+Walter when the latter rejoiced in the added lustre Brother Anselm's
+profession would shed upon his own promotion.
+
+"You must remember, Brother," he said, "that you'll probably remain a
+postulant for a very long time."
+
+"But not for ever," replied poor Brother Walter in a depressed tone of
+voice.
+
+"There may not be time to attend to you," said Brother Lawrence
+spitefully. "You may have to wait until the Bishop has gone."
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," sighed Brother Walter looking woeful. "Brother Mark,
+do you hear what they say?"
+
+"Never mind," said Mark, "we'll take our final vows together when
+Brother Lawrence is still a doddering old novice."
+
+Brother Lawrence clicked his tongue and bit his under lip in disgust at
+such a flippant remark.
+
+"What a thing to say," he muttered, and burying his hands in his sleeves
+he walked off disdainfully, his jaw thrust before him.
+
+"Like a cow-catcher," Mark thought with a smile.
+
+The Bishop of Alberta was a dear old gentleman with silvery hair and a
+complexion as fresh and pink as a boy's. With his laced rochet and
+purple biretta he lent the little matchboarded chapel an exotic
+splendour when he sat in a Glastonbury chair beside the altar during the
+Office. The more ritualistic of the brethren greatly enjoyed giving him
+reverent genuflexions and kissing his episcopal ring. Brother Raymond's
+behaviour towards him was like that of a child who has been presented
+with a large doll to play with, a large doll that can be dressed and
+undressed at the pleasure of its owner with nothing to deter him except
+a faint squeak of protest such as the Bishop himself occasionally
+emitted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+SUSCIPE ME, DOMINE
+
+
+Brother Anselm was to arrive on the vigil of St. Lawrence. Normally
+Brother Walter would have been sent to meet him with the Abbey cart at
+the station three miles away. But Brother Walter was in a state of such
+excitement over his near promotion to postulant that it was not
+considered safe to entrust him with the pony. So Mark was sent in his
+place. It was a hot August evening with thunder clouds lying heavy on
+the Malford woods when Mark drove down the deep lanes to the junction,
+wondering what Brother Anselm would be like and awed by the imagination
+of Brother Anselm's thoughts in the train that was bringing him from
+Aldershot to this momentous date of his life's history. Almost before he
+knew what he was saying Mark was quoting from _Romeo and Juliet_:
+
+                       _My mind misgives_
+    _Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,_
+    _Shall bitterly begin his fearful date_
+    _With this night's revels._
+
+"Now why should I have thought that?" he asked himself, and he was just
+deciding that it was merely a verbal sequence of thought when the first
+far-off peal of thunder muttered a kind of menacing contradiction of so
+easy an explanation. It would be raining soon; Mark thumped the pony's
+angular haunches, and tried to feel cheerful in the oppressive air.
+
+Brother Anselm did not appear as Mark had pictured him. Instead of the
+lithe enthusiast with flaming eyes he saw a heavily built man with
+blunted features, wearing powerful horn spectacles, his expression
+morose, his movements ungainly. He had, however, a mellow and strangely
+sympathetic voice, in which Mark fancied that he perceived the power he
+was reputed to wield over the soldiers for whose well-being he fought so
+hard. Mark would have liked to ask him about life in the Aldershot
+priory; perhaps if Brother Anselm had been less taciturn, he would have
+broken if not the letter at any rate the spirit of the Rule by begging
+the senior to ask for his services in the Priory. But no sooner were
+they jogging back to Malford than the rain came down in a deluge, and
+Brother Anselm, pulling the hood of his frock over his head, was more
+unapproachable than ever. Mark wished that he had a novice's frock and
+hood, for the rain was pouring down the back of his neck and the
+threadbare cassock he wore was already drenched.
+
+"Thank you, Brother," said the new-comer when the Abbey was attained.
+
+It was dark by now, and, with nothing visible of the speaker except his
+white habit in the gloom, the voice might have been the voice of a
+heavenly visitant, so rarely sweet, so gentle and harmonious were the
+tones. Mark was much moved by that brief recognition of himself.
+
+The wind rose high during the night; listening to it roaring through the
+coppice in which the Abbey was built, Mark lay awake for a long time in
+mute prayer that Brother Anselm might find peace and felicity in his new
+state. And while he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther in
+Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell to cell, rousing the
+brethren from sleep with his hammer and salutation, the sun was climbing
+a serene and windless sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain
+top. Heaven was very near.
+
+Mark was glad that the day was so fair for the profession of Brother
+Anselm, and at Lauds the antiphon, versicle, and response proper to St.
+Lawrence appealed to him by their fitness to the occasion,
+
+_Gold is tried in the fire: and acceptable men in the furnace of
+adversity._
+
+    _V. The Righteous shall grow as a lily._
+    _R. He shall flourish for ever before the Lord._
+
+Mark concerned himself less with his own reception as a postulant. The
+distinction between a probationer and a postulant was very slight,
+really an arbitrary one made by Father Burrowes for his own convenience,
+and until he had to decide whether he should petition to be clothed as a
+novice Mark did not feel that he was called upon to take himself too
+seriously as a monk. For that reason he did not change his name, but
+preferred to stay Brother Mark. The little ceremony of reception was
+carried through in Chapter before the brethren went into the Oratory to
+say Terce, and Brother Walter was so much excited when he heard himself
+addressed as Brother Simon that for a moment it seemed doubtful if he
+would be sufficiently calm to attend the profession of Brother Anselm at
+the conventual Mass. However, during the clothing of Brother Lawrence as
+a novice Brother Simon quieted down, and even gave over counting the
+three knots in the rope with which he had been girdled. Ordinarily,
+Brother Lawrence would have been clothed after Mass, but this morning it
+was felt that such a ceremony coming after the profession of Brother
+Anselm would be an anti-climax, and it was carried through in Chapter.
+It took Brother Lawrence all he had ever heard and read about humility
+and obedience not to protest at the way his clothing on his own saint's
+day, for which he had been made to wait nearly a year, was being carried
+through in such a hole in the corner fashion. But he fixed his mind upon
+the torments of the blessed archdeacon on the gridiron and succeeded in
+keeping his temper.
+
+Mark felt that the profession of Brother Anselm lost some of its dignity
+by the absence of Brother George and Brother Birinus, the only other
+professed members of the Order apart from Father Burrowes himself. It
+struck him as slightly ludicrous that a few young novices and postulants
+should represent the venerable choir-monks whom one pictured at such a
+ceremony from one's reading of the Rule of St. Benedict. Moreover,
+Father Burrowes never presented himself to Mark's imagination as an
+authentic abbot. Nor indeed was he such. Malford Abbey was a courtesy
+title, and such monastic euphemisms as the Abbot's Parlour and the
+Abbot's Lodgings to describe the matchboarded apartments sacred to the
+Father Superior, while they might please such ecclesiastical enthusiasts
+as Brother Raymond, appealed to Mark as pretentious and somewhat silly.
+In fact, if it had not been for the presence of the Bishop of Alberta in
+cope and mitre Mark would have found it hard, when after Terce the
+brethren assembled in the Chapter-room to hear Brother Anselm make his
+final petition, to believe in the reality of what was happening, to
+believe, when Brother Anselm in reply to the Father Superior's
+exhortation chose the white cowl and scapular (which in the Order of St.
+George differentiated the professed monk from the novice) and rejected
+the suit of dittos belonging to his worldly condition, that he was
+passing through moments of greater spiritual importance than any since
+he was baptized or than any he would pass through before he stood upon
+the threshold of eternity.
+
+But this was a transient scepticism, a fleeting discontent, which
+vanished when the brethren formed into procession and returned to the
+oratory singing the psalm: _In Convertendo_.
+
+     _When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we
+     like unto them, that dream._
+
+     _Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy._
+
+     _Then said they among the heathen: The Lord hath done great things
+     for them._
+
+     _Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already: whereof we
+     rejoice._
+
+     _Turn our captivity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south._
+
+     _They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy._
+
+     _He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed:
+     shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with
+     him._
+
+The Father Superior of the Order sang the Mass, while the Bishop of
+Alberta seated in his Glastonbury chair suffered with an expression of
+childlike benignity the ritualistic ministrations of Brother Raymond,
+the ceremonial doffing and donning of his mitre. It was very still in
+the little Oratory, for it was the season when birds are hushed; and
+even Sir Charles Horner who was all by himself in the ante-chapel did
+not fidget or try to peep through the heavy brocaded curtains that shut
+out the quire. Mark dared not look up when at the offertory Brother
+Anselm stood before the Altar and answered the solemn interrogations of
+the Father Superior, question after question about his faith and
+endurance in the life he desired to enter. And to every question he
+answered clearly _I will_. The Father Superior took the parchment on
+which were written the vows and read aloud the document. Then it was
+placed upon the Altar, and there upon that sacrificial stone Brother
+Anselm signed his name to a contract with Almighty God. The holy calm
+that shed itself upon the scene was like a spell on every heart that was
+beating there in unison with the heart of him who was drawing nearer to
+Heaven. Prostrating himself, the professed monk prayed first to God the
+Father:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+The hearts that beat in unison with his took up the prayer, and the
+voices of his brethren repeated it word for word. And now the professed
+monk prayed to God the Son:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+Once more his brethren echoed the entreaty.
+
+And lastly the professed monk prayed to God the Holy Ghost:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+For the third time his brethren echoed the entreaty, and then one and
+all in that Oratory cried:
+
+     _Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it
+     was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
+     Amen._
+
+There followed prayers that the peace of God might be granted to the
+professed monk to enable him worthily to perform the vows which he had
+made, and before the blessing and imposition of the scapular the Bishop
+rose to speak in tones of deep emotion:
+
+"Brethren, I scarcely dared to hope, when, now nearly ten years ago, I
+received the vows of your Father Superior as a novice, that I should one
+day be privileged to be present at this inspiring ceremony. Nor even
+when five years ago in the far north-west of Canada I professed your
+Father Superior and those two devoted souls who will soon be with you,
+now that their work in Malta is for the time finished, did I expect to
+find myself in this beautiful Oratory which your Order owes to the
+generosity of a true son of the Church. My heart goes out to you, and I
+thank God humbly that He has vouchsafed to hear my prayers and bless the
+enterprise from which I had indeed expected much, but which Almighty God
+has allowed to prosper more, far more, than I ventured to hope. All my
+days I have longed to behold the restoration of the religious life to
+our country, and now when my eyes are dim with age I am granted the
+ineffable joy of beholding what for too long in my weakness and lack of
+faith I feared was never likely to come to pass.
+
+"The profession of our dear brother this morning is, I pray, an earnest
+of many professions at Malford. May these first vows placed upon the
+Altar of this Oratory be blessed by Almighty God! May our brother be
+steadfast and happy in his choice! Brethren, I had meant to speak more
+and with greater eloquence, but my heart is too full. The Lord be with
+you."
+
+Now Brother Anselm was clothed in the blessed habit while the brethren
+sang:
+
+    _Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,_
+    _And lighten with celestial fire._
+
+The Father Superior of the Order gave him the paternal kiss. He begged
+the prayers of his brethren there assembled, and drawing the hood of his
+cowl over his head prostrated himself again before the Altar. The Mass
+proceeded.
+
+If the strict Benedictine usage had been followed at Malford, Brother
+Anselm would have remained apart from the others for three days ofter
+his profession, wrapped in his cowl, alone with God. But he was anxious
+to go back to Aldershot that very afternoon, excusing himself because
+Brother Chad, left behind in charge of the Priory, would be overwhelmed
+by his various responsibilities. Brother Dunstan, who had wept
+throughout the ceremony of the profession, was much upset by Brother
+Anselm's departure. He had hoped to achieve great exaltation of spirit
+by Brother Anselm's silent presence. He began to wonder if the newly
+professed monk appreciated his position. Had himself been granted what
+Brother Anselm had been granted, he should have liked to spend a week in
+contemplation of the wonder which had befallen him. Brother Dunstan
+asked himself if his thoughts were worthy of a senior novice, of one who
+had for a while acted as Prior and been accorded the address of Reverend
+Brother. He decided that they were not, and as a penance he begged for
+the nib with which Brother Anselm had signed his profession. This he
+wore round his neck as an amulet against unbrotherly thoughts and as a
+pledge of his own determination to vow himself eternally to the service
+of God.
+
+Mark was glad that Brother Anselm was going back so soon to his active
+work. It was an assurance that the Order of St. George did have active
+work to do; and when he was called upon to drive Brother Anselm to the
+station he made up his mind to conquer his shyness and hint that he
+should be glad to serve the Order in the Priory at Aldershot.
+
+This time, notwithstanding that he had a good excuse to draw his hood
+close, Brother Anselm showed himself more approachable.
+
+"If the Reverend Father suggests your name," he promised Mark, "I shall
+be glad to have you with us. Brother Chad is simply splendid, and the
+Tommies are wonderful. It's quite right of course to have a Mother
+House, but. . . ." He broke off, disinclined to criticize the direction
+of the Order's policy to a member so junior as Mark.
+
+"Oh, I'm not asking you to do anything yet awhile," Mark explained. "I
+quite realize that I have a great deal to learn before I should be any
+use at Aldershot or Sandgate. I hope you don't mind my talking like
+this. But until this morning I had not really intended to remain in the
+Order. My hope was to be ordained as soon as I was old enough. Now since
+this morning I feel that I do long for the spiritual support of a
+community for my own feeble aspirations. The Bishop's words moved me
+tremendously. It wasn't what he said so much, but I was filled with all
+his faith and I could have cried out to him a promise that I for one
+would help to carry on the restoration. At the same time, I know that
+I'm more fitted for active work, not by any good I expect to do, but for
+the good it will do me. I suppose you'd say that if I had a true
+vocation I shouldn't be thinking about what part I was going to play in
+the life of the Order, but that I should be content to do whatever I was
+told. I'm boring you?" Mark broke off to inquire, for Brother Anselm was
+staring in front of him through his big horn spectacles like an owl.
+
+"No, no," said the senior. "But I'm not the novice-master. Who is, by
+the way?"
+
+"Brother Jerome."
+
+The other did not comment on this information, but Mark was sure that he
+was trying not to look contemptuous.
+
+Soon the junction came in sight, and from down the line the white smoke
+of a train approaching.
+
+"Hurry, Brother, I don't want to miss it."
+
+Mark thumped the haunches of the pony and drove up just in time for
+Brother Anselm to escape.
+
+"Thank you, Brother," said that same voice which yesterday, only
+yesterday night, had sounded so rarely sweet. Here on this mellow August
+afternoon it was the voice of the golden air itself, and the shriek of
+the engine did not drown its echoes in Mark's soul where all the way
+back to Malford it was chiming like a bell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+ADDITION
+
+
+Mark's ambition to go and work at Aldershot was gratified before the end
+of August, because Brother Chad fell ill, and it was considered
+advisable to let him spend a long convalescence at the Abbey.
+
+     The Priory,
+
+     17, Farnborough Villas,
+
+     Aldershot.
+
+     St. Michael and All Angels.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I don't think you'll be sorry to read from the above address that
+     I've been transferred from Malford to one of the active branches of
+     the Order. I don't accept your condemnation of the Abbey as
+     pseudo-monasticism, though I can quite well understand that my
+     account of it might lead you to make such a criticism. The trouble
+     with me is that my emotions and judgment are always quarrelling. I
+     suppose you might say that is true of most people. It's like the
+     palmist who tells everybody that he is ruled by his head or his
+     heart, as the case may be. But when one approaches the problem of
+     religion (let alone what is called the religious life) one is
+     terribly perplexed to know which is to be obeyed. I don't think
+     that you can altogether rule out emotion as a touchstone of truth.
+     The endless volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, through which I've been
+     wading, do not cope with the fact that the whole of his vast
+     intellectual and severely logical structure is built up on the
+     assumption of faith, which is the gift of emotion, not judgment.
+     The whole system is a petitio principii really.
+
+     I did not mean to embark on a discussion of the question of the
+     Ultimate Cause of religion, but to argue with you about the
+     religious life! The Abbot Paphnutius told Cassian that there were
+     three sorts of vocation--ex Deo, per hominem, and ex necessitate.
+     Now suppose I have a vocation, mine is obviously per hominem. I
+     inherit the missionary spirit from my father. That spirit was
+     fostered by association with Rowley. My main object in entering the
+     Order of St. George was to work among soldiers, not because I felt
+     that soldiers needed "missionizing" more than any other class, but
+     because the work at Chatsea brought me into contact with both
+     sailors and soldiers, and turned my thoughts in their direction. I
+     also felt the need of an organization behind my efforts. My first
+     impulse was to be a preaching friar, but that would have laid too
+     much on me as an individual, and from lack of self-confidence,
+     youthfulness, want of faith perhaps, I was afraid. Well, to come
+     back to the Abbot Paphnutius and his three vocations--it seems
+     fairly clear that the first, direct from God, is a better vocation
+     than the one which is inspired by human example, or the third,
+     which arises from the failure of everything else. At the same time
+     they ARE all three genuine vocations. What applies to the vocation
+     seems to me to apply equally to the community. What you stigmatize
+     as our pseudo-monasticism is still experimental, and I think I can
+     see the Reverend Father's idea. He has had a great deal of
+     experience with an Order which began so amateurishly, if I may use
+     the word, that nobody could have imagined that it would grow to the
+     size and strength it has reached in ten years. The Bishop of
+     Alberta revealed much to us of our beginnings during his stay at
+     the Abbey, and after I had listened to him I felt how presumptuous
+     it was for me to criticize the central source of the religious life
+     we are hoping to spread. You see, Rector, I must have criticized it
+     implicitly in my letters to you, for your objections are simply the
+     expression of what I did not like to say, but what I managed to
+     convey through the medium of would-be humorous description. One
+     hears of the saving grace of humour, but I'm not sure that humour
+     is a saving grace. I rather wish that I had no sense of humour.
+     It's a destructive quality. All the great sceptics have been
+     humourists. Humour is really a device to secure human comfort. Take
+     me. I am inspired to become a preaching friar. I instantly perceive
+     the funny side of setting out to be a preaching friar. I tell
+     myself that other people will perceive the funny side of it, and
+     that consequently I shall do no good as a preaching friar. Yes,
+     humour is a moisture which rusts everything except gold. As a
+     nation the Jews have the greatest sense of humour, and they have
+     been the greatest disintegrating force in the history of mankind.
+     The Scotch are reputed to have no sense of humour, and they are
+     morally the most impressive nation in the world. What humour is
+     allowed them is known as dry humour. The corroding moisture has
+     been eliminated. They are still capable of laughter, but never so
+     as to interfere with their seriousness in the great things of life.
+     I remember I once heard a tiresome woman, who was striving to be
+     clever, say that Our Lord could not have had much sense of humour
+     or He would not have hung so long on the Cross. At the time I was
+     indignant with the silly blasphemy, but thinking it over since I
+     believe that she was right, and that, while her only thought had
+     been to make a remark that would create a sensation in the room,
+     she had actually hit on the explanation of some of Our Lord's human
+     actions. And his lack of humour is the more conspicuous because he
+     was a Jew. I was reading the other day a book of essays by one of
+     our leading young latitudinarian divines, in which he was most
+     anxious to prove that Our Lord had all the graces of a well-bred
+     young man about town, including a pretty wit. He actually claimed
+     that the pun on Peter's name was an example of Our Lord's urbane
+     and genial humour! It gives away the latitudinarian position
+     completely. They're really ashamed of Christianity. They want to
+     bring it into line with modern thought. They hope by throwing
+     overboard the Incarnation, the Resurrection of the Body, and the
+     Ascension, to lighten the ship so effectually that it will ride
+     buoyantly over the billows of modern knowledge. But however lightly
+     the ship rides, she will still be at sea, and it would be the
+     better if she struck on the rock of Peter and perished than that
+     she should ride buoyantly but aimlessly over the uneasy oceans of
+     knowledge.
+
+     I've once more got a long way from the subject of my letter, but
+     I've always taken advantage of your patience to air my theories,
+     and when I begin to write to you my pen runs away with me. The
+     point I want to make is that unless there is a mother house which
+     is going to create a reserve of spiritual energy, the active work
+     of the Order is going to suffer. The impulse to save souls might
+     easily exhaust itself in the individual. A few disappointments,
+     unceasing hard work, the interference of a bishop, the failure of
+     financial support, a long period in which his work seems to have
+     come to a standstill, all these are going to react on the
+     individual missioner who depends on himself. Looking back now at
+     the work done by my father, and by Rowley at Chatsea, I'm beginning
+     to understand how dangerous it is for one man to make himself the
+     pivot of an enterprise. I only really know about my father's work
+     at second hand, but look at Chatsea. I hear now that already the
+     work is falling to pieces. Although that may not justify the Bishop
+     of Silchester, I'm beginning to see that he might argue that if
+     Rowley had shown himself sufficiently humble to obey the forces of
+     law and order in the Church, he would have had accumulated for him
+     a fresh store of energy from which he might have drawn to
+     consolidate his influence upon the people with whom he worked.
+     Anyway, that's what I'm going to try to acquire from the
+     pseudo-monasticism of Malford. I'm determined to dry up the
+     critical and humorous side of myself. Half of it is nothing more
+     than arrogance. I'm grateful for being sent to Aldershot, but I'm
+     going to make my work here depend on the central source of energy
+     and power. I'm going to say that my work is per hominem, but that
+     the success of my work is ex Deo. You may tell me that any man with
+     the least conception of Christian Grace would know that. Yes, he
+     may know it intellectually, but does he know it emotionally? I
+     confess I don't yet awhile. But I do know that if the Order of St.
+     George proves itself a real force, it will not be per hominem, it
+     will not be by the Reverend Father's eloquence in the pulpit, but
+     by the vocation of the community ex Deo.
+
+     Meanwhile, here I am at Aldershot. Brother Chad, whose place I have
+     taken, was a character of infinite sweetness and humility. All our
+     Tommies speak of him in a sort of protective way, as if he were a
+     little boy they had adopted. He had--has, for after all he's only
+     gone to the Abbey to get over a bad attack of influenza on top of
+     months of hard work--he has a strangely youthful look, although
+     he's nearly thirty. He hails from Lichfield. I wonder what Dr.
+     Johnson would have made of him. I've already told you about Brother
+     Anselm. Well, now that I've seen him at home, as it were, I can't
+     discover the secret of his influence with our men. He's every bit
+     as taciturn with them as he was with me on that drive from the
+     station, and yet there is not one of them that doesn't seem to
+     regard him as an intimate friend. He's extraordinarily good at the
+     practical side of the business. He makes the men comfortable. He
+     always knows just what they're wanting for tea or for supper, and
+     the games always go well when Brother Anselm presides, much better
+     than they do when I'm in charge! I think perhaps that's because I
+     play myself, and want to win. It infects the others. And yet we
+     ought to want to win a game--otherwise it's not worth playing.
+     Also, I must admit that there's usually a row in the billiard room
+     on my nights on duty. Brother Anselm makes them talk better than I
+     do, and I don't think he's a bit interested in their South African
+     experiences. I am, and they won't say a word about them to me. I've
+     been here a month now, so they ought to be used to me by this time.
+
+     We've just heard that the guest-house for soldiers at the Abbey
+     will be finished by the middle of next month, so we're already
+     discussing our Christmas party. The Priory, which sounds so grand
+     and gothic, is really the corner house of a most depressing row of
+     suburban villas, called Glenview and that sort of thing. The last
+     tenant was a traveller in tea and had a stable instead of the usual
+     back-garden. This we have converted into a billiard room. An
+     officer in one of the regiments quartered here told us that it was
+     the only thing in Aldershot we had converted. The authorities
+     aren't very fond of us. They say we encourage the men to grumble
+     and give them too great idea of their own importance. Brother
+     Anselm asked a general once with whom we fell out if it was
+     possible to give a man whose profession it was to defend his
+     country too great an idea of his own importance. The general merely
+     blew out his cheeks and looked choleric. He had no suspicion that
+     he had been scored off. We don't push too much religion into the
+     men at present. We've taught them to respect the Crucifix on the
+     wall in the dining-room, and sometimes they attend Vespers. But
+     they're still rather afraid of chaff, such as being called the
+     Salvation Army by their comrades. Well, here's an end to this long
+     letter, for I must write now to Brother Jerome, whose name-day it
+     is to-morrow. Love to all at the Rectory.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+Mark remained at Aldershot until the week before Christmas, when with a
+party of Tommies he went back to the Abbey. He found that Brother Chad's
+convalescence had been seriously impeded in its later stages by the
+prospect of having to remain at the Abbey as guest-master, and though
+Mark was sorry to leave Aldershot he saw by the way the Tommies greeted
+their old friend that he was dear to their hearts. When after Christmas
+Brother Chad took the party back, Mark made up his mind that the right
+person was going.
+
+Mark found many changes at the Abbey during the four months he had been
+away. The greatest of all was the presence of Brother George as Prior.
+The legend of him had led Mark to expect someone out of the ordinary;
+but he had not been prepared for a personality as strong as this.
+Brother George was six feet three inches tall, with a presence of great
+dignity and much personal beauty. He had an aquiline nose, strong chin,
+dark curly hair and bright imperious eyes. His complexion, burnt by the
+Mediterranean sun, made him seem in his white habit darker than he
+really was. His manner was of one accustomed to be immediately obeyed.
+Mark could scarcely believe when he saw Brother Dunstan beside Brother
+George that only last June Brother Dunstan was acting as Prior. As for
+Brother Raymond, who had always been so voluble at recreation, one look
+from Brother George sent him into a silence that was as solemn as the
+disciplinary silence imposed by the rule. Brother Birinus, who was
+Brother George's right hand in the Abbey as much as he had been his
+right hand on the Moose Rib farm, was even taller than the Prior; but he
+was lanky and raw-boned, and had not the proportions of Brother George.
+He was of a swarthy complexion, not given to talking much, although when
+he did speak he always spoke to the point. He and Brother George were
+hard at work ploughing up some derelict fields which they had persuaded
+Sir Charles Horner to let to the Abbey rent free on condition that they
+were put back into cultivation. The patron himself had gone away for the
+winter to Rome and Florence, and Mark was glad that he had, for he was
+sure that otherwise his inquisitiveness would have been severely
+snubbed by the Prior. Father Burrowes went away as usual to preach after
+Christmas; but before he went Mark was clothed as a novice together with
+two other postulants who had been at Malford since September. Of these
+Brother Giles was a former school-master, a dried-up, tobacco-coloured
+little man of about fifty, with a quick and nervous, but always precise
+manner. Mark liked him, and his manual labour was done under the
+direction of Brother Giles, who had been made gardener, a post for which
+he was well suited. The other new novice was Brother Nicholas whom, had
+Mark not been the fellow-member of a community, he would have disliked
+immensely. Brother Nicholas was one of those people who are in a
+perpetual state of prurient concern about the sexual morality of the
+human race. He was impervious to snubs, of which he received many from
+Brother George, and he had somehow managed to become a favourite of the
+Reverend Father, so that he had been appointed guest-master, a post that
+was always coveted, and one for which nobody felt Brother Nicholas was
+suited.
+
+Besides the increase of numbers there had been considerable additions
+made to the fabric of the Abbey, if such a word as fabric may be applied
+to matchboard, felt, and corrugated iron. Mention has already been made
+of the new Guest-house, which accommodated not only soldiers invited to
+spend their furloughs at the Abbey, but also tramps who sought a night's
+lodging. Mark, as Porter, found his time considerably taken up with
+these casuals, because as soon as the news spread of a comfortable
+lodging they came begging for shelter in greater numbers than had been
+anticipated. A rule was made that they should pay for their
+entertainment by doing a day's work, and it was one of Mark's duties to
+report on the qualifications of these casuals to Brother George, whose
+whole life was occupied with the farm that he was creating out of those
+derelict fields.
+
+"There's a black man just arrived, Reverend Brother. He says he lost his
+ship at Southampton through a boiler explosion, and is tramping to
+Cardiff," Mark would report.
+
+"Can he plough a straight furrow?" the Prior would demand.
+
+"I doubt it," Mark would answer with a smile. "He can't walk straight
+across the dormitory."
+
+"What's he been drinking?"
+
+"Rum, I fancy."
+
+"Why did you let him in?"
+
+"It's such a stormy night."
+
+"Well, send him along to me to-morrow after Lauds, and I'll put him to
+cleaning out the pigsties."
+
+Mark only had to deal with these casuals. Regular guests like the
+soldiers, who were always welcome, and ecclesiastically minded inquirers
+were looked after by Brother Nicholas. One of the things for which Mark
+detested Brother Nicholas was the habit he had of showing off his poor
+casuals to the paying guests. It took Mark a stern reading of St.
+Benedict's Rule and the observations therein upon humility and obedience
+not to be rude to Brother Nicholas sometimes.
+
+"Brother," he asked one day. "Have you ever read what our Holy Father
+says about gyrovagues and sarabaites?"
+
+Brother Nicholas, who always thought that any long word with which he
+was unfamiliar referred to sexual perversion, asked what such people
+were.
+
+"You evidently haven't," said Mark. "Our Holy Father disapproves of
+them."
+
+"Oh, so should I, Brother Mark," said Brother Nicholas quickly. "I hate
+anything like that."
+
+"It struck me," Mark went on, "that most of our paying guests are
+gyrovagues and sarabaites."
+
+"What an accusation to make," said Brother Nicholas, flushing with
+expectant curiosity and looking down his long nose to give the
+impression that it was the blush of innocence and modesty.
+
+When, an hour or so later, he had had leisure to discover the meaning of
+both terms, he came up to Mark and exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, brother, how could you?"
+
+"How could I what?" Mark asked.
+
+"How could you let me think that it meant something much worse? Why,
+it's nothing really. Just wandering monks."
+
+"They annoyed our Holy Father," said Mark.
+
+"Yes, they did seem to make him a bit ratty. Perhaps the translation
+softened it down," surmised Brother Nicholas. "I'll get a dictionary
+to-morrow."
+
+The bell for solemn silence clanged, and Brother Nicholas must have
+spent his quarter of an hour in most unprofitable meditation.
+
+Another addition to the buildings was a wide, covered verandah, which
+had been built on in front of the central block, and which therefore
+extended the length of the Refectory, the Library, the Chapter Room, and
+the Abbot's Parlour. The last was now the Prior's Parlour, because
+lodgings for Father Burrowes were being built in the Gatehouse, the only
+building of stone that was being erected.
+
+This Gatehouse was to be finished as an Easter offering to the Father
+Superior from devout ladies, who had been dismayed at the imagination of
+his discomfort. The verandah was granted the title of the Cloister, and
+the hours of recreation were now spent here instead of in the Library as
+formerly, which enabled studious brethren to read in peace.
+
+The Prior made a rule that every Sunday afternoon all the brethren
+should assemble in the Cloister at tea, and spend the hour until Vespers
+in jovial intercourse. He did not actually specify that the intercourse
+was to be jovial, but he look care by judicious teazing to see that it
+was jovial. In his anxiety to bring his farm into cultivation, Brother
+George was apt to make any monastic duty give way to manual labour on
+those thistle-grown fields, and it was seldom that there were more than
+a couple of brethren to say the Office between Lauds and Vespers. The
+others had to be content with crossing themselves when they heard the
+bell for Terce or None, and even Sext was sparingly attended after the
+Prior instituted the eating of the mid-day meal in the fields on fine
+days. Hence the conversation in the Cloister on Sunday afternoons was
+chiefly agricultural.
+
+"Are you going to help me drill the ten-acre field tomorrow, Brother
+Giles?" the Prior asked one grey Sunday afternoon in the middle of
+March.
+
+"No, I'm certainly not, Reverend Brother, unless you put me under
+obedience to do so."
+
+"Then I think I shall," the Prior laughed.
+
+"If you do, Reverend Brother," the gardener retorted, "you'll have to
+put my peas under obedience to sow themselves."
+
+"Peas!" the Prior scoffed. "Who cares about peas?"
+
+"Oh, Reverend Brother!" cried Brother Simon, his hair standing up with
+excitement. "We couldn't do without peas."
+
+Brother Simon was assistant cook nowadays, a post he filled tolerably
+well under the supervision of the one-legged soldier who was cook.
+
+"We couldn't do without oats," said Brother Birinus severely.
+
+He spoke so seldom at these gatherings that when he did few were found
+to disagree with him, because they felt his words must have been deeply
+pondered before they were allowed utterance.
+
+"Have you any flowers in the garden for St. Joseph?" asked Brother
+Raymond, who was sacristan.
+
+"A few daffodils, that's all," Brother Giles replied.
+
+"Oh, I don't think that St. Joseph would like daffodils," exclaimed
+Brother Raymond. "He's so fond of white flowers, isn't he?"
+
+"Good gracious!" the Prior thundered. "Are we a girls' school or a
+company of able-bodied men?"
+
+"Well, St. Joseph is always painted with lilies, Reverend Brother," said
+the sacristan, rather sulkily.
+
+He disapproved of the way the Prior treated what he called his pet
+saints.
+
+"We're not an agricultural college either," he added in an undertone to
+Brother Dunstan, who shook his finger and whispered "hush."
+
+"I doubt if we ought to keep St. Joseph's Day," said the Prior
+truculently. There was nothing he enjoyed better on these Sunday
+afternoons than showing his contempt for ecclesiasticism.
+
+"Reverend Brother!" gasped Brother Dunstan. "Not keep St. Joseph's Day?"
+
+"He's not in our calendar," Brother George argued. "If we're going to
+keep St. Joseph, why not keep St. Alo--what's his name and Philip Neri
+and Anthony of Padua and Bernardine of Sienna and half-a-dozen other
+Italian saints?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Brother Raymond. "At any rate we have to keep my
+patron, who was a dear, even if he was a Spaniard."
+
+The Prior looked as if he were wondering if there was a clause in the
+Rule that forbade a prior to throw anything within reach at an imbecile
+sacristan.
+
+"I don't think you can put St. Joseph in the same class as the saints
+you have just mentioned," pompously interposed Brother Jerome, who was
+cellarer nowadays and fancied that the continued existence of the Abbey
+depended on himself.
+
+"Until you can learn to harness a pair of horses to the plough," said
+the Prior, "your opinions on the relative importance of Roman saints
+will not be accepted."
+
+"I've never been used to horses," said Brother Jerome.
+
+"And you have been used to saints?" the Prior laughed, raising his
+eyebrows.
+
+Brother Jerome was silent.
+
+"Well, Brother Lawrence, what do you say?"
+
+Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw and assumed the expression of
+the good boy in a Sunday School class.
+
+"St. Joseph was the foster-father of Our Blessed Lord, Reverend
+Brother," he said primly. "I think it would be most disrespectful both
+to Our Blessed Lord and to Our Blessed Lady if we didn't keep his
+feast-day, though I am sure St. Joseph would have no objection to
+daffodils. No objections at all. His whole life and character show him
+to have been a man of the greatest humility and forbearance."
+
+The Prior rocked with laughter. This was the kind of speech that
+sometimes rewarded his teasing.
+
+"We always kept St. Joseph's day at the Visitation, Hornsey," Brother
+Nicholas volunteered. "In fact we always made it a great feature. We
+found it came as such a relief in Lent."
+
+The Prior nodded his head mockingly.
+
+"These young folk can teach us a lot about the way to worship God,
+Brother Birinus," he commented.
+
+Brother Birinus scowled.
+
+"I broke three shares ploughing that bad bit of ground by the fir
+trees," he announced gloomily. "I think I'll drill in the oats to-morrow
+in the ten-acre. It's no good ploughing deep," he added reproachfully.
+
+"Well, I believe in deep ploughing," the Prior argued.
+
+Mark realized that Brother Birinus had deliberately brought back the
+conversation to where it started in order to put an end to the
+discussion about St. Joseph. He was glad, because he himself was the
+only one of the brethren who had not yet been called upon to face the
+Prior's contemptuous teasing. He wondered if he should have had the
+courage to speak up for St. Joseph's Day. He should have found it
+difficult to oppose Brother George, whom he liked and revered. But in
+this case he was wrong, and perhaps he was also wrong to make the
+observation of St. Joseph's Day a cudgel with which to belabour the
+brethren.
+
+The following afternoon Mark had two casuals who he fancied might be
+useful to the Prior, and leaving the ward of the gate to Brother
+Nicholas he took them down with him through the coppice to where over
+the bleak March furrows Brother George was ploughing that rocky strip of
+bad land by the fir trees. The men were told to go and report themselves
+to Brother Birinus, who with Brother Dunstan to feed the drill was
+sowing oats a field or two away.
+
+"I don't think Brother Birinus will be sorry to let Brother Dunstan go
+back to his domestic duties," the Prior commented sardonically.
+
+Mark was turning to go back to _his_ domestic duties when Brother George
+signed to him to stop.
+
+"I suppose that like the rest of them you think I've no business to be a
+monk?" Brother George began.
+
+Mark looked at him in surprise.
+
+"I don't believe that anybody thinks that," he said; but even as he
+spoke he looked at the Prior and wondered why he had become a monk. He
+did not appear, standing there in breeches and gaiters, his shirt open
+at the neck, his hair tossing in the wind, his face and form of the soil
+like a figure in one of Fred Walker's pictures, no, he certainly did not
+appear the kind of man who could be led away by Father Burrowes'
+eloquence and persuasiveness into choosing the method of life he had
+chosen. Yes, now that the question had been put to him Mark wondered why
+Brother George was a monk.
+
+"You too are astonished at me," said the Prior. "Well, in a way I don't
+blame you. You've only seen me on the land. This comes of letting myself
+be tempted by Horner's offer to give us this land rent free if I would
+take it in hand. And after all," he went on talking to the wide grey sky
+rather than to Mark, "the old monks were great tillers of the soil. It's
+right that we should maintain the tradition. Besides, all those years in
+Malta I've dreamed just this. Brother Birinus and I have stewed on those
+sun-baked heights above Valetta and dreamed of this. What made you join
+our Order?" he asked abruptly.
+
+Mark told him about himself.
+
+"I see, you want to keep your hand in, eh? Well, I suppose you might
+have done worse for a couple of years. Now, I've never wanted to be a
+priest. The Reverend Father would like me to be ordained, but I don't
+think I should make a good priest. I believe if I were to become a
+priest, I should lose my faith. That sounds a queer thing to say, and
+I'd rather you didn't repeat it to any of those young men up there."
+
+The monastery bell sounded on the wind.
+
+"Three o'clock already," exclaimed the Prior. And crossing himself he
+said the short prayer offered to God instead of the formal attendance at
+the Office.
+
+"Well, I mustn't let the horses get chilled. You'd better get back to
+your casuals. By the way, I'm going to have Brother Nicholas to work out
+here awhile, and I want you to act as guest-master. Brother Raymond
+will be porter, and I'm going to send Brother Birinus off the farm to be
+sacristan. I shall miss him out here, of course."
+
+The Prior put his hand once more to the plough, and Mark went slowly
+back to the Abbey. On the brow of the hill before he plunged into the
+coppice he turned to look down at the distant figure moving with slow
+paces across the field below.
+
+"He's wrestling with himself," Mark thought, "more than he's wrestling
+with the soil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+MULTIPLICATION
+
+
+At Easter the Abbey Gatehouse was blessed by the Father Superior, who
+established himself in the rooms above and allowed himself to take a
+holiday from his labour of preaching. Mark expected to be made porter
+again, but the Reverend Father did not attempt to change the posts
+assigned to the brethren by the Prior, and Mark remained guest-master, a
+duty that was likely to give him plenty of occupation during the summer
+months now close at hand.
+
+On Low Sunday the Father Superior convened a full Chapter of the Order,
+to which were summoned Brother Dominic, the head of the Sandgate house,
+and Brother Anselm. When the brethren, with the exception of Brother
+Simon, who was still a postulant, were gathered together, the Father
+Superior addressed them as follows:
+
+"Brethren, I have called this Chapter of the Order of St. George to
+acquaint you with our financial position, and to ask you to make a grave
+decision. Before I say any more I ought to explain that our three
+professed brethren considered that a Chapter convened to make a decision
+such as I am going to ask you to make presently should not include the
+novices. I contended that in the present state of our Order where
+novices are called upon to fill the most responsible positions it would
+be unfair to exclude them; and our professed brethren, like true sons of
+St. Benedict, have accepted my ruling. You all know what great additions
+to our Mother House we have made during the past year, and you will all
+realize what a burden of debt this has laid upon the Order and on myself
+what a weight of responsibility. The closing of our Malta Priory, which
+was too far away to interest people in England, eased us a little. But
+if we are going to establish ourselves as a permanent force in modern
+religious life, we must establish our Mother House before anything. You
+may say that the Order of St. George is an Order devoted to active work
+among soldiers, and that we are not concerned with the establishment of
+a partially contemplative community. But all of you will recognize the
+advantage it has been to you to be asked to stay here and prepare
+yourselves for active work, to gather within yourselves a great store of
+spiritual energy, and hoard within your hearts a mighty treasure of
+spiritual strength. Brethren, if the Order of St. George is to be worthy
+of its name and of its claim we must not rest till we have a priory in
+every port and garrison, and in every great city where soldiers are
+stationed. Even if we had the necessary funds to endow these priories,
+have we enough brethren to take charge of them? We have not. I cannot
+help feeling that I was too hasty in establishing active houses both at
+Aldershot and at Sandgate, and I have convened you to-day to ask you to
+vote in Chapter that the house at Sandgate be temporarily given up,
+great spiritual influence though it has proved itself under our dear
+Brother Dominic with the men of Shorncliffe Camp, not only that we may
+concentrate our resources and pay our debts, but also that we may have
+the help of Brother Dominic himself, and of Brother Athanasius, who has
+remained behind in charge and is not here today."
+
+The Father Superior then read a statement of the Order's financial
+liabilities, and invited any Brother who wished, to speak his mind. All
+waited for the Prior, who after a short silence rose:
+
+"Reverend Father and Brethren, I don't think that there is much to say.
+Frankly, I am not convinced that we ought to have spent so much on the
+Abbey, but having done so, we must obviously try and put ourselves on a
+sound financial basis. I should like to hear what Brother Dominic has to
+say."
+
+Brother Dominic was a slight man with black hair and a sallow
+complexion, whose most prominent feature was an, immense hooked nose
+with thin nostrils. Whether through the associations with his name
+saint, or merely by his personality, Mark considered that he looked a
+typical inquisitor. When he spoke, his lips seemed to curl in a sneer.
+The expression was probably quite accidental, perhaps caused by some
+difficulty in breathing, but the effect was sinister, and his smooth
+voice did nothing to counteract the unpleasant grimace. Mark wondered if
+he was really successful with the men at Shorncliffe.
+
+"Reverend Father, Reverend Brother, and Brethren," said Brother Dominic,
+"you can imagine that it is no easy matter for me to destroy with a few
+words a house that in a small way I had a share in building up."
+
+"The lion's share," interposed the Father Superior.
+
+"You are too generous, Reverend Father," said Brother Dominic. "We could
+have done very little at Sandgate if you had not worked so hard for us
+throughout the length and breadth of England. And that is what
+personally I do feel, Brethren," he continued in more emphatic tones. "I
+do feel that the Reverend Father knows better than we what is the right
+policy for us to adopt. I will not pretend that I shall be anything but
+loath to leave Sandgate, but the future of the whole order depends on
+the ability of brethren like myself," Brother Dominic paused for the
+briefest instant to flash a quick glance at Brother Anselm, "to
+recognize that our usefulness to the soldiers among whom we are proud
+and happy to spend our lives is bounded by our usefulness to the Order
+of St. George. I give my vote without hesitation in favour of closing
+the Priory at Sandgate, and abandoning temporarily the work at
+Shorncliffe Camp."
+
+Nobody else spoke when Brother Dominic sat down, and everybody voted in
+favour of the course of action proposed by the Father Superior.
+
+Brother Dominic, in addition to his other work, had been editing _The
+Dragon_, the monthly magazine of the Order, and it was now decided to
+print this in future at the Abbey, some constant reader having presented
+a fount of type. The opening of a printing-press involved housing room,
+and it was decided to devote the old kitchens to this purpose, so that
+new kitchens could be built, a desirable addition in view of the
+increasing numbers in the Abbey and the likelihood of a further increase
+presently.
+
+Mark had not been touched by the abandonment of the Sandgate priory
+until Brother Athanasius arrived. Brother Athanasius was a florid young
+man with bright blue eyes, and so much pent-up energy as sometimes to
+appear blustering. He lacked any kind of ability to hide his feelings,
+and he was loud in his denunciation of the Chapter that abolished his
+work. His criticisms were so loud, aggressive, and blatant, that he was
+nearly ordered to retire from the Order altogether. However, the Father
+Superior went away to address a series of drawing-room meetings in
+London, and Brother George, with whom Brother Athanasius, almost alone
+of the brethren, never hesitated to keep his end up, discovering that he
+was as ready to stick up to horses and cows, did not pay attention to
+the Father Superior's threat that, if Brother Athanasius could not keep
+his tongue quiet, he must be sent away. Mark made friends with him, and
+when he found that, in spite of all his blatancy and self-assertion,
+Brother Athanasius could not keep the tears from his bright blue eyes
+whenever he spoke of Shorncliffe, he was sorry for him and vexed with
+himself for accepting the surrender of Sandgate priory so much as a
+matter of course, because he had no personal experience of its work.
+
+"But was Brother Dominic really good with the men?" Mark asked.
+
+"Oh, Brother Dominic was all right. Don't you try and make me criticize
+Brother Dominic. He bought the gloves and I did the fighting. Good man
+of business was Brother D. I wish we could have some boxing here. Half
+the brethren want punching about in my opinion. Old Brother Jerome's
+face is squashed flat like a prize-fighter's, but I bet he's never had
+the gloves on in his life. I'm fond of old Brother J. But, my word,
+wouldn't I like to punch into him when he gives us that pea-soup more
+than four times a week. Chronic, I call it. Well, if he doesn't give us
+a jolly good blow out on my name-day next week I really will punch into
+him. Old Brother Flatface, as I called him the other day. And he wasn't
+half angry either. Didn't we have sport last second of May! I took a
+party of them all round Hythe and Folkestone. No end of a spree!"
+
+Mark was soon too much occupied with his duties as guestmaster to lament
+with Brother Athanasius the end of the Sandgate priory. The Reverend
+Father's drawing-room addresses were sending fresh visitors down every
+week to see for themselves the size of the foundation that required
+money, and more money, and more money still to keep it going. In the old
+Chatsea days guests who visited the Mission House were expected to
+provide entertainment for their hosts. It mattered not who they were,
+millionaires or paupers, parsons or laymen, undergraduates or
+board-school boys, they had to share the common table, face the common
+teasing, and help the common task. Here at the Abbey, although the
+guests had much more opportunity of intercourse with the brethren than
+would have been permitted in a less novel monastic house, they were
+definitely guests, from whom nothing was expected beyond observance of
+the rules for guests. They were of all kinds, from the distinguished lay
+leaders of the Catholic party to young men who thought emotionally of
+joining the Order.
+
+Mark tried to conduct himself as impersonally as possible, and in doing
+so he managed to impress all the visitors with being a young man
+intensely preoccupied with his vocation, and as such to be treated with
+gravity and a certain amount of deference. Mark himself was anxious not
+to take advantage of his position, and make friends with people that
+otherwise he might not have met. Had he been sure that he was going to
+remain in the Order of St. George, he would have allowed himself a
+greater liberty of intercourse, because he would not then have been
+afraid of one day seeing these people in the world. He desired to be
+forgotten when they left the Abbey, or if he was remembered to be
+remembered only as a guestmaster who tried to make the Monastery guests
+comfortable, who treated them with courtesy, but also with reserve.
+
+None of the young men who came down to see if they would like to be
+monks got as far as being accepted as a probationer until the end of
+May, when a certain Mr. Arthur Yarrell, an undergraduate from Keble
+College, Oxford, whose mind was a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms,
+was accepted and a month later became a postulant as Brother Augustine,
+to the great pleasure of Brother Raymond, who said that he really
+thought he should have been compelled to leave the Order if somebody had
+not joined it with an appreciation of historic Catholicism. Early in
+June Sir Charles Horner introduced another young man called Aubrey Wyon,
+whom he had met at Venice in May.
+
+"Take a little trouble over entertaining him," Sir Charles counselled.
+And then, looking round to see that no thieves or highwaymen were
+listening, he whispered to Mark that Wyon had money. "He would be an
+asset, I fancy. And he's seriously thinking of joining you," the baronet
+declared.
+
+To tell the truth, Sir Charles who was beginning to be worried by the
+financial state of the Order of St. George, would at this crisis have
+tried to persuade the Devil to become a monk if the Devil would have
+provided a handsome dowry. He had met Aubrey Wyon at an expensive hotel,
+had noticed that he was expensively dressed and drank good wine, had
+found that he was interested in ecclesiastical religion, and, having
+bragged a bit about the land he had presented to the Order of St.
+George, had inspired Wyon to do some bragging of what he had done for
+various churches.
+
+"If I could find happiness at Malford," Wyon had said, "I would give
+them all that I possess."
+
+Sir Charles had warned the Father Superior that he would do well to
+accept Wyon as a probationer, should he propose himself; and the Father
+Superior, who was by now as anxious for money as a company-promoter,
+made himself as pleasant to Wyon as he knew how, flattering him
+carefully and giving voice to his dreams for the great stone Abbey to be
+built here in days to come.
+
+Mark took an immediate and violent dislike to the newcomer, which, had
+he been questioned about it, he would have attributed to his elaborate
+choice of socks and tie, or to his habit of perpetually tightening the
+leather belt he wore instead of braces, as if he would compel that
+flabbiness of waist caused by soft living to vanish; but to himself he
+admitted that the antipathy was deeper seated.
+
+"It's like the odour of corruption," he murmured, though actually it was
+the odour of hair washes and lotions and scents that filled the guest's
+cell.
+
+However, Aubrey Wyon became for a week a probationer, ludicrously known
+as Brother Aubrey, after which he remained a postulant only a fortnight
+before he was clothed as a novice, having by then taken the name of
+Anthony, alleging that the inspiration to become a monk had been due to
+the direct intervention of St. Anthony of Padua on June 13th.
+
+Whether Brother Anthony turned the Father Superior's head with his
+promises of what he intended to give the Order when he was professed, or
+whether having once started he was unable to stop, there was continuous
+building all that summer, culminating in a decision to begin the Abbey
+Church.
+
+Mark wondered why Brother George did not protest against the
+expenditure, and he came to the conclusion that the Prior was as much
+bewitched by ambition for his farm as the head of the Order was by his
+hope of a mighty fane.
+
+Thus things drifted during the summer, when, since the Father Superior
+was not away so much, his influence was exerted more strongly over the
+brethren, though at the same time he was not attracting as much money as
+was now always required in ever increasing amounts.
+
+Such preaching as he did manage later on during the autumn was by no
+means so financially successful as his campaign of the preceding year at
+the same time. Perhaps the natural buoyancy of his spirit led Father
+Burrowes in his disappointment to place more trust than he might
+otherwise have done in Brother Anthony's plan for the benefit of the
+Order. The cloister became like Aladdin's Cave whenever there were
+enough brethren assembled to make an audience for his luscious projects
+and prefigurations. Sundays were the days when Brother Anthony was
+particularly eloquent, and one Sunday in mid-September--it was the Feast
+of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross--he surpassed himself.
+
+"My notion would be to copy," he proclaimed, "with of course certain
+improvements, the buildings on Monte Cassino. We are not quite so high
+here; but then on the other hand that is an advantage, because it will
+enable us to allot less space to the superficial area. Yes, I have a
+very soft spot for the cloisters of Monte Cassino."
+
+Brother Anthony gazed round for the approbation of the assembled
+brethren, none of whom had the least idea what the cloisters of Monte
+Cassino looked like.
+
+"And I think some of our altar furniture is a little mean," Brother
+Anthony continued. "I'm not advocating undue ostentation; but there is
+room for improvement. They understood so well in the Middle Ages the
+importance of a rich equipment. If I'd only known when I was in Sienna
+this spring that I was coming here, I should certainly have bought a
+superb reredos that was offered to me comparatively cheap. The columns
+were of malachite and porphyry, and the panels of _rosso antico_ with
+scrolls of _lumachella_. They only asked 15,000 lire. It was absurdly
+cheap. However, perhaps it would be wiser to wait till we finish the
+Abbey Church before we decide on the reredos. I'm very much in favour of
+beaten gold for the tabernacle. By the way, Reverend Father, have you
+decided to build an ambulatory round the clerestory? I must say I think
+it would be effective, and of course for meditation unique. I shall have
+to find if my money will run to it. Oh, and Brother Birinus, weren't you
+saying the other day that the green vestments were rather faded? Don't
+worry. I'm only waiting to make up my mind between velvet and brocade
+for the purple set to order a completely new lot, including a set in old
+rose damask for mid-Lent. It always seems to me such a mistake not to
+take advantage of that charming use."
+
+Father Burrowes was transported to the days of his youth at Malta when
+his own imagination was filled with visions of precious metals, of rare
+fabrics and mighty architecture.
+
+"A silver chalice of severe pattern encrusted round the stem with blue
+zircons," Brother Anthony was chanting in his melodious voice, his eyes
+bright with the reflection of celestial splendours. "And perhaps another
+in gold with the sacred monogram wrought on the cup in jacinths and
+orange tourmalines. Yes, I'll talk it over with Sir Charles and get him
+to approve the design."
+
+The next morning two detectives came to Malford Abbey, and arrested
+Aubrey Wyon alias Brother Anthony for obtaining money under false
+pretences in various parts of the world. With them he departed to prison
+and a life more ascetic than any he had hitherto known. Brother Anthony
+departed indeed, but he was not discredited until it was too late. His
+grandiose projects and extravagant promises had already incited Father
+Burrowes to launch out on several new building operations that the Order
+could ill afford.
+
+Perhaps the cloister had been less like the Cave of Aladdin than the
+Cave of the Forty Thieves.
+
+After Christmas another Chapter was convened, to which Brother Anselm
+and Brother Chad were both bidden. The Father Superior addressed the
+brethren as he had addressed them a year ago, and finished up his speech
+by announcing that, deeply as he regretted it, he felt bound to propose
+that the Aldershot priory should be closed.
+
+"What?" shouted Brother Anselm, leaping to his feet, his eyes blazing
+with wrath through his great horn spectacles.
+
+The Prior quickly rose to say that he could not agree to the Reverend
+Father's suggestion. It was impossible for them any longer to claim that
+they were an active Order if they confined themselves entirely to the
+Abbey. He had not opposed the shutting down of the Sandgate priory, nor,
+he would remind the Reverend Father, had he offered any resistance to
+the abandonment of Malta. But he felt obliged to give his opinion
+strongly in favour of making any sacrifice to keep alive the Aldershot
+priory.
+
+Brother George had spoken with force, but without eloquence; and Mark
+was afraid that his speech had not carried much weight.
+
+The next to rise was Brother Birinus, who stood up as tall as a tree and
+said:
+
+"I agree with Brother George."
+
+And when he sat down it was as if a tree had been uprooted.
+
+There was a pause after this, while every brother looked at his
+neighbour, waiting for him to rise at this crisis in the history of the
+Order. At last the Father Superior asked Brother Anselm if he did not
+intend to speak.
+
+"What can I say?" asked Brother Anselm bitterly. "Last year I should
+have been true to myself and voted against the closing of the Sandgate
+house. I was silent then in my egoism. I am not fit to defend our house
+now."
+
+"But I will," cried Brother Chad, rising. "Begging your pardon, Reverend
+Father and Brethren, if I am speaking too soon, but I cannot believe
+that you seriously consider closing us down. We're just beginning to get
+on well with the authorities, and we've a regular lot of communicants
+now. We began as just a Club, but we're something more than a Club now.
+We're bringing men to Our Lord, Brethren. You will do a great wrong if
+you let those poor souls think that for the sake of your own comfort you
+are ready to forsake them. Forgive me, Reverend Father. Forgive me, dear
+Brethren, if I have said too much and spoken uncharitably."
+
+"He has not spoken uncharitably enough," Brother Athanasius shouted,
+rising to his feet, and as he did so unconsciously assuming the attitude
+of a boxer. "If I'd been here last year, I should have spoken much more
+uncharitably. I did not join this Order to sit about playing with
+vestments. I wanted to bring soldiers to God. If this Order is to be
+turned into a kind of male nunnery, I'm off to-morrow. I'm boiling over,
+that's what I am, boiling over. If we can't afford to do what we should
+be doing, we can't afford to build gatehouses, and lay out flower-beds,
+and sit giggling in tin cloisters. It's the limit, that's what it is,
+the limit."
+
+Brother Athanasius stood there flushed with defiance, until the Father
+Superior told him to sit down and not make a fool of himself, a command
+which, notwithstanding that the feeling of the Chapter had been so far
+entirely against the head of the Order, such was the Father Superior's
+authority, Brother Athanasius immediately obeyed.
+
+Brother Dominic now rose to try, as he said, to bring an atmosphere of
+reasonableness into the discussion.
+
+"I do not think that I can be accused of inconsistency," he pointed out
+smoothly, "when we look back to our general Chapter of a year ago.
+Whatever my personal feelings were about closing the Sandgate priory, I
+recognized at once that the Reverend Father was right. There is really
+no doubt that we must be strong at the roots before we try to grow into
+a tall tree. However flourishing the branches, they will wither if the
+roots are not fed. The Reverend Father has no desire, as I understand
+him, to abandon the activity of the Order. He is merely anxious to
+establish us on a firm basis. The Reverend Brother said that we should
+make any sacrifice to maintain the Aldershot house. I have no desire to
+accuse the Reverend Brother of inconsistency, but I would ask him if he
+is willing to give up the farm, which, as you know, has cost so far a
+great deal more than we could afford. But of course the Reverend Brother
+would give up the farm. At the same time, we do not want him to give it
+up. We realize that under his capable guidance that farm will presently
+be a source of profit. Therefore, I beg the Reverend Brother to
+understand that I am making a purely rhetorical point when I ask him if
+he is prepared to give up the farm. I repeat, we do not want the farm
+given up.
+
+"Another point which I feel has been missed. In giving up Aldershot, we
+are not giving up active work entirely. We have a good deal of active
+work here. We have our guest-house for casuals, and we are always ready
+to feed, clothe, and shelter any old soldiers who come to us. We are
+still young as an Order. We have only four professed monks, including
+the Reverend Father. We want to have more than that before we can
+consider ourselves established. I for one should hesitate to take my
+final vows until I had spent a long time in strict religious
+preparation, which in the hurry and scurry of active work is impossible.
+We have listened to a couple of violent speeches, or at any rate to one
+violent speech by a brother who was for a year in close touch with
+myself. I appeal to him not to drag the discussion down to the level of
+lay politics. We are free, we novices, to leave to-morrow. Let us
+remember that, and do not let us take advantage of our freedom to impart
+to this Mother House of ours the atmosphere of the world to which we may
+return when we will.
+
+"And let us remember when we oppose the judgment of the Reverend Father
+that we are exalting ourselves without reason. Let us remember that it
+is he who by his eloquence and by his devotion and by his endurance and
+by his personality, has given us this wonderful house. Are we to turn
+round and say to him who has worked so hard for us that we do not want
+his gifts, that we are such wonderful fishers of men that we can be
+independent of him? Oh, my dear Brethren, let me beg you to vote in
+favour of abandoning all our dependencies until we are ourselves no
+longer dependent on the Reverend Father's eloquence and devotion and
+endurance and personality. God has blessed us infinitely. Are we to
+fling those blessings in His face?"
+
+Brother Dominic sat down; after him in succession Brother Raymond,
+Brother Dunstan, Brother Lawrence, Brother Jerome, Brother Nicholas, and
+Brother Augustine spoke in support of the Father Superior. Brother Giles
+refused to speak, and though Mark's heart was thundering in his mouth
+with unuttered eloquence, at the moment he should rise he could not find
+a word, and he indicated with a sign that like Brother Giles, he had
+nothing to say.
+
+"The voting will be by ballot," the Reverend Father announced. "It is
+proposed to give up the Priory at Aldershot. Let those brethren who
+agree write Yes on a strip of paper. Let those who disagree write No."
+
+All knelt in silent prayer before they inscribed their will; after which
+they advanced one by one to the ballot-box, into which under the eyes of
+a large crucifix they dropped their papers. The Father Superior did not
+vote. Brother Simon, who was still a postulant, and not eligible to sit
+in Chapter, was fetched to count the votes. He was much excited at his
+task, and when he announced that seven papers were inscribed Yes, that
+six were inscribed No, and that one paper was blank, his teeth were
+chattering.
+
+"One paper blank?" somebody repeated.
+
+"Yes, really," said Brother Simon. "I looked everywhere, and there's not
+a mark on it."
+
+All turned involuntarily toward Mark, whose paper in fact it was,
+although he gave no sign of being conscious of the ownership.
+
+"_In a General Chapter of the Order of St. George, held upon the Vigil
+of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the year of Grace, 1903, it
+was resolved to close the Priory of the Order in the town of
+Aldershot._"
+
+The Reverend Father, having invoked the Holy Trinity, declared the
+Chapter dissolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+DIVISION
+
+
+Mark was vexed with himself for evading the responsibility of recording
+his opinion. His vote would not have changed the direction of the
+policy; but if he had voted against giving up the house at Aldershot,
+the Father Superior would have had to record the casting vote in favour
+of his own proposal, and whatever praise or blame was ultimately awarded
+to the decision would have belonged to him alone, who as head of the
+Order was best able to bear it. Mark's whole sympathy had been on the
+side of Brother George, and as one who had known at first hand the work
+in Aldershot, he did feel that it ought not to be abandoned so easily.
+Then when Brother Athanasius was speaking, Mark, in his embarrassment at
+such violence of manner and tone, picked up a volume lying on the table
+by his elbow that by reading he might avoid the eyes of his brethren
+until Brother Athanasius had ceased to shout. It was the Rule of St.
+Benedict which, with a print of Fra Angelico's Crucifixion and an image
+of St. George, was all the decoration allowed to the bare Chapter Room,
+and the page at which Mark opened the leather-bound volume was headed:
+DE PRAEPOSITO MONASTERII.
+
+     "_It happens too often that through the appointment of the Prior
+     grave scandals arise in monasteries, since some there be who,
+     puffed up with a malignant spirit of pride, imagining themselves to
+     be second Abbots, and assuming unto themselves a tyrannous
+     authority, encourage scandals and create dissensions in the
+     community. . . ._
+
+     "_Hence envy is excited, strife, evil-speaking, jealousy, discord,
+     confusion; and while the Abbot and the Prior run counter to each
+     other, by such dissension their souls must of necessity be
+     imperilled; and those who are under them, when they take sides, are
+     travelling on the road to perdition. . . ._
+
+     "_On this account we apprehend that it is expedient for the
+     preservation of peace and good-will that the management of his
+     monastery should be left to the discretion of the Abbot. . . ._
+
+     "_Let the Prior carry out with reverence whatever shall be enjoined
+     upon him by his Abbot, doing nothing against the Abbot's will, nor
+     against his orders. . . ._"
+
+Mark could not be otherwise than impressed by what he read.
+
+     _Ii qui sub ipsis sunt, dum adulantur partibus, eunt in
+     perditionem. . . ._
+
+     _Nihil contra Abbatis voluntatem faciens. . . ._
+
+Mark looked up at the figure of St. Benedict standing in that holy group
+at the foot of the Cross.
+
+     _Ideoque nos proevidemus expedire, propter pacis caritatisque
+     custodiam, in Abbatis pendere arbitrio ordinationem monasterii
+     sui. . . ._
+
+St. Benedict had more than apprehended; he had actually foreseen that
+the Abbot ought to manage his own monastery. It was as if centuries ago,
+in the cave at Subiaco, he had heard that strident voice of Brother
+Athanasius in this matchboarded Chapter-room, as if he had beheld
+Brother Dominic, while apparently he was striving to persuade his
+brethren to accept the Father Superior's advice, nevertheless taking
+sides, and thereby travelling along the road that leads toward
+destruction. This was the thought that paralyzed Mark's tongue when it
+was his turn to speak, and this was why he would not commit himself to
+an opinion. Afterward, his neutrality appeared to him a weak compromise,
+and he regretted that he had not definitely allied himself with one
+party or the other.
+
+The announcement in _The Dragon_ that the Order had been compelled to
+give up the Aldershot house produced a large sum of sympathetic
+contributions; and when the Father Superior came back just before Lent,
+he convened another Chapter, at which he told the Community that it was
+imperative to establish a priory in London before they tried to reopen
+any houses elsewhere. His argument was cogent, and once again there was
+the appearance of unanimity among the Brethren, who all approved of the
+proposal. It had always been the custom of Father Burrowes to preach his
+hardest during Lent, because during that season of self-denial he was
+able to raise more money than at any other time, but until now he had
+never failed to be at the Abbey at the beginning of Passion Week, nor to
+remain there until Easter was over.
+
+The Feast of St. Benedict fell upon the Saturday before the fifth Sunday
+in Lent, and the Father Superior, who had travelled down from the North
+in order to be present, announced that he considered it would be
+prudent, so freely was the money flowing in, not to give up preaching
+this year during Passion Week and Holy Week. Naturally, he did not
+intend to leave the Community without a priest at such a season, and he
+had made arrangements with the Reverend Andrew Hett to act as chaplain
+until he could come back into residence himself.
+
+Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine were particularly thrilled by the
+prospect of enjoying the ministrations of Andrew Hett, less perhaps
+because they would otherwise be debarred from their Easter duties than
+because they looked forward to services and ceremonies of which they
+felt they had been robbed by the austere Anglicanism of Brother George.
+
+"Andrew Hett is famous," declared Brother Raymond at the pitch of
+exultation. "It was he who told the Bishop of Ipswich that if the Bishop
+made him give up Benediction he would give up singing Morning and
+Evening Prayer."
+
+"That must have upset the Bishop," said Mark. "I suppose he resigned
+his bishopric."
+
+"I should have thought that you, Brother Mark, would have been the last
+one to take the part of a bishop when he persecutes a Catholic priest!"
+
+"I'm not taking the part of the Bishop," Mark replied. "But I think it
+was a silly remark for a curate to make. It merely put him in the wrong,
+and gave the Bishop an opportunity to score."
+
+The Prior had questioned the policy of engaging Andrew Hett as Chaplain,
+even for so brief a period as a month. He argued that, inasmuch as the
+Bishop of Silchester had twice refused to licence him to parishes in the
+diocese, it would prejudice the Bishop against the Order of St. George,
+and might lead to his inhibiting the Father Superior later on, should an
+excuse present itself.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear Brother George," said the Reverend Father. "He won't
+know anything about it officially, and in any case ours is a private
+oratory, where refusals to licence and episcopal inhibitions have no
+effect."
+
+"That's not my point," argued Brother George. "My point is that any
+communication with a notorious ecclesiastical outlaw like this fellow
+Hett is liable to react unfavourably upon us. Why can't we get down
+somebody else? There must be a number of unemployed elderly priests who
+would be glad of the holiday."
+
+"I'm afraid that I've offered Hett the job now, so let us make up our
+minds to be content."
+
+Mark, who was doing secretarial work for the Reverend Father, happened
+to be present during this conversation, which distressed him, because it
+showed him that the Prior was still at variance with the Abbot, a state
+of affairs that was ultimately bound to be disastrous for the Community.
+He withdrew almost immediately on some excuse to the Superior's inner
+room, whence he intended to go downstairs to the Porter's Lodge until
+the Prior was gone. Unfortunately, the door of the inner room was
+locked, and before he could explain what had happened, a conversation
+had begun which he could not help overhearing, but which he dreaded to
+interrupt.
+
+"I'm afraid, dear Brother George," the Reverend Father was saying, "I'm
+very much afraid that you are beginning to think I have outlived my
+usefulness as Superior of the Order."
+
+"I've never suggested that," Brother George replied angrily.
+
+"You may not have meant to give that impression, but certainly that is
+what you have succeeded in making me feel personally," said the
+Superior.
+
+"I have been associated with you long enough to be entitled to express
+my opinion in private."
+
+"In private, yes. But are you always careful only to do so in private?
+I'm not complaining. My only desire is the prosperity and health of the
+Order. Next Christmas I am ready to resign, and let the brethren elect
+another Superior-general."
+
+"That's talking nonsense," said the Prior. "You know as well as I do
+that nobody else except you could possibly be Superior. But recently I
+happen to have had a better opportunity than you to criticize our Mother
+House, and frankly I'm not satisfied with the men we have. Few of them
+will be any use to us. Birinus, Anselm, Giles, Chad, Athanasius if
+properly suppressed, Mark, these in varying degrees, have something in
+them, but look at the others! Dominic, ambitious and sly, Jerome, a
+pompous prig, Dunstan, a nincompoop, Raymond, a milliner, Nicholas,
+a--well, you know what I think Nicholas is, Augustine, another
+nincompoop, Lawrence, still at Sunday School, and poor Simon, a clown.
+I've had a dozen probationers through my hands, and not one of them was
+as good as what we've got. I'm afraid I'm less hopeful of the future
+than I was in Canada."
+
+"I notice, dear Brother George," said the Father Superior, "that you are
+prejudiced in favour of the brethren who follow your lead with a certain
+amount of enthusiasm. That is very natural. But I'm not so pessimistic
+about the others as you are. Perhaps you feel that I am forgetting how
+much the Order owes to your generosity in the past. Believe me, I have
+forgotten nothing. At the same time, you gave your money with your eyes
+open. You took your vows without being pressed. Don't you think you owe
+it to yourself, if not to the Order or to me personally, to go through
+with what you undertook? Your three vows were Chastity, Poverty, and
+Obedience."
+
+There was no answer from the Prior; a moment later he shut the door
+behind him, and went downstairs alone. Mark came into the room at once.
+
+"Reverend Father," he said. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that I
+overheard what you and the Reverend Brother were saying." He went on to
+explain how this had happened, and why he had not liked to make his
+presence known.
+
+"You thought the Reverend Brother would not bear the mortification with
+as much fortitude as myself?" the Father Superior suggested with a faint
+smile.
+
+It struck Mark how true this was, and he looked in astonishment at
+Father Burrowes, who had offered him the key to his action.
+
+"Well, we must forget what we heard, my son," said the Father Superior.
+"Sit down, and let's finish off these letters."
+
+An hour's work was done, at the end of which the Reverend Father asked
+Mark if his had been the blank paper when the votes were counted in
+Chapter, and when Mark admitted that it had been, he pressed him for the
+reason of his neutrality.
+
+"I'm not sure that it oughtn't to be called indecision," said Mark. "I
+was personally interested in the keeping on of Aldershot, because I had
+worked there."
+
+"Then why not have voted for doing so?" the Superior asked, in accents
+that were devoid of the least grudge against Mark for disagreeing with
+himself.
+
+"I tried to get rid of my personal opinion," Mark explained. "I tried to
+look at the question strictly from the standpoint of the member of a
+community. As such I felt that the Reverend Brother was wrong to run
+counter to his Superior. At the same time, if you'll forgive me for
+saying so, I felt that you were wrong to give up Aldershot. I simply
+could not arrive at a decision between the two opinions."
+
+"I do not blame you, my son, for your scrupulous cast of mind. Only
+beware of letting it chill your enthusiasm. Satan may avail himself of
+it one day, and attack your faith. Solomon was just. Our Blessed Lord,
+by our cowardly standards, was unjust. Remembering the Gadarene swine,
+the barren fig-tree, the parable of the wedding-guest without a garment,
+Martha and Mary. . . ."
+
+"Martha and Mary!" interrupted Mark. "Why, that was really the point at
+issue. And the ointment that might have been sold for the benefit of the
+poor. Yes, Judas would have voted with the Reverend Brother."
+
+"And Pontius Pilate would have remained neutral," added Father Burrowes,
+his blue eyes glittering with delight at the effect upon Mark of his
+words.
+
+But when Mark was walking back to the Abbey down the winding drive among
+the hazels, he wished that he and not the Reverend Father had used that
+illustration. However, useless regrets for his indecision in the matter
+of the priory at Aldershot were soon obliterated by a new cause of
+division, which was the arrival of the Reverend Andrew Hett on the Vigil
+of the Annunciation, just in time to sing first Vespers.
+
+It fell to Mark's lot to entertain the new chaplain that evening,
+because Brother Jerome who had become guest-master when Brother Anselm
+took his place as cellarer was in the infirmary. Mark was scarcely
+prepared for the kind of personality that Hett's proved to be. He had
+grown accustomed during his time at the Abbey to look down upon the
+protagonists of ecclesiastical battles, so little else did any of the
+guests who visited them want to discuss, so much awe was lavished upon
+them by Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine. It did not strike Mark
+that the fight at St. Agnes' might appear to the large majority of
+people as much a foolish squabble over trifles, a cherishing of the
+letter rather than the spirit of Christian worship, as the dispute
+between Mr. So-and-so and the Bishop of Somewhere-or-other in regard to
+his use of the Litany of the Saints in solemn procession on high days
+and holy days.
+
+Andrew Hett revived in Mark his admiration of the bigot, which would
+have been a dangerous thing to lose in one's early twenties. The
+chaplain was a young man of perhaps thirty-five, tall, raw-boned,
+sandy-haired, with a complexion of extreme pallor. His light-blue eyes
+were very red round the rims, and what eyebrows he possessed slanted up
+at a diabolic angle. His voice was harsh, high, and rasping as a guinea
+fowl's. When Mark brought him his supper, Hett asked him several
+questions about the Abbey time-table, and then said abruptly:
+
+"The ugliness of this place must be soul-destroying."
+
+Mark looked at the Guest-chamber with new eyes. There was such a force
+of assertion in Hett's tone that he could not contradict him, and indeed
+it certainly was ugly.
+
+"Nobody can live with matchboarded walls and ceilings and not suffer for
+it," Hett went on. "Why didn't you buy an old tithe barn and live in
+that? It's an insult to Almighty God to worship Him in such
+surroundings."
+
+"This is only a beginning," Mark pointed out.
+
+"A very bad beginning," Hett growled. "Such brutalizing ugliness would
+be inexcusable if you were leading an active life. But I gather that you
+claim to be contemplative here. I've been reading your ridiculous
+monthly paper _The Dragon_. Full of sentimental bosh about bringing back
+the glories of monasticism to England. Tintern was not built of tin. How
+can you contemplate Almighty God here? It's not possible. What Divine
+purpose is served by collecting men under hundreds of square feet of
+corrugated iron? I'm astonished at Charles Horner. I thought he knew
+better than to encourage this kind of abomination."
+
+There was only one answer to make to Hett, which was that the religious
+life of the Community did not depend upon any externals, least of all
+upon its lodging; but when Mark tried to frame this answer, his lips
+would not utter the words. In that moment he knew that it was time for
+him to leave Malford and prepare himself to be a priest elsewhere, and
+otherwise than by what the Rector had stigmatized as the pseudo-monastic
+life.
+
+Mark wondered when he had left the chaplain to his ferocious
+meditations what would have been the effect of that diatribe upon some
+of his brethren. He smiled to himself, as he sat over his solitary
+supper in the Refectory, to picture the various expressions he could
+imagine upon their faces when they came hotfoot from the Guest-chamber
+with the news of what manner of priest was in their midst. And while he
+was sipping his bowl of pea-soup, he looked up at the image of St.
+George and perceived that the dragon's expression bore a distinct
+resemblance to that of the Reverend Andrew Hett. That night it seemed to
+Mark, in one of those waking trances that occur like dreams between one
+disturbed sleep and another, that the presence of the chaplain was
+shaking the flimsy foundations of the Abbey with such ruthlessness that
+the whole structure must soon collapse.
+
+"It's only the wind," he murmured, with that half of his mind which was
+awake. "March is going out like a dragon."
+
+After Mass next day, when Mark was giving the chaplain his breakfast,
+the latter asked who kept the key of the tabernacle.
+
+"Brother Birinus, I expect. He is the sacristan."
+
+"It ought to have been given to me before Mass. Please go and ask for
+it," requested the chaplain.
+
+Mark found Brother Birinus in the Sacristy, putting away the white
+vestments in the press. When Mark gave him the chaplain's message,
+Brother Birinus told him that the Reverend Brother had the key.
+
+"What does he want the key for?" asked Brother George when Mark had
+repeated to him the chaplain's request.
+
+"He probably wishes to change the Host," Mark suggested.
+
+"There is no need to do that. And I don't believe that is the reason. I
+believe he wants to have Benediction. He's not going to have Benediction
+here."
+
+Mark felt that it was not his place to argue with the Reverend Brother,
+and he merely asked him what reply he was to give to the chaplain.
+
+"Tell him that the key of the Tabernacle is kept by me while the
+Reverend Father is away, and that I regret I cannot give it to him."
+
+The priest's eyes blazed with anger when Mark returned without the key.
+
+"Who is the Reverend Brother?" he rasped.
+
+"Brother George."
+
+"Yes, but what is he? Apothecary, tailor, ploughboy, what?"
+
+"Brother George is the Prior."
+
+"Well, please tell the Prior that I should like to speak to him
+instantly."
+
+When Mark found Brother George he had already doffed his habit, and was
+dressed in his farmer's clothes to go working on the land.
+
+"I'll speak to Mr. Hett before Sext. Meanwhile, you can assure him that
+the key of the Tabernacle is perfectly safe. I wear it round my neck."
+
+Brother George pulled open his shirt, and showed Mark the golden key
+hanging from a cord.
+
+On receiving the Prior's message, the chaplain asked for a railway
+time-table.
+
+"I see there is a fast train at 10.30. Please order the trap."
+
+"You're not going to leave us?" Mark exclaimed.
+
+"Do you suppose, Brother Mark, that no bishop in the Establishment will
+receive me in his diocese because I am accustomed to give way? I should
+not have asked for the key of the Tabernacle unless I thought that it
+was my duty to ask for it. I cannot take it from the Reverend Brother's
+neck. I will not stay here without its being given up to me. Please
+order the trap in time to catch the 10.30 train."
+
+"Surely you will see the Reverend Brother first," Mark urged. "I should
+have made it clear to you that he is out in the fields, and that all the
+work of the farm falls upon his shoulders. It cannot make any difference
+whether you have the key now or before Sext. And I'm sure the Reverend
+Brother will see your point of view when you put it to him."
+
+"I am not going to argue about the custody of God," said the chaplain.
+"I should consider such an argument blasphemy, and I consider the
+Prior's action in refusing to give up the key sacrilege. Please order
+the trap."
+
+"But if you sent a telegram to the Reverend Father . . . Brother Dominic
+will know where he is . . . I'm sure that the Reverend Father will put
+it right with Brother George, and that he will at once give you the
+key."
+
+"I was summoned here as a priest," said the chaplain. "If the amateur
+monk left in charge of this monastery does not understand the
+prerogatives of my priesthood, I am not concerned to teach him except
+directly."
+
+"Well, will you wait until I've found the Reverend Brother and told him
+that you intend to leave us unless he gives you the key?" Mark begged,
+in despair at the prospect of what the chaplain's departure would mean
+to a Community already too much divided against itself.
+
+"It is not one of my prerogatives to threaten the prior of a monastery,
+even if he is an amateur," said the chaplain. "From the moment that
+Brother George refuses to recognize my position, I cease to hold that
+position. Please order the trap."
+
+"You won't have to leave till half-past nine," said Mark, who had made
+up his mind to wrestle with Brother George on his own initiative, and if
+possible to persuade him to surrender the key to the chaplain of his own
+accord. With this object he hurried out, to find Brother George
+ploughing that stony ground by the fir-trees. He was looking ruefully at
+a broken share when Mark approached him.
+
+"Two since I started," he commented.
+
+But he was breaking more precious things than shares, thought Mark, if
+he could but understand.
+
+"Let the fellow go," said Brother George coldly, when Mark had related
+his interview with the chaplain.
+
+"But, Reverend Brother, if he goes we shall have no priest for Easter."
+
+"We shall be better off with no priest than with a fellow like that."
+
+"Reverend Brother," said Mark miserably, "I have no right to remonstrate
+with you, I know. But I must say something. You are making a mistake.
+You will break up the Community. I am not speaking on my own account
+now, because I have already made up my mind to leave, and get ordained.
+But the others! They're not all strong like you. They really are not. If
+they feel that they have been deprived of their Easter Communion by you
+. . . and have you the right to deprive them? After all, Father Hett has
+reason on his side. He is entitled to keep the key of the Tabernacle. If
+he wishes to hold Benediction, you can forbid him, or at least you can
+forbid the brethren to attend. But the key of the Tabernacle belongs to
+him, if he says Mass there. Please forgive me for speaking like this,
+but I love you and respect you, and I cannot bear to see you put
+yourself in the wrong."
+
+The Prior patted Mark on the shoulder.
+
+"Cheer up, Brother," he said. "You mustn't mind if I think that I know
+better than you what is good for the Community. I have had a longer time
+to learn, you must remember. And so you're going to leave us?"
+
+"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that now," Mark said.
+
+"Nor do I," said Brother George. "I want to get on with my ploughing."
+
+Mark saw that it was as useless to argue with him as attempt to persuade
+the chaplain to stay. He turned sadly away, and walked back with heavy
+steps towards the Abbey. Overhead, the larks, rising and falling upon
+their fountains of song, seemed to mock the way men worshipped Almighty
+God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+SUBTRACTION
+
+
+Mark had not spent a more unhappy Easter since the days of Haverton
+House. He was oppressed by the sense of excommunication that brooded
+over the Abbey, and on the Saturday of Passion Week the versicles and
+responses of the proper Compline had a dreadful irony.
+
+    _V. O King most Blessed, govern Thy servants in the right way._
+    _R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed._
+    _V. By holy fasts to amend our sinful lives._
+    _R. O King most Blessed, govern Thy Saints in the right way._
+    _V. To duly keep Thy Paschal Feast._
+    _R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed._
+
+"Brother Mark," said Brother Augustine, on the morning of Palm Sunday,
+"_did_ you notice that ghastly split infinitive in the last versicle at
+Compline? _To duly keep._ I can't think why we don't say the Office in
+Latin."
+
+Mark felt inclined to tell Brother Augustine that if nothing more vital
+than an infinitive was split during this holy season, the Community
+might have cause to congratulate itself. Here now was Brother Birinus
+throwing away as useless the bundle of palms that lacked the blessing of
+a priest, throwing them away like dead flowers.
+
+Sir Charles Horner, who had been in town, arrived at the Abbey on the
+Tuesday, and announced that he was going to spend Holy Week with the
+Community.
+
+"We have no chaplain," Mark told him.
+
+"No chaplain!" Sir Charles exclaimed. "But I understood that Andrew
+Hett had undertaken the job while Father Burrowes was away."
+
+Mark did not think that it was his duty to enlighten Sir Charles upon
+the dispute between Brother George and the chaplain. However, it was not
+long before he found out what had occurred from the Prior's own lips and
+came fuming back to the Guest-chamber.
+
+"I consider the whole state of affairs most unsatisfactory," he said. "I
+really thought that when Brother George took charge here the Abbey would
+be better managed."
+
+"Please, Sir Charles," Mark begged, "you make it very uncomfortable for
+me when you talk like that about the Reverend Brother before me."
+
+"Yes, but I must give my opinion. I have a right to criticize when I am
+the person who is responsible for the Abbey's existence here. It's all
+very fine for Brother George to ask me to notify Bazely at Wivelrod that
+the brethren wish to go to their Easter duties in his church. Bazely is
+a very timid man. I've already driven him into doing more than he really
+likes, and my presence in his church doesn't alarm the parishioners. In
+fact, they rather like it. But they won't like to see the church full of
+monks on Easter morning. They'll be more suspicious than ever of what
+they call poor Bazely's innovations. It's not fair to administer such a
+shock to a remote country parish like Wivelrod, especially when they're
+just beginning to get used to the vestments I gave them. It seems to me
+that you've deliberately driven Andrew Hett away from the Abbey, and I
+don't see why poor Bazely should be made to suffer. How many monks are
+you now? Fifteen? Why, fifteen bulls in Wivelrod church would create
+less dismay!"
+
+Sir Charles's protest on behalf of the Vicar of Wivelrod was effective,
+for the Prior announced that after all he had decided that it was the
+duty of the Community to observe Easter within the Abbey gates. The
+Reverend Father would return on Easter Tuesday, and their Easter duties
+would be accomplished within the Octave. Withal, it was a gloomy Easter
+for the brethren, and when they began the first Vespers with the
+quadruple Alleluia, it seemed as if they were still chanting the
+sorrowful antiphons of Good Friday.
+
+     _My spirit is vexed within Me: and My heart within Me is desolate._
+
+     _Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by: behold and see if there
+     be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me._
+
+     _What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which I was wounded
+     in the house of My friends._
+
+Nor was there rejoicing in the Community when at Lauds of Easter Day
+they chanted:
+
+    _V. In Thy Resurrection, O Christ._
+    _R. Let Heaven and earth rejoice, Alleluia._
+
+Nor when at Prime and Terce and Sext and None they chanted:
+
+     _This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be
+     glad in it._
+
+And when at the second Vespers the Brethren declared:
+
+    _V. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep
+        the Feast._
+
+    _R. Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and
+        wickedness; but with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and
+        truth. Alleluia._
+
+scarcely could they who chanted the versicle challenge with their eyes
+those who hung down their heads when they gave the response.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hour of recreation before Compline, which upon great Feasts was wont
+to be so glad, lay heavily upon the brethren that night, so that Mark
+could not bear to sit in the Cloister; there being no guests in the
+Abbey for his attention, he sat in the library and wrote to the Rector.
+
+     The Abbey,
+
+     Malford, Surrey.
+
+     Easter Sunday.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I should have written before to wish you all a happy Easter, but
+     I've been making up my mind during the last fortnight to leave the
+     Order, and I did not want to write until my mind was made up. That
+     feat is now achieved. I shall stay here until St. George's Day, and
+     then the next day, which will be St. Mark's Eve, I shall come home
+     to spend my birthday with you. I do not regret the year and six
+     months that I have spent at Malford and Aldershot, because during
+     that time, if I have decided not to be a monk, I am none the less
+     determined to be a priest. I shall be 23 this birthday, and I hope
+     that I shall find a Bishop to ordain me next year and a Theological
+     College to accept responsibility for my training and a beneficed
+     priest to give me a title. I will give you a full account of myself
+     when we meet at the end of the month; but in this letter, written
+     in sad circumstances, I want to tell you that I have learnt with
+     the soul what I have long spoken with the lips--the need of God. I
+     expect you will tell me that I ought to have learnt that lesson
+     long ago upon that Whit-Sunday morning in Meade Cantorum church.
+     But I think I was granted then by God to desire Him with my heart.
+     I was scarcely old enough to realize that I needed Him with my
+     soul. "You're not so old now," I hear you say with a smile. But in
+     a place like this one learns almost more than one would learn in
+     the world in the time. One beholds human nature very intimately. I
+     know more about my fellow-men from association with two or three
+     dozen people here than I learnt at St. Agnes' from association with
+     two or three hundred. This much at least my pseudo-monasticism has
+     taught me.
+
+     We have passed through a sad time lately at the Abbey, and I feel
+     that for the Community sorrows are in store. You know from my
+     letters that there have been divisions, and you know how hard I
+     have found it to decide which party I ought to follow. But of
+     course the truth is that from the moment one feels the inclination
+     to side with a party in a community it is time to leave that
+     community. Owing to an unfortunate disagreement between Brother
+     George and the Reverend Andrew Hett, who came down to act as
+     chaplain during the absence of the Reverend Father, Andrew Hett
+     felt obliged to leave us. The consequence is we have had no Mass
+     this Easter, and thus I have learned with my soul to need God. I
+     cannot describe to you the torment of deprivation which I
+     personally feel, a torment that is made worse by the consciousness
+     that all my brethren will go to their cells to-night needing God
+     and not finding Him, because they like myself are involved in an
+     earthly quarrel, so that we are incapable of opening our hearts to
+     God this night. You may say that if we were in such a state we
+     should have had no right to make our Easter Communion. But that
+     surely is what Our Blessed Lord can do for us with His Body and
+     Blood. I have been realizing that all this Holy Week. I have felt
+     as I have never felt before the consciousness of sinning against
+     Him. There has not been an antiphon, not a versicle nor a response,
+     that has not stabbed me with a consciousness of my sin against His
+     Divine Love.
+
+     "What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which I was wounded
+     in the house of My friends."
+
+     But if on Easter eve we could have confessed our sins against His
+     Love, and if this morning we could have partaken of Him, He would
+     have been with us, and our hearts would have been fit for the
+     presence of God. We should have been freed from this spirit of
+     strife, we should have come together in Jesus Christ. We should
+     have seen how to live "with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and
+     truth." God would have revealed His Will, and we, submitting our
+     Order to His Will, should have ceased to think for ourselves, to
+     judge our brethren, to criticize our seniors, to suspect that
+     brother of personal ambition, this brother of toadyism. The
+     Community is being devoured by the Dragon and, unless St. George
+     comes to the rescue of his Order on Thursday week, it will perish.
+     Perhaps I have not much faith in St. George. He has always seemed
+     to me an unreal, fairy-tale sort of a saint. I have more faith in
+     St. Benedict and his Holy Rule. But I have no vocation for the
+     contemplative life. I don't feel that my prayers are good enough to
+     save my own soul, let alone the souls of others. I _must_ give
+     Jesus Christ to my fellow-men in the Blessed Sacrament. I long to
+     be a priest for that service. I don't feel that I want by my own
+     efforts to make people better, or to relieve poverty, or to thunder
+     against sin, or to preach them up to and through Heaven's gates. I
+     want to give them the Blessed Sacrament, because I know that
+     nothing else will be the slightest use to them. I know it more
+     positively to-night than I have ever known it, because as I sit
+     here writing to you I am starved. God has given me the grace to
+     understand why I am starved. It is my duty to bring Our Lord to
+     souls who do not know why they are starved. And if after nearly two
+     years of Malford this passion to bring the Sacraments to human
+     beings consumes me like a fire, then I have not wasted my time, and
+     I can look you in the face and ask for your blessing upon my
+     determination to be a priest.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+When Mark had written this letter, and thus put into words what had
+hitherto been a more or less nebulous intention, and when in addition to
+that he had affixed a date to the carrying out of his intention, he felt
+comparatively at ease. He wasted no time in letting the Father Superior
+know that he was going to leave; in fact he told him after he had
+confessed to him before making his Communion on Easter Thursday.
+
+"I'm sorry to lose you, my dear boy," said Father Burrowes. "Very sorry.
+We are just going to open a priory in London, though that is a secret
+for the moment, please. I shall make the announcement at the Easter
+Chapter. Yes, some kind friends have given us a house in Soho.
+Splendidly central, which is important for our work. I had planned that
+you would be one of the brethren chosen to go there."
+
+"It's very kind of you, Reverend Father," said Mark. "But I'm sure that
+you understand my anxiety not to lose any time, now that I feel
+perfectly convinced that I want to be a priest."
+
+"I had my doubts about you when you first came to us. Let me see, it was
+nearly two years ago, wasn't it? How time flies! Yes, I had my doubts
+about you. But I was wrong. You seem to possess a real fixity of
+purpose. I remember that you told me then that you were not sure you
+wanted to be a monk. Rare candour! I could have professed a hundred
+monks, had I been willing to profess them within ten minutes of their
+first coming to see me."
+
+The Father Superior gave Mark his blessing and dismissed him. Nothing
+had been said about the dispute between the Prior and the Chaplain, and
+Mark began to wonder if Father Burrowes thought the results of it would
+tell more surely in favour of his own influence if he did not allude to
+it nor make any attempt to adjudicate upon the point at issue. Now that
+he was leaving Malford in little more than a week, Mark felt that he was
+completely relieved of the necessity of assisting at any conventual
+legislation, and he would gladly have absented himself from the Easter
+Chapter, which was held on the Saturday within the Octave, had not
+Father Burrowes told him that so long as he wore the habit of a novice
+of the Order he was expected to share in every side of the Community's
+life.
+
+"Brethren," said the Father Superior, "I have brought you back news that
+will gladden your hearts, news that will show I you how by the Grace of
+God your confidence in my judgment was not misplaced. Some kind friends
+have taken for us the long lease of a splendid house in Soho Square, so
+that we may have our priory in London, and resume the active work that
+was abandoned temporarily last Christmas. Not only have these kind
+friends taken for us this splendid house, but other kind friends have
+come forward to guarantee the working expenses up to £20 a week. God is
+indeed good to us, brethren, and when I remember that next Thursday is
+the Feast of our great Patron Saint, my heart is too full for words.
+During the last three or four months there have been unhappy differences
+of opinion in our beloved Order. Do let me entreat you to forget all
+these in gratitude for God's bountiful mercies. Do let us, with the
+arrival once more of our patronal festival, resolve to forget our doubts
+and our hesitations, our timidity and our rashness, our suspicions and
+our jealousies. I blame myself for much that has happened, because I
+have been far away from you, dear brethren, in moments of great
+spiritual distress. But this year I hope by God's mercy to be with you
+more. I hope that you will never again spend such an Easter as this. I
+have only one more announcement to make, which is that I have appointed
+Brother Dominic to be Prior of St. George's Priory, Soho Square, and
+Brother Chad and Brother Dunstan to work with him for God and our
+soldiers."
+
+In the morning, Brother Simon, whose duty it was nowadays to knock with
+the hammer upon the doors of the cells and rouse the brethren from sleep
+with the customary salutation, went running from the dormitory to the
+Prior's cell, his hair standing even more on end than it usually did at
+such an hour.
+
+"Reverend Brother, Reverend Brother," he cried. "I've knocked and
+knocked on Brother Anselm's door, and I've said 'The Lord be with you'
+nine times and shouted 'The Lord be with you' twice, but there's no
+answer, and at last I opened the door, though I know it's against the
+Rule to open the door of a brother's cell, but I thought he might be
+dead, and he isn't dead, but he isn't there. He isn't there, Reverend
+Brother, and he isn't anywhere. He's nowhere, Reverend Brother, and
+shall I go and ring the fire-alarm?"
+
+Brother George sternly bade Brother Simon be quiet; but when the
+Brethren sat in choir to sing Lauds and Prime, they saw that Brother
+Anselm's stall was empty, and those who had heard Brother Simon's
+clamour feared that something terrible had happened.
+
+After Mass the Community was summoned to the Chapter room to learn from
+the lips of the Father Superior that Brother Anselm had broken his vows
+and left the Order. Brother Dunstan, who wore round his neck the nib
+with which Brother Anselm signed his profession, burst into tears.
+Brother Dominic looked down his big nose to avoid the glances of his
+brethren. If Easter Sunday had been gloomy, Low Sunday was gloomier
+still, and as for the Feast of St. George nobody had the courage to
+think what that would be like with such a cloud hanging over the
+Community.
+
+Mark felt that he could not stay even until the patronal festival. If
+Brother George or Brother Birinus had broken his vows, he could have
+borne it more easily, for he had not witnessed their profession; fond he
+might be of the Prior, but he had worked for human souls under the
+orders of Brother Anselm. He went to Father Burrowes and begged to leave
+on Monday.
+
+"Brother Athanasius and Brother Chad are leaving tomorrow," said the
+Father Superior, "Yes, you may go."
+
+Brother Simon drove them to the station. Strange figures they seemed to
+each other in their lay clothes.
+
+"I've been meaning to go for a long time," said Brother Athanasius, who
+was now Percy Wade. "And it's my belief that Brother George and Brother
+Birinus won't stay long."
+
+"I hoped never to go," said Brother Chad, who was now Cecil Masters.
+
+"Then why are you going?" asked the late Brother Athanasius. "I never do
+anything I don't want to do."
+
+"I think I shall be more help to Brother Anselm than to soldiers in
+London," said the late Brother Chad.
+
+Mark beamed at him.
+
+"That's just like you, Brother. I am so glad you're going to do that."
+
+The train came in, and they all shook hands with Brother Simon, who had
+been cheerful throughout the drive, and even now found great difficulty
+in looking serious.
+
+"You seem very happy, Brother Simon," said Mark.
+
+"Oh, I am very happy, Brother Mark. I should say Mr. Mark. The Reverend
+Father has told me that I'm to be clothed as a novice on Wednesday. All
+last week when we sung, '_The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared
+unto Simon_,' I knew something wonderful was going to happen. That's
+what made me so anxious when Brother Anselm didn't answer my knock."
+
+The train left the station, and the three ex-novices settled themselves
+to face the world. They were all glad that Brother Simon at least was
+happy amid so much unhappiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE NEW BISHOP OF SILCHESTER
+
+
+The Rector of Wych thought that Mark's wisest plan if he wished to be
+ordained was to write and ask the Bishop of Silchester for an interview.
+
+"The Bishop of Silchester?" Mark exclaimed. "But he's the last bishop I
+should expect to help me."
+
+"On the contrary," said the Rector, "you have lived in his diocese for
+more than five years, and if you repair to another bishop, he will
+certainly wonder why you didn't go first to the Bishop of Silchester."
+
+"But I don't suppose that the Bishop of Silchester is likely to help
+me," Mark objected. "He wasn't so much enamoured of Rowley as all that,
+and I don't gather that he has much affection or admiration for
+Burrowes."
+
+"That's not the point; the point is that you have devoted yourself to
+the religious life, both informally and formally, in his diocese. You
+have shown that you possess some capacity for sticking to it, and I
+fancy that you will find the Bishop less unsympathetic than you expect."
+
+However, Mark was not given an opportunity to put the Bishop of
+Silchester's good-will to the test, for no sooner had he made up his
+mind to write to him than the news came that he was seriously ill, so
+seriously ill that he was not expected to live, which in fact turned out
+a true prognostication, for on the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the
+prelate died in his Castle of High Thorpe. He was succeeded by the
+Bishop of Warwick, much to Mark's pleasure and surprise, for the new
+Bishop was an old friend of Father Rowley and a High Churchman, one who
+might lend a kindly ear to Mark's ambition. Father Rowley had been in
+the United States for nearly two years, where he had been treated with
+much sympathy and where he had collected enough money to pay off the
+debt upon the new St. Agnes'. He had arrived home about a week before
+Mark left Malford, and in answer to Mark he wrote immediately to Dr.
+Oliphant, the new Bishop of Silchester, to enlist his interest. Early in
+June Mark received a cordial letter inviting him to visit the Bishop at
+High Thorpe.
+
+The promotion of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the see of Silchester was
+considered at the time to be an indication that the political party then
+in power was going mad in preparation for its destruction by the gods.
+The Press in commenting upon the appointment did not attempt to cast a
+slur upon the sanctity and spiritual fervour of the new Bishop, but it
+felt bound to observe that the presence of such a man on the episcopal
+bench was an indication that the party in power was oblivious of the
+existence of an enraged electorate already eager to hurl them out of
+office. At a time when thinking men and women were beginning to turn to
+the leaders of the National Church for a social policy, a government
+worn out by eight years of office that included a costly war was so
+little alive to the signs of the times as to select for promotion a
+prelate conspicuously identified with the obscurantist tactics of that
+small but noisy group in the Church of England which arrogated to itself
+the presumptuous claim to be the Catholic party. Dr. Oliphant's learning
+was indisputable; his liturgical knowledge was profound; his eloquence
+in the pulpit was not to be gainsaid; his life, granted his sacerdotal
+eccentricities, was a noble example to his fellow clergy. But had he
+shown those qualities of statesmanship, that capacity for moderation,
+which were so marked a feature of his predecessor's reign? Was he not
+identified with what might almost be called an unchristian agitation to
+prosecute the holy, wise, and scholarly Dean of Leicester for appearing
+to countenance an opinion that the Virgin Birth was not vital to the
+belief of a Christian? Had he not denounced the Reverend Albert Blundell
+for heresy, and thereby exhibited himself in active opposition to his
+late diocesan, the sagacious Bishop of Kidderminster, who had been
+compelled to express disapproval of his Suffragan's bigotry by
+appointing the Reverend Albert Blundell to be one of his examining
+chaplains?
+
+"We view with the gravest apprehension the appointment of Dr. Aylmer
+Oliphant to the historic see of Silchester," said one great journal.
+"Such reckless disregard, such contempt we might almost say, for the
+feelings of the English people demonstrates that the present government
+has ceased to enjoy the confidence of the electorate. We have for Dr.
+Oliphant personally nothing but the warmest admiration. We do not
+venture for one moment to impugn his sincerity. We do not hesitate to
+affirm most solemnly our disbelief that he is actuated by any but the
+highest motives in lending his name to persecutions that recall the
+spirit of the Star Chamber. But in these days when the rapid and
+relentless march of Scientific Knowledge is devastating the plain of
+Theological Speculation we owe it to our readers to observe that the
+appointment of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the Bishopric of Silchester must
+be regarded as an act of intellectual cowardice. Not merely is Dr.
+Oliphant a notorious extremist in religious matters, one who for the
+sake of outworn forms and ceremonies is inclined to keep alive the
+unhappy dissensions that tear asunder our National Church, but he is
+also what is called a Christian Socialist of the most advanced type, one
+who by his misreading of the Gospel spreads the unwholesome and perilous
+doctrine that all men are equal. This is not the time nor the place to
+break a controversial lance with Dr. Oliphant. We shall content
+ourselves with registering a solemn protest against the unparagoned
+cynicism of a Conservative government which thus gambles not merely with
+its own security, but what is far more unpardonable with the security of
+the Nation and the welfare of the State."
+
+The subject of this ponderous censure received Mark in the same room
+where two and a half years ago the late Bishop had decided that the
+Third Altar in St. Agnes' Church was an intolerable excrescence.
+Nowadays the room was less imposing, not more imposing indeed than the
+room of a scholarly priest who had been able to collect a few books and
+buy such pieces of ancient furniture as consorted with his severe taste.
+Dr. Oliphant himself, a tall spare man, seeming the taller and more
+spare in his worn purple cassock, with clean-shaven hawk's face and
+black bushy eyebrows most conspicuous on account of his grey hair, stood
+before the empty summer grate, his long lean neck out-thrust, his arms
+crossed behind his back, like a gigantic and emaciated shadow of
+Napoleon. Mark felt no embarrassment in genuflecting to salute him; the
+action was spontaneous and was not dictated by any ritualistic
+indulgence. Dr. Oliphant, as he might have guessed from the anger with
+which his appointment had been received, was in outward semblance all
+that a prelate should be.
+
+"Why do you want to be a priest?" the Bishop asked him abruptly.
+
+"To administer the Sacraments," Mark replied without hesitation.
+
+The Bishop's head and neck wagged up and down in grave approbation.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, as no doubt he has told you, wrote to me about you. And so
+you've been with the Order of St. George lately? Is it any good?"
+
+Mark was at a loss what to reply to this. His impulse was to say firmly
+and frankly that it was no good; but after not far short of two years at
+Malford it would be ungrateful and disloyal to criticize the Order,
+particularly to the Bishop of the diocese.
+
+"I don't think it is much good yet," Mark said. He felt that he simply
+could not praise the Order without qualification. "But I expect that
+when they've learnt how to combine the contemplative with the active
+side of their religious life they will be splendid. At least, I hope
+they will."
+
+"What's wrong at present?"
+
+"I don't know that anything's exactly wrong."
+
+Mark paused; but the Bishop was evidently waiting for him to continue,
+and feeling that this was perhaps the best way to present his own point
+of view about the life he had chosen for himself he plunged into an
+account of life at Malford.
+
+"Capital," said the Bishop when the narrative was done. "You have given
+me a very clear picture of the present state of the Order and
+incidentally a fairly clear picture of yourself. Well, I'm going to
+recommend you to Canon Havelock, the Principal of the Theological
+College here, and if he reports well of you and you can pass the
+Cambridge Preliminary Theological Examination, I will ordain you at
+Advent next year, or at any rate, if not in Advent, at Whitsuntide."
+
+"But isn't Silchester Theological College only for graduates?" Mark
+asked.
+
+"Yes, but I'm going to suggest that Canon Havelock stretches a point in
+your favour. I can, if you like, write to the Glastonbury people, but in
+that case you would be out of my diocese where you have spent so much of
+your time and where I have no doubt you will easily find a beneficed
+priest to give you a title. Moreover, in the case of a young man like
+yourself who has been brought up from infancy upon Catholic teaching, I
+think it is advisable to give you an opportunity of mixing with the
+moderate man who wishes to take Holy Orders. You can lose nothing by
+such an association, and it may well happen that you will gain a great
+deal. Silchester Theological College is eminently moderate. The
+lecturers are men of real learning, and the Principal is a man whom it
+would be impertinent for me to praise for his devout and Christian
+life."
+
+"I hardly know how to thank you, my lord," said Mark.
+
+"Do you not, my son?" said the Bishop with a smile. Then his head and
+neck wagged up and down. "Thank me by the life you lead as a priest."
+
+"I will try, my lord," Mark promised.
+
+"Of that I am sure. By the way, didn't you come across a priest at St.
+Agnes' Mission House called Mousley?"
+
+"Oh rather, I remember him well."
+
+"You'll be glad to hear that he has never relapsed since I sent him to
+Rowley. In fact only last week I had the satisfaction of recommending
+him to a friend of mine who had a living in his gift."
+
+Mark spent the three months before he went to Silchester at the Rectory
+where he worked hard at Latin and Greek and the history of the Church.
+At the end of August he entered Silchester Theological College.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SILCHESTER THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE
+
+
+The theological students of Silchester were housed in a red-brick alley
+of detached Georgian houses, both ends of which were closed to traffic
+by double gates of beautifully wrought iron. This alley known as Vicar's
+Walk had formerly been inhabited by the lay vicars of the Cathedral,
+whose music was now performed by minor canons.
+
+There were four little houses on either side of the broad pavement, the
+crevices in which were gay with small rock plants, so infrequent were
+the footsteps that passed over them. Each house consisted of four rooms
+and each room held one student. Vicar's Walk led directly into the
+Close, a large green space surrounded by the houses of dignitaries, from
+a quiet road lined with elms, which skirted the wall of the Deanery
+garden and after several twists and turns among the shadows of great
+Gothic walls found its way downhill into the narrow streets of the small
+city. One of the houses in the Close had been handed over to the
+Theological College, the Principal of which usually occupied a Canon's
+stall in the Cathedral. Here were the lecture-rooms, and here lived
+Canon Havelock the Principal, Mr. Drakeford the Vice-Principal, Mr.
+Brewis the Chaplain, and Mr. Moore and Mr. Waters the Lecturers.
+
+There did not seem to be many arduous rules. Probably the most ascetic
+was one that forbade gentlemen to smoke in the streets of Silchester.
+There was no early Mass except on Saints' days at eight; but gentlemen
+were expected, unless prevented by reasonable cause, to attend Matins in
+the Cathedral before breakfast and Evensong in the College Oratory at
+seven. A mutilated Compline was delivered at ten, after which gentlemen
+were requested to retire immediately to their rooms. Academic Dress was
+to be worn at lectures, and Mark wondered what costume would be designed
+for him. The lectures took place every morning between nine and one, and
+every afternoon between five and seven. The Principal lectured on
+Dogmatic Theology and Old Testament history; the Vice-Principal on the
+Old and New Testament set books; the Chaplain on Christian worship and
+Church history; Mr. Moore on Pastoralia and Old Testament Theology; and
+Mr. Waters on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
+
+As against the prevailing Gothic of the mighty Cathedral Vicar's Walk
+stood out with a simple and fragrant charm of its own, so against the
+prevailing Gothic of Mark's religious experience life at the Theological
+College remained in his memory as an unvexed interlude during which
+flesh and spirit never sought to trouble each other. Perhaps if Mark had
+not been educated at Haverton House, had not experienced conversion, had
+not spent those years at Chatsea and Malford, but like his fellow
+students had gone decorously from public school to University and still
+more decorously from University to Theological College, he might with
+his temperament have wondered if this red-brick alley closed to traffic
+at either end by beautifully wrought iron gates was the best place to
+prepare a man for the professional service of Jesus Christ.
+
+Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where to the sound
+of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon the strife between
+Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient Grace, operating Grace,
+co-operating Grace and the _donum perseverantiae_ all seemed to depend
+for their importance so much more upon a good memory than upon the
+inscrutable favours of Almighty God. Even the Confessions of St.
+Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of Africa upon
+the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched upon. Here in this
+tranquil room St. Augustine lived in quotations from his controversial
+works, or in discussions whether he had not wrongly translated ἐφ᾽ ῷ
+πἁντεϛ ἢμαρτου in the Epistle to the Romans by _in quo omnes
+peccaverunt_ instead of like the Pelagians by _propter quod omnes
+peccaverunt_. The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian
+Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in Mark's brain;
+but they only resounded at all, because he knew that without being able
+to display some ability to convey the impression that he understood the
+Thirty-Nine Articles he should never be ordained. Mark wondered what
+Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken in adultery had
+been brought into the lecture-room by the beadle. Yet such a supposition
+was really beside the point, he thought penitently. After all, human
+beings would soon be degraded to wax-works if they could be lectured
+upon individually in this tranquil and sunny room to the sound of rooks
+cawing in the elms beyond the Deanery garden.
+
+Mark made no intimate friendships among his fellows. Perhaps the
+moderation of their views chilled him into an exceptional reserve, or
+perhaps they were an unusually dull company that year. Of the thirty-one
+students, eighteen were from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the
+thirty-first from Durham. Even he was looked at with a good deal of
+suspicion. As for Mark, nothing less than God's prevenient grace could
+explain his presence at Silchester. Naturally, inasmuch as they were
+going to be clergymen, the greatest charity, the sweetest toleration was
+shown to Mark's unfortunate lack of advantages; but he was never unaware
+that intercourse with him involved his companions in an effort, a
+distinct, a would-be Christlike effort to make the best of him. It was
+the same kind of effort they would soon be making when as Deacons they
+sought for the sick, poor, and impotent people of the Parish. Mark might
+have expected to find among them one or two of whom it might be
+prophesied that they would go far. But he was unlucky. All the brilliant
+young candidates for Ordination must have betaken themselves to
+Cuddesdon or Wells or Lichfield that year.
+
+Of the eighteen graduates from Oxford, half took their religion as a hot
+bath, the other half as a cold one. Nine resembled the pale young
+curates of domestic legend, nine the muscular Christian that is for some
+reason attributed to the example of Charles Kingsley. Of the twelve
+graduates from Cambridge, six treated religion as a cricket match played
+before the man in the street with God as umpire, six regarded it as a
+respectable livelihood for young men with normal brains, social
+connexions, and weak digestions. The young man from Durham looked upon
+religion as a more than respectable livelihood for one who had plenty of
+brains, an excellent digestion, and no social connexions whatever.
+
+Mark wondered if the Bishop of Silchester's design in placing him amid
+such surroundings was to cure him for ever of moderation. As was his
+custom when he was puzzled, he wrote to the Rector.
+
+     The Theological College,
+
+     Silchester.
+
+     All Souls, '03.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     My first impressions have not undergone much change. The young men
+     are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold is the gold of
+     Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles a mild phosphorescence, a
+     dim luminousness as of a bedside match-tray in the dark, in their
+     eyes is when they hear of somebody's what they call conspicuous
+     moderation. I suppose every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his
+     sponge-bag or an archbishop's crosier among his golf-clubs. But in
+     this lot I simply cannot perceive even an embryonic archdeacon. I
+     rather expected when I came here that I should be up against men of
+     brains and culture. I was looking forward to being trampled on by
+     ruthless logicians. I hoped that latitudinarian opinions were going
+     to make my flesh creep and my hair stand on end. But nothing of the
+     kind. I've always got rather angry when I've read caricatures of
+     curates in books with jokes about goloshes and bath-buns. Yet
+     honestly, half my fellows might easily serve as models to any
+     literary cheapjack of the moment. I'm willing to admit that
+     probably most of them will develop under the pressure of life, but
+     a few are bound to remain what they are. I know we get some
+     eccentrics and hotheads and a few sensual knaves among the Catholic
+     clergy, but we do not get these anæmic creatures. I feel that
+     before I came here I knew nothing about the Church of England. I've
+     been thrown all my life with people who had rich ideas and violent
+     beliefs and passionate sympathies and deplorable hatreds, so that
+     when I come into contact with what I am bound to accept as the
+     typical English parson in the making I am really appalled.
+
+     I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told me to come
+     here. Did he really think that the spectacle of moderation in the
+     moulding was good for me? Did he fancy that I was a young zealot
+     who required putting in his place? Or did he more subtly realize
+     from the account I gave him of Malford that I was in danger of
+     becoming moderate, even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even
+     stone-cold? Did he grasp that I must owe something to party as well
+     as mankind, if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind?
+     But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to his
+     lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal eye,
+     than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after all, he merely
+     saw in me a young man who had missed the advantages of Oxford,
+     etc., and wished out of regard for my future to provide me with the
+     best substitute.
+
+     Anyway, please don't think that I live in a constant state of
+     criticism with a correspondingly dangerous increase of self-esteem.
+     I really am working hard. I sometimes wonder if the preparation of
+     a "good" theological college is the best preparation for the
+     priesthood. But so long as bishops demand the knowledge they do, it
+     is obvious that this form of preparation will continue. There again
+     though, I daresay if I imagined myself an inspired pianist I should
+     grumble at the amount of scales I was set to practice. I'm not,
+     once I've written down or talked out some of my folly, so very
+     foolish at bottom.
+
+     Beyond a slight inclination to flirt with the opinions of most of
+     the great heresiarchs in turn, but only with each one until the
+     next comes along, I'm not having any intellectual adventures. One
+     of the excitements I had imagined beforehand was wrestling with
+     Doubt. But I have no wrestles. Shall I always be spared?
+
+     Your ever affectionate,
+
+     Mark.
+
+Gradually, as the months went by, either because the students became
+more mellow in such surroundings or because he himself was achieving a
+wider tolerance, Mark lost much of his capacity for criticism and
+learned to recognize in his fellows a simple goodness and sincerity of
+purpose that almost frightened him when he thought of that great world
+outside, in the confusion and complexity of which they had pledged
+themselves to lead souls up to God. He felt how much they missed by not
+relying rather upon the Sacraments than upon personal holiness and the
+upright conduct of the individual. They were obsessed with the need of
+setting a good example and of being able from the pulpit to direct the
+wandering lamb to the Good Shepherd. Mark scarcely ever argued about his
+point of view, because he was sure that perception of what the
+Sacraments could do for human nature must be given by the grace of God,
+and that the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not avail
+in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had not dawned in a
+swift and comprehensive inspiration of his inner life. Sometimes indeed
+Mark would defend himself from attack, as when it was suggested that his
+reliance upon the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by
+Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion was prolonged
+by mechanical aids to worship.
+
+"But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to your idolatry of
+the outward form," he would maintain.
+
+"What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a congregation of
+a good sermon?" they protested.
+
+"I don't claim that a preacher might not bring the whole of his
+congregation to the feet of God," Mark allowed. "But I must have less
+faith in human nature than you have, for I cannot believe that any
+preacher could exercise a permanent effect without the Sacraments. You
+all know the person who says that the sound of an organ gives him holy
+thoughts, makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes? I've no doubt
+that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind of
+sensation Sunday after Sunday. But sooner or later they will be
+worshipping the outward form--that is to say the words that issue from
+the preacher's mouth and produce those internal moral rumblings in the
+pit of the soul which other listeners get from the diapason. Have your
+organs, have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but don't put
+them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament. The value of that is
+absolute, and I refuse to consider It from the point of view of
+pragmatic philosophy."
+
+All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation upon
+their argument; what they desired to avoid was the substitution of the
+Blessed Sacrament for the Person of the Divine Saviour.
+
+"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with the whole of my
+intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament _is_
+our Divine Saviour. I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament
+can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the
+Person of the Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present
+fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar
+I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him. I shall know that
+I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of
+civilization. All are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains
+divided into classes. You may rent the best pew from which to see and
+hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your
+Communion."
+
+Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too Silchester exerted a
+mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what
+he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that
+June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College
+cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to
+be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.
+
+The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve; ancient clocks
+sounded the hour with strikes rusty from long service of time; rooks and
+white fantail-pigeons spoke with the slow voice of creatures that are
+lazily content with the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy
+morrow. In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers,
+themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed slowly across
+the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with
+the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of
+leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were
+daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the
+grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's tail of
+Japanese quince.
+
+Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in
+Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was worth while except at
+the end of living to have one's effigy in stone upon the walls of the
+Cathedral, and to rest there for ever with viewless eyes and cold
+prayerful hands, oneself in harmony at last with all that had gone
+before.
+
+"Yet this peace is the peace of God," he told himself. "And I who am
+privileged for a little time to share in it must carry away with me
+enough to make a treasure of peace in my own heart, so that I can give
+from that treasure to those who have never known peace."
+
+     _The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your
+     hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son
+     Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the
+     Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with
+     you always._
+
+When Mark heard these words sound from the altar far away in the golden
+glooms of the Cathedral, it seemed to him that the building bowed like a
+mighty couchant beast and fell asleep in the security of God's presence.
+
+After Mark had been a year at the Theological College he received a
+letter from the Bishop:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     Sept. 21, '04.
+
+     Dear Lidderdale,
+
+     I have heard from Canon Havelock that he considers you are ready to
+     be ordained at Advent, having satisfactorily passed the Cambridge
+     Preliminary Theological Examination. If therefore you succeed in
+     passing my examination early in November, I am willing to ordain
+     you on December 18. It will be necessary of course for you to
+     obtain a title, and I have just heard from Mr. Shuter, the Vicar of
+     St. Luke's, Galton, that he is anxious to make arrangements for a
+     curate. You had better make an appointment, and if I hear
+     favourably from him I will licence you for his church. It has
+     always been the rule in this diocese that non-graduate candidates
+     for Holy Orders should spend at least two years over their
+     theological studies, but I am not disposed to enforce this rule in
+     your case.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Aylmer Silton.
+
+This expression of fatherly interest made Mark anxious to show his
+appreciation of it, and whatever he had thought of St. Luke's, Galton,
+or of its incumbent he would have done his best to secure the title
+merely to please the Bishop. Moreover, his money was coming to an end,
+and another year at the Theological College would have compelled him to
+borrow from Mr. Ogilvie, a step which he was most anxious to avoid. He
+found that Galton, which he remembered from the days when he had sent
+Cyril Pomeroy there to be met by Dorward, was a small county town of
+some eight or nine thousand inhabitants and that St. Luke's was a new
+church which had originally been a chapel of ease to the parish church,
+but which had acquired with the growth of a poor population on the
+outskirts of the town an independent parochial status of its own. The
+Reverend Arnold Shuter, who was the first vicar, was at first glance
+just a nervous bearded man, though Mark soon discovered that he
+possessed a great deal of spiritual force. He was a widower and lived in
+the care of a housekeeper who regarded religion as the curse of good
+cooking. Latterly he had suffered from acute neurasthenia, and three or
+four of his wealthier parishioners--they were only relatively
+wealthy--had clubbed together to guarantee the stipend of a curate. Mark
+was to live at the Vicarage, a detached villa, with pointed windows and
+a front door like a lychgate, which gave the impression of having been
+built with what material was left over from building the church.
+
+"You may think that there is not much to do in Galton," said Mr. Shuter
+when he and Mark were sitting in his study after a round of the parish.
+
+"I hope I didn't suggest that," Mark said quickly.
+
+The Vicar tugged nervously at his beard and blinked at his prospective
+curate from pale blue eyes.
+
+"You seem so full of life and energy," he went on, half to himself, as
+though he were wondering if the company of this tall, bright-eyed,
+hatchet-faced young man might not prove too bracing for his worn-out
+nerves.
+
+"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed. "After
+dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I hadn't grown rather too
+much into a type of that sedate and sleepy city."
+
+"But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We have the
+hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried to run a mission
+for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you know. And then there's Oaktown."
+
+"Oaktown?" Mark echoed.
+
+"Yes. A queer collection of people who have settled on a derelict farm
+that was bought up and sold in small plots by a land-speculator. They'll
+give plenty of scope for your activity. By the way, I hope you're not
+too extreme. We have to go very slowly here. I manage an early Eucharist
+every Sunday and Thursday, and of course on Saints' days; but the
+attendance is not good. We have vestments during the week, but not at
+the mid-day Celebration."
+
+Mark had not intended to attach himself to what he considered a too
+indefinite Catholicism; but inasmuch as the Bishop had found him this
+job he made up his mind to give to it at any rate his deacon's year and
+his first year as a priest.
+
+"I've been brought up in the vanguard of the Movement," he admitted.
+"But you can rely on me, sir, to be loyal to your point of view, even if
+I disagreed with it. I can't pretend to believe much in moderation; but
+I should always be your curate before anything else, and I hope very
+much indeed that you will offer me the title."
+
+"You'll find me dull company," Mr. Shuter sighed. "My health has gone
+all to pieces this last year."
+
+"I shall have a good deal of reading to do for my priest's examination,"
+Mark reminded him. "I shall try not to bother you."
+
+The result of Mark's visit to Galton was that amongst the various
+testimonials and papers he forwarded two months later to the Bishop's
+Registrar was the following:
+
+     To the Right Reverend Aylmer, Lord Bishop of Silchester.
+
+     I, Arnold Shuter, Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
+     Southampton, and your Lordship's Diocese of Silchester, do hereby
+     nominate Mark Lidderdale, to perform the office of Assistant Curate
+     in my Church of St. Luke aforesaid; and do promise to allow him the
+     yearly stipend of £120 to be paid by equal quarterly instalments;
+     And I do hereby state to your Lordship that the said Mark
+     Lidderdale intends to reside in the said Parish in my Vicarage; and
+     that the said Mark Lidderdale does not intend to serve any other
+     Parish as Incumbent or Curate.
+
+     Witness my hand this fourteenth day of November; in the year of our
+     Lord, 1904.
+
+     Arnold Shuter,
+
+     St. Luke's Vicarage,
+
+     Galton,
+
+     Hants.
+
+
+     I, Arnold Shuter, Incumbent of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
+     Southampton, bonâ fide undertake to pay Mark Lidderdale, of the
+     Rectory, Wych-on-the-Wold, in the County of Oxford, the annual sum
+     of one hundred and twenty pounds as a stipend for his services as
+     Curate, and I, Mark Lidderdale, bonâ fide intend to receive the
+     whole of the said stipend. And each of us, Arnold Shuter and Mark
+     Lidderdale, declare that no abatement is to be made out of the said
+     stipend in respect of rent or consideration for the use of the
+     Glebe House; and that I, Arnold Shuter, undertake to pay the same,
+     and I, Mark Lidderdale, intend to receive the same, without any
+     deduction or abatement whatsoever.
+
+     Arnold Shuter,
+
+     Mark Lidderdale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+EMBER DAYS
+
+
+Mark, having been notified that he had been successful in passing the
+Bishop's examination for Deacons, was summoned to High Thorpe on
+Thursday. He travelled down with the other candidates from Silchester on
+an iron-grey afternoon that threatened snow from the louring North, and
+in the atmosphere of High Thorpe under the rule of Dr. Oliphant he found
+more of the spirit of preparation than he would have been likely to find
+in any other diocese at this date. So many of the preliminaries to
+Ordination had consisted of filling up forms, signing documents, and
+answering the questions of the Examining Chaplain that Mark, when he was
+now verily on the threshold of his new life, reproached himself with
+having allowed incidental details and petty arrangements to make him for
+a while oblivious of the overwhelming fact of his having been accepted
+for the service of God. Luckily at High Thorpe he was granted a day to
+confront his soul before being harassed again on Ember Saturday with
+further legal formalities and signing of documents. He was able to spend
+the whole of Ember Friday in prayer and meditation, in beseeching God to
+grant him grace to serve Him worthily, strength to fulfil his vows, and
+that great _donum perseverantiæ_ to endure faithful unto death.
+
+"Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," Mark remembered in the
+damasked twilight of the Bishop's Chapel, where he was kneeling. "Let me
+keep those words in my heart. Not everyone," he repeated aloud. Then
+perversely as always come volatile and impertinent thoughts when the
+mind is concentrated on lofty aspirations Mark began to wonder if he had
+quoted the text correctly. He began to be almost sure that he had not,
+and on that to torment his brain in trying to recall what was the exact
+wording of the text he desired to impress upon his heart. "Not everyone
+that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," he repeated once more aloud.
+
+At that moment the tall figure of the Bishop passed by.
+
+"Do you want me, my son?" he asked kindly.
+
+"I should like to make my confession, reverend father in God," said
+Mark.
+
+The Bishop beckoned him into the little sacristy, and putting on rochet
+and purple stole he sat down to hear his penitent.
+
+Mark had few sins of which to accuse himself since he last went to his
+duties a month ago. However, he did have upon his conscience what he
+felt was a breach of the Third Commandment in that he had allowed
+himself to obscure the mighty fact of his approaching ordination by
+attaching too much importance to and fussing too much about the
+preliminary formalities.
+
+The Bishop did not seem to think that Mark's soul was in grave peril on
+that account, and he took the opportunity to warn Mark against an
+over-scrupulousness that might lead him in his confidence to allow sin
+to enter into his soul by some unguarded portal which he supposed firmly
+and for ever secure.
+
+"That is always the danger of a temperament like yours?" he mused. "By
+all means keep your eyes on the high ground ahead of you; but do not
+forget that the more intently you look up, the more liable you are to
+slip on some unnoticed slippery stone in your path. If you abandoned
+yourself to the formalities that are a necessary preliminary to
+Ordination, you did wisely. Our Blessed Lord usually gave practical
+advice, and some of His miracles like the turning of water into wine at
+Cana were reproofs to carelessness in matters of detail. It was only
+when people worshipped utility unduly that He went to the other extreme
+as in His rebuke to Judas over the cruse of ointment."
+
+The Bishop raised his head and gave Mark absolution. When they came out
+of the sacristy he invited him to come up to his library and have a
+talk.
+
+"I'm glad that you are going to Galton," he said, wagging his long neck
+over a crumpet. "I think you'll find your experience in such a parish
+extraordinarily useful at the beginning of your career. So many young
+men have an idea that the only way to serve God is to go immediately to
+a slum. You'll be much more discouraged at Galton than you can imagine.
+You'll learn there more of the difficulties of a clergyman's life in a
+year than you could learn in London in a lifetime. Rowley, as no doubt
+you've heard, has just accepted a slum parish in Shoreditch. Well, he
+wrote to me the other day and suggested that you should go to him. But I
+dissented. You'll have an opportunity at Galton to rely upon yourself.
+You'll begin in the ruck. You'll be one of many who struggle year in
+year out with an ordinary parish. There won't be any paragraphs about
+St. Luke's in the Church papers. There won't be any enthusiastic
+pilgrims. There'll be nothing but the thought of our Blessed Lord to
+keep you struggling on, only that, only our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ."
+
+The Bishop's head wagged slowly to and fro in the silence that succeeded
+his words, and Mark pondering them in that silence felt no longer that
+he was saying "Lord, Lord," but that he had been called to follow and
+that he was ready without hesitation to follow Him whithersoever He
+should lead.
+
+The quiet Ember Friday came to an end, and on the Saturday there were
+more formalities, of which Mark dreaded most the taking of the oath
+before the Registrar. He had managed with the help of subtle High Church
+divines to persuade himself that he could swear he assented to the
+Thirty-nine Articles without perjury. Nevertheless he wished that he was
+not bound to take that oath, and he was glad that the sense in which the
+Thirty-nine Articles were to be accepted was left to the discretion of
+him who took the oath. Of one thing Mark was positive. He was assuredly
+not assenting to those Thirty-nine Articles that their compilers
+intended when they framed them. However, when it came to it, Mark
+affirmed:
+
+"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy Order of Deacons,
+do solemnly make the following declaration:--I assent to the Thirty-nine
+Articles of Religion, and to the Book of Common Prayer, and the
+ordering of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. I believe the doctrine of the
+Church of England, as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the Word of
+God; and in Public Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments I will
+use the Form in the said Book prescribed, and none other, except so far
+as shall be ordered by lawful authority.
+
+"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy Order of Deacons,
+do swear that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty
+King Edward, his heirs and successors according to law.
+
+"So help me God."
+
+"But the strange thing is," Mark said to one of his fellow candidates,
+"nobody asks us to take the oath of allegiance to God."
+
+"We do that when we're baptized," said the other, a serious young man
+who feared that Mark was being flippant.
+
+"Personally," Mark concluded, "I think the solemn profession of a monk
+speaks more directly to the soul."
+
+And this was the feeling that Mark had throughout the Ordination of the
+Deacons notwithstanding that the Bishop of Silchester in cope and mitre
+was an awe-inspiring figure in his own Chapel. But when Mark heard him
+say:
+
+     _Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the
+     Church of God_,
+
+he was caught up to the Seventh Heaven and prayed that, when a year
+hence he should be kneeling thus to hear those words uttered to him and
+to feel upon his head those hands imposed, he should receive the Holy
+Ghost more worthily than lately he had received authority to execute the
+office of a Deacon in the Church of God.
+
+Suddenly at the back of the chapel Mark caught sight of Miriam, who must
+have travelled down from Oxfordshire last night to be present at his
+Ordination. His mind went back to that Whit-Sunday in Meade Cantorum
+nearly ten years ago. Miriam's plume of grey hair was no longer visible,
+for all her hair was grey nowadays; but her face had scarcely altered,
+and she sat there at this moment with that same expression of austere
+sweetness which had been shed like a benison upon Mark's dreary boyhood.
+How dear of Miriam to grace his Ordination, and if only Esther too could
+have been with him! He knelt down to thank God humbly for His mercies,
+and of those mercies not least for the Ogilvies' influence upon his
+life.
+
+Mark could not find Miriam when they came out from the chapel. She must
+have hurried away to catch some slow Sunday train that would get her
+back to Wych-on-the-Wold to-night. She could not have known that he had
+seen her, and when he arrived at the Rectory to-morrow as glossy as a
+beetle in his new clerical attire, Miriam would listen to his account of
+the Ordination, and only when he had finished would she murmur how she
+had been present all the time.
+
+And now there was still the oath of canonical obedience to take before
+lunch; but luckily that was short. Mark was hungry, since unlike most of
+the candidates he had not eaten an enormous breakfast that morning.
+
+Snow was falling outside when the young priests and deacons in their new
+frock coats sat down to lunch; and when they put on their sleek silk
+hats and hurried away to catch the afternoon train back to Silchester,
+it was still falling.
+
+"Even nature is putting on a surplice in our honour," Mark laughed to
+one of his companions, who not feeling quite sure whether Mark was being
+poetical or profane, decided that he was being flippant, and looked
+suitably grieved.
+
+It was dusk of that short winter day when Mark reached Silchester, and
+wandered back in a dream toward Vicar's Walk. Usually on Sunday evenings
+the streets of the city pattered with numerous footsteps; but to-night
+the snow deadened every sound, and the peace of God had gone out from
+the Cathedral to shed itself upon the city.
+
+"It will be Christmas Day in a week," Mark thought, listening to the
+Sabbath bells muffled by the soft snow-laden air. For the first time it
+occurred to him that he should probably have to preach next Sunday
+evening.
+
+     _And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us._
+
+That should be his text, Mark decided; and, passing from the snowy
+streets, he sat thinking in the golden glooms of the Cathedral about his
+sermon.
+
+
+EXPLICIT PRÆLUDIUM
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton MacKenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Altar Steps
+
+Author: Compton MacKenzie
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2005 [EBook #14739]
+[Last updated: April 3, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR STEPS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven desJardins and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+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 C�sar
+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 Dor�, 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
+encyclop�dia. 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 spending a certain amount of money on him. Once more Mark
+opened his mouth to repay his debt by offering Uncle Henry Eternal Life.
+But Uncle Henry fancied himself already in possession of Eternal Life.
+He definitely labelled himself Evangelical. And again Mark prepared one
+of his unanswerable questions.
+
+"Mark," said Mr. Lidderdale. "If you can't keep from yawning you'd
+better get off to bed. Don't forget school begins to-morrow, and you
+must make the most of your last term."
+
+Mark abandoned for ever the task of converting Uncle Henry, and pondered
+his chance of doing something with Aunt Helen. There instead of
+exsiccation he was confronted by a dreadful humidity, an infertile ooze
+that seemed almost less susceptible to cultivation than the other.
+
+"And I really don't owe _her_ anything," he thought. "Besides, it isn't
+that I want to save people from damnation. I want people to be happy.
+And it isn't quite that even. I want them to understand how happy I am.
+I want people to feel fond of their pillows when they turn over to go to
+sleep, because next morning is going to be what? Well, sort of
+exciting."
+
+Mark suddenly imagined how splendid it would be to give some of his
+happiness to Esther Ogilvie; but a moment later he decided that it would
+be rather cheek, and he abandoned the idea of converting Esther Ogilvie.
+He fell back on wishing again that Mr. Spaull had not died; in him he
+really would have had an ideal subject.
+
+In the end Mark fixed upon a boy of his own age, one of the many sons of
+a Papuan missionary called Pomeroy who was glad to have found in Mr.
+Lidderdale a cheap and evangelical schoolmaster. Cyril Pomeroy was a
+blushful, girlish youth, clever at the routine of school work, but in
+other ways so much undeveloped as to give an impression of stupidity.
+The notion of pointing out to him the beauty and utility of the Catholic
+religion would probably never have occurred to Mark if the boy himself
+had not approached him with a direct complaint of the dreariness of home
+life. Mark had never had any intimate friends at Haverton House; there
+was something in its atmosphere that was hostile to intimacy. Cyril
+Pomeroy appealed to that idea of romantic protection which is the common
+appendage of adolescence, and is the cause of half the extravagant
+affection at which maturity is wont to laugh. In the company of Cyril,
+Mark felt ineffably old than which upon the threshold of sixteen there
+is no sensation more grateful; and while the intercourse flattered his
+own sense of superiority he did feel that he had much to offer his
+friend. Mark regarded Cyril's case as curable if the right treatment
+were followed, and every evening after school during the veiled summer
+of a fine October he paced the Slowbridge streets with his willing
+proselyte, debating the gravest issues of religious practice, the
+subtlest varieties of theological opinion. He also lent Cyril suitable
+books, and finally he demanded from him as a double tribute to piety and
+friendship that he should prove his metal by going to Confession.
+Cyril, who was incapable of refusing whatever Mark demanded, bicycled
+timorously behind him to Meade Cantorum one Saturday afternoon, where he
+gulped out the table of his sins to Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had fetched
+from the Vicarage with the urgency of one who fetches a midwife. Nor was
+he at all abashed when Mr. Ogilvie was angry for not having been told
+that Cyril's father would have disapproved of his son's confession. He
+argued that the priest was applying social standards to religious
+principles, and in the end he enjoyed the triumph of hearing Mr. Ogilvie
+admit that perhaps he was right.
+
+"I know I'm right. Come on, Cyril. You'd better get back home now. Oh,
+and I say, Mr. Ogilvie, can I borrow for Cyril some of the books you
+lent me?"
+
+The priest was amused that Mark did not ask him to lend the books to his
+friend, but to himself. However, when he found that the neophyte seemed
+to flourish under Mark's assiduous priming, and that the fundamental
+weakness of his character was likely to be strengthened by what, though
+it was at present nothing more than an interest in religion, might later
+on develop into a profound conviction of the truths of Christianity,
+Ogilvie overlooked his scruples about deceiving parents and encouraged
+the boy as much as he could.
+
+"But I hope your manipulation of the plastic Cyril isn't going to turn
+_you_ into too much of a ritualist," he said to Mark. "It's splendid of
+course that you should have an opportunity so young of proving your
+ability to get round people in the right way. But let it be the right
+way, old man. At the beginning you were full of the happiness, the
+secret of which you burnt to impart to others. That happiness was the
+revelation of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as He dwells in all
+Christian souls. I am sure that the eloquent exposition I lately
+overheard of the propriety of fiddle-backed chasubles and the
+impropriety of Gothic ones doesn't mean that you are in any real danger
+of supposing chasubles to be anything more important relatively than,
+say, the uniform of a soldier compared with his valour and obedience
+and selflessness. Now don't overwhelm me for a minute or two. I haven't
+finished what I want to say. I wasn't speaking sarcastically when I said
+that, and I wasn't criticizing you. But you are not Cyril. By God's
+grace you have been kept from the temptations of the flesh. Yes, I know
+the subject is distasteful to you. But you are old enough to understand
+that your fastidiousness, if it isn't to be priggish, must be
+safeguarded by your humility. I didn't mean to sandwich a sermon to you
+between my remarks on Cyril, but your disdainful upper lip compelled
+that testimony. Let us leave you and your virtues alone. Cyril is weak.
+He's the weak pink type that may fall to women or drink or anything in
+fact where an opportunity is given him of being influenced by a stronger
+character than his own. At the moment he's being influenced by you to go
+to Confession, and say his rosary, and hear Mass, and enjoy all the
+other treats that our holy religion gives us. In addition to that he's
+enjoying them like the proverbial stolen fruit. You were very severe
+with me when I demurred at hearing his confession without authority from
+his father; but I don't like stolen fruit, and I'm not sure even now if
+I was right in yielding on that point. I shouldn't have yielded if I
+hadn't felt that Cyril might be hurt in the future by my scruples. Now
+look here, Mark, you've got to see that I don't regret my surrender. If
+that youth doesn't get from religion what I hope and pray he will get
+. . . but let that point alone. My scruples are my own affair. Your
+convictions are your own affair. But Cyril is our joint affair. He's
+your convert, but he's my penitent; and Mark, don't overdecorate your
+building until you're sure the foundations are well and truly laid."
+
+Mark was never given an opportunity of proving the excellence of his
+methods by the excellence of Cyril's life, because on the morning after
+this conversation, which took place one wet Sunday evening in Advent he
+was sent for by his uncle, who demanded to know the meaning of This.
+This was a letter from the Reverend Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+     The Limes,
+
+     38, Cranborne Road,
+
+     Slowbridge.
+
+     December 9.
+
+     Dear Mr. Lidderdale,
+
+     My son Cyril will not attend school for the rest of this term.
+     Yesterday evening, being confined to the house by fever, I went up
+     to his bedroom to verify a reference in a book I had recently lent
+     him to assist his divinity studies under you. When I took down the
+     book from the shelf I noticed several books hidden away behind, and
+     my curiosity being aroused I examined them, in case they should be
+     works of an unpleasant nature. To my horror and disgust, I found
+     that they were all works of an extremely Popish character, most of
+     them belonging to a clergyman in this neighbourhood called Ogilvie,
+     whose illegal practices have for several years been a scandal to
+     this diocese. These I am sending to the Bishop that he may see with
+     his own eyes the kind of propaganda that is going on. Two of the
+     books, inscribed Mark Lidderdale, are evidently the property of
+     your nephew to whom I suppose my son is indebted for this wholesale
+     corruption. On questioning my son I found him already so sunk in
+     the mire of the pernicious doctrines he has imbibed that he
+     actually defied his own father. I thrashed him severely in spite of
+     my fever, and he is now under lock and key in his bedroom where he
+     will remain until he sails with me to Sydney next week whither I am
+     summoned to the conference of Australasian missionaries. During the
+     voyage I shall wrestle with the demon that has entered into my son
+     and endeavour to persuade him that Jesus only is necessary for
+     salvation. And when I have done so, I shall leave him in Australia
+     to earn his own living remote from the scene of his corruption. In
+     the circumstances I assume that you will deduct a proportion of his
+     school fees for this term. I know that you will be as much
+     horrified and disgusted as I was by your nephew's conduct, and I
+     trust that you will be able to wrestle with him in the Lord and
+     prove to him that Jesus only is necessary to salvation.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+     P.S. I suggest that instead of �6 6s. 0d. I should pay �5 5s. 0d.
+     for this term, plus, of course, the usual extras.
+
+The pulse in Mr. Lidderdale's temple had never throbbed so remarkably
+as while Mark was reading this letter.
+
+"A fine thing," he ranted, "if this story gets about in Slowbridge. A
+fine reward for all my kindness if you ruin my school. As for this man
+Ogilvie, I'll sue him for damages. Don't look at me with that expression
+of bestial defiance. Do you hear? What prevents my thrashing you as you
+deserve? What prevents me, I say?"
+
+But Mark was not paying any attention to his uncle's fury; he was
+thinking about the unfortunate martyr under lock and key in The Limes,
+Cranborne Road, Slowbridge. He was wondering what would be the effect of
+this violent removal to the Antipodes and how that fundamental weakness
+of character would fare if Cyril were left to himself at his age.
+
+"I think Mr. Pomeroy is a ruffian," said Mark. "Don't you, Uncle Henry?
+If he writes to the Bishop about Mr. Ogilvie, I shall write to the
+Bishop about him. I hate Protestants. I hate them."
+
+"There's your father to the life. You'd like to burn them, wouldn't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I would," Mark declared.
+
+"You'd like to burn me, I suppose?"
+
+"Not you in particular."
+
+"Will you listen to him, Helen," he shouted to his sister. "Come here
+and listen to him. Listen to the boy we took in and educated and clothed
+and fed, listen to him saying he'd like to burn his uncle. Into Mr.
+Hitchcock's office you go at once. No more education if this is what it
+leads to. Read that letter, Helen, look at that book, Helen. _Catholic
+Prayers for Church of England People by the Reverend A.H. Stanton._ Look
+at this book, Helen. _The Catholic Religion by Vernon Staley._ No wonder
+you hate Protestants, you ungrateful boy. No wonder you're longing to
+burn your uncle and aunt. It'll be in the _Slowbridge Herald_ to-morrow.
+Headlines! Ruin! They'll think I'm a Jesuit in disguise. I ought to have
+got a very handsome sum of money for the good-will. Go back to your
+class-room, and if you have a spark of affection in your nature, don't
+brag about this to the other boys."
+
+Mark, pondering all the morning the best thing to do for Cyril,
+remembered that a boy called Hacking lived at The Laurels, 36, Cranborne
+Road. He did not like Hacking, but wishing to utilize his back garden
+for the purpose of communicating with the prisoner he made himself
+agreeable to him in the interval between first and second school.
+
+"Hullo, Hacking," he began. "I say, do you want a cricket bat? I shan't
+be here next summer, so you may as well have mine."
+
+Hacking looked at Mark suspicious of some hidden catch that would make
+him appear a fool.
+
+"No, really I'm not ragging," said Mark. "I'll bring it round to you
+after dinner. I'll be at your place about a quarter to two. Wait for me,
+won't you?"
+
+Hacking puzzled his brains to account for this generous whim, and at
+last decided that Mark must be "gone" on his sister Edith. He supposed
+that he ought to warn Edith to be about when Mark called; if the bat was
+not forthcoming he could easily prevent a meeting. The bat however
+turned out to be much better than he expected, and Hacking was on the
+point of presenting Cressida to Troilus when Troilus said:
+
+"That's your garden at the back, isn't it?"
+
+Hacking admitted that it was.
+
+"It looks rather decent."
+
+Hacking allowed modestly that it wasn't bad.
+
+"My father's rather dead nuts on gardening. So's my kiddy sister," he
+added.
+
+"I vote we go out there," Mark suggested.
+
+"Shall I give a yell to my kiddy sister?" asked Pandarus.
+
+"Good lord, no," Mark exclaimed. "Don't the Pomeroys live next door to
+you? Look here, Hacking, I want to speak to Cyril Pomeroy."
+
+"He was absent this morning."
+
+Mark considered Hacking as a possible adjutant to the enterprise he was
+plotting. That he finally decided to admit Hacking to his confidence was
+due less to the favourable result of the scrutiny than to the fact that
+unless he confided in Hacking he would find it difficult to communicate
+with Cyril and impossible to manage his escape. Mark aimed as high as
+this. His first impulse had been to approach the Vicar of Meade
+Cantorum, but on second thoughts he had rejected him in favour of Mr.
+Dorward, who was not so likely to suffer from respect for paternal
+authority.
+
+"Look here, Hacking, will you swear not to say a word about what I'm
+going to tell you?"
+
+"Of course," said Hacking, who scenting a scandal would have promised
+much more than this to obtain the details of it.
+
+"What will you swear by?"
+
+"Oh, anything," Hacking offered, without the least hesitation. "I don't
+mind what it is."
+
+"Well, what do you consider the most sacred thing in the world?"
+
+If Hacking had known himself, he would have said food; not knowing
+himself, he suggested the Bible.
+
+"I suppose you know that if you swear something on the Bible and break
+your oath you can be put in prison?" Mark demanded sternly.
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+The oath was administered, and Hacking waited goggle-eyed for the
+revelation.
+
+"Is that all?" he asked when Mark stopped.
+
+"Well, it's enough, isn't it? And now you've got to help him to escape."
+
+"But I didn't swear I'd do that," argued Hacking.
+
+"All right then. Don't. I thought you'd enjoy it."
+
+"We should get into a row. There'd be an awful shine."
+
+"Who's to know it's us? I've got a friend in the country. And I shall
+telegraph to him and ask if he'll hide Pomeroy."
+
+Mark was not sufficiently sure of Hacking's discretion or loyalty to
+mention Dorward's name. After all this business wasn't just a rag.
+
+"The first thing is for you to go out in the garden and attract
+Pomeroy's attention. He's locked in his bedroom."
+
+"But I don't know which is his bedroom," Hacking objected.
+
+"Well, you don't suppose the whole family are locked in their bedrooms,
+do you?" asked Mark scornfully.
+
+"But how do you know his bedroom is on this side of the house?"
+
+"I don't," said Mark. "That's what I want to find out. If it's in the
+front of the house, I shan't want your help, especially as you're so
+funky."
+
+Hacking went out into the garden, and presently he came back with the
+news that Pomeroy was waiting outside to talk to Mark over the wall.
+
+"Waiting outside?" Mark repeated. "What do you mean, waiting outside?
+How can he be waiting outside when he's locked in his bedroom?"
+
+"But he's not," said Hacking.
+
+Sure enough, when Mark went out he found Cyril astride the party wall
+between the two gardens waiting for him.
+
+"You can't let your father drag you off to Australia like this," Mark
+argued. "You'll go all to pieces there. You'll lose your faith, and take
+to drink, and--you must refuse to go."
+
+Cyril smiled weakly and explained to Mark that when once his father had
+made up his mind to do something it was impossible to stop him.
+
+Thereupon Mark explained his scheme.
+
+"I'll get an answer from Dorward to-night and you must escape to-morrow
+afternoon as soon as it's dark. Have you got a rope ladder?"
+
+Cyril smiled more feebly than ever.
+
+"No, I suppose you haven't. Then what you must do is tear up your sheets
+and let yourself down into the garden. Hacking will whistle three times
+if all's clear, and then you must climb over into his garden and run as
+hard as you can to the corner of the road where I'll be waiting for you
+in a cab. I'll go up to London with you and see you off from Waterloo,
+which is the station for Green Lanes where Father Dorward lives. You
+take a ticket to Galton, and I expect he'll meet you, or if he doesn't,
+it's only a seven mile walk. I don't know the way, but you can ask when
+you get to Galton. Only if you could find your way without asking it
+would be better, because if you're pursued and you're seen asking the
+way you'll be caught more easily. Now I must rush off and borrow some
+money from Mr. Ogilvie. No, perhaps it would rouse suspicions if I were
+absent from afternoon school. My uncle would be sure to guess,
+and--though I don't think he would--he might try to lock me up in my
+room. But I say," Mark suddenly exclaimed in indignation, "how on earth
+did you manage to come and talk to me out here?"
+
+Cyril explained that he had only been locked in his bedroom last night
+when his father was so angry. He had freedom to move about in the house
+and garden, and, he added to Mark's annoyance, there would be no need
+for him to use rope ladders or sheets to escape. If Mark would tell him
+what time to be at the corner of the road and would wait for him a
+little while in case his father saw him going out and prevented him, he
+would easily be able to escape.
+
+"Then I needn't have told Hacking," said Mark. "However, now I have told
+him, he must do something, or else he's sure to let out what he knows. I
+wish I knew where to get the money for the fare."
+
+"I've got a pound in my money box."
+
+"Have you?" said Mark, a little mortified, but at the same time relieved
+that he could keep Mr. Ogilvie from being involved. "Well, that ought to
+be enough. I've got enough to send a telegram to Dorward. As soon as I
+get his answer I'll send you word by Hacking. Now don't hang about in
+the garden all the afternoon or your people will begin to think
+something's up. If you could, it would be a good thing for you to be
+heard praying and groaning in your room."
+
+Cyril smiled his feeble smile, and Mark felt inclined to abandon him to
+his fate; but he decided on reflection that the importance of
+vindicating the claims of the Church to a persecuted son was more
+important than the foolishness and the feebleness of the son.
+
+"Do you want me to do anything more?" Hacking asked.
+
+Mark suggested that Hacking's name and address should be given for Mr.
+Dorward's answer, but this Hacking refused.
+
+"If a telegram came to our house, everybody would want to read it. Why
+can't it be sent to you?"
+
+Mark sighed for his fellow-conspirator's stupidity. To this useless clod
+he had presented a valuable bat.
+
+"All right," he said impatiently, "you needn't do anything more except
+tell Pomeroy what time he's to be at the corner of the road to-morrow."
+
+"I'll do that, Lidderdale."
+
+"I should think you jolly well would," Mark exclaimed scornfully.
+
+Mark spent a long time over the telegram to Dorward; in the end he
+decided that it would be safer to assume that the priest would shelter
+and hide Cyril rather than take the risk of getting an answer. The final
+draft was as follows:--
+
+     Dorward Green Lanes Medworth Hants
+
+     Am sending persecuted Catholic boy by 7.30 from Waterloo Tuesday
+     please send conveyance Mark Lidderdale.
+
+Mark only had eightpence, and this message would cost tenpence. He took
+out the _am_, changed _by 7.30 from Waterloo_ to _arriving 9.35_ and
+_send conveyance_ to _meet_. If he had only borrowed Cyril's sovereign,
+he could have been more explicit. However, he flattered himself that he
+was getting full value for his eightpence. He then worked out the cost
+of Cyril's escape.
+
+                                                s.   d.
+Third Class single to Paddington                1    6
+Third Class return to Paddington (for self)     2    6
+Third Class single Waterloo to Galton           3   11
+Cab from Paddington to Waterloo                 3    6?
+Cab from Waterloo to Paddington (for self)      3    6?
+Sandwiches for Cyril and Self                   1    0
+Ginger-beer for Cyril and Self (4 bottles)           8
+                                               ________
+Total                                          16    7
+
+The cab of course might cost more, and he must take back the eightpence
+out of it for himself. But Cyril would have at least one and sixpence
+in his pocket when he arrived, which he could put in the offertory at
+the Mass of thanksgiving for his escape that he would attend on the
+following morning. Cyril would be useful to old Dorward, and he (Mark)
+would give him some tips on serving if they had an empty compartment
+from Slowbridge to Paddington. Mark's original intention had been to
+wait at the corner of Cranborne Road in a closed cab like the proverbial
+postchaise of elopements, but he discarded this idea for reasons of
+economy. He hoped that Cyril would not get frightened on the way to the
+station and turn back. Perhaps after all it would be wiser to order a
+cab and give up the ginger-beer, or pay for the ginger-beer with the
+money for the telegram. Once inside a cab Cyril was bound to go on.
+Hacking might be committed more completely to the enterprise by waiting
+inside until he arrived with Cyril. It was a pity that Cyril was not
+locked in his room, and yet when it came to it he would probably have
+funked letting himself down from the window by knotted sheets. Mark
+walked home with Hacking after school, to give his final instructions
+for the following day.
+
+"I'm telling you now," he said, "because we oughtn't to be seen together
+at all to-morrow, in case of arousing suspicion. You must get hold of
+Pomeroy and tell him to run to the corner of the road at half-past-five,
+and jump straight into the fly that'll be waiting there with you
+inside."
+
+"But where will you be?"
+
+"I shall be waiting outside the ticket barrier with the tickets."
+
+"Supposing he won't?"
+
+"I'll risk seeing him once more. Go and ask if you can speak to him a
+minute, and tell him to come out in the garden presently. Say you've
+knocked a ball over or something and will Master Cyril throw it back. I
+say, we might really put a message inside a ball and throw it over. That
+was the way the Duc de Beaufort escaped in _Twenty Years After_."
+
+Hacking looked blankly at Mark.
+
+"But it's dark and wet," he objected. "I shouldn't knock a ball over on
+a wet evening like this."
+
+"Well, the skivvy won't think of that, and Pomeroy will guess that
+we're trying to communicate with him."
+
+Mark thought how odd it was that Hacking should be so utterly blind to
+the romance of the enterprise. After a few more objections which were
+disposed of by Mark, Hacking agreed to go next door and try to get the
+prisoner into the garden. He succeeded in this, and Mark rated Cyril for
+not having given him the sovereign yesterday.
+
+"However, bunk in and get it now, because I shan't see you again till
+to-morrow at the station, and I must have some money to buy the
+tickets."
+
+He explained the details of the escape and exacted from Cyril a promise
+not to back out at the last moment.
+
+"You've got nothing to do. It's as simple as A B C. It's too simple,
+really, to be much of a rag. However, as it isn't a rag, but serious, I
+suppose we oughtn't to grumble. Now, you are coming, aren't you?"
+
+Cyril promised that nothing but physical force should prevent him.
+
+"If you funk, don't forget that you'll have betrayed your faith and
+. . ."
+
+At this moment Mark in his enthusiasm slipped off the wall, and after
+uttering one more solemn injunction against backing out at the last
+minute he left Cyril to the protection of Angels for the next
+twenty-four hours.
+
+Although he would never have admitted as much, Mark was rather
+astonished when Cyril actually did present himself at Slowbridge station
+in time to catch the 5.47 train up to town. Their compartment was not
+empty, so that Mark was unable to give Cyril that lesson in serving at
+the altar which he had intended to give him. Instead, as Cyril seemed in
+his reaction to the excitement of the escape likely to burst into tears
+at any moment, he drew for him a vivid picture of the enjoyable life to
+which the train was taking him.
+
+"Father Dorward says that the country round Green Lanes is ripping. And
+his church is Norman. I expect he'll make you his ceremonarius. You're
+an awfully lucky chap, you know. He says that next Corpus Christi, he's
+going to have Mass on the village green. Nobody will know where you
+are, and I daresay later on you can become a hermit. You might become a
+saint. The last English saint to be canonized was St. Thomas Cantilupe
+of Hereford. But of course Charles the First ought to have been properly
+canonized. By the time you die I should think we should have got back
+canonization in the English Church, and if I'm alive then I'll propose
+your canonization. St. Cyril Pomeroy you'd be."
+
+Such were the bright colours in which Mark painted Cyril's future; when
+he had watched him wave his farewells from the window of the departing
+train at Waterloo, he felt as if he were watching the bodily assumption
+of a saint.
+
+"Where have you been all the evening?" asked Uncle Henry, when Mark came
+back about nine o'clock.
+
+"In London," said Mark.
+
+"Your insolence is becoming insupportable. Get away to your room."
+
+It never struck Mr. Lidderdale that his nephew was telling the truth.
+
+The hue and cry for Cyril Pomeroy began at once, and though Mark
+maintained at first that the discovery of Cyril's hiding-place was due
+to nothing else except the cowardice of Hacking, who when confronted by
+a detective burst into tears and revealed all he knew, he was bound to
+admit afterward that, if Mr. Ogilvie had been questioned much more, he
+would have had to reveal the secret himself. Mark was hurt that his
+efforts to help a son of Holy Church should not be better appreciated by
+Mr. Ogilvie; but he forgave his friend in view of the nuisance that it
+undoubtedly must have been to have Meade Cantorum beleaguered by half a
+dozen corpulent detectives. The only person in the Vicarage who seemed
+to approve of what he had done was Esther; she who had always seemed to
+ignore him, even sometimes in a sensitive mood to despise him, was full
+of congratulations.
+
+"How did you manage it, Mark?"
+
+"Oh, I took a cab," said Mark modestly. "One from the corner of
+Cranborne Road to Slowbridge, and another from Paddington to Waterloo.
+We had some sandwiches, and a good deal of ginger-beer at Paddington
+because we thought we mightn't be able to get any at Waterloo, but at
+Waterloo we had some more ginger-beer. I wish I hadn't told Hacking. If
+I hadn't, we should probably have pulled it off. Old Dorward was up to
+anything. But Hacking is a hopeless ass."
+
+"What does your uncle say?"
+
+"He's rather sick," Mark admitted. "He refused to let me go to school
+any more, which as you may imagine doesn't upset me very much, and I'm
+to go into Hitchcock's office after Christmas. As far as I can make out
+I shall be a kind of servant."
+
+"Have you talked to Stephen about it?"
+
+"Well, he's a bit annoyed with me about this kidnapping. I'm afraid I
+have rather let him in for it. He says he doesn't mind so much if it's
+kept out of the papers."
+
+"Anyway, I think it was a sporting effort by you," said Esther. "I
+wasn't particularly keen on you until you brought this off. I hate pious
+boys. I wish you'd told me beforehand. I'd have loved to help."
+
+"Would you? I say, I am sorry. I never thought of you," said Mark much
+disappointed at the lost opportunity. "You'd have been much better than
+that ass Hacking. If you and I had been the only people in it, I'll bet
+the detectives would never have found him."
+
+"And what's going to happen to the youth now?"
+
+"Oh, his father's going to take him to Australia as he arranged. They
+sail to-morrow. There's one thing," Mark added with a kind of gloomy
+relish. "He's bound to go to the bad, and perhaps that'll be a lesson to
+his father."
+
+The hope of the Vicar of Meade Cantorum and equally it may be added the
+hope of Mr. Lidderdale that the affair would be kept out of the papers
+was not fulfilled. The day after Mr. Pomeroy and his son sailed from
+Tilbury the following communication appeared in _The Times_:
+
+     Sir,--The accompanying letter was handed to me by my friend the
+     Reverend Eustace Pomeroy to be used as I thought fit and subject to
+     only one stipulation--that it should not be published until he and
+     his son were out of England. As President of the Society for the
+     Protection of the English Church against Romish Aggression I feel
+     that it is my duty to lay the facts before the country. I need
+     scarcely add that I have been at pains to verify the surprising and
+     alarming accusations made by a clergyman against two other
+     clergymen, and I earnestly request the publicity of your columns
+     for what I venture to believe is positive proof of the dangerous
+     conspiracy existing in our very midst to romanize the Established
+     Church of England. I shall be happy to produce for any of your
+     readers who find Mr. Pomeroy's story incredible at the close of the
+     nineteenth century the signed statements of witnesses and other
+     documentary evidence.
+
+     I am, Sir,
+
+     Your obedient servant,
+
+     Danvers.
+
+
+     The Right Honble. the Lord Danvers, P.C.
+
+     President of the Society for the Protection of the English Church
+     against Romish Aggression.
+
+     My Lord,
+
+     I have to bring to your notice as President of the S.P.E. C.R.A.
+     what I venture to assert is one of the most daring plots to subvert
+     home and family life in the interests of priestcraft that has ever
+     been discovered. In taking this step I am fully conscious of its
+     seriousness, and if I ask your lordship to delay taking any
+     measures for publicity until the unhappy principal is upon the high
+     seas in the guardianship of his even more unhappy father, I do so
+     for the sake of the wretched boy whose future has been nearly
+     blasted by the Jesuitical behaviour of two so-called Protestant
+     clergymen.
+
+     Four years ago, my lord, I retired from a lifelong career as a
+     missionary in New Guinea to give my children the advantages of
+     English education and English climate, and it is surely hard that I
+     should live to curse the day on which I did so. My third son Cyril
+     was sent to school at Haverton House, Slowbridge, to an educational
+     establishment kept by a Mr. Henry Lidderdale, reputed to be a
+     strong Evangelical and I believe I am justified in saying rightly
+     so reputed. At the same time I regret that Mr. Lidderdale, whose
+     brother was a notorious Romanizer I have since discovered, should
+     not have exercised more care in the supervision of his nephew, a
+     fellow scholar with my own son at Haverton House. It appears that
+     Mr. Lidderdale was so lax as to permit his nephew to frequent the
+     services of the Reverend Stephen Ogilvie at Meade Cantorum, where
+     every excess such as incense, lighted candles, mariolatry and
+     creeping to the cross is openly practised. The Revd. S. Ogilvie I
+     may add is a member of the S.S.C., that notorious secret society
+     whose machinations have been so often exposed and the originators
+     of that filthy book "The Priest in Absolution." He is also a member
+     of the Guild of All Souls which has for its avowed object the
+     restoration of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory with all its
+     attendant horrors, and finally I need scarcely add he is a member
+     of the Confraternity of the "Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly
+     to popularize the idolatrous and blasphemous cult of the Mass.
+
+     Young Lidderdale presumably under the influence of this disloyal
+     Protestant clergyman sought to corrupt my son, and was actually so
+     far successful as to lure him to attend the idolatrous services at
+     Meade Cantorum church, which of course he was only able to do by
+     inventing lies and excuses to his father to account for his absence
+     from the simple worship to which all his life he had been
+     accustomed. Not content with this my unhappy son was actually
+     persuaded to confess his sins to this self-styled "priest"! I
+     wonder if he confessed the sin of deceiving his own father to
+     "Father" Ogilvie who supplied him with numerous Mass books, several
+     of which I enclose for your lordship's inspection. You will be
+     amused if you are not too much horrified by these puerile and
+     degraded works, and in one of them, impudently entitled "Catholic
+     Prayers for Church of England People" you will actually see in cold
+     print a prayer for the "Pope of Rome." This work emanates from that
+     hotbed of sacerdotal disloyalty, St. Alban's, Holborn.
+
+     These vile books I discovered by accident carefully hidden away in
+     my son's bedroom. "Facilis descensus Averni!" You will easily
+     imagine the humiliation of a parent who, having devoted his life to
+     bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen, finds that his own
+     son has fallen as low as the lowest savage. As soon as I made my
+     discovery, I removed him from Haverton House, and warned the
+     proprietor of the risk he was running by not taking better care of
+     his pupils. Having been summoned to a conference of missionaries in
+     Sydney, N.S.W., I determined to take my son with me in the hope
+     that a long voyage in the company of a loving parent, eager to help
+     him back to the path of Truth and Salvation from which he had
+     strayed, might cure him of his idolatrous fancies, and restore him
+     to Jesus.
+
+     What followed is, as I write this, scarcely credible to myself;
+     but however incredible, it is true. Young Lidderdale, acting no
+     doubt at the instigation of "Father" Ogilvie (as my son actually
+     called him to my face, not realizing the blasphemy of according to
+     a mortal clergyman the title that belongs to God alone), entered
+     into a conspiracy with another Romanizing clergyman, the Reverend
+     Oliver Dorward, Vicar of Green Lanes, Hants, to abduct my son from
+     his own father's house, with what ultimate intention I dare not
+     think. Incredible as it must sound to modern ears, they were so far
+     successful that for a whole week I was in ignorance of his
+     whereabouts, while detectives were hunting for him up and down
+     England. The abduction was carried out by young Lidderdale, with
+     the assistance of a youth called Hacking, so coolly and skilfully
+     as to indicate that the abettors behind the scenes are USED TO SUCH
+     ABDUCTIONS. This, my lord, points to a very grave state of affairs
+     in our midst. If the son of a Protestant clergyman like myself can
+     be spirited away from a populous but nevertheless comparatively
+     small town like Slowbridge, what must be going on in great cities
+     like London? Moreover, everything is done to make it attractive for
+     the unhappy youth who is thus lured away from his father's hearth.
+     My own son is even now still impenitent, and I have the greatest
+     fears for his moral and religious future, so rapid has been the
+     corruption set up by evil companionship.
+
+     These, my lord, are the facts set out as shortly as possible and
+     written on the eve of my departure in circumstances that militate
+     against elegance of expression. I am, to tell the truth, still
+     staggered by this affair, and if I make public my sorrow and my
+     shame I do so in the hope that the Society of which your lordship
+     is President, may see its way to take some kind of action that will
+     make a repetition of such an outrage upon family life for ever
+     impossible.
+
+     Believe me to be,
+
+     Your lordship's obedient servant,
+
+     Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+The publication of this letter stirred England. _The Times_ in a leading
+article demanded a full inquiry into the alleged circumstances. _The
+English Churchman_ said that nothing like it had happened since the days
+of Bloody Mary. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, and
+finally when it became known that Lord Danvers would ask a question in
+the House of Lords, Mr. Ogilvie took Mark to see Lord Hull who wished to
+be in possession of the facts before he rose to correct some
+misapprehensions of Lord Danvers. Mark also had to interview two
+Bishops, an Archdeacon, and a Rural Dean. He did not realize that for a
+few weeks he was a central figure in what was called THE CHURCH CRISIS.
+He was indignant at Mr. Pomeroy's exaggeration and perversions of fact,
+and he was so evidently speaking the truth that everybody from Lord Hull
+to a reporter of _The Sun_ was impressed by his account of the affair,
+so that in the end the Pomeroy Abduction was decided to be less
+revolutionary than the Gunpowder Plot.
+
+Mr. Lidderdale, however, believed that his nephew had deliberately tried
+to ruin him out of malice, and when two parents seized the opportunity
+of such a scandal to remove their sons from Haverton House without
+paying the terminal fees, Mr. Lidderdale told Mark that he should recoup
+himself for the loss out of the money left by his mother.
+
+"How much did she leave?" his nephew asked.
+
+"Don't ask impertinent questions."
+
+"But it's my money, isn't it?"
+
+"It will be your money in another six years, if you behave yourself.
+Meanwhile half of it will be devoted to paying your premium at the
+office of my friend Mr. Hitchcock."
+
+"But I don't want to be a solicitor. I want to be a priest," said Mark.
+
+Uncle Henry produced a number of cogent reasons that would make his
+nephew's ambition unattainable.
+
+"Very well, if I can't be a priest, I don't want the money, and you can
+keep it yourself," said Mark. "But I'm not going to be a solicitor."
+
+"And what are you going to be, may I inquire?" asked Uncle Henry.
+
+"In the end I probably _shall_ be a priest," Mark prophesied. "But I
+haven't quite decided yet how. I warn you that I shall run away."
+
+"Run away," his uncle echoed in amazement. "Good heavens, boy, haven't
+you had enough of running away over this deplorable Pomeroy affair?
+Where are you going to run to?"
+
+"I couldn't tell you, could I, even if I knew?" Mark asked as tactfully
+as he was able. "But as a matter of fact, I don't know. I only know that
+I won't go into Mr. Hitchcock's office. If you try to force me, I shall
+write to _The Times_ about it."
+
+Such a threat would have sounded absurd in the mouth of a schoolboy
+before the Pomeroy business; but now Mr. Lidderdale took it seriously
+and began to wonder if Haverton House would survive any more of such
+publicity. When a few days later Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had consulted
+about his future, wrote to propose that Mark should live with him and
+work under his superintendence with the idea of winning a scholarship at
+Oxford, Mr. Lidderdale was inclined to treat his suggestion as a
+solution of the problem, and he replied encouragingly:
+
+     Haverton House,
+
+     Slowbridge.
+
+     Jan. 15.
+
+     Dear Sir,
+
+     Am I to understand from your letter that you are offering to make
+     yourself responsible for my nephew's future, for I must warn you
+     that I could not accept your suggestion unless such were the case?
+     I do not approve of what I assume will be the trend of your
+     education, and I should have to disclaim any further responsibility
+     in the matter of my nephew's future. I may inform you that I hold
+     in trust for him until he comes of age the sum of �522 8s. 7d.
+     which was left by his mother. The annual interest upon this I have
+     used until now as a slight contribution to the expense to which I
+     have been put on his account; but I have not thought it right to
+     use any of the capital sum. This I am proposing to transfer to you.
+     His mother did not execute any legal document and I have nothing
+     more binding than a moral obligation. If you undertake the
+     responsibility of looking after him until such time as he is able
+     to earn his own living, I consider that you are entitled to use
+     this money in any way you think right. I hope that the boy will
+     reward your confidence more amply than he has rewarded mine. I need
+     not allude to the Pomeroy business to you, for notwithstanding your
+     public denials I cannot but consider that you were as deeply
+     implicated in that disgraceful affair as he was. I note what you
+     say about the admiration you had for my brother. I wish I could
+     honestly say that I shared that admiration. But my brother and I
+     were not on good terms, for which state of affairs he was entirely
+     responsible. I am more ready to surrender to you all my authority
+     over Mark because I am only too well aware how during the last year
+     you have consistently undermined that authority and encouraged my
+     nephew's rebellious spirit. I have had a great experience of boys
+     during thirty-five years of schoolmastering, and I can assure you
+     that I have never had to deal with a boy so utterly insensible to
+     kindness as my nephew. His conduct toward his aunt I can only
+     characterize as callous. Of his conduct towards me I prefer to say
+     no more. I came forward at a moment when he was likely to be sunk
+     in the most abject poverty, and my reward has been ingratitude. I
+     pray that his dark and stubborn temperament may not turn to vice
+     and folly as he grows older, but I have little hope of its not
+     doing so. I confess that to me his future seems dismally black. You
+     may have acquired some kind of influence over his emotions, if he
+     has any emotions, but I am not inclined to suppose that it will
+     endure.
+
+     On hearing from you that you persist in your offer to assume
+     complete responsibility for my nephew, I will hand him over to your
+     care at once. I cannot pretend that I shall be sorry to see the
+     last of him, for I am not a hypocrite. I may add that his clothes
+     are in rather a sorry state. I had intended to equip him upon his
+     entering the office of my old friend Mr. Hitchcock and with that
+     intention I have been letting him wear out what he has. This, I may
+     say, he has done most effectually.
+
+     I am, Sir,
+
+     Yours faithfully,
+
+     Henry Lidderdale.
+
+To which Mr. Ogilvie replied:
+
+     The Vicarage,
+
+     Meade Cantorum,
+
+     Bucks.
+
+     Jan. 16.
+
+     Dear Mr. Lidderdale,
+
+     I accept full responsibility for Mark and for Mark's money. Send
+     both of them along whenever you like. I'm not going to embark on
+     another controversy about the "rights" of boys. I've exhausted
+     every argument on this subject since Mark involved me in his
+     drastic measures of a month ago. But please let me assure you that
+     I will do my best for him and that I am convinced he will do his
+     best for me.
+
+     Yours truly,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WYCH-ON-THE-WOLD
+
+
+Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went to live at Meade
+Cantorum; and the break was made complete soon afterward when the living
+of Wych-on-the-Wold was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that
+he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five years later;
+Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where she took up palmistry
+and became indispensable to the success of charitable bazaars in East
+Sussex.
+
+Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was actually in
+Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that all the windows looked
+down into Gloucestershire, except those in the Rectory; they looked out
+across a flat country of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing
+spire in Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a high
+windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of the numbers of
+pigeons that were always circling round the church tower. There was
+hardly a house in Wych that did not have its pigeon-cote, from the great
+round columbary in the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of
+some steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as most
+Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford in the vale
+below, that was because the exposed position had kept its successive
+builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was
+an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape
+whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old
+wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient
+observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing
+with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the
+inmates was a succession of blank spaces of freestone that delighted
+the eye with an effect of strength and leisure, of cleanliness and
+tranquillity.
+
+The Rectory, dating from the reign of Charles II, did not arrogate to
+itself the right to retire behind trees from the long line of the single
+village street; but being taller than the other houses it brought the
+street to a dignified conclusion, and it was not unworthy of the noble
+church which stood apart from the village, a landmark for miles, upon
+the brow of the rolling wold. There was little traffic on the road that
+climbed up from Wychford in the valley of the swift Greenrush five miles
+away, and there was less traffic on the road beyond, which for eight
+miles sent branch after branch to remote farms and hamlets until itself
+became no more than a sheep track and faded out upon a hilly pasturage.
+Yet even this unfrequented road only bisected the village at the end of
+its wide street, where in the morning when the children were at school
+and the labourers at work in the fields the silence was cloistral, where
+one could stand listening to the larks high overhead, and where the
+lightest footstep aroused curiosity, so that one turned the head to peep
+and peer for the cause of so strange a sound.
+
+Mr. Ogilvie's parish had a large superficial area; but his parishioners
+were not many outside the village, and in that country of wide pastures
+the whole of his cure did not include half-a-dozen farms. There was no
+doctor and no squire, unless Will Starling of Rushbrooke Grange could be
+counted as the squire.
+
+Halfway to Wychford and close to the boundary of the two parishes an
+infirm signpost managed with the aid of a stunted hawthorn to keep
+itself partially upright and direct the wayfarer to Wych Maries. Without
+the signpost nobody would have suspected that the grassgrown track thus
+indicated led anywhere except over the top of the wold.
+
+"You must go and explore Wych Maries," the Rector had said to Mark soon
+after they arrived. "You'll find it rather attractive. There's a disused
+chapel dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. My
+predecessor took me there when we drove round the parish on my first
+visit; but I haven't yet had time to go again. And you ought to have a
+look at the gardens of Rushbrooke Grange. The present squire is away. In
+the South Seas, I believe. But the housekeeper, Mrs. Honeybone, will
+show you round."
+
+It was in response to this advice that Mark and Esther set out on a
+golden May evening to explore Wych Maries. Esther had continued to be
+friendly with Mark after the Pomeroy affair; and when he came to live at
+Meade Cantorum she had expressed her pleasure at the prospect of having
+him for a brother.
+
+"But you'll keep off religion, won't you?" she had demanded.
+
+Mark promised that he would, wondering why she should suppose that he
+was incapable of perceiving who was and who was not interested in it.
+
+"I suppose you've guessed my fear?" she had continued. "Haven't you?
+Haven't you guessed that I'm frightened to death of becoming religious?"
+
+The reassuring contradiction that one naturally gives to anybody who
+voices a dread of being overtaken by some misfortune might perhaps have
+sounded inappropriate, and Mark had held his tongue.
+
+"My father was very religious. My mother is more or less religious.
+Stephen is religious. Miriam is religious. Oh, Mark, and I sometimes
+feel that I too must fall on my knees and surrender. But I won't.
+Because it spoils life. I shall be beaten in the end of course, and I'll
+probably get religious mania when I am beaten. But until then--" She did
+not finish her sentence; only her blue eyes glittered at the challenge
+of life.
+
+That was the last time religion was mentioned between Mark and Esther,
+and since both of them enjoyed the country they became friends. On this
+May evening they stood by the signpost and looked across the shimmering
+grass to where the sun hung in his web of golden haze above the edge of
+the wold.
+
+"If we take the road to Wych Maries," said Mark, "we shall be walking
+right into the sun."
+
+Esther did not reply, but Mark understood that she assented to his
+truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed
+them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge
+of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the
+brow, but which grew denser down the slope with many dark evergreens
+interspersed, and in the valley below became a jungle. After the bare
+upland country this volume of May verdure seemed indescribably rich and
+the valley beyond, where the Greenrush flowed through kingcups toward
+the sun, indescribably alluring. Esther and Mark forgot that they were
+exploring Wych Maries and thinking only of reaching that wide valley
+they ran down through the wood, rejoicing in the airy green of the
+ash-trees above them and shouting as they ran. But presently cypresses
+and sombre yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych
+Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and their
+whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more. At the bottom of
+the hill the trees increased in number and variety; the sun shone
+through pale oak-leaves and the warm green of sycamores. Nevertheless a
+sadness haunted the wood, where the red campions made only a mist of
+colour with no reality of life and flowers behind.
+
+"This wood's awfully jolly, isn't it?" said Mark, hoping to gain from
+Esther's agreement the dispersal of his gloom.
+
+"I don't care for it much," she replied. "There doesn't seem to be any
+life in it."
+
+"I heard a cuckoo just now," said Mark.
+
+"Yes, out of tune already."
+
+"Mm, rather out of tune. Mind those nettles," he warned her.
+
+"I thought Stephen said he drove here."
+
+"Perhaps we've come the wrong way. I believe the road forked by the ash
+wood above. Anyway if we go toward the sun we shall come out in the
+valley, and we can walk back along the banks of the river to Wychford."
+
+"We can always go back through the wood," said Esther.
+
+"Yes, if you don't mind going back the way you came."
+
+"Come on," she snapped. She was not going to be laughed at by Mark, and
+she dared him to deny that he was not as much aware as herself of an
+eeriness in the atmosphere.
+
+"Only because it seems dark in here after that dazzling sunlight on the
+wold. Hark! I hear the sound of water."
+
+They struggled through the undergrowth toward the sound; soon from a
+steep wooded bank they were gazing down into a millpool, the surface of
+which reflected with a gloomy deepening of their hue the colour but not
+the form of the trees above. Water was flowing through a rotten sluice
+gate down from the level of the stream upon a slimy water-wheel that
+must have been out of action for many years.
+
+"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of Weir!" Mark
+exclaimed. "Don't you love _Ulalume_? I think it's about my favourite
+poem."
+
+"Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently. He might have taken
+advantage of this confession to give her a lecture on poetry, if the
+millpool and the melancholy wood had not been so affecting as to make
+the least attempt at literary exposition impertinent.
+
+"And there's the chapel," Mark exclaimed, pointing to a ruined edifice
+of stone, the walls of which were stained with the damp of years rising
+from the pool. "But how shall we reach it? We must have come the wrong
+way."
+
+"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering to the
+command of an intuition that overcame her pride. "This place is
+unlucky."
+
+Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that came so early in
+this overshadowed place, was half inclined to turn round at her behest;
+but at that moment he perceived a possible path through the nettles and
+briers at the farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the
+Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych Maries he
+called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully at first; but
+gradually regaining her composure she emerged on the other side as cool
+and scornful as the Esther with whom he was familiar.
+
+"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing on a grassgrown
+road that wound through a rank pasturage browsed on by a solitary black
+cow and turned the corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building,
+the presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.
+
+"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.
+
+"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I say, this chapel is
+rather ripping, isn't it?"
+
+But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow, where her
+meditative form made the solitary black cow look lonelier than ever.
+Mark turned aside to examine the chapel. He had been warned by the
+Rector to look at the images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary
+Magdalene that had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they
+were tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history of the
+chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as to suggest that it was
+a chantry; but there was no historical justification for linking its
+fortunes with the Starlings who owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was
+no record of any lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might
+show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold; it lay
+about midway between the two, and in days gone by there had been
+controversy on this point between the two parishes. The question had
+been settled by a squire of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth
+century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by
+some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record
+neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk
+worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of
+bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that
+covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its
+floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of
+the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six
+hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the
+place and speculated upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy
+that covered the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit
+of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two
+austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that
+enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom
+from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed
+upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the
+chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which
+marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly
+assured that he would neither marry nor beget children. He was
+astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had
+never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor
+even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite
+purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be
+considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of
+mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to
+illuminate with reason's eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to
+the stone an illusion of life's bloom.
+
+"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from the field beyond
+the black cow lowed a melancholy negative. Whether the stone had spoken
+or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour,
+and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the
+place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.
+
+"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field,
+and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led
+round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.
+
+"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.
+
+They were standing before the house.
+
+"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it
+seems later than it really is."
+
+Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average
+Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building it occupied a large
+superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the
+outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation
+that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of
+this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as
+if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the
+trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had
+never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had
+grown smaller with each succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous
+author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose
+ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There was indeed nothing of
+interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of
+armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, when the squire's wife and two little girls were
+murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag
+Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much inclined to
+blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange
+under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther
+perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her
+excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a
+pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with
+the scent of apple blossom.
+
+"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while the echoes of the
+bell died away on the silence within the house and they waited for the
+footsteps that should answer their summons. The answer came from a
+window above the porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in
+wistaria, looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with alarm
+who was there.
+
+"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.
+
+"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You have no business
+to go ringing the bell at this time of the evening. It frightened me to
+death."
+
+"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.
+
+Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her brother as an
+excuse to visit the house and he was still more surprised by hearing her
+speak so politely, so ingratiatingly, it seemed, to this grim woman
+embowered in wistaria.
+
+"We lost our way," Esther explained, "and that's why we're so late. The
+Rector told me about the water-lily pool, and I should so much like to
+see it."
+
+Mrs. Honeybone debated with herself for a moment, until at last with a
+grunt of disapproval she came downstairs and opened the front door. The
+lily pool, now a lily pool only in name, for it was covered with an
+integument of duckweed which in twilight took on the texture of velvet,
+was an attractive place set in an enclosure of grass between high grey
+walls.
+
+"That's all there is to see," said Mrs. Honeybone.
+
+"Mr. Starling is abroad?" Esther asked.
+
+The housekeeper nodded.
+
+"And when is he coming back?" she went on.
+
+"That's for him to say," said the housekeeper disagreeably. "He might
+come back to-night for all I know."
+
+Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth the hall bell jangled,
+and a distant voice shouted:
+
+"Nanny, Nanny, hurry up and open the door!"
+
+Mrs. Honeybone could not have looked more startled if the voice had been
+that of a ghost. Mark began to talk of going until Esther cut him short.
+
+"I don't think Mr. Starling will mind our being here so much as that,"
+she said.
+
+Mrs. Honeybone had already hurried off to greet her master; and when she
+was gone Mark looked at Esther, saw that her face was strangely flushed,
+and in an instant of divination apprehended either that she had already
+met the squire of Rushbrooke Grange or that she expected to meet him
+here to-night; so that, when presently a tall man of about thirty-five
+with brick-dust cheeks came into the close, he was not taken aback when
+Esther greeted him by name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was
+he astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks should
+deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with recognition,
+and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a moment its immobility and
+gape, yes, gape, in the amazement of meeting somebody whom he never
+could have expected to meet at such an hour in such a place.
+
+"You," he exclaimed. "You here!"
+
+By the way he quickly looked behind him as if to intercept a prying
+glance Mark knew that, whatever the relationship between Esther and the
+squire had been in the past, it had been a relationship in which
+secrecy had played a part. In that moment between him and Will Starling
+there was enmity.
+
+"You couldn't have expected him to make a great fuss about a boy," said
+Esther brutally on their way back to the Rectory.
+
+"I suppose you think that's the reason why I don't like him," said Mark.
+"I don't want him to take any notice of me, but I think it's very odd
+that you shouldn't have said a word about knowing him even to his
+housekeeper."
+
+"It was a whim of mine," she murmured. "Besides, I don't know him very
+well. We met at Eastbourne once when I was staying there with Mother."
+
+"Well, why didn't he say 'How do you do, Miss Ogilvie?' instead of
+breathing out 'you' like that?"
+
+Esther turned furiously upon Mark.
+
+"What has it got to do with you?"
+
+"Nothing whatever to do with me," he said deliberately. "But if you
+think you're going to make a fool of me, you're not. Are you going to
+tell your brother you knew him?"
+
+Esther would not answer, and separated by several yards they walked
+sullenly back to the Rectory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ST. MARK'S DAY
+
+
+Mark tried next day to make up his difference with Esther; but she
+repulsed his advances, and the friendship that had blossomed after the
+Pomeroy affair faded and died. There was no apparent dislike on either
+side, nothing more than a coolness as of people too well used to each
+other's company. In a way this was an advantage for Mark, who was having
+to apply himself earnestly to the amount of study necessary to win a
+scholarship at Oxford. Companionship with Esther would have meant
+considerable disturbance of his work, for she was a woman who depended
+on the inspiration of the moment for her pastimes and pleasures, who was
+impatient of any postponement and always avowedly contemptuous of Mark's
+serious side. His classical education at Haverton House had made little
+of the material bequeathed to him by his grandfather's tuition at
+Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of
+a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the
+other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical
+facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of
+Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair
+the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to
+Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark
+had been reading with him six months he did find a really first-class
+scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of Little Fairfield. Mark worked
+steadily, and existence in Oxfordshire went by without any great
+adventures of mind, body, or spirit. Life at the Rectory had a kind of
+graceful austerity like the well-proportioned Rectory itself. If Mark
+had bothered to analyze the cause of this graceful austerity, he might
+have found it in the personality of the Rector's elder sister Miriam.
+Even at Meade Cantorum, when he was younger, Mark had been fully
+conscious of her qualities; but here they found a background against
+which they could display themselves more perfectly. When they moved from
+Buckinghamshire and the new rector was seeing how much Miriam
+appreciated the new surroundings, he sold out some stock and presented
+her with enough ready money to express herself in the outward beauty of
+the Rectory's refurbishing. He was luckily not called upon to spend a
+great deal on the church, both his predecessors having maintained the
+fabric with care, and the fabric itself being sound enough and
+magnificent enough to want no more than that. Miriam, though shaking one
+of those capable and well-tended fingers at her beloved brother's
+extravagance, accepted the gift with an almost childish determination to
+give full value of beauty in return, so that there should not be a
+servant's bedroom nor a cupboard nor a corridor that did not display the
+evidence of her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over
+to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures bloomed
+there like one of her own favourite peonies, rosy of face and fragrant,
+ample of girth, golden-hearted.
+
+Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with Richard Ford, the
+son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with whom he went to work in the
+autumn after his arrival in Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for
+Richard, who was a year or two older than himself and a student at
+Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer bound for
+India, was one of those entirely admirable young men who succeed in
+being saintly without any rapture or righteousness.
+
+Mark said one day:
+
+"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only for goodness'
+sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be furious."
+
+The Rector stopped humming a joyful _Miserere_ to give Mark an assurance
+of his discretion. But Mark having said so much in praise of Richard
+could say no more, and indeed he would have found it hard to express in
+words what he felt about his friend.
+
+Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford Rectory where in
+this fortunate corner of England existed a third perfect family. Richard
+was deeply in love with Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark
+had ever been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen in
+love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.
+
+"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down
+the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies
+on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like
+her cheek."
+
+"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.
+
+Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities
+of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his
+imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic,
+somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced
+partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all,
+it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds
+imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing
+appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do
+not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not
+living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices
+lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and
+aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.
+
+Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good fortune had set
+him as the natural expression of an inward orderliness, a traditional
+respect for beauty like the ritual of Christian worship. That the three
+daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who
+failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
+him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other
+standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected
+to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to
+him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but
+it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of
+wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the
+age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when
+they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his
+youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
+form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from
+the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for
+those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the
+utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of
+those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home, the
+Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all Richard Ford at
+Fairfield gave him in a few months the poise he would have received more
+gradually from a public school education.
+
+So Mark read Greek with the Vicar of Little Fairfield and Latin with the
+Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold, who, amiable and holy man, had to work
+nearly twice as hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of
+instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was
+home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at
+Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to
+enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach and Brahms.
+
+"You're like three Saint Cecilias," he told them. "Monica is by Luini
+and Margaret is by Perugino and Pauline. . . ."
+
+"Oh, who am I by?" Pauline exclaimed, clapping her hands.
+
+"I give it up. You're just Saint Cecilia herself at fourteen."
+
+"Isn't Mark foolish?" Pauline laughed.
+
+"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mark, "so I'm allowed to be foolish."
+
+"It's my birthday in a week," said Pauline. "And as I'm two years
+younger than you I can be two years more foolish."
+
+Mark looked at her, and he was filled with wonder at the sanctity of her
+maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating upon the Annunciation he should
+always clothe Pauline in a robe of white samite and set her in his
+mind's eye for that other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy
+maids in Florence or Perugia for their bright mysteries.
+
+While Mark was walking back to Wych and when on the brow of the first
+rise of the road he stood looking down at Wychford in the valley below,
+a chill lisping wind from the east made him shiver and he thought of the
+lines in Keats' _Eve of St. Mark_:
+
+    _The chilly sunset faintly told_
+    _Of unmatured green vallies cold,_
+    _Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,_
+    _Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,_
+    _Of primroses by shelter'd rills,_
+    _And daisies on the aguish hills._
+
+The sky in the west was an unmatured green valley tonight, where Venus
+bloomed like a solitary primrose; and on the dark hills of Heaven the
+stars were like daisies. He turned his back on the little town and set
+off up the hill again, while the wind slipped through the hedge beside
+him in and out of the blackthorn boughs, lisping, whispering, snuffling,
+sniffing, like a small inquisitive animal. He thought of Monica,
+Margaret, and Pauline playing in their warm, candle-lit room behind him,
+and he thought of Miriam reading in her tall-back chair before dinner,
+for Evensong would be over by now. Yes, Evensong would be over, he
+remembered penitently, and he ought to have gone this evening, which was
+the vigil of St. Mark and of his birthday. At this moment he caught
+sight of the Wych Maries signpost black against that cold green sky. He
+gave a momentary start, because seen thus the signpost had a human look;
+and when his heart beat normally it was roused again, this time by the
+sight of a human form indeed, the form of Esther, the wind blowing her
+skirts before her, hurrying along the road to which the signpost so
+crookedly pointed. Mark who had been climbing higher and higher now felt
+the power of that wind full on his cheeks. It was as if it had found
+what it wanted, for it no longer whispered and lisped among the boughs
+of the blackthorn, but blew fiercely over the wide pastures, driving
+Esther before it, cutting through Mark like a sword. By the time he had
+reached the signpost she had disappeared in the wood.
+
+Mark asked himself why she was going to Rushbrooke Grange.
+
+"To Rushbrooke Grange," he said aloud. "Why should I think she is going
+to Rushbrooke Grange?"
+
+Though even in this desolate place he would not say it aloud, the answer
+came back from this very afternoon when somebody had mentioned casually
+that the Squire was come home again. Mark half turned to follow Esther,
+but in the moment of turning he set his face resolutely in the direction
+of home. If Esther were really on her way to meet Will Starling, he
+would do more harm than good by appearing to pry.
+
+Esther was the flaw in Mark's crystal clear world. When a year ago they
+had quarrelled over his avowed dislike of Will Starling, she had gone
+back to her solitary walks and he conscious, painfully conscious, that
+she regarded him as a young prig, had with that foolish pride of youth
+resolved to be so far as she was concerned what she supposed him to be.
+His admiration for the Greys and the Fords had driven her into jeering
+at them; throughout the year Mark and she had been scarcely polite to
+each other even in public. The Rector and Miriam probably excused Mark's
+rudeness whenever he let himself give way to it, because their sister
+did not spare either of them, and they were made aware with exasperating
+insistence of the dullness of the country and of the dreariness of
+everybody who lived in the neighbourhood. Yet, Mark could never achieve
+that indifference to her attitude either toward himself or toward other
+people that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he should
+have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because in his thoughts
+about her she always appeared to him like the wind, restlessly sighing
+and fluttering round a comfortable house. However steady the
+candle-light, however bright the fire, however absorbing the book,
+however secure one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there;
+and throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been most
+unmistakably there.
+
+In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion. It was a
+strangely calm morning; through the unstained windows of the clerestory
+the sun sloped quivering ladders of golden light. He looked round with
+half a hope that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and
+throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit across the
+cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his imagination, so that
+for all the rich peace of this interior he was troubled in spirit, and
+the intention to make this Mass upon his seventeenth birthday another
+spiritual experience was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping
+mechanically, and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to
+make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began to apprehend
+how he was asking fresh favours from God without having moved a step
+forward to deserve them.
+
+"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think I'm
+suffering from spiritual pride. I think. . . ."
+
+He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an intuition that God
+was about to play some horrible trick on him. Mark discussed with the
+Rector the theological aspects of this intuition.
+
+"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps you are
+leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your
+intuition is your soul's perception of this. Indeed, once or twice
+lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get
+into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world
+so gentle as here."
+
+"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite long enough
+at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here."
+
+"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House it was a passive
+ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty. After our Lord had fasted
+forty days in the desert, accumulating reserves of spiritual energy,
+just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves
+of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He
+was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on
+earth. The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed
+of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual
+perfection displays the same phenomena. In the action and reaction of
+experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of
+the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm. No, I
+fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those
+movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."
+
+Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He
+wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of
+spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh
+seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear
+to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector
+was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a
+horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an
+academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
+probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some
+hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone
+Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own
+troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been
+and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
+brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or
+if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till
+nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark,
+remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a
+moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe
+that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to
+wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night. Did Mrs.
+Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in
+perplexity at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their
+attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips,
+Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing. He
+debated now the notion of warning Miriam in veiled language about her
+sister; but such an idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and
+horrible nightmare. Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill that
+would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes. Besides, what right
+had he on the little he knew to involve Esther with her family?
+Superficially he might count himself her younger brother; but if he
+presumed too far, with what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his
+claim. Most certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he
+intervened bravely and directly. Mark shook his head at the prospect of
+doing that. He could not imagine anybody's tackling Esther directly on
+such a subject. Seventeen to-day! He looked out of the window and felt
+that he was bearing upon his shoulders the whole of that green world
+outspread before him.
+
+The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and Mark who had
+intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying every moment of it had
+allowed the best of the hours to slip away in a stupor of indecision.
+More and more the vision of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt
+that he could not go and see the Greys as he had intended. He could not
+bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of Esther on
+his mind. He decided to walk over to Little Fairfield and persuade
+Richard to make a journey of exploration up the Greenrush in a canoe. He
+would ask Richard his opinion of Will Starling. What a foolish notion!
+He knew perfectly well Richard's opinion of the Squire, and to lure him
+into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.
+
+"Well, I must go somewhere to-day," Mark shouted at himself. He secured
+a packet of sandwiches from the Rectory cook and set out to walk away
+his worries.
+
+"Why shouldn't I go down to Wych Maries? I needn't meet that chap. And
+if I see him I needn't speak to him. He's always been only too jolly
+glad to be offensive to me."
+
+Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked signpost and took
+the same path down under the ash-trees as he had taken with Esther for
+the first time nearly a year ago. Spring was much more like Spring in
+these wooded hollows; the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was
+murmurous as limes in June. Mark congratulated himself on the spot in
+which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day robbed from
+time like the day of a dream. He ate his lunch by the old mill dam,
+feeding the roach with crumbs until an elderly pike came up from the
+deeps and frightened the smaller fish away. He searched for a
+bullfinch's nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the
+birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples
+they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after
+speculating idly for a little while upon its former state he fell as he
+usually did when he visited Wych Maries into a contemplation of the two
+images of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a
+hummock of grass before the old West doorway he received an impression
+that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased to be
+mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved from ruin, but
+that they had somehow regained their importance. It was not that he
+discerned in them any miraculous quality of living, still less of
+winking or sweating as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the
+faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them
+thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the
+point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well
+aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the
+rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he
+climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel,
+that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed
+by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of fancy and
+discover why they should give him this impression of having regained
+their utility, yes, that was the word, utility, not importance. They
+were revitalized not from within, but from without; and even as his mind
+leapt at this explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the
+shadowy yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that
+hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself been sitting.
+
+For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation of the
+strange impression the images had made upon him, Mark supposed that she
+was come there for a tryst. This vanished almost at once in the
+conviction that Esther's soul waited there either in question or appeal.
+He restrained an impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt
+that he was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy
+the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that Esther's pride
+would be so deeply outraged at having been discovered in a moment of
+weakness thus upon her knees, for she had by now fallen upon her knees
+in prayer, that it might easily happen she would never in all her life
+pray more. There was no escape for Mark without disturbing her, and he
+sat breathless in the yew-tree, thinking that soon she must perceive his
+glittering eye in the depths of the dark foliage as in passing a
+hedgerow one may perceive the eye of a nested bird. From his position he
+could see the images, and out of the spiritual agony of Esther kneeling
+there, the force of which was communicated to himself, he watched them
+close, scarcely able to believe that they would not stoop from their
+pedestals and console the suppliant woman with benediction of those
+stone hands now clasped aspiringly to God, themselves for centuries
+suppliant like the woman at their feet. Mark could think of nothing
+better to do than to turn his face from Esther's face and to say for her
+many _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. At first he thought that he was praying
+in a silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his position
+began to affect his concentration, and he found that he was saying the
+words mechanically, listening the while to the voices of birds. He
+compelled his attention to the prayers; but the birds were too loud. The
+_Paternosters_ and the _Aves_ were absorbed in their singing and
+chirping and twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a
+rosary to help his feeble attention. Yet could he have used a rosary
+without falling out of the yew-tree? He took his hands from the bough
+for a moment and nearly overbalanced. _Make not your rosary of yew
+berries_, he found himself saying. Who wrote that? _Make not your rosary
+of yew berries._ Why, of course, it was Keats. It was the first line of
+the _Ode to Melancholy_. Esther was still kneeling out there in the
+sunlight. And how did the poem continue? _Make not your rosary of yew
+berries._ What was the second line? It was ridiculous to sit astride a
+bough and say _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. He could not sit there much
+longer. And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw that
+Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling was standing in
+the doorway of the chapel looking at her, not speaking but waiting for
+her to speak, while he wound a strand of ivy round his fingers and
+unwound it again, and wound it round again until it broke and he was
+saying:
+
+"I thought we agreed after your last display here that you'd give this
+cursed chapel the go by?"
+
+"I can't escape from it," Esther cried. "You don't understand, Will,
+what it means. You never have understood."
+
+"Dearest Essie, I understand only too well. I've paid pretty handsomely
+in having to listen to reproaches, in having to dry your tears and stop
+your sighs with kisses. Your damned religion is a joke. Can't you grasp
+that? It's not my fault we can't get married. If I were really the
+scoundrel you torment yourself into thinking I am, I would have married
+and taken the risk of my strumpet of a wife turning up. But I've treated
+you honestly, Essie. I can't help loving you. I went away once. I went
+away again. And a third time I went just to relieve your soul of the sin
+of loving me. But I'm sick of suffering for the sake of a myth, a
+superstition."
+
+Esther had moved close to him, and now she put a hand upon his arm.
+
+"To you, Will. Not to me."
+
+"Look here, Essie," said her lover. "If you knew that you were liable to
+these dreadful attacks of remorse and penitence, why did you ever
+encourage me?"
+
+"How dare you say I encouraged you?"
+
+"Now don't let your religion make you dishonest," he stabbed. "No man
+seduces a woman of your character without as much goodwill as deserves
+to be called encouragement, and by God _is_ encouragement," he went on
+furiously. "Let's cut away some of the cant before we begin arguing
+again about religion."
+
+"You don't know what a hell you're making for me when you talk like
+that," she gasped. "If I did encourage you, then my sin is a thousand
+times blacker."
+
+"Oh, don't exaggerate, my dear girl," he said wearily. "It isn't a sin
+for two people to love each other."
+
+"I've tried my best to think as you do, but I can't. I've avoided going
+to church. I've tried to hate religion, I've mocked at God . . ." she
+broke off in despair of explaining the force of grace, against the gift
+of which she had contended in vain.
+
+"I always thought you were brave, Essie. But you're a real coward. The
+reason for all this is your fear of being pitchforked into a big bonfire
+by a pantomime demon with horns and a long tail." He laughed bitterly.
+"To think that you, my adored Essie, should really have the soul of a
+Sunday school teacher. You, a Bacchante of passion, to be puling about
+your sins. You! You! Girl, you're mad! I tell you there is no such thing
+as damnation. It's a bogey invented by priests to enchain mankind. But
+if there is and if that muddle-headed old gentleman you call God really
+exists and if he's a just God, why then let him damn me and let him give
+you your harp and your halo while I burn for both. Essie, my mad foolish
+frightened Essie, can't you understand that if you give me up for this
+God of yours you'll drive me to murder. If I must marry you to hold you,
+why then I'll kill that cursed wife of mine. . . ."
+
+It was his turn now to break off in despair of being able to express his
+will to keep Esther for his own, and because argument seemed so hopeless
+he tried to take her in his arms, whereupon Mark who was aching with the
+effort to maintain himself unobserved upon the bough of the yew-tree
+said his _Paternosters_ and _Aves_ faster than ever, that she might have
+the strength to resist that scoundrel of Rushbrooke Grange. He longed to
+have the eloquence to make some wonderful prayer to the Blessed Virgin
+and St. Mary Magdalene so that a miracle might happen and their images
+point accusing hands at the blasphemer below.
+
+And then it seemed as if a miracle did happen, for out of the jangle of
+recriminations and appeals that now signified no more than the noise of
+trees in a storm he heard the voice of Esther gradually gain its right
+to be heard, gradually win from its rival silence until the tale was
+told.
+
+"I know that I am overcome by the saving grace of God," she was saying.
+"And I know that I owe it to them." She pointed to the holy women above
+the door. The squire shook his fist; but he still kept silence. "I have
+run away from God since I knew you, Will. I have loved you as much as
+that. I have gone to church only when I had to go for my brother's sake,
+but I have actually stuffed my ears with cotton wool so that no word
+there spoken might shake my faith in my right to love you. But it was
+all to no purpose. You know that it was you who told me always to come
+to our meetings through the wood and past the chapel. And however fast I
+went and however tight I shut myself up in thoughts of you and your love
+and my love I have always felt that these images spoke to me
+reproachfully in passing. It's not mere imagination, Will. Why, before
+we came to Wych-on-the-Wold when you went away to the Pacific that I
+might have peace of mind, I used always to be haunted by the idea that
+God was calling me back to Him, and I would run, yes, actually run
+through the woods until my legs have been torn by brambles."
+
+"Madness! Madness!" cried Starling.
+
+"Let it be madness. If God chooses to pursue a human soul with madness,
+the pursuit is not less swift and relentless for that. And I shook Him
+off. I escaped from religion; I prayed to the Devil to keep me wicked,
+so utterly did I love you. Then when my brother was offered
+Wych-on-the-Wold I felt that the Devil had heard my prayer and had
+indeed made me his own. That frightened me for a moment. When I wrote to
+you and said we were coming here and you hurried back, I can't describe
+to you the fear that overcame me when I first entered this hollow where
+you lived. Several times I'd tried to come down before you arrived here,
+but I'd always been afraid, and that was why the first night I brought
+Mark with me."
+
+"That long-legged prig and puppy," grunted the squire.
+
+Mark could have shouted for joy when he heard this, shouted because he
+was helping with his _Paternosters_ and his _Aves_ to drive this
+ruffian out of Esther's life for ever, shouted because his long legs
+were strong enough to hold on to this yew-tree bough.
+
+"He's neither a prig nor a puppy," Esther said. "I've treated him badly
+ever since he came to live with us, and I treated him badly on your
+account, because whenever I was with him I found it harder to resist the
+pursuit of God. Now let's leave Mark out of this. Everything was in your
+favour, I tell you. I was sure that the Devil. . . ."
+
+"The Devil!" Starling interrupted. "Your Devil, dear Essie, is as
+ridiculous as your God. It's only your poor old God with his face
+painted black like the bogey man of childhood."
+
+"I was sure that the Devil," Esther repeated without seeming to hear the
+blasphemy, "had taken me for his own and given us to each other. You to
+me. Me to you, my darling. I didn't care. I was ready to burn in Hell
+for you. So, don't call me coward, for mad though you think me I was
+ready to be damned for you, and _I_ believe in damnation. You don't. Yet
+the first time I passed by this chapel on my way to meet you again after
+that endless horrible parting I had to run away from the holy influence.
+I remember that there was a black cow in the field near the gates of the
+Grange, and I waited there while Mark poked about in this chapel, waited
+in the twilight afraid to go back and tell him to hurry in case I should
+be recaptured by God and meet you only to meet you never more."
+
+"I suppose you thought my old Kerry cow was the Devil, eh?" he sneered.
+
+She paid no attention, but continued enthralled by the passion of her
+spiritual adventure.
+
+"It was no use. I couldn't come by here every day and not go back. Why,
+once I opened the Bible at hazard just to show my defiance and I read
+_Her sins which are many are forgiven for she loved much._ This must be
+the end of our love, my lover, for I can't go on. Those two stone Maries
+have brought me back to God. No more with you, my own beloved. No more,
+my darling, no more. And yet if even now with one kiss you could give me
+strength to sin I should rejoice. But they have made my lips as cold as
+their own, and my arms that once knew how to clasp you to my heart they
+have lifted up to Heaven like their own. I am going into a convent at
+once, where until I die I shall pray for you, my own love."
+
+The birds no longer sang nor twittered nor cheeped in the thickets
+around, but all passion throbbed in the voice of Esther when she spoke
+these words. She stood there with her hair in disarray transfigured like
+a tree in autumn on which the sunlight shines when the gale has died,
+but from which the leaves will soon fall because winter is at hand. Yet
+her lover was so little moved by her ordeal that he went back to
+mouthing his blasphemies.
+
+"Go then," he shouted. "But these two stone dolls shall not have power
+to drive my next mistress into folly. Wasn't Mary Magdalene a sinner?
+Didn't she fall in love with Christ? Of course, she did! And I'll make
+an example of her just as Christians make an example of all women who
+love much."
+
+The squire pulled himself up by the ivy and struck the image of St. Mary
+Magdalene on the face.
+
+"When you pray for me, dear Essie, in your convent of greensick women,
+don't forget that your patron saint was kicked from her pedestal by your
+lover."
+
+Starling was as good as his word; but the effort he made to overthrow
+the saint carried him with it; his foot catching in the ivy fell head
+downward and striking upon a stone was killed.
+
+Mark hesitated before he jumped down from his bough, because he dreaded
+to add to Esther's despair the thought of his having overheard all that
+went before. But seeing her in the sunlight now filled again with the
+voices of birds, seeing her blue eyes staring in horror and the nervous
+twitching of her hands he felt that the shock of his irruption might
+save her reason and in a moment he was standing beside her looking down
+at the dead man.
+
+"Let me die too," she cried.
+
+Mark found himself answering in a kind of inspiration:
+
+"No, Esther, you must live to pray for his soul."
+
+"He was struck dead for his blasphemy. He is in Hell. Of what use to
+pray for his soul?"
+
+"But Esther while he was falling, even in that second, he had time to
+repent. Live, Esther. Live to pray for him."
+
+Mark was overcome with a desire to laugh at the stilted way in which he
+was talking, and, from the suppression of the desire, to laugh wildly at
+everything in the scene, and not least at the comic death of Will
+Starling, even at the corpse itself lying with a broken neck at his
+feet. By an effort of will he regained control of his muscles, and the
+tension of the last half hour finding no relief in bodily relaxation was
+stamped ineffaceably upon his mind to take its place with that afternoon
+in his father's study at the Lima Street Mission which first inspired
+him with dread of the sexual relation of man to woman, a dread that was
+now made permanent by what he had endured on the bough of that yew-tree.
+
+Thanks to Mark's intervention the business was explained without
+scandal; nobody doubted that the squire of Rushbrooke Grange died a
+martyr to his dislike of ivy's encroaching upon ancient images. Esther's
+stormy soul took refuge in a convent, and there it seemed at peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SCHOLARSHIP
+
+
+The encounter between Esther and Will Starling had the effect of
+strengthening Mark's intention to be celibate. He never imagined himself
+as a possible protagonist in such a scene; but the impression of that
+earlier encounter between his mother and father which gave him a horror
+of human love was now renewed. It was renewed, moreover, with the light
+of a miracle to throw it into high relief. And this miracle could not be
+explained away as a coincidence, but was an old-fashioned miracle that
+required no psychical buttressing, a hard and fast miracle able to
+withstand any criticism. It was a pity that out of regard for Esther he
+could not publish it for the encouragement of the faithful and the
+confusion of the unbelievers.
+
+The miracle of St. Mary Magdalene's intervention on his seventeenth
+birthday was the last violent impression of Mark's boyhood.
+Thenceforward life moved placidly through the changing weeks of a
+country calendar until the date of the scholarship examination held by
+the group of colleges that contained St. Mary's, the college he aspired
+to enter, but for which he failed to win even an exhibition. Mr. Ogilvie
+was rather glad, for he had been worried how Mark was going to support
+himself for three or four years at an expensive college like St. Mary's.
+But when Mark was no more successful with another group of colleges, his
+tutors began to be alarmed, wondering if their method of teaching Latin
+and Greek lacked the tradition of the public school necessary to
+success.
+
+"Oh, no, it's obviously my fault," said Mark. "I expect I go to pieces
+in examinations, or perhaps I'm not intended to go to Oxford."
+
+"I beg you, my dear boy," said the Rector a little irritably, "not to
+apply such a loose fatalism to your career. What will you do if you
+don't go to the University?"
+
+"It's not absolutely essential for a priest to have been to the
+University," Mark argued.
+
+"No, but in your case I think it's highly advisable. You haven't had a
+public school education, and inasmuch as I stand to you _in loco
+parentis_ I should consider myself most culpable if I didn't do
+everything possible to give you a fair start. You haven't got a very
+large sum of money to launch yourself upon the world, and I want you to
+spend what you have to the best advantage. Of course, if you can't get a
+scholarship, you can't and that's the end of it. But, rather than that
+you should miss the University I will supplement from my own savings
+enough to carry you through three years as a commoner."
+
+Tears stood in Mark's eyes.
+
+"You've already been far too generous," he said. "You shan't spend any
+more on me. I'm sorry I talked in that foolish way. It was really only a
+kind of affectation of indifference. I'm feeling pretty sore with myself
+for being such a failure; but I'll have another shot and I hope I shall
+do better."
+
+Mark as a last chance tried for a close scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall
+for the sons of clergymen.
+
+"It's a tiny place of course," said the Rector. "But it's authentic
+Oxford, and in some ways perhaps you would be happier at a very small
+college. Certainly you'd find your money went much further."
+
+The examination was held in the Easter vacation, and when Mark arrived
+at the college he found only one other candidate besides himself. St.
+Osmund's Hall with its miniature quadrangle, miniature hall, miniature
+chapel, empty of undergraduates and with only the Principal and a couple
+of tutors in residence, was more like an ancient almshouse than an
+Oxford college. Mark and his rival, a raw-boned youth called Emmett who
+was afflicted with paroxysms of stammering, moved about the precincts
+upon tiptoe like people trespassing from a high road.
+
+On their first evening the two candidates were invited to dine with the
+Principal, who read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner, only
+pausing from their perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr.
+Lidderdale or Mr. Emmett would not take another glass of wine. After
+dinner they sat in his library where the Principal addressed himself to
+the evidently uncongenial task of estimating the comparative fitness of
+his two guests to receive Mr. Tweedle's bounty. The Reverend Thomas
+Tweedle was a benevolent parson of the eighteenth century who by his
+will had provided the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman
+for four years. Mark was shy enough under the Principal's courtly
+inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each time he was asked the
+simplest question about his tastes or his ambitions. His tongue
+appearing like a disturbed mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an
+agonized endeavour to give utterance to such familiar words as "yes" or
+"no." Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back at all
+and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest of his life with it
+protruding before him or submit it to amputation and become a mute. When
+the ordeal with the Principal was over and the two guests were strolling
+back across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally and
+without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer must have had
+upon the Principal. Mark did his best to reassure poor Emmett.
+
+"Really," he said, "it was scarcely noticeable to anybody else. You
+noticed it, because you felt your tongue getting wedged like that
+between your teeth; but other people would hardly have noticed it at
+all. When the Principal asked you if you were going to take Holy Orders
+yourself, I'm sure he only thought you hadn't quite made up your mind
+yet."
+
+"But I'm sure he did notice something," poor Emmett bewailed. "Because
+he began to hum."
+
+"Well, but he was always humming," said Mark. "He hummed all through
+dinner while he was reading those book catalogues."
+
+"It's very kind of you, Lidderdale," said Emmett, "to make the best of
+it for me, but I'm not such a fool as I look, and the Principal
+certainly hummed six times as loud whenever he asked me a question as
+he did over those catalogues. I know what I look like when I get into
+one of those states. I once caught sight of myself in a glass by
+accident, and now whenever my tongue gets caught up like that I'm
+wondering all the time why everybody doesn't get up and run out of the
+room."
+
+"But I assure you," Mark persisted, "that little things like that--"
+
+"Little things like that!" Emmett interrupted furiously. "It's all very
+well for you, Lidderdale, to talk about little things like that. If you
+had a tongue like mine which seems to get bigger instead of smaller
+every year, you'd feel very differently."
+
+"But people always grow out of stammering," Mark pointed out.
+
+"Thanks very much," said Emmett bitterly, "but where shall I be by the
+time I've grown out of it? You don't suppose I shall win this
+scholarship, do you, after they've seen me gibbering and mouthing at
+them like that? But if only I could manage somehow to get to Oxford I
+should have a chance of being ordained, and--" he broke off, perhaps
+unwilling to embarrass his rival by any more lamentations.
+
+"Do forget about this evening," Mark begged, "and come up to my room and
+have a talk before you turn in."
+
+"No, thanks very much," said Emmett. "I must sit up and do some work.
+We've got that general knowledge paper to-morrow morning."
+
+"But you won't be able to acquire much more general knowledge in one
+evening," Mark protested.
+
+"I might," said Emmett darkly. "I noticed a Whitaker's almanack in the
+rooms I have. My only chance to get this scholarship is to do really
+well in my papers; and though I know it's no good and that this is my
+last chance, I'm not going to neglect anything that could possibly help.
+I've got a splendid memory for statistics, and if they'll only ask a few
+statistics in the general knowledge paper I may have some luck
+to-morrow. Good-night, Lidderdale, I'm sorry to have inflicted myself on
+you like this."
+
+Emmett hurried away up the staircase leading to his room and left his
+rival standing on the moonlit grass of the quadrangle. Mark was turning
+toward his own staircase when he heard a window open above and Emmett's
+voice:
+
+"I've found another Whitaker of the year before," it proclaimed. "I'll
+read that, and you'd better read this year's. If by any chance I did win
+this scholarship, I shouldn't like to think I'd taken an unfair
+advantage of you, Lidderdale."
+
+"Thanks very much, Emmett," said Mark. "But I think I'll have a shot at
+getting to bed early."
+
+"Ah, you're not worrying," said Emmett gloomily, retiring from the
+window.
+
+When Mark was sitting by the fire in his room and thinking over the
+dinner with the Principal and poor Emmett's stammering and poor Emmett's
+words in the quad afterwards, he began to imagine what it would mean to
+poor Emmett if he failed to win the scholarship. Mark had not been so
+successful himself in these examinations as to justify a grand
+self-confidence; but he could not regard Emmett as a dangerous
+competitor. Had he the right in view of Emmett's handicap to accept this
+scholarship at his expense? To be sure, he might urge on his own behalf
+that without it he should himself be debarred from Oxford. What would
+the loss of it mean? It would mean, first of all, that Mr. Ogilvie would
+make the financial effort to maintain him for three years as a commoner,
+an effort which he could ill afford to make and which Mark had not the
+slightest intention of allowing him to make. It would mean, next, that
+he should have to occupy himself during the years before his ordination
+with some kind of work among people. He obviously could not go on
+reading theology at Wych-on-the-Wold until he went to Glastonbury. Such
+an existence, however attractive, was no preparation for the active life
+of a priest. It would mean, thirdly, a great disappointment to his
+friend and patron, and considering the social claims of the Church of
+England it would mean a handicap for himself. There was everything to be
+said for winning this scholarship, nothing to be said against it on the
+grounds of expediency. On the grounds of expediency, no, but on other
+grounds? Should he not be playing the better part if he allowed Emmett
+to win? No doubt all that was implied in the necessity for him to win a
+scholarship was equally implied in the necessity for Emmett to win one.
+It was obvious that Emmett was no better off than himself; it was
+obvious that Emmett was competing in a kind of despair. Mark remembered
+how a few minutes ago his rival had offered him this year's Whitaker,
+keeping for himself last year's almanack. Looked at from the point of
+view of Emmett who really believed that something might be gained at
+this eleventh hour from a study of the more recent volume, it had been a
+fine piece of self-denial. It showed that Emmett had Christian talents
+which surely ought not to be wasted because he was handicapped by a
+stammer.
+
+The spell that Oxford had already cast on Mark, the glamour of the
+firelight on the walls and raftered ceiling of this room haunted by
+centuries of youthful hope, did not persuade him how foolish it was to
+surrender all this. On the contrary, this prospect of Oxford so
+beautiful in the firelight within, so fair in the moonlight without,
+impelled him to renounce it, and the very strength of his temptation to
+enjoy all this by winning the scholarship helped him to make up his mind
+to lose it. But how? The obvious course was to send in idiotic answers
+for the rest of his papers. Yet examinations were so mysterious that
+when he thought he was being most idiotic he might actually be gaining
+his best marks. Moreover, the examiners might ascribe his answers to ill
+health, to some sudden attack of nerves, especially if his papers to-day
+had been tolerably good. Looking back at the Principal's attitude after
+dinner that night, Mark could not help feeling that there had been
+something in his manner which had clearly shown a determination not to
+award the scholarship to poor Emmett if it could possibly be avoided.
+The safest way would be to escape to-morrow morning, put up at some
+country inn for the next two days, and go back to Wych-on-the-Wold; but
+if he did that, the college authorities might write to Mr. Ogilvie to
+demand the reason for such extraordinary behaviour. And how should he
+explain it? If he really intended to deny himself, he must take care
+that nobody knew he was doing so. It would give him an air of
+unbearable condescension, should it transpire that he had deliberately
+surrendered his scholarship to Emmett. Moreover, poor Emmett would be so
+dreadfully mortified if he found out. No, he must complete his papers,
+do them as badly as he possibly could, and leave the result to the
+wisdom of God. If God wished Emmett to stammer forth His praises and
+stutter His precepts from the pulpit, God would know how to manage that
+seemingly so intractable Principal. Or God might hear his prayers and
+cure poor Emmett of his impediment. Mark wondered to what saint was
+entrusted the patronage of stammerers; but he could not remember. The
+man in whose rooms he was lodging possessed very few books, and those
+few were mostly detective stories.
+
+It amused Mark to make a fool of himself next morning in the general
+knowledge paper. He flattered himself that no candidate for a
+scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall had ever shown such black ignorance of
+the facts of every-day life. Had he been dropped from Mars two days
+before, he could scarcely have shown less knowledge of the Earth. Mark
+tried to convey an impression that he had been injudiciously crammed
+with Latin and Greek, and in the afternoon he produced a Latin prose
+that would have revolted the easy conscience of a fourth form boy.
+Finally, on the third day, in an unseen passage set from the Georgics he
+translated _tonsisque ferunt mantelia villis_ by _having pulled down the
+villas (i. e. literally shaved) they carry off the mantelpieces_ which
+he followed up with translating _Maeonii carchesia Bacchi_ as the _lees
+of Maeonian wine (i.e. literally carcases of Maeonian Bacchus)_.
+
+"I say, Lidderdale," said Emmett, when they came out of the lecture room
+where the examination was being held. "I had a tremendous piece of luck
+this afternoon."
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"Yes, I've just been reading the fourth Georgics last term, and I don't
+think I made a single mistake in that unseen."
+
+"Good work," said Mark.
+
+"I wonder when they'll let us know who's got the scholarship," said
+Emmett. "But of course you've won," he added with a sigh.
+
+"I did very badly both yesterday and to-day."
+
+"Oh, you're only saying that to encourage me," Emmett sighed. "It sounds
+a dreadful thing to say and I ought not to say it because it'll make you
+uncomfortable, but if I don't succeed, I really think I shall kill
+myself."
+
+"All right, that's a bargain," Mark laughed; and when his rival shook
+hands with him at parting he felt that poor Emmett was going home to
+Rutland convinced that Mark was just as hard-hearted as the rest of the
+world and just as ready to laugh at his misfortune.
+
+It was Saturday when the examination was finished, and Mark wished he
+could be granted the privilege of staying over Sunday in college. He had
+no regrets for what he had done; he was content to let this experience
+be all that he should ever intimately gain of Oxford; but he should like
+to have the courage to accost one of the tutors and to tell him that
+being convinced he should never come to Oxford again he desired the
+privilege of remaining until Monday morning, so that he might
+crystallize in that short space of time an impression which, had he been
+successful in gaining the scholarship, would have been spread over four
+years. Mark was not indulging in sentiment; he really felt that by the
+intensity of the emotion with which he would live those twenty-four
+hours he should be able to achieve for himself as much as he should
+achieve in four years. So far as the world was concerned, this
+experience would be valueless; for himself it would be beyond price. So
+far as the world was concerned, he would never have been to Oxford; but
+could he be granted this privilege, Oxford would live for ever in his
+heart, a refuge and a meditation until the grave. Yet this coveted
+experience must be granted from without to make it a perfect experience.
+To ask and to be refused leave to stay till Monday would destroy for him
+the value of what he had already experienced in three days' residence;
+even to ask and to be granted the privilege would spoil it in
+retrospect. He went down the stairs from his room and stood in the
+little quadrangle, telling himself that at any rate he might postpone
+his departure until twilight and walk the seven miles from Shipcot to
+Wych-on-the-Wold. While he was on his way to notify the porter of the
+time of his departure he met the Principal, who stopped him and asked
+how he had got on with his papers. Mark wondered if the Principal had
+been told about his lamentable performance and was making inquiries on
+his own account to find out if the unsuccessful candidate really was a
+lunatic.
+
+"Rather badly, I'm afraid, sir."
+
+"Well, I shall see you at dinner to-night," said the Principal
+dismissing Mark with a gesture before he had time even to look
+surprised. This was a new perplexity, for Mark divined from the
+Principal's manner that he had entirely forgotten that the scholarship
+examination was over and that the candidates had already dined with him.
+He went into the lodge and asked the porter's advice.
+
+"The Principal's a most absent-minded gentleman," said the porter. "Most
+absent-minded, he is. He's the talk of Oxford sometimes is the
+Principal. What do you think he went and did only last term. Why, he was
+having some of the senior men to tea and was going to put some coal on
+the fire with the tongs and some sugar in his cup. Bothered if he didn't
+put the sugar in the fire and a lump of coal in his cup. It didn't so
+much matter him putting sugar in the fire. That's all according, as they
+say. But fancy--well, I tell you we had a good laugh over it in the
+lodge when the gentlemen came out and told me."
+
+"Ought I to explain that I've already dined with him?" Mark asked.
+
+"Are you in any what you might call immediate hurry to get away?" the
+porter asked judicially.
+
+"I'm in no hurry at all. I'd like to stay a bit longer."
+
+"Then you'd better go to dinner with him again to-night and stay in
+college over the Sunday. I'll take it upon myself to explain to the Dean
+why you're still here. If it had been tea I should have said 'don't
+bother about it,' but dinner's another matter, isn't it? And he always
+has dinner laid for two or more in case he's asked anybody and
+forgotten."
+
+Thus it came about that for the second time Mark dined with the
+Principal, who disconcerted him by saying when he arrived:
+
+"I remember now that you dined with me the night before last. You should
+have told me. I forget these things. But never mind, you'd better stay
+now you're here."
+
+The Principal read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner just
+as he had done two nights ago, and he only interrupted his perusal to
+inquire in courtly tones if Mark would take another glass of wine. The
+only difference between now and the former occasion was the absence of
+poor Emmett and his paroxysms. After dinner with some misgivings if he
+ought not to leave his host to himself Mark followed him upstairs to the
+library. The principal was one of those scholars who live in an
+atmosphere of their own given off by old calf-bound volumes and who
+apparently can only inhale the air of the world in which ordinary men
+move when they are smoking their battered old pipes. Mark sitting
+opposite to him by the fireside was tempted to pour out the history of
+himself and Emmett, to explain how he had come to make such a mess of
+the examination. Perhaps if the Principal had alluded to his papers Mark
+would have found the courage to talk about himself; but the Principal
+was apparently unaware that his guest had any ambitions to enter St.
+Osmund's Hall, and whatever questions he asked related to the ancient
+folios and quartos he took down in turn from his shelves. A clock struck
+ten in the moonlight without, and Mark rose to go. He felt a pang as he
+walked from the cloudy room and looked for the last time at that tall
+remote scholar, who had forgotten his guest's existence at the moment he
+ceased to shake his hand and who by the time he had reached the doorway
+was lost again in the deeps of the crabbed volume resting upon his
+knees. Mark sighed as he closed the library door behind him, for he knew
+that he was shutting out a world. But when he stood in the small silver
+quadrangle Mark was glad that he had not given way to the temptation of
+confiding in the Principal. It would have been a feeble end to his first
+denial of self. He was sure that he had done right in surrendering his
+place to Emmett, for was not the unexpected opportunity to spend these
+few more hours in Oxford a sign of God's approval? _Bright as the
+glimpses of eternity to saints accorded in their mortal hour._ Such was
+Oxford to-night.
+
+Mark sat for a long while at the open window of his room until the moon
+had passed on her way and the quadrangle was in shadow; and while he sat
+there he was conscious of how many people had inhabited this small
+quadrangle and of how they too had passed on their way like the moon,
+leaving behind them no more than he should leave behind from this one
+hour of rapture, no more than the moon had left of her silver upon the
+dim grass below.
+
+Mark was not given to gazing at himself in mirrors, but he looked at
+himself that night in the mirror of the tiny bedroom, into which the
+April air came up sweet and frore from the watermeadows of the Cherwell
+close at hand.
+
+"What will you do now?" he asked his reflection. "Yet, you have such a
+dark ecclesiastical face that I'm sure you'll be a priest whether you go
+to Oxford or not."
+
+Mark was right in supposing his countenance to be ecclesiastical. But it
+was something more than that: it was religious. Even already, when he
+was barely eighteen, the high cheekbones and deepset burning eyes gave
+him an ascetic look, while the habit of prayer and meditation had added
+to his expression a steadfast purpose that is rarely seen in people as
+young as him. What his face lacked were those contours that come from
+association with humanity; the ripeness that is bestowed by long
+tolerance of folly, the mellowness that has survived the icy winds of
+disillusion. It was the absence of these contours that made Mark think
+his face so ecclesiastical; however, if at eighteen he had possessed
+contours and soft curves, they would have been nothing but the contours
+and soft curves of that rose, youth; and this ecclesiastical bonyness
+would not fade and fall as swiftly as that.
+
+Mark turned from the glass in sudden irritation at his selfishness in
+speculating about his appearance and his future, when in a short time he
+should have to break the news to his guardian that he had thrown away
+for a kindly impulse the fruit of so many months of diligence and care.
+
+"What am I going to say to Ogilvie?" he exclaimed. "I can't go back to
+Wych and live there in pleasant idleness until it's time to go to
+Glastonbury. I must have some scheme for the immediate future."
+
+In bed when the light was out and darkness made the most fantastic
+project appear practical, Mark had an inspiration to take the habit of a
+preaching friar. Why should he not persuade Dorward to join him?
+Together they would tramp the English country, compelling even the
+dullest yokels to hear the word of God . . . discalced . . . over hill,
+down dale . . . telling stories of the saints and martyrs in remote inns
+. . . deep lanes . . . the butterflies and the birds . . . Dorward
+should say Mass in the heart of great woods . . . over hill, down dale
+. . . discalced . . . preaching to men of Christ. . . .
+
+Mark fell asleep.
+
+In the morning Mark heard Mass at the church of the Cowley Fathers, a
+strengthening experience, because the Gregorian there so strictly and so
+austerely chanted without any consideration for sentimental humanity
+possessed that very effect of liberating and purifying spirit held in
+the bonds of flesh which is conveyed by the wind blowing through a grove
+of pines or by waves quiring below a rocky shore.
+
+If Mark had had the least inclination to be sorry for himself and
+indulge in the flattery of regret, it vanished in this music. Rolling
+down through time on the billows of the mighty Gregorian it were as
+grotesque to pity oneself as it were for an Arctic explorer to build a
+snowman for company at the North Pole.
+
+Mark came out of St. John's, Cowley, into the suburban prettiness of
+Iffley Road, where men and women in their Sunday best tripped along in
+the April sunlight, tripped along in their Sunday best like newly
+hatched butterflies and beetles. Mark went in and out of colleges all
+day long, forgetting about the problem of his immediate future just as
+he forgot that the people in the sunny streets were not really
+butterflies and beetles. At twilight he decided to attend Evensong at
+St. Barnabas'. Perhaps the folk in the sunny April streets had turned
+his thoughts unconsciously toward the simple aspirations of simple
+human nature. He felt when he came into the warm candle-lit church like
+one who has voyaged far and is glad to be at home again. How everybody
+sang together that night, and how pleasant Mark found this
+congregational outburst. It was all so jolly that if the organist had
+suddenly turned round like an Italian organ-grinder and kissed his
+fingers to the congregation, his action would have seemed perfectly
+appropriate. Even during the _Magnificat_, when the altar was being
+censed, the tinkling of the thurible reminded Mark of a tambourine; and
+the lighting and extinction of the candles was done with as much
+suppressed excitement as if the candles were going to shoot red and
+green stars or go leaping and cracking all round the chancel.
+
+It happened this evening that the preacher was Father Rowley, that
+famous priest of the Silchester College Mission in the great naval port
+of Chatsea. Father Rowley was a very corpulent man with a voice of such
+compassion and with an eloquence so simple that when he ascended into
+the pulpit, closed his eyes, and began to speak, his listeners
+involuntarily closed their eyes and followed that voice whithersoever it
+led them. He neither changed the expression of his face nor made use of
+dramatic gestures; he scarcely varied his tone, yet he could keep a
+congregation breathlessly attentive for an hour. Although he seemed to
+be speaking in a kind of trance, it was evident that he was unusually
+conscious of his hearers, for if by chance some pious woman coughed or
+turned the pages of a prayer-book he would hold up the thread of his
+sermon and without any change of tone reprove her. It was strange to
+watch him at such a moment, his eyes still tightly shut and yet giving
+the impression of looking directly at the offending member of the
+congregation. This evening he was preaching about a naval disaster which
+had lately occurred, the sinking of a great battleship by another great
+battleship through a wrong signal. He was describing the scene when the
+news reached Chatsea, telling of the sweethearts and wives of the lost
+bluejackets who waited hoping against hope to hear that their loved ones
+had escaped death and hearing nearly always the worst news.
+
+"So many of our own dear bluejackets and marines, some of whom only
+last Christmas had been eating their plum duff at our Christmas dinner,
+so many of my own dear boys whom I prepared for Confirmation, whose
+first Confession I had heard, and to whom I had given for the first time
+the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
+
+He spoke too of what it meant in the future of material suffering on top
+of their mental agony. He asked for money to help these women
+immediately, and he spoke fiercely of the Admiralty red tape and of the
+obstruction of the official commission appointed to administer the
+relief fund.
+
+The preacher went on to tell stories from the lives of these boys,
+finding in each of them some illustration of a Christian virtue and
+conveying to his listeners a sense of the extraordinary preciousness of
+human life, so that there was no one who heard him but was fain to weep
+for those young bluejackets and marines taken in their prime. He
+inspired in Mark a sense of shame that he had ever thought of people in
+the aggregate, that he had ever walked along a crowded street without
+perceiving the importance of every single human being that helped to
+compose its variety. While he sat there listening to the Missioner and
+watching the large tears roll slowly down his cheeks from beneath the
+closed lids, Mark wondered how he could have dared to suppose last night
+that he was qualified to become a friar and preach the Gospel to the
+poor. While Father Rowley was speaking, he began to apprehend that
+before he could aspire to do that he must himself first of all learn
+about Christ from those very poor whom he had planned to convert.
+
+This sermon was another milestone in Mark's religious life. It
+discovered in him a hidden treasure of humility, and it taught him to
+build upon the rock of human nature. He divined the true meaning of Our
+Lord's words to St. Peter: _Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build
+my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it._ John was
+the disciple whom Jesus loved, but he chose Peter with all his failings
+and all his follies, with his weakness and his cowardice and his vanity.
+He chose Peter, the bedrock of human nature, and to him he gave the keys
+of Heaven.
+
+Mark knew that somehow he must pluck up courage to ask Father Rowley to
+let him come and work under him at Chatsea. He was sure that if he could
+only make him grasp the spirit in which he would offer himself, the
+spirit of complete humility devoid of any kind of thought that he was
+likely to be of the least use to the Mission, Father Rowley might accept
+his oblation. He would have liked to wait behind after Evensong and
+approach the Missioner directly, so that before speaking to Mr. Ogilvie
+he might know what chance the offer had of being accepted; but he
+decided against this course, because he felt that Father Rowley's
+compassion might be embarrassed if he had to refuse his request, a point
+of view that was characteristic of the mood roused in him by the sermon.
+He went back to sleep for the last time in an Oxford college, profoundly
+reassured of the rightness of his action in giving up the scholarship to
+Emmett, although, which was characteristic of his new mood, he had by
+this time begun to tell himself that he had really done nothing at all
+and that probably in any case Emmett would have been the chosen scholar.
+
+If Mark had still any doubts of his behaviour, they would have vanished
+when on getting into the train for Shipcot he found himself in an
+otherwise empty third-class smoking carriage opposite Father Rowley
+himself, who with a small black bag beside him, so small that Mark
+wondered how it could possibly contain the night attire of so fat a man,
+was sitting back in the corner with a large pipe in his mouth. He was
+wearing one of those square felt hats sometimes seen on the heads of
+farmers, and if one had only seen his head and hat without the grubby
+clerical attire beneath one might have guessed him to be a farmer. Mark
+noticed now that his eyes of a limpid blue were like a child's, and he
+realized that in his voice while he was preaching there had been the
+same sweet gravity of childhood. Just at this moment Father Rowley
+caught sight of someone he knew on the platform and shouting from the
+window of the compartment he attracted the attention of a young man
+wearing an Old Siltonian tie.
+
+"My dear man," he cried, "how are you? I've just made a most idiotic
+mistake. I got it into my head that I should be preaching here on the
+first Sunday in term and was looking forward to seeing so many
+Silchester men. I can't think how I came to make such a muddle."
+
+Father Rowley's shoulders filled up all the space of the window, so that
+Mark only heard scattered fragments of the conversation, which was
+mostly about Silchester and the Siltonians he had hoped to see at
+Oxford.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear man, good-bye," the Missioner shouted, as the train
+moved out of the station. "Come down and see us soon at Chatsea. The
+more of you men who come, the more we shall be pleased."
+
+Mark's heart leapt at these words, which seemed of good omen to his own
+suit. When Father Rowley was ensconced in his corner and once more
+puffing away at his pipe, Mark thought how ridiculous it would sound to
+say that he had heard him preach last night at St. Barnabas' and that,
+having been much moved by the sermon, he was anxious to be taken on at
+St. Agnes' as a lay helper. He wished that Father Rowley would make some
+remark to him that would lead up to his request, but all that Father
+Rowley said was:
+
+"This is a slow train to Birmingham, isn't it?"
+
+This led to a long conversation about trains, and slow though this one
+might be it was going much too fast for Mark, who would be at Shipcot in
+another twenty minutes without having taken any advantage of his lucky
+encounter.
+
+"Are you up at Oxford?" the priest at last inquired.
+
+It was now or never; and Mark took the opportunity given him by that one
+question to tell Father Rowley twenty disjointed facts about his life,
+which ended with a request to be allowed to come and work at Chatsea.
+
+"You can come and see us whenever you like," said the Missioner.
+
+"But I don't want just to come and pay a visit," said Mark. "I really do
+want to be given something to do, and I shan't be any expense. I only
+want to keep enough money to go to Glastonbury in four years' time. If
+you'd only see how I got on for a month. I don't pretend I can be of any
+help to you. I don't suppose I can. But I do so tremendously want you
+to help me."
+
+"Who did you say your father was?"
+
+"Lidderdale, James Lidderdale. He was priest-in-charge of the Lima
+Street Mission, which belonged to St. Simon's, Notting Hill, in those
+days. St. Wilfred's, Notting Dale, it is now."
+
+"Lidderdale," Father Rowley echoed. "I knew him. I knew him well. Lima
+Street. Viner's there now, a dear good fellow. So you're Lidderdale's
+son?"
+
+"I say, here's my station," Mark exclaimed in despair, "and you haven't
+said whether I can come or not."
+
+"Come down on Tuesday week," said Father Rowley. "Hurry up, or you'll
+get carried on to the next station."
+
+Mark waved his farewell, and he knew, as he drove back on the omnibus
+over the rolling wold to Wych that he had this morning won something
+much better than a scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+CHATSEA
+
+
+When Mark had been exactly a week at Chatsea he celebrated his
+eighteenth birthday by writing a long letter to the Rector of Wych:
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     St. Mark's Day.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     Thank you very much for sending me the money. I've handed it over
+     to a splendid fellow called Gurney who keeps all the accounts
+     (private or otherwise) in the Mission House. Poor chap, he's
+     desperately ill with asthma, and nobody thinks he can live much
+     longer. He suffers tortures, particularly at night, and as I sleep
+     in the next room I can hear him.
+
+     You mustn't think me inconsiderate because I haven't written
+     sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had seen a bit of this place
+     before I wrote to you so that you might have some idea what I was
+     doing and be able to realize that it is the one and only place
+     where I ought to be at the moment.
+
+     But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I want to try
+     to express a little of what your kindness has meant to me during
+     the last two years. I look back at myself just before my sixteenth
+     birthday when I was feeling that I should have to run away to sea
+     or do something mad in order to escape that solicitor's office, and
+     I simply gasp! What and where should I be now if it hadn't been for
+     you? You have always made light of the burden I must have been, and
+     though I have tried to show you my gratitude I'm afraid it hasn't
+     been very successful. I'm not being very successful now in putting
+     it into words. I know my failure to gain a scholarship at Oxford
+     has been a great disappointment to you, especially after you had
+     worked so hard yourself to coach me. Please don't be anxious about
+     my letting my books go to the wall here. I had a talk about this
+     with Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to do
+     in the district must only be done when I have a good morning's work
+     with my books behind me. I quite realize the importance of a
+     priest's education. One of the assistant priests here, a man called
+     Snaith, took a good degree at Cambridge both in classics and
+     theology, so I shall have somebody to keep me on the lines. If I
+     stay here three years and then have two years at Glastonbury I
+     don't honestly think that I shall start off much handicapped by
+     having missed both public school and university. I expect you're
+     smiling to read after one week of my staying here three years! But
+     I assure you that the moment I sat down to supper on the evening of
+     my arrival I felt at home. I think at first they all thought I was
+     an eager young Ritualist, but when they found that they didn't get
+     any rises out of ragging me, they shut up.
+
+     This house is a most extraordinary place. It is an old
+     Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has been made
+     into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty or ever likely
+     to be empty so far as I can see! I should think it must be rather
+     like what the guest house of a monastery used to be like in the old
+     days before the Reformation. The ground floor of the chapel has
+     been turned into a gymnasium, and twice a week the apparatus is
+     cleared away and we have a dance. Every other evening it's used
+     furiously by Father Rowley's "boys." They're such a jolly lot, and
+     most of them splendid gymnasts. Quite a few have become
+     professional acrobats since they opened the gymnasium. The first
+     morning after my arrival I asked Father Rowley if he'd got anything
+     special for me to do and he told me to catalogue the books in his
+     library. Everybody laughed at this, and I thought at first that
+     some joke was intended, but when I got to his room I found it
+     really was in utter confusion with masses of books lying about
+     everywhere. So I set to work pretty hard and after about three days
+     I got them catalogued and in good order. When I told him I had
+     finished he looked very surprised, and a solemn visit of inspection
+     was ordered. As the room was looking quite tidy at last, I didn't
+     mind. I've realized since that Father Rowley always sets people the
+     task of cataloguing and arranging his books when he doubts if they
+     are really worth their salt, and now he complains that I have
+     spoilt one of his best ordeals for slackers. I said to him that he
+     needn't be afraid because from what I could see of the way he
+     treated books they would be just as untidy as ever in another week.
+     Everybody laughed, though I was afraid at first they might consider
+     it rather cheek my talking like this, but you've got to stand up
+     for yourself here because there never was such a place for turning
+     a man inside out. It's a real discipline, and I think if I manage
+     to deserve to stay here three years I shall have the right to feel
+     I've had the finest training for Holy Orders anybody could possibly
+     have.
+
+     You know enough about Father Rowley yourself to understand how
+     impossible it would be for me to give any impression of his
+     personality in a letter. I have never felt so strongly the absolute
+     goodness of anybody. I suppose that some of the great medi�val
+     saints like St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua must have been
+     like that. One reads about them and what they did, but the facts
+     one reads don't really tell anything. I always feel that what we
+     really depend on is a kind of tradition of their absolute
+     saintliness handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose
+     in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't
+     matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries
+     to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was
+     God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met
+     Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes
+     with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good
+     because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't
+     have ever been anything else but good, but I always feel that
+     people like him remain practically out of reach of the ordinary
+     person and that the goodness is all their own and dies with them
+     just as it was born with them. What I feel about a man like Father
+     Rowley is that he probably had a tremendous fight to be good. Of
+     course, I may be perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at
+     all. I know one of the people at the Mission House told me that,
+     though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or more
+     enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up both at St.
+     Agnes merely to set an example to weak people. I feel that his
+     goodness was with such energy fought for that it now exists as a
+     kind of complete thing and will go on existing when Father Rowley
+     himself is dead. I begin to understand the doctrine of the treasury
+     of merit. I remember you once told me how grateful I ought to be to
+     God because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack
+     most boys. I am grateful; but at the same time I can't claim any
+     merit for it! The only time in my life when I might have acquired
+     any merit was when I was at Haverton House. Instead of doing that,
+     I just dried up, and if I hadn't had that wonderful experience at
+     Whitsuntide in Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I
+     should be spiritually dead by now.
+
+     This is a very long letter, and I don't seem to have left myself
+     any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It reminds me of my
+     father's mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new
+     church is being built almost next door just as one was being built
+     in Lima Street. I went to the children's Mass last Sunday, and I
+     seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I
+     thought to myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for
+     his soul. Will you do so now next time you say a black Mass? This
+     is a wretched letter, and it doesn't succeed in the least in
+     expressing what I owe to you and what I already owe to Father
+     Rowley. I used to think that the Sacred Heart was a rather material
+     device for attracting the multitude, but I'm beginning to realize
+     in the atmosphere of St. Agnes' that it is a gloriously simple
+     devotion and that it is human nature's attempt to express the
+     inexpressible. I'll write to you again next week. Please give my
+     love to everybody at the Rectory.
+
+     Always your most affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+Father Rowley had been at St. Agnes' seven or eight years when Mark
+found himself attached to the Mission, in which time he had transformed
+the district completely. It was a small parish (actually of course it
+was not a parish at all, although it was fast qualifying to become one)
+of something over a thousand small houses, few of which were less than a
+century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after
+bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque
+quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but
+heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of
+its overcrowded and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness
+of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets
+and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always in view, and the windows of
+the pawnbrokers were filled with the relics of long voyages, with idols
+and large shells, with savage weapons and the handiwork of remote
+islands.
+
+When Mark came to live in Keppel Street, most of the brothels and many
+of the public houses had been eliminated from the district, and in their
+place flourished various clubs and guilds. The services in the church
+were crowded: there was a long roll of communicants; the civilization of
+the city of God was visible in this Chatsea slum. One or two of the lay
+helpers used to horrify Mark with stories of early days there, and when
+he seemed inclined to regret that he had arrived so late upon the scene,
+they used to tease him about his missionary spirit.
+
+"If he can't reform the people," said Cartwright, one of the lay
+helpers, a tall thin young man with a long nose and a pleasant smile,
+"he still has us to reform."
+
+"Come along, Mark Anthony," said Warrender, another lay helper, who
+after working for seven years among the poor had at last been charily
+accepted by the Bishop for ordination. "Come along. Why don't you try
+your hand on us?"
+
+"You people seem to think," said Mark, "that I've got a mania for
+reforming. I don't mean that I should like to see St. Agnes' where it
+was merely for my own personal amusement. The only thing I'm sorry about
+is that I didn't actually see the work being done."
+
+Father Rowley came in at this moment, and everybody shouted that Mark
+was going to preach a sermon.
+
+"Splendid," said the Missioner whose voice when not moved by emotion was
+rich in a natural unction that encouraged everyone round to suppose he
+was being successfully humorous, such a savour did it add to the most
+innutritious chaff. Those who were privileged to share his ordinary life
+never ceased to wonder how in the pulpit or in the confessional or at
+prayer this unction was replaced by a remote beauty of tone, a plangent
+and thrilling compassion that played upon the hearts of all who heard
+him.
+
+"Now really, Father Rowley," Mark protested. "Do I preach a great deal?
+I'm always being chaffed by Cartwright and Warrender about an alleged
+mania for reforming people, which only exists in their imagination."
+
+Indeed Mark had long ago grown out of the desire to reform or to convert
+anybody, although had he wished to keep his hand in, he could have had
+plenty of practice among the guests of the Mission House. Nobody had
+ever succeeded in laying down the exact number of casual visitors that
+could be accommodated therein. However full it appeared, there was
+always room for one more. Taking an average, day in, day out through the
+year, one might fairly say that there were always eight or nine casual
+guests in addition to the eight or nine permanent residents, of whom
+Mark was soon glad to be able to count himself one. The company was
+sufficiently mixed to have been offered as a proof to the sceptical that
+there was something after all in simple Christianity. There would
+usually be a couple of prefects from Silchester, one or two 'Varsity
+men, two or three bluejackets or marines, an odd soldier or so, a naval
+officer perhaps, a stray priest sometimes, an earnest seeker after
+Christian example often, and often a drunkard who had been dumped down
+at the door of St. Agnes' Mission House in the hope that where everybody
+else had failed Father Rowley might succeed. Then there were the tramps,
+some who had heard of a comfortable night's lodging, some who came
+whining and cringing with a pretence of religion. This last class was
+discouraged as much as possible, for one of the first rules of the
+Mission House was to show no favour to any man who claimed to be
+religious, it being Father Rowley's chief dread to make anybody's
+religion a paying concern. Sometimes a jailbird just released from
+prison would find in the Mission House an opportunity to recover his
+self-respect. But whoever the guest was, soldier, sailor, tinker,
+tailor, apothecary, ploughboy, or thief, he was judged at the Mission
+House as a man. Some of the visitors repaid their host by theft or
+fraud; but when they did, nobody uttered proverbs or platitudes about
+mistaken kindness. If one lame dog bit the hand that was helping him
+over the stile, the next dog that came limping along was helped over
+just as freely.
+
+"What right has one miserable mortal to be disillusioned by another
+miserable mortal?" Father Rowley demanded. "Our dear Lord when he was
+nailed to the cross said 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what
+they do.' He did not say, 'I am fed up with these people I have come
+down from Heaven to save. I've had enough of it. Send an angel with a
+pair of pincers to pull out these nails.'"
+
+If the Missioner's patience ever failed, it was when he had to deal with
+High Church young men who made pilgrimages to St. Agnes' because they
+had heard that this or that service was conducted there with a finer
+relish of Romanism than anywhere else at the moment in England. On one
+occasion a pietistic young creature, who brought with him his own lace
+cotta but forgot to bring his nightshirt, begged to be allowed the joy
+of serving Father Rowley at early Mass next morning. When they came back
+and were sitting round the breakfast table, this young man simpered in a
+ladylike voice:
+
+"Oh, Father, couldn't you keep your fingers closed when you give the
+_Dominus vobiscum_?"
+
+"Et cum spiritu tuo," shouted Father Rowley. "I can keep my fingers
+closed when I box your ears."
+
+And he proved it.
+
+It was a real box on the ears, so hard a blow that the ladylike young
+man burst into tears to the great indignation of a Chief Petty Officer
+staying in the Mission House, who declared that he was half in a mind to
+catch the young swab such a snitch on the conk as really would give him
+something to blubber about. Father Rowley evidently had no remorse for
+his violence, and the young man went away that afternoon saying how
+sorry he was that the legend of the good work being done at St. Agnes'
+had been so much exaggerated.
+
+Mark wrote an account of this incident, which had given him intense
+pleasure, to Mr. Ogilvie. Perhaps the Rector was afraid that Mark in his
+ambition to avoid "churchiness" was inclining toward the opposite
+extreme; or perhaps, charitable and saintly man though he was, he felt a
+pang of jealousy at Mark's unbounded admiration of his new friend; or
+perhaps it was merely that the east wind was blowing more sharply than
+usual that morning over the wold into the Rectory garden. Whatever the
+cause, his answering letter made Mark feel that the Rector did not
+appreciate Father Rowley as thoroughly as he ought.
+
+     The Rectory,
+
+     Wych-on-the-Wold.
+
+     Oxon.
+
+     Dec. 1.
+
+     My dear Mark,
+
+     I was glad to get your long and amusing letter of last week. I am
+     delighted to think that as the months go by you are finding work
+     among the poor more and more congenial. I would not for the world
+     suggest your coming back here for Christmas after what you tell me
+     of the amount of extra work it will entail for everybody in the
+     Mission House; at the same time it would be useless to pretend that
+     we shan't all be disappointed not to see you until the New Year.
+
+     On reading through your last letter again I feel just a little
+     worried lest, in the pleasure you derive from Father Rowley's
+     treatment of what was no doubt a very irritating young man, you may
+     be inclined to go to the opposite extreme and be too ready to laugh
+     at real piety when it is not accompanied by geniality and good
+     fellowship, or by an obvious zeal for good works. I know you will
+     acquit me of any desire to defend extreme "churchiness," and I have
+     no doubt you will remember one or two occasions in the past when I
+     was rather afraid that you were tending that way yourself. I am not
+     in the least criticizing Father Rowley's method of dealing with it,
+     but I am a trifle uneasy at the inordinate delight it seems to have
+     afforded you. Of course, it is intolerable for any young man
+     serving a priest at Mass to watch his fingers all the time, but I
+     don't think you have any right to assume because on this occasion
+     the young man showed himself so sensitive to mere externals that he
+     is always aware only of externals. Unfortunately a very great deal
+     of true and fervid piety exists under this apparent passion for
+     externals. Remember that the ordinary criticism by the man in the
+     street of Catholic ceremonies and of Catholic methods of worship
+     involves us all in this condemnation. I suppose that you would
+     consider yourself justified, should the circumstances permit (which
+     in this case of course they do not), in protesting against a
+     priest's not taking the Eastward Position when he said Mass. I was
+     talking to Colonel Fraser the other day, and he was telling me how
+     much he had enjoyed the ministrations of the Reverend Archibald
+     Tait, the Leicestershire cricketer, who throughout the "second
+     service" never once turned his back on the congregation, and, so
+     far as I could gather from the Colonel's description, conducted
+     this "second service" very much as a conjuror performs his tricks.
+     When I ventured to argue with the Colonel, he said to me: "That is
+     the worst of you High Churchmen, you make the ritual more important
+     than the Communion itself." All human judgments, my dear Mark, are
+     relative, and I have no doubt that this unpleasant young man (who,
+     as I have already said, was no doubt justly punished by Father
+     Rowley) may have felt the same kind of feeling in a different
+     degree that I should feel if I assisted at the jugglery of the
+     Reverend Archibald Tait. At any rate you, my dear boy, are bound to
+     credit this young man with as much sincerity as yourself, otherwise
+     you commit a sin against charity. You must acquire at least as much
+     toleration for the Ritualist as I am glad to notice you are
+     acquiring for the thief. When you are a priest yourself, and in a
+     comparatively short time you will be a priest, I do hope you won't,
+     without his experience, try to imitate Father Rowley too closely in
+     his summary treatment of what I have already I hope made myself
+     quite clear in believing to be in this case a most insufferable
+     young man. Don't misunderstand this letter. I have such great hopes
+     of you in the stormy days to come, and the stormy days are coming,
+     that I should feel I was wrong if I didn't warn you of your
+     attitude towards the merest trifles, for I shall always judge you
+     and your conduct by standards that I should be very cautious of
+     setting for most of my penitents.
+
+     Your ever affectionate,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+
+     My mother and Miriam send you much love. We miss you greatly at
+     Wych. Esther seems happy in her convent and will soon be clothed as
+     a novice.
+
+When Mark read this letter, he was prompt to admit himself in the
+wrong; but he could not bear the least implied criticism of Father
+Rowley.
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     Dec. 3.
+
+     My dear Mr. Ogilvie,
+
+     I'm afraid I must have expressed myself very badly in my last
+     letter if I gave you the least idea that Father Rowley was not
+     always charity personified. He had probably come to the conclusion
+     that the young man was not much good and no doubt he deliberately
+     made it impossible for him to stay on at the Mission House. We do
+     get an awful lot of mere loafers here; I don't suppose that anybody
+     who keeps open house can avoid getting them. After all, if the
+     young man had been worth anything he would have realized that he
+     had made a fool of himself and by the way he took his snubbing have
+     re-established himself. What he actually did was to sulk and clear
+     out with a sneer at the work done here. I'm sorry I gave you the
+     impression that I was triumphing so tremendously over his
+     discomfiture. By writing about it I probably made the incident
+     appear much more important than it really was. I've no doubt I did
+     triumph a little, and I'm afraid I shall never be able not to feel
+     rather glad when a fellow like that is put in his place. I am not
+     for a moment going to try to argue that you can carry Christian
+     charity too far. The more one meditates on the words, and actions
+     of Our Lord, the more one grasps how impossible it is to carry
+     charity too far. All the same, one owes as much charity to Father
+     Rowley as to the young man. This sounds now I have written it down
+     as if I were getting in a hit at you, and that is the worst of
+     writing letters to justify oneself. What I am trying to say is that
+     if I were to have taken up arms for the young man and supposed him
+     to be ill-used or misjudged I should be criticizing Father Rowley.
+     I think that perhaps you don't quite realize what a saint he is in
+     every way. This is my fault, no doubt, because in my letters to you
+     I have always emphasized anything that would bring into relief his
+     personality. I expect that I've been too much concerned to draw a
+     picture of him as a man, in doing which I've perhaps been
+     unsuccessful in giving you a picture of him as a priest. It's
+     always difficult to talk or write about one's intimate religious
+     feelings, and you've been the only person to whom I ever have been
+     able to talk about them. However much I admire and revere Father
+     Rowley I doubt if I could talk or write to him about myself as I do
+     to you.
+
+     Until I came here I don't think I ever quite realized all that the
+     Blessed Sacrament means. I had accepted the Sacrifice of the Mass
+     as one accepts so much in our creed, without grasping its full
+     implication. If anybody were to have put me through a catechism
+     about the dogma I should have answered with theological exactitude,
+     without any appearance of misapprehending the meaning of it; but it
+     was not until I came here that its practical reality--I don't know
+     if I'm expressing myself properly or not, I'm pretty sure I'm not;
+     I don't mean practical application and I don't mean any kind of
+     addition to my faith; perhaps what I mean is that I've learnt to
+     grasp the mystery of the Mass outside myself, outside that is to
+     say my own devotion, my own awe, as a practical fact alive to these
+     people here. Sometimes when I go to Mass I feel as people who
+     watched Our Lord with His disciples and followers must have felt. I
+     feel like one of those people who ran after Him and asked Him what
+     they could do to be saved. I feel when I look at what has been done
+     here as if I must go to each of these poor people in turn and beg
+     them to bring me to the feet of Christ, just as I suppose on the
+     shores of the sea of Galilee people must have begged St. Peter or
+     St. Andrew or St. James or St. John to introduce them, if one can
+     use such a word for such an occasion. This seems to me the great
+     work that Father Rowley has effected in this parish. I have only
+     had one rather shy talk with him about religion, and in the course
+     of it I said something in praise of what his personality had
+     effected.
+
+     "My personality has effected nothing," he answered. "Everything
+     here is effected by the Blessed Sacrament."
+
+     That is why he surely has the right without any consideration for
+     the dignity of churchy young men to box their ears if they question
+     his outward respect for the Blessed Sacrament. Even Our Lord found
+     it necessary at least on one occasion to chase the buyers and
+     sellers out of the Temple, and though it is not recorded that He
+     boxed the ears of any Pharisee, it seems to me quite permissible to
+     believe that He did! He lashed them with scorn anyway.
+
+     To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry of the
+     so-called Evangelical party "Jesus only"? Well, Father Rowley has
+     really managed to make out of what was becoming a sort of
+     ecclesiastical party cry something that really is evangelical and
+     at the same time Catholic. These people are taught to make the
+     Blessed Sacrament the central fact of their lives in a way that I
+     venture to say no Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has
+     ever made Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts,
+     because with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them, Which
+     is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures. I could fill a
+     book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls.
+     The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has
+     such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that
+     by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his
+     flock. Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly
+     that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not
+     believe, and I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any
+     use without Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of
+     Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed
+     Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural service.
+     Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself, so
+     that the poor people may flock round Him. He does not go round
+     arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their
+     lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every
+     difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers
+     them the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a great
+     use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who
+     considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions
+     revolve round that one great fact. "Jesus Christ is what you need,"
+     he says, "and Jesus Christ is here in your church, here upon your
+     altar."
+
+     You can't go into the little church without finding fifty people
+     praying before the Blessed Sacrament. The other day when the "King
+     Harry" was sunk by the "Trafalgar," the people here subscribed I
+     forget how many pounds for the widows and children of the
+     bluejackets and marines of the Mission who were drowned, and when
+     it was finished and the subscription list was closed, they
+     subscribed all over again to erect an altar at which to say Masses
+     for the dead. And the old women living in Father Rowley's free
+     houses that were once brothels gave up their summer outing so that
+     the money spent on them might be added to the fund. When the Bishop
+     of Silchester came here last week for Confirmation he asked Father
+     Rowley what that altar was.
+
+     "That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," he said. But when
+     Father Rowley told him about the poor people and the old women who
+     had no money of their own, he said: "That is the most beautiful
+     thing I've ever heard."
+
+     I am beginning to write as if it was necessary to convince you of
+     the necessity of making the Blessed Sacrament the central feature
+     of the religious life to-day and for ever until the end of the
+     world. But, I know you won't think I'm doing anything of the kind,
+     for really I am only trying to show you how much my faith has been
+     strengthened and how much my outlook has deepened and how much more
+     than ever I long to be a priest to be able to give poor people
+     Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE DRUNKEN PRIEST
+
+
+Gradually, Mark found to his pleasure and his pride that he was
+becoming, if not indispensable to Father Rowley (the Missioner found no
+human being indispensable) at any rate quite evidently useful. Perhaps
+Father Rowley though that in allowing himself to rely considerably upon
+Mark's secretarial talent he was indulging himself in a luxury to which
+he was not entitled. That was Father Rowley's way. The moment he
+discovered himself enjoying anything too much, whether it was a cigar or
+a secretary, he cut himself off from it, and this not in any spirit of
+mortification for mortification's sake, but because he dreaded the
+possibility of putting the slightest drag upon his freedom to criticize
+others. He had no doubt at all in his own mind that he was perfectly
+justified in making use of Mark's intelligence and energy. But in a
+place like the Mission House, where everybody from lay helper to casual
+guest was supposed to stand on his own feet, the Missioner himself felt
+that he must offer an example of independence.
+
+"You're spoiling me, Mark Anthony," he said one day. "There's nothing
+for me to do this evening."
+
+"I know," Mark agreed contentedly. "I want to give you a rest for once."
+
+"Rest?" the priest echoed. "You don't seriously expect a fat man like me
+to sit down in an armchair and rest, do you? Besides, you've got your
+own reading to do, and you didn't come to Chatsea as my punkah walla."
+
+Mark insisted that he was getting along in his own way quite fast
+enough, and that he had plenty of time on his hands to keep Father
+Rowley's correspondence in some kind of order.
+
+"All these other people have any amount to do," said Mark. "Cartwright
+has his boys every evening and Warrender has his men."
+
+"And Mark Anthony has nothing but a fat, poverty-stricken, slothful
+mission priest," Father Rowley gurgled.
+
+"Yes, and you're more trouble than all the rest put together. Look here,
+I've written to the Bishop's chaplain about that confirmation; I
+explained why we wanted to hold a special confirmation for these two
+boys we are emigrating, and he has written back to say that the Bishop
+has no objection to a special confirmation's being held by the Bishop of
+Matabeleland when he comes to stay here next week. At the same time, he
+says the Bishop doesn't want it to become a precedent."
+
+"No. I can quite understand that," Father Rowley chuckled. "Bishops are
+haunted by the creation of precedents. A precedent in the life of a
+bishop is like an illegitimate child in the life of a respectable
+churchwarden. No, the only thing I fear is that if I devour all your
+spare time you won't get quite what you wanted to get by coming to live
+with us."
+
+He laid a fat hand on Mark's shoulder.
+
+"Please don't bother about me," said Mark. "I get all I want and more
+than I expected if I can be of the least use to you. I know I'm rather
+disappointing you by not behaving like half the people who come down
+here and want to get up a concert on Monday, a dance on Tuesday, a
+conjuring entertainment on Wednesday, a street procession on Thursday, a
+day of intercession on Friday, and an amateur dramatic entertainment on
+Saturday, not to mention acting as ceremonarius on Sunday. I know you'd
+like me to propose all sorts of energetic diversions, so that you could
+have the pleasure of assuring me that I was only proposing them to
+gratify my own vanity, which of course would be perfectly true. Luckily
+I'm of a retiring disposition, and I don't want to do anything to help
+the ten thousand benighted parishioners of Saint Agnes', except
+indirectly by striving to help in my own feeble way the man who really
+is helping them. Now don't throw that inkpot at me, because the room's
+quite dirty enough already, and as I've made you sit still for five
+minutes I've achieved something this evening that mighty few people
+have achieved in Keppel Street. I believe the only time you really rest
+is in the confessional box."
+
+"Mark Anthony, Mark Anthony," said the priest, "you talk a great deal
+too much. Come along now, it's bedtime."
+
+One of the rules of the Mission House was that every inmate should be in
+bed by ten o'clock and all lights out by a quarter past. The day began
+with Mass at seven o'clock at which everybody was expected to be
+present; and from that time onward everybody was so fully occupied that
+it was essential to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Guests who came down
+for a night or two were often apt to forget how much the regular workers
+had to do and what a tax it put upon the willing servants to manage a
+house of which nobody could say ten minutes before a meal how many would
+sit down to it, nor even until lights out for how many people beds must
+be made. In case any guest should forget this rule by coming back after
+ten o'clock, Father Rowley made a point of having the front door bell to
+ring in his bedroom, so that he might get out of bed at any hour of the
+night and admit the loiterer. Guests were warned what would be the
+effect of their lack of consideration, and it was seldom that Father
+Rowley was disturbed.
+
+Among the guests there was one class of which a representative was
+usually to be found at the Mission House. This was the drunken
+clergyman, which sounds as if there was at this date a high proportion
+of drunken clergymen in the Church of England; but which means that when
+one did come to St. Agnes' he usually stayed for a long time, because he
+would in most cases have been sent there when everybody else had
+despaired of him to see what Father Rowley could effect.
+
+About the time when Mark was beginning to be recognized as Father
+Rowley's personal vassal, it happened that the Reverend George Edward
+Mousley who had been handed on from diocese to diocese during the last
+five years had lately reached the Mission House. For more than two
+months now he had spent his time inconspicuously reading in his own
+room, and so well had he behaved, so humbly had he presented himself to
+the notice of his fellow guests, that Father Rowley was moved one
+afternoon to dictate a letter about him to Mark, who felt that the
+Missioner by taking him so far into his confidence had surrendered to
+his pertinacity and that thenceforth he might consider himself
+established as his private secretary.
+
+"The letter is to the Lord Bishop Suffragan of Warwick, St. Peter's
+Rectory, Warwick," Father Rowley began. "My dear Bishop of Warwick, I
+have now had poor Mousley here for two months. It is not a long time in
+which to effect a lasting reformation of one who has fallen so often and
+so grievously, but I think you know me well enough not to accuse me of
+being too sanguine about drunken priests. I have had too many of them
+here for that. In his case however I do feel justified in asking you to
+agree with me in letting him have an opportunity to regain the respect
+due to himself and the reverence due to his priesthood by being allowed
+once more to the altar. I should not dream of allowing him to officiate
+without your permission, because his sad history has been so much a
+personal burden to yourself. I'm afraid that after the many
+disappointments he has inflicted upon you, you will be doubtful of my
+judgment. Yet I do think that the critical moment has arrived when by
+surprising him thus we might clinch the matter of his future behaviour
+once and for all. His conduct here has been so humble and patient and in
+every way exemplary that my heart bleeds for him. Therefore, my dear
+Bishop of Warwick, I hope you will agree to what I firmly trust will be
+the completion of his spiritual cure. I am writing to you quite
+impersonally and informally, as you see, so that in replying to me you
+will not be involving yourself in the affairs of another diocese. You
+will, of course, put me down as much a Jesuit as ever in writing to you
+like this, but you will equally, I know, believe me to be, Yours ever
+affectionately in Our Blessed Lord.
+
+"And I'll sign it as soon as you can type it out," Father Rowley wound
+up.
+
+"Oh, I do hope he will agree," Mark exclaimed.
+
+"He will," the Missioner prophesied. "He will because he is a wise and
+tender and godly man and therefore will never be more than a Bishop
+Suffragan as long as he lives. Mark!"
+
+Mark looked up at the severity of the tone.
+
+"Mark! Correct me when I fall into the habit of sneering at the
+episcopate."
+
+That night Father Rowley was attending a large temperance demonstration
+in the Town Hall for the purpose of securing if possible a smaller
+proportion of public houses than one for every eighty of the population,
+which was the average for Chatsea. The meeting lasted until nearly ten
+o'clock; and it had already struck the hour when Father Rowley with Mark
+and two or three others got back to Keppel Street. There was nothing
+Father Rowley disliked so much as arriving home himself after ten, and
+he hurried up to his room without inquiring if everybody was in.
+
+Mark's window looked out on Keppel Street; and the May night being warm
+and his head aching from the effects of the meeting, he sat for nearly
+an hour at the open window gazing down at the passers by. There was not
+much to see, nothing more indeed than couples wandering home, a
+bluejacket or two, an occasional cat, and a few women carrying jugs of
+beer. By eleven o'clock even this slight traffic had ceased, and there
+was nothing down the silent street except a salt wind from the harbour
+that roused a memory of the beach at Nancepean years ago when he had sat
+there watching the glow-worm and decided to be a lighthouse-keeper
+keeping his lamps bright for mariners homeward bound. It was of streets
+like Keppel Street that they would have dreamed, with the Stag Light
+winking to port, and the west wind blowing strong astern. What a
+lighthouse-keeper Father Rowley was! How except by the grace of God
+could one explain such goodness as his? Fashions in saintliness might
+change, but there was one kind of saint that always and for every creed
+spoke plainly of God's existence, such saints as St. Francis of Assisi
+or St. Anthony of Padua, who were manifestly the heirs of Christ. With
+what a tender cynicism Our Lord had called St. Peter to be the
+foundation stone of His Church, with what a sorrowful foreboding of the
+failure of Christianity. Such a choice appeared as the expression of
+God's will not to be let down again as He was let down by Adam. Jesus
+Christ, conscious at the moment of what He must shortly suffer at the
+hands of mankind, must have been equally conscious of the failure of
+Christianity two thousand years beyond His Agony and Bloody Sweat and
+Crucifixion. Why, within a short time after His life on earth it was
+necessary for that light from heaven to shine round about Saul on the
+Damascus road, because already scoffers, while the disciples were still
+alive, may have been talking about the failure of Christianity. It must
+have been another of God's self-imposed limitations that He did not give
+to St. John that capacity of St. Paul for organization which might have
+made practicable the Christianity of the master Who loved him. _Woman,
+behold thy son! Behold thy mother!_ That dying charge showed that Our
+Lord considered John the most Christlike of His disciples, and he
+remained the most Christlike man until twelve hundred years later St.
+Francis was born at Assisi. St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Dominic, if
+Christianity could only produce mighty individualists of Faith like
+them, it could scarcely have endured as it had endured. _And now abideth
+faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is
+charity._ There was something almost wistful in those words coming from
+the mouth of St. Paul. It was scarcely conceivable that St. John or St.
+Francis could ever have said that; it would scarcely have struck either
+that the three virtues were separable.
+
+Keppel Street was empty now. Mark's headache had been blown away by the
+night wind with his memories and the incoherent thoughts which had
+gathered round the contemplation of Father Rowley's character. He was
+just going to draw away from the window and undress when he caught sight
+of a figure tacking from one pavement to the other up Keppel Street.
+Mark watched its progress, amused at the extraordinary amount of trouble
+it was giving itself, until one tack was brought to a sharp conclusion
+by a lamp-post to which the figure clung long enough to be recognized as
+that of the Reverend George Edward Mousley, who had been tacking like
+this to make the harbour of the Mission House. Mark, remembering the
+letter which had been written to the Bishop of Warwick, wondered if he
+could not at any rate for to-night spare Father Rowley the
+disappointment of knowing that his plea for re-instatement was already
+answered by the drunken priest himself. He must make up his mind
+quickly, because even with the zigzag course Mousley was taking he would
+soon be ringing the bell of the Mission House, which meant that Father
+Rowley would be woken up and go down to let him in. Of course, he would
+have to know all about it in the morning, but to-night when he had gone
+to bed tired and full of hope for temperance in general and the
+reformation of Mousley in particular it was surely right to let him
+sleep in ignorance. Mark decided to take it upon himself to break the
+rules of the house, to open the door to Mousley, and if possible to get
+him upstairs to bed quietly. He went down with a lighted candle, crept
+across the gymnasium, and opened the door. Mousley was still tacking
+from pavement to pavement and making very little headway against a
+strong current of drink. Mark thought he had better go out and offer his
+services as pilot, because Mousley was beginning to sing an
+extraordinary song in which the tune and the words of _Good-bye, Dolly,
+I must leave you_, had got mixed up with _O happy band of pilgrims_.
+
+"Look here, Mr. Mousley, you mustn't sing now," said Mark taking hold of
+the arm with which the drunkard was trying to beat time. "It's after
+eleven o'clock, and you're just outside the Mission House."
+
+"I've been just outside the Mission House for an hour and three
+quarters, old chap," said Mr. Mousley solemnly. "Most incompatible thing
+I've ever known. I got back here at a quarter past nine, and I was just
+going to walk in when the house took two paces to the rear, and I've
+been walking after it the whole evening. Most incompatible thing I've
+ever known. Most incompatible thing that's ever happened to me in my
+life, Lidderdale. If I were a superstitious man, which I'm not, I should
+say the house was bewitched. If I had a moment to spare, I should sit
+down at once and write an account of my most incompatible experience to
+the Society of Psychical Research, if I were a superstitious man, which
+I'm not. Yes. . . ."
+
+Mr. Mousley tried to focus his glassy eyes upon the arcana of
+spiritualism, rocking ambiguously the while upon the kerb. Mark murmured
+something more about the need for going in quietly.
+
+"It's very kind of you to come out and talk to me like this," the
+drunken priest went on. "But what you ought to have done was to have
+kept hold of the house for a minute or two so as to give me time to get
+in quietly. Now we shall probably both be out here all night trying to
+get in quietly. It's impossible to keep warm by this lamp-post. Most
+inadequate heating arrangement. It is a lamp-post, isn't it? Yes, I
+thought it was. I had a fleeting impression that it was my bedroom
+candle, but I see now that I was mistaken, I see now perfectly clearly
+that it is a lamp-post, if not two. Of course, that may account for my
+not being able to get into the Mission House. I was trying to decide
+which front door I should go in by, and while I was waiting I think I
+must have gone in by the wrong one, for I hit my nose a most severe blow
+on the nose. One has to remember to be very careful with front doors. Of
+course, if it was my own house I should have used a latch-key instanter;
+for I inevitably, I mean invariably, carry a latch-key about with me and
+when it won't open my front door I use it to wind my watch. You know,
+it's one of those small keys you can wind up watches with, if you know
+the kind of key I mean. I'd draw you a picture of it if I had a pencil,
+but I haven't got a pencil."
+
+"Now don't stay talking here," Mark urged. "Come along back, and do try
+to come quietly. I keep telling you it's after eleven o'clock, and you
+know Father Rowley likes everybody to be in by ten."
+
+"That's what I've been saying to myself the whole evening," said Mr.
+Mousley. "Only what happened, you see, was that I met the son of a man
+who used to know my father, a very nice fellow indeed, a very
+intellectual fellow. I never remember spending a more intellectual
+evening in my life. A feast of reason and a flowing bowl, I mean soul,
+s-o-u-l, not b-o-u-l. Did I say bowl? Soul. . . . Soul. . . ."
+
+"All right," said Mark. "But if you've had such a jolly evening, come in
+now and don't make a noise."
+
+"I'll come in whenever you like," Mr. Mousley offered. "I'm at your
+disposition entirely. The only request I have to make is that you will
+guarantee that the house stays where it was built. It's all very fine
+for an ordinary house to behave like this, but when a mission house
+behaves like this I call it disgraceful. I don't know what I've done to
+the house that it should conceive such a dislike to me. I say,
+Lidderdale, have they been taking up the drains or something in this
+street? Because I distinctly had an impression just then that I put my
+foot into a hole."
+
+"The street's perfectly all right," said Mark. "Nothing has been done to
+it."
+
+"There's no reason why they shouldn't take up the drains if they want
+to, I'm not complaining. Drains have to be taken up and I should be the
+last man to complain; but I merely asked a question, and I'm convinced
+that they have been taking up the drains. Yes, I've had a very
+intellectual evening. My head's whirling with philosophy. We've talked
+about everything. My friend talked a good deal about Buddhism. And I
+made rather a good joke about Confucius being so confusing, at which I
+laughed inordinately. Inordinately, Lidderdale. I've had a very keen
+sense of humour ever since I was a baby. I say, Lidderdale, you
+certainly know your way about this street. I'm very much obliged to me
+for meeting you. I shall get to know the street in time. You see, my
+object was to get beyond the house, because I said to myself 'the house
+is in Keppel Street, it can dodge about _in_ Keppel Street, but it can't
+be in any other street,' so I thought that if I could dodge it into the
+corner of Keppel Street--you follow what I mean? I may be talking a bit
+above your head, we've been talking philosophy all the evening, but if
+you concentrate you'll follow my meaning."
+
+"Here we are," said Mark, for by this time he had persuaded Mr. Mousley
+to put his foot upon the step of the front door.
+
+"You managed the house very well," said the clergyman. "It's
+extraordinary how a house will take to some people and not to others.
+Now I can do anything I like with dogs, and you can do anything you like
+with houses. But it's no good patting or stroking a house. You've got to
+manage a house quite differently to that. You've got to keep a house's
+accounts. You haven't got to keep a dog's accounts."
+
+They were in the gymnasium by now, which by the light of Mark's small
+candle loomed as vast as a church.
+
+"Don't talk as you go upstairs," Mark admonished.
+
+"Isn't that a dog I see there?"
+
+"No, no, no," said Mark. "It's the horse. Come along."
+
+"A horse?" Mousley echoed. "Well, I can manage horses too. Come here,
+Dobbin. If I'd known we were going to meet a horse I should have brought
+back some sugar with me. I suppose it's too late to go back and buy some
+sugar now?"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mark impatiently. "Much too late. Come along."
+
+"If I had a piece of sugar he'd follow us upstairs. You'll find a horse
+will go anywhere after a piece of sugar. It is a horse, isn't it? Not a
+donkey? Because if it was a donkey he would want a thistle, and I don't
+know where I can get a thistle at this time of night. I say, did you
+prod me in the stomach then with anything?" asked Mr. Mousley severely.
+
+"No, no," said Mark. "Come along, it was the parallel bars."
+
+"I've not been near any bars to-night, and if you are suggesting that
+I've been in bars you're making an insinuation which I very much resent,
+an insinuation which I resent most bitterly, an insinuation which I
+should not allow anybody to make without first pointing out that it was
+an insinuation."
+
+"Do come down off that ladder," Mark said.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Lidderdale. I was under the impression for the
+moment that I was going upstairs. I have really been so confused by
+Confucius and by the extraordinary behaviour of the house to-night,
+recoiling from me as it did, that for the moment I was under the
+impression that I was going upstairs."
+
+At this moment Mr. Mousley fell from the ladder, luckily on one of the
+gymnasium mats.
+
+"I do think it's a most ridiculous habit," he said, "not to place a
+doormat in what I might describe as a suitable cavity. The number of
+times in my life that I've fallen over doormats simply because people
+will not take the trouble to make the necessary depression in the floor
+with which to contain such a useful domestic receptacle you would
+scarcely believe. I must have fallen over thousands of doormats in my
+life," he shouted at the top of his voice.
+
+"You'll wake everybody up in the house," Mark exclaimed in an agony.
+"For heaven's sake keep quiet."
+
+"Oh, we are in the house, are we?" said Mr. Mousley. "I'm very much
+relieved to hear you say that, Lidderdale. For a brief moment, I don't
+know why, I was almost as confused as Confucius as to where we were."
+
+At this moment, candle in hand, and in a white flannel nightgown looking
+larger than ever, Father Rowley appeared in the gallery above and
+leaning over demanded who was there.
+
+"Is that Father Rowley?" Mr. Mousley inquired with intense courtesy. "Or
+do my eyes deceive me? You'll excuse me from replying to your apparently
+simple question, Father Rowley, but I have met such a number of people
+to-night including the son of a man who used to know my father that I
+really don't know who _is_ there, although I'm inclined to think that
+_I_ am here. But I've had a series of such a remarkable series of
+adventures to-night that I should like your advice about them. I've been
+spending a very intellectual evening, Father Rowley."
+
+"Go to bed," said the mission priest severely. "I'll speak to you in the
+morning."
+
+"Father Rowley isn't annoyed with me, is he?" Mr. Mousley asked.
+
+"I think he's rather annoyed at your being so late," said Mark.
+
+"Late for what?"
+
+"Is that you, Mark, down there?" asked the Missioner.
+
+"I'm lighting Mr. Mousley across the gymnasium," Mark explained. "I
+think I'd better take him up to his room."
+
+"If your young friend is as clever at managing rooms as he is at
+managing houses we shall get on splendidly, Father Rowley. I have
+perfect confidence in his manner with rooms. He soothed this house in
+the most remarkable way. It was jumping about like a pea in a pod till
+he caught hold of the reins."
+
+"Mark, go to bed. I will see Mr. Mousley to his room."
+
+"Several years ago," said the drunken priest. "I went with an old friend
+to see Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. The resemblance between Father
+Rowley and Miss Ellen Terry is very remarkable. Good-night, Lidderdale,
+I am perfectly comfortable on this mat. Good-night."
+
+In the gallery above Mark, who had not dared to disobey Father Rowley's
+orders, asked him what was to be done to get Mr. Mousley to bed.
+
+"Go and wake Cartwright and Warrender to help me to get him upstairs,"
+the Missioner commanded.
+
+"I can help you. . . ." Mark began.
+
+"Do what I say," said the Missioner curtly.
+
+In the morning Father Rowley sent for Mark to give his account of what
+had happened the night before, and when Mark had finished his tale, the
+priest sat for a while in silence.
+
+"Are you going to send him away?" Mark asked.
+
+"Send him away?" Father Rowley repeated. "Where would I send him? If he
+can't keep off drink in this house and in these surroundings where else
+will he keep off drink? No, I'm only amused at my optimism."
+
+There was a knock on the door.
+
+"I expect that is Mr. Mousley," said Mark. "I'll leave you with him."
+
+"No, don't go away," said the Missioner. "If Mousley didn't mind your
+seeing him as he was last night, there's no reason why this morning he
+should mind your hearing my comments upon his behaviour."
+
+The tap on the door was repeated.
+
+"Come in, come in, Mousley, and take a seat."
+
+Mr. Mousley walked timidly across the room and sat on the very edge of
+the chair offered him by Father Rowley. He was a quiet, rather drab
+little man, the kind of little man who always loses his seat in a
+railway carriage and who always gets pushed further up in an omnibus,
+one of life's pawns. The presence of Mark did not seem to affect him,
+for no sooner was he seated than he began to apologize with suspicious
+rapidity, as if by now his apologies had been reduced to a formula.
+
+"I really must apologize, Father Rowley, for my lateness last night and
+for coming in, I fear, slightly the worse for liquor. The fact is I had
+a little headache and went to the chemist for a pick-me-up, on top of
+which I met an old college friend, and though I don't think I had more
+than two glasses of beer I may have had three. They didn't seem to go
+very well with the pick-me-up. I assure you--"
+
+"Stop," said Father Rowley. "The only assurance of any value to me will
+be your behaviour in the future."
+
+"Oh, then I'm not to leave this morning?" Mr. Mousley gasped with open
+mouth.
+
+"Where would you go if you left here?"
+
+"Well, to tell you the truth," Mr. Mousley admitted, "I have been rather
+worried over that little problem ever since I woke up this morning. I
+scarcely expected that you would tolerate my presence any longer in this
+house. You will excuse me, Father Rowley, but I am rather overwhelmed
+for the moment by your kindness. I scarcely know how to express what I
+feel. I have usually found people so very impatient of my weakness. Do
+you seriously mean I needn't go away this morning?"
+
+"You have already been sufficiently punished, I hope," said the
+Missioner, "by the humiliations you have inflicted on yourself both
+outside and inside this house."
+
+"My thoughts are always humiliating," said Mr. Mousley. "I think perhaps
+that nowadays these humiliating thoughts are my chief temptation to
+drink. Since I have been here and shared in your hospitality I have felt
+more sharply than ever my disgrace. I have several times been on the
+point of asking you to let me be given some kind of work, but I have
+always been too much ashamed when it came to the point to express my
+aspirations in words."
+
+"Only yesterday afternoon," said Father Rowley, "I wrote to the Bishop
+of Warwick, who has continued to interest himself in you notwithstanding
+the many occasions you have disappointed him, yes, I wrote to the Bishop
+of Warwick to say that since you came to St. Agnes' your behaviour had
+justified my suggesting that you should once again be allowed to say
+Mass."
+
+"You wrote that yesterday afternoon?" Mr. Mousley exclaimed. "And the
+instant afterwards I went out and got drunk?"
+
+"You mean you took a pick-me-up and two glasses of beer," corrected
+Father Rowley.
+
+"No, no, no, it wasn't a pick-me-up. I went out and got drunk on brandy
+quite deliberately."
+
+Father Rowley looked quickly across at Mark, who hastily left the two
+priests together. He divined from the Missioner's quick glance that he
+was going to hear Mr. Mousley's confession. A week later Mr. Mousley
+asked Mark if he would serve at Mass the next morning.
+
+"It may seem an odd request," he said, "but inasmuch as you have seen
+the depths to which I can sink, I want you equally to see the heights to
+which Father Rowley has raised me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SILCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION
+
+
+It was never allowed to be forgotten at St. Agnes' that the Mission was
+the Silchester College Mission; and there were few days in the year on
+which it was possible to visit the Mission House without finding there
+some member of the College past or present. Every Sunday during term two
+or three prefects would sit down to dinner; masters turned up during the
+holidays; even the mighty Provost himself paid occasional visits, during
+which he put off most of his majesty and became as nearly human as a
+facetious judge. Nor did Father Rowley allow Silchester to forget that
+it had a Mission. He was not at all content with issuing a half yearly
+report of progress and expenses, and he had no intention of letting St.
+Agnes' exist as a subject for an occasional school sermon or a religious
+tax levied on parents. From the first moment he had put foot in Chatsea
+he had done everything he could to make St. Agnes' be what it was
+supposed to be--the Silchester College Mission. He was particularly
+anxious that the new church should be built and beautified with money
+from Silchester sources, even if he also accepted money for this purpose
+from outside. Soon after Mark had become recognized as Father Rowley's
+confidential secretary, he visited Silchester for the first time in his
+company.
+
+It was the custom during the summer for the various guilds and clubs
+connected with the parish to be entertained in turn at the College. It
+had never happened that Mark had accompanied any of these outings, which
+in the early days of St. Agnes' had been regarded with dread by the
+College authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was
+stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions as you
+could wish to see. Mark's first visit to Silchester was on the occasion
+of Father Rowley's terminal sermon in the June after he was nineteen. He
+found the experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough to
+have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed through the ordeal
+either of a first term at a public school or of a first term at the
+University. Boys are always critical, and at Silchester with the
+tradition of six hundred years to give them a corporate self-confidence,
+the judgment of outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world,
+unless it might be in the New Hebrides. Added to their critical regard
+was a chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence
+appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of
+the Houyhnms. These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so
+condescending, appalled him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who
+came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they,
+without their background were themselves a little shy, although their
+shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease. Here,
+however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints,
+row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended
+more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he
+found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of
+respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete.
+The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive
+conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society;
+he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously
+when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without
+being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying at
+a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a
+tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the
+Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master. It was difficult
+for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a
+standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address
+their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline. Yet
+everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that
+delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and
+curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be
+called anything else except Jex.
+
+For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of
+St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his
+surrender of the scholarship to Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had
+his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have
+brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or
+five men in whose charge he had been left. He was tired of being
+continually rescued from drowning in their conversation. Their
+intentional courtesy galled him. He felt like a negro chief being shown
+the sights of England by a tired equerry. It was a fine summer day, and
+he went down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match. He sat
+down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the
+mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side
+was in. Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the
+sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than
+a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees and towers of
+Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, the cattle in
+the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated Mark with his inability to
+put himself in the picture. The grass beneath the oak was scattered with
+a treasury of small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens
+and silver disks that Mark set himself to count.
+
+"Trying not to yearn and trying not to yawn," he muttered. "Forty-four,
+forty-five, forty-six."
+
+"You're ten out," said a voice. "We want fifty-six to tie, fifty-seven
+to win."
+
+Mark looked up and saw that a Silchester man whom he remembered seeing
+once at the Mission was preparing to sit down beside him. He was a tall
+youth, fair and freckled and clear cut, perfectly self-possessed, but
+lacking any hint of condescension in his manner.
+
+"Didn't you come over with Rowley?" he inquired.
+
+Mark was going to explain that he was working at the Mission when it
+struck him that a Silchester man might have the right to resent that,
+and he gave no more than a simple affirmative.
+
+"I remember seeing you at the Mission," he went on. "My name's Hathorne.
+Oh, well hit, sir, well hit!"
+
+Hathorne's approbation of the batsman made the match appear even more
+remote. It was like the comment of a passer-by upon a well-designed
+figure in a tapestry. It was an expression of his own �sthetic pleasure,
+and bore no relation to the player he applauded.
+
+"I've only been down to the Mission once," he continued, turning to
+Mark. "I felt rather up against it there."
+
+"Well, I feel much more up against it in Silchester," replied Mark.
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," Hathorne nodded. "But you're only up
+against form: I was up against matter. It struck me when I was down
+there what awful cheek it was for me to be calmly going down to Chatsea
+and supposing that I had a right to go there, because I had contributed
+a certain amount of money belonging to my father, to help spiritually a
+lot of people who probably need spiritual help much less than I do
+myself. Of course, with anybody else except Rowley in charge the effect
+would be damnable. As it is, he manages to keep us from feeling as if
+we'd paid to go and look at the Zoo. You're a lucky chap to be working
+there without the uncomfortable feeling that you're just being tolerated
+because you're a Siltonian."
+
+"I was thinking," said Mark, "that I was only being tolerated here
+because I happened to come with Rowley. It's impossible to visit a place
+like this and not regret that one must remain an outsider."
+
+"It depends on what you want to do," said Hathorne. "I want to be a
+parson. I'm going up to the Varsity in October, and I am beginning to
+wonder what on earth good I shall be at the end of it all."
+
+He gave Mark an opportunity to comment on this announcement; but Mark
+did not know what to say and remained silent.
+
+"I see you're not in the mood to be communicative," Hathorne went on
+with a smile. "I don't blame you. It's impossible to be communicative in
+this place; but some time, when I'm down at the Mission again, I'd like
+to have what is called a heart-to-heart talk. That was a good boundary.
+We shall win quite comfortably. So long!"
+
+The tall, fair youth passed on; and although Mark never had that
+heart-to-heart talk with him in the Mission, because he was killed in a
+mountaineering accident in Switzerland that August, the memory of him
+sitting there under the oak tree on that fine summer afternoon remained
+with Mark for ever; and after that brief conversation he lost most of
+his shyness, so that he came to enjoy his visits to Silchester as much
+as the Missioner himself did.
+
+As the new church drew near its completion, Mark apprehended why Father
+Rowley attached so much importance to as much of the money for it as
+possible coming directly from Silchester. He apprehended how the
+Missioner felt that he was building Silchester in a Chatsea slum; and
+from that moment that landscape like a mirage of the sunlight, that
+landscape into which he had been unable to fit himself when he first
+beheld it became his own, for now beyond the chimneypots he could always
+see the bald hills of Berkshire and the trees and towers of Silchester,
+and at the end of all the meanest alleys there were cattle in the
+meadows and birds in the air above.
+
+Silchester was not the only place that Mark visited with Father Rowley.
+It became a recognized custom for him to travel up to London whenever
+the Missioner was preaching, and in London he was once more struck by
+the variety of Father Rowley's worldly knowledge and secular friends.
+One week-end will serve as a specimen of many. They left Chatsea on a
+Saturday morning travelling up to town in a third class smoker full of
+bluejackets and soldiers on leave. None of them happened to know the
+Missioner, and for a time they talked surlily in undertones, evidently
+viewing with distaste the prospect of having a Holy Joe in their
+compartment all the way to London; but when Father Rowley pulled out his
+pipe, for always when he was away from St. Agnes' he allowed himself the
+privilege of smoking, and began to talk to them about their ships and
+their regiments with unquestionable knowledge, they unbent, so that long
+before Waterloo was reached it must have been the jolliest compartment
+in the whole train. It was all done so easily, and yet without any of
+that deliberate descent from a pedestal, which is the democratic manner
+of so many parsons; there was none of that Friar Tuck style of
+aggressive laymanhood, nor that subtler way of denying Christ (of course
+with the best intentions) which consists of salting the conversation
+with a few "damns" and peppering it with a couple of "bloodies" to show
+that a parson may be what is called human. Father Rowley was simply
+himself; and a month later two of the bluejackets in that compartment
+and one of the soldiers were regular visitors to the Mission House, and
+what is more regular visitors to the Blessed Sacrament.
+
+They reached London soon after midday and went to lunch at a restaurant
+in Jermyn Street famous for a Russian salad that Father Rowley sometimes
+spoke of with affection in Chatsea. After lunch they went to a matin�e
+of _Pelleas and M�lisande_, the Missioner having been given two stalls
+by an actor friend. Mark enjoyed the play and was being stirred by the
+imagination of old, unhappy, far off things until his companion began to
+laugh. Several clever women who looked as if they had been dragged
+through a hedge said "Hush!"; even Mark, compassionate of the players'
+feelings should they hear Father Rowley laugh at the poignant nonsense
+they were uttering on the stage, begged him to control himself.
+
+"But this is most unending rubbish," he said. "I've never heard anything
+so ridiculous in my life. Terrible."
+
+The curtain fell on the act at this moment, so that Father Rowley was
+able to give louder voice to his opinions.
+
+"This is unspeakable bosh," he repeated. "I can't understand anything at
+all that is going on. People run on and run off again and make the most
+idiotic remarks. I really don't think I can stand any more of this."
+
+The clever women rattled their beads and writhed their necks like angry
+snakes without effect upon the Missioner.
+
+"I don't think I can stand any more of this," he repeated. "I shall
+have apoplexy if this goes on."
+
+The clever women hissed angrily about the kind of people that came to
+theatres nowadays.
+
+"This man Maeterlinck must have escaped from an asylum," Father Rowley
+went on. "I never heard such deplorable nonsense in my life."
+
+"I shall ask an attendant if we can change our seats," snapped one of
+the clever women in front. "That's the worst of coming to a Saturday
+afternoon performance, such extraordinary people come up to town on
+Saturdays."
+
+"There you are," exclaimed Father Rowley loudly, "even that poor woman
+in front thinks they're extraordinary."
+
+"She's talking about you," said Mark, "not about the people in the
+play."
+
+"My good woman," said Father Rowley, leaning over and tapping her on the
+shoulder. "You don't think that you really enjoy this rubbish, do you?"
+
+One of her friends who was near the gangway called out to a programme
+seller:
+
+"Attendant, attendant, is it possible for my friends and myself to move
+into another row? We are being pestered with a running commentary by
+that stout clergyman behind that lady in green."
+
+"Don't disturb yourselves, you foolish geese," said Father Rowley
+rising. "I'm not going to sit through another act. Come along, Mark,
+come along, come along. I am not happy. I am not happy," he cried in an
+absurd falsetto.
+
+Then roaring with laughter at his own imitation of M�lisande, he went
+rolling out of the theatre and sniffed contentedly the air of the
+Strand.
+
+"I told Lady Pechell we shouldn't arrive till tea-time, so we'd better
+go and ride on the top of a bus as far as the city."
+
+It was an exhilarating ride, although Mark found that Father Rowley
+occupied much more than half of the seat for two. About five o'clock
+they came to the shadowy house in Portman Square in which they were to
+stay till Monday. The Missioner was as much at home here as he was at
+Silchester College or in a railway compartment full of bluejackets. He
+knew as well how to greet the old butler as Lady Pechell and her sister
+Mrs. Mannakay, to all of whom equally his visit was an obvious delight.
+Not even Father Rowley's bulk could dwarf the proportions of that double
+drawing-room or of that heavy Victorian furniture. He took his place
+among the cases of stuffed humming birds and glass-topped tables of
+curios, among the brocade curtains with shaped vallances and golden
+tassels, among the chandeliers and lacquered cabinets and cages of
+avadavats, sitting there like a great Buddha while he chatted to the two
+old ladies of a society that seemed to Mark as remote as the people in
+_Pelleas and M�lisande_. From time to time one of the old ladies would
+try to draw Mark into the conversation; but he preferred listening and
+let them think that his monosyllabic answers signified a shyness that
+did not want to be conspicuous. Soon they appeared to forget his
+existence. Deep in the lap of an armchair covered with a glazed chintz
+of S�vres roses and sable he was enthralled by that chronicle of
+phantoms, that frieze of ghosts passing before his eyes, while the
+present faded away upon the growing quiet of the London evening and
+became remote as the distant roar of the traffic, which itself was
+remote as the sound of the sea in a shell. Fox-hunting squires caracoled
+by with the air of paladins; and there was never a lady mentioned that
+did not take the fancy like a princess in an old tale.
+
+"He's universal," Mark thought. "And that's one of the secrets of being
+a great priest. And that's why he can talk about Heaven and make you
+feel that he knows what he's talking about. And if I can discern what he
+is," Mark went on to himself, "I can be what he is. And I will be," he
+vowed in the rapture of a sudden revelation.
+
+On Sunday morning Father Rowley preached in the fashionable church of
+St. Cyprian's, South Kensington, after which they lunched at the
+vicarage. The Reverend Drogo Mortemer was a dapper little bachelor (it
+would be inappropriate to call such a worldly little fellow a celibate)
+who considered himself the leader of the most advanced section of the
+Catholic Party in the Church of England. He certainly had a finger in
+the pie of every well-cooked intrigue, knew everybody worth knowing in
+London, and had the private ears of several bishops. No more skilful
+place-finder existed, and any member of the advanced section who wanted
+a place for himself or for a friend had recourse to Mortemer.
+
+"But the little man is all right," Father Rowley had told Mark. "Many
+people would have used his talents to further himself. He has every
+qualification for the episcopate except one--he believes in the
+Sacraments."
+
+Mr. Mortemer was the only son of James Mortimer of the famous firm of
+Hadley and Mortimer. His father had become rich before he married the
+youngest daughter of an ancient but impoverished house, and soon after
+his marriage he died. Mrs. Mortemer brought up her son to forget that
+his father had been a tradesman and to remember that he was rich. In
+order to dissociate herself from a partnership which now existed only in
+name above the plate glass of the enormous shop in Oxford Street Mrs.
+Mortemer took to spelling her name with an "e," which as she pointed out
+was the original spelling. She had already gratified her romantic fancy
+by calling her son Drogo. Harrow and Cambridge completed what Mrs.
+Mortemer began, and if Drogo had not developed what his mother spoke of
+as a "mania for religion" there is no reason to suppose that he would
+not one day have been a cabinet minister. However, as it was, Mrs.
+Mortemer died cherishing with her last breath a profound conviction that
+her son would soon be a bishop. That he was not likely to become a
+bishop was due to the fact that with all his worldliness, with all his
+wealth, with all his love of wire-pulling, with all his respect for rank
+he held definite opinions and was not afraid to belong to a minority
+unpopular in high places. He had too a simple piety that made his church
+a power in spite of fashionable weddings and exorbitant pew rents.
+
+"The sort of thing we're trying to do here in a small way," he said to
+Father Rowley at lunch, "is what the Jesuits are doing at Farm Street.
+My two assistant priests are both rather brilliant young people, and I'm
+always on the look out to get more young men of the right type."
+
+"You'd better offer Lidderdale a title when he's ready to be ordained."
+
+"Why, of course I will," said the dapper little vicar with a courteous
+smile for Mark. "Do take some more claret, Father Rowley. It's rather a
+specialty of ours here. We have a friend in Bordeaux who buys for us."
+
+It was typical of Mr. Mortemer to use the plural.
+
+"There you are, Mark Anthony. I've secured you a title."
+
+"Mr. Mortemer is only being polite," said Mark.
+
+"No, no, my dear boy, on the contrary I meant absolutely what I said."
+
+He seemed worried by Mark's distrust of his sincerity, and for the rest
+of lunch he laid himself out to entertain his less important guest,
+talking with a slight excess of charm about the lack of vitality, loss
+of influence, and oriental barbarism of the Orthodox Church.
+
+"_Enfin_, Asiatic religion," he said. "Don't you agree with me, Mr.
+Lidderdale? And our Philorthodox brethren who would like to bring about
+reunion with such a Church . . . the result would be dreadful . . .
+Eurasian . . . yes, I must confess that sometimes I sympathize with the
+behaviour of the Venetians in the Fourth Crusade."
+
+Father Rowley looked at his watch and announced that it was time to
+start for Poplar, where he was to address a large gathering of
+Socialists in the Town Hall. Mr. Mortemer made a _moue_.
+
+"Nevertheless I'm bound to admit that you have a strong case. Perhaps
+I'm like the young man with large possessions," he burst out with a
+sudden intense gravity. "Perhaps after all the St. Cyprian's religion
+isn't Christianity at all. Just Catholicism. Nothing else."
+
+"You'd better come down to Poplar with Mark and me," Father Rowley
+suggested.
+
+But Mr. Mortemer shook his head with a smile.
+
+The Poplar meeting was crowded. In an atmosphere of good fellowship one
+speaker after another got up and denounced the present order. It was
+difficult to follow the arguments of the speakers, because the audience
+cheered so many isolated statements. A number of people shook hands
+with Father Rowley when he had finished his speech and wished that
+there were more parsons like him. Father Rowley had not indulged in
+political attacks, but had contented himself with praise of the poor. He
+had spoken movingly, but Mark was not moved by his words. He had a vague
+feeling that Father Rowley was being exploited. He was dazed by the
+exuberance of the meeting and was glad when it was over and he was back
+in Portman Square talking to Lady Pechell and Mrs. Mannakay while Father
+Rowley rested for an hour before he walked round the corner to preach in
+old Jamaica Chapel, a galleried Georgian conventicle that was now the
+Church of the Visitation, but was still generally known as Jamaica
+Chapel. Evensong was half over when the preacher arrived, and the church
+being full Mark was given a chair by the sidesman in a dark corner,
+which presently became darker when Father Rowley went up into the
+pulpit, for all the lights were lowered except those above the
+preacher's head, and nothing was visible in the church except the
+luminous crucifix upon the High Altar. The warmth and darkness brought
+out the scent of the many women gathered together; the atmosphere was
+charged with human emotion so that Mark sitting in his corner could
+fancy that he was lost in the sensuous glooms behind some _Mater
+Addolorata_ of the seventeenth century. He longed to be back in Chatsea.
+He was dismayed at the prospect of one day perhaps having to cope with
+this quality of devotion. He shuddered at the thought, and for the first
+time he wondered if he had not a vocation for the monastic life. But was
+it a vocation if one longed to escape the world? Must not a true
+vocation be a longing to draw nearer to God? Oh, this nauseating bouquet
+of feminine perfumes . . . it was impossible to pay attention to the
+sermon.
+
+Mark went to bed early with a headache; but in the morning he woke
+refreshed with the knowledge that they were going back to Chatsea,
+although before they reached home the journey had to be broken at High
+Thorpe whither Father Rowley had been summoned to an interview by the
+Bishop of Silchester on account of refusing to communicate some people
+at the mid-day celebration. Dr. Crawshay was at that time so ill that
+he received the Chatsea Missioner in bed, and on hearing that he was
+accompanied by a young man who hoped to take Holy Orders the Bishop sent
+word for Mark to come up to his bedroom, where he gave him his blessing.
+Mark never forgot the picture of the Bishop lying there under a
+chequered coverlet looking like an old ivory chessman, a white bishop
+that had been taken in the game and put off the board.
+
+"And now, Mr. Rowley," Dr. Crawshay began when he had motioned Mark to a
+chair. "To return to the subject under discussion between us. How can
+you justify by any rubric of the Book of Common Prayer non-communicating
+attendance?"
+
+"I don't justify it by any rubric," the Missioner replied.
+
+"Oh, you don't, don't you?"
+
+"I justify it by the needs of human nature," the Missioner continued.
+"In order to provide the necessary three communicants for the mid-day
+Mass. . . ."
+
+"One moment, Mr. Rowley," the Bishop interrupted. "I beg you most
+earnestly to avoid that word. You know my old-fashioned Protestant
+notions," he added, and his eyes so tired with pain twinkled for a
+moment. "To me there is always something distasteful about that word."
+
+"What shall I substitute, my lord?" the Missioner asked. "Do you object
+to the word 'Eucharist'?"
+
+"No, I don't object to that, though why you should want a Greek name
+when we have a beautiful English name like the Lord's Supper, why you
+should want to employ such a barbarism as 'Eucharist' I don't know.
+However, if you must use Eucharist, use Eucharist. And now, by wandering
+off into a discussion of terminology I forget where we were. Oh yes, you
+were on the point of justifying non-communicating attendance by the
+needs of human nature."
+
+"I am afraid, my lord, that in a district like St. Agnes' it is
+impossible always to ensure communicants for sometimes as many as four
+early Lord's Suppers said by visiting priests."
+
+The Bishop's eyes twinkled again.
+
+"Yes, there you rather have me, Mr. Rowley. Four early Lord's Suppers
+does sound, I must admit, a little odd."
+
+"Four early Eucharists followed by another for children at half-past
+nine, and the parochial sung Mass--sung Eucharist."
+
+"Children?" Dr. Crawshay repeated. "You surely don't let children go to
+the Celebration?"
+
+"_Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven_," Father Rowley reminded the Bishop.
+
+"Yes, yes, I happen to have heard that text before. But the devil, Mr.
+Rowley, can cite Scripture to his purpose."
+
+"In the last letter I wrote to your lordship about the services at St.
+Agnes' I particularly mentioned our children's Eucharist."
+
+"Did you, Mr. Rowley, did you? I had quite forgotten that."
+
+Father Rowley turned to Mark for verification.
+
+"Oh, if Mr. Rowley remembers that he did write, there is no need to call
+witnesses. I have had to complain a good deal of him, but I have never
+had to complain of his frankness. It must be my fault, but I certainly
+hadn't understood that there was definitely a children's Eucharist. This
+then, I fancy, must be the service at which those three ladies
+complained of your treatment of them."
+
+"What three ladies?" asked the priest.
+
+"Dear me, I'm growing very unbusinesslike, I'm afraid. I thought I had
+enclosed you a copy of their letter to me when I wrote to invite an
+explanation of your high-handed action."
+
+The Bishop sighed. The details of these ecclesiastical squabbles
+distracted him at a time when he should soon leave this fretful earth
+behind him. He continued wearily:
+
+"These were the three ladies who were refused communion by you at, as I
+understood, the mid-day Celebration, which now turns out to be what you
+call the children's Eucharist."
+
+"It is perfectly true, my lord," Father Rowley admitted, "that on Sunday
+week three women did present themselves from a neighbouring parish."
+
+"Ah, they were not parishioners?"
+
+"Certainly not, my lord."
+
+"Which is a point in your favour."
+
+"Throughout the service they sat looking through opera-glasses at Snaith
+who was officiating, and greatly scandalizing the children, who are not
+used to such behaviour in church."
+
+"Such behaviour was certainly most objectionable," the Bishop agreed.
+
+"I happened to be sitting at the back of the church, thinking out my
+sermon, and their behaviour annoyed me so much that I sent for the
+sacristan to go and order a cab. I then went up and whispered to them
+that inasmuch as they were strangers it would be better if they went and
+made their Communion in the next parish where the service would be more
+lenient to their theory of worship. I took one of them by the arm, led
+her gently down the aisle and out into the street, and handed her into
+the cab. Her two companions followed her; I paid the cabman; and that
+was the end of the matter."
+
+The Bishop lay back on the pillows and thought for a moment or two in
+silence.
+
+"Yes," he said finally, "I think that in this case you were justified.
+At the same time your justification by the Book of Common Prayer lay in
+the fact that these women did not give you notice beforehand of their
+intention to communicate. I think I must insist that in future you make
+some arrangement with your workers and helpers to secure the requisite
+minimum of communicants for every celebration. Personally, I think six
+on a Sunday and four on a week-day far too many. I think the repetition
+has a tendency to cheapen the Sacrament."
+
+"_By Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God
+continually_," Father Rowley quoted from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
+
+"Yes, yes, I know," said the Bishop. "But I wish you wouldn't drag in
+these texts. They really have nothing whatever to do with the point in
+question. Please realize, Mr. Rowley, that I allow you a great deal of
+latitude at St. Agnes' because I am aware of what a great influence for
+good you have been among these poor people."
+
+"Your lordship has always been consideration itself."
+
+"If that be your opinion, I want you to obey my ruling in this small
+matter. I am continually being involved in correspondence on your
+account with Vigilance Societies of the type of the Protestant Alliance,
+and I shall give myself the pleasure of answering their complaints
+without at the same time not, as I hope, impeding your splendid work. I
+wish also, if God allows me to leave this bed again, to take the next
+Confirmation in St. Agnes' myself. My presence there will afford you a
+measure of official support which will not, I venture to believe, be a
+disadvantage to your work. I do not expect you to modify your method of
+conducting the service too much. That would savour of hypocrisy, both on
+your side and on mine. But there are one or two things which I should
+prefer not to see again. Last time you dressed a number of your
+choir-boys in red cassocks."
+
+"The servers, you mean, my lord?"
+
+"Whatever you call them, they wear red cassocks, red slippers, and red
+skull caps. That I really cannot stand. You must put them into black
+cassocks and leave their caps and slippers in the vestry cupboard.
+Further, I do not wish that most conspicuous processional crucifix to be
+carried about in front of me wherever I go."
+
+"Would you like the crucifix to be taken down from the altar as well?"
+Father Rowley asked.
+
+"No, that can stay: I shan't see that one."
+
+"What date will suit your lordship for the Confirmation?"
+
+"Ought not the question to have been rather what date will suit you, for
+I have never yet been fortunate enough, and I never hope to be fortunate
+enough, to fix upon a date straight off that will suit you, Mr. Rowley.
+Let me know that later. In any case, my presence must depend, alas, upon
+the state of my health. Now, how are you getting on with your new
+church?"
+
+"We shall be ready to open it in the spring of next year if all goes
+well. Do you think that a new licence will be required? The new St.
+Agnes' is joined to the present church by the sacristy."
+
+The Bishop considered the question for a moment.
+
+"No, I think that the old licence will serve. There is no prospect yet
+of making St. Agnes' into a parish, and I would rather take advantage of
+the technicality, all things being considered. Good-bye, Mr. Rowley. God
+bless you."
+
+The Bishop raised his thin arm.
+
+"God bless your lordship."
+
+"You are always in my prayers, Mr. Rowley. I think much about you lying
+here on the threshold of Eternal Life."
+
+The Bishop turned to Mark who knelt beside the bed.
+
+"Young man, I would fain be spared long enough to ordain you to the
+service of Almighty God, but you are still young and I am very near to
+death. You could not have before you a better example of a Christian
+gentleman than your friend and my friend Mr. Rowley. I shall say nothing
+about his example as a clergyman of the Church of England. Remember me,
+both of you, in your prayers."
+
+The Bishop sank back exhausted, and his visitors went quietly out of the
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE ALTAR FOR THE DEAD
+
+
+All went as well with the new St. Agnes' as the Bishop had hoped.
+Columns of red brick were covered in marble and alabaster by the votive
+offerings of individuals or the subscriptions of different Silchester
+Houses; the baldacchino was given by one rich old lady, the pavement of
+the church by another; the Duke of Birmingham contributed a thurible;
+Oxford Old Siltonians decorated the Lady Chapel; Cambridge Old
+Siltonians found the gold mosaic for the dome of the apse. Father Rowley
+begged money for the fabric far and wide, and the architect, the
+contractors, and the workmen, all Chatsea men, gave of their best and
+asked as little as possible in return. The new church was to be opened
+on Easter morning. But early in Lent the Bishop of Silchester died in
+the bed from which he had never risen since the day Father Rowley and
+Mark received his blessing. The diocese mourned him, for he was a gentle
+scholar, wise in his knowledge of men, simple and pious in his own life.
+
+Dr. Harvard Cheesman, the new Bishop, was translated from the see of
+Ipswich to which he had been preferred from the Chapel Royal in the
+Savoy. Bishop Cheesman possessed all the episcopal qualities. He had the
+hands of a physician and the brow of a scholar. He was filled with a
+sense of the importance of his position, and in that perhaps was
+included a sense of the importance of himself. He was eloquent in
+public, grandiloquent in private. To him Father Rowley wrote shortly
+after his enthronement.
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     March 24.
+
+     My Lord Bishop,
+
+     I am unwilling to trouble you at a moment when you must be
+     unusually busy; but I shall be glad to hear from you about the
+     opening of the new church of the Silchester College Mission, which
+     was fixed for Easter Sunday. Your predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, did
+     not think that any new licence would be necessary, because the new
+     St. Agnes' is joined by the sacristy to the old mission church.
+     There is no idea at present of asking you to constitute St. Agnes'
+     a parish and therefore the question of consecration does not arise.
+     I regret to say that Bishop Crawshay thoroughly disapproved of our
+     services and ritual, and I think he may have felt unwilling to
+     commit himself to endorsing them by the formal grant of a new
+     licence. May I hear from you at your convenience, and may I
+     respectfully add that your lordship has the prayers of all my
+     people?
+
+     I am your lordship's obedient servant,
+
+     John Rowley.
+
+To which the Lord Bishop of Silchester replied as follows:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     March 26.
+
+     Dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     As my predecessor Bishop Crawshay did not think a new licence would
+     be necessary I have no doubt that you can go ahead with your plan
+     of opening the new St. Agnes' on Easter Sunday. At the same time I
+     cannot help feeling that a new licence would be desirable and I am
+     asking Canon Whymper as Rural Dean to pay a visit and make the
+     necessary report. I have heard much of your work, and I pray that
+     it may be as blessed in my time as it was in the time of my
+     predecessor. I am grateful to your people for their prayers and I
+     am, my dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Harvard Silton.
+
+Canon Whymper, the Rector of Chatsea and Rural Dean, visited the new
+church on the Monday of Passion week. On Saturday Father Rowley received
+the following letter from the Bishop:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     April 9.
+
+     Dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     I have just received Canon Whymper's report upon the new church of
+     the Silchester College Mission, and I think before you open the
+     church on Easter Sunday I should like to talk over one or two
+     comparatively unimportant details with you personally. Moreover, it
+     would give me pleasure to make your acquaintance and hear something
+     of your method of work at St. Agnes'. Perhaps you will come to High
+     Thorpe on Monday. There is a train which arrives at High Thorpe at
+     2.36. So I shall expect you at the Castle at 2.42.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Harvard Silton.
+
+Mark paid his second visit to High Thorpe Castle on one of those serene
+April mornings that sail like swans across the lake of time. The
+episcopal standard on the highest turret hung limp; the castle quivered
+in the sunlight; the lawns wearing their richest green seemed as far
+from being walked upon as the blue sky above them. Whether it was that
+Mark was nervous about the result of the coming interview or whether it
+was that his first visit to High Thorpe had been the climax of so many
+new experiences, he was certainly much more sharply aware on this
+occasion of what the Castle stood for. Looking back to the morning when
+he and Father Rowley sat with Bishop Crawshay in his bedroom, he
+realized how much the personality of the dead bishop had dominated his
+surroundings and how little all this dignity and splendour, which must
+have been as imposing then as it was now, had impressed his imagination.
+There came over Mark, when he and Father Rowley were walking silently
+along the drive, such a foreboding of the result of this visit that he
+almost asked the priest why they bothered to continue their journey, why
+they did not turn round immediately and take the next train back to
+Chatsea. But before he had time to say anything Father Rowley had pulled
+the chain of the door bell, the butler had opened the door, and they
+were waiting the Bishop's pleasure in a room that smelt of the best
+leather and the best furniture polish. It was a room that so long as Dr.
+Cheesman held the see of Silchester would be given over to the
+preliminary nervousness of the diocesan clergy, who would one after
+another look at that steel engraving of Jesus Christ preaching by the
+Sea of Galilee, and who when they had finished looking at that would
+look at those two oil paintings of still life, those rich and sombre
+accumulations of fish, fruit and game, that glowed upon the walls with a
+kind of sinister luxury. Waiting rooms are all much alike, the doctor's,
+the dentist's, the bishop's, the railway-station's; they may differ
+slightly in externals, but they all possess the same atmosphere of
+transitory discomfort. They have all occupied human beings with the
+perusal of books they would never otherwise have dreamed of opening,
+with the observation of pictures they would never otherwise have thought
+of regarding twice.
+
+"Would you step this way," the butler requested. "His lordship is
+waiting for you in the library."
+
+The two culprits, for by this time Mark was oblivious of every other
+emotion except one of profound guilt, guilt of what he could not say,
+but most unmistakably guilt, walked along toward the Bishop's
+library--Father Rowley like a fat and naughty child who knows he is
+going to be reproved for eating too many tarts.
+
+There was a studied poise in the attitude of the Bishop when they
+entered. One shapely leg trailed negligently behind his chair ready at
+any moment to serve as the pivot upon which its owner could swing round
+again into the every-day world; the other leg firmly wedged against the
+desk supported the burden of his concentration. The Bishop swung round
+on the shapely leg in attendance, and in a single sweeping gesture
+blotted the last page of the letter he had been writing and shook Father
+Rowley by the hand.
+
+"I am delighted to have an opportunity of meeting you, Mr. Rowley," he
+began, and then paused a moment with an inquiring look at Mark.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't mind, my lord, if I brought with me young
+Lidderdale, who is reading for Holy Orders and working with us at St.
+Agnes'. I am apt to forget sometimes exactly to what I have and have not
+committed myself and I thought your lordship would not object. . . ."
+
+"To a witness?" interposed the Bishop in a tone of courtly banter.
+"Come, come, Mr. Rowley, had I known you were going to be so suspicious
+of me I should have asked my domestic chaplain to be present on my
+side."
+
+Mark, supposing that the Bishop was annoyed by his presence at the
+interview, made a movement to retire, whereupon the Bishop tapped him
+paternally upon the shoulder and said:
+
+"Nonsense, non-sense, I was merely indulging in a mild pleasantry. Sit
+down, Mr. Rowley. Mr. Lidderdale I think you will find that chair quite
+comfortable. Well, Mr. Rowley," he began, "I have heard much of you and
+your work. Our friend Canon Whymper spoke of it with enthusiasm. Yes,
+yes, with enthusiasm. I often regret that in the course of my ministry I
+have never had the good fortune to be called to work among the poor, the
+real poor. You have been privileged, Mr. Rowley, if I may be allowed to
+say so, greatly, immensely privileged. You find a wilderness, and you
+make of it a garden. Wonderful. Wonderful."
+
+Mark began to feel uncomfortable, and he thought by the way Father
+Rowley was puffing his cheeks that he too was beginning to feel
+uncomfortable. The Missioner looked as if he was blowing away the lather
+of the soap that the Bishop was using upon him so prodigally.
+
+"Some other time, Mr. Rowley, when I have a little leisure . . . I
+perceive the need of making myself acquainted with every side of my new
+diocese--a little leisure, yes . . . sometime I should like to have a
+long talk with you about all the details of your work at Chatsea, of
+which as I said Canon Whymper has spoken to me most enthusiastically.
+The question, however, immediately before us this morning is the licence
+of your new church. Since writing to you first I have thought the matter
+over most earnestly. I have given the matter the gravest consideration.
+I have consulted Canon Whymper and I have come to the conclusion that
+bearing all the circumstances in mind it will be wiser for you to apply,
+and I hope be granted, a new licence. With this decision in my mind I
+asked Canon Whymper in his capacity as Rural Dean to report upon the new
+church. Mr. Rowley, his report is extremely favourable. He writes to me
+of the noble fabric, noble is the actual epithet he employs, yes, the
+very phrase. He expresses his conviction that you are to be
+congratulated, most warmly congratulated, Mr. Rowley, upon your vigorous
+work. I believe I am right in saying that all the money necessary to
+erect this noble edifice has been raised by yourself?"
+
+"Not all of it," said Father Rowley. "I still owe �3,000."
+
+"A mere trifle," said the Bishop, dismissing the sum with the airy
+gesture of a conjurer who palms a coin. "A mere trifle compared with
+what you have already raised. I know that at the moment there is no
+question of constituting as a parish what is at present merely a
+district; but such a contingency must be borne in mind by both of us,
+and inasmuch as that would imply consecration by myself I am unwilling
+to prejudice any decision I might have to take later, should the
+necessity for consecration arise, by allowing you at the moment a wider
+latitude than I might be prepared to allow you in the future. Yes, Canon
+Whymper writes most enthusiastically of the noble fabric." The Bishop
+paused, drummed with his fingers on the arm of his chair as if he were
+testing the pitch of his instrument, and then taking a deep breath
+boomed forth: "But Mr. Rowley, in his report he informs me that in the
+middle of the south aisle exists an altar or Holy Table expressly and
+exclusively designed for what he was told are known as masses for the
+dead."
+
+"That is perfectly true," said Father Rowley.
+
+"Ah," said the Bishop, shaking his head gravely. "I did not indeed
+imagine that Canon Whymper would be misinformed about such an important
+feature; but I did not think it right to act without ascertaining first
+from you that such is indeed the case. Mr. Rowley, it would be difficult
+for me to express how grievously it pains me to have to seem to
+interfere in the slightest degree with the successful prosecution of
+your work among the poor of Chatsea, especially to make such
+interference one of the first of my actions in a new diocese; but the
+responsibilities of a bishop are grave. He cannot lightly endorse a
+condition of affairs, a method of services which in his inmost heart
+after the deepest confederation he feels is repugnant to the spirit of
+the Church Of England. . . ."
+
+"I question that opinion, my lord," said the Missioner.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, pray allow me to finish. We have little time at our
+disposal for a theological argument which would in any case be
+fruitless, for as I told you I have already examined the question with
+the deepest consideration from every standpoint. Though I may respect
+your opinions in my private capacity, for I do not wish to impugn for
+one moment the sincerity of your beliefs, in my episcopal, or what I may
+call my public character, I can only condemn them utterly. Utterly, Mr.
+Rowley, and completely."
+
+"But this altar, my lord," shouted Father Rowley, springing to his feet,
+to the alarm of Mark, who thought he was going to shake his fist in the
+Bishop's face, "this altar was subscribed for by the poor of St. Agnes',
+by all the poor of St. Agnes', as a memorial of the lives of sailors and
+marines of St. Agnes' lost in the sinking of the _King Harry_. Your
+predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, knew of its existence, actually saw it and
+commented on its ugliness; yet when I told him the circumstances in
+which it had been erected he was deeply moved by the beautiful idea.
+This altar has been in use for nearly three years. Masses for the dead
+have been said there time after time. This altar is surrounded by
+memorials of my dead people. It is one of the most vital factors in my
+work there. You ask me to remove it, before you have been in the diocese
+a month, before you have had time to see with your own eyes what an
+influence for good it has on the daily lives of the poor people who
+built it. My lord, I will not remove the altar."
+
+While Father Rowley was speaking the Bishop of Silchester had been
+looking like a man on a railway platform who has been ambushed by a
+whistling engine.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley," he said, "I pray you to control yourself. I
+beg you to understand that this is not a mere question of red tape, if I
+may use the expression, of one extra altar or Holy Table, but it is a
+question of the services said at that altar or Holy Table."
+
+"That is precisely what I am trying to point out to your lordship,"
+said Father Rowley angrily.
+
+"You yourself told me when you wrote to me that Bishop Crawshay
+disapproved of much that was done at St. Agnes'. It was you who put it
+into my head at the beginning of our correspondence that you were not
+asking me formally to open the new church, because you were doubtful of
+the effect your method of worship might have upon me. I don't wish for a
+moment to suggest that you were trying to bundle on one side the
+question of the licence, before I had had a moment to look round me in
+my new diocese, I say I do _not_ think this for a moment; but inasmuch
+as the question has come before me officially, as sooner or later it
+must have come before me officially, I cannot allow my future action to
+be prejudiced by giving you liberties now that I may not be prepared to
+allow you later on. Suppose that in three years' time the question of
+consecrating the new St. Agnes' arises and the legality of this third
+altar or Holy Table is questioned, how should I be able to turn round
+and forbid then what I have not forbidden now?"
+
+"Your lordship prefers to force me to resign?"
+
+"Force you to resign, Mr. Rowley?" the Bishop repeated in aggrieved
+accents. "What can I possibly have said that could lead you to suppose
+for one moment that I was desirous of forcing you to resign? I make
+allowance for your natural disappointment. I make every allowance.
+Otherwise Mr. Rowley I should be tempted to characterize such a
+statement as cruel. As cruel, Mr. Rowley."
+
+"What other alternative have I?"
+
+"I should have said, Mr. Rowley, that you have one other very obvious
+alternative, and that is to accept my ruling upon the subject of this
+third altar or Holy Table. When I shall receive an assurance that you
+will do so, I shall with pleasure, with great pleasure, give you a new
+licence."
+
+"I could not possibly do that," said the Missioner. "I could not
+possibly go back to my people to-night and tell them this Holy Week that
+what I have been teaching them for ten years is a lie. I would rather
+resign a thousand times."
+
+"That is a far more accurate statement than your previous assertion
+that I was forcing you to resign."
+
+"When will you have found a priest to take my place temporarily?" the
+Missioner asked in a chill voice. "It is unlikely that the Silchester
+College authorities will find another missioner at once, and I think it
+rests with your lordship to find a locum tenens. I do not wish to
+disappoint my people about the date of the opening of their new church.
+They have been looking forward to this Easter for so long now. Poor
+dears!"
+
+Father Rowley sighed out the last ejaculation to himself, and his sigh
+ran through the Bishop's opulent library like a dull wind. Mark had a
+mad impulse to tell the Bishop the story of his father and the Lima
+Street Mission. His father had resigned on Palm Sunday. Oh, this ghastly
+dream. . . . Father Rowley leave Chatsea! It was unimaginable. . . .
+
+But the Bishop was overthrowing the work of ten years with apparently as
+little consciousness of the ruin he was creating as a boar that has
+rooted up an ant-heap with his snout.
+
+"Quite so. Quite so, Mr. Rowley. I certainly see your point," the Bishop
+declared. "I will do my best to secure a priest, but meanwhile . . . let
+me see. I need scarcely say how painful your decision has been, what
+pain it has caused me. Let me see, yes, in the circumstances I agree
+with you that it would be inadvisable to postpone the opening. I think
+from every point of view it would be wisest to proceed according to
+schedule. Could not this altar or Holy Table be railed off temporarily,
+I do not say muffled up, but could not some indication be given of the
+fact that I do not sanction its use? In that case I should have no
+objection, indeed on the contrary I should be only too happy for you to
+carry on with your work either until I can find a temporary substitute
+or until the Silchester College authorities can appoint a new missioner.
+Dear me, this is dreadfully painful for me."
+
+Father Rowley stared at the Bishop in astonishment.
+
+"You want me to continue?" he asked. "Really, my lord, you will excuse
+my plain speaking if I tell you that I am amazed at your point of view.
+A moment ago you told me that I must either remove this altar or
+resign."
+
+"Pardon me, Mr. Rowley. I did not mention the word 'resign.'"
+
+"And now," the Missioner went on without paying any attention to the
+interruption. "You are ready to let me stay at St. Agnes' until a
+successor can conveniently be found. If my teaching is as pernicious as
+you think, I cannot understand your lordship's tolerating my officiating
+for another hour in your diocese."
+
+"Mr. Rowley, you are introducing into this unhappy affair a great deal
+of extraneous feeling. I do not reproach you. I know that you are
+labouring under the stress of strong emotion. I overlook the manner
+which you have adopted towards me. I overlook it, Mr. Rowley. Before we
+close this interview, which I must once more assure you is as painful
+for me as for you, I want you to understand how deeply I regret having
+been forced to take the action I have. I ask your prayers, Mr. Rowley,
+and please be sure that you always have and always will have my prayers.
+Have you anything more you would like to say? Do not let me give you the
+impression from my alluding to the heavy work of entering upon the
+duties and responsibilities of a new diocese that I desire to hurry you
+in any way this afternoon. You will want to catch the 4.10 back to
+Chatsea I have no doubt. Too early perhaps for tea. Good-bye, Mr.
+Rowley. Good-bye, Mr. . . ." the Bishop paused and looked inquiringly at
+Mark. "Lidderdale, ah, yes," he said. "For the moment I forgot.
+Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale. A simple railing will, I think be sufficient
+for the altar in question, Mr. Rowley. I perfectly appreciate your
+motive in asking the Bishop of Barbadoes to officiate at the opening. I
+quite see that you did not wish to commit me to an approval of a ritual
+which might be more advanced than I might consider proper in my diocese.
+. . . Good-bye, good-bye."
+
+Father Rowley and Mark found themselves once more in the drive. The
+episcopal standard floated in the wind, which had sprung up while they
+were with the Bishop. They walked silently to the railway station under
+a fast clouding sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FATHER ROWLEY
+
+
+The first episcopal act of the Bishop of Silchester drove many poor
+souls away from God. It was a time of deep emotional stress for all the
+St. Agnes' workers, and Father Rowley could not show himself in Keppel
+Street without being surrounded by a crowd of supplicants who with tears
+and lamentations begged him to give up the new St. Agnes' and to remain
+in the old mission church rather than be lost to them for ever. There
+were some who even wished him to surrender the Third Altar; but in his
+last sermon preached on the Sunday night before he left Chatsea, he
+spoke to them and said:
+
+"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
+The 15th verse of the 21st Chapter of the Holy Gospel according to Saint
+John: _Feed my lambs._
+
+"It is difficult for me, dear people, to preach to you this evening for
+the last time as your missioner, to preach, moreover, the last sermon
+that will ever be preached in this little mission church which has meant
+so much to you and so much to me. By the mercy of God man does not
+realize at the moment all that is implied by an occasion like this. He
+speaks with his mouth words of farewell; but his heart still beats to
+what was and what is, rather than to what will be.
+
+"When I took as my text to-night those three words of Our Lord to St.
+Peter, _Feed my Lambs_, I took them as words that might be applied,
+first to the Lord Bishop of this diocese, secondly to the priest who
+will take my place in this Mission, and thirdly and perhaps most
+poignantly of all to myself. I cannot bring myself to suppose that in
+this moment of grief, in this moment of bitterness, almost of despair I
+am able to speak fairly of the Bishop of Silchester's action in
+compelling me to resign what has counted for all that is most precious
+in my life on earth. And already, in saying that the Bishop has
+compelled me to resign, I am not speaking with perfect accuracy,
+inasmuch as if I had been willing to surrender what I considered one of
+the essential articles of our belief, the Bishop would have been glad to
+licence the new St. Agnes' and to give his countenance and his support
+to me, the unworthy priest in charge of it.
+
+"I want you therefore, dear people, to try to look at the matter from
+the standpoint of the Bishop. I want you to try to understand that in
+objecting to our little altar for the dead he is objecting not so much
+to the altar itself as to the services said at that altar. If it had
+merely been a question between us of a third altar, whether here or in
+the new St. Agnes', I should have found it possible, however
+unwillingly, to ask you--you, who out of your hard-earned savings built
+that altar--to allow it to be removed. Yes, I should have been selfish
+enough to ask you to make that great sacrifice on my account. But when
+the Bishop insisted that I and the priests who have borne with me and
+worked with me and preached with me and prayed with me all these years
+should abstain from saying those Masses which we believe and which you
+believe help our dear ones waiting for the Day of Judgment--why, then, I
+felt that my surrender would have been a denial of our dear Lord, such a
+denial as St. Peter himself uttered in the hall of the high-priest's
+house. But the Bishop does not believe that our prayers here below have
+any efficacy or can in any way help the blessed dead. He does not
+believe in such prayers, and he believes that those who do believe in
+such prayers are wrong, not merely according to the teaching of the
+Prayer Book, but also according to the revelation of Almighty God. I do
+not want you to say, as you will be tempted to say, that the Bishop of
+Silchester in condemning our method of services at St. Agnes' is
+condemning them with an eye to public opinion or to political advantage.
+Alas, I have myself been tempted to say bitter words about him, to think
+bitter thoughts; but at this moment, with that last _Nunc Dimittis_
+ringing in my ears, _Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace_,
+I realize that the Bishop is acting honestly and sincerely, however
+much he may be acting wrongly and hastily. It is dreadful for me at this
+moment of parting to feel that some of you here to-night may be turned
+from the face of God because you are angered against one of God's
+ministers. If any poor words of mine have power to touch your hearts, I
+beg you to believe that in giving us this great trial of our faith God
+is acting with that mysterious justice and omniscience of which we speak
+idly without in the least apprehending what He means. I shall say no
+more in defence and explanation of the Bishop's action, and if he should
+consider my defence and explanation of it a piece of presumption I send
+him at this solemn moment of farewell a message that I shall never cease
+to pray that he may long guide you on the way that leads up to eternal
+happiness.
+
+"I can speak more freely of what your attitude should be towards Father
+Hungerford, the priest who is coming to take my place and who is going
+with God's help to do far more for you here than ever I have been able
+to do. I want you all to put yourselves in his place; I want you all to
+think of him to-night wondering, fearing, doubting, hoping, and praying.
+I want you to imagine how difficult he must be feeling the situation is
+for him. He will come here to-morrow conscious that there is nobody in
+this district of ours who does not feel, whether he be a communicant or
+not, that the Bishop had no right to intervene so soon and without
+greater knowledge of his new diocese in a district like ours. I cannot
+help knowing how much I myself am to blame in this particular; but, my
+dear people, it has been very hard for me during these last two weeks
+always to be brave and hopeful. Often I have found those entreaties on
+my doorstep almost more than I could endure to hear, those letters on my
+desk almost more than I could bear to read. So, if you want to do the
+one thing that can comfort me in this bitter hour of mine I entreat you
+to show Father Hungerford that your faith and your hope and your love do
+not depend on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that
+deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There is only one
+way in which you can show Father Hungerford that Jesus Christ lives in
+your hearts, and that is by going to Confession and to Communion and by
+hearing Mass as you have done all this time. Show him by your behaviour
+in the street, by your kindness and consideration at home, by your
+devotion and reverence in church, that you appreciate the mercies of
+God, that you appreciate what it means to have Jesus Christ upon your
+altar, that you are, in a word, Christians.
+
+"And now at last I must think of those words of our dear Lord as they
+apply to myself: _Feed my lambs._ And as I repeat them, I ask myself
+again if I have done right, for I am troubled in spirit, and I wonder if
+I ought to have given up that third altar and to have remained here. But
+even as I wonder this, even as at this moment I stand in this pulpit for
+the last time, a voice within me forbids me to doubt. No, my clear folk,
+I cannot surrender that altar. I cannot come to you and say that what I
+have been teaching for ten years was of so little value, of so little
+importance, of so little worth, that for the sake of policy it can be
+abandoned with a stroke of the pen or a nod of the head. I stand here
+looking out into the future, hearing like angelic trumpets those three
+words sounding and resounding upon the great void of time: _Feed my
+lambs!_ I ask myself what work lies before me, what lambs I shall have
+to feed elsewhere; I ask myself in my misery whether God has found me
+unworthy of the trust He gave me. I feel that if I leave St. Agnes'
+to-morrow with the thought that you still cherish angry and resentful
+feelings I shall sink to a lower depth of humiliation and depression
+than I have yet reached. But if I can leave St. Agnes' with the
+assurance that my work here will go steadily forward to the glory of God
+from the point at which I renounced it, I shall know that God must have
+some other purpose for the remainder of my life, some other mission to
+which He intends to call me. To you, my dear people, to you who have
+borne with me patiently, to you who have tolerated so sweetly my
+infirmities, to you who have been kind to my failings, to you who have
+taught me so much more of our dear Lord Jesus Christ than I have been
+able to teach you, to you I say good-bye. I cannot harrow your feelings
+or my own by saying any more. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
+and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
+
+Notwithstanding these words, the first episcopal act of the Bishop of
+Silchester drove many poor souls away from God.
+
+The effect upon Mark, had his religion been merely a pastime of
+adolescence, would have been disastrous. Owing to human nature's respect
+for the conspicuous there is nothing so demoralizing to faith as the
+failure of a leader of religion to set forth in his own actions the word
+of God. Mark, however, looked at the whole business more from an
+ecclesiastical angle. He had reason to condemn the Bishop for
+unchristian behaviour; but he preferred to condemn him for uncatholic
+behaviour. Dr. Cheesman and the many other Dr. Cheesmans of whom the
+Anglican episcopate was at this period composed never succeeded in
+shaking his belief in Christ; they did succeed in shaking for a short
+time his belief in the Church of England. There are few Anglo-Catholics,
+whether priests or laymen, who have never doubted the right of their
+Church to proclaim herself a branch of the Holy Catholic Church. This
+phase of doubt is indeed so common that in ecclesiastical circles it has
+come to be regarded as a kind of mental chicken-pox, not very alarming
+if it catches the patient when young, but growing more dangerous in
+proportion to the lateness of its attack. Mark had his attack young.
+When Father Rowley left Chatsea, he was anxious to accompany him on what
+he knew would be an exhausting time of travelling round to preach and
+collect the necessary money to pay off what was actually a personal
+debt. It seemed that there must be something fundamentally wrong with a
+Church that allowed a man to perambulate England in an endeavour to pay
+off the debt upon a building from ministrating in which he had been
+debarred. This debt, moreover, was presumably going to be paid by people
+who fully subscribed to teaching which had been officially condemned.
+
+When Mark commented on this, Father Rowley pointed out that as a matter
+of fact a great deal of money had been sent by people who admired the
+practical side, or what they would have called the practical side of his
+work among the poor, but who at the same time thoroughly disapproved of
+its ecclesiastical form.
+
+"In justice to the poor old Church of England," he said to Mark, "it
+must be pointed out that a good deal of this money has been given by
+devout Anglicans under protest."
+
+"Yes, but that doesn't seriously affect the argument," said Mark. "You
+collect I don't know how many thousands of pounds to put up a
+magnificent church from which the Bishop of Silchester sees fit to turn
+you out, but for the debt on which you are still personally responsible.
+It's fantastic!"
+
+"Mark Anthony," the priest said with a laugh, "you lack the legal mind.
+The Bishop did not turn me out. The Bishop can perfectly well say I
+turned myself out."
+
+"It is all too subtle for me," said Mark. "But I'm not going to worry
+you with any more arguments. You've had enough of them to last you for
+ever. I do wish you'd let me stick to you personally and help you in any
+way possible."
+
+"No, Mark Anthony," the priest replied. "I've done my work at St.
+Agnes', and you've done yours. Your business now is to take advantage of
+what has happened and to get back to your books, which whatever you may
+say have been more and more neglected lately. You'll find it of enormous
+help to be a good theologian. I have never ceased to regret my own
+shortcomings in that respect. Besides, I think you ought to spend a
+certain amount of time with Ogilvie before you go to Glastonbury. There
+is quite a lot of work to do if you look for it in a country parish
+like--what's the name of the place? Wych. Oh, yes, quite a lot of work.
+Don't bother your head about Anglican Orders and Roman Claims and the
+Catholicity of the Church of England. Your business is to save souls,
+your own included. Go back and read and get to know the people in
+Ogilvie's parish. Anybody can tackle a district like St. Agnes'; anybody
+that is who has the suitable personality. How many people can tackle an
+English country parish? I hardly know one. I should like to have you
+with me. I'm fond of you, and you're useful; but at your age to travel
+round from town to town listening to my begging would be all wrong. I
+might even go to America. I've had most cordial invitations from several
+American bishops, and if I can't raise the money in England I shall
+have to go there. If God has any more work for me to do I shall be
+offered a cure some day somewhere. I want you to be one of my assistant
+priests, and if you're going to be useful to me as an assistant priest,
+you really must have some theology behind you. These bishops get more
+and more difficult to deal with every year. Now, it's no good arguing.
+My mind's made up. I won't take you with me."
+
+So Mark went back to Wych-on-the-Wold and brooded upon the non-Catholic
+aspects of the Anglican Church.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+POINTS OF VIEW
+
+
+Mark did not find that his guardian was much disturbed by his doubts of
+the validity of Anglican Orders nor much alarmed by his suspicion that
+the Establishment had no right to be considered a branch of the Holy
+Catholic Church.
+
+"The crucial point in the Roman position is their doctrine of
+intention," said Mr. Ogilvie. "It always seems to me that this doctrine
+is a particularly dangerous one for them to play with and one that may
+recoil at any moment upon their own heads. There has been a great deal
+of super-subtle dividing of intentions into actual, virtual, habitual,
+and interpretative; but if you are going to take your stand on logic you
+must be ready to face a logical conclusion. Let us agree for a moment
+that Barlow and the other bishops who consecrated Matthew Parker had no
+intention of consecrating him as a bishop for the purpose of ordaining
+priests in the sense in which Catholics understand the word priest. Do
+the Romans expect us to believe that all their prelates in the time of
+the Renaissance had a perfect intention when they were consecrating? Or
+leave on one side for a moment the sacrament of Orders; the validity of
+other sacraments is affected by their extension of the doctrine beyond
+the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas. However improbable it may be
+that at one moment all the priests of the Catholic Church should lack
+the intention let us say of absolution, it _is_ a _logical_ possibility,
+in which case all the faithful would logically speaking be damned. It
+was in order to guard against this kind of logical catastrophe that the
+first split between an actual intention and a virtual intention was
+made. The Roman Church teaches that the virtual intention is enough; but
+if we argue that a virtual intention might be ascribed to the bishops
+who consecrated Parker, the Roman controversialists present us with
+another subdivision--the habitual intention, which is one that formerly
+existed, but of the present continuance of which there is no trace. Now
+really, my dear Mark, you must admit that we've reached a point very
+near to nonsense if this kind of logical subtlety is to control Faith."
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "I don't think I should ever want to
+'vert over the question of the validity of Anglican Orders. I haven't
+any doubts now of their validity, and I think it's improbable that I
+shall have any doubts after I'm ordained. At the same time, there _is_
+something wrong with the Church of England if a situation like that in
+Chatsea can be created by the whim of a bishop. Our unhappy union
+between Church and State has created a class of bishops which has no
+parallel anywhere else in Christendom. In order to become a bishop in
+England, at any rate of the kind that has a seat in the House of Lords,
+it is necessary to be a gentleman, or rather to have the outward and
+visible signs of being a gentleman, to be a scholar, or to be a
+diplomat. Of course, there will be exceptions; but if you look at almost
+all our bishops, you will find they have reached their dignity by social
+attainments or by political utility or sometimes by intellectual
+distinction, but hardly ever by religious fervour, or spiritual honesty,
+or fearless opinion. I can sympathize with the dissenters of the
+seventeenth century in blaming the episcopate for all spiritual
+maladies. I expect there were a good many Dr. Cheesmans in the days of
+Defoe. Look back and see how the bishops have always voted in the House
+of Lords with enthusiastic unanimity against every proposal of reform
+that was ever put forward. I wonder what will happen when they are
+called upon to face a real national crisis."
+
+"I'm perfectly ready to agree with everything you say about bishops,"
+the Rector volunteered. "But more or less, I'm sorry to add, it is a
+criticism that can be applied to all the orders of the priesthood
+everywhere in Christendom. What can we, what dare we say in favour of
+priests when we remember Our Lord?"
+
+"When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more closely than
+the rest," Mark raged, "the bishops down him. They exist to maintain the
+safety of their class. They have reached their present position by
+knowing the right people, by condemning the wrong people, and by
+balancing their fat bottoms on fences. Sometimes when their political
+patrons quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is either
+very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed as a stop-gap."
+
+"Yes," the Rector agreed. "But our present bishops are only one more
+aspect of Victorian materialism. The whole of contemporary society can
+be criticized in the same way. After all, we get the bishops we deserve,
+just as we get the politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve
+and the painters we deserve."
+
+"I don't think that's any excuse for the bishops. I sometimes dream of
+worming myself up and stopping at nothing in order to be made a bishop,
+and then when I have the mitre at last of appearing in my true colours."
+
+"Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our right reverend
+fathers in God do now," the Rector laughed.
+
+These discussions might have continued for ever without taking Mark any
+further. His failure to experience Oxford had deprived him of the
+opportunity to whet his opinions upon the grindstone of debate, and
+there had been no time for academic argument in the three years of
+Keppel Street. In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do
+but argue. It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather of seeing
+destroyed, a society that was obviously performing useful work and
+returning to a society that, so far as Mark could observe performed no
+kind of work whatever. He was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt
+that he was moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to a
+chasm in which he would be spiritually lost. He seemed to be taking his
+priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be content with gratifying his
+own desire to worship Almighty God without troubling about his
+parishioners. Mark did not like to make any suggestions about parochial
+work, because he was afraid of the Rector's retorting with an implied
+criticism of St. Agnes'; and that would have involved him in a bitter
+argument for which he would afterward be sorry. Nor was it only in his
+missionary duties that he felt his old friend was allowing himself to
+rust. Three years ago the Rector had said a daily Mass. Now he was
+content with one on Thursdays except on festivals. Mark began to take
+walks far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of
+the life round him rather than the expression of an interest in the life
+beyond. On one of these walks he found himself at Wield in the diocese
+of Kidderminster thirty miles or more away from home. He had spent the
+night in a remote Cotswold village, and all the morning he had been
+travelling through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time
+of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line, monotonously
+green, prosperous and complacent. While he was eating his bread and
+cheese at the public bar of the principal inn, he picked up one of the
+local newspapers and reading it, as one so often reads in such
+surroundings, with much greater particularity than the journal of a
+metropolis, he came upon the following letter:
+
+     To the Editor of the WIELD OBSERVER AND SOUTH WORCESTERSHIRE
+     COURANT,
+
+     SIR,--The leader in your issue of last Tuesday upon my sermon in
+     St. Andrew's Church on the preceding Sunday calls for some
+     corrections. The action of the Bishop of Kidderminster in
+     inhibiting Father Rowley from accepting an invitation to preach in
+     my church is due either to his ignorance of the facts of the case,
+     to his stupidity in appreciating them, or, I must regretfully add,
+     to his natural bias towards persecution. These are strong words for
+     a parish priest to use about his diocesan; but the Bishop of
+     Kidderminster's consistent support of latitudinarianism and his
+     consistent hostility towards any of his clergy who practise the
+     forms of worship which they feel they are bound to practise by the
+     rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer call for strong words. The
+     Bishop in correspondence with me declined to give any reason for
+     his inhibition of Father Rowley beyond a general disapproval of his
+     teaching. I am informed privately that the Bishop is suffering from
+     a delusion that Father Rowley disobeyed the Bishop of Silchester,
+     which is of course perfectly untrue and which is only one more sign
+     of how completely out of accord our bishops are with what is going
+     on either in their own diocese or in any other. My own inclination
+     was frankly to defy his Lordship and insist upon Father Rowley's
+     fulfilling his engagement. I am not sure that I do not now regret
+     that I allowed my church-wardens to overpersuade me on this point.
+     I take great exception to your statement that the offertories both
+     in the morning and in the evening were sent by me to Father Rowley
+     regardless of the wishes of my parishioners. That there are certain
+     parishioners of St. Andrew's who objected I have no doubt. But when
+     I send you the attached list of parishioners who subscribed no less
+     than �18 to be added to the two collections, you will I am sure
+     courteously admit that in this case the opinion of the parishioners
+     of St. Andrew's was at one with the opinion of their Vicar.--I am,
+     Sir, your obedient servant,
+
+     ADRIAN FORSHAW.
+
+Mark was so much delighted by this letter that he went off at once to
+call on Mr. Forshaw, but did not find him at home; he was amused to hear
+from the housekeeper that his reverence had been summoned to an
+interview with the Bishop of Kidderminster. Mark fancied that it would
+be the prelate who would have the unpleasant quarter of an hour.
+Presently he began to ponder what it meant for such a letter to be
+written and published; his doubts about the Church of England returned;
+and in this condition of mind he found himself outside a small Roman
+Catholic church dedicated to St. Joseph, where hopeful of gaining the
+Divine guidance within he passed through the door. It may be that he was
+in a less receptive mood than he thought, for what impressed him most
+was the Anglican atmosphere of this Italian outpost. The stale perfume
+of incense on stone could not eclipse that authentic perfume of
+respectability which has been acquired by so many Roman Catholic
+churches in England. There were still hanging on the pillars the framed
+numbers of Sunday's hymns. Mark pictured the choir boy who must have
+slipped the cards in the frame with anxious and triumphant and
+immemorial Anglican zeal; and while he was contemplating this symbolical
+hymn-board, over his shoulder floated an authentic Anglican voice, a
+voice that sounded as if it was being choked out of the larynx by the
+clerical collar. It was the Rector, a stumpy little man with the purple
+stock of a monseigneur, who showed the stranger round his church and
+ended by inviting him to lunch. Mark, wondering if he had reached a
+crossroad in his progress, accepted the invitation, and prepared himself
+reverently to hear the will of God. Monseigneur Cripps lived in a little
+Gothic house next to St. Joseph's, a trim little Gothic house covered
+with the oiled curls of an ampelopsis still undyed by autumn's henna.
+
+"You've chosen a bad day to come to lunch," said Monseigneur with a
+warning shake of the head. "It's Friday, you know. And it's hard to get
+decent fish away from the big towns."
+
+While his host went off to consult the housekeeper about the extra place
+for lunch, a proceeding which induced him to make a joke about extra
+'plaice' and extra 'place,' at which he laughed heartily, Mark
+considered the most tactful way of leading up to a discussion of the
+position of the Anglican Church in regard to Roman claims. It should not
+be difficult, he supposed, because Monseigneur at the first hint of his
+guest's desire to be converted would no doubt welcome the topic. But
+when Monseigneur led the way to his little Gothic dining-room full of
+Arundel prints, Mark soon apprehended that his host had evidently not
+had the slightest notion of offering an _ad hoc_ hospitality. He paid no
+attention to Mark's tentative advances, and if he was willing to talk
+about Rome, it was only because he had just paid a visit there in
+connexion with a school of which he was a trustee and out of which he
+wanted to make one kind of school and the Roman Catholic Bishop of
+Dudley wanted to make another.
+
+"I had to take the whole question to headquarters," Monseigneur
+explained impressively. "But I was disappointed by Rome, oh yes, I was
+very disappointed. When I was a young man I saw it _couleur de rose_. I
+did enjoy one thing though, and that was going round the Vatican. Yes,
+they looked remarkably smart, the Papal Guards; as soon as they saw I
+was _Monsignore_, they turned out and presented arms. I'm bound to admit
+that I _was_ impressed by that. But on the way down I lost my pipe in
+the train. And do you think I could buy a decent pipe in Rome? I
+actually had to pay five _lire_--or was it six?--for this inadequate
+tube."
+
+He produced from his pocket the pipe he had been compelled to buy, a
+curved briar all varnish and gold lettering.
+
+"I've been badly treated in Wield. Certainly, they made me Monseigneur.
+But then they couldn't very well do less after I built this church.
+We've been successful here. And I venture to think popular. But the
+Bishop is in the hands of the Irish. He cannot grasp that the English
+people will not have Irish priests to rule them. They don't like it, and
+I don't blame them. You're not Irish, are you?"
+
+Mark reassured him.
+
+"This plaice isn't bad, eh? I ordered turbot, but you never get the fish
+you order in these Midland towns. It always ends in my having plaice,
+which is good for the soul! Ha-ha! I hate the Irish myself. This school
+of which I am the chief trustee was intended to be a Catholic
+reformatory. That idea fell through, and now my notion is to turn it
+into a decent school run by secular clergy. All the English Catholic
+schools are in the hands of the regular clergy, which is a mistake. It
+puts too much power in the hands of the Benedictines and the Jesuits and
+the rest of them. After all, the great strength of the Catholic Church
+in England will always be the secular clergy. And what do we get now? A
+lot of objectionable Irishmen in Trilby hats. Last time I saw the Bishop
+I gave him my frank opinion of his policy. I told him my opinion to his
+face. He won't get me to kowtow to him. Yes, I said to him that, if he
+handed over this school to the Dominicans, he was going to spoil one of
+the finest opportunities ever presented of educating the sons of decent
+English gentlemen to be simple parish priests. But the Bishop of Dudley
+is an Irishman himself. He can't think of anything educationally better
+than Ushaw. And, as I was telling you, I saw there was nothing for it
+but to take the whole matter right up to headquarters, that is to Rome.
+Did I tell you that the Papal Guards turned out and presented arms? Ah,
+I remember now, I did mention it. I was extraordinarily impressed by
+them. A fine body. But generally speaking, Rome disappointed me after
+many years. Of course we English Catholics don't understand that way of
+worshipping. I'm not criticizing it. I realize that it suits the
+Italians. But suppose I started clearing my throat in the middle of
+Mass? My congregation would be disgusted, and rightly. It's an
+astonishing thing that I couldn't buy a good pipe in Rome, don't you
+think? I must have lost mine when I got out of the carriage to look at
+the leaning tower of Pisa, and my other one got clogged up with some
+candle grease. I couldn't get the beastly stuff out, so I had to give
+the pipe to a porter. They're keen on English pipes, those Italian
+porters. Poor devils, I'm not surprised. Of course, I need hardly say
+that in Rome they promised to do everything for me; but you can't trust
+them when your back is turned, and I need hardly add that the Bishop was
+pulling strings all the time. They showed me one of his letters, which
+was a tissue of mis-statements--a regular tissue. Now, suppose you had a
+son and you wanted him to be a priest? You don't necessarily want him to
+become a Jesuit or a Benedictine or a Dominican. Where can you send him
+now? Stonyhurst, Downside, Beaumont. There isn't a single decent school
+run by the secular clergy. You know what I mean? A school for the sons
+of gentlemen--a public school. We've got magnificent buildings, grounds,
+everything you could wish. I've been promised all the money necessary,
+and then the Bishop of Dudley steps in and says that these Dominicans
+ought to take it on."
+
+"I'm afraid I've somehow given you a wrong impression," Mark interposed
+when Monseigneur Cripps at last filled his mouth with plaice. "I'm not a
+Roman Catholic."
+
+"Oh, aren't you?" said Monseigneur indifferently. "Never mind, I expect
+you see my point about the necessity for the school to be run by secular
+clergy. Did I tell you how I got the land for my church here? That's
+rather an interesting story. It belonged to Lord Evesham who, as perhaps
+you may know, is very anti-Catholic, but a thorough good sportsman. We
+always get on capitally together. Well, one day I said to his agent,
+Captain Hart: 'What about this land, Hart? Don't you think you could get
+it out of his lordship?' 'It's no good, Father Cripps,' said Hart--I
+wasn't Monseigneur then of course--'It's no good,' he said, 'his
+lordship absolutely declines to let his land be used for a Catholic
+church.' 'Come along, Hart,' I said, 'let's have a round of golf.' Well,
+when we got to the eighteenth hole we were all square, and we'd both of
+us gone round three better than bogie and broken our own records. I was
+on the green with my second shot, and holed out in three. 'My game,' I
+shouted because Hart had foozled his drive and wasn't on the green. 'Not
+at all,' he said. 'You shouldn't be in such a hurry. I may hole out in
+one,' he laughed. 'If you do,' I said, 'you ought to get Lord Evesham to
+give me that land.' 'That's a bargain,' he said, and he took his mashie.
+Will you believe it? He did the hole in two, sir, won the game, and beat
+the record for the course! And that's how I got the land to build my
+church. I was delighted! I was delighted! I've told that story
+everywhere to show what sportsmen are. I told it to the Bishop, but of
+course he being an Irishman didn't see anything funny in it. If he could
+have stopped my being made Monseigneur, he'd have done so. But he
+couldn't."
+
+"You seem to have as much trouble with your bishops as we do with ours
+in the Anglican Church," said Mark.
+
+"We shouldn't, if we made the right men bishops," said Monseigneur. "But
+so long as they think at Westminster that we're going to convert England
+with a tagrag and bobtail mob of Irish priests, we never shall make the
+right men. You were looking round my church just now. Didn't it remind
+you of an English church?"
+
+Mark agreed that it did very much.
+
+"That's my secret: that's why I've been the most successful mission
+priest in this diocese. I realize as an Englishman that it is no use to
+give the English Irish Catholicism. When I was in Rome the other day I
+was disgusted, I really was. I was disgusted. I thoroughly sympathize
+with Protestants who go there and are disgusted. You cannot expect a
+decent English family to confess to an Irish peasant. It's not
+reasonable. We want to create an English tradition."
+
+"What between the Roman party in the Anglican Church and the Anglican
+party in the Roman Church," said Mark, "It seems a pity that some kind
+of reunion cannot be effected."
+
+"So it could," Monseigneur declared. "So it could, if it wasn't for the
+Irish. Look at the way we treat our English converts. The clergy, I
+mean. Why? Because the Irish do not want England to be converted."
+
+Mark did not raise with Monseigneur Cripps the question of his doubts.
+Indeed, before the plaice had been taken away he had decided that they
+no longer existed. It became clear to him that the English Church was
+England; and although he knew in his heart that Monseigneur Cripps was
+suffering from a sense of grievance and that his criticism of Roman
+policy was too obviously biased, it pleased him to believe that it was a
+fair criticism.
+
+Mark thanked Monseigneur Cripps for his hospitality and took a friendly
+leave of him. An hour later he was walking back through the pleasant
+vale of Wield toward the Cotswolds. As he went his way among the green
+orchards, he thought over his late impulse to change allegiance,
+marvelling at it now and considering it irrational, like one astonished
+at his own behaviour in a dream. There came into his mind a story of
+George Fox who drawing near to the city of Lichfield took off his shoes
+in a meadow and cried three times in a loud voice "Woe unto the bloody
+city of Lichfield," after which he put on his shoes again and proceeded
+into the town. Mark looked back in amazement at his lunch with
+Monseigneur Cripps and his own meditated apostasy. To his present mood
+that intention to forsake his own Church appeared as remote from
+actuality as the malediction of George Fox upon the city of Lichfield.
+
+Here among these green orchards in the heart of England Roman
+Catholicism presented itself to Mark's imagination as an exotic. The two
+words "Roman Catholicism" uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave
+him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an
+apple-tree. People who talked about bringing the English Church into
+line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of history.
+Apart from the question whether the English Church before the
+Reformation had accepted the pretensions of the Papacy, it was absurd
+to suppose that contemporary Romanism had anything in common with
+English Catholicism of the early sixteenth century. English Catholicism
+long before the Reformation had been a Protestant Catholicism, always in
+revolt against Roman claims, always preserving its insularity. It was
+idle to question the Catholic intentions of a priesthood that could
+produce within a century of the Reformation such prelates as Andrews and
+Ken. It was ridiculous at the prompting of the party in the ascendancy
+at Westminster to procure a Papal decision against English Orders when
+two hundred and fifty years ago there was a cardinal's hat waiting for
+Laud if he would leave the Church of England. And what about Paul IV and
+Elizabeth? Was he not willing to recognize English Orders if she would
+recognize his headship of Christendom?
+
+But these were controversial arguments, and as Mark walked along through
+the pleasant vale of Wield with the Cotswold hills rising taller before
+him at every mile he apprehended that his adhesion to the English Church
+had been secured by the natural scene rather than by argument.
+Nevertheless, it was interesting to speculate why Romanism had not made
+more progress in England, why even now with a hierarchy and with such a
+distinguished line of converts beginning with Newman it remained so
+completely out of touch with the national life of the country. While the
+Romans converted one soul to Catholicism, the inheritors of the Oxford
+Movement were converting twenty. Catholicism must be accounted a
+disposition of mind, an attitude toward life that did not necessarily
+imply all that was implied by Roman Catholicism. What was the secret of
+the Roman failure? Everywhere else in the world Roman Catholicism had
+known how to adapt itself to national needs; only in England did it
+remain exotic. It was like an Anglo-Indian magnate who returns to find
+himself of no importance in his native land, and who but for the flavour
+of his curries and perhaps a black servant or two would be utterly
+inconspicuous. He tries to fit in with the new conditions of his
+readopted country, but he remains an exotic and is regarded by his
+neighbours as one to whom the lesson must be taught that he is no
+longer of importance. What had been the cause of this breach in the
+Roman Catholic tradition, this curious incompetency, this Anglo-Indian
+conservatism and pretentiousness? Perhaps it had begun when in the
+seventeenth century the propagation of Roman Catholicism in England was
+handed over to the Jesuits, who mismanaged the country hopelessly. By
+the time Rome had perceived that the conversion of England could not be
+left to the Jesuits the harm was done, so that when with greater
+toleration the time was ripe to expand her organization it was necessary
+to recruit her priests in Ireland. What the Jesuits had begun the Irish
+completed. It had been amusing to listen to the lamentations of
+Monseigneur Cripps; but Monseigneur Cripps had expressed, however
+ludicrous his egoism, the failure of his Church in England.
+
+Mark's statement of the Anglican position with nobody to answer his
+arguments except the trees and the hedgerows seemed flawless. The level
+road, the gentle breeze in the orchards on either side, the scent of the
+grass, and the busy chirping of the birds coincided with the main point
+of his argument that England was most inexpressibly Anglican and that
+Roman Catholicism was most unmistakably not. His arguments were really
+hasty foot-notes to his convictions; if each one had separately been
+proved wrong, that would have had no influence on the point of view he
+had reached. He forgot that this very landscape that was seeming
+incomparable England herself had yesterday appeared complacent and
+monotonous. In fact he was as bad as George Fox, who after taking off
+his shoes to curse the bloody city of Lichfield should only have put
+them on again to walk away from it.
+
+The grey road was by now beginning to climb the foothills of the
+Cotswolds; a yellow-hammer, keeping always a few paces ahead, twittered
+from quickset boughs nine encouraging notes that drowned the echoes of
+ancient controversies. In such a countryside no claims papal or
+episcopal possessed the least importance; and Mark dismissed the subject
+from his mind, abandoning himself to the pleasure of the slow ascent.
+Looking back after a while he could see the town of Wield riding like a
+ship in a sea of verdure, and when he surveyed thus England asleep in
+the sunlight, the old ambition to become a preaching friar was kindled
+again in his heart. He would re-establish the extinct and absolutely
+English Order of St. Gilbert so that there should be no question of
+Roman pretensions. Doubtless, St. Francis himself would understand a
+revival of his Order without reference to existing Franciscans; but
+nobody else would understand, and it would be foolish to insist upon
+being a Franciscan if the rest of the Order disowned him and his
+followers. If anybody had asked Mark at that moment why he wanted to
+restore the preaching friars, he might have found it difficult to
+answer. He was by no means imbued with the missionary spirit just then;
+his experience at Chatsea had made him pessimistic about missionary
+effort in the Church of England. If a man like Father Rowley had failed
+to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed
+more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should
+be successful. The ambition to become a friar was revived by an
+incomprehensible, or if not incomprehensible, certainly by an
+inexplicable impulse to put himself in tune with the landscape, to
+proclaim as it were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down
+there in the flowery Vale of Wield: _God rest you merry gentlemen, let
+nothing you dismay!_ There was revealed to him with the assurance of
+absolute faith that all the sorrows, all the ugliness, all the
+soullessness (no other word could be found) of England in the first year
+of the twentieth century was due to the Reformation; the desire to
+become a preaching friar was the dramatic expression of this inspired
+conviction. Before his journey through the Vale of Wield Mark in any
+discussion would have been ready to argue the mistake of the
+Reformation: but now there was no longer room for argument. What
+formerly he thought now he knew. The song of the yellow-hammer was
+louder in the quickset hedge; the trees burned with a sharper green; the
+road urged his feet.
+
+"If only everybody in England could move as I am moving now," he
+thought. "If only I could be granted the power to show a few people, so
+that they could show others, and those others show all the world. How
+confidently that yellow-hammer repeats his song! How well he knows that
+his song is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the
+linnet envies him! The fools that talk of nature's cruelty, the blind
+fatuous sentimental coxcombs!"
+
+Thus apostrophizing, Mark came to a wayside inn; discovering that he was
+hungry, he took his seat at a rustic table outside and called for bread
+and cheese and beer. While he was eating, a vehicle approached from the
+direction in which he would soon be travelling. He took it at first for
+a caravan of gipsies, but when it grew near he saw that it was painted
+over with minatory texts and was evidently the vehicle of itinerant
+gospellers. Two young men alighted from the caravan when it pulled up
+before the door of the inn. They were long-nosed sallow creatures with
+that expression of complacency which organized morality too often
+produces, and in this quiet countryside they gave an effect of being
+overgrown Sunday-school scholars upon their annual outing. Having cast a
+censorious glance in the direction of Mark's jug of ale, they sat down
+at the farther end of the bench and ordered food.
+
+"The preaching friars of to-day," Mark thought gloomily.
+
+"Excuse me," said one of the gospellers. "I notice you've been looking
+very hard at our van. Excuse me, but are you saved?"
+
+"No, are you?" Mark countered with an angry blush.
+
+"We are," the gospeller proclaimed. "Or I and Mr. Smillie here," he
+indicated his companion, "wouldn't be travelling round trying to save
+others. Here, read this tract, my friend. Don't hurry over it. We can
+wait all day and all night to bring one wandering soul to Jesus."
+
+Mark looked at the young men curiously; perceiving that they were
+sincere, he accepted the tract and out of courtesy perused it. The tale
+therein enfolded reminded him of a narrative testifying to the efficacy
+of a patent medicine. The process of conversation followed a stereotyped
+formula.
+
+_For three and a half years I was unable to keep down any sins for more
+than five minutes after I had committed the last one. I had a dizzy
+feeling in the heart and a sharp pain in the small of the soul. A friend
+of mine recommended me to try the good minister in the slum. . . . After
+the first text I was able to keep down my sins for six minutes . . .
+after twenty-two bottles I am as good as I ever was. . . . I ascribe my
+salvation entirely to_. . . . Mark handed back the tract with a smile.
+
+"Do you convert many people with this literature?" he asked.
+
+"We don't often convert a soul right off," said Mr. Smillie. "But we sow
+the good seed, if you follow my meaning; and we leave the rest to Jesus.
+Mr. Bullock and I have handed over seven hundred tracts in three weeks,
+and we know that they won't all fall on stony ground or be choked by
+tares and thistles."
+
+"Do you mind my asking you a question?" Mark said.
+
+The gospel bearers craned their necks like hungry fowls in their
+eagerness to peck at any problems Mark felt inclined to scatter before
+them. A ludicrous fancy passed through his mind that much of the good
+seed was pecked up by the scatterers.
+
+"What are you trying to convert people to?" Mark solemnly inquired.
+
+"What are we trying to convert people to?" echoed Mr. Bullock and Mr.
+Smillie in unison. Then the former became eloquent. "We're trying to
+wash ignorant people in the blood of the Lamb. We're converting them
+from the outer darkness, where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing
+of teeth, to be rocked safe for ever in the arms of Jesus. If you'd have
+read that tract I handed you a bit more slowly and a bit more carefully,
+you wouldn't have had any call to ask a question like that."
+
+"Perhaps I framed my question rather badly," Mark admitted. "I
+understand that you want to bring people to believe in Our Lord; but
+when by a tract or by a personal exhortation or by an emotional appeal
+you've induced them to suppose that they are converted, or as you put it
+saved, what more do you give them?"
+
+"What more do we give them?" Mr. Smillie shrilled. "What more can we
+give them after we've given them Christ Jesus? We're sitting here
+offering you Christ Jesus at this moment. You're sitting there mocking
+at us. But Mr. Bullock and me don't mind how much you mock. We're ready
+to stay here for hours if we can bring you safe to the bosom of
+Emmanuel."
+
+"Yes, but suppose I told you that I believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ
+without any persuasion from you?" Mark inquired.
+
+"Well, then you're saved," said Mr. Bullock decidedly. "And you can ask
+the landlord for our bill, Mr. Smillie."
+
+"But is nothing more necessary?" Mark persisted.
+
+"_By faith are ye justified_," Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie shouted
+simultaneously.
+
+Mark paused for a moment to consider whether argument was worth while,
+and then he returned to the attack.
+
+"I'm afraid I think that people like you do a great deal of damage to
+Christianity. You only flatter human conceit. You get hold of some
+emotional creature and work upon his feelings until in an access of
+self-absorption he feels that the universe is standing still while the
+necessary measures are taken to secure his personal salvation. You
+flatter this poor soul, and then you go away and leave him to work out
+his own salvation."
+
+"If you're dwelling in Christ Jesus and Christ Jesus is dwelling in you,
+you haven't got to work out your own salvation. He worked out your
+salvation on the Cross," said Mr. Bullock contemptuously.
+
+"And you think that nothing more is necessary from a man? It seems to me
+that the religion you preach is fatal to human character. I'm not trying
+to be offensive when I tell you that it's the religion of a tapeworm.
+It's a religion for parasites. It's a religion which ignores the Holy
+Ghost."
+
+"Perhaps you'll explain your assertion a little more fully?" Mr. Bullock
+invited with a scowl.
+
+"What I mean is that, if Our Lord's Atonement removed all responsibility
+from human nature, there doesn't seem much for the Holy Ghost to do,
+does there?"
+
+"Well, as it happens," said Mr. Bullock sarcastically, "Mr. Smillie and
+I here do most of our work with the help of the Holy Ghost, so you've
+hit on a bad example to work off your sneers on."
+
+"I'm not trying to sneer," Mark protested. "But strangely enough just
+before you came along I was thinking to myself how much I should like to
+travel over England preaching about Our Lord, because I think that
+England has need of Him. But I also think, now you've answered my
+question, that _you_ are doing more harm than good by your
+interpretation of the Holy Ghost."
+
+"Mr. Smillie," interrupted Mr. Bullock in an elaborately off-hand voice,
+"if you've counted the change and it's all correct, we'd better get a
+move on. Let's gird up our loins, Mr. Smillie, and not sit wrestling
+here with infidels."
+
+"No, really, you must allow me," Mark persisted. "You've had it so much
+your own way with your tracts and your talks this last few weeks that by
+now you must be in need of a sermon yourselves. The gospel you preach is
+only going to add to the complacency of England, and England is too
+complacent already. All Northern nations are, which is why they are
+Protestant. They demand a religion which will truckle to them, a
+religion which will allow them to devote six days of the week to what is
+called business and on the seventh day to rest and praise God that they
+are not as other men."
+
+"_Render unto C�sar the things that are C�sar's and unto God the things
+that are God's_," said Mr. Smillie, putting the change in his pocket and
+untying the nosebag from the horse.
+
+"_Ye cannot serve God and mammon_," Mark retorted. "And I wish you'd let
+me finish my argument."
+
+"Mr. Smillie and I aren't touring the Midlands trying to find grapes on
+thorns and figs on thistles," said Mr. Bullock scathingly. "We'd have
+given you a chance, if you'd have shown any fruits of the Spirit."
+
+"You've just said you weren't looking for grapes or figs," Mark laughed.
+"I'm sorry I've made you so cross. But you began the argument by asking
+me if I was saved. Think how annoyed you would have been if I had begun
+a conversation by asking you if you were washed."
+
+"My last words to you is," said Mr. Bullock solemnly, looking out of
+the caravan window, "my last words to you are," he corrected himself,
+"is to avoid beer. You can touch up the horse, Mr. Smillie."
+
+"I'll come and touch you up, you big-mouthed Bible thumpers," a rich
+voice shouted from the inn door. "Yes, you sit outside my public-house
+and swill minerals when you're so full of gas already you could light a
+corporation gasworks. Avoid beer, you walking bellows? Step down out of
+that travelling menagerie, and I'll give you 'avoid beer.' You'll avoid
+more than beer before I've finished with you."
+
+But the gospel bearers without paying any attention to the tirade went
+on their way; and Mark who did not wait to listen to the innkeeper's
+abuse of all religion and all religious people went on his way in the
+opposite direction.
+
+Swinging homeward over the Cotswolds Mark flattered himself on a victory
+over heretics, and he imagined his adversaries entering Wield that
+afternoon, the prey of doubt and mortification. At the highest point of
+the road he even ventured to suppose that they might find themselves at
+Evensong outside St. Andrew's Church and led within by the grace of the
+Holy Spirit that they might renounce their errors before the altar.
+Indeed, it was not until he was back in the Rectory that the futility of
+his own bearing overwhelmed him with shame. Anxious to atone for his
+self-conceit, Mark gave the Rector an account of the incident.
+
+"It seems to me that I behaved very feebly, don't you think?"
+
+"That kind of fellow is a hard nut to crack," the Rector said
+consolingly. "And you can't expect just by quoting text against text to
+effect an instant conversion. Don't forget that your friends are in
+their way as great enthusiasts probably as yourself."
+
+"Yes, but it's humiliating to be imagining oneself leading a revival of
+the preaching friars and then to behave like that. What strikes me now,
+when it's too late, is that I ought to have waited and taken the
+opportunity to tackle the innkeeper. He was just the ordinary man who
+supposes that religion is his natural enemy. You must admit that I
+missed a chance there."
+
+"I don't want to check your missionary zeal," said the Rector. "But I
+really don't think you need worry yourself about an omission of that
+kind so long before you are ordained. If I didn't know you as well as I
+do, I might even be inclined to consider such a passion for souls at
+your age a little morbid. I wish with all my heart you'd gone to
+Oxford," he added with a sigh.
+
+"Well, really, do you know," said Mark, "I don't regret that. Whatever
+may be the advantages of a public school and university, the education
+hampers one. One becomes identified with a class; and when one has
+finished with that education, the next two or three years have to be
+spent in discovering that public school and university men form a very
+small proportion of the world's population. Sometimes I almost regret
+that my mother did not let me acquire that Cockney accent. You can say a
+lot of things in a Cockney accent which said without any accent sound
+priggish. You must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale of
+the gospellers and the innkeeper is 'Dear me! I am afraid Mark's turning
+into a prig.'"
+
+"No, no. I laid particular stress on the point that if I didn't know you
+as well as I do I might perhaps have thought that," the Rector
+protested.
+
+"I don't think I am a prig," Mark went on slowly. "I don't think I have
+enough confidence in myself to be a prig. I think the way I argued with
+Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie was a bit priggish, because at the back of
+my head all the time I was talking I felt in addition to the arrogance
+of faith a kind of confounded snobbishness; and this sense of
+superiority came not from my being a member of the Church, but from
+feeling myself more civilized than they were. Looking back now at the
+conversation, I can remember that actually at the very moment I was
+talking of the Holy Ghost I was noticing how Mr. Bullock's dicky would
+keep escaping from his waistcoat. I wonder if the great missionary
+saints of the middle ages had to contend with this accumulation of
+social conventions with which we are faced nowadays. It seems to me
+that in everything--in art, in religion, in mere ordinary everyday life
+and living--man is adding daily to the wall that separates him from
+God."
+
+"H'm, yes," said the Rector, "all this only means that you are growing
+up. The child is nearer to God than the man. Wordsworth said it better
+than I can say it. Similarly, the human race must grow away from God as
+it takes upon itself the burden of knowledge. That surely is inherent in
+the fall of man. No philosopher has yet improved upon the first chapter
+of Genesis as a symbolical explanation of humanity's plight. When man
+was created--or if you like to put it evolved--there must have been an
+exact moment at which he had the chance of remaining where he was--in
+other words, in the Garden of Eden--or of developing further along his
+own lines with free will. Satan fell from pride. It is natural to assume
+that man, being tempted by Satan, would fall from the same sin, though
+the occasion, of his fall might be the less heroic sin of curiosity.
+Yes, I think that first chapter of Genesis, as an attempt to sum up the
+history of millions of years, is astoundingly complete. Have you ever
+thought how far by now the world would have grown away from God without
+the Incarnation?"
+
+"Yes," said Mark, "and after nineteen hundred years how little nearer it
+has grown."
+
+"My dear boy," said the Rector, "if man has not even yet got rid of
+rudimentary gills or useless paps he is not going to grow very visibly
+nearer to God in nineteen hundred years after growing away from God for
+ninety million. Yet such is the mercy of our Father in Heaven that,
+infinitely remote as we have grown from Him, we are still made in His
+image, and in childhood we are allowed a few years of blessed innocency.
+To some children--and you were one of them--God reveals Himself more
+directly. But don't, my dear fellow, grow up imagining that these
+visions you were accorded as a boy will be accorded to you all through
+your life. You may succeed in remaining pure in act, but you will find
+it hard to remain pure in heart. To me the most frightening beatitude is
+_Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God._ What your
+present state of mind really amounts to is lack of hope, for as soon as
+you find yourself unable to be as miraculously eloquent as St. Anthony
+of Padua you become the prey of despair."
+
+"I am not so foolish as that," Mark replied. "But surely, Rector, it
+behoves me during these years before my ordination to criticize myself
+severely."
+
+"As severely as you like," the Rector agreed, "provided that you only
+criticize yourself, and don't criticize Almighty God."
+
+"But surely," Mark went on, "I ought to be asking myself now that I am
+twenty-one how I shall best occupy the next three years?"
+
+"Certainly," the Rector assented. "Think it over, and be sure that, when
+you have thought it over and have made your decision with the help of
+prayer, I shall be the first to support that decision in every way
+possible. Even if you decide to be a preaching friar," he added with a
+smile. "And now I have some news for you. Esther arrives here tomorrow
+to stay with us for a fortnight before she is professed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+SISTER ESTHER MAGDALENE
+
+
+Esther's novitiate in the community of St. Mary Magdalene, Shoreditch,
+had lasted six months longer than was usual, because the Mother Superior
+while never doubting her vocation for the religious life had feared for
+her ability to stand the strain of that work among penitents to which
+the community was dedicated. In the end, her perseverance had been
+rewarded, and the day of her profession was at hand.
+
+During the whole of her nearly four years' novitiate Esther had not been
+home once; although Mark and she had corresponded at long intervals,
+their letters had been nothing more than formal records of minor events,
+and on St. John's eve he drove with the dogcart to meet her, wondering
+all the way how much she would have changed. The first thing that struck
+him when he saw her alight from the train on Shipcot platform was her
+neatness. In old days with windblown hair and clothes flung on anyhow
+she had belonged so unmistakably to the open air. Now in her grey habit
+and white veil of the novice she was as tranquil as Miriam, and for the
+first time Mark perceived a resemblance between the sisters. Her
+complexion, which formerly was flushed and much freckled by the open
+air, was now like alabaster; and although her auburn hair was hidden
+beneath the veil Mark was aware of it like a hidden fire. He had in the
+very moment of welcoming her a swift vision of that auburn hair lying on
+the steps of the altar a fortnight hence, and he was filled with a wild
+desire to be present at her profession and gathering up the shorn locks
+to let them run through his fingers like flames. He had no time to be
+astonished at himself before they were shaking hands.
+
+"Why, Esther," he laughed, "you're carrying an umbrella."
+
+"It was raining in London," she said gravely.
+
+He was on the point of exclaiming at such prudence in Esther when he
+blushed in the remembrance that she was a nun. During the drive back
+they talked shyly about the characters of the village and the Rectory
+animals.
+
+"I feel as if you'd just come back from school for the holidays," he
+said.
+
+"Yes, I feel as if I'd been at school," she agreed. "How sweet the
+country smells."
+
+"Don't you miss the country sometimes in Shoreditch?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head and looked at him with puzzled eyes.
+
+"Why should I miss anything in Shoreditch?"
+
+Mark was abashed and silent for the rest of the drive, because he
+fancied that Esther might have supposed that he was referring to the
+past, rather than give which impression he would have cut out his
+tongue. When they reached the Rectory, Mark was moved almost to tears by
+the greetings.
+
+"Dear little sister," Miriam murmured. "How happy we are to have you
+with us again."
+
+"Dear child," said Mrs. Ogilvie. "And really she does look like a nun."
+
+"My dearest girl, we have missed you every moment of these four years,"
+said the Rector, bending to kiss her. "How cold your cheek is."
+
+"It was quite chilly driving," said Mark quickly, for there had come
+upon him a sudden dismay lest they should think she was a ghost. He was
+relieved when Miriam announced tea half an hour earlier than usual in
+honour of Esther's arrival; it seemed to prove that to her family she
+was still alive.
+
+"After tea I'm going to Wych Maries to pick St. John's wort for the
+church. Would you like to walk as far?" Mark suggested, and then stood
+speechless, horrified at his want of tact. He had the presence of mind
+not to excuse himself, and he was grateful to Esther when she replied in
+a calm voice that she should like a walk after tea.
+
+When the opportunity presented itself, Mark apologized for his
+suggestion.
+
+"By why apologize?" she asked. "I assure you I'm not at all tired and I
+really should like to walk to Wych Maries."
+
+He was amazed at her self-possession, and they walked along with
+unhastening conventual steps to where the St. John's wort grew amid a
+tangle of ground ivy in the open spaces of a cypress grove, appearing
+most vividly and richly golden like sunlight breaking from black clouds
+in the western sky.
+
+"Gather some sprays quickly, Sister Esther Magdalene," Mark advised.
+"And you will be safe against the demons of this night when evil has
+such power."
+
+"Are we ever safe against the demons of the night?" she asked solemnly.
+"And has not evil great power always?"
+
+"Always," he assented in a voice that trembled to a sigh, like the
+uncertain wind that comes hesitating at dusk in the woods. "Always," he
+repeated.
+
+As he spoke Mark fell upon his knees among the holy flowers, for there
+had come upon him temptation; and the sombre trees standing round
+watched him like fiends with folded wings.
+
+"Go to the chapel," he cried in an agony.
+
+"Mark, what is the matter?"
+
+"Go to the chapel. For God's sake, Esther, don't wait."
+
+In another moment he felt that he should tear the white veil from her
+forehead and set loose her auburn hair.
+
+"Mark, are you ill?"
+
+"Oh, do what I ask," he begged. "Once I prayed for you here. Pray for me
+now."
+
+At that moment she understood, and putting her hands to her eyes she
+stumbled blindly toward the ruined church of the two Maries, heavily
+too, because she was encumbered by her holy garb. When she was gone and
+the last rustle of her footsteps had died away upon the mid-summer
+silence, Mark buried his body in the golden flowers.
+
+"How can I ever look any of them in the face again?" he cried aloud.
+"Small wonder that yesterday I was so futile. Small wonder indeed! And
+of all women, to think that I should fall in love with Esther. If I had
+fallen in love with her four years ago . . . but now when she is going
+to be professed . . . suddenly without any warning . . . without any
+warning . . . yet perhaps I did love her in those days . . . and was
+jealous. . . ."
+
+And even while Mark poured forth his horror of himself he held her image
+to his heart.
+
+"I thought she was a ghost because she was dead to me, not because she
+was dead to them. She is not a ghost to them. And is she to me?"
+
+He leapt to his feet, listening.
+
+"Should she come back," he thought with beating heart. "Should she come
+back . . . I love her . . . she hasn't taken her final vows . . . might
+she not love me? No," he shouted at the top of his voice. "I will not do
+as my father did . . . I will not . . . I will not. . . ."
+
+Mark felt sure of himself again: he felt as he used to feel as a little
+boy when his mother entered on a shaft of light to console his childish
+terrors. When he came to the ruined chapel and saw Esther standing with
+uplifted palms before the image of St. Mary Magdalene long since put
+back upon the pedestal from which it had been flung by the squire of
+Rushbrooke Grange, Mark was himself again.
+
+"My dear," Esther cried, impulsively taking his hand. "You frightened
+me. What was the matter?"
+
+He did not answer for a moment or two, because he wanted her to hold his
+hand a little while longer, so much time was to come when she would
+never hold it.
+
+"Whenever I dip my hand in cold water," he said at last, "I shall think
+of you. Why did you say that about the demons of the night?"
+
+She dropped his hand in comprehension.
+
+"You're disgusted with me," he murmured. "I'm not surprised."
+
+"No, no, you mustn't think of me like that. I'm still a very human
+Esther, so human that the Reverend Mother has made me wait an extra year
+to be professed. But, Mark dear, can't you understand, you who know what
+I endured in this place, that I am sometimes tempted by memories of
+him, that I sometimes sin by regrets for giving him up, my dead lover
+so near to me in this place. My dead love," she sighed to herself, "to
+whose memory in my pride of piety I thought I should be utterly
+indifferent."
+
+A spasm of jealousy had shaken Mark while Esther was speaking, but by
+the time she had finished he had fought it down.
+
+"I think I must have loved you all this time," he told her.
+
+"Mark dear, I'm ten years older than you. I'm going to be a nun for what
+of my life remains. And I can never love anybody else. Don't make this
+visit of mine a misery to me. I've had to conquer so much and I need
+your prayers."
+
+"I wish you needed my kisses."
+
+"Mark!"
+
+"What did I say? Oh, Esther, I'm a brute. Tell me one thing."
+
+"I've already told you more than I've told anyone except my confessor."
+
+"Have you found happiness in the religious life?"
+
+"I have found myself. The Reverend Mother wanted me to leave the
+community and enter a contemplative order. She did not think I should be
+able to help poor girls."
+
+"Esther, what a stupid woman! Why surely you would be wonderful with
+them?"
+
+"I think she is a wise woman," said Esther. "I think since we came
+picking St. John's wort I understand how wise she is."
+
+"Esther, dear dear Esther, you make me feel more than ever ashamed of
+myself. I entreat you not to believe what the Reverend Mother says."
+
+"You have only a fortnight to convince me," said Esther.
+
+"And I will convince you."
+
+"Mark, do you remember when you made me pray for his soul telling me
+that in that brief second he had time to repent?"
+
+Mark nodded grimly.
+
+"You still do think that, don't you?"
+
+"Of course I do. He must have repented."
+
+She thanked him with her eyes; and Mark looking into their depths of
+hope unfathomable put away from him the thought that the damned soul of
+Will Starling was abroad to-night with power of evil. Yes, he put this
+thought behind him; but carrying an armful of St. John's wort to hang in
+sprays above the doors of the church he could not rid himself of the
+fancy that his arms were filled with Esther's auburn hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+MALFORD ABBEY
+
+
+Mark left Wych-on-the-Wold next day; although he did not announce that
+he should be absent from home so long, he intended not to return until
+Esther had gone back to Shoreditch. He hoped that he was not being
+cowardly in thus running away; but after having assured Esther that she
+could count on his behaving normally for the rest of her visit, he found
+his sleep that night so profoundly disturbed by feverish visions that
+when morning came he dreaded his inability to behave as both he would
+wish himself and she would wish him to behave. Flight seemed the only
+way to find peace. He was shocked not so much by being in love with
+Esther, but by the suddenness with which his desires had overwhelmed
+him, desires which had never been roused since he was born. If in an
+instant he could be turned upside down like that, could he be sure that
+upon the next occasion, supposing that he fell in love with somebody
+more suitable, he should be able to escape so easily? His father must
+have married his mother out of some such violent impulse as had seized
+himself yesterday afternoon, and resentiment about his weakness had
+spoilt his whole life. And those dreams! How significant now were the
+words of the Compline hymn, and how much it behoved a Christian soul to
+vanquish these ill dreams against beholding which the defence of the
+Creator was invoked. He had vowed celibacy; yet already, three months
+after his twenty-first birthday, after never once being troubled with
+the slightest hint that the vow he had taken might be hard to keep, his
+security had been threatened. How right the Rector had been about that
+frightening beatitude.
+
+Mark had taken the direction of Wychford, and when he reached the
+bridge at the bottom of the road from Wych-on-the-Wold he thought he
+would turn aside and visit the Greys whom he had not seen for a long
+time. He was conscious of a curiosity to know if the feelings aroused by
+Esther could be aroused by Monica or Margaret or Pauline. He found the
+dear family unchanged and himself, so far as they were concerned,
+equally unchanged and as much at his ease as he had ever been.
+
+"And what are you going to do now?" one of them asked.
+
+"You mean immediately?"
+
+Mark could not bring himself to say that he did not know, because such a
+reply would have seemed to link him with the state of mind in which he
+had been thrown yesterday afternoon.
+
+"Well, really, I was thinking of going into a monastery," he announced.
+
+Pauline clapped her hands.
+
+"Now I think that is just what you ought to do," she said.
+
+Then followed questions about which Order he proposed to join; and Mark
+ashamed to go back on what he had said lest they should think him
+flippant answered that he thought of joining the Order of St. George.
+
+"You know--Father Burrowes, who works among soldiers."
+
+When Mark was standing by the cross-roads above Wychford and was
+wondering which to take, he decided that really the best thing he could
+do at this moment was to try to enter the Order of St. George. He might
+succeed in being ordained without going to a theological college, or if
+the Bishop insisted upon a theological course and he found that he had a
+vocation for the religious life, he could go to Glastonbury and rejoin
+the Order when he was a priest. It was true that Father Rowley
+disapproved of Father Burrowes; but he had never expressed more than a
+general disapproval, and Mark was inclined to attribute his attitude to
+the prejudice of a man of strong personality and definite methods
+against another man of strong personality and definite methods working
+on similar lines among similar people. Mark remembered now that there
+had been a question at one time of Father Burrowes' opening a priory in
+the next parish to St. Agnes'. Probably that was the reason why Father
+Rowley disapproved of him. Mark had heard the monk preach on one
+occasion and had liked him. Outside the pulpit, however, he knew nothing
+more of him than what he had heard from soldiers staying in the Keppel
+Street Mission House, who from Aldershot had visited Malford Abbey, the
+mother house of the Order. The alternative to Malford was Clere Abbey on
+the Berkshire downs where Dom Cuthbert Manners ruled over a small
+community of strict Benedictines. Had Mark really been convinced that he
+was likely to remain a monk for the rest of his life, he would have
+chosen the Benedictines; but he did not feel justified in presenting
+himself for admission to Clere on what would seem impulse. He hoped that
+if he was accepted by the Order of St. George he should be given an
+opportunity to work at one of the priories in Aldershot or Sandgate, and
+that the experience he might expect to gain would help him later as a
+parish priest. He could not confide in the Rector his reason for wanting
+to subject himself to monastic discipline, and he expected a good deal
+of opposition. It might be better to write from whatever village he
+stayed in to-night and make the announcement without going back at all.
+And this is what in the end he decided to do.
+
+     The Sun Inn,
+
+     Ladingford.
+
+     June 24.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I expect you gathered from our talk the day before yesterday that I
+     was feeling dissatisfied with myself, and you must know that the
+     problem of occupying my time wisely before I am ordained has lately
+     been on my mind. I don't feel that I could honestly take up a
+     profession to which I had no intention of sticking, and though
+     Father Rowley recommended me to stay at home and work with the
+     village people I don't feel capable of doing that yet. If it was a
+     question of helping you by taking off your shoulders work that I
+     could do it would be another matter. But you've often said to me
+     that you had more time on your hands than you cared for since you
+     gave up coaching me for an Oxford scholarship, and so I don't think
+     I'm wrong in supposing that you would find it hard to discover for
+     me any parochial routine work. I'm not old enough yet to fish for
+     souls, and I have no confidence in my ability to hook them.
+     Besides, I think it would bore you if I started "missionizing" in
+     Wych-on-the-Wold.
+
+     I've settled therefore to try to get into the Order of St. George.
+     I don't think you know Father Burrowes personally, but I've always
+     heard that he does a splendid work among soldiers, and I'm hoping
+     that he will accept me as a novice.
+
+     Latterly, in fact since I left Chatsea, I've been feeling the need
+     of a regular existence, and, though I cannot pretend that I have a
+     vocation for the monastic life in the highest sense, I do feel that
+     I have a vocation for the Order of St. George. You will wonder why
+     I have not mentioned this to you, but the fact is--and I hope
+     you'll appreciate my frankness--I did not think of the O.S.G. till
+     this morning. Of course they may refuse to have me. But I shall
+     present myself without a preliminary letter, and I hope to persuade
+     Father Burrowes to have me on probation. If he once does that, I'm
+     sure that I shall satisfy him. This sounds like the letter of a
+     conceited clerk. It must be the fault of this horrible inn pen,
+     which is like writing with a tooth-pick dipped in a puddle! I
+     thought it was best not to stay at the Rectory, with Esther on the
+     verge of her profession. It wouldn't be fair to her at a time like
+     this to make my immediate future a matter of prime importance. So
+     do forgive my going off in this fashion. I suppose it's just
+     possible that some bishop will accept me for ordination from
+     Malford, though no doubt it's improbable. This will be a matter to
+     discuss with Father Burrowes later.
+
+     Do forgive what looks like a most erratic course of procedure. But
+     I really should hate a long discussion, and if I make a mistake I
+     shall have had a lesson. It really is essential for me to be
+     tremendously occupied. I cannot say more than this, but I do beg
+     you to believe that I'm not taking this apparently unpremeditated
+     step without a very strong reason. It's a kind of compromise with
+     my ambition to re-establish in the English Church an order of
+     preaching friars. I haven't yet given up that idea, but I'm sure
+     that I ought not to think about it seriously until I'm a priest.
+
+     I'm staying here to-night after a glorious day's tramp, and
+     to-morrow morning I shall take the train and go by Reading and
+     Basingstoke to Malford. I'll write to you as soon as I know if I'm
+     accepted. My best love to everybody, and please tell Esther that I
+     shall think about her on St. Mary Magdalene's Day.
+
+     Yours always affectionately,
+
+     Mark.
+
+To Esther he wrote by the same post:
+
+     My dear Sister Esther Magdalene,
+
+     Do not be angry with me for running away, and do not despise me for
+     trying to enter a monastery in such a mood. I'm as much the prey of
+     religion as you are. And I am really horrified by the revelation of
+     what I am capable of. I saw in your eyes yesterday the passion of
+     your soul for Divine things. The memory of them awes me. Pray for
+     me, dear sister, that all my passion may be turned to the service
+     of God. Defend me to your brother, who will not understand my
+     behaviour.
+
+     Mark.
+
+Three days later Mark wrote again to the Rector:
+
+     The Abbey,
+
+     Malford,
+
+     Surrey.
+
+     June 27th.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I do hope that you're not so much annoyed with me that you don't
+     want to hear anything about my monastic adventures. However, if you
+     are you can send back this long letter unopened. I believe that is
+     the proper way to show one's disapproval by correspondence.
+
+     I reached Malford yesterday afternoon, and after a jolly walk
+     between high hazel hedges for about two miles I reached the Abbey.
+     It doesn't quite fulfil one's preconceived ideas of what an abbey
+     should look like, but I suppose it is the most practicable building
+     that could be erected with the amount of money that the Order had
+     to spare for what in a way is a luxury for a working order like
+     this. What it most resembles is three tin tabernacles put together
+     to form three sides of a square, the fourth and empty side of which
+     is by far the most beautiful, because it consists of a glorious
+     view over a foreground of woods, a middle-distance of park land,
+     and on the horizon the Hampshire downs.
+
+     I am an authority on this view, because I had to gaze at it for
+     about a quarter of an hour while I was waiting for somebody to open
+     the Abbey door. At last the porter, Brother Lawrence, after taking
+     a good look at me through the grill, demanded what I wanted. When I
+     said that I wanted to be a monk, he looked very alarmed and hurried
+     away, leaving me to gaze at that view for another ten minutes. He
+     came back at last and let me in, informing me in a somewhat
+     adenoidish voice that the Reverend Brother was busy in the garden
+     and asking me to wait until he came in. Brother Lawrence has a
+     large, pock-marked face, and while he is talking to anybody he
+     stands with his right hand in his left sleeve and his left hand in
+     his right sleeve like a Chinese mandarin or an old washer-woman
+     with her arms folded under her apron. You must make the most of my
+     descriptions in this letter, because if I am accepted as a
+     probationer I shan't be able to indulge in any more personalities
+     about my brethren.
+
+     The guest-room like everything else in the monastery is
+     match-boarded; and while I was waiting in it the noise was
+     terrific, because some corrugated iron was being nailed on the roof
+     of a building just outside. I began to regret that Brother Lawrence
+     had opened the door at all and that he had not left me in the
+     cloisters, as by the way I discovered that the space enclosed by
+     the three tin tabernacles is called! There was nothing to read in
+     the guest-room except one sheet of a six months' old newspaper
+     which had been spread on the table presumably for a guest to mend
+     something with glue. At last the Reverend Brother, looking most
+     beautiful in a white habit with a zucchetto of mauve velvet, came
+     in and welcomed me with much friendliness. I was surprised to find
+     somebody so young as Brother Dunstan in charge of a monastery,
+     especially as he said he was only a novice as yet. It appears that
+     all the bigwigs--or should I say big-cowls?--are away at the moment
+     on business of the Order and that various changes are in the
+     offing, the most important being the giving up of their branch in
+     Malta and the consequent arrival of Brother George, of whom
+     Brother Dunstan spoke in a hushed voice. Father Burrowes, or the
+     Reverend Father as he is called, is preaching in the north of
+     England at the moment, and Brother Dunstan tells me it is quite
+     impossible for him to say anything, still less to do anything,
+     about my admission. However, he urged me to stay on for the present
+     as a guest, an invitation which I accepted without hesitation. He
+     had only just time to show me my cell and the card of rules for
+     guests when a bell rang and, drawing his cowl over his head, he
+     hurried off.
+
+     After perusing the rules, I discovered that this was the bell which
+     rings a quarter of an hour before Vespers for solemn silence. I
+     hadn't the slightest idea where the chapel was, and when I asked
+     Brother Lawrence he glared at me and put his finger to his mouth. I
+     was not to be discouraged, however, and in the end he showed me
+     into the ante-chapel which is curtained off from the quire. There
+     was only one other person in the ante-chapel, a florid,
+     well-dressed man with a rather mincing and fussy way of
+     worshipping. The monks led by Brother Lawrence (who is not even a
+     novice yet, but a postulant and wears a black habit, without a
+     hood, tied round the waist with a rope) passed from the refectory
+     through the ante-chapel into the quire, and Vespers began. They
+     used an arrangement called "The Day Hours of the English Church,"
+     but beyond a few extra antiphons there was very little difference
+     from ordinary Evening Prayer. After Vespers I had a simple and
+     solemn meal by myself, and I was wondering how I should get hold of
+     a book to pass away the evening, when Brother Dunstan came in and
+     asked me if I'd like to sit with the brethren in the library until
+     the bell rang for simple silence a quarter of an hour before
+     Compline at 9.15, after which everybody--guests and monks--are
+     expected to go to bed in solemn silence. The difference between
+     simple silence and solemn silence is that you may ask necessary
+     questions and get necessary replies during simple silence; but as
+     far as I can make out, during solemn silence you wouldn't be
+     allowed to tell anybody that you were dying, or if you did tell
+     anybody, he wouldn't be able to do anything about it until solemn
+     silence was over.
+
+     The other monks are Brother Jerome, the senior novice after Brother
+     Dunstan, a pious but rather dull young man with fair hair and a
+     squashed face, and Brother Raymond, attractive and bird-like, and
+     considered a great Romanizer by the others. There is also Brother
+     Walter, who is only a probationer and is not even allowed wide
+     sleeves and a habit like Brother Lawrence, but has to wear a very
+     moth-eaten cassock with a black band tied round it. Brother Walter
+     had been marketing in High Thorpe (I wonder what the Bishop of
+     Silchester thought if he saw him in the neighbourhood of the
+     episcopal castle!) and having lost himself on the way home he had
+     arrived back late for Vespers and was tremendously teased by the
+     others in consequence. Brother Walter is a tall excitable awkward
+     creature with black hair that sticks up on end and wide-open
+     frightened eyes. His cassock is much too short for him both in the
+     arms and in the legs; and as he has very large hands and very large
+     feet, his hands and feet look still larger in consequence. They
+     didn't talk about much that was interesting during recreation.
+     Brother Dunstan and Brother Raymond were full of monkish jokes, at
+     all of which Brother Walter laughed in a very high voice--so loudly
+     once that Brother Jerome asked him if he would mind making less
+     noise, as he was reading Montalembert's Monks of the West, at which
+     Brother Walter fell into an abashed gloom.
+
+     I asked who the visitor in the ante-chapel was and was told that he
+     was a Sir Charles Horner who owns the whole of Malford and who has
+     presented the Order with the thirty acres on which the Abbey is
+     built. Sir Charles is evidently an ecclesiastically-minded person
+     and, I should imagine, rather pleased to be able to be the patron
+     of a monastic order.
+
+     I will write you again when I have seen Father Burrowes. For the
+     moment I'm inclined to think that Malford is rather playing at
+     being monks; but as I said, the bigwigs are all away. Brother
+     Dunstan is a delightful fellow, yet I shouldn't imagine that he
+     would make a successful abbot for long.
+
+     I enjoyed Compline most of all my experiences during the day, after
+     which I retired to my cell and slept without turning till the bell
+     rang for Lauds and Prime, both said as one office at six o'clock,
+     after which I should have liked a conventual Mass. But alas, there
+     is no priest here and I have been spending the time till breakfast
+     by writing you this endless letter.
+
+     Yours ever affectionately,
+
+     Mark.
+
+     P.S. They don't say Mattins, which I'm inclined to think rather
+     slack. But I suppose I oughtn't to criticize so soon.
+
+To those two letters of Mark's, the Rector replied as follows:
+
+     The Rectory,
+
+     Wych-on-the-Wold,
+
+     Oxon.
+
+     June 29th.
+
+     My dear Mark,
+
+     I cannot say frankly that I approve of your monastic scheme. I
+     should have liked an opportunity to talk it over with you first of
+     all, and I cannot congratulate you on your good manners in going
+     off like that without any word. Although you are technically
+     independent now, I think it would be a great mistake to sink your
+     small capital of �500 in the Order of St. George, and you can't
+     very well make use of them to pass the next two or three years
+     without contributing anything.
+
+     The other objection to your scheme is that you may not get taken at
+     Glastonbury. In any case the Glastonbury people will give the
+     preference to Varsity men, and I'm not sure that they would be very
+     keen on having an ex-monk. However, as I said, you are independent
+     now and can choose yourself what you do. Meanwhile, I suppose it is
+     possible that Burrowes may decide you have no vocation, in which
+     case I hope you'll give up your monastic ambitions and come back
+     here.
+
+     Yours affectionately,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+Mark who had been growing bored in the guest-room of Malford Abbey
+nearly said farewell to it for ever when he received the Rector's
+letter. His old friend and guardian was evidently wounded by his
+behaviour, and Mark considering what he owed him felt that he ought to
+abandon his monastic ambitions if by doing so he could repay the Rector
+some of his kindness. His hand was on the bell that should summon the
+guest-brother (when the bell was working and the guest-brother was not)
+in order to tell him that he had been called away urgently and to ask if
+he might have the Abbey cart to take him to the station; but at that
+moment Sir Charles Horner came in and began to chat affably to Mark.
+
+"I've been intending to come up and see you for the last three days. But
+I've been so confoundedly busy. They wonder what we country gentlemen do
+with ourselves. By gad, they ought to try our life for a change."
+
+Mark supposed that the third person plural referred to the whole body of
+Radical critics.
+
+"You're the son of Lidderdale, I hear," Sir Charles went on without
+giving Mark time to comment on the hardship of his existence. "I visited
+Lima Street twenty-five years ago, before you were born that was. Your
+father was a great pioneer. We owe him a lot. And you've been with
+Rowley lately? That confounded bishop. He's our bishop, you know. But he
+finds it difficult to get at Burrowes except by starving him for
+priests. The fellow's a time-server, a pusher . . ."
+
+Mark began to like Sir Charles; he would have liked anybody who would
+abuse the Bishop of Silchester.
+
+"So you're thinking of joining my Order," Sir Charles went on without
+giving Mark time to say a word. "I call it my Order because I set them
+up here with thirty acres of uncleared copse. It gives the Tommies
+something to do when they come over here on furlough from Aldershot.
+You've never met Burrowes, I hear."
+
+Mark thought that Sir Charles for a busy man had managed to learn a
+great deal about an unimportant person like himself.
+
+"Will Father Burrowes be here soon?" Mark inquired.
+
+"'Pon my word, I don't know. Nobody knows when he'll be anywhere. He's
+preaching all over the place. He begs the deuce of a lot of money, you
+know. Aren't you a friend of Dorward's? You were asking Brother Dunstan
+about him. His parish isn't far from here. About fifteen miles, that's
+all. He's an amusing fellow, isn't he? Has tremendous rows with his
+squire, Philip Iredale. A pompous ass whose wife ran away from him a
+little time ago. Served him right, Dorward told me in confidence. You
+must come and have lunch with me. There's only Lady Landells. I can't
+afford to live in the big place. Huge affair with Doric portico and all
+that, don't you know. It's let to Lord Middlesborough, the shipping man.
+I live at Malford Lodge. Quite a jolly little place I've made of it.
+Suits me better than that great gaunt Georgian pile. You'd better walk
+down with me this morning and stop to lunch."
+
+Mark, who was by now growing tired of his own company in the guest-room,
+accepted Sir Charles' invitation with alacrity; and they walked down
+from the Abbey to the village of Malford, which was situated at the
+confluence of the Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the
+Wey, which itself is not a mighty stream.
+
+"A rather charming village, don't you think?" said Sir Charles, pointing
+with his tasselled cane to a particularly attractive rose-hung cottage.
+"It was lucky that the railway missed us by a couple of miles; we should
+have been festering with tin bungalows by now on any available land,
+which means on any land that doesn't belong to me. I don't offer to show
+you the church, because I never enter it."
+
+Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate, supposing that
+with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should be of unusual interest.
+
+"My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the Simeon Trustees, it
+being the only part of my inheritance he could alienate from me, whom he
+loathed. He knew nothing would enrage me more than that, and the result
+is that I've got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has
+evening communion twice a month. That is why I took such pleasure in
+planting a monastery in the parish; and if only that old time-server the
+Bishop of Silchester would licence a chaplain to the community, I should
+get my Sunday Mass in my own parish despite my uncle's simeony, as I
+call it. As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I don't
+get a Mass at the Abbey and I have to go to the next parish, which is
+four miles away and appears highly undignified for the squire."
+
+"And you can't get him out?" said Mark.
+
+"If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another one just as
+bad. The Simeon Trustees only appoint people of the stamp of Mr.
+Choules, my present enemy. He's a horrid little man with a gaunt wife
+six feet high who beats her children and, if village gossip be true, her
+husband as well. Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to
+Middlesborough, as I told you."
+
+Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns and cedars and
+gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns. He had seen many of these great
+houses in the course of his tramping; but he had never thought of them
+before except as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people
+could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home as the small
+houses in which Mark had spent his life came over him now with a sense
+of novelty.
+
+"Ghastly affair, isn't it?" said the owner contemptuously. "I'd let it
+stand empty rather than live in it myself. It reeks of my uncle's
+medicine and echoes with his gouty groans. Besides what is there in it
+that's really mine?"
+
+Mark who had been thinking what an easy affair life must be for Sir
+Charles was struck by his tone of disillusionment. Perhaps all people
+who inherited old names and old estates were affected by their awareness
+of transitory possession. Sir Charles could not alienate even a piece of
+furniture. A middle-aged bachelor and a cosmopolitan, he would have
+moved about the corridors and halls of that huge house with less
+permanency than Lord Middlesborough who paid him so well to walk about
+in it in his stead, and who was no more restricted by the terms of his
+lease than was his landlord by the conditions of the entail. Mark began
+to feel sorry for him; but without cause, for when Sir Charles came in
+sight of Malford Lodge where he lived, he was full of enthusiasm. It was
+indeed a pretty little house of red brick, dating from the first quarter
+of the nineteenth century and like so many houses of that period built
+close to the road, surrounded too on three sides by a verandah of iron
+and copper in the pagoda style, thoroughly ugly, but by reason of the
+mellow peacock hues time had given its roof, full of personality and
+charm. They entered by a green door in the brick wall and crossed a
+lawn sloping down to the little river to reach the shade of a tulip tree
+in full bloom, where seated in one of those tall wicker garden chairs
+shaped like an alcove was an elderly lady as ugly as Priapus.
+
+"There's Lady Landells, who's a poetess, you know," said Sir Charles
+gravely.
+
+Mark accepted the information with equal gravity. He was still
+unsophisticated enough to be impressed at hearing a woman called a
+poetess.
+
+"Mr. Lidderdale is going to have lunch with us, Lady Landells," Sir
+Charles announced.
+
+"Oh, is he?" Lady Landells replied in a cracked murmur of complete
+indifference.
+
+"He's a great admirer of your poems," added Sir Charles, hearing which
+Lady Landells looked at Mark with her cod's eyes and by way of greeting
+offered him two fingers of her left hand.
+
+"I can't read him any of my poems to-day, Charles, so pray don't ask me
+to do so," the poetess groaned.
+
+"I'm going to show Mr. Lidderdale some of our pictures before lunch,"
+said Sir Charles.
+
+Lady Landells paid no attention; Mark, supposing her to be on the verge
+of a poetic frenzy, was glad to leave her in that wicker alcove under
+the tulip tree and to follow Sir Charles into the house.
+
+It was an astonishing house inside, with Gothic carving everywhere and
+with ancient leaded casements built inside the sashed windows of the
+exterior.
+
+"I took an immense amount of trouble to get this place arranged to my
+taste," said Sir Charles; and Mark wondered why he had bothered to
+retain the outer shell, since that was all that was left of the
+original. In every room there were copies, excellently done of pictures
+by Botticelli and Mantegna and other pre-Raphaelite painters; the walls
+were rich with antique brocades and tapestries; the ceilings were gilded
+or elaborately moulded with fan traceries and groining; great
+candlesticks stood in every corner; the doors were all old with
+floriated hinges and huge locks--it was the sort of house in which
+Victor Hugo might have put on his slippers and said, "I am at home."
+
+"I admit nothing after 1520," said Sir Charles proudly.
+
+Mark wondered why so fastidious a medievalist allowed the Order of St.
+George to erect those three tin tabernacles and to matchboard the
+interior of the Abbey. But perhaps that was only another outer shell
+which would gradually be filled.
+
+Lunch was a disappointment, because when Sir Charles began to talk about
+the monastery, which was what Mark had been wanting to talk about all
+the morning, Lady Landells broke in:
+
+"I am sorry, Charles, but I'm afraid that I must beg for complete
+silence at lunch, as I'm in the middle of a sonnet."
+
+The poetess sighed, took a large mouthful of food, and sighed again.
+
+After lunch Sir Charles took Mark to see his library, which reminded him
+of a Rossetti interior and lacked only a beautiful long-necked creature,
+full-lipped and auburn-haired, to sit by the casement languishing over a
+cithern or gazing out through bottle-glass lights at a forlorn and
+foreshortened landscape of faerie land.
+
+"Poor Lady Landells was a little tiresome at lunch," said Sir Charles
+half to himself. "She gets moods. Women seem never to grow out of
+getting moods. But she has always been most kind to me, and she insists
+on giving me anything I want for my house. Last year she was good enough
+to buy it from me as it stands, so it's really her house, although she
+has left it back to me in her will. She took rather a fancy to you by
+the way."
+
+Mark, who had supposed that Lady Landells had regarded him with aversion
+and scorn, stared at this.
+
+"Didn't she give you her hand when you said good-bye?" asked Sir
+Charles.
+
+"Her left hand," said Mark.
+
+"Oh, she never gives her right hand to anybody. She has some fad about
+spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or something. Now, what about a
+walk?"
+
+Mark said he should like to go for a walk very much, but wasn't Sir
+Charles too busy?
+
+"Oh, no, I've nothing to do at all."
+
+Yet only that morning he had held forth to Mark at great length on the
+amount of work demanded for the management of an estate.
+
+"Now, why do you want to join Burrowes?" Sir Charles inquired presently.
+
+"Well, I hope to be a priest, and I think I should like to spend the
+next two years out of the world."
+
+"Yes, that is all very well," said Sir Charles, "but I don't know that I
+altogether recommend the O.S.G. I'm not satisfied with the way things
+are being run. However, they tell me that this fellow Brother George has
+a good deal of common-sense. He has been running their house in Malta,
+where he's done some good work. I gave them the land to build a mother
+house so that they could train people for active service, as it were;
+but Burrowes keeps chopping and changing and sending untrained novices
+to take charge of an important branch like Sandgate, and now since
+Rowley left he talks of opening a priory in Chatsea. That's all very
+well, and it's quite right of him to bear in mind that the main object
+of the Order is to work among soldiers; but at the same time he leaves
+this place to run itself, and whenever he does come down here he plans
+some hideous addition, to pay for which he has to go off preaching for
+another three months, so that the Abbey gets looked after by a young
+novice of twenty-five. It's ridiculous, you know. I was grumbling at the
+Bishop; but really I can understand his disinclination to countenance
+Burrowes. I have hopes of Brother George, and I shall take an early
+opportunity of talking to him."
+
+Mark was discouraged by Sir Charles' criticism of the Order; and that it
+could be criticized like this through the conduct of its founder
+accentuated for him the gulf that lay between the English Church and the
+rest of Catholic Christendom.
+
+It was not much solace to remember that every Benedictine community was
+an independent congregation. One could not imagine the most independent
+community's being placed in charge of a novice of twenty-five. It made
+Mark's proposed monastic life appear amateurish; and when he was back in
+the matchboarded guest-room the impulse to abandon his project was
+revised. Yet he felt it would be wrong to return to Wych-on-the-Wold.
+The impulse to come here, though sudden, had been very strong, and to
+give it up without trial might mean the loss of an experience that one
+day he should regret. The opinion of Sir Charles Horner might or might
+not be well founded; but it was bound to be a prejudiced opinion,
+because by constituting himself to the extent he had a patron of the
+Order he must involuntarily expect that it should be conducted according
+to his views. Sir Charles himself, seen in perspective, was a tolerably
+ridiculous figure, too much occupied with the paraphernalia of worship,
+too well pleased with himself, a man of rank and wealth who judged by
+severe standards was an old maid, and like all old maids critical, but
+not creative.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE ORDER OF ST. GEORGE
+
+
+The Order of St. George was started by the Reverend Edward Burrowes six
+years before Sir Charles Horner's gift of land for a Mother House led
+him to suppose that he had made his foundation a permanent factor in the
+religious life of England.
+
+Edward Burrowes was the only son of a band-master in the Royal Artillery
+who at an impressionable moment in the life of his son was stationed at
+Malta. The religious atmosphere of Malta combined with the romantic
+associations of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the
+boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated by his son's
+ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much church-going argued an
+unhealthy preoccupation, and as for Edward's rhapsodies about the
+Auberge of Castile, which sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery
+and the Royal Engineers, they made him sick, to use his own expression.
+
+"You make me sick, Ted," he used to declare. "The sooner I get quit of
+Malta and quartered at Woolwich again, the better I shall be pleased."
+
+When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he hoped that the
+effect of such prosaic surroundings would put an end to Ted's mooning,
+and that he would settle down to a career more likely to reward him in
+this world rather than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his
+dreams aspired. Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who had so
+far submitted to his father's wishes as to be working in a solicitor's
+office, found that the effect of being banished from Malta was to
+stimulate him into a practical attempt to express his dreams of
+religious devotion. He hired a small room over a stable in a back street
+and started a club for the sons of soldiers. The band-master would not
+have minded this so much, especially when he was congratulated on his
+son's enterprise by the wife of the Colonel. Unfortunately this was not
+enough for Edward, who having got the right side of an unscrupulously
+romantic curate persuaded him to receive his vows of a Benedictine
+oblate. The band-master, proud and fond though he might be of his own
+uniform, objected to his son's arriving home from business and walking
+about the house in a cassock. He objected equally to finding that his
+own musical gifts had with his son degenerated into a passion for
+playing Gregorian chants on a vile harmonium. It was only consideration
+for his delicate wife that kept the band-master from pitching both
+cassock and harmonium into the street. The amateur oblate regretted his
+father's hostility; but he persevered with the manner of life he had
+marked out for himself, finding much comfort and encouragement in
+reading the lives of the saintly founders of religious orders.
+
+At last, after a long struggle against the difficulties that friends and
+father put in his way, Edward Burrowes managed at the age of
+twenty-seven to get ordained in Canada, whither, in despair of escaping
+otherwise from the solicitor's office, he had gone to seek his own
+fortune. He took with him the oblate's cassock; but he left behind the
+harmonium, which his father kicked to pieces in rage at not being able
+to kick his son. Burrowes worked as a curate in a dismal lakeside town
+in Ontario, consoling himself with dreams of monasticism and chivalry,
+and gaining a reputation as a preacher. His chief friend was a young
+farmer, called George Harvey, whom he succeeded in firing with his own
+enthusiasm and whom he managed to persuade--which shows that Burrowes
+must have had great powers of persuasion--to wear the habit of a
+Benedictine novice, when he came to spend Saturday night to Monday
+morning with his friend. By this time Burrowes had passed beyond the
+oblate stage, for having found a Canadian bishop willing to dispense him
+from that portion of the Benedictine rule which was incompatible with
+his work as a curate in Jonesville, Ontario, he got himself clothed as a
+novice. About this period a third man joined Burrowes and Harvey in
+their spare-time monasticism. This was John Holcombe, who had emigrated
+from Dorsetshire after an unfortunate love affair and who had been taken
+on by George Harvey as a carter. Holcombe was the son of a yeoman farmer
+that owned several hundred acres of land. He had been educated at
+Sherborne, and soon by his capacity and attractive personality he made
+himself so indispensable to his employer that George Harvey's farm was
+turned into a joint concern. No doubt Harvey's example was the immediate
+cause of Holcombe's associating himself with the little community: but
+it still says much for Burrowes' powers of persuasion that he should
+have been able to impress this young Dorset farmer with the serious
+possibility of leading the monastic life in Ontario.
+
+When another year had passed, an opportunity arose of acquiring a better
+farm in Alberta. It was the Bishop of Alberta who had been so
+sympathetic with Burrowes' monastic aspirations; and, when Harvey and
+Holcombe decided to move to Moose Rib, Burrowes gave up his curacy to
+lead a regular monastic life, so far as one could lead a regular
+monastic life on a farm in the North-west.
+
+Two more years had gone by when a letter arrived from England to tell
+George Harvey that he was the heir to �12,000. Burrowes had kept all his
+influence over the young farmer, and he was actually able to persuade
+Harvey to devote this fortune to founding the Order of St. George for
+mission work among soldiers. There was some debate whether Father
+Burrowes, Brother George, and Brother Birinus should take their final
+vows immediately; but in the end Father Burrowes had his way, and they
+were all three professed by the sympathetic Bishop of Alberta, who
+granted them a constitution subject to the ratification of the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. Father Burrowes was elected Father Superior,
+Brother George was made Assistant Superior, and Brother Birinus had to
+concentrate in his person various monastic offices just as on the Moose
+Rib Farm he had combined in his person the duties of the various hands.
+
+The immediate objective of the new community was Malta, where it was
+proposed to open their first house and where, in despite of the
+outraged dignity of innumerable real monks already there, they made a
+successful beginning. A second house was opened at Gibraltar and put in
+charge of Brother Birinus. Neither Malta nor Gibraltar provided much of
+a field for reinforcing the Order, which, if it was to endure, required
+additional members. Father Burrowes proposed that he should go to
+England and open a house at Aldershot, and that, if he could obtain a
+hearing as a preacher, he should try to raise enough funds for a house
+at Sandgate as well. Brother George and Brother Birinus in a solemn
+chapter of three accepted the proposal; the house at Gibraltar was given
+up; the Father Superior went to seek the fortunes of the Order in
+England, while the other two remained at their work in Malta. Father
+Burrowes was even more successful as a preacher than he hoped; ascribing
+the steady flow of offertories to Divine favour, he instituted during
+the next four years, priories at Aldershot and Sandgate. He began to
+feel the need of a Mother House, having now more than enough candidates
+for the Order of Saint George, where the novices could be suitably
+trained to meet the stress of active mission work. One of his moving
+appeals for this object was heard by Sir Charles Horner who, for reasons
+he had already explained to Mark and because underneath all his
+ecclesiasticism there did exist a genuine desire for the glory of God,
+had presented the land at Malford to the Order. Father Burrowes preached
+harder than ever, addressed drawing-room meetings, and started a monthly
+magazine called _The Dragon_ to raise the necessary money to build a
+mighty abbey. Meanwhile, he had to be contented with those three tin
+tabernacles. Brother George, who had remained all these years in Malta,
+suggested that it was time for somebody else to take his place out
+there, and the Father Superior, although somewhat unwillingly, had
+agreed to his coming to Malford. Not having heard of anybody whom at the
+moment he considered suitable to take charge of what was now a distant
+outpost of the Order, he told Brother George to close the house. It was
+at this stage in the history of the Order that Mark presented himself as
+a candidate for admission.
+
+Father Burrowes arrived unexpectedly two days after the lunch at
+Malford Lodge; and presently Brother Dunstan came to tell Mark that the
+Reverend Father would see him in the Abbott's Parlour immediately after
+Nones. Mark thought that Sir Charles might have given a medi�val lining
+to this room at least, which with its roll-top desk looked like the
+office of the clerk of the works.
+
+"So you want to be a monk?" said Father Burrowes contemptuously. "Want
+to dress up in a beautiful white habit, eh?"
+
+"I really don't mind what I wear," said Mark, trying not to appear
+ruffled by the imputation of wrong motives. "But I do want to be a monk,
+yes."
+
+"You can't come here to play at it," said the Superior, looking keenly
+at Mark from his bright blue eyes and lighting up a large pipe.
+
+"Curiously enough," said Mark, who had forgotten the Benedictine
+injunction to discourage newcomers that seek to enter a community, "I
+wrote to my guardian a few days ago that my impression of Malford Abbey
+was rather that it was playing at being monks."
+
+The Superior flushed to a vivid red. He was a burly man of fair
+complexion, inclined to plumpness, and with a large mobile mouth
+eloquent and sensual. His hands were definitely fat, the backs of them
+covered with golden hairs and freckles.
+
+"So you're a critical young gentleman, are you? I suppose we're not
+Catholic enough for you. Well," he snapped, "I'm afraid you won't suit
+us. We don't want you. Sorry."
+
+"I'm sorry too," said Mark. "But I thought you would prefer frankness.
+If you will spare me a few minutes, I'll explain why I want to join the
+Order of St. George. If when you've heard what I have to say you still
+think that I'm not suitable, I shall recognize your right to be of that
+opinion from your experience of many young men like myself who have been
+tried and found wanting."
+
+"Did you learn that speech by heart?" the Superior inquired, raising his
+eyebrows mockingly.
+
+"I see you're determined to find fault," Mark laughed. "But, Reverend
+Father, surely you will listen to my reasons before deciding against
+them or me?"
+
+"My instinct tells me you'll be no good to us. But if you insist on
+wasting my time, fire ahead. Only please remember that, though I may be
+a monk, I'm a very busy man."
+
+Mark gave a full account of himself until the present and wound up by
+saying:
+
+"I don't think I have any sentimental reasons for wanting to enter a
+monastery. I like working among soldiers and sailors. I am ready to put
+down �200 and I hope to be of use. I wish to be a priest, and if you
+find or I find that when the time comes for me to be ordained I shall
+make a better secular priest, at any rate, I shall have had the
+advantage of a life of discipline and you, I promise, will have had a
+novice who will have regarded himself as such, but yet will have learnt
+somehow to have justified your confidence."
+
+The Superior looked down at his desk pondering. Presently he opened a
+letter and threw a quick suspicious glance at Mark.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me that you had an introduction from Sir Charles
+Horner?"
+
+"I didn't know that I had," Mark answered in some astonishment. "I only
+met him here a few days ago for the first time. He invited me to lunch,
+and he was very pleasant; but I never asked him to write to you, nor did
+he suggest doing so."
+
+"Have you any vices?" Father Burrowes asked abruptly.
+
+"I don't think--what do you mean exactly?" Mark inquired.
+
+"Drink?"
+
+"No, certainly not."
+
+"Women?"
+
+Mark flushed.
+
+"No." He wondered if he should speak of the episode of St. John's eve
+such a short time ago; but he could not bring himself to do so, and he
+repeated the denial.
+
+"You seem doubtful," the Superior insisted.
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "since you press this point I ought
+to tell you that I took a vow of celibacy when I was sixteen."
+
+Father Burrowes looked at him sharply.
+
+"Did you indeed? That sounds very morbid. Don't you like women?"
+
+"I don't think a priest ought to marry. I was told by Sir Charles that
+you vowed yourself to the monastic life when you were not much more than
+seventeen. Was that morbid?"
+
+The Superior laughed boisterously, and Mark glad to have put him in a
+good humour laughed with him. It was only after the interview was over
+that the echo of that laugh sounded unpleasantly in the caves of memory,
+that it rang false somehow like a denial of himself.
+
+"Well, I suppose we must try you as a probationer at any rate," said the
+Superior. And suddenly his whole manner changed. He became affectionate
+and sentimental as he put his hand on Mark's shoulder.
+
+"I hope, dear lad, that you will find a vocation to serve our dear Lord
+in the religious life. God bless you and give you endurance in the path
+you have chosen."
+
+Mark reproached himself for his inclination to dislike the Reverend
+Father to whom he now owed filial affection, piety, and respect, apart
+from what he owed him as a Christian of Christian charity. He should
+gain but small spiritual benefit from his self-chosen experiment if this
+was the mood in which he was beginning his monastic life; and when
+Brother Jerome, who was acting novice-master, began to instruct him in
+his monastic duty, he made up his mind to drive out that demon of
+criticism or rather to tame it to his own service by criticizing
+himself. He wrote on markers for his favourite devotional books:
+
+_Observe at every moment of the day the good in others, the evil in
+thyself; and when thou liest awake in the night remember only what good
+thou hast found in others, what evil in thyself._
+
+This was Mark's addition to Thomas a Kempis, to Mother Juliana of
+Norwich, to Jeremy Taylor and William Law; this was Mark's sprout of
+holy wisdom among the Little Flowers of Saint Francis.
+
+The Rule of Malford was not a very austere adaptation of the Rule of
+Saint Benedict; and, with the Reverend Father departing after Mark had
+been admitted as a probationer and leaving the administration of the
+Abbey to the priority of Brother Dunstan, a good deal of what austerity
+had been retained was now relaxed.
+
+The Night Office was not said at Malford, where the liturgical worship
+of the day began with Lauds and Prime at six. On Mark devolved the duty
+of waking the brethren in the morning, which was done by striking the
+door of each cell with a hammer and saying: _The Lord be with you_,
+whereupon the sleeping brother must rise from his couch and open the
+door of his cell to make the customary response. After Lauds and Prime,
+which lasted about half an hour, the brethren retired to their cells to
+put them in order for the day and to meditate until seven o'clock,
+unless they had been given tasks out of doors. At seven o'clock, if
+there was a priest in the monastery, Mass was said; otherwise meditation
+and study was prolonged until eight o'clock, when breakfast was eaten.
+Those who had work in the fields or about the house departed after
+breakfast to their tasks. At nine Terce was said, which was not attended
+by the brethren working out of doors; at twelve Sext was said attended
+by all the brethren, and at twelve-fifteen dinner was eaten. After
+dinner, the brethren retired to their cells and meditated until one
+o'clock, when their various duties were resumed, interrupted only in the
+case of those working indoors by the office of None at three o'clock. At
+a quarter to five the bell rang for tea. Simple silence was relaxed, and
+the brethren enjoyed their recreation until six-fifteen when the bell
+rang for a quarter of an hour's solemn silence before Vespers. Supper
+was eaten after Vespers, and after supper, which was finished about
+eight o'clock, there was reading and recreation until the bell rang for
+Compline at nine-fifteen. This office said, solemn silence was not
+broken until the response to the _dominus vobiscum_ in the morning. The
+rule of simple silence was not kept very strictly at this period. Two
+brethren working in the garden in these hot July days found that
+permitted conversation about the immediate matter in hand, say the
+whereabouts of a trowel or a hoe, was easily extended into observations
+about the whereabouts of Brother So-and-So during Terce or the way
+Brother Somebody-else was late with the antiphon. From the little
+incidents of the Abbey's daily round the conversation was easily
+extended into a discussion of the policy of the Order in general.
+Speculations where the Reverend Father was preaching that evening or
+that morning and whether his offertories would be as large during the
+summer as they had been during the spring were easily amplified from
+discussions about the general policy of the Order into discussions about
+the general policy of Christendom, the pros and cons of the Roman
+position, the disgraceful latitudinarianism of bishops and deans; and
+still more widely amplified from remarks upon the general policy of
+Christendom into arguments about the universe and the great philosophies
+of humanity. Thus Mark, who was an ardent Platonist, would find himself
+at odds with Brother Jerome who was an equally ardent Aristotelian,
+while the weeds, taking advantage of the philosophic contest, grew
+faster than ever.
+
+Whatever may have been Brother Dunstan's faults of indulgence, they
+sprang from a debonair and kindly personality which shone like a sun
+upon the little family and made everybody good-humoured, even Brother
+Lawrence, who was apt to be cross because he had been kept a postulant
+longer than he expected. But perhaps the happiest of all was Brother
+Walter, who though still a probationer was now the senior probationer, a
+status which afforded him the most profound satisfaction and gave him a
+kindly feeling toward Mark who was the cause of promotion.
+
+"And the Reverend Father has promised me that I shall be clothed as a
+postulant on August 10th when Brother Lawrence is to be clothed as a
+novice. The thought makes me so excited that I hardly know what to do
+sometimes, and I still don't know what saint's name I'm going to take.
+You see, there was some mystery about my birth, and I was called Walter
+because I was found by a policeman in Walter Street, and as ill-luck
+would have it there's no St. Walter. Of course, I know I have a very
+wide choice of names, but that is what makes it so difficult. I had
+rather a fancy to be Peter, but he's such a very conspicuous saint that
+it struck me as being a little presumptuous. Of course, I have no doubt
+whatever that St. Peter would take me under his protection, for if you
+remember he was a modest saint, a very modest saint indeed who asked to
+be crucified upside down, not liking to show the least sign of
+competition with our dear Lord. I should very much like to call myself
+Brother Paul, because at the school I was at we were taken twice a year
+to see St. Paul's Cathedral and had toffee when we came home. I look
+back to those days as some of the happiest of my life. There again it
+does seem to be putting yourself up rather to take the name of a great
+saint like St. Paul. Then I thought of taking William after the little
+St. William of Norwich who was murdered by the Jews. That seems going to
+the other extreme, doesn't it, for though I know that out of the mouths
+of babes and sucklings shall come forth praise, one would like to feel
+one had for a patron saint somebody a little more conspicuous than a
+baby. I wish you'd give me a word of advice. I think about this problem
+until sometimes my head's in a regular whirl, and I lose my place in the
+Office. Only yesterday at Sext, I found myself saying the antiphon
+proper to St. Peter a fortnight after St. Peter's day had passed and
+gone, which seems to show that my mind is really set upon being Brother
+Peter, doesn't it? And yet I don't know. He is so very conspicuous all
+through the Gospels, isn't he?"
+
+"Then why don't you compromise," suggested Mark, "and call yourself
+Brother Simon?"
+
+"Oh, what a splendid idea!" Brother Walter exclaimed, clapping his
+hands. "Oh, thank you, Brother Mark. That has solved all my
+difficulties. Oh, do let me pull up that thistle for you."
+
+Brother Walter the probationer resumed his weeding with joyful ferocity
+of purpose, his mind at peace in the expectation of shortly becoming
+Brother Simon the postulant.
+
+What Mark enjoyed most in his personal relations with the community were
+the walks on Sunday afternoons. Sir Charles Horner made a habit of
+joining these to obtain the Abbey gossip and also because he took
+pleasure in hearing himself hold forth on the management of his estate.
+Most of his property was woodland, and the walks round Malford possessed
+that rich intimacy of the English countryside at its best. Mark was not
+much interested in what Sir Charles had to ask or in what Sir Charles
+had to tell or in what Sir Charles had to show, but to find himself
+walking with his monastic brethren in their habits down glades of mighty
+oaks, or through sparse plantations of birches, beneath which grew
+brakes of wild raspberries that would redden with the yellowing corn,
+gave him as assurance of that old England before the Reformation to
+which he looked back as to a Golden Age. Years after, when much that was
+good and much that was bad in his monastic experience had been
+forgotten, he held in his memory one of these walks on a fine afternoon
+at July's end within the octave of St. Mary Magdalene. It happened that
+Sir Charles had not accompanied the monks that Sunday; but in his place
+was an old priest who had spent the week-end as a guest in the Abbey and
+who had said Mass for the brethren that morning. This had given Mark
+deep pleasure, because it was the Sunday after Esther's profession, and
+he had been able to make his intention her present joy and future
+happiness. He had been silent throughout the walk, seeming to listen in
+turn to Brother Dunstan's rhapsodies about the forthcoming arrival of
+Brother George and Brother Birinus with all that it meant to him of
+responsibility more than he could bear removed from his shoulders; or to
+Brother Raymond's doubts if it should not be made a rule that when no
+priest was in the Abbey the brethren ought to walk over to Wivelrod, the
+church Sir Charles attended four miles away, or to Brother Jerome's
+disclaimer of Roman sympathies in voicing his opinion that the Office
+should be said in Latin. Actually he paid little attention to any of
+them, his thoughts being far away with Esther. They had chosen Hollybush
+Down for their walk that Sunday, because they thought that the view over
+many miles of country would please the ancient priest. Seated on the
+short aromatic grass in the shade of a massive hawthorn full-berried
+with tawny fruit, the brethren looked down across a slope dotted with
+junipers to the view outspread before them. None spoke, for it had been
+warm work in their habits to climb the burnished grass. It would have
+been hard to explain the significance of that group, unless it were due
+to some haphazard achievement of perfect form; yet somehow for Mark that
+moment was taken from time and placed in eternity, so that whenever
+afterward in his life he read about the Middle Ages he was able to be
+what he read, merely by re-conjuring that monkish company in the shade
+of that hawthorn tree.
+
+On their way back to the Abbey Mark found himself walking with Mr.
+Lamplugh, the ancient priest, who turned out to have known his father.
+
+"Dear me, are you really the son of James Lidderdale? Why, I used to go
+and preach at Lima Street in old days long before your father married.
+And so you're Lidderdale's son. Now I wonder why you want to be a monk."
+
+Mark gave an account of himself since he left school and tried to give
+some good reasons why he was at Malford.
+
+"And so you were with Rowley? Well, really you ought to know something
+about missions by now. But perhaps you're tired of mission work
+already?" the old priest inquired with a quick glance at Mark as if he
+would see how much of the real stuff existed underneath that
+probationer's cassock.
+
+"This is an active Order, isn't it?" Mark countered. "Of course, I'm not
+tired of mission work. But after being with Father Rowley and being kept
+busy all the time I found that being at home in the country made me
+idle. I told the Reverend Father that I hoped to be ordained as a
+secular priest and that I did not imagine I had any vocation for the
+contemplative life. I have as a matter of fact a great longing for it.
+But I don't think that twenty-one is a good age for being quite sure if
+that longing is not mere sentiment. I suppose you think I'm just
+indulging myself with the decorative side of religion, Father Lamplugh?
+I really am not. I can assure you that I'm far too much accustomed to
+the decorative side to be greatly influenced by it."
+
+The old priest laid a thin hand on Mark's sleeve.
+
+"To tell the truth, my dear boy, I was on the verge of violating the
+decencies of accepted hospitality by criticizing the Order of which you
+have become a probationer. I am just a little doubtful about the
+efficacy of its method of training young men. However, it really is not
+my business, and I hope that I am wrong. But I _am_ a little doubtful if
+all these excellent young brethren are really desirous . . . no, I'll
+not say another word, I've already disgracefully exceeded the
+limitations to criticism that courtesy alone demands of me. I was
+carried away by my interest in you when I heard whose son you were. What
+a debt we owe to men like your father and Rowley! And here am I at
+seventy-six after a long and useless life presuming to criticize other
+people. God forgive me!" The old man crossed himself.
+
+That afternoon and evening recreation was unusually noisy, and during
+Vespers one or two of the brethren were seized with an attack of giggles
+because Brother Lawrence, who was in a rapt condition of mind owing to
+the near approach of St. Lawrence's day when he was to be clothed as a
+novice, tripped while he was holding back the cope during the censing of
+the _Magnificat_ and falling on his knees almost upset Father Lamplugh.
+There was no doubt that the way Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw
+when he was self-conscious was very funny; but Mark wished that the
+giggling had not occurred in front of Father Lamplugh. He wished too
+that during recreation after supper Brother Raymond would be less
+skittish and Brother Dunstan less arch in the manner of reproving him.
+
+"Holy simplicity is all very well," Mark thought. "But holy imbecility
+is a great bore, especially when there is a stranger present."
+
+Luckily Father Burrowes came back the following week, and Mark's
+deepening impression of the monastery's futility was temporarily
+obliterated by the exciting news that the Bishop of Alberta whom the
+brethren were taught to reverence as a second founder would be the guest
+of the Order on St. Lawrence's day and attend the profession of Brother
+Anselm. Mark had not yet seen Brother Anselm, who was the brother in
+charge of the Aldershot priory, and he welcomed the opportunity of
+witnessing those solemn final vows. He felt that he should gain much
+from meeting Brother Anselm, whose work at Aldershot was considered
+after the Reverend Father's preaching to be the chief glory of the
+Order. Brother Lawrence was a little jealous that his name day, on which
+he was to be clothed in Chapter as a novice, should be chosen for the
+much more important ceremony, and he spoke sharply to poor Brother
+Walter when the latter rejoiced in the added lustre Brother Anselm's
+profession would shed upon his own promotion.
+
+"You must remember, Brother," he said, "that you'll probably remain a
+postulant for a very long time."
+
+"But not for ever," replied poor Brother Walter in a depressed tone of
+voice.
+
+"There may not be time to attend to you," said Brother Lawrence
+spitefully. "You may have to wait until the Bishop has gone."
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," sighed Brother Walter looking woeful. "Brother Mark,
+do you hear what they say?"
+
+"Never mind," said Mark, "we'll take our final vows together when
+Brother Lawrence is still a doddering old novice."
+
+Brother Lawrence clicked his tongue and bit his under lip in disgust at
+such a flippant remark.
+
+"What a thing to say," he muttered, and burying his hands in his sleeves
+he walked off disdainfully, his jaw thrust before him.
+
+"Like a cow-catcher," Mark thought with a smile.
+
+The Bishop of Alberta was a dear old gentleman with silvery hair and a
+complexion as fresh and pink as a boy's. With his laced rochet and
+purple biretta he lent the little matchboarded chapel an exotic
+splendour when he sat in a Glastonbury chair beside the altar during the
+Office. The more ritualistic of the brethren greatly enjoyed giving him
+reverent genuflexions and kissing his episcopal ring. Brother Raymond's
+behaviour towards him was like that of a child who has been presented
+with a large doll to play with, a large doll that can be dressed and
+undressed at the pleasure of its owner with nothing to deter him except
+a faint squeak of protest such as the Bishop himself occasionally
+emitted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+SUSCIPE ME, DOMINE
+
+
+Brother Anselm was to arrive on the vigil of St. Lawrence. Normally
+Brother Walter would have been sent to meet him with the Abbey cart at
+the station three miles away. But Brother Walter was in a state of such
+excitement over his near promotion to postulant that it was not
+considered safe to entrust him with the pony. So Mark was sent in his
+place. It was a hot August evening with thunder clouds lying heavy on
+the Malford woods when Mark drove down the deep lanes to the junction,
+wondering what Brother Anselm would be like and awed by the imagination
+of Brother Anselm's thoughts in the train that was bringing him from
+Aldershot to this momentous date of his life's history. Almost before he
+knew what he was saying Mark was quoting from _Romeo and Juliet_:
+
+                       _My mind misgives_
+    _Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,_
+    _Shall bitterly begin his fearful date_
+    _With this night's revels._
+
+"Now why should I have thought that?" he asked himself, and he was just
+deciding that it was merely a verbal sequence of thought when the first
+far-off peal of thunder muttered a kind of menacing contradiction of so
+easy an explanation. It would be raining soon; Mark thumped the pony's
+angular haunches, and tried to feel cheerful in the oppressive air.
+
+Brother Anselm did not appear as Mark had pictured him. Instead of the
+lithe enthusiast with flaming eyes he saw a heavily built man with
+blunted features, wearing powerful horn spectacles, his expression
+morose, his movements ungainly. He had, however, a mellow and strangely
+sympathetic voice, in which Mark fancied that he perceived the power he
+was reputed to wield over the soldiers for whose well-being he fought so
+hard. Mark would have liked to ask him about life in the Aldershot
+priory; perhaps if Brother Anselm had been less taciturn, he would have
+broken if not the letter at any rate the spirit of the Rule by begging
+the senior to ask for his services in the Priory. But no sooner were
+they jogging back to Malford than the rain came down in a deluge, and
+Brother Anselm, pulling the hood of his frock over his head, was more
+unapproachable than ever. Mark wished that he had a novice's frock and
+hood, for the rain was pouring down the back of his neck and the
+threadbare cassock he wore was already drenched.
+
+"Thank you, Brother," said the new-comer when the Abbey was attained.
+
+It was dark by now, and, with nothing visible of the speaker except his
+white habit in the gloom, the voice might have been the voice of a
+heavenly visitant, so rarely sweet, so gentle and harmonious were the
+tones. Mark was much moved by that brief recognition of himself.
+
+The wind rose high during the night; listening to it roaring through the
+coppice in which the Abbey was built, Mark lay awake for a long time in
+mute prayer that Brother Anselm might find peace and felicity in his new
+state. And while he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther in
+Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell to cell, rousing the
+brethren from sleep with his hammer and salutation, the sun was climbing
+a serene and windless sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain
+top. Heaven was very near.
+
+Mark was glad that the day was so fair for the profession of Brother
+Anselm, and at Lauds the antiphon, versicle, and response proper to St.
+Lawrence appealed to him by their fitness to the occasion,
+
+_Gold is tried in the fire: and acceptable men in the furnace of
+adversity._
+
+    _V. The Righteous shall grow as a lily._
+    _R. He shall flourish for ever before the Lord._
+
+Mark concerned himself less with his own reception as a postulant. The
+distinction between a probationer and a postulant was very slight,
+really an arbitrary one made by Father Burrowes for his own convenience,
+and until he had to decide whether he should petition to be clothed as a
+novice Mark did not feel that he was called upon to take himself too
+seriously as a monk. For that reason he did not change his name, but
+preferred to stay Brother Mark. The little ceremony of reception was
+carried through in Chapter before the brethren went into the Oratory to
+say Terce, and Brother Walter was so much excited when he heard himself
+addressed as Brother Simon that for a moment it seemed doubtful if he
+would be sufficiently calm to attend the profession of Brother Anselm at
+the conventual Mass. However, during the clothing of Brother Lawrence as
+a novice Brother Simon quieted down, and even gave over counting the
+three knots in the rope with which he had been girdled. Ordinarily,
+Brother Lawrence would have been clothed after Mass, but this morning it
+was felt that such a ceremony coming after the profession of Brother
+Anselm would be an anti-climax, and it was carried through in Chapter.
+It took Brother Lawrence all he had ever heard and read about humility
+and obedience not to protest at the way his clothing on his own saint's
+day, for which he had been made to wait nearly a year, was being carried
+through in such a hole in the corner fashion. But he fixed his mind upon
+the torments of the blessed archdeacon on the gridiron and succeeded in
+keeping his temper.
+
+Mark felt that the profession of Brother Anselm lost some of its dignity
+by the absence of Brother George and Brother Birinus, the only other
+professed members of the Order apart from Father Burrowes himself. It
+struck him as slightly ludicrous that a few young novices and postulants
+should represent the venerable choir-monks whom one pictured at such a
+ceremony from one's reading of the Rule of St. Benedict. Moreover,
+Father Burrowes never presented himself to Mark's imagination as an
+authentic abbot. Nor indeed was he such. Malford Abbey was a courtesy
+title, and such monastic euphemisms as the Abbot's Parlour and the
+Abbot's Lodgings to describe the matchboarded apartments sacred to the
+Father Superior, while they might please such ecclesiastical enthusiasts
+as Brother Raymond, appealed to Mark as pretentious and somewhat silly.
+In fact, if it had not been for the presence of the Bishop of Alberta in
+cope and mitre Mark would have found it hard, when after Terce the
+brethren assembled in the Chapter-room to hear Brother Anselm make his
+final petition, to believe in the reality of what was happening, to
+believe, when Brother Anselm in reply to the Father Superior's
+exhortation chose the white cowl and scapular (which in the Order of St.
+George differentiated the professed monk from the novice) and rejected
+the suit of dittos belonging to his worldly condition, that he was
+passing through moments of greater spiritual importance than any since
+he was baptized or than any he would pass through before he stood upon
+the threshold of eternity.
+
+But this was a transient scepticism, a fleeting discontent, which
+vanished when the brethren formed into procession and returned to the
+oratory singing the psalm: _In Convertendo_.
+
+     _When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we
+     like unto them, that dream._
+
+     _Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy._
+
+     _Then said they among the heathen: The Lord hath done great things
+     for them._
+
+     _Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already: whereof we
+     rejoice._
+
+     _Turn our captivity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south._
+
+     _They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy._
+
+     _He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed:
+     shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with
+     him._
+
+The Father Superior of the Order sang the Mass, while the Bishop of
+Alberta seated in his Glastonbury chair suffered with an expression of
+childlike benignity the ritualistic ministrations of Brother Raymond,
+the ceremonial doffing and donning of his mitre. It was very still in
+the little Oratory, for it was the season when birds are hushed; and
+even Sir Charles Horner who was all by himself in the ante-chapel did
+not fidget or try to peep through the heavy brocaded curtains that shut
+out the quire. Mark dared not look up when at the offertory Brother
+Anselm stood before the Altar and answered the solemn interrogations of
+the Father Superior, question after question about his faith and
+endurance in the life he desired to enter. And to every question he
+answered clearly _I will_. The Father Superior took the parchment on
+which were written the vows and read aloud the document. Then it was
+placed upon the Altar, and there upon that sacrificial stone Brother
+Anselm signed his name to a contract with Almighty God. The holy calm
+that shed itself upon the scene was like a spell on every heart that was
+beating there in unison with the heart of him who was drawing nearer to
+Heaven. Prostrating himself, the professed monk prayed first to God the
+Father:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+The hearts that beat in unison with his took up the prayer, and the
+voices of his brethren repeated it word for word. And now the professed
+monk prayed to God the Son:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+Once more his brethren echoed the entreaty.
+
+And lastly the professed monk prayed to God the Holy Ghost:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+For the third time his brethren echoed the entreaty, and then one and
+all in that Oratory cried:
+
+     _Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it
+     was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
+     Amen._
+
+There followed prayers that the peace of God might be granted to the
+professed monk to enable him worthily to perform the vows which he had
+made, and before the blessing and imposition of the scapular the Bishop
+rose to speak in tones of deep emotion:
+
+"Brethren, I scarcely dared to hope, when, now nearly ten years ago, I
+received the vows of your Father Superior as a novice, that I should one
+day be privileged to be present at this inspiring ceremony. Nor even
+when five years ago in the far north-west of Canada I professed your
+Father Superior and those two devoted souls who will soon be with you,
+now that their work in Malta is for the time finished, did I expect to
+find myself in this beautiful Oratory which your Order owes to the
+generosity of a true son of the Church. My heart goes out to you, and I
+thank God humbly that He has vouchsafed to hear my prayers and bless the
+enterprise from which I had indeed expected much, but which Almighty God
+has allowed to prosper more, far more, than I ventured to hope. All my
+days I have longed to behold the restoration of the religious life to
+our country, and now when my eyes are dim with age I am granted the
+ineffable joy of beholding what for too long in my weakness and lack of
+faith I feared was never likely to come to pass.
+
+"The profession of our dear brother this morning is, I pray, an earnest
+of many professions at Malford. May these first vows placed upon the
+Altar of this Oratory be blessed by Almighty God! May our brother be
+steadfast and happy in his choice! Brethren, I had meant to speak more
+and with greater eloquence, but my heart is too full. The Lord be with
+you."
+
+Now Brother Anselm was clothed in the blessed habit while the brethren
+sang:
+
+    _Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,_
+    _And lighten with celestial fire._
+
+The Father Superior of the Order gave him the paternal kiss. He begged
+the prayers of his brethren there assembled, and drawing the hood of his
+cowl over his head prostrated himself again before the Altar. The Mass
+proceeded.
+
+If the strict Benedictine usage had been followed at Malford, Brother
+Anselm would have remained apart from the others for three days ofter
+his profession, wrapped in his cowl, alone with God. But he was anxious
+to go back to Aldershot that very afternoon, excusing himself because
+Brother Chad, left behind in charge of the Priory, would be overwhelmed
+by his various responsibilities. Brother Dunstan, who had wept
+throughout the ceremony of the profession, was much upset by Brother
+Anselm's departure. He had hoped to achieve great exaltation of spirit
+by Brother Anselm's silent presence. He began to wonder if the newly
+professed monk appreciated his position. Had himself been granted what
+Brother Anselm had been granted, he should have liked to spend a week in
+contemplation of the wonder which had befallen him. Brother Dunstan
+asked himself if his thoughts were worthy of a senior novice, of one who
+had for a while acted as Prior and been accorded the address of Reverend
+Brother. He decided that they were not, and as a penance he begged for
+the nib with which Brother Anselm had signed his profession. This he
+wore round his neck as an amulet against unbrotherly thoughts and as a
+pledge of his own determination to vow himself eternally to the service
+of God.
+
+Mark was glad that Brother Anselm was going back so soon to his active
+work. It was an assurance that the Order of St. George did have active
+work to do; and when he was called upon to drive Brother Anselm to the
+station he made up his mind to conquer his shyness and hint that he
+should be glad to serve the Order in the Priory at Aldershot.
+
+This time, notwithstanding that he had a good excuse to draw his hood
+close, Brother Anselm showed himself more approachable.
+
+"If the Reverend Father suggests your name," he promised Mark, "I shall
+be glad to have you with us. Brother Chad is simply splendid, and the
+Tommies are wonderful. It's quite right of course to have a Mother
+House, but. . . ." He broke off, disinclined to criticize the direction
+of the Order's policy to a member so junior as Mark.
+
+"Oh, I'm not asking you to do anything yet awhile," Mark explained. "I
+quite realize that I have a great deal to learn before I should be any
+use at Aldershot or Sandgate. I hope you don't mind my talking like
+this. But until this morning I had not really intended to remain in the
+Order. My hope was to be ordained as soon as I was old enough. Now since
+this morning I feel that I do long for the spiritual support of a
+community for my own feeble aspirations. The Bishop's words moved me
+tremendously. It wasn't what he said so much, but I was filled with all
+his faith and I could have cried out to him a promise that I for one
+would help to carry on the restoration. At the same time, I know that
+I'm more fitted for active work, not by any good I expect to do, but for
+the good it will do me. I suppose you'd say that if I had a true
+vocation I shouldn't be thinking about what part I was going to play in
+the life of the Order, but that I should be content to do whatever I was
+told. I'm boring you?" Mark broke off to inquire, for Brother Anselm was
+staring in front of him through his big horn spectacles like an owl.
+
+"No, no," said the senior. "But I'm not the novice-master. Who is, by
+the way?"
+
+"Brother Jerome."
+
+The other did not comment on this information, but Mark was sure that he
+was trying not to look contemptuous.
+
+Soon the junction came in sight, and from down the line the white smoke
+of a train approaching.
+
+"Hurry, Brother, I don't want to miss it."
+
+Mark thumped the haunches of the pony and drove up just in time for
+Brother Anselm to escape.
+
+"Thank you, Brother," said that same voice which yesterday, only
+yesterday night, had sounded so rarely sweet. Here on this mellow August
+afternoon it was the voice of the golden air itself, and the shriek of
+the engine did not drown its echoes in Mark's soul where all the way
+back to Malford it was chiming like a bell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+ADDITION
+
+
+Mark's ambition to go and work at Aldershot was gratified before the end
+of August, because Brother Chad fell ill, and it was considered
+advisable to let him spend a long convalescence at the Abbey.
+
+     The Priory,
+
+     17, Farnborough Villas,
+
+     Aldershot.
+
+     St. Michael and All Angels.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I don't think you'll be sorry to read from the above address that
+     I've been transferred from Malford to one of the active branches of
+     the Order. I don't accept your condemnation of the Abbey as
+     pseudo-monasticism, though I can quite well understand that my
+     account of it might lead you to make such a criticism. The trouble
+     with me is that my emotions and judgment are always quarrelling. I
+     suppose you might say that is true of most people. It's like the
+     palmist who tells everybody that he is ruled by his head or his
+     heart, as the case may be. But when one approaches the problem of
+     religion (let alone what is called the religious life) one is
+     terribly perplexed to know which is to be obeyed. I don't think
+     that you can altogether rule out emotion as a touchstone of truth.
+     The endless volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, through which I've been
+     wading, do not cope with the fact that the whole of his vast
+     intellectual and severely logical structure is built up on the
+     assumption of faith, which is the gift of emotion, not judgment.
+     The whole system is a petitio principii really.
+
+     I did not mean to embark on a discussion of the question of the
+     Ultimate Cause of religion, but to argue with you about the
+     religious life! The Abbot Paphnutius told Cassian that there were
+     three sorts of vocation--ex Deo, per hominem, and ex necessitate.
+     Now suppose I have a vocation, mine is obviously per hominem. I
+     inherit the missionary spirit from my father. That spirit was
+     fostered by association with Rowley. My main object in entering the
+     Order of St. George was to work among soldiers, not because I felt
+     that soldiers needed "missionizing" more than any other class, but
+     because the work at Chatsea brought me into contact with both
+     sailors and soldiers, and turned my thoughts in their direction. I
+     also felt the need of an organization behind my efforts. My first
+     impulse was to be a preaching friar, but that would have laid too
+     much on me as an individual, and from lack of self-confidence,
+     youthfulness, want of faith perhaps, I was afraid. Well, to come
+     back to the Abbot Paphnutius and his three vocations--it seems
+     fairly clear that the first, direct from God, is a better vocation
+     than the one which is inspired by human example, or the third,
+     which arises from the failure of everything else. At the same time
+     they ARE all three genuine vocations. What applies to the vocation
+     seems to me to apply equally to the community. What you stigmatize
+     as our pseudo-monasticism is still experimental, and I think I can
+     see the Reverend Father's idea. He has had a great deal of
+     experience with an Order which began so amateurishly, if I may use
+     the word, that nobody could have imagined that it would grow to the
+     size and strength it has reached in ten years. The Bishop of
+     Alberta revealed much to us of our beginnings during his stay at
+     the Abbey, and after I had listened to him I felt how presumptuous
+     it was for me to criticize the central source of the religious life
+     we are hoping to spread. You see, Rector, I must have criticized it
+     implicitly in my letters to you, for your objections are simply the
+     expression of what I did not like to say, but what I managed to
+     convey through the medium of would-be humorous description. One
+     hears of the saving grace of humour, but I'm not sure that humour
+     is a saving grace. I rather wish that I had no sense of humour.
+     It's a destructive quality. All the great sceptics have been
+     humourists. Humour is really a device to secure human comfort. Take
+     me. I am inspired to become a preaching friar. I instantly perceive
+     the funny side of setting out to be a preaching friar. I tell
+     myself that other people will perceive the funny side of it, and
+     that consequently I shall do no good as a preaching friar. Yes,
+     humour is a moisture which rusts everything except gold. As a
+     nation the Jews have the greatest sense of humour, and they have
+     been the greatest disintegrating force in the history of mankind.
+     The Scotch are reputed to have no sense of humour, and they are
+     morally the most impressive nation in the world. What humour is
+     allowed them is known as dry humour. The corroding moisture has
+     been eliminated. They are still capable of laughter, but never so
+     as to interfere with their seriousness in the great things of life.
+     I remember I once heard a tiresome woman, who was striving to be
+     clever, say that Our Lord could not have had much sense of humour
+     or He would not have hung so long on the Cross. At the time I was
+     indignant with the silly blasphemy, but thinking it over since I
+     believe that she was right, and that, while her only thought had
+     been to make a remark that would create a sensation in the room,
+     she had actually hit on the explanation of some of Our Lord's human
+     actions. And his lack of humour is the more conspicuous because he
+     was a Jew. I was reading the other day a book of essays by one of
+     our leading young latitudinarian divines, in which he was most
+     anxious to prove that Our Lord had all the graces of a well-bred
+     young man about town, including a pretty wit. He actually claimed
+     that the pun on Peter's name was an example of Our Lord's urbane
+     and genial humour! It gives away the latitudinarian position
+     completely. They're really ashamed of Christianity. They want to
+     bring it into line with modern thought. They hope by throwing
+     overboard the Incarnation, the Resurrection of the Body, and the
+     Ascension, to lighten the ship so effectually that it will ride
+     buoyantly over the billows of modern knowledge. But however lightly
+     the ship rides, she will still be at sea, and it would be the
+     better if she struck on the rock of Peter and perished than that
+     she should ride buoyantly but aimlessly over the uneasy oceans of
+     knowledge.
+
+     I've once more got a long way from the subject of my letter, but
+     I've always taken advantage of your patience to air my theories,
+     and when I begin to write to you my pen runs away with me. The
+     point I want to make is that unless there is a mother house which
+     is going to create a reserve of spiritual energy, the active work
+     of the Order is going to suffer. The impulse to save souls might
+     easily exhaust itself in the individual. A few disappointments,
+     unceasing hard work, the interference of a bishop, the failure of
+     financial support, a long period in which his work seems to have
+     come to a standstill, all these are going to react on the
+     individual missioner who depends on himself. Looking back now at
+     the work done by my father, and by Rowley at Chatsea, I'm beginning
+     to understand how dangerous it is for one man to make himself the
+     pivot of an enterprise. I only really know about my father's work
+     at second hand, but look at Chatsea. I hear now that already the
+     work is falling to pieces. Although that may not justify the Bishop
+     of Silchester, I'm beginning to see that he might argue that if
+     Rowley had shown himself sufficiently humble to obey the forces of
+     law and order in the Church, he would have had accumulated for him
+     a fresh store of energy from which he might have drawn to
+     consolidate his influence upon the people with whom he worked.
+     Anyway, that's what I'm going to try to acquire from the
+     pseudo-monasticism of Malford. I'm determined to dry up the
+     critical and humorous side of myself. Half of it is nothing more
+     than arrogance. I'm grateful for being sent to Aldershot, but I'm
+     going to make my work here depend on the central source of energy
+     and power. I'm going to say that my work is per hominem, but that
+     the success of my work is ex Deo. You may tell me that any man with
+     the least conception of Christian Grace would know that. Yes, he
+     may know it intellectually, but does he know it emotionally? I
+     confess I don't yet awhile. But I do know that if the Order of St.
+     George proves itself a real force, it will not be per hominem, it
+     will not be by the Reverend Father's eloquence in the pulpit, but
+     by the vocation of the community ex Deo.
+
+     Meanwhile, here I am at Aldershot. Brother Chad, whose place I have
+     taken, was a character of infinite sweetness and humility. All our
+     Tommies speak of him in a sort of protective way, as if he were a
+     little boy they had adopted. He had--has, for after all he's only
+     gone to the Abbey to get over a bad attack of influenza on top of
+     months of hard work--he has a strangely youthful look, although
+     he's nearly thirty. He hails from Lichfield. I wonder what Dr.
+     Johnson would have made of him. I've already told you about Brother
+     Anselm. Well, now that I've seen him at home, as it were, I can't
+     discover the secret of his influence with our men. He's every bit
+     as taciturn with them as he was with me on that drive from the
+     station, and yet there is not one of them that doesn't seem to
+     regard him as an intimate friend. He's extraordinarily good at the
+     practical side of the business. He makes the men comfortable. He
+     always knows just what they're wanting for tea or for supper, and
+     the games always go well when Brother Anselm presides, much better
+     than they do when I'm in charge! I think perhaps that's because I
+     play myself, and want to win. It infects the others. And yet we
+     ought to want to win a game--otherwise it's not worth playing.
+     Also, I must admit that there's usually a row in the billiard room
+     on my nights on duty. Brother Anselm makes them talk better than I
+     do, and I don't think he's a bit interested in their South African
+     experiences. I am, and they won't say a word about them to me. I've
+     been here a month now, so they ought to be used to me by this time.
+
+     We've just heard that the guest-house for soldiers at the Abbey
+     will be finished by the middle of next month, so we're already
+     discussing our Christmas party. The Priory, which sounds so grand
+     and gothic, is really the corner house of a most depressing row of
+     suburban villas, called Glenview and that sort of thing. The last
+     tenant was a traveller in tea and had a stable instead of the usual
+     back-garden. This we have converted into a billiard room. An
+     officer in one of the regiments quartered here told us that it was
+     the only thing in Aldershot we had converted. The authorities
+     aren't very fond of us. They say we encourage the men to grumble
+     and give them too great idea of their own importance. Brother
+     Anselm asked a general once with whom we fell out if it was
+     possible to give a man whose profession it was to defend his
+     country too great an idea of his own importance. The general merely
+     blew out his cheeks and looked choleric. He had no suspicion that
+     he had been scored off. We don't push too much religion into the
+     men at present. We've taught them to respect the Crucifix on the
+     wall in the dining-room, and sometimes they attend Vespers. But
+     they're still rather afraid of chaff, such as being called the
+     Salvation Army by their comrades. Well, here's an end to this long
+     letter, for I must write now to Brother Jerome, whose name-day it
+     is to-morrow. Love to all at the Rectory.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+Mark remained at Aldershot until the week before Christmas, when with a
+party of Tommies he went back to the Abbey. He found that Brother Chad's
+convalescence had been seriously impeded in its later stages by the
+prospect of having to remain at the Abbey as guest-master, and though
+Mark was sorry to leave Aldershot he saw by the way the Tommies greeted
+their old friend that he was dear to their hearts. When after Christmas
+Brother Chad took the party back, Mark made up his mind that the right
+person was going.
+
+Mark found many changes at the Abbey during the four months he had been
+away. The greatest of all was the presence of Brother George as Prior.
+The legend of him had led Mark to expect someone out of the ordinary;
+but he had not been prepared for a personality as strong as this.
+Brother George was six feet three inches tall, with a presence of great
+dignity and much personal beauty. He had an aquiline nose, strong chin,
+dark curly hair and bright imperious eyes. His complexion, burnt by the
+Mediterranean sun, made him seem in his white habit darker than he
+really was. His manner was of one accustomed to be immediately obeyed.
+Mark could scarcely believe when he saw Brother Dunstan beside Brother
+George that only last June Brother Dunstan was acting as Prior. As for
+Brother Raymond, who had always been so voluble at recreation, one look
+from Brother George sent him into a silence that was as solemn as the
+disciplinary silence imposed by the rule. Brother Birinus, who was
+Brother George's right hand in the Abbey as much as he had been his
+right hand on the Moose Rib farm, was even taller than the Prior; but he
+was lanky and raw-boned, and had not the proportions of Brother George.
+He was of a swarthy complexion, not given to talking much, although when
+he did speak he always spoke to the point. He and Brother George were
+hard at work ploughing up some derelict fields which they had persuaded
+Sir Charles Horner to let to the Abbey rent free on condition that they
+were put back into cultivation. The patron himself had gone away for the
+winter to Rome and Florence, and Mark was glad that he had, for he was
+sure that otherwise his inquisitiveness would have been severely
+snubbed by the Prior. Father Burrowes went away as usual to preach after
+Christmas; but before he went Mark was clothed as a novice together with
+two other postulants who had been at Malford since September. Of these
+Brother Giles was a former school-master, a dried-up, tobacco-coloured
+little man of about fifty, with a quick and nervous, but always precise
+manner. Mark liked him, and his manual labour was done under the
+direction of Brother Giles, who had been made gardener, a post for which
+he was well suited. The other new novice was Brother Nicholas whom, had
+Mark not been the fellow-member of a community, he would have disliked
+immensely. Brother Nicholas was one of those people who are in a
+perpetual state of prurient concern about the sexual morality of the
+human race. He was impervious to snubs, of which he received many from
+Brother George, and he had somehow managed to become a favourite of the
+Reverend Father, so that he had been appointed guest-master, a post that
+was always coveted, and one for which nobody felt Brother Nicholas was
+suited.
+
+Besides the increase of numbers there had been considerable additions
+made to the fabric of the Abbey, if such a word as fabric may be applied
+to matchboard, felt, and corrugated iron. Mention has already been made
+of the new Guest-house, which accommodated not only soldiers invited to
+spend their furloughs at the Abbey, but also tramps who sought a night's
+lodging. Mark, as Porter, found his time considerably taken up with
+these casuals, because as soon as the news spread of a comfortable
+lodging they came begging for shelter in greater numbers than had been
+anticipated. A rule was made that they should pay for their
+entertainment by doing a day's work, and it was one of Mark's duties to
+report on the qualifications of these casuals to Brother George, whose
+whole life was occupied with the farm that he was creating out of those
+derelict fields.
+
+"There's a black man just arrived, Reverend Brother. He says he lost his
+ship at Southampton through a boiler explosion, and is tramping to
+Cardiff," Mark would report.
+
+"Can he plough a straight furrow?" the Prior would demand.
+
+"I doubt it," Mark would answer with a smile. "He can't walk straight
+across the dormitory."
+
+"What's he been drinking?"
+
+"Rum, I fancy."
+
+"Why did you let him in?"
+
+"It's such a stormy night."
+
+"Well, send him along to me to-morrow after Lauds, and I'll put him to
+cleaning out the pigsties."
+
+Mark only had to deal with these casuals. Regular guests like the
+soldiers, who were always welcome, and ecclesiastically minded inquirers
+were looked after by Brother Nicholas. One of the things for which Mark
+detested Brother Nicholas was the habit he had of showing off his poor
+casuals to the paying guests. It took Mark a stern reading of St.
+Benedict's Rule and the observations therein upon humility and obedience
+not to be rude to Brother Nicholas sometimes.
+
+"Brother," he asked one day. "Have you ever read what our Holy Father
+says about gyrovagues and sarabaites?"
+
+Brother Nicholas, who always thought that any long word with which he
+was unfamiliar referred to sexual perversion, asked what such people
+were.
+
+"You evidently haven't," said Mark. "Our Holy Father disapproves of
+them."
+
+"Oh, so should I, Brother Mark," said Brother Nicholas quickly. "I hate
+anything like that."
+
+"It struck me," Mark went on, "that most of our paying guests are
+gyrovagues and sarabaites."
+
+"What an accusation to make," said Brother Nicholas, flushing with
+expectant curiosity and looking down his long nose to give the
+impression that it was the blush of innocence and modesty.
+
+When, an hour or so later, he had had leisure to discover the meaning of
+both terms, he came up to Mark and exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, brother, how could you?"
+
+"How could I what?" Mark asked.
+
+"How could you let me think that it meant something much worse? Why,
+it's nothing really. Just wandering monks."
+
+"They annoyed our Holy Father," said Mark.
+
+"Yes, they did seem to make him a bit ratty. Perhaps the translation
+softened it down," surmised Brother Nicholas. "I'll get a dictionary
+to-morrow."
+
+The bell for solemn silence clanged, and Brother Nicholas must have
+spent his quarter of an hour in most unprofitable meditation.
+
+Another addition to the buildings was a wide, covered verandah, which
+had been built on in front of the central block, and which therefore
+extended the length of the Refectory, the Library, the Chapter Room, and
+the Abbot's Parlour. The last was now the Prior's Parlour, because
+lodgings for Father Burrowes were being built in the Gatehouse, the only
+building of stone that was being erected.
+
+This Gatehouse was to be finished as an Easter offering to the Father
+Superior from devout ladies, who had been dismayed at the imagination of
+his discomfort. The verandah was granted the title of the Cloister, and
+the hours of recreation were now spent here instead of in the Library as
+formerly, which enabled studious brethren to read in peace.
+
+The Prior made a rule that every Sunday afternoon all the brethren
+should assemble in the Cloister at tea, and spend the hour until Vespers
+in jovial intercourse. He did not actually specify that the intercourse
+was to be jovial, but he look care by judicious teazing to see that it
+was jovial. In his anxiety to bring his farm into cultivation, Brother
+George was apt to make any monastic duty give way to manual labour on
+those thistle-grown fields, and it was seldom that there were more than
+a couple of brethren to say the Office between Lauds and Vespers. The
+others had to be content with crossing themselves when they heard the
+bell for Terce or None, and even Sext was sparingly attended after the
+Prior instituted the eating of the mid-day meal in the fields on fine
+days. Hence the conversation in the Cloister on Sunday afternoons was
+chiefly agricultural.
+
+"Are you going to help me drill the ten-acre field tomorrow, Brother
+Giles?" the Prior asked one grey Sunday afternoon in the middle of
+March.
+
+"No, I'm certainly not, Reverend Brother, unless you put me under
+obedience to do so."
+
+"Then I think I shall," the Prior laughed.
+
+"If you do, Reverend Brother," the gardener retorted, "you'll have to
+put my peas under obedience to sow themselves."
+
+"Peas!" the Prior scoffed. "Who cares about peas?"
+
+"Oh, Reverend Brother!" cried Brother Simon, his hair standing up with
+excitement. "We couldn't do without peas."
+
+Brother Simon was assistant cook nowadays, a post he filled tolerably
+well under the supervision of the one-legged soldier who was cook.
+
+"We couldn't do without oats," said Brother Birinus severely.
+
+He spoke so seldom at these gatherings that when he did few were found
+to disagree with him, because they felt his words must have been deeply
+pondered before they were allowed utterance.
+
+"Have you any flowers in the garden for St. Joseph?" asked Brother
+Raymond, who was sacristan.
+
+"A few daffodils, that's all," Brother Giles replied.
+
+"Oh, I don't think that St. Joseph would like daffodils," exclaimed
+Brother Raymond. "He's so fond of white flowers, isn't he?"
+
+"Good gracious!" the Prior thundered. "Are we a girls' school or a
+company of able-bodied men?"
+
+"Well, St. Joseph is always painted with lilies, Reverend Brother," said
+the sacristan, rather sulkily.
+
+He disapproved of the way the Prior treated what he called his pet
+saints.
+
+"We're not an agricultural college either," he added in an undertone to
+Brother Dunstan, who shook his finger and whispered "hush."
+
+"I doubt if we ought to keep St. Joseph's Day," said the Prior
+truculently. There was nothing he enjoyed better on these Sunday
+afternoons than showing his contempt for ecclesiasticism.
+
+"Reverend Brother!" gasped Brother Dunstan. "Not keep St. Joseph's Day?"
+
+"He's not in our calendar," Brother George argued. "If we're going to
+keep St. Joseph, why not keep St. Alo--what's his name and Philip Neri
+and Anthony of Padua and Bernardine of Sienna and half-a-dozen other
+Italian saints?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Brother Raymond. "At any rate we have to keep my
+patron, who was a dear, even if he was a Spaniard."
+
+The Prior looked as if he were wondering if there was a clause in the
+Rule that forbade a prior to throw anything within reach at an imbecile
+sacristan.
+
+"I don't think you can put St. Joseph in the same class as the saints
+you have just mentioned," pompously interposed Brother Jerome, who was
+cellarer nowadays and fancied that the continued existence of the Abbey
+depended on himself.
+
+"Until you can learn to harness a pair of horses to the plough," said
+the Prior, "your opinions on the relative importance of Roman saints
+will not be accepted."
+
+"I've never been used to horses," said Brother Jerome.
+
+"And you have been used to saints?" the Prior laughed, raising his
+eyebrows.
+
+Brother Jerome was silent.
+
+"Well, Brother Lawrence, what do you say?"
+
+Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw and assumed the expression of
+the good boy in a Sunday School class.
+
+"St. Joseph was the foster-father of Our Blessed Lord, Reverend
+Brother," he said primly. "I think it would be most disrespectful both
+to Our Blessed Lord and to Our Blessed Lady if we didn't keep his
+feast-day, though I am sure St. Joseph would have no objection to
+daffodils. No objections at all. His whole life and character show him
+to have been a man of the greatest humility and forbearance."
+
+The Prior rocked with laughter. This was the kind of speech that
+sometimes rewarded his teasing.
+
+"We always kept St. Joseph's day at the Visitation, Hornsey," Brother
+Nicholas volunteered. "In fact we always made it a great feature. We
+found it came as such a relief in Lent."
+
+The Prior nodded his head mockingly.
+
+"These young folk can teach us a lot about the way to worship God,
+Brother Birinus," he commented.
+
+Brother Birinus scowled.
+
+"I broke three shares ploughing that bad bit of ground by the fir
+trees," he announced gloomily. "I think I'll drill in the oats to-morrow
+in the ten-acre. It's no good ploughing deep," he added reproachfully.
+
+"Well, I believe in deep ploughing," the Prior argued.
+
+Mark realized that Brother Birinus had deliberately brought back the
+conversation to where it started in order to put an end to the
+discussion about St. Joseph. He was glad, because he himself was the
+only one of the brethren who had not yet been called upon to face the
+Prior's contemptuous teasing. He wondered if he should have had the
+courage to speak up for St. Joseph's Day. He should have found it
+difficult to oppose Brother George, whom he liked and revered. But in
+this case he was wrong, and perhaps he was also wrong to make the
+observation of St. Joseph's Day a cudgel with which to belabour the
+brethren.
+
+The following afternoon Mark had two casuals who he fancied might be
+useful to the Prior, and leaving the ward of the gate to Brother
+Nicholas he took them down with him through the coppice to where over
+the bleak March furrows Brother George was ploughing that rocky strip of
+bad land by the fir trees. The men were told to go and report themselves
+to Brother Birinus, who with Brother Dunstan to feed the drill was
+sowing oats a field or two away.
+
+"I don't think Brother Birinus will be sorry to let Brother Dunstan go
+back to his domestic duties," the Prior commented sardonically.
+
+Mark was turning to go back to _his_ domestic duties when Brother George
+signed to him to stop.
+
+"I suppose that like the rest of them you think I've no business to be a
+monk?" Brother George began.
+
+Mark looked at him in surprise.
+
+"I don't believe that anybody thinks that," he said; but even as he
+spoke he looked at the Prior and wondered why he had become a monk. He
+did not appear, standing there in breeches and gaiters, his shirt open
+at the neck, his hair tossing in the wind, his face and form of the soil
+like a figure in one of Fred Walker's pictures, no, he certainly did not
+appear the kind of man who could be led away by Father Burrowes'
+eloquence and persuasiveness into choosing the method of life he had
+chosen. Yes, now that the question had been put to him Mark wondered why
+Brother George was a monk.
+
+"You too are astonished at me," said the Prior. "Well, in a way I don't
+blame you. You've only seen me on the land. This comes of letting myself
+be tempted by Horner's offer to give us this land rent free if I would
+take it in hand. And after all," he went on talking to the wide grey sky
+rather than to Mark, "the old monks were great tillers of the soil. It's
+right that we should maintain the tradition. Besides, all those years in
+Malta I've dreamed just this. Brother Birinus and I have stewed on those
+sun-baked heights above Valetta and dreamed of this. What made you join
+our Order?" he asked abruptly.
+
+Mark told him about himself.
+
+"I see, you want to keep your hand in, eh? Well, I suppose you might
+have done worse for a couple of years. Now, I've never wanted to be a
+priest. The Reverend Father would like me to be ordained, but I don't
+think I should make a good priest. I believe if I were to become a
+priest, I should lose my faith. That sounds a queer thing to say, and
+I'd rather you didn't repeat it to any of those young men up there."
+
+The monastery bell sounded on the wind.
+
+"Three o'clock already," exclaimed the Prior. And crossing himself he
+said the short prayer offered to God instead of the formal attendance at
+the Office.
+
+"Well, I mustn't let the horses get chilled. You'd better get back to
+your casuals. By the way, I'm going to have Brother Nicholas to work out
+here awhile, and I want you to act as guest-master. Brother Raymond
+will be porter, and I'm going to send Brother Birinus off the farm to be
+sacristan. I shall miss him out here, of course."
+
+The Prior put his hand once more to the plough, and Mark went slowly
+back to the Abbey. On the brow of the hill before he plunged into the
+coppice he turned to look down at the distant figure moving with slow
+paces across the field below.
+
+"He's wrestling with himself," Mark thought, "more than he's wrestling
+with the soil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+MULTIPLICATION
+
+
+At Easter the Abbey Gatehouse was blessed by the Father Superior, who
+established himself in the rooms above and allowed himself to take a
+holiday from his labour of preaching. Mark expected to be made porter
+again, but the Reverend Father did not attempt to change the posts
+assigned to the brethren by the Prior, and Mark remained guest-master, a
+duty that was likely to give him plenty of occupation during the summer
+months now close at hand.
+
+On Low Sunday the Father Superior convened a full Chapter of the Order,
+to which were summoned Brother Dominic, the head of the Sandgate house,
+and Brother Anselm. When the brethren, with the exception of Brother
+Simon, who was still a postulant, were gathered together, the Father
+Superior addressed them as follows:
+
+"Brethren, I have called this Chapter of the Order of St. George to
+acquaint you with our financial position, and to ask you to make a grave
+decision. Before I say any more I ought to explain that our three
+professed brethren considered that a Chapter convened to make a decision
+such as I am going to ask you to make presently should not include the
+novices. I contended that in the present state of our Order where
+novices are called upon to fill the most responsible positions it would
+be unfair to exclude them; and our professed brethren, like true sons of
+St. Benedict, have accepted my ruling. You all know what great additions
+to our Mother House we have made during the past year, and you will all
+realize what a burden of debt this has laid upon the Order and on myself
+what a weight of responsibility. The closing of our Malta Priory, which
+was too far away to interest people in England, eased us a little. But
+if we are going to establish ourselves as a permanent force in modern
+religious life, we must establish our Mother House before anything. You
+may say that the Order of St. George is an Order devoted to active work
+among soldiers, and that we are not concerned with the establishment of
+a partially contemplative community. But all of you will recognize the
+advantage it has been to you to be asked to stay here and prepare
+yourselves for active work, to gather within yourselves a great store of
+spiritual energy, and hoard within your hearts a mighty treasure of
+spiritual strength. Brethren, if the Order of St. George is to be worthy
+of its name and of its claim we must not rest till we have a priory in
+every port and garrison, and in every great city where soldiers are
+stationed. Even if we had the necessary funds to endow these priories,
+have we enough brethren to take charge of them? We have not. I cannot
+help feeling that I was too hasty in establishing active houses both at
+Aldershot and at Sandgate, and I have convened you to-day to ask you to
+vote in Chapter that the house at Sandgate be temporarily given up,
+great spiritual influence though it has proved itself under our dear
+Brother Dominic with the men of Shorncliffe Camp, not only that we may
+concentrate our resources and pay our debts, but also that we may have
+the help of Brother Dominic himself, and of Brother Athanasius, who has
+remained behind in charge and is not here today."
+
+The Father Superior then read a statement of the Order's financial
+liabilities, and invited any Brother who wished, to speak his mind. All
+waited for the Prior, who after a short silence rose:
+
+"Reverend Father and Brethren, I don't think that there is much to say.
+Frankly, I am not convinced that we ought to have spent so much on the
+Abbey, but having done so, we must obviously try and put ourselves on a
+sound financial basis. I should like to hear what Brother Dominic has to
+say."
+
+Brother Dominic was a slight man with black hair and a sallow
+complexion, whose most prominent feature was an, immense hooked nose
+with thin nostrils. Whether through the associations with his name
+saint, or merely by his personality, Mark considered that he looked a
+typical inquisitor. When he spoke, his lips seemed to curl in a sneer.
+The expression was probably quite accidental, perhaps caused by some
+difficulty in breathing, but the effect was sinister, and his smooth
+voice did nothing to counteract the unpleasant grimace. Mark wondered if
+he was really successful with the men at Shorncliffe.
+
+"Reverend Father, Reverend Brother, and Brethren," said Brother Dominic,
+"you can imagine that it is no easy matter for me to destroy with a few
+words a house that in a small way I had a share in building up."
+
+"The lion's share," interposed the Father Superior.
+
+"You are too generous, Reverend Father," said Brother Dominic. "We could
+have done very little at Sandgate if you had not worked so hard for us
+throughout the length and breadth of England. And that is what
+personally I do feel, Brethren," he continued in more emphatic tones. "I
+do feel that the Reverend Father knows better than we what is the right
+policy for us to adopt. I will not pretend that I shall be anything but
+loath to leave Sandgate, but the future of the whole order depends on
+the ability of brethren like myself," Brother Dominic paused for the
+briefest instant to flash a quick glance at Brother Anselm, "to
+recognize that our usefulness to the soldiers among whom we are proud
+and happy to spend our lives is bounded by our usefulness to the Order
+of St. George. I give my vote without hesitation in favour of closing
+the Priory at Sandgate, and abandoning temporarily the work at
+Shorncliffe Camp."
+
+Nobody else spoke when Brother Dominic sat down, and everybody voted in
+favour of the course of action proposed by the Father Superior.
+
+Brother Dominic, in addition to his other work, had been editing _The
+Dragon_, the monthly magazine of the Order, and it was now decided to
+print this in future at the Abbey, some constant reader having presented
+a fount of type. The opening of a printing-press involved housing room,
+and it was decided to devote the old kitchens to this purpose, so that
+new kitchens could be built, a desirable addition in view of the
+increasing numbers in the Abbey and the likelihood of a further increase
+presently.
+
+Mark had not been touched by the abandonment of the Sandgate priory
+until Brother Athanasius arrived. Brother Athanasius was a florid young
+man with bright blue eyes, and so much pent-up energy as sometimes to
+appear blustering. He lacked any kind of ability to hide his feelings,
+and he was loud in his denunciation of the Chapter that abolished his
+work. His criticisms were so loud, aggressive, and blatant, that he was
+nearly ordered to retire from the Order altogether. However, the Father
+Superior went away to address a series of drawing-room meetings in
+London, and Brother George, with whom Brother Athanasius, almost alone
+of the brethren, never hesitated to keep his end up, discovering that he
+was as ready to stick up to horses and cows, did not pay attention to
+the Father Superior's threat that, if Brother Athanasius could not keep
+his tongue quiet, he must be sent away. Mark made friends with him, and
+when he found that, in spite of all his blatancy and self-assertion,
+Brother Athanasius could not keep the tears from his bright blue eyes
+whenever he spoke of Shorncliffe, he was sorry for him and vexed with
+himself for accepting the surrender of Sandgate priory so much as a
+matter of course, because he had no personal experience of its work.
+
+"But was Brother Dominic really good with the men?" Mark asked.
+
+"Oh, Brother Dominic was all right. Don't you try and make me criticize
+Brother Dominic. He bought the gloves and I did the fighting. Good man
+of business was Brother D. I wish we could have some boxing here. Half
+the brethren want punching about in my opinion. Old Brother Jerome's
+face is squashed flat like a prize-fighter's, but I bet he's never had
+the gloves on in his life. I'm fond of old Brother J. But, my word,
+wouldn't I like to punch into him when he gives us that pea-soup more
+than four times a week. Chronic, I call it. Well, if he doesn't give us
+a jolly good blow out on my name-day next week I really will punch into
+him. Old Brother Flatface, as I called him the other day. And he wasn't
+half angry either. Didn't we have sport last second of May! I took a
+party of them all round Hythe and Folkestone. No end of a spree!"
+
+Mark was soon too much occupied with his duties as guestmaster to lament
+with Brother Athanasius the end of the Sandgate priory. The Reverend
+Father's drawing-room addresses were sending fresh visitors down every
+week to see for themselves the size of the foundation that required
+money, and more money, and more money still to keep it going. In the old
+Chatsea days guests who visited the Mission House were expected to
+provide entertainment for their hosts. It mattered not who they were,
+millionaires or paupers, parsons or laymen, undergraduates or
+board-school boys, they had to share the common table, face the common
+teasing, and help the common task. Here at the Abbey, although the
+guests had much more opportunity of intercourse with the brethren than
+would have been permitted in a less novel monastic house, they were
+definitely guests, from whom nothing was expected beyond observance of
+the rules for guests. They were of all kinds, from the distinguished lay
+leaders of the Catholic party to young men who thought emotionally of
+joining the Order.
+
+Mark tried to conduct himself as impersonally as possible, and in doing
+so he managed to impress all the visitors with being a young man
+intensely preoccupied with his vocation, and as such to be treated with
+gravity and a certain amount of deference. Mark himself was anxious not
+to take advantage of his position, and make friends with people that
+otherwise he might not have met. Had he been sure that he was going to
+remain in the Order of St. George, he would have allowed himself a
+greater liberty of intercourse, because he would not then have been
+afraid of one day seeing these people in the world. He desired to be
+forgotten when they left the Abbey, or if he was remembered to be
+remembered only as a guestmaster who tried to make the Monastery guests
+comfortable, who treated them with courtesy, but also with reserve.
+
+None of the young men who came down to see if they would like to be
+monks got as far as being accepted as a probationer until the end of
+May, when a certain Mr. Arthur Yarrell, an undergraduate from Keble
+College, Oxford, whose mind was a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms,
+was accepted and a month later became a postulant as Brother Augustine,
+to the great pleasure of Brother Raymond, who said that he really
+thought he should have been compelled to leave the Order if somebody had
+not joined it with an appreciation of historic Catholicism. Early in
+June Sir Charles Horner introduced another young man called Aubrey Wyon,
+whom he had met at Venice in May.
+
+"Take a little trouble over entertaining him," Sir Charles counselled.
+And then, looking round to see that no thieves or highwaymen were
+listening, he whispered to Mark that Wyon had money. "He would be an
+asset, I fancy. And he's seriously thinking of joining you," the baronet
+declared.
+
+To tell the truth, Sir Charles who was beginning to be worried by the
+financial state of the Order of St. George, would at this crisis have
+tried to persuade the Devil to become a monk if the Devil would have
+provided a handsome dowry. He had met Aubrey Wyon at an expensive hotel,
+had noticed that he was expensively dressed and drank good wine, had
+found that he was interested in ecclesiastical religion, and, having
+bragged a bit about the land he had presented to the Order of St.
+George, had inspired Wyon to do some bragging of what he had done for
+various churches.
+
+"If I could find happiness at Malford," Wyon had said, "I would give
+them all that I possess."
+
+Sir Charles had warned the Father Superior that he would do well to
+accept Wyon as a probationer, should he propose himself; and the Father
+Superior, who was by now as anxious for money as a company-promoter,
+made himself as pleasant to Wyon as he knew how, flattering him
+carefully and giving voice to his dreams for the great stone Abbey to be
+built here in days to come.
+
+Mark took an immediate and violent dislike to the newcomer, which, had
+he been questioned about it, he would have attributed to his elaborate
+choice of socks and tie, or to his habit of perpetually tightening the
+leather belt he wore instead of braces, as if he would compel that
+flabbiness of waist caused by soft living to vanish; but to himself he
+admitted that the antipathy was deeper seated.
+
+"It's like the odour of corruption," he murmured, though actually it was
+the odour of hair washes and lotions and scents that filled the guest's
+cell.
+
+However, Aubrey Wyon became for a week a probationer, ludicrously known
+as Brother Aubrey, after which he remained a postulant only a fortnight
+before he was clothed as a novice, having by then taken the name of
+Anthony, alleging that the inspiration to become a monk had been due to
+the direct intervention of St. Anthony of Padua on June 13th.
+
+Whether Brother Anthony turned the Father Superior's head with his
+promises of what he intended to give the Order when he was professed, or
+whether having once started he was unable to stop, there was continuous
+building all that summer, culminating in a decision to begin the Abbey
+Church.
+
+Mark wondered why Brother George did not protest against the
+expenditure, and he came to the conclusion that the Prior was as much
+bewitched by ambition for his farm as the head of the Order was by his
+hope of a mighty fane.
+
+Thus things drifted during the summer, when, since the Father Superior
+was not away so much, his influence was exerted more strongly over the
+brethren, though at the same time he was not attracting as much money as
+was now always required in ever increasing amounts.
+
+Such preaching as he did manage later on during the autumn was by no
+means so financially successful as his campaign of the preceding year at
+the same time. Perhaps the natural buoyancy of his spirit led Father
+Burrowes in his disappointment to place more trust than he might
+otherwise have done in Brother Anthony's plan for the benefit of the
+Order. The cloister became like Aladdin's Cave whenever there were
+enough brethren assembled to make an audience for his luscious projects
+and prefigurations. Sundays were the days when Brother Anthony was
+particularly eloquent, and one Sunday in mid-September--it was the Feast
+of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross--he surpassed himself.
+
+"My notion would be to copy," he proclaimed, "with of course certain
+improvements, the buildings on Monte Cassino. We are not quite so high
+here; but then on the other hand that is an advantage, because it will
+enable us to allot less space to the superficial area. Yes, I have a
+very soft spot for the cloisters of Monte Cassino."
+
+Brother Anthony gazed round for the approbation of the assembled
+brethren, none of whom had the least idea what the cloisters of Monte
+Cassino looked like.
+
+"And I think some of our altar furniture is a little mean," Brother
+Anthony continued. "I'm not advocating undue ostentation; but there is
+room for improvement. They understood so well in the Middle Ages the
+importance of a rich equipment. If I'd only known when I was in Sienna
+this spring that I was coming here, I should certainly have bought a
+superb reredos that was offered to me comparatively cheap. The columns
+were of malachite and porphyry, and the panels of _rosso antico_ with
+scrolls of _lumachella_. They only asked 15,000 lire. It was absurdly
+cheap. However, perhaps it would be wiser to wait till we finish the
+Abbey Church before we decide on the reredos. I'm very much in favour of
+beaten gold for the tabernacle. By the way, Reverend Father, have you
+decided to build an ambulatory round the clerestory? I must say I think
+it would be effective, and of course for meditation unique. I shall have
+to find if my money will run to it. Oh, and Brother Birinus, weren't you
+saying the other day that the green vestments were rather faded? Don't
+worry. I'm only waiting to make up my mind between velvet and brocade
+for the purple set to order a completely new lot, including a set in old
+rose damask for mid-Lent. It always seems to me such a mistake not to
+take advantage of that charming use."
+
+Father Burrowes was transported to the days of his youth at Malta when
+his own imagination was filled with visions of precious metals, of rare
+fabrics and mighty architecture.
+
+"A silver chalice of severe pattern encrusted round the stem with blue
+zircons," Brother Anthony was chanting in his melodious voice, his eyes
+bright with the reflection of celestial splendours. "And perhaps another
+in gold with the sacred monogram wrought on the cup in jacinths and
+orange tourmalines. Yes, I'll talk it over with Sir Charles and get him
+to approve the design."
+
+The next morning two detectives came to Malford Abbey, and arrested
+Aubrey Wyon alias Brother Anthony for obtaining money under false
+pretences in various parts of the world. With them he departed to prison
+and a life more ascetic than any he had hitherto known. Brother Anthony
+departed indeed, but he was not discredited until it was too late. His
+grandiose projects and extravagant promises had already incited Father
+Burrowes to launch out on several new building operations that the Order
+could ill afford.
+
+Perhaps the cloister had been less like the Cave of Aladdin than the
+Cave of the Forty Thieves.
+
+After Christmas another Chapter was convened, to which Brother Anselm
+and Brother Chad were both bidden. The Father Superior addressed the
+brethren as he had addressed them a year ago, and finished up his speech
+by announcing that, deeply as he regretted it, he felt bound to propose
+that the Aldershot priory should be closed.
+
+"What?" shouted Brother Anselm, leaping to his feet, his eyes blazing
+with wrath through his great horn spectacles.
+
+The Prior quickly rose to say that he could not agree to the Reverend
+Father's suggestion. It was impossible for them any longer to claim that
+they were an active Order if they confined themselves entirely to the
+Abbey. He had not opposed the shutting down of the Sandgate priory, nor,
+he would remind the Reverend Father, had he offered any resistance to
+the abandonment of Malta. But he felt obliged to give his opinion
+strongly in favour of making any sacrifice to keep alive the Aldershot
+priory.
+
+Brother George had spoken with force, but without eloquence; and Mark
+was afraid that his speech had not carried much weight.
+
+The next to rise was Brother Birinus, who stood up as tall as a tree and
+said:
+
+"I agree with Brother George."
+
+And when he sat down it was as if a tree had been uprooted.
+
+There was a pause after this, while every brother looked at his
+neighbour, waiting for him to rise at this crisis in the history of the
+Order. At last the Father Superior asked Brother Anselm if he did not
+intend to speak.
+
+"What can I say?" asked Brother Anselm bitterly. "Last year I should
+have been true to myself and voted against the closing of the Sandgate
+house. I was silent then in my egoism. I am not fit to defend our house
+now."
+
+"But I will," cried Brother Chad, rising. "Begging your pardon, Reverend
+Father and Brethren, if I am speaking too soon, but I cannot believe
+that you seriously consider closing us down. We're just beginning to get
+on well with the authorities, and we've a regular lot of communicants
+now. We began as just a Club, but we're something more than a Club now.
+We're bringing men to Our Lord, Brethren. You will do a great wrong if
+you let those poor souls think that for the sake of your own comfort you
+are ready to forsake them. Forgive me, Reverend Father. Forgive me, dear
+Brethren, if I have said too much and spoken uncharitably."
+
+"He has not spoken uncharitably enough," Brother Athanasius shouted,
+rising to his feet, and as he did so unconsciously assuming the attitude
+of a boxer. "If I'd been here last year, I should have spoken much more
+uncharitably. I did not join this Order to sit about playing with
+vestments. I wanted to bring soldiers to God. If this Order is to be
+turned into a kind of male nunnery, I'm off to-morrow. I'm boiling over,
+that's what I am, boiling over. If we can't afford to do what we should
+be doing, we can't afford to build gatehouses, and lay out flower-beds,
+and sit giggling in tin cloisters. It's the limit, that's what it is,
+the limit."
+
+Brother Athanasius stood there flushed with defiance, until the Father
+Superior told him to sit down and not make a fool of himself, a command
+which, notwithstanding that the feeling of the Chapter had been so far
+entirely against the head of the Order, such was the Father Superior's
+authority, Brother Athanasius immediately obeyed.
+
+Brother Dominic now rose to try, as he said, to bring an atmosphere of
+reasonableness into the discussion.
+
+"I do not think that I can be accused of inconsistency," he pointed out
+smoothly, "when we look back to our general Chapter of a year ago.
+Whatever my personal feelings were about closing the Sandgate priory, I
+recognized at once that the Reverend Father was right. There is really
+no doubt that we must be strong at the roots before we try to grow into
+a tall tree. However flourishing the branches, they will wither if the
+roots are not fed. The Reverend Father has no desire, as I understand
+him, to abandon the activity of the Order. He is merely anxious to
+establish us on a firm basis. The Reverend Brother said that we should
+make any sacrifice to maintain the Aldershot house. I have no desire to
+accuse the Reverend Brother of inconsistency, but I would ask him if he
+is willing to give up the farm, which, as you know, has cost so far a
+great deal more than we could afford. But of course the Reverend Brother
+would give up the farm. At the same time, we do not want him to give it
+up. We realize that under his capable guidance that farm will presently
+be a source of profit. Therefore, I beg the Reverend Brother to
+understand that I am making a purely rhetorical point when I ask him if
+he is prepared to give up the farm. I repeat, we do not want the farm
+given up.
+
+"Another point which I feel has been missed. In giving up Aldershot, we
+are not giving up active work entirely. We have a good deal of active
+work here. We have our guest-house for casuals, and we are always ready
+to feed, clothe, and shelter any old soldiers who come to us. We are
+still young as an Order. We have only four professed monks, including
+the Reverend Father. We want to have more than that before we can
+consider ourselves established. I for one should hesitate to take my
+final vows until I had spent a long time in strict religious
+preparation, which in the hurry and scurry of active work is impossible.
+We have listened to a couple of violent speeches, or at any rate to one
+violent speech by a brother who was for a year in close touch with
+myself. I appeal to him not to drag the discussion down to the level of
+lay politics. We are free, we novices, to leave to-morrow. Let us
+remember that, and do not let us take advantage of our freedom to impart
+to this Mother House of ours the atmosphere of the world to which we may
+return when we will.
+
+"And let us remember when we oppose the judgment of the Reverend Father
+that we are exalting ourselves without reason. Let us remember that it
+is he who by his eloquence and by his devotion and by his endurance and
+by his personality, has given us this wonderful house. Are we to turn
+round and say to him who has worked so hard for us that we do not want
+his gifts, that we are such wonderful fishers of men that we can be
+independent of him? Oh, my dear Brethren, let me beg you to vote in
+favour of abandoning all our dependencies until we are ourselves no
+longer dependent on the Reverend Father's eloquence and devotion and
+endurance and personality. God has blessed us infinitely. Are we to
+fling those blessings in His face?"
+
+Brother Dominic sat down; after him in succession Brother Raymond,
+Brother Dunstan, Brother Lawrence, Brother Jerome, Brother Nicholas, and
+Brother Augustine spoke in support of the Father Superior. Brother Giles
+refused to speak, and though Mark's heart was thundering in his mouth
+with unuttered eloquence, at the moment he should rise he could not find
+a word, and he indicated with a sign that like Brother Giles, he had
+nothing to say.
+
+"The voting will be by ballot," the Reverend Father announced. "It is
+proposed to give up the Priory at Aldershot. Let those brethren who
+agree write Yes on a strip of paper. Let those who disagree write No."
+
+All knelt in silent prayer before they inscribed their will; after which
+they advanced one by one to the ballot-box, into which under the eyes of
+a large crucifix they dropped their papers. The Father Superior did not
+vote. Brother Simon, who was still a postulant, and not eligible to sit
+in Chapter, was fetched to count the votes. He was much excited at his
+task, and when he announced that seven papers were inscribed Yes, that
+six were inscribed No, and that one paper was blank, his teeth were
+chattering.
+
+"One paper blank?" somebody repeated.
+
+"Yes, really," said Brother Simon. "I looked everywhere, and there's not
+a mark on it."
+
+All turned involuntarily toward Mark, whose paper in fact it was,
+although he gave no sign of being conscious of the ownership.
+
+"_In a General Chapter of the Order of St. George, held upon the Vigil
+of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the year of Grace, 1903, it
+was resolved to close the Priory of the Order in the town of
+Aldershot._"
+
+The Reverend Father, having invoked the Holy Trinity, declared the
+Chapter dissolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+DIVISION
+
+
+Mark was vexed with himself for evading the responsibility of recording
+his opinion. His vote would not have changed the direction of the
+policy; but if he had voted against giving up the house at Aldershot,
+the Father Superior would have had to record the casting vote in favour
+of his own proposal, and whatever praise or blame was ultimately awarded
+to the decision would have belonged to him alone, who as head of the
+Order was best able to bear it. Mark's whole sympathy had been on the
+side of Brother George, and as one who had known at first hand the work
+in Aldershot, he did feel that it ought not to be abandoned so easily.
+Then when Brother Athanasius was speaking, Mark, in his embarrassment at
+such violence of manner and tone, picked up a volume lying on the table
+by his elbow that by reading he might avoid the eyes of his brethren
+until Brother Athanasius had ceased to shout. It was the Rule of St.
+Benedict which, with a print of Fra Angelico's Crucifixion and an image
+of St. George, was all the decoration allowed to the bare Chapter Room,
+and the page at which Mark opened the leather-bound volume was headed:
+DE PRAEPOSITO MONASTERII.
+
+     "_It happens too often that through the appointment of the Prior
+     grave scandals arise in monasteries, since some there be who,
+     puffed up with a malignant spirit of pride, imagining themselves to
+     be second Abbots, and assuming unto themselves a tyrannous
+     authority, encourage scandals and create dissensions in the
+     community. . . ._
+
+     "_Hence envy is excited, strife, evil-speaking, jealousy, discord,
+     confusion; and while the Abbot and the Prior run counter to each
+     other, by such dissension their souls must of necessity be
+     imperilled; and those who are under them, when they take sides, are
+     travelling on the road to perdition. . . ._
+
+     "_On this account we apprehend that it is expedient for the
+     preservation of peace and good-will that the management of his
+     monastery should be left to the discretion of the Abbot. . . ._
+
+     "_Let the Prior carry out with reverence whatever shall be enjoined
+     upon him by his Abbot, doing nothing against the Abbot's will, nor
+     against his orders. . . ._"
+
+Mark could not be otherwise than impressed by what he read.
+
+     _Ii qui sub ipsis sunt, dum adulantur partibus, eunt in
+     perditionem. . . ._
+
+     _Nihil contra Abbatis voluntatem faciens. . . ._
+
+Mark looked up at the figure of St. Benedict standing in that holy group
+at the foot of the Cross.
+
+     _Ideoque nos proevidemus expedire, propter pacis caritatisque
+     custodiam, in Abbatis pendere arbitrio ordinationem monasterii
+     sui. . . ._
+
+St. Benedict had more than apprehended; he had actually foreseen that
+the Abbot ought to manage his own monastery. It was as if centuries ago,
+in the cave at Subiaco, he had heard that strident voice of Brother
+Athanasius in this matchboarded Chapter-room, as if he had beheld
+Brother Dominic, while apparently he was striving to persuade his
+brethren to accept the Father Superior's advice, nevertheless taking
+sides, and thereby travelling along the road that leads toward
+destruction. This was the thought that paralyzed Mark's tongue when it
+was his turn to speak, and this was why he would not commit himself to
+an opinion. Afterward, his neutrality appeared to him a weak compromise,
+and he regretted that he had not definitely allied himself with one
+party or the other.
+
+The announcement in _The Dragon_ that the Order had been compelled to
+give up the Aldershot house produced a large sum of sympathetic
+contributions; and when the Father Superior came back just before Lent,
+he convened another Chapter, at which he told the Community that it was
+imperative to establish a priory in London before they tried to reopen
+any houses elsewhere. His argument was cogent, and once again there was
+the appearance of unanimity among the Brethren, who all approved of the
+proposal. It had always been the custom of Father Burrowes to preach his
+hardest during Lent, because during that season of self-denial he was
+able to raise more money than at any other time, but until now he had
+never failed to be at the Abbey at the beginning of Passion Week, nor to
+remain there until Easter was over.
+
+The Feast of St. Benedict fell upon the Saturday before the fifth Sunday
+in Lent, and the Father Superior, who had travelled down from the North
+in order to be present, announced that he considered it would be
+prudent, so freely was the money flowing in, not to give up preaching
+this year during Passion Week and Holy Week. Naturally, he did not
+intend to leave the Community without a priest at such a season, and he
+had made arrangements with the Reverend Andrew Hett to act as chaplain
+until he could come back into residence himself.
+
+Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine were particularly thrilled by the
+prospect of enjoying the ministrations of Andrew Hett, less perhaps
+because they would otherwise be debarred from their Easter duties than
+because they looked forward to services and ceremonies of which they
+felt they had been robbed by the austere Anglicanism of Brother George.
+
+"Andrew Hett is famous," declared Brother Raymond at the pitch of
+exultation. "It was he who told the Bishop of Ipswich that if the Bishop
+made him give up Benediction he would give up singing Morning and
+Evening Prayer."
+
+"That must have upset the Bishop," said Mark. "I suppose he resigned
+his bishopric."
+
+"I should have thought that you, Brother Mark, would have been the last
+one to take the part of a bishop when he persecutes a Catholic priest!"
+
+"I'm not taking the part of the Bishop," Mark replied. "But I think it
+was a silly remark for a curate to make. It merely put him in the wrong,
+and gave the Bishop an opportunity to score."
+
+The Prior had questioned the policy of engaging Andrew Hett as Chaplain,
+even for so brief a period as a month. He argued that, inasmuch as the
+Bishop of Silchester had twice refused to licence him to parishes in the
+diocese, it would prejudice the Bishop against the Order of St. George,
+and might lead to his inhibiting the Father Superior later on, should an
+excuse present itself.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear Brother George," said the Reverend Father. "He won't
+know anything about it officially, and in any case ours is a private
+oratory, where refusals to licence and episcopal inhibitions have no
+effect."
+
+"That's not my point," argued Brother George. "My point is that any
+communication with a notorious ecclesiastical outlaw like this fellow
+Hett is liable to react unfavourably upon us. Why can't we get down
+somebody else? There must be a number of unemployed elderly priests who
+would be glad of the holiday."
+
+"I'm afraid that I've offered Hett the job now, so let us make up our
+minds to be content."
+
+Mark, who was doing secretarial work for the Reverend Father, happened
+to be present during this conversation, which distressed him, because it
+showed him that the Prior was still at variance with the Abbot, a state
+of affairs that was ultimately bound to be disastrous for the Community.
+He withdrew almost immediately on some excuse to the Superior's inner
+room, whence he intended to go downstairs to the Porter's Lodge until
+the Prior was gone. Unfortunately, the door of the inner room was
+locked, and before he could explain what had happened, a conversation
+had begun which he could not help overhearing, but which he dreaded to
+interrupt.
+
+"I'm afraid, dear Brother George," the Reverend Father was saying, "I'm
+very much afraid that you are beginning to think I have outlived my
+usefulness as Superior of the Order."
+
+"I've never suggested that," Brother George replied angrily.
+
+"You may not have meant to give that impression, but certainly that is
+what you have succeeded in making me feel personally," said the
+Superior.
+
+"I have been associated with you long enough to be entitled to express
+my opinion in private."
+
+"In private, yes. But are you always careful only to do so in private?
+I'm not complaining. My only desire is the prosperity and health of the
+Order. Next Christmas I am ready to resign, and let the brethren elect
+another Superior-general."
+
+"That's talking nonsense," said the Prior. "You know as well as I do
+that nobody else except you could possibly be Superior. But recently I
+happen to have had a better opportunity than you to criticize our Mother
+House, and frankly I'm not satisfied with the men we have. Few of them
+will be any use to us. Birinus, Anselm, Giles, Chad, Athanasius if
+properly suppressed, Mark, these in varying degrees, have something in
+them, but look at the others! Dominic, ambitious and sly, Jerome, a
+pompous prig, Dunstan, a nincompoop, Raymond, a milliner, Nicholas,
+a--well, you know what I think Nicholas is, Augustine, another
+nincompoop, Lawrence, still at Sunday School, and poor Simon, a clown.
+I've had a dozen probationers through my hands, and not one of them was
+as good as what we've got. I'm afraid I'm less hopeful of the future
+than I was in Canada."
+
+"I notice, dear Brother George," said the Father Superior, "that you are
+prejudiced in favour of the brethren who follow your lead with a certain
+amount of enthusiasm. That is very natural. But I'm not so pessimistic
+about the others as you are. Perhaps you feel that I am forgetting how
+much the Order owes to your generosity in the past. Believe me, I have
+forgotten nothing. At the same time, you gave your money with your eyes
+open. You took your vows without being pressed. Don't you think you owe
+it to yourself, if not to the Order or to me personally, to go through
+with what you undertook? Your three vows were Chastity, Poverty, and
+Obedience."
+
+There was no answer from the Prior; a moment later he shut the door
+behind him, and went downstairs alone. Mark came into the room at once.
+
+"Reverend Father," he said. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that I
+overheard what you and the Reverend Brother were saying." He went on to
+explain how this had happened, and why he had not liked to make his
+presence known.
+
+"You thought the Reverend Brother would not bear the mortification with
+as much fortitude as myself?" the Father Superior suggested with a faint
+smile.
+
+It struck Mark how true this was, and he looked in astonishment at
+Father Burrowes, who had offered him the key to his action.
+
+"Well, we must forget what we heard, my son," said the Father Superior.
+"Sit down, and let's finish off these letters."
+
+An hour's work was done, at the end of which the Reverend Father asked
+Mark if his had been the blank paper when the votes were counted in
+Chapter, and when Mark admitted that it had been, he pressed him for the
+reason of his neutrality.
+
+"I'm not sure that it oughtn't to be called indecision," said Mark. "I
+was personally interested in the keeping on of Aldershot, because I had
+worked there."
+
+"Then why not have voted for doing so?" the Superior asked, in accents
+that were devoid of the least grudge against Mark for disagreeing with
+himself.
+
+"I tried to get rid of my personal opinion," Mark explained. "I tried to
+look at the question strictly from the standpoint of the member of a
+community. As such I felt that the Reverend Brother was wrong to run
+counter to his Superior. At the same time, if you'll forgive me for
+saying so, I felt that you were wrong to give up Aldershot. I simply
+could not arrive at a decision between the two opinions."
+
+"I do not blame you, my son, for your scrupulous cast of mind. Only
+beware of letting it chill your enthusiasm. Satan may avail himself of
+it one day, and attack your faith. Solomon was just. Our Blessed Lord,
+by our cowardly standards, was unjust. Remembering the Gadarene swine,
+the barren fig-tree, the parable of the wedding-guest without a garment,
+Martha and Mary. . . ."
+
+"Martha and Mary!" interrupted Mark. "Why, that was really the point at
+issue. And the ointment that might have been sold for the benefit of the
+poor. Yes, Judas would have voted with the Reverend Brother."
+
+"And Pontius Pilate would have remained neutral," added Father Burrowes,
+his blue eyes glittering with delight at the effect upon Mark of his
+words.
+
+But when Mark was walking back to the Abbey down the winding drive among
+the hazels, he wished that he and not the Reverend Father had used that
+illustration. However, useless regrets for his indecision in the matter
+of the priory at Aldershot were soon obliterated by a new cause of
+division, which was the arrival of the Reverend Andrew Hett on the Vigil
+of the Annunciation, just in time to sing first Vespers.
+
+It fell to Mark's lot to entertain the new chaplain that evening,
+because Brother Jerome who had become guest-master when Brother Anselm
+took his place as cellarer was in the infirmary. Mark was scarcely
+prepared for the kind of personality that Hett's proved to be. He had
+grown accustomed during his time at the Abbey to look down upon the
+protagonists of ecclesiastical battles, so little else did any of the
+guests who visited them want to discuss, so much awe was lavished upon
+them by Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine. It did not strike Mark
+that the fight at St. Agnes' might appear to the large majority of
+people as much a foolish squabble over trifles, a cherishing of the
+letter rather than the spirit of Christian worship, as the dispute
+between Mr. So-and-so and the Bishop of Somewhere-or-other in regard to
+his use of the Litany of the Saints in solemn procession on high days
+and holy days.
+
+Andrew Hett revived in Mark his admiration of the bigot, which would
+have been a dangerous thing to lose in one's early twenties. The
+chaplain was a young man of perhaps thirty-five, tall, raw-boned,
+sandy-haired, with a complexion of extreme pallor. His light-blue eyes
+were very red round the rims, and what eyebrows he possessed slanted up
+at a diabolic angle. His voice was harsh, high, and rasping as a guinea
+fowl's. When Mark brought him his supper, Hett asked him several
+questions about the Abbey time-table, and then said abruptly:
+
+"The ugliness of this place must be soul-destroying."
+
+Mark looked at the Guest-chamber with new eyes. There was such a force
+of assertion in Hett's tone that he could not contradict him, and indeed
+it certainly was ugly.
+
+"Nobody can live with matchboarded walls and ceilings and not suffer for
+it," Hett went on. "Why didn't you buy an old tithe barn and live in
+that? It's an insult to Almighty God to worship Him in such
+surroundings."
+
+"This is only a beginning," Mark pointed out.
+
+"A very bad beginning," Hett growled. "Such brutalizing ugliness would
+be inexcusable if you were leading an active life. But I gather that you
+claim to be contemplative here. I've been reading your ridiculous
+monthly paper _The Dragon_. Full of sentimental bosh about bringing back
+the glories of monasticism to England. Tintern was not built of tin. How
+can you contemplate Almighty God here? It's not possible. What Divine
+purpose is served by collecting men under hundreds of square feet of
+corrugated iron? I'm astonished at Charles Horner. I thought he knew
+better than to encourage this kind of abomination."
+
+There was only one answer to make to Hett, which was that the religious
+life of the Community did not depend upon any externals, least of all
+upon its lodging; but when Mark tried to frame this answer, his lips
+would not utter the words. In that moment he knew that it was time for
+him to leave Malford and prepare himself to be a priest elsewhere, and
+otherwise than by what the Rector had stigmatized as the pseudo-monastic
+life.
+
+Mark wondered when he had left the chaplain to his ferocious
+meditations what would have been the effect of that diatribe upon some
+of his brethren. He smiled to himself, as he sat over his solitary
+supper in the Refectory, to picture the various expressions he could
+imagine upon their faces when they came hotfoot from the Guest-chamber
+with the news of what manner of priest was in their midst. And while he
+was sipping his bowl of pea-soup, he looked up at the image of St.
+George and perceived that the dragon's expression bore a distinct
+resemblance to that of the Reverend Andrew Hett. That night it seemed to
+Mark, in one of those waking trances that occur like dreams between one
+disturbed sleep and another, that the presence of the chaplain was
+shaking the flimsy foundations of the Abbey with such ruthlessness that
+the whole structure must soon collapse.
+
+"It's only the wind," he murmured, with that half of his mind which was
+awake. "March is going out like a dragon."
+
+After Mass next day, when Mark was giving the chaplain his breakfast,
+the latter asked who kept the key of the tabernacle.
+
+"Brother Birinus, I expect. He is the sacristan."
+
+"It ought to have been given to me before Mass. Please go and ask for
+it," requested the chaplain.
+
+Mark found Brother Birinus in the Sacristy, putting away the white
+vestments in the press. When Mark gave him the chaplain's message,
+Brother Birinus told him that the Reverend Brother had the key.
+
+"What does he want the key for?" asked Brother George when Mark had
+repeated to him the chaplain's request.
+
+"He probably wishes to change the Host," Mark suggested.
+
+"There is no need to do that. And I don't believe that is the reason. I
+believe he wants to have Benediction. He's not going to have Benediction
+here."
+
+Mark felt that it was not his place to argue with the Reverend Brother,
+and he merely asked him what reply he was to give to the chaplain.
+
+"Tell him that the key of the Tabernacle is kept by me while the
+Reverend Father is away, and that I regret I cannot give it to him."
+
+The priest's eyes blazed with anger when Mark returned without the key.
+
+"Who is the Reverend Brother?" he rasped.
+
+"Brother George."
+
+"Yes, but what is he? Apothecary, tailor, ploughboy, what?"
+
+"Brother George is the Prior."
+
+"Well, please tell the Prior that I should like to speak to him
+instantly."
+
+When Mark found Brother George he had already doffed his habit, and was
+dressed in his farmer's clothes to go working on the land.
+
+"I'll speak to Mr. Hett before Sext. Meanwhile, you can assure him that
+the key of the Tabernacle is perfectly safe. I wear it round my neck."
+
+Brother George pulled open his shirt, and showed Mark the golden key
+hanging from a cord.
+
+On receiving the Prior's message, the chaplain asked for a railway
+time-table.
+
+"I see there is a fast train at 10.30. Please order the trap."
+
+"You're not going to leave us?" Mark exclaimed.
+
+"Do you suppose, Brother Mark, that no bishop in the Establishment will
+receive me in his diocese because I am accustomed to give way? I should
+not have asked for the key of the Tabernacle unless I thought that it
+was my duty to ask for it. I cannot take it from the Reverend Brother's
+neck. I will not stay here without its being given up to me. Please
+order the trap in time to catch the 10.30 train."
+
+"Surely you will see the Reverend Brother first," Mark urged. "I should
+have made it clear to you that he is out in the fields, and that all the
+work of the farm falls upon his shoulders. It cannot make any difference
+whether you have the key now or before Sext. And I'm sure the Reverend
+Brother will see your point of view when you put it to him."
+
+"I am not going to argue about the custody of God," said the chaplain.
+"I should consider such an argument blasphemy, and I consider the
+Prior's action in refusing to give up the key sacrilege. Please order
+the trap."
+
+"But if you sent a telegram to the Reverend Father . . . Brother Dominic
+will know where he is . . . I'm sure that the Reverend Father will put
+it right with Brother George, and that he will at once give you the
+key."
+
+"I was summoned here as a priest," said the chaplain. "If the amateur
+monk left in charge of this monastery does not understand the
+prerogatives of my priesthood, I am not concerned to teach him except
+directly."
+
+"Well, will you wait until I've found the Reverend Brother and told him
+that you intend to leave us unless he gives you the key?" Mark begged,
+in despair at the prospect of what the chaplain's departure would mean
+to a Community already too much divided against itself.
+
+"It is not one of my prerogatives to threaten the prior of a monastery,
+even if he is an amateur," said the chaplain. "From the moment that
+Brother George refuses to recognize my position, I cease to hold that
+position. Please order the trap."
+
+"You won't have to leave till half-past nine," said Mark, who had made
+up his mind to wrestle with Brother George on his own initiative, and if
+possible to persuade him to surrender the key to the chaplain of his own
+accord. With this object he hurried out, to find Brother George
+ploughing that stony ground by the fir-trees. He was looking ruefully at
+a broken share when Mark approached him.
+
+"Two since I started," he commented.
+
+But he was breaking more precious things than shares, thought Mark, if
+he could but understand.
+
+"Let the fellow go," said Brother George coldly, when Mark had related
+his interview with the chaplain.
+
+"But, Reverend Brother, if he goes we shall have no priest for Easter."
+
+"We shall be better off with no priest than with a fellow like that."
+
+"Reverend Brother," said Mark miserably, "I have no right to remonstrate
+with you, I know. But I must say something. You are making a mistake.
+You will break up the Community. I am not speaking on my own account
+now, because I have already made up my mind to leave, and get ordained.
+But the others! They're not all strong like you. They really are not. If
+they feel that they have been deprived of their Easter Communion by you
+. . . and have you the right to deprive them? After all, Father Hett has
+reason on his side. He is entitled to keep the key of the Tabernacle. If
+he wishes to hold Benediction, you can forbid him, or at least you can
+forbid the brethren to attend. But the key of the Tabernacle belongs to
+him, if he says Mass there. Please forgive me for speaking like this,
+but I love you and respect you, and I cannot bear to see you put
+yourself in the wrong."
+
+The Prior patted Mark on the shoulder.
+
+"Cheer up, Brother," he said. "You mustn't mind if I think that I know
+better than you what is good for the Community. I have had a longer time
+to learn, you must remember. And so you're going to leave us?"
+
+"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that now," Mark said.
+
+"Nor do I," said Brother George. "I want to get on with my ploughing."
+
+Mark saw that it was as useless to argue with him as attempt to persuade
+the chaplain to stay. He turned sadly away, and walked back with heavy
+steps towards the Abbey. Overhead, the larks, rising and falling upon
+their fountains of song, seemed to mock the way men worshipped Almighty
+God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+SUBTRACTION
+
+
+Mark had not spent a more unhappy Easter since the days of Haverton
+House. He was oppressed by the sense of excommunication that brooded
+over the Abbey, and on the Saturday of Passion Week the versicles and
+responses of the proper Compline had a dreadful irony.
+
+    _V. O King most Blessed, govern Thy servants in the right way._
+    _R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed._
+    _V. By holy fasts to amend our sinful lives._
+    _R. O King most Blessed, govern Thy Saints in the right way._
+    _V. To duly keep Thy Paschal Feast._
+    _R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed._
+
+"Brother Mark," said Brother Augustine, on the morning of Palm Sunday,
+"_did_ you notice that ghastly split infinitive in the last versicle at
+Compline? _To duly keep._ I can't think why we don't say the Office in
+Latin."
+
+Mark felt inclined to tell Brother Augustine that if nothing more vital
+than an infinitive was split during this holy season, the Community
+might have cause to congratulate itself. Here now was Brother Birinus
+throwing away as useless the bundle of palms that lacked the blessing of
+a priest, throwing them away like dead flowers.
+
+Sir Charles Horner, who had been in town, arrived at the Abbey on the
+Tuesday, and announced that he was going to spend Holy Week with the
+Community.
+
+"We have no chaplain," Mark told him.
+
+"No chaplain!" Sir Charles exclaimed. "But I understood that Andrew
+Hett had undertaken the job while Father Burrowes was away."
+
+Mark did not think that it was his duty to enlighten Sir Charles upon
+the dispute between Brother George and the chaplain. However, it was not
+long before he found out what had occurred from the Prior's own lips and
+came fuming back to the Guest-chamber.
+
+"I consider the whole state of affairs most unsatisfactory," he said. "I
+really thought that when Brother George took charge here the Abbey would
+be better managed."
+
+"Please, Sir Charles," Mark begged, "you make it very uncomfortable for
+me when you talk like that about the Reverend Brother before me."
+
+"Yes, but I must give my opinion. I have a right to criticize when I am
+the person who is responsible for the Abbey's existence here. It's all
+very fine for Brother George to ask me to notify Bazely at Wivelrod that
+the brethren wish to go to their Easter duties in his church. Bazely is
+a very timid man. I've already driven him into doing more than he really
+likes, and my presence in his church doesn't alarm the parishioners. In
+fact, they rather like it. But they won't like to see the church full of
+monks on Easter morning. They'll be more suspicious than ever of what
+they call poor Bazely's innovations. It's not fair to administer such a
+shock to a remote country parish like Wivelrod, especially when they're
+just beginning to get used to the vestments I gave them. It seems to me
+that you've deliberately driven Andrew Hett away from the Abbey, and I
+don't see why poor Bazely should be made to suffer. How many monks are
+you now? Fifteen? Why, fifteen bulls in Wivelrod church would create
+less dismay!"
+
+Sir Charles's protest on behalf of the Vicar of Wivelrod was effective,
+for the Prior announced that after all he had decided that it was the
+duty of the Community to observe Easter within the Abbey gates. The
+Reverend Father would return on Easter Tuesday, and their Easter duties
+would be accomplished within the Octave. Withal, it was a gloomy Easter
+for the brethren, and when they began the first Vespers with the
+quadruple Alleluia, it seemed as if they were still chanting the
+sorrowful antiphons of Good Friday.
+
+     _My spirit is vexed within Me: and My heart within Me is desolate._
+
+     _Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by: behold and see if there
+     be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me._
+
+     _What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which I was wounded
+     in the house of My friends._
+
+Nor was there rejoicing in the Community when at Lauds of Easter Day
+they chanted:
+
+    _V. In Thy Resurrection, O Christ._
+    _R. Let Heaven and earth rejoice, Alleluia._
+
+Nor when at Prime and Terce and Sext and None they chanted:
+
+     _This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be
+     glad in it._
+
+And when at the second Vespers the Brethren declared:
+
+    _V. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep
+        the Feast._
+
+    _R. Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and
+        wickedness; but with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and
+        truth. Alleluia._
+
+scarcely could they who chanted the versicle challenge with their eyes
+those who hung down their heads when they gave the response.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hour of recreation before Compline, which upon great Feasts was wont
+to be so glad, lay heavily upon the brethren that night, so that Mark
+could not bear to sit in the Cloister; there being no guests in the
+Abbey for his attention, he sat in the library and wrote to the Rector.
+
+     The Abbey,
+
+     Malford, Surrey.
+
+     Easter Sunday.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I should have written before to wish you all a happy Easter, but
+     I've been making up my mind during the last fortnight to leave the
+     Order, and I did not want to write until my mind was made up. That
+     feat is now achieved. I shall stay here until St. George's Day, and
+     then the next day, which will be St. Mark's Eve, I shall come home
+     to spend my birthday with you. I do not regret the year and six
+     months that I have spent at Malford and Aldershot, because during
+     that time, if I have decided not to be a monk, I am none the less
+     determined to be a priest. I shall be 23 this birthday, and I hope
+     that I shall find a Bishop to ordain me next year and a Theological
+     College to accept responsibility for my training and a beneficed
+     priest to give me a title. I will give you a full account of myself
+     when we meet at the end of the month; but in this letter, written
+     in sad circumstances, I want to tell you that I have learnt with
+     the soul what I have long spoken with the lips--the need of God. I
+     expect you will tell me that I ought to have learnt that lesson
+     long ago upon that Whit-Sunday morning in Meade Cantorum church.
+     But I think I was granted then by God to desire Him with my heart.
+     I was scarcely old enough to realize that I needed Him with my
+     soul. "You're not so old now," I hear you say with a smile. But in
+     a place like this one learns almost more than one would learn in
+     the world in the time. One beholds human nature very intimately. I
+     know more about my fellow-men from association with two or three
+     dozen people here than I learnt at St. Agnes' from association with
+     two or three hundred. This much at least my pseudo-monasticism has
+     taught me.
+
+     We have passed through a sad time lately at the Abbey, and I feel
+     that for the Community sorrows are in store. You know from my
+     letters that there have been divisions, and you know how hard I
+     have found it to decide which party I ought to follow. But of
+     course the truth is that from the moment one feels the inclination
+     to side with a party in a community it is time to leave that
+     community. Owing to an unfortunate disagreement between Brother
+     George and the Reverend Andrew Hett, who came down to act as
+     chaplain during the absence of the Reverend Father, Andrew Hett
+     felt obliged to leave us. The consequence is we have had no Mass
+     this Easter, and thus I have learned with my soul to need God. I
+     cannot describe to you the torment of deprivation which I
+     personally feel, a torment that is made worse by the consciousness
+     that all my brethren will go to their cells to-night needing God
+     and not finding Him, because they like myself are involved in an
+     earthly quarrel, so that we are incapable of opening our hearts to
+     God this night. You may say that if we were in such a state we
+     should have had no right to make our Easter Communion. But that
+     surely is what Our Blessed Lord can do for us with His Body and
+     Blood. I have been realizing that all this Holy Week. I have felt
+     as I have never felt before the consciousness of sinning against
+     Him. There has not been an antiphon, not a versicle nor a response,
+     that has not stabbed me with a consciousness of my sin against His
+     Divine Love.
+
+     "What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which I was wounded
+     in the house of My friends."
+
+     But if on Easter eve we could have confessed our sins against His
+     Love, and if this morning we could have partaken of Him, He would
+     have been with us, and our hearts would have been fit for the
+     presence of God. We should have been freed from this spirit of
+     strife, we should have come together in Jesus Christ. We should
+     have seen how to live "with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and
+     truth." God would have revealed His Will, and we, submitting our
+     Order to His Will, should have ceased to think for ourselves, to
+     judge our brethren, to criticize our seniors, to suspect that
+     brother of personal ambition, this brother of toadyism. The
+     Community is being devoured by the Dragon and, unless St. George
+     comes to the rescue of his Order on Thursday week, it will perish.
+     Perhaps I have not much faith in St. George. He has always seemed
+     to me an unreal, fairy-tale sort of a saint. I have more faith in
+     St. Benedict and his Holy Rule. But I have no vocation for the
+     contemplative life. I don't feel that my prayers are good enough to
+     save my own soul, let alone the souls of others. I _must_ give
+     Jesus Christ to my fellow-men in the Blessed Sacrament. I long to
+     be a priest for that service. I don't feel that I want by my own
+     efforts to make people better, or to relieve poverty, or to thunder
+     against sin, or to preach them up to and through Heaven's gates. I
+     want to give them the Blessed Sacrament, because I know that
+     nothing else will be the slightest use to them. I know it more
+     positively to-night than I have ever known it, because as I sit
+     here writing to you I am starved. God has given me the grace to
+     understand why I am starved. It is my duty to bring Our Lord to
+     souls who do not know why they are starved. And if after nearly two
+     years of Malford this passion to bring the Sacraments to human
+     beings consumes me like a fire, then I have not wasted my time, and
+     I can look you in the face and ask for your blessing upon my
+     determination to be a priest.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+When Mark had written this letter, and thus put into words what had
+hitherto been a more or less nebulous intention, and when in addition to
+that he had affixed a date to the carrying out of his intention, he felt
+comparatively at ease. He wasted no time in letting the Father Superior
+know that he was going to leave; in fact he told him after he had
+confessed to him before making his Communion on Easter Thursday.
+
+"I'm sorry to lose you, my dear boy," said Father Burrowes. "Very sorry.
+We are just going to open a priory in London, though that is a secret
+for the moment, please. I shall make the announcement at the Easter
+Chapter. Yes, some kind friends have given us a house in Soho.
+Splendidly central, which is important for our work. I had planned that
+you would be one of the brethren chosen to go there."
+
+"It's very kind of you, Reverend Father," said Mark. "But I'm sure that
+you understand my anxiety not to lose any time, now that I feel
+perfectly convinced that I want to be a priest."
+
+"I had my doubts about you when you first came to us. Let me see, it was
+nearly two years ago, wasn't it? How time flies! Yes, I had my doubts
+about you. But I was wrong. You seem to possess a real fixity of
+purpose. I remember that you told me then that you were not sure you
+wanted to be a monk. Rare candour! I could have professed a hundred
+monks, had I been willing to profess them within ten minutes of their
+first coming to see me."
+
+The Father Superior gave Mark his blessing and dismissed him. Nothing
+had been said about the dispute between the Prior and the Chaplain, and
+Mark began to wonder if Father Burrowes thought the results of it would
+tell more surely in favour of his own influence if he did not allude to
+it nor make any attempt to adjudicate upon the point at issue. Now that
+he was leaving Malford in little more than a week, Mark felt that he was
+completely relieved of the necessity of assisting at any conventual
+legislation, and he would gladly have absented himself from the Easter
+Chapter, which was held on the Saturday within the Octave, had not
+Father Burrowes told him that so long as he wore the habit of a novice
+of the Order he was expected to share in every side of the Community's
+life.
+
+"Brethren," said the Father Superior, "I have brought you back news that
+will gladden your hearts, news that will show I you how by the Grace of
+God your confidence in my judgment was not misplaced. Some kind friends
+have taken for us the long lease of a splendid house in Soho Square, so
+that we may have our priory in London, and resume the active work that
+was abandoned temporarily last Christmas. Not only have these kind
+friends taken for us this splendid house, but other kind friends have
+come forward to guarantee the working expenses up to �20 a week. God is
+indeed good to us, brethren, and when I remember that next Thursday is
+the Feast of our great Patron Saint, my heart is too full for words.
+During the last three or four months there have been unhappy differences
+of opinion in our beloved Order. Do let me entreat you to forget all
+these in gratitude for God's bountiful mercies. Do let us, with the
+arrival once more of our patronal festival, resolve to forget our doubts
+and our hesitations, our timidity and our rashness, our suspicions and
+our jealousies. I blame myself for much that has happened, because I
+have been far away from you, dear brethren, in moments of great
+spiritual distress. But this year I hope by God's mercy to be with you
+more. I hope that you will never again spend such an Easter as this. I
+have only one more announcement to make, which is that I have appointed
+Brother Dominic to be Prior of St. George's Priory, Soho Square, and
+Brother Chad and Brother Dunstan to work with him for God and our
+soldiers."
+
+In the morning, Brother Simon, whose duty it was nowadays to knock with
+the hammer upon the doors of the cells and rouse the brethren from sleep
+with the customary salutation, went running from the dormitory to the
+Prior's cell, his hair standing even more on end than it usually did at
+such an hour.
+
+"Reverend Brother, Reverend Brother," he cried. "I've knocked and
+knocked on Brother Anselm's door, and I've said 'The Lord be with you'
+nine times and shouted 'The Lord be with you' twice, but there's no
+answer, and at last I opened the door, though I know it's against the
+Rule to open the door of a brother's cell, but I thought he might be
+dead, and he isn't dead, but he isn't there. He isn't there, Reverend
+Brother, and he isn't anywhere. He's nowhere, Reverend Brother, and
+shall I go and ring the fire-alarm?"
+
+Brother George sternly bade Brother Simon be quiet; but when the
+Brethren sat in choir to sing Lauds and Prime, they saw that Brother
+Anselm's stall was empty, and those who had heard Brother Simon's
+clamour feared that something terrible had happened.
+
+After Mass the Community was summoned to the Chapter room to learn from
+the lips of the Father Superior that Brother Anselm had broken his vows
+and left the Order. Brother Dunstan, who wore round his neck the nib
+with which Brother Anselm signed his profession, burst into tears.
+Brother Dominic looked down his big nose to avoid the glances of his
+brethren. If Easter Sunday had been gloomy, Low Sunday was gloomier
+still, and as for the Feast of St. George nobody had the courage to
+think what that would be like with such a cloud hanging over the
+Community.
+
+Mark felt that he could not stay even until the patronal festival. If
+Brother George or Brother Birinus had broken his vows, he could have
+borne it more easily, for he had not witnessed their profession; fond he
+might be of the Prior, but he had worked for human souls under the
+orders of Brother Anselm. He went to Father Burrowes and begged to leave
+on Monday.
+
+"Brother Athanasius and Brother Chad are leaving tomorrow," said the
+Father Superior, "Yes, you may go."
+
+Brother Simon drove them to the station. Strange figures they seemed to
+each other in their lay clothes.
+
+"I've been meaning to go for a long time," said Brother Athanasius, who
+was now Percy Wade. "And it's my belief that Brother George and Brother
+Birinus won't stay long."
+
+"I hoped never to go," said Brother Chad, who was now Cecil Masters.
+
+"Then why are you going?" asked the late Brother Athanasius. "I never do
+anything I don't want to do."
+
+"I think I shall be more help to Brother Anselm than to soldiers in
+London," said the late Brother Chad.
+
+Mark beamed at him.
+
+"That's just like you, Brother. I am so glad you're going to do that."
+
+The train came in, and they all shook hands with Brother Simon, who had
+been cheerful throughout the drive, and even now found great difficulty
+in looking serious.
+
+"You seem very happy, Brother Simon," said Mark.
+
+"Oh, I am very happy, Brother Mark. I should say Mr. Mark. The Reverend
+Father has told me that I'm to be clothed as a novice on Wednesday. All
+last week when we sung, '_The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared
+unto Simon_,' I knew something wonderful was going to happen. That's
+what made me so anxious when Brother Anselm didn't answer my knock."
+
+The train left the station, and the three ex-novices settled themselves
+to face the world. They were all glad that Brother Simon at least was
+happy amid so much unhappiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE NEW BISHOP OF SILCHESTER
+
+
+The Rector of Wych thought that Mark's wisest plan if he wished to be
+ordained was to write and ask the Bishop of Silchester for an interview.
+
+"The Bishop of Silchester?" Mark exclaimed. "But he's the last bishop I
+should expect to help me."
+
+"On the contrary," said the Rector, "you have lived in his diocese for
+more than five years, and if you repair to another bishop, he will
+certainly wonder why you didn't go first to the Bishop of Silchester."
+
+"But I don't suppose that the Bishop of Silchester is likely to help
+me," Mark objected. "He wasn't so much enamoured of Rowley as all that,
+and I don't gather that he has much affection or admiration for
+Burrowes."
+
+"That's not the point; the point is that you have devoted yourself to
+the religious life, both informally and formally, in his diocese. You
+have shown that you possess some capacity for sticking to it, and I
+fancy that you will find the Bishop less unsympathetic than you expect."
+
+However, Mark was not given an opportunity to put the Bishop of
+Silchester's good-will to the test, for no sooner had he made up his
+mind to write to him than the news came that he was seriously ill, so
+seriously ill that he was not expected to live, which in fact turned out
+a true prognostication, for on the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the
+prelate died in his Castle of High Thorpe. He was succeeded by the
+Bishop of Warwick, much to Mark's pleasure and surprise, for the new
+Bishop was an old friend of Father Rowley and a High Churchman, one who
+might lend a kindly ear to Mark's ambition. Father Rowley had been in
+the United States for nearly two years, where he had been treated with
+much sympathy and where he had collected enough money to pay off the
+debt upon the new St. Agnes'. He had arrived home about a week before
+Mark left Malford, and in answer to Mark he wrote immediately to Dr.
+Oliphant, the new Bishop of Silchester, to enlist his interest. Early in
+June Mark received a cordial letter inviting him to visit the Bishop at
+High Thorpe.
+
+The promotion of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the see of Silchester was
+considered at the time to be an indication that the political party then
+in power was going mad in preparation for its destruction by the gods.
+The Press in commenting upon the appointment did not attempt to cast a
+slur upon the sanctity and spiritual fervour of the new Bishop, but it
+felt bound to observe that the presence of such a man on the episcopal
+bench was an indication that the party in power was oblivious of the
+existence of an enraged electorate already eager to hurl them out of
+office. At a time when thinking men and women were beginning to turn to
+the leaders of the National Church for a social policy, a government
+worn out by eight years of office that included a costly war was so
+little alive to the signs of the times as to select for promotion a
+prelate conspicuously identified with the obscurantist tactics of that
+small but noisy group in the Church of England which arrogated to itself
+the presumptuous claim to be the Catholic party. Dr. Oliphant's learning
+was indisputable; his liturgical knowledge was profound; his eloquence
+in the pulpit was not to be gainsaid; his life, granted his sacerdotal
+eccentricities, was a noble example to his fellow clergy. But had he
+shown those qualities of statesmanship, that capacity for moderation,
+which were so marked a feature of his predecessor's reign? Was he not
+identified with what might almost be called an unchristian agitation to
+prosecute the holy, wise, and scholarly Dean of Leicester for appearing
+to countenance an opinion that the Virgin Birth was not vital to the
+belief of a Christian? Had he not denounced the Reverend Albert Blundell
+for heresy, and thereby exhibited himself in active opposition to his
+late diocesan, the sagacious Bishop of Kidderminster, who had been
+compelled to express disapproval of his Suffragan's bigotry by
+appointing the Reverend Albert Blundell to be one of his examining
+chaplains?
+
+"We view with the gravest apprehension the appointment of Dr. Aylmer
+Oliphant to the historic see of Silchester," said one great journal.
+"Such reckless disregard, such contempt we might almost say, for the
+feelings of the English people demonstrates that the present government
+has ceased to enjoy the confidence of the electorate. We have for Dr.
+Oliphant personally nothing but the warmest admiration. We do not
+venture for one moment to impugn his sincerity. We do not hesitate to
+affirm most solemnly our disbelief that he is actuated by any but the
+highest motives in lending his name to persecutions that recall the
+spirit of the Star Chamber. But in these days when the rapid and
+relentless march of Scientific Knowledge is devastating the plain of
+Theological Speculation we owe it to our readers to observe that the
+appointment of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the Bishopric of Silchester must
+be regarded as an act of intellectual cowardice. Not merely is Dr.
+Oliphant a notorious extremist in religious matters, one who for the
+sake of outworn forms and ceremonies is inclined to keep alive the
+unhappy dissensions that tear asunder our National Church, but he is
+also what is called a Christian Socialist of the most advanced type, one
+who by his misreading of the Gospel spreads the unwholesome and perilous
+doctrine that all men are equal. This is not the time nor the place to
+break a controversial lance with Dr. Oliphant. We shall content
+ourselves with registering a solemn protest against the unparagoned
+cynicism of a Conservative government which thus gambles not merely with
+its own security, but what is far more unpardonable with the security of
+the Nation and the welfare of the State."
+
+The subject of this ponderous censure received Mark in the same room
+where two and a half years ago the late Bishop had decided that the
+Third Altar in St. Agnes' Church was an intolerable excrescence.
+Nowadays the room was less imposing, not more imposing indeed than the
+room of a scholarly priest who had been able to collect a few books and
+buy such pieces of ancient furniture as consorted with his severe taste.
+Dr. Oliphant himself, a tall spare man, seeming the taller and more
+spare in his worn purple cassock, with clean-shaven hawk's face and
+black bushy eyebrows most conspicuous on account of his grey hair, stood
+before the empty summer grate, his long lean neck out-thrust, his arms
+crossed behind his back, like a gigantic and emaciated shadow of
+Napoleon. Mark felt no embarrassment in genuflecting to salute him; the
+action was spontaneous and was not dictated by any ritualistic
+indulgence. Dr. Oliphant, as he might have guessed from the anger with
+which his appointment had been received, was in outward semblance all
+that a prelate should be.
+
+"Why do you want to be a priest?" the Bishop asked him abruptly.
+
+"To administer the Sacraments," Mark replied without hesitation.
+
+The Bishop's head and neck wagged up and down in grave approbation.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, as no doubt he has told you, wrote to me about you. And so
+you've been with the Order of St. George lately? Is it any good?"
+
+Mark was at a loss what to reply to this. His impulse was to say firmly
+and frankly that it was no good; but after not far short of two years at
+Malford it would be ungrateful and disloyal to criticize the Order,
+particularly to the Bishop of the diocese.
+
+"I don't think it is much good yet," Mark said. He felt that he simply
+could not praise the Order without qualification. "But I expect that
+when they've learnt how to combine the contemplative with the active
+side of their religious life they will be splendid. At least, I hope
+they will."
+
+"What's wrong at present?"
+
+"I don't know that anything's exactly wrong."
+
+Mark paused; but the Bishop was evidently waiting for him to continue,
+and feeling that this was perhaps the best way to present his own point
+of view about the life he had chosen for himself he plunged into an
+account of life at Malford.
+
+"Capital," said the Bishop when the narrative was done. "You have given
+me a very clear picture of the present state of the Order and
+incidentally a fairly clear picture of yourself. Well, I'm going to
+recommend you to Canon Havelock, the Principal of the Theological
+College here, and if he reports well of you and you can pass the
+Cambridge Preliminary Theological Examination, I will ordain you at
+Advent next year, or at any rate, if not in Advent, at Whitsuntide."
+
+"But isn't Silchester Theological College only for graduates?" Mark
+asked.
+
+"Yes, but I'm going to suggest that Canon Havelock stretches a point in
+your favour. I can, if you like, write to the Glastonbury people, but in
+that case you would be out of my diocese where you have spent so much of
+your time and where I have no doubt you will easily find a beneficed
+priest to give you a title. Moreover, in the case of a young man like
+yourself who has been brought up from infancy upon Catholic teaching, I
+think it is advisable to give you an opportunity of mixing with the
+moderate man who wishes to take Holy Orders. You can lose nothing by
+such an association, and it may well happen that you will gain a great
+deal. Silchester Theological College is eminently moderate. The
+lecturers are men of real learning, and the Principal is a man whom it
+would be impertinent for me to praise for his devout and Christian
+life."
+
+"I hardly know how to thank you, my lord," said Mark.
+
+"Do you not, my son?" said the Bishop with a smile. Then his head and
+neck wagged up and down. "Thank me by the life you lead as a priest."
+
+"I will try, my lord," Mark promised.
+
+"Of that I am sure. By the way, didn't you come across a priest at St.
+Agnes' Mission House called Mousley?"
+
+"Oh rather, I remember him well."
+
+"You'll be glad to hear that he has never relapsed since I sent him to
+Rowley. In fact only last week I had the satisfaction of recommending
+him to a friend of mine who had a living in his gift."
+
+Mark spent the three months before he went to Silchester at the Rectory
+where he worked hard at Latin and Greek and the history of the Church.
+At the end of August he entered Silchester Theological College.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SILCHESTER THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE
+
+
+The theological students of Silchester were housed in a red-brick alley
+of detached Georgian houses, both ends of which were closed to traffic
+by double gates of beautifully wrought iron. This alley known as Vicar's
+Walk had formerly been inhabited by the lay vicars of the Cathedral,
+whose music was now performed by minor canons.
+
+There were four little houses on either side of the broad pavement, the
+crevices in which were gay with small rock plants, so infrequent were
+the footsteps that passed over them. Each house consisted of four rooms
+and each room held one student. Vicar's Walk led directly into the
+Close, a large green space surrounded by the houses of dignitaries, from
+a quiet road lined with elms, which skirted the wall of the Deanery
+garden and after several twists and turns among the shadows of great
+Gothic walls found its way downhill into the narrow streets of the small
+city. One of the houses in the Close had been handed over to the
+Theological College, the Principal of which usually occupied a Canon's
+stall in the Cathedral. Here were the lecture-rooms, and here lived
+Canon Havelock the Principal, Mr. Drakeford the Vice-Principal, Mr.
+Brewis the Chaplain, and Mr. Moore and Mr. Waters the Lecturers.
+
+There did not seem to be many arduous rules. Probably the most ascetic
+was one that forbade gentlemen to smoke in the streets of Silchester.
+There was no early Mass except on Saints' days at eight; but gentlemen
+were expected, unless prevented by reasonable cause, to attend Matins in
+the Cathedral before breakfast and Evensong in the College Oratory at
+seven. A mutilated Compline was delivered at ten, after which gentlemen
+were requested to retire immediately to their rooms. Academic Dress was
+to be worn at lectures, and Mark wondered what costume would be designed
+for him. The lectures took place every morning between nine and one, and
+every afternoon between five and seven. The Principal lectured on
+Dogmatic Theology and Old Testament history; the Vice-Principal on the
+Old and New Testament set books; the Chaplain on Christian worship and
+Church history; Mr. Moore on Pastoralia and Old Testament Theology; and
+Mr. Waters on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
+
+As against the prevailing Gothic of the mighty Cathedral Vicar's Walk
+stood out with a simple and fragrant charm of its own, so against the
+prevailing Gothic of Mark's religious experience life at the Theological
+College remained in his memory as an unvexed interlude during which
+flesh and spirit never sought to trouble each other. Perhaps if Mark had
+not been educated at Haverton House, had not experienced conversion, had
+not spent those years at Chatsea and Malford, but like his fellow
+students had gone decorously from public school to University and still
+more decorously from University to Theological College, he might with
+his temperament have wondered if this red-brick alley closed to traffic
+at either end by beautifully wrought iron gates was the best place to
+prepare a man for the professional service of Jesus Christ.
+
+Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where to the sound
+of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon the strife between
+Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient Grace, operating Grace,
+co-operating Grace and the _donum perseverantiae_ all seemed to depend
+for their importance so much more upon a good memory than upon the
+inscrutable favours of Almighty God. Even the Confessions of St.
+Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of Africa upon
+the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched upon. Here in this
+tranquil room St. Augustine lived in quotations from his controversial
+works, or in discussions whether he had not wrongly translated [Greek]
+in the Epistle to the Romans by _in quo omnes
+peccaverunt_ instead of like the Pelagians by _propter quod omnes
+peccaverunt_. The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian
+Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in Mark's brain;
+but they only resounded at all, because he knew that without being able
+to display some ability to convey the impression that he understood the
+Thirty-Nine Articles he should never be ordained. Mark wondered what
+Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken in adultery had
+been brought into the lecture-room by the beadle. Yet such a supposition
+was really beside the point, he thought penitently. After all, human
+beings would soon be degraded to wax-works if they could be lectured
+upon individually in this tranquil and sunny room to the sound of rooks
+cawing in the elms beyond the Deanery garden.
+
+Mark made no intimate friendships among his fellows. Perhaps the
+moderation of their views chilled him into an exceptional reserve, or
+perhaps they were an unusually dull company that year. Of the thirty-one
+students, eighteen were from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the
+thirty-first from Durham. Even he was looked at with a good deal of
+suspicion. As for Mark, nothing less than God's prevenient grace could
+explain his presence at Silchester. Naturally, inasmuch as they were
+going to be clergymen, the greatest charity, the sweetest toleration was
+shown to Mark's unfortunate lack of advantages; but he was never unaware
+that intercourse with him involved his companions in an effort, a
+distinct, a would-be Christlike effort to make the best of him. It was
+the same kind of effort they would soon be making when as Deacons they
+sought for the sick, poor, and impotent people of the Parish. Mark might
+have expected to find among them one or two of whom it might be
+prophesied that they would go far. But he was unlucky. All the brilliant
+young candidates for Ordination must have betaken themselves to
+Cuddesdon or Wells or Lichfield that year.
+
+Of the eighteen graduates from Oxford, half took their religion as a hot
+bath, the other half as a cold one. Nine resembled the pale young
+curates of domestic legend, nine the muscular Christian that is for some
+reason attributed to the example of Charles Kingsley. Of the twelve
+graduates from Cambridge, six treated religion as a cricket match played
+before the man in the street with God as umpire, six regarded it as a
+respectable livelihood for young men with normal brains, social
+connexions, and weak digestions. The young man from Durham looked upon
+religion as a more than respectable livelihood for one who had plenty of
+brains, an excellent digestion, and no social connexions whatever.
+
+Mark wondered if the Bishop of Silchester's design in placing him amid
+such surroundings was to cure him for ever of moderation. As was his
+custom when he was puzzled, he wrote to the Rector.
+
+     The Theological College,
+
+     Silchester.
+
+     All Souls, '03.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     My first impressions have not undergone much change. The young men
+     are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold is the gold of
+     Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles a mild phosphorescence, a
+     dim luminousness as of a bedside match-tray in the dark, in their
+     eyes is when they hear of somebody's what they call conspicuous
+     moderation. I suppose every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his
+     sponge-bag or an archbishop's crosier among his golf-clubs. But in
+     this lot I simply cannot perceive even an embryonic archdeacon. I
+     rather expected when I came here that I should be up against men of
+     brains and culture. I was looking forward to being trampled on by
+     ruthless logicians. I hoped that latitudinarian opinions were going
+     to make my flesh creep and my hair stand on end. But nothing of the
+     kind. I've always got rather angry when I've read caricatures of
+     curates in books with jokes about goloshes and bath-buns. Yet
+     honestly, half my fellows might easily serve as models to any
+     literary cheapjack of the moment. I'm willing to admit that
+     probably most of them will develop under the pressure of life, but
+     a few are bound to remain what they are. I know we get some
+     eccentrics and hotheads and a few sensual knaves among the Catholic
+     clergy, but we do not get these an�mic creatures. I feel that
+     before I came here I knew nothing about the Church of England. I've
+     been thrown all my life with people who had rich ideas and violent
+     beliefs and passionate sympathies and deplorable hatreds, so that
+     when I come into contact with what I am bound to accept as the
+     typical English parson in the making I am really appalled.
+
+     I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told me to come
+     here. Did he really think that the spectacle of moderation in the
+     moulding was good for me? Did he fancy that I was a young zealot
+     who required putting in his place? Or did he more subtly realize
+     from the account I gave him of Malford that I was in danger of
+     becoming moderate, even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even
+     stone-cold? Did he grasp that I must owe something to party as well
+     as mankind, if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind?
+     But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to his
+     lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal eye,
+     than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after all, he merely
+     saw in me a young man who had missed the advantages of Oxford,
+     etc., and wished out of regard for my future to provide me with the
+     best substitute.
+
+     Anyway, please don't think that I live in a constant state of
+     criticism with a correspondingly dangerous increase of self-esteem.
+     I really am working hard. I sometimes wonder if the preparation of
+     a "good" theological college is the best preparation for the
+     priesthood. But so long as bishops demand the knowledge they do, it
+     is obvious that this form of preparation will continue. There again
+     though, I daresay if I imagined myself an inspired pianist I should
+     grumble at the amount of scales I was set to practice. I'm not,
+     once I've written down or talked out some of my folly, so very
+     foolish at bottom.
+
+     Beyond a slight inclination to flirt with the opinions of most of
+     the great heresiarchs in turn, but only with each one until the
+     next comes along, I'm not having any intellectual adventures. One
+     of the excitements I had imagined beforehand was wrestling with
+     Doubt. But I have no wrestles. Shall I always be spared?
+
+     Your ever affectionate,
+
+     Mark.
+
+Gradually, as the months went by, either because the students became
+more mellow in such surroundings or because he himself was achieving a
+wider tolerance, Mark lost much of his capacity for criticism and
+learned to recognize in his fellows a simple goodness and sincerity of
+purpose that almost frightened him when he thought of that great world
+outside, in the confusion and complexity of which they had pledged
+themselves to lead souls up to God. He felt how much they missed by not
+relying rather upon the Sacraments than upon personal holiness and the
+upright conduct of the individual. They were obsessed with the need of
+setting a good example and of being able from the pulpit to direct the
+wandering lamb to the Good Shepherd. Mark scarcely ever argued about his
+point of view, because he was sure that perception of what the
+Sacraments could do for human nature must be given by the grace of God,
+and that the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not avail
+in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had not dawned in a
+swift and comprehensive inspiration of his inner life. Sometimes indeed
+Mark would defend himself from attack, as when it was suggested that his
+reliance upon the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by
+Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion was prolonged
+by mechanical aids to worship.
+
+"But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to your idolatry of
+the outward form," he would maintain.
+
+"What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a congregation of
+a good sermon?" they protested.
+
+"I don't claim that a preacher might not bring the whole of his
+congregation to the feet of God," Mark allowed. "But I must have less
+faith in human nature than you have, for I cannot believe that any
+preacher could exercise a permanent effect without the Sacraments. You
+all know the person who says that the sound of an organ gives him holy
+thoughts, makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes? I've no doubt
+that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind of
+sensation Sunday after Sunday. But sooner or later they will be
+worshipping the outward form--that is to say the words that issue from
+the preacher's mouth and produce those internal moral rumblings in the
+pit of the soul which other listeners get from the diapason. Have your
+organs, have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but don't put
+them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament. The value of that is
+absolute, and I refuse to consider It from the point of view of
+pragmatic philosophy."
+
+All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation upon
+their argument; what they desired to avoid was the substitution of the
+Blessed Sacrament for the Person of the Divine Saviour.
+
+"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with the whole of my
+intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament _is_
+our Divine Saviour. I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament
+can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the
+Person of the Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present
+fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar
+I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him. I shall know that
+I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of
+civilization. All are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains
+divided into classes. You may rent the best pew from which to see and
+hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your
+Communion."
+
+Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too Silchester exerted a
+mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what
+he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that
+June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College
+cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to
+be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.
+
+The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve; ancient clocks
+sounded the hour with strikes rusty from long service of time; rooks and
+white fantail-pigeons spoke with the slow voice of creatures that are
+lazily content with the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy
+morrow. In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers,
+themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed slowly across
+the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with
+the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of
+leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were
+daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the
+grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's tail of
+Japanese quince.
+
+Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in
+Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was worth while except at
+the end of living to have one's effigy in stone upon the walls of the
+Cathedral, and to rest there for ever with viewless eyes and cold
+prayerful hands, oneself in harmony at last with all that had gone
+before.
+
+"Yet this peace is the peace of God," he told himself. "And I who am
+privileged for a little time to share in it must carry away with me
+enough to make a treasure of peace in my own heart, so that I can give
+from that treasure to those who have never known peace."
+
+     _The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your
+     hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son
+     Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the
+     Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with
+     you always._
+
+When Mark heard these words sound from the altar far away in the golden
+glooms of the Cathedral, it seemed to him that the building bowed like a
+mighty couchant beast and fell asleep in the security of God's presence.
+
+After Mark had been a year at the Theological College he received a
+letter from the Bishop:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     Sept. 21, '04.
+
+     Dear Lidderdale,
+
+     I have heard from Canon Havelock that he considers you are ready to
+     be ordained at Advent, having satisfactorily passed the Cambridge
+     Preliminary Theological Examination. If therefore you succeed in
+     passing my examination early in November, I am willing to ordain
+     you on December 18. It will be necessary of course for you to
+     obtain a title, and I have just heard from Mr. Shuter, the Vicar of
+     St. Luke's, Galton, that he is anxious to make arrangements for a
+     curate. You had better make an appointment, and if I hear
+     favourably from him I will licence you for his church. It has
+     always been the rule in this diocese that non-graduate candidates
+     for Holy Orders should spend at least two years over their
+     theological studies, but I am not disposed to enforce this rule in
+     your case.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Aylmer Silton.
+
+This expression of fatherly interest made Mark anxious to show his
+appreciation of it, and whatever he had thought of St. Luke's, Galton,
+or of its incumbent he would have done his best to secure the title
+merely to please the Bishop. Moreover, his money was coming to an end,
+and another year at the Theological College would have compelled him to
+borrow from Mr. Ogilvie, a step which he was most anxious to avoid. He
+found that Galton, which he remembered from the days when he had sent
+Cyril Pomeroy there to be met by Dorward, was a small county town of
+some eight or nine thousand inhabitants and that St. Luke's was a new
+church which had originally been a chapel of ease to the parish church,
+but which had acquired with the growth of a poor population on the
+outskirts of the town an independent parochial status of its own. The
+Reverend Arnold Shuter, who was the first vicar, was at first glance
+just a nervous bearded man, though Mark soon discovered that he
+possessed a great deal of spiritual force. He was a widower and lived in
+the care of a housekeeper who regarded religion as the curse of good
+cooking. Latterly he had suffered from acute neurasthenia, and three or
+four of his wealthier parishioners--they were only relatively
+wealthy--had clubbed together to guarantee the stipend of a curate. Mark
+was to live at the Vicarage, a detached villa, with pointed windows and
+a front door like a lychgate, which gave the impression of having been
+built with what material was left over from building the church.
+
+"You may think that there is not much to do in Galton," said Mr. Shuter
+when he and Mark were sitting in his study after a round of the parish.
+
+"I hope I didn't suggest that," Mark said quickly.
+
+The Vicar tugged nervously at his beard and blinked at his prospective
+curate from pale blue eyes.
+
+"You seem so full of life and energy," he went on, half to himself, as
+though he were wondering if the company of this tall, bright-eyed,
+hatchet-faced young man might not prove too bracing for his worn-out
+nerves.
+
+"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed. "After
+dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I hadn't grown rather too
+much into a type of that sedate and sleepy city."
+
+"But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We have the
+hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried to run a mission
+for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you know. And then there's Oaktown."
+
+"Oaktown?" Mark echoed.
+
+"Yes. A queer collection of people who have settled on a derelict farm
+that was bought up and sold in small plots by a land-speculator. They'll
+give plenty of scope for your activity. By the way, I hope you're not
+too extreme. We have to go very slowly here. I manage an early Eucharist
+every Sunday and Thursday, and of course on Saints' days; but the
+attendance is not good. We have vestments during the week, but not at
+the mid-day Celebration."
+
+Mark had not intended to attach himself to what he considered a too
+indefinite Catholicism; but inasmuch as the Bishop had found him this
+job he made up his mind to give to it at any rate his deacon's year and
+his first year as a priest.
+
+"I've been brought up in the vanguard of the Movement," he admitted.
+"But you can rely on me, sir, to be loyal to your point of view, even if
+I disagreed with it. I can't pretend to believe much in moderation; but
+I should always be your curate before anything else, and I hope very
+much indeed that you will offer me the title."
+
+"You'll find me dull company," Mr. Shuter sighed. "My health has gone
+all to pieces this last year."
+
+"I shall have a good deal of reading to do for my priest's examination,"
+Mark reminded him. "I shall try not to bother you."
+
+The result of Mark's visit to Galton was that amongst the various
+testimonials and papers he forwarded two months later to the Bishop's
+Registrar was the following:
+
+     To the Right Reverend Aylmer, Lord Bishop of Silchester.
+
+     I, Arnold Shuter, Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
+     Southampton, and your Lordship's Diocese of Silchester, do hereby
+     nominate Mark Lidderdale, to perform the office of Assistant Curate
+     in my Church of St. Luke aforesaid; and do promise to allow him the
+     yearly stipend of �120 to be paid by equal quarterly instalments;
+     And I do hereby state to your Lordship that the said Mark
+     Lidderdale intends to reside in the said Parish in my Vicarage; and
+     that the said Mark Lidderdale does not intend to serve any other
+     Parish as Incumbent or Curate.
+
+     Witness my hand this fourteenth day of November; in the year of our
+     Lord, 1904.
+
+     Arnold Shuter,
+
+     St. Luke's Vicarage,
+
+     Galton,
+
+     Hants.
+
+
+     I, Arnold Shuter, Incumbent of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
+     Southampton, bon� fide undertake to pay Mark Lidderdale, of the
+     Rectory, Wych-on-the-Wold, in the County of Oxford, the annual sum
+     of one hundred and twenty pounds as a stipend for his services as
+     Curate, and I, Mark Lidderdale, bon� fide intend to receive the
+     whole of the said stipend. And each of us, Arnold Shuter and Mark
+     Lidderdale, declare that no abatement is to be made out of the said
+     stipend in respect of rent or consideration for the use of the
+     Glebe House; and that I, Arnold Shuter, undertake to pay the same,
+     and I, Mark Lidderdale, intend to receive the same, without any
+     deduction or abatement whatsoever.
+
+     Arnold Shuter,
+
+     Mark Lidderdale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+EMBER DAYS
+
+
+Mark, having been notified that he had been successful in passing the
+Bishop's examination for Deacons, was summoned to High Thorpe on
+Thursday. He travelled down with the other candidates from Silchester on
+an iron-grey afternoon that threatened snow from the louring North, and
+in the atmosphere of High Thorpe under the rule of Dr. Oliphant he found
+more of the spirit of preparation than he would have been likely to find
+in any other diocese at this date. So many of the preliminaries to
+Ordination had consisted of filling up forms, signing documents, and
+answering the questions of the Examining Chaplain that Mark, when he was
+now verily on the threshold of his new life, reproached himself with
+having allowed incidental details and petty arrangements to make him for
+a while oblivious of the overwhelming fact of his having been accepted
+for the service of God. Luckily at High Thorpe he was granted a day to
+confront his soul before being harassed again on Ember Saturday with
+further legal formalities and signing of documents. He was able to spend
+the whole of Ember Friday in prayer and meditation, in beseeching God to
+grant him grace to serve Him worthily, strength to fulfil his vows, and
+that great _donum perseveranti�_ to endure faithful unto death.
+
+"Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," Mark remembered in the
+damasked twilight of the Bishop's Chapel, where he was kneeling. "Let me
+keep those words in my heart. Not everyone," he repeated aloud. Then
+perversely as always come volatile and impertinent thoughts when the
+mind is concentrated on lofty aspirations Mark began to wonder if he had
+quoted the text correctly. He began to be almost sure that he had not,
+and on that to torment his brain in trying to recall what was the exact
+wording of the text he desired to impress upon his heart. "Not everyone
+that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," he repeated once more aloud.
+
+At that moment the tall figure of the Bishop passed by.
+
+"Do you want me, my son?" he asked kindly.
+
+"I should like to make my confession, reverend father in God," said
+Mark.
+
+The Bishop beckoned him into the little sacristy, and putting on rochet
+and purple stole he sat down to hear his penitent.
+
+Mark had few sins of which to accuse himself since he last went to his
+duties a month ago. However, he did have upon his conscience what he
+felt was a breach of the Third Commandment in that he had allowed
+himself to obscure the mighty fact of his approaching ordination by
+attaching too much importance to and fussing too much about the
+preliminary formalities.
+
+The Bishop did not seem to think that Mark's soul was in grave peril on
+that account, and he took the opportunity to warn Mark against an
+over-scrupulousness that might lead him in his confidence to allow sin
+to enter into his soul by some unguarded portal which he supposed firmly
+and for ever secure.
+
+"That is always the danger of a temperament like yours?" he mused. "By
+all means keep your eyes on the high ground ahead of you; but do not
+forget that the more intently you look up, the more liable you are to
+slip on some unnoticed slippery stone in your path. If you abandoned
+yourself to the formalities that are a necessary preliminary to
+Ordination, you did wisely. Our Blessed Lord usually gave practical
+advice, and some of His miracles like the turning of water into wine at
+Cana were reproofs to carelessness in matters of detail. It was only
+when people worshipped utility unduly that He went to the other extreme
+as in His rebuke to Judas over the cruse of ointment."
+
+The Bishop raised his head and gave Mark absolution. When they came out
+of the sacristy he invited him to come up to his library and have a
+talk.
+
+"I'm glad that you are going to Galton," he said, wagging his long neck
+over a crumpet. "I think you'll find your experience in such a parish
+extraordinarily useful at the beginning of your career. So many young
+men have an idea that the only way to serve God is to go immediately to
+a slum. You'll be much more discouraged at Galton than you can imagine.
+You'll learn there more of the difficulties of a clergyman's life in a
+year than you could learn in London in a lifetime. Rowley, as no doubt
+you've heard, has just accepted a slum parish in Shoreditch. Well, he
+wrote to me the other day and suggested that you should go to him. But I
+dissented. You'll have an opportunity at Galton to rely upon yourself.
+You'll begin in the ruck. You'll be one of many who struggle year in
+year out with an ordinary parish. There won't be any paragraphs about
+St. Luke's in the Church papers. There won't be any enthusiastic
+pilgrims. There'll be nothing but the thought of our Blessed Lord to
+keep you struggling on, only that, only our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ."
+
+The Bishop's head wagged slowly to and fro in the silence that succeeded
+his words, and Mark pondering them in that silence felt no longer that
+he was saying "Lord, Lord," but that he had been called to follow and
+that he was ready without hesitation to follow Him whithersoever He
+should lead.
+
+The quiet Ember Friday came to an end, and on the Saturday there were
+more formalities, of which Mark dreaded most the taking of the oath
+before the Registrar. He had managed with the help of subtle High Church
+divines to persuade himself that he could swear he assented to the
+Thirty-nine Articles without perjury. Nevertheless he wished that he was
+not bound to take that oath, and he was glad that the sense in which the
+Thirty-nine Articles were to be accepted was left to the discretion of
+him who took the oath. Of one thing Mark was positive. He was assuredly
+not assenting to those Thirty-nine Articles that their compilers
+intended when they framed them. However, when it came to it, Mark
+affirmed:
+
+"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy Order of Deacons,
+do solemnly make the following declaration:--I assent to the Thirty-nine
+Articles of Religion, and to the Book of Common Prayer, and the
+ordering of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. I believe the doctrine of the
+Church of England, as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the Word of
+God; and in Public Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments I will
+use the Form in the said Book prescribed, and none other, except so far
+as shall be ordered by lawful authority.
+
+"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy Order of Deacons,
+do swear that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty
+King Edward, his heirs and successors according to law.
+
+"So help me God."
+
+"But the strange thing is," Mark said to one of his fellow candidates,
+"nobody asks us to take the oath of allegiance to God."
+
+"We do that when we're baptized," said the other, a serious young man
+who feared that Mark was being flippant.
+
+"Personally," Mark concluded, "I think the solemn profession of a monk
+speaks more directly to the soul."
+
+And this was the feeling that Mark had throughout the Ordination of the
+Deacons notwithstanding that the Bishop of Silchester in cope and mitre
+was an awe-inspiring figure in his own Chapel. But when Mark heard him
+say:
+
+     _Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the
+     Church of God_,
+
+he was caught up to the Seventh Heaven and prayed that, when a year
+hence he should be kneeling thus to hear those words uttered to him and
+to feel upon his head those hands imposed, he should receive the Holy
+Ghost more worthily than lately he had received authority to execute the
+office of a Deacon in the Church of God.
+
+Suddenly at the back of the chapel Mark caught sight of Miriam, who must
+have travelled down from Oxfordshire last night to be present at his
+Ordination. His mind went back to that Whit-Sunday in Meade Cantorum
+nearly ten years ago. Miriam's plume of grey hair was no longer visible,
+for all her hair was grey nowadays; but her face had scarcely altered,
+and she sat there at this moment with that same expression of austere
+sweetness which had been shed like a benison upon Mark's dreary boyhood.
+How dear of Miriam to grace his Ordination, and if only Esther too could
+have been with him! He knelt down to thank God humbly for His mercies,
+and of those mercies not least for the Ogilvies' influence upon his
+life.
+
+Mark could not find Miriam when they came out from the chapel. She must
+have hurried away to catch some slow Sunday train that would get her
+back to Wych-on-the-Wold to-night. She could not have known that he had
+seen her, and when he arrived at the Rectory to-morrow as glossy as a
+beetle in his new clerical attire, Miriam would listen to his account of
+the Ordination, and only when he had finished would she murmur how she
+had been present all the time.
+
+And now there was still the oath of canonical obedience to take before
+lunch; but luckily that was short. Mark was hungry, since unlike most of
+the candidates he had not eaten an enormous breakfast that morning.
+
+Snow was falling outside when the young priests and deacons in their new
+frock coats sat down to lunch; and when they put on their sleek silk
+hats and hurried away to catch the afternoon train back to Silchester,
+it was still falling.
+
+"Even nature is putting on a surplice in our honour," Mark laughed to
+one of his companions, who not feeling quite sure whether Mark was being
+poetical or profane, decided that he was being flippant, and looked
+suitably grieved.
+
+It was dusk of that short winter day when Mark reached Silchester, and
+wandered back in a dream toward Vicar's Walk. Usually on Sunday evenings
+the streets of the city pattered with numerous footsteps; but to-night
+the snow deadened every sound, and the peace of God had gone out from
+the Cathedral to shed itself upon the city.
+
+"It will be Christmas Day in a week," Mark thought, listening to the
+Sabbath bells muffled by the soft snow-laden air. For the first time it
+occurred to him that he should probably have to preach next Sunday
+evening.
+
+     _And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us._
+
+That should be his text, Mark decided; and, passing from the snowy
+streets, he sat thinking in the golden glooms of the Cathedral about his
+sermon.
+
+
+EXPLICIT PR�LUDIUM
+
+
+
+
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton Mackenzie.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton MacKenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Altar Steps
+
+Author: Compton MacKenzie
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2005 [EBook #14739]
+[Last updated: April 3, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR STEPS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven desJardins and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>THE ALTAR STEPS</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>COMPTON MACKENZIE</h2>
+
+<div class="center"><span><i>Author of "Carnival," "Youth's Encounter,"
+"Poor Relations," etc.</i></span></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="center"><span>NEW YORK</span><br />
+<span>GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY</span><br />
+<span>1922</span></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="center"><span><i>The only portrait in this book is
+of one who is now dead</i></span></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="center"><span>THIS BOOK, THE PRELUDE TO</span><br />
+<span><i>The Parson's Progress</i></span><br />
+<br />
+<span>I INSCRIBE</span><br />
+<span>WITH DEEPEST AFFECTION</span><br />
+<span>TO MY MOTHER</span><br />
+<br />
+<span><i>S. Valentine's Day, 1922.</i></span></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS" />CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I</a></td><td align='left'>The Bishop's Shadow</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II</a></td><td align='left'>The Lima Street Mission</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III</a></td><td align='left'>Religious Education</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV</a></td><td align='left'>Husband and Wife</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V</a></td><td align='left'>Palm Sunday</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI</a></td><td align='left'>Nancepean</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII</a></td><td align='left'>Life at Nancepean</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII</a></td><td align='left'>The Wreck</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX</a></td><td align='left'>Slowbridge</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X</a></td><td align='left'>Whit-Sunday</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI</a></td><td align='left'>Meade Cantorum</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII</a></td><td align='left'>The Pomeroy Affair</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII</a></td><td align='left'>Wych-on-the-Wold</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV</a></td><td align='left'>St. Mark's Day</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV</a></td><td align='left'>The Scholarship</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">XVI</a></td><td align='left'>Chatsea</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII</a></td><td align='left'>The Drunken Priest</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII</a></td><td align='left'>Silchester College Mission</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">XIX</a></td><td align='left'>The Altar for the Dead</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">XX</a></td><td align='left'>Father Rowley</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">XXI</a></td><td align='left'>Points of View</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">XXII</a></td><td align='left'>Sister Esther Magdalene</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">XXIII</a></td><td align='left'>Malford Abbey</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">XXIV</a></td><td align='left'>The Order of St. George</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">XXV</a></td><td align='left'>Suscipe Me, Domine</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">XXVI</a></td><td align='left'>Addition</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">XXVII</a></td><td align='left'>Multiplication</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">XXVIII</a></td><td align='left'> Division</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">XXIX</a></td><td align='left'>Subtraction</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">XXX</a></td><td align='left'>The New Bishop of Silchester</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">XXXI</a></td><td align='left'>Silchester Theological College</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">XXXII</a></td><td align='left'>Ember Days</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_ALTAR_STEPS" id="THE_ALTAR_STEPS" />THE ALTAR STEPS</h2>
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I" />CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BISHOP'S SHADOW</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or was it the end of the
+world? The quick and the dead .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. skeletons .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. thousands
+and thousands of skeletons. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>"Guardian Angel!" he shrieked.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you awake, Mark?" he heard his mother whisper
+outside.</p>
+
+<p>He answered with a cry of exultation and relief.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mother," he sighed, clinging to the soft sleeves of
+her dressing-gown. "I thought it was being the end of the
+world."</p>
+
+<p>"What made you think that, my precious?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"The room looks quite safe now, doesn't it?" Mark
+theorized.</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite safe, darling."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I could have the gas lighted when you really
+<i>must</i> go?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just a little bit for once."</p>
+
+<p>"Only a little bit?" he echoed doubtfully. A very small
+illumination was in its eerie effect almost worse than absolute
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't healthy to sleep with a great deal of light," said
+his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, how much could I have? Just for once not a
+crocus, but a tulip. And of course not a violet."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark seized upon this splendid excuse to detain his mother
+for awhile.</p>
+
+<p>"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. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, well, my sweetheart, you must tell Mother in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps my Guardian Angel was beside me all the time,
+because, look! here's a feather."</p>
+
+<p>He eyed his mother, hoping against hope that she would
+pretend to accept his suggestion; but alas, she was severely
+unimaginative.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, darling, don't talk foolishly. You know perfectly
+that is only a feather which has worked its way out of your pillow."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't stay to explain 'why' now; but if you try to think
+you'll understand why."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I forgot to tell you that. I
+forgot to tell you because when it was you I was so excited
+that I forgot."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Will he wear a hat like the Bishop who came last Easter?
+Why is he coming?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"And perhaps she won't go to sleep before I go to sleep,"
+he hoped.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;ugh!&mdash;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
+.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. there was always the evening hymn to fall back upon.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Now the day is over,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Night is drawing nigh,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Shadows of the evening</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Steal across the sky.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Now the darkness gathers,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Stars begin to peep,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Birds and beasts and flowers</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Soon will be asleep</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But rats did not sleep; they were at their worst and wake-fullest
+in the night time.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Jesu, give the weary</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Calm and sweet repose,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>With thy tenderest blessing</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>May mine eyelids close</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Grant to little children</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Visions bright of Thee;</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Guard the sailors tossing</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>On the deep blue sea.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Mark envied the sailors.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Comfort every sufferer</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Watching late in pain</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This was a most encouraging couplet. Mark did not
+suppose that in the event of a great emergency&mdash;he thanked
+Mrs. Ewing for that long and descriptive word&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Those who plan some evil</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>From their sin restrain.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes, but prayers were not always answered immediately.
+For instance he was still awake. He hurried on to murmur
+aloud in fervour:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Through the long night watches</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>May Thine Angels spread</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Their white wings above me,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Watching round my bed.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A delicious idea, and even more delicious was the picture
+contained in the next verse.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>When the morning wakens,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Then may I arise</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Pure, and fresh, and sinless</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>In Thy Holy Eyes.</i><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Glory to the Father,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Glory to the Son,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>And to thee, blest Spirit,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Whilst all ages run. Amen.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning his mother put out Sunday clothes for him.</p>
+
+<p>"The Bishop is coming to-day," she explained.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I want you to look nice."</p>
+
+<p>"I can play with my soldiers?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, you can play with your soldiers."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't bang, I'll only have them marching."</p>
+
+<p>"No, dearest, don't bang. And when the Bishop comes
+to lunch I want you not to ask questions. Will you promise
+me that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't bishops like to be asked questions?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, darling. They don't."</p>
+
+<p>Mark registered this episcopal distaste in his memory
+beside other facts such as that cats object to having their tails
+pulled.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II" />CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LIMA STREET MISSION</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"If St. Simon's is an outpost of the Movement, Lidderdale
+must be one of the vedettes," he used to declare with a grin.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I quite see your point," Thurston would agree.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Of which I have heard great things, great things, Mr.
+Thurston," he boomed condescendingly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;er&mdash;they were quite&mdash;er&mdash;cleaned up."</p>
+
+<p>"In body or soul?" Thurston inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;very loath indeed&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>trafficked for strange
+webs with Eastern merchants</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;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 &pound;200
+a year off his own net income in doing so.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Steady, steady, dear man," said Astill. "You'll ruin your
+case by such ill-considered exaggeration."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III" />CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>RELIGIOUS EDUCATION</h3>
+
+
+<p>When Mark was grown up and looked back at his early
+childhood&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"You leave that kebbidge-stalk be, Elfie!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ethel! Jew hear your ma calling you, you naughty girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"Stanlee! will you give over fishing in that puddle, this
+sminute. I'll give you such a slepping, you see if I don't."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"All mothers think their sons are the cleverest in the
+world."</p>
+
+<p>"But, James, he <i>is</i> an exceptionally clever little boy. Most
+observant, with a splendid memory and plenty of
+imagination."</p>
+
+<p>"Too much imagination. His nights are one long circus."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"He has nothing to fear from the Devil, if he behaves
+himself. Haven't I made that clear?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lidderdale sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>This was one of many arguments between husband and
+wife about the religious education of their son.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"But can God cry?" asked Mark incredulously.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, darling. God can do everything."</p>
+
+<p>"But fancy crying! If I could do everything I shouldn't
+cry."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lidderdale perceived that her picture of the wise and
+compassionate Eye would require elaboration.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But you don't often feel like that?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not often," he admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some
+poor dog or cat being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to
+cry?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me,
+and I want to kick the people who is doing it."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"But Our Lord <i>is</i> God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.</p>
+
+<p>Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more
+this eternal puzzle.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one
+God?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day
+in Kensington Gardens?"</p>
+
+<p>"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I
+want you to think about the Holy Trinity."</p>
+
+<p>"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he
+protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great
+mystery."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she
+had declared.</p>
+
+<p>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
+C&aelig;sar 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.</p>
+
+<p>"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."</p>
+
+<p>It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and
+dead bodies huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Nunc Dimittis</i> before it flew away.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Our Field</i>, and if the country was the tiniest part as wonderful
+as that, well .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV" />CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>HUSBAND AND WIFE</h3>
+
+
+<p>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
+<i>The Jackdaw of Rheims</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;the point of view,
+if I may use so crude an expression, the point of view of&mdash;er&mdash;expediency.
+Is it wise?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not a wise man, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I repeat,
+Mr. Lidderdale, is it right to fling all this away for the sake
+of a few&mdash;you will not misunderstand me&mdash;if I call them a
+few excrescences?"</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop helped himself to the cauliflower and paused
+to give his rhetoric time to work.</p>
+
+<p>"What you regard, my lord, as excrescences I regard as
+fundamentals of our Holy Religion."</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come, Mr. Lidderdale," the Bishop protested. "I
+do not think that you expect to convince me that a ceremony
+like the&mdash;er&mdash;Asperges is a fundamental of Christianity."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;er&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Inquest," the Missioner supplied with a fierce smile.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop encouraged by the first sign of humour he had
+observed in the bigoted priest hastened to smile back.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;I will not say
+excrescences since you object to the word&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"That has nothing .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." Lidderdale interrupted
+angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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. <i>Is</i> not that enough?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Three Hours I <i>would</i> give up. It's a modern
+invention of the Jesuits. The Adoration of the Cross goes
+back. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>Gloria in Excelsis</i>.
+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."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop waved his umbrella, which looked much like
+a pastoral staff, and lightly mounted the step of his cab.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Rorke's Drift," said Mark to himself, trying to fancy
+that he heard in the distance a Zulu <i>impi</i> 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
+<i>Battles of the British Army</i>. 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 <i>chevaux de frise</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Now whatever do you want down here?" Dora demanded
+ungraciously.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever?" said one.</p>
+
+<p>"Fancy! A lump of sugar! Goodness gracious!"</p>
+
+<p>"What a sweet tooth!" commented the first.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you have Mark to sit with you?"</p>
+
+<p>And his father had answered doubtfully:</p>
+
+<p>"Mark? Oh yes, he can come. But I hope he'll keep
+quiet, because I shall be rather busy."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Does it worry you, darling, that I'm not entered?" his
+mother had asked with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Happy now?" she had asked.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Inferno</i> illustrated
+by Gustave Dor&eacute;, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't mean you to dress yourself and come downstairs,"
+his father was saying ungraciously.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You can guess, can't you?" said the husband.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You're going to give way to the Bishop?" the wife asked
+gently.</p>
+
+<p>"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. <i>Before the cock crow twice, thou
+shalt deny me thrice.</i> A coward and a traitor."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither, James&mdash;at any rate to me."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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! <i>Woman, what have I to do
+with thee?</i> Our Blessed Lord could speak thus even to His
+Blessed Mother. But I! <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.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not blaspheme," the priest commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You're becoming hysterical."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, mother, don't cry. You are bad, you are bad,"
+he told his father. "You are wicked and bad to make
+her cry."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been in the room all this time?" his father
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V" />CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>PALM SUNDAY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"We can't go there if we're in the country."</p>
+
+<p>Mark stared at her.</p>
+
+<p>"But really go in the country?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, darling, really go."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother," and immediately he checked his enthusiasm
+with a sceptical "when?"</p>
+
+<p>"Next Monday."</p>
+
+<p>"And shall I see cows?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And donkeys? And horses? And pigs? And goats?"</p>
+
+<p>To every question she nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother, I will be good," he promised of his own
+accord. "And can I take my grenadiers?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can take everything you have, darling."</p>
+
+<p>"Will Dora come?" He did not inquire about his father.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Just you and me?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is this Sunday called?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence until a well-informed little girl
+breathed through her nose that it was called Passion Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right. And next Sunday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Palm Sunday," all the children shouted with alacrity,
+for they looked forward to it almost more than to any
+Sunday in the year.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something that isn't true," sang out a too ready boy from
+the back of the church.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>And all the children baa'd in unison:</p>
+
+<p>"A parable is a story with a hidden meaning."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>A concordance of opinion cried "God."</p>
+
+<p>"No. Now think. The father surely was God. And
+now once more, who was the little boy?"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no," said the Missioner. "Surely the little boy
+is myself. And what is the baby?"</p>
+
+<p>Without hesitation the boys and girls all together shouted
+"Jesus Christ."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. The baby is our Holy Catholic Faith. For
+which we are ready if necessary to&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer.</p>
+
+<p>"To do what?"</p>
+
+<p>"To be baptized," one boy hazarded.</p>
+
+<p>"To die," said the Missioner reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>"To die," the class complacently echoed.</p>
+
+<p>"And now what is the perambulator?"</p>
+
+<p>This was a puzzle, but at last somebody tried:</p>
+
+<p>"The Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The new church," two children answered simultaneously.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"A high-priest."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jesus Christ," said the class, convinced that this time
+it must be He.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>We are but little
+children weak</i>."</p>
+
+<p>They all sang more loudly than usual to express a vague
+and troubled sympathy:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>There's not a child so small and weak</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>But has his little cross to take,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>His little work of love and praise</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>That he may do for Jesus' sake.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And they bleated a most canorous <i>Amen</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning was Monday.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, Mark, be a good boy and obedient to your
+mother," said his father on the platform at Paddington.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is that man?" Mark whispered when the guard
+locked them in.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI" />CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>NANCEPEAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, there are seven daffodils growing wild under
+my window."</p>
+
+<p>"My darling, you frightened me so. I thought you'd
+hurt yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>His mother smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"No, not dreadfully frightened."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, do you think I might dress myself and go in the
+garden?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't disturb grandfather."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mother, of course not."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"He's very nice, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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:</p>
+
+<p>"But if I want to touch it, I will."</p>
+
+<p>"Will 'ee? I say you won't do no such a thing then."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Lev go," the boy commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll make 'ee lev go."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, make me."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my gosh, look behind 'ee, Mr. Timbury. The bullocks
+is coming into the churchyard."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Timbury loosed his hold on the two boys as he turned,
+and Cass Dale catching hold of Mark's hand shouted:</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, run, or he'll have us again."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>The old man was leaning over the churchyard wall, shaking
+his stick and abusing them with violent words.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"So's mine," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Is he? Where to?"</p>
+
+<p>"London."</p>
+
+<p>"A minister, is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, he's a priest."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"My father doesn't kiss the Pope's toe," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"My grandfather is the priest here," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't no priest to Nancepean. Only Passon
+Trehawke."</p>
+
+<p>"My grandfather's name is Trehawke."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it, by gosh? Well, why for do 'ee call him a priest?
+He isn't a priest."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he is."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't care if they didn't," Mark affirmed.</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't care if you had to preach to a parcel of
+empty chairs and benches?" exclaimed Cass.</p>
+
+<p>"St. Francis preached to the trees," said Mark. "And
+St. Anthony preached to the fishes."</p>
+
+<p>"They must have been a couple of loonies."</p>
+
+<p>"They were saints," Mark insisted.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"What from?" Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, from Hell of course. What else would you be
+saved from?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"That wasn't a wild beast. That was an old badger."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, isn't a badger a wild beast?"</p>
+
+<p>Cass Dale laughed scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>"My gosh, if that isn't a good one! I suppose you'd say
+a fox was a wild beast?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I shouldn't," said Mark, repressing an inclination to
+cry, so much mortified was he by Cass Dale's contemptuous
+tone.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to be going home," he said. "But I don't think
+I remember the way."</p>
+
+<p>"To Passon Trehawke's?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Mark acquired the habit and agreed with Cass that the
+blossoms were delicious.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Mark reverently.</p>
+
+<p>"We belong to get limpets every Good Friday. Are you
+coming with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Won't I be in church?" Mark inquired with memories
+of Good Friday in Lima Street.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But you'd die," Mark objected. "People must drink."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Darling boy, you mustn't excite yourself too much," she
+warned him. "Do try to eat a little more and talk a little
+less."</p>
+
+<p>"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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest father, why don't you ask Mark or me to pass
+you what you want?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;Mark, do tell grandfather how
+much you're enjoying yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Mark gulped several times, and finally managed to mutter
+a confirmation of his mother's statement.</p>
+
+<p>"And he's already made friends with Cass Dale."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII" />CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>LIFE AT NANCEPEAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 encyclop&aelig;dia. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Never," vowed the Parson. "Never while I live will I
+lay that blackguard in my churchyard."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &pound;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The bodies of fifteen seamen from the brigantine <i>Ann
+Pink</i> wrecked in Church Cove, on the afternoon of Dec.
+19, 1757.</p>
+
+<p>The body of a child washed into Pendhu Cove from the
+high seas during the night of Jan. 24, 1760.</p>
+
+<p>The body of an unknown sailor, the breast tattooed with
+a heart and the initials M.&nbsp;V. found in Hanover Cove on the
+morning of March 3, 1801.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"But how am I to go back all the way from Rome to
+Brittany?" St. Tugdual asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I have a white horse waiting for you," the angel replied.</p>
+
+<p>And sure enough there was a beautiful white horse with
+wings, which carried St. Tugdual back to Brittany in a few
+minutes.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it mean when a woman becomes barren?"
+Mark inquired of his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"It means when she does not have any more children,
+darling," said Mrs. Lidderdale, who did not believe in telling
+lies about anything.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII" />CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE WRECK</h3>
+
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother," he shouted, while he was dressing, "the Captain
+can sleep in my bed, if he isn't drowned, can't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Darling, do you really want to go down to the sea on
+such a night?"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must ask grandfather first before you make
+arrangements for his house."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, dearest, I certainly can. I think you'd better shut
+your windows. It's blowing everything about in your room
+most uncomfortably."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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' .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."</p>
+
+<p>"How's the tide?" asked the Vicar.</p>
+
+<p>"About an hour of the ebb," said Ernie Hockin. "And
+the moon's been up this hour and more."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo!" yelled Ernie Hockin. "Here's the bridge."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll have to get round by the road," shouted the Vicar.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope the churchyard wall is all right," said the Vicar.
+"I never remember such a night since I came to
+Nancepean."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the Vicar shouted:</p>
+
+<p>"I can see a poor fellow hanging on to a ledge of rock.
+Bring a rope! Bring a rope!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody must go down with the rope and get a slip
+knot under his arms," the Vicar shouted.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't do it alone," he shouted. "He's got a hold like
+a limpet."</p>
+
+<p>Nobody seemed anxious to suppose that the addition of
+another rescuer would be any more successful.</p>
+
+<p>"If there was two of us," Eddowes went on, "we might
+do something."</p>
+
+<p>The people on the cliff shook their heads doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't anybody coming down along with me to have a
+try?" the coastguard demanded at the top of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Happy Return</i> not one ever
+came to port.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Birds of Great Britain</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"I must write and ask your father what we ought to
+do." .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the end, and as Mrs. Lidderdale supposed in answer
+to her prayers, the solution was provided unexpectedly in
+the following letter:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Haverton House,</p>
+
+<p>Elmhurst Road,</p>
+
+<p>Slowbridge.</p>
+
+<p>November 29th.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Grace,</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Your affectionate brother-in-law,</p>
+
+<p>Henry Lidderdale.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Slowbridge?" he asked in a gloomy voice.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark groaned.</p>
+
+<p>"It's so difficult to thank people. It makes me feel silly."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, darling, mother wants you to. So sit down like a
+dear boy and get it done."</p>
+
+<p>"I think my nib is crossed."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it? You'll find another in my desk."</p>
+
+<p>"But, mother, yours are so thick."</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Mark, don't make any more excuses. Don't you
+want to do everything you can to help me just now?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Vicarage,</p>
+
+<p>Nancepean,</p>
+
+<p>South Cornwall.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Uncle Henry,</p>
+
+<p>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,</p>
+
+<p>I remain,</p>
+
+<p>Your loving nephew,</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Cass. "I wouldn't come up from Church Cove
+myself not for anything."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, all right," said Mark, turning away in resentment
+at his friend's desertion.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, sister glow-worm," he said aloud in imitation
+of St. Francis. "Good-night, brother samphire."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your
+good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX" />CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>SLOWBRIDGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"And what is Mark going to be?" Uncle Henry inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"A lighthouse-keeper."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder if you will play with soldiers when Aunt Helen
+dies?" she pressed.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Mark quickly, "I shall work at my lessons
+when you die."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X" />CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>WHIT-SUNDAY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 &pound;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not hankering after anything," Mark replied sullenly.</p>
+
+<p>"But you're looking forward to Mr. Hitchcock's office?"
+his uncle proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At supper Mr. Palmer asked suddenly if the headmaster
+wanted Mark to go into the Confirmation Class this term.</p>
+
+<p>"No thanks," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Henry raised his eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>"I fancy that is for me to decide."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you suggesting that you should never be confirmed?"
+his uncle required.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not going to take anything to-morrow morning," said
+Mark angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want me to thrash you?" Uncle Henry
+demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Palmer's eyes glittered with the zeal of muscular
+Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"That poor worm!" Mark scoffed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mark, he's dead," Aunt Helen gasped. "You mustn't
+speak of him like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Get out of the room and go to bed," Uncle Henry
+shouted.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><i>Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of
+this world cometh and hath nothing in me.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your
+good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.</i></p>
+
+<p>"I will be a priest," Mark vowed to himself.</p>
+
+<p><i>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></p>
+
+<p>"I will, I will," he vowed.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>Mark prayed that with such words he might when he was
+a priest bring consolation.</p>
+
+<p><i>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;</i></p>
+
+<p>The red chasuble of the priest glowed with Pentecostal
+light.</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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,
+<i>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</i>, that
+sublime proclamation spoke the fullness of his aspiring
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark told her, and he should have liked to ask what hers
+was, but he felt too shy.</p>
+
+<p>"You're going to stay and have lunch with us, I hope?"
+asked the Vicar.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he's going to stay," said the old lady.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Lidderdale," the Vicar was saying meditatively, "Lidderdale.
+I wonder if you were a relative of the famous
+Lidderdale of St. Wilfred's?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you hope to be a priest yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes I do rather," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Splendid! Capital!" cried the Vicar, his kindly blue eye
+beaming with approval of Mark's intention.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Mark was talking to him as though he had
+known him for years.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Ogilvie&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>Then chanting the <i>Dies Irae</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ogilvie knew my father."</p>
+
+<p>"That has nothing to do with the case," said Uncle Henry.</p>
+
+<p>"I think it has."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But do you really mean that I'm not to go and see Mr.
+Ogilvie?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"He said he would write to you."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I've asked Mr. Ogilvie to prepare me for confirmation,"
+said Mark, who was determined to goad his uncle into losing
+his temper.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you deserve to be thrashed."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Your religion!" broke in Mr. Lidderdale, scornful both of
+the pronoun and the substantive.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Helen half rose in her chair upon an impulse to
+protect her brother against Mark's violence.</p>
+
+<p>"And you can't cure me with Gregory Powder," he said.
+"Nor with Senna nor with Licorice nor even with Cascara."</p>
+
+<p>"Your behaviour, my boy, is revolting," said Mr. Lidderdale.
+"A young Mohawk would not talk to his guardians
+as you are talking to me."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI" />CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>MEADE CANTORUM</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You were never so ugly," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Ogilvie," Mark expostulated.</p>
+
+<p>"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. <i>Mine
+eyes have seen thy salvation, O Lord.</i> 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? <i>Faith, Hope, and Love. But the greatest of these
+is Love.</i> 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>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.</i> 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 <i>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.</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Henry found it hard to dispose of words like these
+when he deplored his nephew's collapse into ritualism.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Leave the room," was Mr. Lidderdale's reply. "I won't
+stand this kind of talk from a boy of your age."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Magnificat</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Taking a quick walk by myself," she called out to him
+as they passed.</p>
+
+<p>No, she was certainly not dreary. But what was she?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 <i>Angelus</i>?
+Damn, I knelt on a thistle."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't the <i>Angelus</i>," said Mark quietly. "It's the bell
+on that cow."</p>
+
+<p>But Mr. Dorward had finished his devotion before he
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>"I was half way through before you told me. You should
+have spoken sooner."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I spoke as soon as I could."</p>
+
+<p>"Very cunning of Satan," said Dorward meditatively.
+"Induced a cow to simulate the <i>Angelus</i>, 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I shall bicycle back to Slowbridge and bicycle over
+to Mass to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Ridiculous. Stay the night. Didn't Ogilvie invite you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can boil eggs and that sort of thing," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"For whom?" Mark exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Mark supposed that Mr. Dorward must be joking, and his
+expression must have told as much to the priest, who murmured:</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing to laugh at. Nothing to laugh at."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly easy. Perfectly easy. I'll give you a book
+when we get back."</p>
+
+<p>Mark bicycled home that afternoon with a tall thin volume
+called <i>Ritual Notes</i>, 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 <i>Lavabo</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ogilvie isn't saying Mass this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mark went on ringing. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang! All the holy Virgins were waving
+their palms. Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang! All the blessed Doctors
+and Confessors were twanging their harps to the clanging.
+Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang! All the holy Saints and Martyrs were
+tossing their haloes in the air as schoolboys toss their caps.
+Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang! Angels, Archangels, and Principalities
+with faces that shone like brass and with forms that
+quivered like flames thronged the noise. Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang!
+Virtues, Powers, and Dominations bade the morning
+stars sing to the ringing. Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang! The ringing
+reached up to the green-winged Thrones who sustain the
+seat of the Most High. Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang! The azure
+Cherubs heard the bells within their contemplation: the
+scarlet Seraphs felt them within their love. Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang&mdash;clang. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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: <i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Oxford," Mr. Dorward pronounced. "And then Glastonbury."</p>
+
+<p>"Glastonbury?"</p>
+
+<p>"Glastonbury Theological College."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I've always been Oxford," he admitted.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Dorward had gone, Mark asked Mr. Ogilvie
+what he thought about Oxford.</p>
+
+<p>"If you can afford to go there, my dear boy, of course you
+ought to go."</p>
+
+<p>"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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I think five hundred
+pounds. Would that be enough?"</p>
+
+<p>"With care and economy," said Mr. Ogilvie. "And you
+might win a scholarship."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm leaving school at the end of this year."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII" />CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE POMEROY AFFAIR</h3>
+
+
+<p>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 spending a certain amount of money on him. Once more
+Mark opened his mouth to repay his debt by offering Uncle
+Henry Eternal Life. But Uncle Henry fancied himself
+already in possession of Eternal Life. He definitely labelled
+himself Evangelical. And again Mark prepared one of his
+unanswerable questions.</p>
+
+<p>"Mark," said Mr. Lidderdale. "If you can't keep from
+yawning you'd better get off to bed. Don't forget school
+begins to-morrow, and you must make the most of your
+last term."</p>
+
+<p>Mark abandoned for ever the task of converting Uncle
+Henry, and pondered his chance of doing something with
+Aunt Helen. There instead of exsiccation he was confronted
+by a dreadful humidity, an infertile ooze that seemed
+almost less susceptible to cultivation than the other.</p>
+
+<p>"And I really don't owe <i>her</i> anything," he thought. "Besides,
+it isn't that I want to save people from damnation. I
+want people to be happy. And it isn't quite that even. I
+want them to understand how happy I am. I want people
+to feel fond of their pillows when they turn over to go to
+sleep, because next morning is going to be what? Well,
+sort of exciting."</p>
+
+<p>Mark suddenly imagined how splendid it would be to
+give some of his happiness to Esther Ogilvie; but a moment
+later he decided that it would be rather cheek, and he abandoned
+the idea of converting Esther Ogilvie. He fell back
+on wishing again that Mr. Spaull had not died; in him he
+really would have had an ideal subject.</p>
+
+<p>In the end Mark fixed upon a boy of his own age, one of
+the many sons of a Papuan missionary called Pomeroy who
+was glad to have found in Mr. Lidderdale a cheap and evangelical
+schoolmaster. Cyril Pomeroy was a blushful, girlish
+youth, clever at the routine of school work, but in other
+ways so much undeveloped as to give an impression of
+stupidity. The notion of pointing out to him the beauty and
+utility of the Catholic religion would probably never have
+occurred to Mark if the boy himself had not approached
+him with a direct complaint of the dreariness of home life.
+Mark had never had any intimate friends at Haverton
+House; there was something in its atmosphere that was hostile
+to intimacy. Cyril Pomeroy appealed to that idea of
+romantic protection which is the common appendage of
+adolescence, and is the cause of half the extravagant affection
+at which maturity is wont to laugh. In the company
+of Cyril, Mark felt ineffably old than which upon the
+threshold of sixteen there is no sensation more grateful; and
+while the intercourse flattered his own sense of superiority
+he did feel that he had much to offer his friend. Mark
+regarded Cyril's case as curable if the right treatment were
+followed, and every evening after school during the veiled
+summer of a fine October he paced the Slowbridge streets
+with his willing proselyte, debating the gravest issues of religious
+practice, the subtlest varieties of theological opinion.
+He also lent Cyril suitable books, and finally he demanded
+from him as a double tribute to piety and friendship that he
+should prove his metal by going to Confession. Cyril, who
+was incapable of refusing whatever Mark demanded, bicycled
+timorously behind him to Meade Cantorum one Saturday
+afternoon, where he gulped out the table of his sins to Mr.
+Ogilvie, whom Mark had fetched from the Vicarage with
+the urgency of one who fetches a midwife. Nor was he at
+all abashed when Mr. Ogilvie was angry for not having been
+told that Cyril's father would have disapproved of his son's
+confession. He argued that the priest was applying social
+standards to religious principles, and in the end he enjoyed
+the triumph of hearing Mr. Ogilvie admit that perhaps he
+was right.</p>
+
+<p>"I know I'm right. Come on, Cyril. You'd better get
+back home now. Oh, and I say, Mr. Ogilvie, can I borrow
+for Cyril some of the books you lent me?"</p>
+
+<p>The priest was amused that Mark did not ask him to lend
+the books to his friend, but to himself. However, when
+he found that the neophyte seemed to flourish under Mark's
+assiduous priming, and that the fundamental weakness of
+his character was likely to be strengthened by what, though
+it was at present nothing more than an interest in religion,
+might later on develop into a profound conviction of the
+truths of Christianity, Ogilvie overlooked his scruples about
+deceiving parents and encouraged the boy as much as he
+could.</p>
+
+<p>"But I hope your manipulation of the plastic Cyril isn't
+going to turn <i>you</i> into too much of a ritualist," he said to
+Mark. "It's splendid of course that you should have an
+opportunity so young of proving your ability to get round
+people in the right way. But let it be the right way, old man.
+At the beginning you were full of the happiness, the secret
+of which you burnt to impart to others. That happiness was
+the revelation of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as He dwells
+in all Christian souls. I am sure that the eloquent exposition
+I lately overheard of the propriety of fiddle-backed chasubles
+and the impropriety of Gothic ones doesn't mean that you
+are in any real danger of supposing chasubles to be anything
+more important relatively than, say, the uniform of a soldier
+compared with his valour and obedience and selflessness.
+Now don't overwhelm me for a minute or two. I haven't
+finished what I want to say. I wasn't speaking sarcastically
+when I said that, and I wasn't criticizing you. But you are
+not Cyril. By God's grace you have been kept from the
+temptations of the flesh. Yes, I know the subject is distasteful
+to you. But you are old enough to understand that your
+fastidiousness, if it isn't to be priggish, must be safeguarded
+by your humility. I didn't mean to sandwich a sermon to
+you between my remarks on Cyril, but your disdainful upper
+lip compelled that testimony. Let us leave you and your
+virtues alone. Cyril is weak. He's the weak pink type that
+may fall to women or drink or anything in fact where an
+opportunity is given him of being influenced by a stronger
+character than his own. At the moment he's being influenced
+by you to go to Confession, and say his rosary, and hear
+Mass, and enjoy all the other treats that our holy religion
+gives us. In addition to that he's enjoying them like the
+proverbial stolen fruit. You were very severe with me when
+I demurred at hearing his confession without authority from
+his father; but I don't like stolen fruit, and I'm not sure even
+now if I was right in yielding on that point. I shouldn't
+have yielded if I hadn't felt that Cyril might be hurt in the
+future by my scruples. Now look here, Mark, you've got to
+see that I don't regret my surrender. If that youth doesn't
+get from religion what I hope and pray he will get .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. but
+let that point alone. My scruples are my own affair. Your
+convictions are your own affair. But Cyril is our joint affair.
+He's your convert, but he's my penitent; and Mark, don't
+overdecorate your building until you're sure the foundations
+are well and truly laid."</p>
+
+<p>Mark was never given an opportunity of proving the excellence
+of his methods by the excellence of Cyril's life,
+because on the morning after this conversation, which took
+place one wet Sunday evening in Advent he was sent for by
+his uncle, who demanded to know the meaning of This.
+This was a letter from the Reverend Eustace Pomeroy.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Limes,</p>
+
+<p>38, Cranborne Road,</p>
+
+<p>Slowbridge.</p>
+
+<p>December 9.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Mr. Lidderdale,</p>
+
+<p>My son Cyril will not attend school for the rest of this
+term. Yesterday evening, being confined to the house by
+fever, I went up to his bedroom to verify a reference in a
+book I had recently lent him to assist his divinity studies
+under you. When I took down the book from the shelf I
+noticed several books hidden away behind, and my curiosity
+being aroused I examined them, in case they should be works
+of an unpleasant nature. To my horror and disgust, I found
+that they were all works of an extremely Popish character,
+most of them belonging to a clergyman in this neighbourhood
+called Ogilvie, whose illegal practices have for several
+years been a scandal to this diocese. These I am sending
+to the Bishop that he may see with his own eyes the kind of
+propaganda that is going on. Two of the books, inscribed
+Mark Lidderdale, are evidently the property of your nephew
+to whom I suppose my son is indebted for this wholesale
+corruption. On questioning my son I found him already so
+sunk in the mire of the pernicious doctrines he has imbibed
+that he actually defied his own father. I thrashed him
+severely in spite of my fever, and he is now under lock and
+key in his bedroom where he will remain until he sails with
+me to Sydney next week whither I am summoned to the
+conference of Australasian missionaries. During the voyage
+I shall wrestle with the demon that has entered into my son
+and endeavour to persuade him that Jesus only is necessary
+for salvation. And when I have done so, I shall leave him
+in Australia to earn his own living remote from the scene of
+his corruption. In the circumstances I assume that you will
+deduct a proportion of his school fees for this term. I know
+that you will be as much horrified and disgusted as I was by
+your nephew's conduct, and I trust that you will be able to
+wrestle with him in the Lord and prove to him that Jesus
+only is necessary to salvation.</p>
+
+<p>Yours very truly,</p>
+
+<p>Eustace Pomeroy.</p>
+
+<p>P.S. I suggest that instead of &pound;6 6s. 0d. I should pay
+&pound;5 5s. 0d. for this term, plus, of course, the usual
+extras.</p></div>
+
+<p>The pulse in Mr. Lidderdale's temple had never throbbed
+so remarkably as while Mark was reading this letter.</p>
+
+<p>"A fine thing," he ranted, "if this story gets about in
+Slowbridge. A fine reward for all my kindness if you ruin
+my school. As for this man Ogilvie, I'll sue him for damages.
+Don't look at me with that expression of bestial
+defiance. Do you hear? What prevents my thrashing you
+as you deserve? What prevents me, I say?"</p>
+
+<p>But Mark was not paying any attention to his uncle's fury;
+he was thinking about the unfortunate martyr under lock and
+key in The Limes, Cranborne Road, Slowbridge. He was
+wondering what would be the effect of this violent removal
+to the Antipodes and how that fundamental weakness of
+character would fare if Cyril were left to himself at his age.</p>
+
+<p>"I think Mr. Pomeroy is a ruffian," said Mark. "Don't
+you, Uncle Henry? If he writes to the Bishop about Mr.
+Ogilvie, I shall write to the Bishop about him. I hate Protestants.
+I hate them."</p>
+
+<p>"There's your father to the life. You'd like to burn them,
+wouldn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I would," Mark declared.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd like to burn me, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not you in particular."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you listen to him, Helen," he shouted to his sister.
+"Come here and listen to him. Listen to the boy we took
+in and educated and clothed and fed, listen to him saying
+he'd like to burn his uncle. Into Mr. Hitchcock's office you
+go at once. No more education if this is what it leads to.
+Read that letter, Helen, look at that book, Helen. <i>Catholic
+Prayers for Church of England People by the Reverend
+A.H. Stanton.</i> Look at this book, Helen. <i>The Catholic
+Religion by Vernon Staley.</i> No wonder you hate Protestants,
+you ungrateful boy. No wonder you're longing to
+burn your uncle and aunt. It'll be in the <i>Slowbridge Herald</i>
+to-morrow. Headlines! Ruin! They'll think I'm a Jesuit
+in disguise. I ought to have got a very handsome sum of
+money for the good-will. Go back to your class-room, and
+if you have a spark of affection in your nature, don't brag
+about this to the other boys."</p>
+
+<p>Mark, pondering all the morning the best thing to do for
+Cyril, remembered that a boy called Hacking lived at The
+Laurels, 36, Cranborne Road. He did not like Hacking, but
+wishing to utilize his back garden for the purpose of communicating
+with the prisoner he made himself agreeable to
+him in the interval between first and second school.</p>
+
+<p>"Hullo, Hacking," he began. "I say, do you want a cricket
+bat? I shan't be here next summer, so you may as well have
+mine."</p>
+
+<p>Hacking looked at Mark suspicious of some hidden catch
+that would make him appear a fool.</p>
+
+<p>"No, really I'm not ragging," said Mark. "I'll bring it
+round to you after dinner. I'll be at your place about a
+quarter to two. Wait for me, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Hacking puzzled his brains to account for this generous
+whim, and at last decided that Mark must be "gone" on his
+sister Edith. He supposed that he ought to warn Edith to
+be about when Mark called; if the bat was not forthcoming
+he could easily prevent a meeting. The bat however turned
+out to be much better than he expected, and Hacking was
+on the point of presenting Cressida to Troilus when Troilus
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"That's your garden at the back, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Hacking admitted that it was.</p>
+
+<p>"It looks rather decent."</p>
+
+<p>Hacking allowed modestly that it wasn't bad.</p>
+
+<p>"My father's rather dead nuts on gardening. So's my
+kiddy sister," he added.</p>
+
+<p>"I vote we go out there," Mark suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I give a yell to my kiddy sister?" asked Pandarus.</p>
+
+<p>"Good lord, no," Mark exclaimed. "Don't the Pomeroys
+live next door to you? Look here, Hacking, I want to speak
+to Cyril Pomeroy."</p>
+
+<p>"He was absent this morning."</p>
+
+<p>Mark considered Hacking as a possible adjutant to the
+enterprise he was plotting. That he finally decided to admit
+Hacking to his confidence was due less to the favourable
+result of the scrutiny than to the fact that unless he confided
+in Hacking he would find it difficult to communicate with
+Cyril and impossible to manage his escape. Mark aimed as
+high as this. His first impulse had been to approach the
+Vicar of Meade Cantorum, but on second thoughts he had
+rejected him in favour of Mr. Dorward, who was not so
+likely to suffer from respect for paternal authority.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Hacking, will you swear not to say a word
+about what I'm going to tell you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said Hacking, who scenting a scandal would
+have promised much more than this to obtain the details of it.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you swear by?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, anything," Hacking offered, without the least hesitation.
+"I don't mind what it is."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what do you consider the most sacred thing in the
+world?"</p>
+
+<p>If Hacking had known himself, he would have said food;
+not knowing himself, he suggested the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you know that if you swear something on the
+Bible and break your oath you can be put in prison?" Mark
+demanded sternly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, of course."</p>
+
+<p>The oath was administered, and Hacking waited goggle-eyed
+for the revelation.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?" he asked when Mark stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's enough, isn't it? And now you've got to help
+him to escape."</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't swear I'd do that," argued Hacking.</p>
+
+<p>"All right then. Don't. I thought you'd enjoy it."</p>
+
+<p>"We should get into a row. There'd be an awful shine."</p>
+
+<p>"Who's to know it's us? I've got a friend in the country.
+And I shall telegraph to him and ask if he'll hide Pomeroy."</p>
+
+<p>Mark was not sufficiently sure of Hacking's discretion or
+loyalty to mention Dorward's name. After all this business
+wasn't just a rag.</p>
+
+<p>"The first thing is for you to go out in the garden and
+attract Pomeroy's attention. He's locked in his bedroom."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't know which is his bedroom," Hacking
+objected.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you don't suppose the whole family are locked in
+their bedrooms, do you?" asked Mark scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>"But how do you know his bedroom is on this side of the
+house?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't," said Mark. "That's what I want to find out.
+If it's in the front of the house, I shan't want your help,
+especially as you're so funky."</p>
+
+<p>Hacking went out into the garden, and presently he came
+back with the news that Pomeroy was waiting outside to
+talk to Mark over the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"Waiting outside?" Mark repeated. "What do you mean,
+waiting outside? How can he be waiting outside when he's
+locked in his bedroom?"</p>
+
+<p>"But he's not," said Hacking.</p>
+
+<p>Sure enough, when Mark went out he found Cyril astride
+the party wall between the two gardens waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't let your father drag you off to Australia like
+this," Mark argued. "You'll go all to pieces there. You'll
+lose your faith, and take to drink, and&mdash;you must refuse to
+go."</p>
+
+<p>Cyril smiled weakly and explained to Mark that when once
+his father had made up his mind to do something it was
+impossible to stop him.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon Mark explained his scheme.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll get an answer from Dorward to-night and you must
+escape to-morrow afternoon as soon as it's dark. Have you
+got a rope ladder?"</p>
+
+<p>Cyril smiled more feebly than ever.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I suppose you haven't. Then what you must do is
+tear up your sheets and let yourself down into the garden.
+Hacking will whistle three times if all's clear, and then you
+must climb over into his garden and run as hard as you
+can to the corner of the road where I'll be waiting for you
+in a cab. I'll go up to London with you and see you off from
+Waterloo, which is the station for Green Lanes where Father
+Dorward lives. You take a ticket to Galton, and I expect
+he'll meet you, or if he doesn't, it's only a seven mile walk.
+I don't know the way, but you can ask when you get to
+Galton. Only if you could find your way without asking it
+would be better, because if you're pursued and you're seen
+asking the way you'll be caught more easily. Now I must
+rush off and borrow some money from Mr. Ogilvie. No,
+perhaps it would rouse suspicions if I were absent from
+afternoon school. My uncle would be sure to guess, and&mdash;though
+I don't think he would&mdash;he might try to lock me up
+in my room. But I say," Mark suddenly exclaimed in indignation,
+"how on earth did you manage to come and talk to
+me out here?"</p>
+
+<p>Cyril explained that he had only been locked in his bedroom
+last night when his father was so angry. He had freedom
+to move about in the house and garden, and, he added
+to Mark's annoyance, there would be no need for him to
+use rope ladders or sheets to escape. If Mark would tell
+him what time to be at the corner of the road and would wait
+for him a little while in case his father saw him going out
+and prevented him, he would easily be able to escape.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I needn't have told Hacking," said Mark. "However,
+now I have told him, he must do something, or else
+he's sure to let out what he knows. I wish I knew where
+to get the money for the fare."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got a pound in my money box."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you?" said Mark, a little mortified, but at the same
+time relieved that he could keep Mr. Ogilvie from being
+involved. "Well, that ought to be enough. I've got enough
+to send a telegram to Dorward. As soon as I get his answer
+I'll send you word by Hacking. Now don't hang about in
+the garden all the afternoon or your people will begin to
+think something's up. If you could, it would be a good
+thing for you to be heard praying and groaning in your
+room."</p>
+
+<p>Cyril smiled his feeble smile, and Mark felt inclined to
+abandon him to his fate; but he decided on reflection that
+the importance of vindicating the claims of the Church to a
+persecuted son was more important than the foolishness and
+the feebleness of the son.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want me to do anything more?" Hacking asked.</p>
+
+<p>Mark suggested that Hacking's name and address should
+be given for Mr. Dorward's answer, but this Hacking refused.</p>
+
+<p>"If a telegram came to our house, everybody would want
+to read it. Why can't it be sent to you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark sighed for his fellow-conspirator's stupidity. To this
+useless clod he had presented a valuable bat.</p>
+
+<p>"All right," he said impatiently, "you needn't do anything
+more except tell Pomeroy what time he's to be at the corner
+of the road to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll do that, Lidderdale."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think you jolly well would," Mark exclaimed
+scornfully.</p>
+
+<p>Mark spent a long time over the telegram to Dorward; in
+the end he decided that it would be safer to assume that the
+priest would shelter and hide Cyril rather than take the risk
+of getting an answer. The final draft was as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Dorward Green Lanes Medworth Hants</p>
+
+<p>Am sending persecuted Catholic boy by 7.30 from Waterloo
+Tuesday please send conveyance Mark Lidderdale.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mark only had eightpence, and this message would cost
+tenpence. He took out the <i>am</i>, changed <i>by 7.30 from
+Waterloo</i> to <i>arriving 9.35</i> and <i>send conveyance</i> to <i>meet</i>. If
+he had only borrowed Cyril's sovereign, he could have been
+more explicit. However, he flattered himself that he was
+getting full value for his eightpence. He then worked out
+the cost of Cyril's escape.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">s.</td><td align="right">d.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Third Class single to Paddington</td><td align="right">1</td><td align="right">6&nbsp; </td></tr>
+<tr><td>Third Class return to Paddington (for self)</td><td align="right">2</td><td align="right">6&nbsp; </td></tr>
+<tr><td>Third Class single Waterloo to Galton</td><td align="right">3</td><td align="right">11&nbsp; </td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cab from Paddington to Waterloo</td><td align="right">3</td><td align="right">6?</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cab from Waterloo to Paddington (for self)</td><td align="right">3</td><td align="right">6?</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sandwiches for Cyril and Self</td><td align="right">1</td><td align="right">0&nbsp; </td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ginger-beer for Cyril and Self (4 bottles)</td><td align="right">8</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">Total</td><td align="right"
+style="border-top:1px solid black;">16</td><td align="right"
+style="border-top:1px solid black;">7&nbsp; </td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The cab of course might cost more, and he must take back
+the eightpence out of it for himself. But Cyril would have
+at least one and sixpence in his pocket when he arrived,
+which he could put in the offertory at the Mass of thanksgiving
+for his escape that he would attend on the following
+morning. Cyril would be useful to old Dorward, and he
+(Mark) would give him some tips on serving if they had
+an empty compartment from Slowbridge to Paddington.
+Mark's original intention had been to wait at the corner of
+Cranborne Road in a closed cab like the proverbial postchaise
+of elopements, but he discarded this idea for reasons of
+economy. He hoped that Cyril would not get frightened on
+the way to the station and turn back. Perhaps after all it
+would be wiser to order a cab and give up the ginger-beer,
+or pay for the ginger-beer with the money for the telegram.
+Once inside a cab Cyril was bound to go on. Hacking might
+be committed more completely to the enterprise by waiting
+inside until he arrived with Cyril. It was a pity that Cyril
+was not locked in his room, and yet when it came to it he
+would probably have funked letting himself down from the
+window by knotted sheets. Mark walked home with Hacking
+after school, to give his final instructions for the following
+day.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm telling you now," he said, "because we oughtn't to be
+seen together at all to-morrow, in case of arousing suspicion.
+You must get hold of Pomeroy and tell him to run to the
+corner of the road at half-past-five, and jump straight into
+the fly that'll be waiting there with you inside."</p>
+
+<p>"But where will you be?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be waiting outside the ticket barrier with the
+tickets."</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing he won't?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll risk seeing him once more. Go and ask if you can
+speak to him a minute, and tell him to come out in the garden
+presently. Say you've knocked a ball over or something and
+will Master Cyril throw it back. I say, we might really put
+a message inside a ball and throw it over. That was the way
+the Duc de Beaufort escaped in <i>Twenty Years After</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Hacking looked blankly at Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's dark and wet," he objected. "I shouldn't knock
+a ball over on a wet evening like this."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the skivvy won't think of that, and Pomeroy will
+guess that we're trying to communicate with him."</p>
+
+<p>Mark thought how odd it was that Hacking should be so
+utterly blind to the romance of the enterprise. After a few
+more objections which were disposed of by Mark, Hacking
+agreed to go next door and try to get the prisoner into the
+garden. He succeeded in this, and Mark rated Cyril for not
+having given him the sovereign yesterday.</p>
+
+<p>"However, bunk in and get it now, because I shan't see
+you again till to-morrow at the station, and I must have some
+money to buy the tickets."</p>
+
+<p>He explained the details of the escape and exacted from
+Cyril a promise not to back out at the last moment.</p>
+
+<p>"You've got nothing to do. It's as simple as A&nbsp;B&nbsp;C. It's
+too simple, really, to be much of a rag. However, as it isn't
+a rag, but serious, I suppose we oughtn't to grumble. Now,
+you are coming, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Cyril promised that nothing but physical force should prevent
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"If you funk, don't forget that you'll have betrayed your
+faith and .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Mark in his enthusiasm slipped off the
+wall, and after uttering one more solemn injunction against
+backing out at the last minute he left Cyril to the protection
+of Angels for the next twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>Although he would never have admitted as much, Mark
+was rather astonished when Cyril actually did present himself
+at Slowbridge station in time to catch the 5.47 train up
+to town. Their compartment was not empty, so that Mark
+was unable to give Cyril that lesson in serving at the altar
+which he had intended to give him. Instead, as Cyril seemed
+in his reaction to the excitement of the escape likely to burst
+into tears at any moment, he drew for him a vivid picture of
+the enjoyable life to which the train was taking him.</p>
+
+<p>"Father Dorward says that the country round Green Lanes
+is ripping. And his church is Norman. I expect he'll make
+you his ceremonarius. You're an awfully lucky chap, you
+know. He says that next Corpus Christi, he's going to have
+Mass on the village green. Nobody will know where you
+are, and I daresay later on you can become a hermit. You
+might become a saint. The last English saint to be canonized
+was St. Thomas Cantilupe of Hereford. But of course
+Charles the First ought to have been properly canonized.
+By the time you die I should think we should have got back
+canonization in the English Church, and if I'm alive then I'll
+propose your canonization. St. Cyril Pomeroy you'd be."</p>
+
+<p>Such were the bright colours in which Mark painted Cyril's
+future; when he had watched him wave his farewells from
+the window of the departing train at Waterloo, he felt as
+if he were watching the bodily assumption of a saint.</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you been all the evening?" asked Uncle
+Henry, when Mark came back about nine o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>"In London," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Your insolence is becoming insupportable. Get away to
+your room."</p>
+
+<p>It never struck Mr. Lidderdale that his nephew was telling
+the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The hue and cry for Cyril Pomeroy began at once, and
+though Mark maintained at first that the discovery of Cyril's
+hiding-place was due to nothing else except the cowardice of
+Hacking, who when confronted by a detective burst into tears
+and revealed all he knew, he was bound to admit afterward
+that, if Mr. Ogilvie had been questioned much more, he
+would have had to reveal the secret himself. Mark was hurt
+that his efforts to help a son of Holy Church should not be
+better appreciated by Mr. Ogilvie; but he forgave his friend
+in view of the nuisance that it undoubtedly must have been
+to have Meade Cantorum beleaguered by half a dozen corpulent
+detectives. The only person in the Vicarage who seemed
+to approve of what he had done was Esther; she who had
+always seemed to ignore him, even sometimes in a sensitive
+mood to despise him, was full of congratulations.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you manage it, Mark?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I took a cab," said Mark modestly. "One from the
+corner of Cranborne Road to Slowbridge, and another from
+Paddington to Waterloo. We had some sandwiches, and a
+good deal of ginger-beer at Paddington because we thought
+we mightn't be able to get any at Waterloo, but at Waterloo
+we had some more ginger-beer. I wish I hadn't told Hacking.
+If I hadn't, we should probably have pulled it off. Old
+Dorward was up to anything. But Hacking is a hopeless
+ass."</p>
+
+<p>"What does your uncle say?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's rather sick," Mark admitted. "He refused to let
+me go to school any more, which as you may imagine doesn't
+upset me very much, and I'm to go into Hitchcock's office
+after Christmas. As far as I can make out I shall be a kind
+of servant."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you talked to Stephen about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's a bit annoyed with me about this kidnapping.
+I'm afraid I have rather let him in for it. He says he doesn't
+mind so much if it's kept out of the papers."</p>
+
+<p>"Anyway, I think it was a sporting effort by you," said
+Esther. "I wasn't particularly keen on you until you brought
+this off. I hate pious boys. I wish you'd told me beforehand.
+I'd have loved to help."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you? I say, I am sorry. I never thought of you,"
+said Mark much disappointed at the lost opportunity.
+"You'd have been much better than that ass Hacking. If you
+and I had been the only people in it, I'll bet the detectives
+would never have found him."</p>
+
+<p>"And what's going to happen to the youth now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, his father's going to take him to Australia as he
+arranged. They sail to-morrow. There's one thing," Mark
+added with a kind of gloomy relish. "He's bound to go to
+the bad, and perhaps that'll be a lesson to his father."</p>
+
+<p>The hope of the Vicar of Meade Cantorum and equally
+it may be added the hope of Mr. Lidderdale that the affair
+would be kept out of the papers was not fulfilled. The day
+after Mr. Pomeroy and his son sailed from Tilbury the following
+communication appeared in <i>The Times</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Sir,&mdash;The accompanying letter was handed to me by my
+friend the Reverend Eustace Pomeroy to be used as I thought
+fit and subject to only one stipulation&mdash;that it should not be
+published until he and his son were out of England. As
+President of the Society for the Protection of the English
+Church against Romish Aggression I feel that it is my duty
+to lay the facts before the country. I need scarcely add that
+I have been at pains to verify the surprising and alarming
+accusations made by a clergyman against two other clergymen,
+and I earnestly request the publicity of your columns
+for what I venture to believe is positive proof of the dangerous
+conspiracy existing in our very midst to romanize the
+Established Church of England. I shall be happy to produce
+for any of your readers who find Mr. Pomeroy's story
+incredible at the close of the nineteenth century the signed
+statements of witnesses and other documentary evidence.</p>
+
+<p>I am, Sir,</p>
+
+<p>Your obedient servant,</p>
+
+<p>Danvers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Right Honble. the Lord Danvers, P.C.</p>
+
+<p>President of the Society for the Protection of the English
+Church against Romish Aggression.</p>
+
+<p>My Lord,</p>
+
+<p>I have to bring to your notice as President of the S.P.E.
+C.R.A. what I venture to assert is one of the most daring
+plots to subvert home and family life in the interests of
+priestcraft that has ever been discovered. In taking this step
+I am fully conscious of its seriousness, and if I ask your
+lordship to delay taking any measures for publicity until the
+unhappy principal is upon the high seas in the guardianship
+of his even more unhappy father, I do so for the sake of the
+wretched boy whose future has been nearly blasted by the
+Jesuitical behaviour of two so-called Protestant clergymen.</p>
+
+<p>Four years ago, my lord, I retired from a lifelong career
+as a missionary in New Guinea to give my children the
+advantages of English education and English climate, and it
+is surely hard that I should live to curse the day on which I
+did so. My third son Cyril was sent to school at Haverton
+House, Slowbridge, to an educational establishment kept by
+a Mr. Henry Lidderdale, reputed to be a strong Evangelical
+and I believe I am justified in saying rightly so reputed. At
+the same time I regret that Mr. Lidderdale, whose brother
+was a notorious Romanizer I have since discovered, should
+not have exercised more care in the supervision of his
+nephew, a fellow scholar with my own son at Haverton
+House. It appears that Mr. Lidderdale was so lax as to
+permit his nephew to frequent the services of the Reverend
+Stephen Ogilvie at Meade Cantorum, where every excess
+such as incense, lighted candles, mariolatry and creeping to
+the cross is openly practised. The Revd. S. Ogilvie I may
+add is a member of the S.S.C., that notorious secret society
+whose machinations have been so often exposed and the
+originators of that filthy book "The Priest in Absolution."
+He is also a member of the Guild of All Souls which has for
+its avowed object the restoration of the Romish doctrine of
+Purgatory with all its attendant horrors, and finally I need
+scarcely add he is a member of the Confraternity of the
+"Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly to popularize the
+idolatrous and blasphemous cult of the Mass.</p>
+
+<p>Young Lidderdale presumably under the influence of this
+disloyal Protestant clergyman sought to corrupt my son, and
+was actually so far successful as to lure him to attend the
+idolatrous services at Meade Cantorum church, which of
+course he was only able to do by inventing lies and excuses
+to his father to account for his absence from the simple
+worship to which all his life he had been accustomed. Not
+content with this my unhappy son was actually persuaded
+to confess his sins to this self-styled "priest"! I wonder if
+he confessed the sin of deceiving his own father to "Father"
+Ogilvie who supplied him with numerous Mass books, several
+of which I enclose for your lordship's inspection. You
+will be amused if you are not too much horrified by these
+puerile and degraded works, and in one of them, impudently
+entitled "Catholic Prayers for Church of England People"
+you will actually see in cold print a prayer for the "Pope of
+Rome." This work emanates from that hotbed of sacerdotal
+disloyalty, St. Alban's, Holborn.</p>
+
+<p>These vile books I discovered by accident carefully hidden
+away in my son's bedroom. "Facilis descensus Averni!"
+You will easily imagine the humiliation of a parent who,
+having devoted his life to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ
+to the heathen, finds that his own son has fallen as low as
+the lowest savage. As soon as I made my discovery, I removed
+him from Haverton House, and warned the proprietor
+of the risk he was running by not taking better care
+of his pupils. Having been summoned to a conference of
+missionaries in Sydney, N.S.W., I determined to take my
+son with me in the hope that a long voyage in the company
+of a loving parent, eager to help him back to the path of
+Truth and Salvation from which he had strayed, might cure
+him of his idolatrous fancies, and restore him to Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>What followed is, as I write this, scarcely credible to
+myself; but however incredible, it is true. Young Lidderdale,
+acting no doubt at the instigation of "Father" Ogilvie
+(as my son actually called him to my face, not realizing
+the blasphemy of according to a mortal clergyman the title
+that belongs to God alone), entered into a conspiracy with
+another Romanizing clergyman, the Reverend Oliver Dorward,
+Vicar of Green Lanes, Hants, to abduct my son from
+his own father's house, with what ultimate intention I dare
+not think. Incredible as it must sound to modern ears, they
+were so far successful that for a whole week I was in
+ignorance of his whereabouts, while detectives were hunting
+for him up and down England. The abduction was carried
+out by young Lidderdale, with the assistance of a youth
+called Hacking, so coolly and skilfully as to indicate that the
+abettors behind the scenes are <small>USED TO SUCH ABDUCTIONS</small>.
+This, my lord, points to a very grave state of affairs in our
+midst. If the son of a Protestant clergyman like myself
+can be spirited away from a populous but nevertheless comparatively
+small town like Slowbridge, what must be going
+on in great cities like London? Moreover, everything is done
+to make it attractive for the unhappy youth who is thus lured
+away from his father's hearth. My own son is even now
+still impenitent, and I have the greatest fears for his moral
+and religious future, so rapid has been the corruption set up
+by evil companionship.</p>
+
+<p>These, my lord, are the facts set out as shortly as possible
+and written on the eve of my departure in circumstances that
+militate against elegance of expression. I am, to tell the
+truth, still staggered by this affair, and if I make public my
+sorrow and my shame I do so in the hope that the Society
+of which your lordship is President, may see its way to take
+some kind of action that will make a repetition of such an
+outrage upon family life for ever impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Believe me to be,</p>
+
+<p>Your lordship's obedient servant,</p>
+
+<p>Eustace Pomeroy.</p></div>
+
+<p>The publication of this letter stirred England. <i>The Times</i>
+in a leading article demanded a full inquiry into the alleged
+circumstances. <i>The English Churchman</i> said that nothing
+like it had happened since the days of Bloody Mary. Questions
+were asked in the House of Commons, and finally when
+it became known that Lord Danvers would ask a question in
+the House of Lords, Mr. Ogilvie took Mark to see Lord Hull
+who wished to be in possession of the facts before he rose
+to correct some misapprehensions of Lord Danvers. Mark
+also had to interview two Bishops, an Archdeacon, and a
+Rural Dean. He did not realize that for a few weeks he was
+a central figure in what was called <small>THE CHURCH CRISIS</small>. He
+was indignant at Mr. Pomeroy's exaggeration and perversions
+of fact, and he was so evidently speaking the truth that
+everybody from Lord Hull to a reporter of <i>The Sun</i> was
+impressed by his account of the affair, so that in the end the
+Pomeroy Abduction was decided to be less revolutionary
+than the Gunpowder Plot.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Lidderdale, however, believed that his nephew had
+deliberately tried to ruin him out of malice, and when two
+parents seized the opportunity of such a scandal to remove
+their sons from Haverton House without paying the terminal
+fees, Mr. Lidderdale told Mark that he should recoup himself
+for the loss out of the money left by his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"How much did she leave?" his nephew asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't ask impertinent questions."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's my money, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It will be your money in another six years, if you behave
+yourself. Meanwhile half of it will be devoted to paying
+your premium at the office of my friend Mr. Hitchcock."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want to be a solicitor. I want to be a priest,"
+said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Henry produced a number of cogent reasons that
+would make his nephew's ambition unattainable.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, if I can't be a priest, I don't want the money,
+and you can keep it yourself," said Mark. "But I'm not
+going to be a solicitor."</p>
+
+<p>"And what are you going to be, may I inquire?" asked
+Uncle Henry.</p>
+
+<p>"In the end I probably <i>shall</i> be a priest," Mark prophesied.
+"But I haven't quite decided yet how. I warn you that I
+shall run away."</p>
+
+<p>"Run away," his uncle echoed in amazement. "Good
+heavens, boy, haven't you had enough of running away over
+this deplorable Pomeroy affair? Where are you going to
+run to?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't tell you, could I, even if I knew?" Mark asked
+as tactfully as he was able. "But as a matter of fact, I don't
+know. I only know that I won't go into Mr. Hitchcock's
+office. If you try to force me, I shall write to <i>The Times</i>
+about it."</p>
+
+<p>Such a threat would have sounded absurd in the mouth of
+a schoolboy before the Pomeroy business; but now Mr.
+Lidderdale took it seriously and began to wonder if Haverton
+House would survive any more of such publicity. When a
+few days later Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had consulted about
+his future, wrote to propose that Mark should live with him
+and work under his superintendence with the idea of winning
+a scholarship at Oxford, Mr. Lidderdale was inclined to treat
+his suggestion as a solution of the problem, and he replied
+encouragingly:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Haverton House,</p>
+
+<p>Slowbridge.</p>
+
+<p>Jan. 15.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir,</p>
+
+<p>Am I to understand from your letter that you are offering
+to make yourself responsible for my nephew's future, for I
+must warn you that I could not accept your suggestion unless
+such were the case? I do not approve of what I assume will
+be the trend of your education, and I should have to disclaim
+any further responsibility in the matter of my nephew's
+future. I may inform you that I hold in trust for him until
+he comes of age the sum of &pound;522 8s. 7d. which was left by
+his mother. The annual interest upon this I have used until
+now as a slight contribution to the expense to which I have
+been put on his account; but I have not thought it right to
+use any of the capital sum. This I am proposing to transfer
+to you. His mother did not execute any legal document and
+I have nothing more binding than a moral obligation. If you
+undertake the responsibility of looking after him until such
+time as he is able to earn his own living, I consider that
+you are entitled to use this money in any way you think
+right. I hope that the boy will reward your confidence more
+amply than he has rewarded mine. I need not allude to the
+Pomeroy business to you, for notwithstanding your public
+denials I cannot but consider that you were as deeply implicated
+in that disgraceful affair as he was. I note what you
+say about the admiration you had for my brother. I wish
+I could honestly say that I shared that admiration. But my
+brother and I were not on good terms, for which state of
+affairs he was entirely responsible. I am more ready to surrender
+to you all my authority over Mark because I am only
+too well aware how during the last year you have consistently
+undermined that authority and encouraged my nephew's rebellious
+spirit. I have had a great experience of boys during
+thirty-five years of schoolmastering, and I can assure you
+that I have never had to deal with a boy so utterly insensible
+to kindness as my nephew. His conduct toward his aunt I
+can only characterize as callous. Of his conduct towards me
+I prefer to say no more. I came forward at a moment when
+he was likely to be sunk in the most abject poverty, and my
+reward has been ingratitude. I pray that his dark and stubborn
+temperament may not turn to vice and folly as he grows
+older, but I have little hope of its not doing so. I confess
+that to me his future seems dismally black. You may have
+acquired some kind of influence over his emotions, if he has
+any emotions, but I am not inclined to suppose that it will
+endure.</p>
+
+<p>On hearing from you that you persist in your offer to
+assume complete responsibility for my nephew, I will hand
+him over to your care at once. I cannot pretend that I shall
+be sorry to see the last of him, for I am not a hypocrite. I
+may add that his clothes are in rather a sorry state. I had
+intended to equip him upon his entering the office of my old
+friend Mr. Hitchcock and with that intention I have been
+letting him wear out what he has. This, I may say, he has
+done most effectually.</p>
+
+<p>I am, Sir,</p>
+
+<p>Yours faithfully,</p>
+
+<p>Henry Lidderdale.</p></div>
+
+<p>To which Mr. Ogilvie replied:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Vicarage,</p>
+
+<p>Meade Cantorum,</p>
+
+<p>Bucks.</p>
+
+<p>Jan. 16.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Mr. Lidderdale,</p>
+
+<p>I accept full responsibility for Mark and for Mark's
+money. Send both of them along whenever you like. I'm
+not going to embark on another controversy about the
+"rights" of boys. I've exhausted every argument on this
+subject since Mark involved me in his drastic measures of a
+month ago. But please let me assure you that I will do my
+best for him and that I am convinced he will do his best
+for me.</p>
+
+<p>Yours truly,</p>
+
+<p>Stephen Ogilvie.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII" />CHAPTER XIII<br />
+
+<small>WYCH-ON-THE-WOLD</small></h2>
+
+
+<p>Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went
+to live at Meade Cantorum; and the break was made
+complete soon afterward when the living of Wych-on-the-Wold
+was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that
+he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five
+years later; Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where
+she took up palmistry and became indispensable to the success
+of charitable bazaars in East Sussex.</p>
+
+<p>Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was
+actually in Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that
+all the windows looked down into Gloucestershire, except
+those in the Rectory; they looked out across a flat country
+of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing spire in
+Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a
+high windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of
+the numbers of pigeons that were always circling round the
+church tower. There was hardly a house in Wych that did
+not have its pigeon-cote, from the great round columbary in
+the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of some
+steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as
+most Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford
+in the vale below, that was because the exposed position
+had kept its successive builders too intent on solidity to
+indulge their fancy. The result was an austere uniformity
+of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape whose
+beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an
+old wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to
+the transient observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the
+builders to be sparing with their windows; the result of such
+solicitude for the comfort of the inmates was a succession of
+blank spaces of freestone that delighted the eye with an effect
+of strength and leisure, of cleanliness and tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>The Rectory, dating from the reign of Charles II, did not
+arrogate to itself the right to retire behind trees from the
+long line of the single village street; but being taller than
+the other houses it brought the street to a dignified conclusion,
+and it was not unworthy of the noble church which
+stood apart from the village, a landmark for miles, upon
+the brow of the rolling wold. There was little traffic on the
+road that climbed up from Wychford in the valley of the
+swift Greenrush five miles away, and there was less traffic
+on the road beyond, which for eight miles sent branch after
+branch to remote farms and hamlets until itself became no
+more than a sheep track and faded out upon a hilly pasturage.
+Yet even this unfrequented road only bisected the
+village at the end of its wide street, where in the morning
+when the children were at school and the labourers at work
+in the fields the silence was cloistral, where one could stand
+listening to the larks high overhead, and where the lightest
+footstep aroused curiosity, so that one turned the head to
+peep and peer for the cause of so strange a sound.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ogilvie's parish had a large superficial area; but his
+parishioners were not many outside the village, and in that
+country of wide pastures the whole of his cure did not include
+half-a-dozen farms. There was no doctor and no
+squire, unless Will Starling of Rushbrooke Grange could be
+counted as the squire.</p>
+
+<p>Halfway to Wychford and close to the boundary of the
+two parishes an infirm signpost managed with the aid of a
+stunted hawthorn to keep itself partially upright and direct
+the wayfarer to Wych Maries. Without the signpost nobody
+would have suspected that the grassgrown track thus indicated
+led anywhere except over the top of the wold.</p>
+
+<p>"You must go and explore Wych Maries," the Rector
+had said to Mark soon after they arrived. "You'll find it
+rather attractive. There's a disused chapel dedicated to St.
+Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. My predecessor
+took me there when we drove round the parish on my first
+visit; but I haven't yet had time to go again. And you ought
+to have a look at the gardens of Rushbrooke Grange. The
+present squire is away. In the South Seas, I believe. But
+the housekeeper, Mrs. Honeybone, will show you round."</p>
+
+<p>It was in response to this advice that Mark and Esther
+set out on a golden May evening to explore Wych Maries.
+Esther had continued to be friendly with Mark after the
+Pomeroy affair; and when he came to live at Meade Cantorum
+she had expressed her pleasure at the prospect of
+having him for a brother.</p>
+
+<p>"But you'll keep off religion, won't you?" she had demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Mark promised that he would, wondering why she should
+suppose that he was incapable of perceiving who was and
+who was not interested in it.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you've guessed my fear?" she had continued.
+"Haven't you? Haven't you guessed that I'm frightened to
+death of becoming religious?"</p>
+
+<p>The reassuring contradiction that one naturally gives to
+anybody who voices a dread of being overtaken by some misfortune
+might perhaps have sounded inappropriate, and
+Mark had held his tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"My father was very religious. My mother is more or
+less religious. Stephen is religious. Miriam is religious.
+Oh, Mark, and I sometimes feel that I too must fall on my
+knees and surrender. But I won't. Because it spoils life.
+I shall be beaten in the end of course, and I'll probably get
+religious mania when I am beaten. But until then&mdash;"
+She did not finish her sentence; only her blue eyes glittered
+at the challenge of life.</p>
+
+<p>That was the last time religion was mentioned between
+Mark and Esther, and since both of them enjoyed the country
+they became friends. On this May evening they stood by
+the signpost and looked across the shimmering grass to where
+the sun hung in his web of golden haze above the edge of
+the wold.</p>
+
+<p>"If we take the road to Wych Maries," said Mark, "we
+shall be walking right into the sun."</p>
+
+<p>Esther did not reply, but Mark understood that she
+assented to his truism, and they walked on as silent as the
+long shadows that followed them. A quarter of a mile from
+the high road the path reached the edge of the wold and
+dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the
+brow, but which grew denser down the slope with many dark
+evergreens interspersed, and in the valley below became a
+jungle. After the bare upland country this volume of May
+verdure seemed indescribably rich and the valley beyond,
+where the Greenrush flowed through kingcups toward the
+sun, indescribably alluring. Esther and Mark forgot that
+they were exploring Wych Maries and thinking only of
+reaching that wide valley they ran down through the wood,
+rejoicing in the airy green of the ash-trees above them and
+shouting as they ran. But presently cypresses and sombre
+yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych
+Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and
+their whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more.
+At the bottom of the hill the trees increased in number and
+variety; the sun shone through pale oak-leaves and the warm
+green of sycamores. Nevertheless a sadness haunted the
+wood, where the red campions made only a mist of colour
+with no reality of life and flowers behind.</p>
+
+<p>"This wood's awfully jolly, isn't it?" said Mark, hoping
+to gain from Esther's agreement the dispersal of his gloom.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care for it much," she replied. "There doesn't
+seem to be any life in it."</p>
+
+<p>"I heard a cuckoo just now," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, out of tune already."</p>
+
+<p>"Mm, rather out of tune. Mind those nettles," he warned
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought Stephen said he drove here."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps we've come the wrong way. I believe the road
+forked by the ash wood above. Anyway if we go toward the
+sun we shall come out in the valley, and we can walk back
+along the banks of the river to Wychford."</p>
+
+<p>"We can always go back through the wood," said Esther.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, if you don't mind going back the way you came."</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," she snapped. She was not going to be laughed
+at by Mark, and she dared him to deny that he was not as
+much aware as herself of an eeriness in the atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>"Only because it seems dark in here after that dazzling
+sunlight on the wold. Hark! I hear the sound of water."</p>
+
+<p>They struggled through the undergrowth toward the
+sound; soon from a steep wooded bank they were gazing
+down into a millpool, the surface of which reflected with a
+gloomy deepening of their hue the colour but not the form
+of the trees above. Water was flowing through a rotten
+sluice gate down from the level of the stream upon a slimy
+water-wheel that must have been out of action for many
+years.</p>
+
+<p>"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of
+Weir!" Mark exclaimed. "Don't you love <i>Ulalume</i>? I think
+it's about my favourite poem."</p>
+
+<p>"Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently.
+He might have taken advantage of this confession to give
+her a lecture on poetry, if the millpool and the melancholy
+wood had not been so affecting as to make the least attempt
+at literary exposition impertinent.</p>
+
+<p>"And there's the chapel," Mark exclaimed, pointing to a
+ruined edifice of stone, the walls of which were stained with
+the damp of years rising from the pool. "But how shall we
+reach it? We must have come the wrong way."</p>
+
+<p>"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering
+to the command of an intuition that overcame her
+pride. "This place is unlucky."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that
+came so early in this overshadowed place, was half inclined
+to turn round at her behest; but at that moment he perceived
+a possible path through the nettles and briers at the
+farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the
+Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych
+Maries he called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully
+at first; but gradually regaining her composure she emerged
+on the other side as cool and scornful as the Esther with
+whom he was familiar.</p>
+
+<p>"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing
+on a grassgrown road that wound through a rank pasturage
+browsed on by a solitary black cow and turned the
+corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building, the
+presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.</p>
+
+<p>"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.</p>
+
+<p>"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I
+say, this chapel is rather ripping, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow,
+where her meditative form made the solitary black cow
+look lonelier than ever. Mark turned aside to examine the
+chapel. He had been warned by the Rector to look at the
+images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene that
+had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they were
+tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history
+of the chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as
+to suggest that it was a chantry; but there was no historical
+justification for linking its fortunes with the Starlings who
+owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was no record of any
+lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might
+show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold;
+it lay about midway between the two, and in days
+gone by there had been controversy on this point between
+the two parishes. The question had been settled by a squire
+of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth century, since
+when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by
+some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There
+was record neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of
+what manner of folk worshipped there, nor of those who
+destroyed it. The roofless haunt of bats and owls, preserved
+from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that covered its
+walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its
+floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over
+the arch of the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward
+as they had gazed for six hundred years. The curiosity of
+the few antiquarians who visited the place and speculated
+upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy that covered
+the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit of
+the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these
+two austere shapes of divine women under conditions of
+atmosphere that enhanced their austerity and unearthliness
+he ascribed their freedom from decay to the interposition of
+God. To Mark's imagination, fixed upon the images while
+Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the chapel, there
+was granted another of those moments of vision which
+marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became
+suddenly assured that he would neither marry nor beget
+children. He was astonished to find himself in the grip of
+this thought, for his mind had never until this evening occupied
+itself with marriage or children, nor even with love.
+Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite purpose
+in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to
+himself, be considered credulous if he sought for the explanation
+of his state of mind in the images of the two
+Maries. He looked at them resolved to illuminate with reason's
+eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to the
+stone an illusion of life's bloom.</p>
+
+<p>"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from
+the field beyond the black cow lowed a melancholy negative.
+Whether the stone had spoken or not, Mark accepted the
+revelation of his future as a Divine favour, and thenceforth
+he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the place
+where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted
+by God.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called
+across the field, and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on
+the grassgrown drive that led round the cedar grove to
+Rushbrooke Grange.</p>
+
+<p>"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.</p>
+
+<p>They were standing before the house.</p>
+
+<p>"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down
+here it seems later than it really is."</p>
+
+<p>Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of
+the average Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building
+it occupied a large superficial area, and its tumbling irregular
+roofs of freestone, the outlines of which were blurred by
+the encroaching mist of vegetation that overhung them, gave
+the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of this dank valley
+had wrought upon the substance of the building and as if the
+architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of
+the trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke
+Grange had never occupied a prominent position in
+the county, and their estates had grown smaller with each
+succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous author
+of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from
+whose ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There
+was indeed nothing of interest in their annals except an
+attack upon the Grange by a party of armed burglars in the
+disorderly times at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
+when the squire's wife and two little girls were murdered
+while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag
+Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much
+inclined to blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating
+Rushbrooke Grange under the guidance of Mrs.
+Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther perversely insisted
+upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her
+excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By
+now it was a pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy
+with moths' wings, heavy with the scent of apple blossom.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while
+the echoes of the bell died away on the silence within the
+house and they waited for the footsteps that should answer
+their summons. The answer came from a window above the
+porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in wistaria,
+looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with
+alarm who was there.</p>
+
+<p>"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You
+have no business to go ringing the bell at this time of the
+evening. It frightened me to death."</p>
+
+<p>"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.</p>
+
+<p>Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her
+brother as an excuse to visit the house and he was still more
+surprised by hearing her speak so politely, so ingratiatingly,
+it seemed, to this grim woman embowered in wistaria.</p>
+
+<p>"We lost our way," Esther explained, "and that's why
+we're so late. The Rector told me about the water-lily pool,
+and I should so much like to see it."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Honeybone debated with herself for a moment, until
+at last with a grunt of disapproval she came downstairs and
+opened the front door. The lily pool, now a lily pool only
+in name, for it was covered with an integument of duckweed
+which in twilight took on the texture of velvet, was an attractive
+place set in an enclosure of grass between high grey
+walls.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all there is to see," said Mrs. Honeybone.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Starling is abroad?" Esther asked.</p>
+
+<p>The housekeeper nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"And when is he coming back?" she went on.</p>
+
+<p>"That's for him to say," said the housekeeper disagreeably.
+"He might come back to-night for all I know."</p>
+
+<p>Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth the hall
+bell jangled, and a distant voice shouted:</p>
+
+<p>"Nanny, Nanny, hurry up and open the door!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Honeybone could not have looked more startled if
+the voice had been that of a ghost. Mark began to talk of
+going until Esther cut him short.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think Mr. Starling will mind our being here so
+much as that," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Honeybone had already hurried off to greet her
+master; and when she was gone Mark looked at Esther,
+saw that her face was strangely flushed, and in an instant
+of divination apprehended either that she had already met
+the squire of Rushbrooke Grange or that she expected to
+meet him here to-night; so that, when presently a tall man
+of about thirty-five with brick-dust cheeks came into the
+close, he was not taken aback when Esther greeted him by
+name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was he
+astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks
+should deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with
+recognition, and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a
+moment its immobility and gape, yes, gape, in the amazement
+of meeting somebody whom he never could have expected
+to meet at such an hour in such a place.</p>
+
+<p>"You," he exclaimed. "You here!"</p>
+
+<p>By the way he quickly looked behind him as if to intercept
+a prying glance Mark knew that, whatever the relationship
+between Esther and the squire had been in the past, it had
+been a relationship in which secrecy had played a part. In
+that moment between him and Will Starling there was
+enmity.</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't have expected him to make a great fuss
+about a boy," said Esther brutally on their way back to the
+Rectory.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you think that's the reason why I don't like
+him," said Mark. "I don't want him to take any notice
+of me, but I think it's very odd that you shouldn't have said
+a word about knowing him even to his housekeeper."</p>
+
+<p>"It was a whim of mine," she murmured. "Besides, I
+don't know him very well. We met at Eastbourne once when
+I was staying there with Mother."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why didn't he say 'How do you do, Miss Ogilvie?'
+instead of breathing out 'you' like that?"</p>
+
+<p>Esther turned furiously upon Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"What has it got to do with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing whatever to do with me," he said deliberately.
+"But if you think you're going to make a fool of me, you're
+not. Are you going to tell your brother you knew him?"</p>
+
+<p>Esther would not answer, and separated by several yards
+they walked sullenly back to the Rectory.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV" />CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>ST. MARK'S DAY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark tried next day to make up his difference with
+Esther; but she repulsed his advances, and the friendship
+that had blossomed after the Pomeroy affair faded and
+died. There was no apparent dislike on either side, nothing
+more than a coolness as of people too well used to each
+other's company. In a way this was an advantage for Mark,
+who was having to apply himself earnestly to the amount of
+study necessary to win a scholarship at Oxford. Companionship
+with Esther would have meant considerable disturbance
+of his work, for she was a woman who depended on the
+inspiration of the moment for her pastimes and pleasures,
+who was impatient of any postponement and always avowedly
+contemptuous of Mark's serious side. His classical
+education at Haverton House had made little of the material
+bequeathed to him by his grandfather's tuition at Nancepean.
+None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough
+of a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must
+be one or the other) to educate his taste. The result was an
+assortment of grammatical facts to which he was incapable
+of giving life. If the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold was not
+a great scholar, he was at least able to repair the neglect of,
+more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to Mark's
+education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover,
+after Mark had been reading with him six months he did
+find a really first-class scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of
+Little Fairfield. Mark worked steadily, and existence in
+Oxfordshire went by without any great adventures of mind,
+body, or spirit. Life at the Rectory had a kind of graceful
+austerity like the well-proportioned Rectory itself. If Mark
+had bothered to analyze the cause of this graceful austerity,
+he might have found it in the personality of the Rector's elder
+sister Miriam. Even at Meade Cantorum, when he was
+younger, Mark had been fully conscious of her qualities; but
+here they found a background against which they could display
+themselves more perfectly. When they moved from
+Buckinghamshire and the new rector was seeing how much
+Miriam appreciated the new surroundings, he sold out some
+stock and presented her with enough ready money to express
+herself in the outward beauty of the Rectory's refurbishing.
+He was luckily not called upon to spend a great deal on the
+church, both his predecessors having maintained the fabric
+with care, and the fabric itself being sound enough and magnificent
+enough to want no more than that. Miriam, though
+shaking one of those capable and well-tended fingers at her
+beloved brother's extravagance, accepted the gift with an
+almost childish determination to give full value of beauty in
+return, so that there should not be a servant's bedroom nor a
+cupboard nor a corridor that did not display the evidence of
+her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over
+to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures
+bloomed there like one of her own favourite peonies,
+rosy of face and fragrant, ample of girth, golden-hearted.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with
+Richard Ford, the son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with
+whom he went to work in the autumn after his arrival in
+Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for Richard,
+who was a year or two older than himself and a student at
+Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer
+bound for India, was one of those entirely admirable young
+men who succeed in being saintly without any rapture or
+righteousness.</p>
+
+<p>Mark said one day:</p>
+
+<p>"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only
+for goodness' sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be
+furious."</p>
+
+<p>The Rector stopped humming a joyful <i>Miserere</i> to give
+Mark an assurance of his discretion. But Mark having
+said so much in praise of Richard could say no more, and
+indeed he would have found it hard to express in words
+what he felt about his friend.</p>
+
+<p>Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford
+Rectory where in this fortunate corner of England existed
+a third perfect family. Richard was deeply in love with
+Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark had ever
+been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen
+in love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.</p>
+
+<p>"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard.
+"Walking down the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning
+I saw two blue butterflies on a wild rose, and they were
+like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like her cheek."</p>
+
+<p>"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.</p>
+
+<p>Mark had had such a limited experience of the world
+that the amenities of the society in which he found himself
+incorporated did not strike his imagination as remarkable.
+It was in truth one of those eclectic, somewhat exquisite,
+even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced partly
+by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most
+of all, it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The
+genius of Cotswolds imparts to those who come beneath
+his influence the art of existing appropriately in the houses
+that were built at his inspiration. They do not boast of
+their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not living
+up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their
+voices lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind
+through willows and aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales
+or the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good
+fortune had set him as the natural expression of an inward
+orderliness, a traditional respect for beauty like the ritual
+of Christian worship. That the three daughters of the
+Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who failed
+to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
+him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment
+that any other standard than theirs existed. He felt the
+same about people who objected to Catholic ceremonies; their
+dislike of them did not present itself to him as arising out
+of a different religious experience from his own; but it
+appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as
+a kind of wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He
+was indeed still at the age when externals possess not so
+much an undue importance, but when they affect a boy as a
+mould through which the plastic experience of his youth is
+passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
+form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was
+the revulsion from the arid ugliness of Haverton House
+and the ambition to make up for those years of beauty withheld,
+both of which urged him on to take the utmost advantage
+of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of those
+years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home,
+the Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all
+Richard Ford at Fairfield gave him in a few months the
+poise he would have received more gradually from a public
+school education.</p>
+
+<p>So Mark read Greek with the Vicar of Little Fairfield
+and Latin with the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold, who,
+amiable and holy man, had to work nearly twice as hard as
+his pupil to maintain his reserve of instruction. Mark took
+long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was home in
+his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was
+at Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory,
+where he learnt to enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach
+and Brahms.</p>
+
+<p>"You're like three Saint Cecilias," he told them. "Monica
+is by Luini and Margaret is by Perugino and Pauline. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, who am I by?" Pauline exclaimed, clapping her
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I give it up. You're just Saint Cecilia herself at fourteen."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't Mark foolish?" Pauline laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mark, "so I'm allowed
+to be foolish."</p>
+
+<p>"It's my birthday in a week," said Pauline. "And as I'm
+two years younger than you I can be two years more foolish."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked at her, and he was filled with wonder at
+the sanctity of her maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating
+upon the Annunciation he should always clothe Pauline in a
+robe of white samite and set her in his mind's eye for that
+other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy maids in
+Florence or Perugia for their bright mysteries.</p>
+
+<p>While Mark was walking back to Wych and when on
+the brow of the first rise of the road he stood looking down
+at Wychford in the valley below, a chill lisping wind from
+the east made him shiver and he thought of the lines in
+Keats' <i>Eve of St. Mark</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>The chilly sunset faintly told</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Of unmatured green vallies cold,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Of primroses by shelter'd rills,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>And daisies on the aguish hills.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The sky in the west was an unmatured green valley tonight,
+where Venus bloomed like a solitary primrose; and
+on the dark hills of Heaven the stars were like daisies. He
+turned his back on the little town and set off up the hill again,
+while the wind slipped through the hedge beside him in and
+out of the blackthorn boughs, lisping, whispering, snuffling,
+sniffing, like a small inquisitive animal. He thought of
+Monica, Margaret, and Pauline playing in their warm,
+candle-lit room behind him, and he thought of Miriam reading
+in her tall-back chair before dinner, for Evensong would
+be over by now. Yes, Evensong would be over, he
+remembered penitently, and he ought to have gone this
+evening, which was the vigil of St. Mark and of his birthday.
+At this moment he caught sight of the Wych Maries signpost
+black against that cold green sky. He gave a momentary
+start, because seen thus the signpost had a human look; and
+when his heart beat normally it was roused again, this time
+by the sight of a human form indeed, the form of Esther,
+the wind blowing her skirts before her, hurrying along the
+road to which the signpost so crookedly pointed. Mark who
+had been climbing higher and higher now felt the power of
+that wind full on his cheeks. It was as if it had found what
+it wanted, for it no longer whispered and lisped among the
+boughs of the blackthorn, but blew fiercely over the wide
+pastures, driving Esther before it, cutting through Mark like
+a sword. By the time he had reached the signpost she had
+disappeared in the wood.</p>
+
+<p>Mark asked himself why she was going to Rushbrooke
+Grange.</p>
+
+<p>"To Rushbrooke Grange," he said aloud. "Why should I
+think she is going to Rushbrooke Grange?"</p>
+
+<p>Though even in this desolate place he would not say it
+aloud, the answer came back from this very afternoon when
+somebody had mentioned casually that the Squire was come
+home again. Mark half turned to follow Esther, but in the
+moment of turning he set his face resolutely in the direction
+of home. If Esther were really on her way to meet Will
+Starling, he would do more harm than good by appearing
+to pry.</p>
+
+<p>Esther was the flaw in Mark's crystal clear world. When
+a year ago they had quarrelled over his avowed dislike of Will
+Starling, she had gone back to her solitary walks and he
+conscious, painfully conscious, that she regarded him as a
+young prig, had with that foolish pride of youth resolved
+to be so far as she was concerned what she supposed him
+to be. His admiration for the Greys and the Fords had
+driven her into jeering at them; throughout the year Mark
+and she had been scarcely polite to each other even in public.
+The Rector and Miriam probably excused Mark's rudeness
+whenever he let himself give way to it, because their sister
+did not spare either of them, and they were made aware
+with exasperating insistence of the dullness of the country
+and of the dreariness of everybody who lived in the neighbourhood.
+Yet, Mark could never achieve that indifference
+to her attitude either toward himself or toward other people
+that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he
+should have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because
+in his thoughts about her she always appeared to him like
+the wind, restlessly sighing and fluttering round a comfortable
+house. However steady the candle-light, however
+bright the fire, however absorbing the book, however secure
+one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there; and
+throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been
+most unmistakably there.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion.
+It was a strangely calm morning; through the
+unstained windows of the clerestory the sun sloped quivering
+ladders of golden light. He looked round with half a hope
+that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and
+throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit
+across the cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his
+imagination, so that for all the rich peace of this interior he
+was troubled in spirit, and the intention to make this Mass
+upon his seventeenth birthday another spiritual experience
+was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping mechanically,
+and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to
+make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began
+to apprehend how he was asking fresh favours from God
+without having moved a step forward to deserve them.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think
+I'm suffering from spiritual pride. I think. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an
+intuition that God was about to play some horrible trick on
+him. Mark discussed with the Rector the theological aspects
+of this intuition.</p>
+
+<p>"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps
+you are leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation
+of your intuition is your soul's perception of this.
+Indeed, once or twice lately I have been on the point of
+warning you that you must not get into the habit of supposing
+you will always find the onset of the world so gentle as here."</p>
+
+<p>"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite
+long enough at Haverton House to appreciate what it means
+to be here."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House
+it was a passive ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty.
+After our Lord had fasted forty days in the desert, accumulating
+reserves of spiritual energy, just as we in our poor
+human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves of
+spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter
+worthily, He was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than
+ever during His life on earth. The history of all the early
+Egyptian monks, the history indeed of any life lived without
+losing sight of the way of spiritual perfection displays the
+same phenomena. In the action and reaction of experience,
+in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of the
+human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine
+rhythm. No, I fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing
+more than one of those movements which warn us that
+the sleeper will soon wake."</p>
+
+<p>Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector
+dissatisfied. He wanted something more than analogies
+taken from the experience of spiritual giants, Titans of
+holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh seemed as
+remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might
+appear to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had
+gone to ask the Rector was whether it was blasphemous to
+suppose that God was going to play a horrible trick on him.
+He had not wanted a theological discussion, an academic
+question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
+probably himself in another twenty years, when he had
+preached some hundreds of sermons, would talk like that.
+Moreover, when he was alone Mark understood that he had
+not really wanted to talk about his own troubles to the Rector
+at all, but that his real preoccupation had been and still was
+Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
+brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will
+Starling, or if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther
+had not come in till nine o'clock last night because she had
+been to Wych Maries? Mark, remembering those wild eyes
+and that windblown hair when she stood for a moment
+framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not
+believe that none of her family had guessed that something
+more than the whim to wander over the hills had taken her
+out on such a night. Did Mrs. Ogilvie, promenading so
+placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in perplexity
+at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their
+attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their
+lips, Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what
+Esther was doing. He debated now the notion of warning
+Miriam in veiled language about her sister; but such an
+idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and horrible
+nightmare. Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill
+that would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes.
+Besides, what right had he on the little he knew to involve
+Esther with her family? Superficially he might count himself
+her younger brother; but if he presumed too far, with
+what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his claim. Most
+certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he intervened
+bravely and directly. Mark shook his head at the prospect
+of doing that. He could not imagine anybody's tackling
+Esther directly on such a subject. Seventeen to-day! He
+looked out of the window and felt that he was bearing upon
+his shoulders the whole of that green world outspread before
+him.</p>
+
+<p>The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and
+Mark who had intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying
+every moment of it had allowed the best of the hours to slip
+away in a stupor of indecision. More and more the vision
+of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt that he could
+not go and see the Greys as he had intended. He could not
+bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of
+Esther on his mind. He decided to walk over to Little
+Fairfield and persuade Richard to make a journey of exploration
+up the Greenrush in a canoe. He would ask Richard
+his opinion of Will Starling. What a foolish notion! He
+knew perfectly well Richard's opinion of the Squire, and to
+lure him into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I must go somewhere to-day," Mark shouted at
+himself. He secured a packet of sandwiches from the
+Rectory cook and set out to walk away his worries.</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't I go down to Wych Maries? I needn't
+meet that chap. And if I see him I needn't speak to him.
+He's always been only too jolly glad to be offensive to me."</p>
+
+<p>Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked
+signpost and took the same path down under the ash-trees as
+he had taken with Esther for the first time nearly a year ago.
+Spring was much more like Spring in these wooded hollows;
+the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was murmurous
+as limes in June. Mark congratulated himself on the spot
+in which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day
+robbed from time like the day of a dream. He ate his lunch
+by the old mill dam, feeding the roach with crumbs until an
+elderly pike came up from the deeps and frightened the
+smaller fish away. He searched for a bullfinch's nest; but
+he did not find one, though he saw several of the birds
+singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October
+apples they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel,
+where after speculating idly for a little while upon its former
+state he fell as he usually did when he visited Wych Maries
+into a contemplation of the two images of the Blessed Virgin
+and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a hummock of
+grass before the old West doorway he received an impression
+that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased
+to be mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved
+from ruin, but that they had somehow regained their importance.
+It was not that he discerned in them any
+miraculous quality of living, still less of winking or sweating
+as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the faithful.
+No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them
+thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself
+to the point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He
+was too well aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so,
+rousing himself from the rapt contemplation of them and
+forsaking the hummock of grass, he climbed up into the
+branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel, that there
+and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed
+by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of
+fancy and discover why they should give him this impression
+of having regained their utility, yes, that was the word,
+utility, not importance. They were revitalized not from
+within, but from without; and even as his mind leapt at this
+explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the shadowy
+yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that
+hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself
+been sitting.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation
+of the strange impression the images had made upon him,
+Mark supposed that she was come there for a tryst. This
+vanished almost at once in the conviction that Esther's soul
+waited there either in question or appeal. He restrained an
+impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt that he
+was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy
+the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that
+Esther's pride would be so deeply outraged at having been
+discovered in a moment of weakness thus upon her knees,
+for she had by now fallen upon her knees in prayer, that it
+might easily happen she would never in all her life pray more.
+There was no escape for Mark without disturbing her, and
+he sat breathless in the yew-tree, thinking that soon she must
+perceive his glittering eye in the depths of the dark foliage as
+in passing a hedgerow one may perceive the eye of a nested
+bird. From his position he could see the images, and out of
+the spiritual agony of Esther kneeling there, the force of
+which was communicated to himself, he watched them close,
+scarcely able to believe that they would not stoop from their
+pedestals and console the suppliant woman with benediction
+of those stone hands now clasped aspiringly to God, themselves
+for centuries suppliant like the woman at their feet.
+Mark could think of nothing better to do than to turn his
+face from Esther's face and to say for her many <i>Paternosters</i>
+and <i>Aves</i>. At first he thought that he was praying in a
+silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his
+position began to affect his concentration, and he found that
+he was saying the words mechanically, listening the while to
+the voices of birds. He compelled his attention to the
+prayers; but the birds were too loud. The <i>Paternosters</i> and
+the <i>Aves</i> were absorbed in their singing and chirping and
+twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a
+rosary to help his feeble attention. Yet could he have used
+a rosary without falling out of the yew-tree? He took his
+hands from the bough for a moment and nearly overbalanced.
+<i>Make not your rosary of yew berries</i>, he found himself
+saying. Who wrote that? <i>Make not your rosary of yew
+berries.</i> Why, of course, it was Keats. It was the first
+line of the <i>Ode to Melancholy</i>. Esther was still kneeling
+out there in the sunlight. And how did the poem continue?
+<i>Make not your rosary of yew berries.</i> What was the second
+line? It was ridiculous to sit astride a bough and say
+<i>Paternosters</i> and <i>Aves</i>. He could not sit there much longer.
+And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw
+that Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling
+was standing in the doorway of the chapel looking at her,
+not speaking but waiting for her to speak, while he wound a
+strand of ivy round his fingers and unwound it again, and
+wound it round again until it broke and he was saying:</p>
+
+<p>"I thought we agreed after your last display here that
+you'd give this cursed chapel the go by?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't escape from it," Esther cried. "You don't understand,
+Will, what it means. You never have understood."</p>
+
+<p>"Dearest Essie, I understand only too well. I've paid
+pretty handsomely in having to listen to reproaches, in having
+to dry your tears and stop your sighs with kisses. Your
+damned religion is a joke. Can't you grasp that? It's not
+my fault we can't get married. If I were really the scoundrel
+you torment yourself into thinking I am, I would have
+married and taken the risk of my strumpet of a wife turning
+up. But I've treated you honestly, Essie. I can't help loving
+you. I went away once. I went away again. And a third
+time I went just to relieve your soul of the sin of loving me.
+But I'm sick of suffering for the sake of a myth, a
+superstition."</p>
+
+<p>Esther had moved close to him, and now she put a hand
+upon his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"To you, Will. Not to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Essie," said her lover. "If you knew that
+you were liable to these dreadful attacks of remorse and
+penitence, why did you ever encourage me?"</p>
+
+<p>"How dare you say I encouraged you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now don't let your religion make you dishonest," he
+stabbed. "No man seduces a woman of your character without
+as much goodwill as deserves to be called encouragement,
+and by God <i>is</i> encouragement," he went on furiously. "Let's
+cut away some of the cant before we begin arguing again
+about religion."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know what a hell you're making for me when
+you talk like that," she gasped. "If I did encourage you,
+then my sin is a thousand times blacker."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't exaggerate, my dear girl," he said wearily. "It
+isn't a sin for two people to love each other."</p>
+
+<p>"I've tried my best to think as you do, but I can't. I've
+avoided going to church. I've tried to hate religion, I've
+mocked at God .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." she broke off in despair of explaining
+the force of grace, against the gift of which she had contended
+in vain.</p>
+
+<p>"I always thought you were brave, Essie. But you're a
+real coward. The reason for all this is your fear of being
+pitchforked into a big bonfire by a pantomime demon with
+horns and a long tail." He laughed bitterly. "To think that
+you, my adored Essie, should really have the soul of a Sunday
+school teacher. You, a Bacchante of passion, to be puling
+about your sins. You! You! Girl, you're mad! I tell you
+there is no such thing as damnation. It's a bogey invented
+by priests to enchain mankind. But if there is and if that
+muddle-headed old gentleman you call God really exists and
+if he's a just God, why then let him damn me and let him
+give you your harp and your halo while I burn for both.
+Essie, my mad foolish frightened Essie, can't you understand
+that if you give me up for this God of yours you'll drive me
+to murder. If I must marry you to hold you, why then I'll
+kill that cursed wife of mine. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>It was his turn now to break off in despair of being able
+to express his will to keep Esther for his own, and because
+argument seemed so hopeless he tried to take her in his
+arms, whereupon Mark who was aching with the effort to
+maintain himself unobserved upon the bough of the yew-tree
+said his <i>Paternosters</i> and <i>Aves</i> faster than ever, that she
+might have the strength to resist that scoundrel of Rushbrooke
+Grange. He longed to have the eloquence to make
+some wonderful prayer to the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary
+Magdalene so that a miracle might happen and their images
+point accusing hands at the blasphemer below.</p>
+
+<p>And then it seemed as if a miracle did happen, for out of
+the jangle of recriminations and appeals that now signified
+no more than the noise of trees in a storm he heard the voice
+of Esther gradually gain its right to be heard, gradually win
+from its rival silence until the tale was told.</p>
+
+<p>"I know that I am overcome by the saving grace of God,"
+she was saying. "And I know that I owe it to them." She
+pointed to the holy women above the door. The squire shook
+his fist; but he still kept silence. "I have run away from
+God since I knew you, Will. I have loved you as much as
+that. I have gone to church only when I had to go for my
+brother's sake, but I have actually stuffed my ears with
+cotton wool so that no word there spoken might shake my
+faith in my right to love you. But it was all to no purpose.
+You know that it was you who told me always to come to
+our meetings through the wood and past the chapel. And
+however fast I went and however tight I shut myself up in
+thoughts of you and your love and my love I have always
+felt that these images spoke to me reproachfully in passing.
+It's not mere imagination, Will. Why, before we came to
+Wych-on-the-Wold when you went away to the Pacific that
+I might have peace of mind, I used always to be haunted by
+the idea that God was calling me back to Him, and I would
+run, yes, actually run through the woods until my legs have
+been torn by brambles."</p>
+
+<p>"Madness! Madness!" cried Starling.</p>
+
+<p>"Let it be madness. If God chooses to pursue a human
+soul with madness, the pursuit is not less swift and relentless
+for that. And I shook Him off. I escaped from religion; I
+prayed to the Devil to keep me wicked, so utterly did I love
+you. Then when my brother was offered Wych-on-the-Wold
+I felt that the Devil had heard my prayer and had indeed
+made me his own. That frightened me for a moment. When
+I wrote to you and said we were coming here and you hurried
+back, I can't describe to you the fear that overcame me when
+I first entered this hollow where you lived. Several times
+I'd tried to come down before you arrived here, but I'd
+always been afraid, and that was why the first night I brought
+Mark with me."</p>
+
+<p>"That long-legged prig and puppy," grunted the squire.</p>
+
+<p>Mark could have shouted for joy when he heard this,
+shouted because he was helping with his <i>Paternosters</i> and
+his <i>Aves</i> to drive this ruffian out of Esther's life for ever,
+shouted because his long legs were strong enough to hold on
+to this yew-tree bough.</p>
+
+<p>"He's neither a prig nor a puppy," Esther said. "I've
+treated him badly ever since he came to live with us, and
+I treated him badly on your account, because whenever I was
+with him I found it harder to resist the pursuit of God. Now
+let's leave Mark out of this. Everything was in your favour,
+I tell you. I was sure that the Devil. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"The Devil!" Starling interrupted. "Your Devil, dear
+Essie, is as ridiculous as your God. It's only your poor old
+God with his face painted black like the bogey man of
+childhood."</p>
+
+<p>"I was sure that the Devil," Esther repeated without seeming
+to hear the blasphemy, "had taken me for his own and
+given us to each other. You to me. Me to you, my darling.
+I didn't care. I was ready to burn in Hell for you. So,
+don't call me coward, for mad though you think me I was
+ready to be damned for you, and <i>I</i> believe in damnation.
+You don't. Yet the first time I passed by this chapel on my
+way to meet you again after that endless horrible parting I
+had to run away from the holy influence. I remember that
+there was a black cow in the field near the gates of the
+Grange, and I waited there while Mark poked about in this
+chapel, waited in the twilight afraid to go back and tell him
+to hurry in case I should be recaptured by God and meet you
+only to meet you never more."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you thought my old Kerry cow was the Devil,
+eh?" he sneered.</p>
+
+<p>She paid no attention, but continued enthralled by the
+passion of her spiritual adventure.</p>
+
+<p>"It was no use. I couldn't come by here every day and
+not go back. Why, once I opened the Bible at hazard just
+to show my defiance and I read <i>Her sins which are many are
+forgiven for she loved much.</i> This must be the end of our
+love, my lover, for I can't go on. Those two stone Maries
+have brought me back to God. No more with you, my own
+beloved. No more, my darling, no more. And yet if even
+now with one kiss you could give me strength to sin I should
+rejoice. But they have made my lips as cold as their own,
+and my arms that once knew how to clasp you to my heart
+they have lifted up to Heaven like their own. I am going
+into a convent at once, where until I die I shall pray for you,
+my own love."</p>
+
+<p>The birds no longer sang nor twittered nor cheeped in
+the thickets around, but all passion throbbed in the voice of
+Esther when she spoke these words. She stood there with
+her hair in disarray transfigured like a tree in autumn on
+which the sunlight shines when the gale has died, but from
+which the leaves will soon fall because winter is at hand.
+Yet her lover was so little moved by her ordeal that he went
+back to mouthing his blasphemies.</p>
+
+<p>"Go then," he shouted. "But these two stone dolls shall
+not have power to drive my next mistress into folly. Wasn't
+Mary Magdalene a sinner? Didn't she fall in love with
+Christ? Of course, she did! And I'll make an example of
+her just as Christians make an example of all women who
+love much."</p>
+
+<p>The squire pulled himself up by the ivy and struck the
+image of St. Mary Magdalene on the face.</p>
+
+<p>"When you pray for me, dear Essie, in your convent of
+greensick women, don't forget that your patron saint was
+kicked from her pedestal by your lover."</p>
+
+<p>Starling was as good as his word; but the effort he made
+to overthrow the saint carried him with it; his foot catching
+in the ivy fell head downward and striking upon a stone was
+killed.</p>
+
+<p>Mark hesitated before he jumped down from his bough,
+because he dreaded to add to Esther's despair the thought of
+his having overheard all that went before. But seeing her
+in the sunlight now filled again with the voices of birds,
+seeing her blue eyes staring in horror and the nervous twitching
+of her hands he felt that the shock of his irruption might
+save her reason and in a moment he was standing beside her
+looking down at the dead man.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me die too," she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Mark found himself answering in a kind of inspiration:</p>
+
+<p>"No, Esther, you must live to pray for his soul."</p>
+
+<p>"He was struck dead for his blasphemy. He is in Hell.
+Of what use to pray for his soul?"</p>
+
+<p>"But Esther while he was falling, even in that second, he
+had time to repent. Live, Esther. Live to pray for him."</p>
+
+<p>Mark was overcome with a desire to laugh at the stilted
+way in which he was talking, and, from the suppression of
+the desire, to laugh wildly at everything in the scene, and not
+least at the comic death of Will Starling, even at the corpse
+itself lying with a broken neck at his feet. By an effort of
+will he regained control of his muscles, and the tension of
+the last half hour finding no relief in bodily relaxation was
+stamped ineffaceably upon his mind to take its place with
+that afternoon in his father's study at the Lima Street
+Mission which first inspired him with dread of the sexual
+relation of man to woman, a dread that was now made permanent
+by what he had endured on the bough of that yew-tree.</p>
+
+<p>Thanks to Mark's intervention the business was explained
+without scandal; nobody doubted that the squire of Rushbrooke
+Grange died a martyr to his dislike of ivy's
+encroaching upon ancient images. Esther's stormy soul took
+refuge in a convent, and there it seemed at peace.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV" />CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SCHOLARSHIP</h3>
+
+
+<p>The encounter between Esther and Will Starling had the
+effect of strengthening Mark's intention to be celibate.
+He never imagined himself as a possible protagonist in such
+a scene; but the impression of that earlier encounter between
+his mother and father which gave him a horror of human
+love was now renewed. It was renewed, moreover, with
+the light of a miracle to throw it into high relief. And this
+miracle could not be explained away as a coincidence, but
+was an old-fashioned miracle that required no psychical
+buttressing, a hard and fast miracle able to withstand any
+criticism. It was a pity that out of regard for Esther he
+could not publish it for the encouragement of the faithful
+and the confusion of the unbelievers.</p>
+
+<p>The miracle of St. Mary Magdalene's intervention on his
+seventeenth birthday was the last violent impression of
+Mark's boyhood. Thenceforward life moved placidly
+through the changing weeks of a country calendar until the
+date of the scholarship examination held by the group of
+colleges that contained St. Mary's, the college he aspired to
+enter, but for which he failed to win even an exhibition. Mr.
+Ogilvie was rather glad, for he had been worried how Mark
+was going to support himself for three or four years at an
+expensive college like St. Mary's. But when Mark was no
+more successful with another group of colleges, his tutors
+began to be alarmed, wondering if their method of teaching
+Latin and Greek lacked the tradition of the public school
+necessary to success.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, it's obviously my fault," said Mark. "I expect
+I go to pieces in examinations, or perhaps I'm not intended
+to go to Oxford."</p>
+
+<p>"I beg you, my dear boy," said the Rector a little irritably,
+"not to apply such a loose fatalism to your career. What
+will you do if you don't go to the University?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's not absolutely essential for a priest to have been
+to the University," Mark argued.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but in your case I think it's highly advisable. You
+haven't had a public school education, and inasmuch as I
+stand to you <i>in loco parentis</i> I should consider myself most
+culpable if I didn't do everything possible to give you a fair
+start. You haven't got a very large sum of money to launch
+yourself upon the world, and I want you to spend what you
+have to the best advantage. Of course, if you can't get a
+scholarship, you can't and that's the end of it. But, rather
+than that you should miss the University I will supplement
+from my own savings enough to carry you through three
+years as a commoner."</p>
+
+<p>Tears stood in Mark's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You've already been far too generous," he said. "You
+shan't spend any more on me. I'm sorry I talked in that
+foolish way. It was really only a kind of affectation of
+indifference. I'm feeling pretty sore with myself for being
+such a failure; but I'll have another shot and I hope I shall
+do better."</p>
+
+<p>Mark as a last chance tried for a close scholarship at St.
+Osmund's Hall for the sons of clergymen.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a tiny place of course," said the Rector. "But it's
+authentic Oxford, and in some ways perhaps you would be
+happier at a very small college. Certainly you'd find your
+money went much further."</p>
+
+<p>The examination was held in the Easter vacation, and when
+Mark arrived at the college he found only one other candidate
+besides himself. St. Osmund's Hall with its miniature
+quadrangle, miniature hall, miniature chapel, empty of
+undergraduates and with only the Principal and a couple of
+tutors in residence, was more like an ancient almshouse than
+an Oxford college. Mark and his rival, a raw-boned youth
+called Emmett who was afflicted with paroxysms of stammering,
+moved about the precincts upon tiptoe like people
+trespassing from a high road.</p>
+
+<p>On their first evening the two candidates were invited to
+dine with the Principal, who read second-hand book
+catalogues all through dinner, only pausing from their
+perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr. Lidderdale
+or Mr. Emmett would not take another glass of wine. After
+dinner they sat in his library where the Principal addressed
+himself to the evidently uncongenial task of estimating the
+comparative fitness of his two guests to receive Mr. Tweedle's
+bounty. The Reverend Thomas Tweedle was a benevolent
+parson of the eighteenth century who by his will had provided
+the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman for
+four years. Mark was shy enough under the Principal's
+courtly inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each
+time he was asked the simplest question about his tastes or
+his ambitions. His tongue appearing like a disturbed
+mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an agonized endeavour
+to give utterance to such familiar words as "yes" or "no."
+Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back
+at all and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest
+of his life with it protruding before him or submit it to amputation
+and become a mute. When the ordeal with the
+Principal was over and the two guests were strolling back
+across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally
+and without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer
+must have had upon the Principal. Mark did his best to
+reassure poor Emmett.</p>
+
+<p>"Really," he said, "it was scarcely noticeable to anybody
+else. You noticed it, because you felt your tongue getting
+wedged like that between your teeth; but other people would
+hardly have noticed it at all. When the Principal asked you
+if you were going to take Holy Orders yourself, I'm sure he
+only thought you hadn't quite made up your mind yet."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm sure he did notice something," poor Emmett
+bewailed. "Because he began to hum."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but he was always humming," said Mark. "He
+hummed all through dinner while he was reading those book
+catalogues."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very kind of you, Lidderdale," said Emmett, "to make
+the best of it for me, but I'm not such a fool as I look, and
+the Principal certainly hummed six times as loud whenever
+he asked me a question as he did over those catalogues. I
+know what I look like when I get into one of those states.
+I once caught sight of myself in a glass by accident, and now
+whenever my tongue gets caught up like that I'm wondering
+all the time why everybody doesn't get up and run out of
+the room."</p>
+
+<p>"But I assure you," Mark persisted, "that little things like
+that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Little things like that!" Emmett interrupted furiously.
+"It's all very well for you, Lidderdale, to talk about little
+things like that. If you had a tongue like mine which seems
+to get bigger instead of smaller every year, you'd feel very
+differently."</p>
+
+<p>"But people always grow out of stammering," Mark
+pointed out.</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks very much," said Emmett bitterly, "but where
+shall I be by the time I've grown out of it? You don't suppose
+I shall win this scholarship, do you, after they've seen
+me gibbering and mouthing at them like that? But if only
+I could manage somehow to get to Oxford I should have a
+chance of being ordained, and&mdash;" he broke off, perhaps
+unwilling to embarrass his rival by any more lamentations.</p>
+
+<p>"Do forget about this evening," Mark begged, "and come
+up to my room and have a talk before you turn in."</p>
+
+<p>"No, thanks very much," said Emmett. "I must sit up
+and do some work. We've got that general knowledge paper
+to-morrow morning."</p>
+
+<p>"But you won't be able to acquire much more general
+knowledge in one evening," Mark protested.</p>
+
+<p>"I might," said Emmett darkly. "I noticed a Whitaker's
+almanack in the rooms I have. My only chance to get this
+scholarship is to do really well in my papers; and though I
+know it's no good and that this is my last chance, I'm not
+going to neglect anything that could possibly help. I've got
+a splendid memory for statistics, and if they'll only ask a few
+statistics in the general knowledge paper I may have some
+luck to-morrow. Good-night, Lidderdale, I'm sorry to have
+inflicted myself on you like this."</p>
+
+<p>Emmett hurried away up the staircase leading to his room
+and left his rival standing on the moonlit grass of the quadrangle.
+Mark was turning toward his own staircase when he
+heard a window open above and Emmett's voice:</p>
+
+<p>"I've found another Whitaker of the year before," it
+proclaimed. "I'll read that, and you'd better read this year's.
+If by any chance I did win this scholarship, I shouldn't like
+to think I'd taken an unfair advantage of you, Lidderdale."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks very much, Emmett," said Mark. "But I think
+I'll have a shot at getting to bed early."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you're not worrying," said Emmett gloomily, retiring
+from the window.</p>
+
+<p>When Mark was sitting by the fire in his room and thinking
+over the dinner with the Principal and poor Emmett's
+stammering and poor Emmett's words in the quad
+afterwards, he began to imagine what it would mean to poor
+Emmett if he failed to win the scholarship. Mark had not
+been so successful himself in these examinations as to justify
+a grand self-confidence; but he could not regard Emmett as
+a dangerous competitor. Had he the right in view of Emmett's
+handicap to accept this scholarship at his expense?
+To be sure, he might urge on his own behalf that without it
+he should himself be debarred from Oxford. What would
+the loss of it mean? It would mean, first of all, that Mr.
+Ogilvie would make the financial effort to maintain him for
+three years as a commoner, an effort which he could ill afford
+to make and which Mark had not the slightest intention of
+allowing him to make. It would mean, next, that he should
+have to occupy himself during the years before his ordination
+with some kind of work among people. He obviously
+could not go on reading theology at Wych-on-the-Wold until
+he went to Glastonbury. Such an existence, however attractive,
+was no preparation for the active life of a priest.
+It would mean, thirdly, a great disappointment to his friend
+and patron, and considering the social claims of the Church
+of England it would mean a handicap for himself. There
+was everything to be said for winning this scholarship, nothing
+to be said against it on the grounds of expediency. On
+the grounds of expediency, no, but on other grounds? Should
+he not be playing the better part if he allowed Emmett to
+win? No doubt all that was implied in the necessity for him
+to win a scholarship was equally implied in the necessity for
+Emmett to win one. It was obvious that Emmett was no
+better off than himself; it was obvious that Emmett was
+competing in a kind of despair. Mark remembered how a
+few minutes ago his rival had offered him this year's Whitaker,
+keeping for himself last year's almanack. Looked at
+from the point of view of Emmett who really believed that
+something might be gained at this eleventh hour from a study
+of the more recent volume, it had been a fine piece of self-denial.
+It showed that Emmett had Christian talents which
+surely ought not to be wasted because he was handicapped
+by a stammer.</p>
+
+<p>The spell that Oxford had already cast on Mark, the
+glamour of the firelight on the walls and raftered ceiling of
+this room haunted by centuries of youthful hope, did not
+persuade him how foolish it was to surrender all this. On
+the contrary, this prospect of Oxford so beautiful in the firelight
+within, so fair in the moonlight without, impelled him
+to renounce it, and the very strength of his temptation to
+enjoy all this by winning the scholarship helped him to make
+up his mind to lose it. But how? The obvious course was
+to send in idiotic answers for the rest of his papers. Yet
+examinations were so mysterious that when he thought he
+was being most idiotic he might actually be gaining his best
+marks. Moreover, the examiners might ascribe his answers
+to ill health, to some sudden attack of nerves, especially if
+his papers to-day had been tolerably good. Looking back
+at the Principal's attitude after dinner that night, Mark could
+not help feeling that there had been something in his manner
+which had clearly shown a determination not to award the
+scholarship to poor Emmett if it could possibly be avoided.
+The safest way would be to escape to-morrow morning, put
+up at some country inn for the next two days, and go back
+to Wych-on-the-Wold; but if he did that, the college authorities
+might write to Mr. Ogilvie to demand the reason for
+such extraordinary behaviour. And how should he explain
+it? If he really intended to deny himself, he must take care
+that nobody knew he was doing so. It would give him an
+air of unbearable condescension, should it transpire that he
+had deliberately surrendered his scholarship to Emmett.
+Moreover, poor Emmett would be so dreadfully mortified
+if he found out. No, he must complete his papers, do them
+as badly as he possibly could, and leave the result to the
+wisdom of God. If God wished Emmett to stammer forth
+His praises and stutter His precepts from the pulpit, God
+would know how to manage that seemingly so intractable
+Principal. Or God might hear his prayers and cure poor
+Emmett of his impediment. Mark wondered to what saint
+was entrusted the patronage of stammerers; but he could not
+remember. The man in whose rooms he was lodging possessed
+very few books, and those few were mostly detective
+stories.</p>
+
+<p>It amused Mark to make a fool of himself next morning
+in the general knowledge paper. He flattered himself that
+no candidate for a scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall had ever
+shown such black ignorance of the facts of every-day life.
+Had he been dropped from Mars two days before, he could
+scarcely have shown less knowledge of the Earth. Mark
+tried to convey an impression that he had been injudiciously
+crammed with Latin and Greek, and in the afternoon he
+produced a Latin prose that would have revolted the easy
+conscience of a fourth form boy. Finally, on the third day,
+in an unseen passage set from the Georgics he translated
+<i>tonsisque ferunt mantelia villis</i> by <i>having pulled down the
+villas (i.&nbsp;e. literally shaved) they carry off the mantelpieces</i>
+which he followed up with translating <i>Maeonii carchesia
+Bacchi</i> as the <i>lees of Maeonian wine (i.e. literally carcases of
+Maeonian Bacchus)</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, Lidderdale," said Emmett, when they came out of
+the lecture room where the examination was being held. "I
+had a tremendous piece of luck this afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I've just been reading the fourth Georgics last term,
+and I don't think I made a single mistake in that unseen."</p>
+
+<p>"Good work," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder when they'll let us know who's got the scholarship,"
+said Emmett. "But of course you've won," he added
+with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"I did very badly both yesterday and to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you're only saying that to encourage me," Emmett
+sighed. "It sounds a dreadful thing to say and I ought not
+to say it because it'll make you uncomfortable, but if I don't
+succeed, I really think I shall kill myself."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, that's a bargain," Mark laughed; and when his
+rival shook hands with him at parting he felt that poor Emmett
+was going home to Rutland convinced that Mark was
+just as hard-hearted as the rest of the world and just as
+ready to laugh at his misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>It was Saturday when the examination was finished, and
+Mark wished he could be granted the privilege of staying
+over Sunday in college. He had no regrets for what he had
+done; he was content to let this experience be all that he
+should ever intimately gain of Oxford; but he should like
+to have the courage to accost one of the tutors and to tell
+him that being convinced he should never come to Oxford
+again he desired the privilege of remaining until Monday
+morning, so that he might crystallize in that short space of
+time an impression which, had he been successful in gaining
+the scholarship, would have been spread over four years.
+Mark was not indulging in sentiment; he really felt that by
+the intensity of the emotion with which he would live those
+twenty-four hours he should be able to achieve for himself
+as much as he should achieve in four years. So far as the
+world was concerned, this experience would be valueless; for
+himself it would be beyond price. So far as the world was
+concerned, he would never have been to Oxford; but could
+he be granted this privilege, Oxford would live for ever in
+his heart, a refuge and a meditation until the grave. Yet this
+coveted experience must be granted from without to make
+it a perfect experience. To ask and to be refused leave to
+stay till Monday would destroy for him the value of what
+he had already experienced in three days' residence; even to
+ask and to be granted the privilege would spoil it in retrospect.
+He went down the stairs from his room and stood in
+the little quadrangle, telling himself that at any rate he might
+postpone his departure until twilight and walk the seven miles
+from Shipcot to Wych-on-the-Wold. While he was on his
+way to notify the porter of the time of his departure he met
+the Principal, who stopped him and asked how he had got on
+with his papers. Mark wondered if the Principal had been
+told about his lamentable performance and was making
+inquiries on his own account to find out if the unsuccessful
+candidate really was a lunatic.</p>
+
+<p>"Rather badly, I'm afraid, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I shall see you at dinner to-night," said the Principal
+dismissing Mark with a gesture before he had time even
+to look surprised. This was a new perplexity, for Mark
+divined from the Principal's manner that he had entirely
+forgotten that the scholarship examination was over and that
+the candidates had already dined with him. He went into
+the lodge and asked the porter's advice.</p>
+
+<p>"The Principal's a most absent-minded gentleman," said
+the porter. "Most absent-minded, he is. He's the talk of
+Oxford sometimes is the Principal. What do you think he
+went and did only last term. Why, he was having some of
+the senior men to tea and was going to put some coal on the
+fire with the tongs and some sugar in his cup. Bothered if
+he didn't put the sugar in the fire and a lump of coal in his
+cup. It didn't so much matter him putting sugar in the fire.
+That's all according, as they say. But fancy&mdash;well, I tell
+you we had a good laugh over it in the lodge when the gentlemen
+came out and told me."</p>
+
+<p>"Ought I to explain that I've already dined with him?"
+Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you in any what you might call immediate hurry to
+get away?" the porter asked judicially.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm in no hurry at all. I'd like to stay a bit longer."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you'd better go to dinner with him again to-night
+and stay in college over the Sunday. I'll take it upon myself
+to explain to the Dean why you're still here. If it had been
+tea I should have said 'don't bother about it,' but dinner's
+another matter, isn't it? And he always has dinner laid for
+two or more in case he's asked anybody and forgotten."</p>
+
+<p>Thus it came about that for the second time Mark dined
+with the Principal, who disconcerted him by saying when he
+arrived:</p>
+
+<p>"I remember now that you dined with me the night before
+last. You should have told me. I forget these things. But
+never mind, you'd better stay now you're here."</p>
+
+<p>The Principal read second-hand book catalogues all
+through dinner just as he had done two nights ago, and he
+only interrupted his perusal to inquire in courtly tones if
+Mark would take another glass of wine. The only difference
+between now and the former occasion was the absence of
+poor Emmett and his paroxysms. After dinner with some
+misgivings if he ought not to leave his host to himself Mark
+followed him upstairs to the library. The principal was one
+of those scholars who live in an atmosphere of their own
+given off by old calf-bound volumes and who apparently can
+only inhale the air of the world in which ordinary men move
+when they are smoking their battered old pipes. Mark sitting
+opposite to him by the fireside was tempted to pour
+out the history of himself and Emmett, to explain how he
+had come to make such a mess of the examination. Perhaps
+if the Principal had alluded to his papers Mark would have
+found the courage to talk about himself; but the Principal
+was apparently unaware that his guest had any ambitions
+to enter St. Osmund's Hall, and whatever questions he asked
+related to the ancient folios and quartos he took down in turn
+from his shelves. A clock struck ten in the moonlight without,
+and Mark rose to go. He felt a pang as he walked
+from the cloudy room and looked for the last time at that tall
+remote scholar, who had forgotten his guest's existence at
+the moment he ceased to shake his hand and who by the time
+he had reached the doorway was lost again in the deeps of
+the crabbed volume resting upon his knees. Mark sighed as
+he closed the library door behind him, for he knew that he
+was shutting out a world. But when he stood in the small
+silver quadrangle Mark was glad that he had not given way
+to the temptation of confiding in the Principal. It would
+have been a feeble end to his first denial of self. He was sure
+that he had done right in surrendering his place to Emmett,
+for was not the unexpected opportunity to spend these few
+more hours in Oxford a sign of God's approval? <i>Bright as
+the glimpses of eternity to saints accorded in their mortal
+hour.</i> Such was Oxford to-night.</p>
+
+<p>Mark sat for a long while at the open window of his room
+until the moon had passed on her way and the quadrangle
+was in shadow; and while he sat there he was conscious of
+how many people had inhabited this small quadrangle and of
+how they too had passed on their way like the moon, leaving
+behind them no more than he should leave behind from this
+one hour of rapture, no more than the moon had left of her
+silver upon the dim grass below.</p>
+
+<p>Mark was not given to gazing at himself in mirrors, but
+he looked at himself that night in the mirror of the tiny bedroom,
+into which the April air came up sweet and frore from
+the watermeadows of the Cherwell close at hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you do now?" he asked his reflection. "Yet,
+you have such a dark ecclesiastical face that I'm sure you'll
+be a priest whether you go to Oxford or not."</p>
+
+<p>Mark was right in supposing his countenance to be ecclesiastical.
+But it was something more than that: it was
+religious. Even already, when he was barely eighteen, the
+high cheekbones and deepset burning eyes gave him an ascetic
+look, while the habit of prayer and meditation had added to
+his expression a steadfast purpose that is rarely seen in
+people as young as him. What his face lacked were those
+contours that come from association with humanity; the ripeness
+that is bestowed by long tolerance of folly, the
+mellowness that has survived the icy winds of disillusion.
+It was the absence of these contours that made Mark think
+his face so ecclesiastical; however, if at eighteen he had possessed
+contours and soft curves, they would have been
+nothing but the contours and soft curves of that rose, youth;
+and this ecclesiastical bonyness would not fade and fall as
+swiftly as that.</p>
+
+<p>Mark turned from the glass in sudden irritation at his
+selfishness in speculating about his appearance and his future,
+when in a short time he should have to break the news to
+his guardian that he had thrown away for a kindly impulse
+the fruit of so many months of diligence and care.</p>
+
+<p>"What am I going to say to Ogilvie?" he exclaimed. "I
+can't go back to Wych and live there in pleasant idleness until
+it's time to go to Glastonbury. I must have some scheme for
+the immediate future."</p>
+
+<p>In bed when the light was out and darkness made the
+most fantastic project appear practical, Mark had an inspiration
+to take the habit of a preaching friar. Why should he
+not persuade Dorward to join him? Together they would
+tramp the English country, compelling even the dullest yokels
+to hear the word of God .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. discalced .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. over hill,
+down dale .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. telling stories of the saints and martyrs in
+remote inns .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. deep lanes .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the butterflies and the
+birds .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Dorward should say Mass in the heart of great
+woods .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. over hill, down dale .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. discalced .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+preaching to men of Christ. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>Mark fell asleep.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning Mark heard Mass at the church of the
+Cowley Fathers, a strengthening experience, because the
+Gregorian there so strictly and so austerely chanted without
+any consideration for sentimental humanity possessed that
+very effect of liberating and purifying spirit held in the bonds
+of flesh which is conveyed by the wind blowing through a
+grove of pines or by waves quiring below a rocky shore.</p>
+
+<p>If Mark had had the least inclination to be sorry for himself
+and indulge in the flattery of regret, it vanished in this
+music. Rolling down through time on the billows of the
+mighty Gregorian it were as grotesque to pity oneself as it
+were for an Arctic explorer to build a snowman for company
+at the North Pole.</p>
+
+<p>Mark came out of St. John's, Cowley, into the suburban
+prettiness of Iffley Road, where men and women in their
+Sunday best tripped along in the April sunlight, tripped along
+in their Sunday best like newly hatched butterflies and beetles.
+Mark went in and out of colleges all day long, forgetting
+about the problem of his immediate future just as he forgot
+that the people in the sunny streets were not really butterflies
+and beetles. At twilight he decided to attend Evensong
+at St. Barnabas'. Perhaps the folk in the sunny April streets
+had turned his thoughts unconsciously toward the simple
+aspirations of simple human nature. He felt when he came
+into the warm candle-lit church like one who has voyaged far
+and is glad to be at home again. How everybody sang together
+that night, and how pleasant Mark found this
+congregational outburst. It was all so jolly that if the organist
+had suddenly turned round like an Italian organ-grinder
+and kissed his fingers to the congregation, his action would
+have seemed perfectly appropriate. Even during the
+<i>Magnificat</i>, when the altar was being censed, the tinkling of
+the thurible reminded Mark of a tambourine; and the lighting
+and extinction of the candles was done with as much suppressed
+excitement as if the candles were going to shoot red
+and green stars or go leaping and cracking all round the
+chancel.</p>
+
+<p>It happened this evening that the preacher was Father
+Rowley, that famous priest of the Silchester College Mission
+in the great naval port of Chatsea. Father Rowley was a
+very corpulent man with a voice of such compassion and with
+an eloquence so simple that when he ascended into the pulpit,
+closed his eyes, and began to speak, his listeners involuntarily
+closed their eyes and followed that voice whithersoever it led
+them. He neither changed the expression of his face nor
+made use of dramatic gestures; he scarcely varied his tone,
+yet he could keep a congregation breathlessly attentive for
+an hour. Although he seemed to be speaking in a kind of
+trance, it was evident that he was unusually conscious of his
+hearers, for if by chance some pious woman coughed or
+turned the pages of a prayer-book he would hold up the
+thread of his sermon and without any change of tone reprove
+her. It was strange to watch him at such a moment, his eyes
+still tightly shut and yet giving the impression of looking
+directly at the offending member of the congregation. This
+evening he was preaching about a naval disaster which had
+lately occurred, the sinking of a great battleship by another
+great battleship through a wrong signal. He was describing
+the scene when the news reached Chatsea, telling of the
+sweethearts and wives of the lost bluejackets who waited
+hoping against hope to hear that their loved ones had escaped
+death and hearing nearly always the worst news.</p>
+
+<p>"So many of our own dear bluejackets and marines, some
+of whom only last Christmas had been eating their plum
+duff at our Christmas dinner, so many of my own dear boys
+whom I prepared for Confirmation, whose first Confession
+I had heard, and to whom I had given for the first time the
+Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke too of what it meant in the future of material
+suffering on top of their mental agony. He asked for money
+to help these women immediately, and he spoke fiercely of
+the Admiralty red tape and of the obstruction of the official
+commission appointed to administer the relief fund.</p>
+
+<p>The preacher went on to tell stories from the lives of these
+boys, finding in each of them some illustration of a Christian
+virtue and conveying to his listeners a sense of the extraordinary
+preciousness of human life, so that there was no one
+who heard him but was fain to weep for those young bluejackets
+and marines taken in their prime. He inspired in
+Mark a sense of shame that he had ever thought of people
+in the aggregate, that he had ever walked along a crowded
+street without perceiving the importance of every single
+human being that helped to compose its variety. While he
+sat there listening to the Missioner and watching the large
+tears roll slowly down his cheeks from beneath the closed
+lids, Mark wondered how he could have dared to suppose last
+night that he was qualified to become a friar and preach the
+Gospel to the poor. While Father Rowley was speaking, he
+began to apprehend that before he could aspire to do that
+he must himself first of all learn about Christ from those
+very poor whom he had planned to convert.</p>
+
+<p>This sermon was another milestone in Mark's religious
+life. It discovered in him a hidden treasure of humility, and
+it taught him to build upon the rock of human nature. He
+divined the true meaning of Our Lord's words to St. Peter:
+<i>Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church and
+the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.</i> John was the
+disciple whom Jesus loved, but he chose Peter with all his
+failings and all his follies, with his weakness and his cowardice
+and his vanity. He chose Peter, the bedrock of human
+nature, and to him he gave the keys of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Mark knew that somehow he must pluck up courage to
+ask Father Rowley to let him come and work under him at
+Chatsea. He was sure that if he could only make him grasp
+the spirit in which he would offer himself, the spirit of complete
+humility devoid of any kind of thought that he was
+likely to be of the least use to the Mission, Father Rowley
+might accept his oblation. He would have liked to wait
+behind after Evensong and approach the Missioner directly,
+so that before speaking to Mr. Ogilvie he might know what
+chance the offer had of being accepted; but he decided against
+this course, because he felt that Father Rowley's compassion
+might be embarrassed if he had to refuse his request, a point
+of view that was characteristic of the mood roused in him
+by the sermon. He went back to sleep for the last time in
+an Oxford college, profoundly reassured of the rightness of
+his action in giving up the scholarship to Emmett, although,
+which was characteristic of his new mood, he had by this
+time begun to tell himself that he had really done nothing
+at all and that probably in any case Emmett would have been
+the chosen scholar.</p>
+
+<p>If Mark had still any doubts of his behaviour, they would
+have vanished when on getting into the train for Shipcot he
+found himself in an otherwise empty third-class smoking
+carriage opposite Father Rowley himself, who with a small
+black bag beside him, so small that Mark wondered how it
+could possibly contain the night attire of so fat a man, was
+sitting back in the corner with a large pipe in his mouth.
+He was wearing one of those square felt hats sometimes seen
+on the heads of farmers, and if one had only seen his head
+and hat without the grubby clerical attire beneath one might
+have guessed him to be a farmer. Mark noticed now that his
+eyes of a limpid blue were like a child's, and he realized
+that in his voice while he was preaching there had been
+the same sweet gravity of childhood. Just at this moment
+Father Rowley caught sight of someone he knew on the
+platform and shouting from the window of the compartment
+he attracted the attention of a young man wearing an Old
+Siltonian tie.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear man," he cried, "how are you? I've just made
+a most idiotic mistake. I got it into my head that I should
+be preaching here on the first Sunday in term and was looking
+forward to seeing so many Silchester men. I can't think
+how I came to make such a muddle."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley's shoulders filled up all the space of the
+window, so that Mark only heard scattered fragments of
+the conversation, which was mostly about Silchester and the
+Siltonians he had hoped to see at Oxford.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, my dear man, good-bye," the Missioner
+shouted, as the train moved out of the station. "Come down
+and see us soon at Chatsea. The more of you men who
+come, the more we shall be pleased."</p>
+
+<p>Mark's heart leapt at these words, which seemed of good
+omen to his own suit. When Father Rowley was ensconced
+in his corner and once more puffing away at his pipe, Mark
+thought how ridiculous it would sound to say that he had
+heard him preach last night at St. Barnabas' and that, having
+been much moved by the sermon, he was anxious to be taken
+on at St. Agnes' as a lay helper. He wished that Father
+Rowley would make some remark to him that would lead
+up to his request, but all that Father Rowley said was:</p>
+
+<p>"This is a slow train to Birmingham, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>This led to a long conversation about trains, and slow
+though this one might be it was going much too fast for
+Mark, who would be at Shipcot in another twenty minutes
+without having taken any advantage of his lucky encounter.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you up at Oxford?" the priest at last inquired.</p>
+
+<p>It was now or never; and Mark took the opportunity given
+him by that one question to tell Father Rowley twenty disjointed
+facts about his life, which ended with a request to be
+allowed to come and work at Chatsea.</p>
+
+<p>"You can come and see us whenever you like," said the
+Missioner.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want just to come and pay a visit," said Mark.
+"I really do want to be given something to do, and I shan't be
+any expense. I only want to keep enough money to go to
+Glastonbury in four years' time. If you'd only see how I
+got on for a month. I don't pretend I can be of any help to
+you. I don't suppose I can. But I do so tremendously want
+you to help me."</p>
+
+<p>"Who did you say your father was?"</p>
+
+<p>"Lidderdale, James Lidderdale. He was priest-in-charge
+of the Lima Street Mission, which belonged to St. Simon's,
+Notting Hill, in those days. St. Wilfred's, Notting Dale, it is
+now."</p>
+
+<p>"Lidderdale," Father Rowley echoed. "I knew him. I
+knew him well. Lima Street. Viner's there now, a dear good
+fellow. So you're Lidderdale's son?"</p>
+
+<p>"I say, here's my station," Mark exclaimed in despair, "and
+you haven't said whether I can come or not."</p>
+
+<p>"Come down on Tuesday week," said Father Rowley.
+"Hurry up, or you'll get carried on to the next station."</p>
+
+<p>Mark waved his farewell, and he knew, as he drove back
+on the omnibus over the rolling wold to Wych that he had
+this morning won something much better than a scholarship
+at St. Osmund's Hall.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI" />CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>CHATSEA</h3>
+
+
+<p>When Mark had been exactly a week at Chatsea he
+celebrated his eighteenth birthday by writing a long
+letter to the Rector of Wych:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>St. Agnes' House,</p>
+
+<p>Keppel Street,</p>
+
+<p>Chatsea.</p>
+
+<p>St. Mark's Day.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Rector,</p>
+
+<p>Thank you very much for sending me the money. I've
+handed it over to a splendid fellow called Gurney who keeps
+all the accounts (private or otherwise) in the Mission House.
+Poor chap, he's desperately ill with asthma, and nobody
+thinks he can live much longer. He suffers tortures, particularly
+at night, and as I sleep in the next room I can hear
+him.</p>
+
+<p>You mustn't think me inconsiderate because I haven't
+written sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had seen a bit
+of this place before I wrote to you so that you might have
+some idea what I was doing and be able to realize that it is
+the one and only place where I ought to be at the moment.</p>
+
+<p>But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I
+want to try to express a little of what your kindness has
+meant to me during the last two years. I look back at myself
+just before my sixteenth birthday when I was feeling
+that I should have to run away to sea or do something mad
+in order to escape that solicitor's office, and I simply gasp!
+What and where should I be now if it hadn't been for you?
+You have always made light of the burden I must have been,
+and though I have tried to show you my gratitude I'm afraid
+it hasn't been very successful. I'm not being very successful
+now in putting it into words. I know my failure to gain a
+scholarship at Oxford has been a great disappointment to
+you, especially after you had worked so hard yourself to
+coach me. Please don't be anxious about my letting my
+books go to the wall here. I had a talk about this with
+Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to
+do in the district must only be done when I have a good
+morning's work with my books behind me. I quite realize
+the importance of a priest's education. One of the assistant
+priests here, a man called Snaith, took a good degree at
+Cambridge both in classics and theology, so I shall have
+somebody to keep me on the lines. If I stay here three years
+and then have two years at Glastonbury I don't honestly
+think that I shall start off much handicapped by having
+missed both public school and university. I expect you're
+smiling to read after one week of my staying here three
+years! But I assure you that the moment I sat down to
+supper on the evening of my arrival I felt at home. I think
+at first they all thought I was an eager young Ritualist, but
+when they found that they didn't get any rises out of ragging
+me, they shut up.</p>
+
+<p>This house is a most extraordinary place. It is an old
+Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has
+been made into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty
+or ever likely to be empty so far as I can see! I should
+think it must be rather like what the guest house of a monastery
+used to be like in the old days before the Reformation.
+The ground floor of the chapel has been turned into a gymnasium,
+and twice a week the apparatus is cleared away and
+we have a dance. Every other evening it's used furiously
+by Father Rowley's "boys." They're such a jolly lot, and
+most of them splendid gymnasts. Quite a few have become
+professional acrobats since they opened the gymnasium.
+The first morning after my arrival I asked Father Rowley
+if he'd got anything special for me to do and he told me
+to catalogue the books in his library. Everybody laughed
+at this, and I thought at first that some joke was intended,
+but when I got to his room I found it really was in utter
+confusion with masses of books lying about everywhere. So
+I set to work pretty hard and after about three days I got
+them catalogued and in good order. When I told him I had
+finished he looked very surprised, and a solemn visit of inspection
+was ordered. As the room was looking quite tidy
+at last, I didn't mind. I've realized since that Father Rowley
+always sets people the task of cataloguing and arranging his
+books when he doubts if they are really worth their salt,
+and now he complains that I have spoilt one of his best
+ordeals for slackers. I said to him that he needn't be afraid
+because from what I could see of the way he treated books
+they would be just as untidy as ever in another week.
+Everybody laughed, though I was afraid at first they might
+consider it rather cheek my talking like this, but you've got
+to stand up for yourself here because there never was such
+a place for turning a man inside out. It's a real discipline,
+and I think if I manage to deserve to stay here three years
+I shall have the right to feel I've had the finest training for
+Holy Orders anybody could possibly have.</p>
+
+<p>You know enough about Father Rowley yourself to
+understand how impossible it would be for me to give any
+impression of his personality in a letter. I have never felt
+so strongly the absolute goodness of anybody. I suppose
+that some of the great medi&aelig;val saints like St. Francis and
+St. Anthony of Padua must have been like that. One reads
+about them and what they did, but the facts one reads don't
+really tell anything. I always feel that what we really depend
+on is a kind of tradition of their absolute saintliness
+handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose
+in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it
+wouldn't matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved
+to be forgeries to-morrow, because I should still be convinced
+that Our Lord was God. I know this is a platitude,
+but I don't think until I met Father Rowley that I ever
+realized the force and power that goes with exceptional
+goodness. There are so many people who are good because
+they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he
+couldn't have ever been anything else but good, but I always
+feel that people like him remain practically out of reach of
+the ordinary person and that the goodness is all their own
+and dies with them just as it was born with them. What I
+feel about a man like Father Rowley is that he probably
+had a tremendous fight to be good. Of course, I may be
+perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at all. I
+know one of the people at the Mission House told me that,
+though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or
+more enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up
+both at St. Agnes merely to set an example to weak people.
+I feel that his goodness was with such energy fought for
+that it now exists as a kind of complete thing and will go on
+existing when Father Rowley himself is dead. I begin to
+understand the doctrine of the treasury of merit. I remember
+you once told me how grateful I ought to be to God
+because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack
+most boys. I am grateful; but at the same time I can't
+claim any merit for it! The only time in my life when I
+might have acquired any merit was when I was at Haverton
+House. Instead of doing that, I just dried up, and if I
+hadn't had that wonderful experience at Whitsuntide in
+Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I should be
+spiritually dead by now.</p>
+
+<p>This is a very long letter, and I don't seem to have left
+myself any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It
+reminds me of my father's mission church in Lima Street,
+and oddly enough a new church is being built almost next
+door just as one was being built in Lima Street. I went to
+the children's Mass last Sunday, and I seemed to see him
+walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I thought to
+myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for his
+soul. Will you do so now next time you say a black Mass?
+This is a wretched letter, and it doesn't succeed in the least
+in expressing what I owe to you and what I already owe to
+Father Rowley. I used to think that the Sacred Heart was
+a rather material device for attracting the multitude, but
+I'm beginning to realize in the atmosphere of St. Agnes' that
+it is a gloriously simple devotion and that it is human
+nature's attempt to express the inexpressible. I'll write to
+you again next week. Please give my love to everybody at
+the Rectory.</p>
+
+<p>Always your most affectionate</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>Father Rowley had been at St. Agnes' seven or eight years
+when Mark found himself attached to the Mission, in which
+time he had transformed the district completely. It was a
+small parish (actually of course it was not a parish at all,
+although it was fast qualifying to become one) of something
+over a thousand small houses, few of which were less than a
+century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly
+named after bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the
+romantic and picturesque quarter of a great naval port to the
+casual glance of a passer-by, but heartbreaking to any except
+the most courageous resident on account of its overcrowded
+and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness of
+an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest
+streets and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always
+in view, and the windows of the pawnbrokers were filled with
+the relics of long voyages, with idols and large shells, with
+savage weapons and the handiwork of remote islands.</p>
+
+<p>When Mark came to live in Keppel Street, most of the
+brothels and many of the public houses had been eliminated
+from the district, and in their place flourished various clubs
+and guilds. The services in the church were crowded: there
+was a long roll of communicants; the civilization of the city
+of God was visible in this Chatsea slum. One or two of the
+lay helpers used to horrify Mark with stories of early days
+there, and when he seemed inclined to regret that he had
+arrived so late upon the scene, they used to tease him about
+his missionary spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"If he can't reform the people," said Cartwright, one of
+the lay helpers, a tall thin young man with a long nose and
+a pleasant smile, "he still has us to reform."</p>
+
+<p>"Come along, Mark Anthony," said Warrender, another
+lay helper, who after working for seven years among the
+poor had at last been charily accepted by the Bishop for
+ordination. "Come along. Why don't you try your hand on us?"</p>
+
+<p>"You people seem to think," said Mark, "that I've got a
+mania for reforming. I don't mean that I should like to see
+St. Agnes' where it was merely for my own personal amusement.
+The only thing I'm sorry about is that I didn't actually
+see the work being done."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley came in at this moment, and everybody
+shouted that Mark was going to preach a sermon.</p>
+
+<p>"Splendid," said the Missioner whose voice when not
+moved by emotion was rich in a natural unction that
+encouraged everyone round to suppose he was being successfully
+humorous, such a savour did it add to the most
+innutritious chaff. Those who were privileged to share his
+ordinary life never ceased to wonder how in the pulpit or
+in the confessional or at prayer this unction was replaced
+by a remote beauty of tone, a plangent and thrilling compassion
+that played upon the hearts of all who heard him.</p>
+
+<p>"Now really, Father Rowley," Mark protested. "Do I
+preach a great deal? I'm always being chaffed by Cartwright
+and Warrender about an alleged mania for reforming people,
+which only exists in their imagination."</p>
+
+<p>Indeed Mark had long ago grown out of the desire to
+reform or to convert anybody, although had he wished to
+keep his hand in, he could have had plenty of practice among
+the guests of the Mission House. Nobody had ever succeeded
+in laying down the exact number of casual visitors
+that could be accommodated therein. However full it
+appeared, there was always room for one more. Taking an
+average, day in, day out through the year, one might fairly
+say that there were always eight or nine casual guests in
+addition to the eight or nine permanent residents, of whom
+Mark was soon glad to be able to count himself one. The
+company was sufficiently mixed to have been offered as a
+proof to the sceptical that there was something after all in
+simple Christianity. There would usually be a couple of
+prefects from Silchester, one or two 'Varsity men, two or
+three bluejackets or marines, an odd soldier or so, a naval
+officer perhaps, a stray priest sometimes, an earnest seeker
+after Christian example often, and often a drunkard who
+had been dumped down at the door of St. Agnes' Mission
+House in the hope that where everybody else had failed
+Father Rowley might succeed. Then there were the tramps,
+some who had heard of a comfortable night's lodging, some
+who came whining and cringing with a pretence of religion.
+This last class was discouraged as much as possible, for one
+of the first rules of the Mission House was to show no favour
+to any man who claimed to be religious, it being Father
+Rowley's chief dread to make anybody's religion a paying
+concern. Sometimes a jailbird just released from prison
+would find in the Mission House an opportunity to recover
+his self-respect. But whoever the guest was, soldier, sailor,
+tinker, tailor, apothecary, ploughboy, or thief, he was judged
+at the Mission House as a man. Some of the visitors repaid
+their host by theft or fraud; but when they did, nobody
+uttered proverbs or platitudes about mistaken kindness. If
+one lame dog bit the hand that was helping him over the
+stile, the next dog that came limping along was helped over
+just as freely.</p>
+
+<p>"What right has one miserable mortal to be disillusioned
+by another miserable mortal?" Father Rowley demanded.
+"Our dear Lord when he was nailed to the cross said 'Father,
+forgive them, for they know not what they do.' He did not
+say, 'I am fed up with these people I have come down from
+Heaven to save. I've had enough of it. Send an angel with
+a pair of pincers to pull out these nails.'"</p>
+
+<p>If the Missioner's patience ever failed, it was when he had
+to deal with High Church young men who made pilgrimages
+to St. Agnes' because they had heard that this or that service
+was conducted there with a finer relish of Romanism than
+anywhere else at the moment in England. On one occasion
+a pietistic young creature, who brought with him his own
+lace cotta but forgot to bring his nightshirt, begged to be
+allowed the joy of serving Father Rowley at early Mass next
+morning. When they came back and were sitting round the
+breakfast table, this young man simpered in a ladylike voice:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Father, couldn't you keep your fingers closed when
+you give the <i>Dominus vobiscum</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Et cum spiritu tuo," shouted Father Rowley. "I can
+keep my fingers closed when I box your ears."</p>
+
+<p>And he proved it.</p>
+
+<p>It was a real box on the ears, so hard a blow that the
+ladylike young man burst into tears to the great indignation
+of a Chief Petty Officer staying in the Mission House, who
+declared that he was half in a mind to catch the young
+swab such a snitch on the conk as really would give him
+something to blubber about. Father Rowley evidently had
+no remorse for his violence, and the young man went away
+that afternoon saying how sorry he was that the legend of
+the good work being done at St. Agnes' had been so much
+exaggerated.</p>
+
+<p>Mark wrote an account of this incident, which had given
+him intense pleasure, to Mr. Ogilvie. Perhaps the Rector
+was afraid that Mark in his ambition to avoid "churchiness"
+was inclining toward the opposite extreme; or perhaps,
+charitable and saintly man though he was, he felt a pang of
+jealousy at Mark's unbounded admiration of his new friend;
+or perhaps it was merely that the east wind was blowing more
+sharply than usual that morning over the wold into the
+Rectory garden. Whatever the cause, his answering letter
+made Mark feel that the Rector did not appreciate Father
+Rowley as thoroughly as he ought.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Rectory,</p>
+
+<p>Wych-on-the-Wold.</p>
+
+<p>Oxon.</p>
+
+<p>Dec. 1.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Mark,</p>
+
+<p>I was glad to get your long and amusing letter of last
+week. I am delighted to think that as the months go by
+you are finding work among the poor more and more congenial.
+I would not for the world suggest your coming back
+here for Christmas after what you tell me of the amount of
+extra work it will entail for everybody in the Mission House;
+at the same time it would be useless to pretend that we shan't
+all be disappointed not to see you until the New Year.</p>
+
+<p>On reading through your last letter again I feel just a
+little worried lest, in the pleasure you derive from Father
+Rowley's treatment of what was no doubt a very irritating
+young man, you may be inclined to go to the opposite extreme
+and be too ready to laugh at real piety when it is not
+accompanied by geniality and good fellowship, or by an
+obvious zeal for good works. I know you will acquit me
+of any desire to defend extreme "churchiness," and I have
+no doubt you will remember one or two occasions in the
+past when I was rather afraid that you were tending that
+way yourself. I am not in the least criticizing Father
+Rowley's method of dealing with it, but I am a trifle uneasy
+at the inordinate delight it seems to have afforded you. Of
+course, it is intolerable for any young man serving a priest
+at Mass to watch his fingers all the time, but I don't think
+you have any right to assume because on this occasion the
+young man showed himself so sensitive to mere externals
+that he is always aware only of externals. Unfortunately
+a very great deal of true and fervid piety exists under this
+apparent passion for externals. Remember that the ordinary
+criticism by the man in the street of Catholic ceremonies
+and of Catholic methods of worship involves us all in this
+condemnation. I suppose that you would consider yourself
+justified, should the circumstances permit (which in this
+case of course they do not), in protesting against a priest's
+not taking the Eastward Position when he said Mass. I
+was talking to Colonel Fraser the other day, and he was
+telling me how much he had enjoyed the ministrations of
+the Reverend Archibald Tait, the Leicestershire cricketer,
+who throughout the "second service" never once turned his
+back on the congregation, and, so far as I could gather from
+the Colonel's description, conducted this "second service"
+very much as a conjuror performs his tricks. When I ventured
+to argue with the Colonel, he said to me: "That is
+the worst of you High Churchmen, you make the ritual
+more important than the Communion itself." All human
+judgments, my dear Mark, are relative, and I have no doubt
+that this unpleasant young man (who, as I have already said,
+was no doubt justly punished by Father Rowley) may have
+felt the same kind of feeling in a different degree that I
+should feel if I assisted at the jugglery of the Reverend
+Archibald Tait. At any rate you, my dear boy, are bound
+to credit this young man with as much sincerity as yourself,
+otherwise you commit a sin against charity. You must acquire
+at least as much toleration for the Ritualist as I am
+glad to notice you are acquiring for the thief. When you
+are a priest yourself, and in a comparatively short time you
+will be a priest, I do hope you won't, without his experience,
+try to imitate Father Rowley too closely in his summary
+treatment of what I have already I hope made myself quite
+clear in believing to be in this case a most insufferable young
+man. Don't misunderstand this letter. I have such great
+hopes of you in the stormy days to come, and the stormy
+days are coming, that I should feel I was wrong if I didn't
+warn you of your attitude towards the merest trifles, for I
+shall always judge you and your conduct by standards that
+I should be very cautious of setting for most of my penitents.</p>
+
+<p>Your ever affectionate,</p>
+
+<p>Stephen Ogilvie.</p>
+
+
+<p>My mother and Miriam send you much love. We miss you
+greatly at Wych. Esther seems happy in her convent and
+will soon be clothed as a novice.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Mark read this letter, he was prompt to admit himself
+in the wrong; but he could not bear the least implied
+criticism of Father Rowley.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>St. Agnes' House,</p>
+
+<p>Keppel Street,</p>
+
+<p>Chatsea.</p>
+
+<p>Dec. 3.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Mr. Ogilvie,</p>
+
+<p>I'm afraid I must have expressed myself very badly in my
+last letter if I gave you the least idea that Father Rowley
+was not always charity personified. He had probably come
+to the conclusion that the young man was not much good
+and no doubt he deliberately made it impossible for him to
+stay on at the Mission House. We do get an awful lot of
+mere loafers here; I don't suppose that anybody who keeps
+open house can avoid getting them. After all, if the young
+man had been worth anything he would have realized that
+he had made a fool of himself and by the way he took his
+snubbing have re-established himself. What he actually did
+was to sulk and clear out with a sneer at the work done here.
+I'm sorry I gave you the impression that I was triumphing
+so tremendously over his discomfiture. By writing about it
+I probably made the incident appear much more important
+than it really was. I've no doubt I did triumph a little, and
+I'm afraid I shall never be able not to feel rather glad when
+a fellow like that is put in his place. I am not for a moment
+going to try to argue that you can carry Christian charity
+too far. The more one meditates on the words, and actions
+of Our Lord, the more one grasps how impossible it is to
+carry charity too far. All the same, one owes as much
+charity to Father Rowley as to the young man. This sounds
+now I have written it down as if I were getting in a hit at
+you, and that is the worst of writing letters to justify oneself.
+What I am trying to say is that if I were to have
+taken up arms for the young man and supposed him to be
+ill-used or misjudged I should be criticizing Father Rowley.
+I think that perhaps you don't quite realize what a saint he
+is in every way. This is my fault, no doubt, because in my
+letters to you I have always emphasized anything that would
+bring into relief his personality. I expect that I've been too
+much concerned to draw a picture of him as a man, in doing
+which I've perhaps been unsuccessful in giving you a picture
+of him as a priest. It's always difficult to talk or write about
+one's intimate religious feelings, and you've been the only
+person to whom I ever have been able to talk about them.
+However much I admire and revere Father Rowley I doubt
+if I could talk or write to him about myself as I do to you.</p>
+
+<p>Until I came here I don't think I ever quite realized all
+that the Blessed Sacrament means. I had accepted the Sacrifice
+of the Mass as one accepts so much in our creed,
+without grasping its full implication. If anybody were to
+have put me through a catechism about the dogma I should
+have answered with theological exactitude, without any
+appearance of misapprehending the meaning of it; but it was
+not until I came here that its practical reality&mdash;I don't know
+if I'm expressing myself properly or not, I'm pretty sure
+I'm not; I don't mean practical application and I don't mean
+any kind of addition to my faith; perhaps what I mean is
+that I've learnt to grasp the mystery of the Mass outside
+myself, outside that is to say my own devotion, my own
+awe, as a practical fact alive to these people here. Sometimes
+when I go to Mass I feel as people who watched Our
+Lord with His disciples and followers must have felt. I
+feel like one of those people who ran after Him and asked
+Him what they could do to be saved. I feel when I look at
+what has been done here as if I must go to each of these
+poor people in turn and beg them to bring me to the feet of
+Christ, just as I suppose on the shores of the sea of Galilee
+people must have begged St. Peter or St. Andrew or St.
+James or St. John to introduce them, if one can use such a
+word for such an occasion. This seems to me the great work
+that Father Rowley has effected in this parish. I have only
+had one rather shy talk with him about religion, and in the
+course of it I said something in praise of what his personality
+had effected.</p>
+
+<p>"My personality has effected nothing," he answered.
+"Everything here is effected by the Blessed Sacrament."</p>
+
+<p>That is why he surely has the right without any consideration
+for the dignity of churchy young men to box their
+ears if they question his outward respect for the Blessed
+Sacrament. Even Our Lord found it necessary at least on
+one occasion to chase the buyers and sellers out of the
+Temple, and though it is not recorded that He boxed the
+ears of any Pharisee, it seems to me quite permissible to
+believe that He did! He lashed them with scorn anyway.</p>
+
+<p>To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry
+of the so-called Evangelical party "Jesus only"? Well,
+Father Rowley has really managed to make out of what
+was becoming a sort of ecclesiastical party cry something
+that really is evangelical and at the same time Catholic.
+These people are taught to make the Blessed Sacrament the
+central fact of their lives in a way that I venture to say no
+Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has ever made
+Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts, because
+with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them,
+Which is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures.
+I could fill a book with stories of the wonderful behaviour
+of these poor souls. The temptation is to say of a man like
+Father Rowley that he has such a natural spring of human
+charity flowing from his heart that by offering to the world
+a Christlike example he converts his flock. Certainly he does
+give a Christlike example and undoubtedly that must have a
+great influence on his people; but he does not believe, and
+I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any use without
+Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of
+Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the
+Blessed Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural
+service. Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament
+Christ Himself, so that the poor people may flock
+round Him. He does not go round arguing with them, persuading
+them, but in the crises of their lives, as the answer
+to every question, as the solution of every difficulty and
+doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers them
+the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a
+great use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of
+the Bishop, who considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons,
+all his actions revolve round that one great fact.
+"Jesus Christ is what you need," he says, "and Jesus Christ
+is here in your church, here upon your altar."</p>
+
+<p>You can't go into the little church without finding fifty
+people praying before the Blessed Sacrament. The other
+day when the "King Harry" was sunk by the "Trafalgar,"
+the people here subscribed I forget how many pounds for
+the widows and children of the bluejackets and marines of
+the Mission who were drowned, and when it was finished and
+the subscription list was closed, they subscribed all over again
+to erect an altar at which to say Masses for the dead. And
+the old women living in Father Rowley's free houses that
+were once brothels gave up their summer outing so that the
+money spent on them might be added to the fund. When
+the Bishop of Silchester came here last week for Confirmation
+he asked Father Rowley what that altar was.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," he said. But
+when Father Rowley told him about the poor people and
+the old women who had no money of their own, he said:
+"That is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."</p>
+
+<p>I am beginning to write as if it was necessary to convince
+you of the necessity of making the Blessed Sacrament the
+central feature of the religious life to-day and for ever until
+the end of the world. But, I know you won't think I'm
+doing anything of the kind, for really I am only trying to
+show you how much my faith has been strengthened and
+how much my outlook has deepened and how much more
+than ever I long to be a priest to be able to give poor people
+Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.</p>
+
+<p>Your ever affectionate</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII" />CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DRUNKEN PRIEST</h3>
+
+
+<p>Gradually, Mark found to his pleasure and his pride
+that he was becoming, if not indispensable to Father
+Rowley (the Missioner found no human being indispensable)
+at any rate quite evidently useful. Perhaps Father Rowley
+though that in allowing himself to rely considerably upon
+Mark's secretarial talent he was indulging himself in a
+luxury to which he was not entitled. That was Father
+Rowley's way. The moment he discovered himself enjoying
+anything too much, whether it was a cigar or a secretary, he
+cut himself off from it, and this not in any spirit of mortification
+for mortification's sake, but because he dreaded the
+possibility of putting the slightest drag upon his freedom
+to criticize others. He had no doubt at all in his own mind
+that he was perfectly justified in making use of Mark's intelligence
+and energy. But in a place like the Mission House,
+where everybody from lay helper to casual guest was supposed
+to stand on his own feet, the Missioner himself felt
+that he must offer an example of independence.</p>
+
+<p>"You're spoiling me, Mark Anthony," he said one day.
+"There's nothing for me to do this evening."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," Mark agreed contentedly. "I want to give you
+a rest for once."</p>
+
+<p>"Rest?" the priest echoed. "You don't seriously expect a
+fat man like me to sit down in an armchair and rest, do you?
+Besides, you've got your own reading to do, and you didn't
+come to Chatsea as my punkah walla."</p>
+
+<p>Mark insisted that he was getting along in his own way
+quite fast enough, and that he had plenty of time on his hands
+to keep Father Rowley's correspondence in some kind of
+order.</p>
+
+<p>"All these other people have any amount to do," said Mark.
+"Cartwright has his boys every evening and Warrender has
+his men."</p>
+
+<p>"And Mark Anthony has nothing but a fat, poverty-stricken,
+slothful mission priest," Father Rowley gurgled.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and you're more trouble than all the rest put together.
+Look here, I've written to the Bishop's chaplain
+about that confirmation; I explained why we wanted to hold
+a special confirmation for these two boys we are emigrating,
+and he has written back to say that the Bishop has no objection
+to a special confirmation's being held by the Bishop of
+Matabeleland when he comes to stay here next week. At the
+same time, he says the Bishop doesn't want it to become a
+precedent."</p>
+
+<p>"No. I can quite understand that," Father Rowley
+chuckled. "Bishops are haunted by the creation of precedents.
+A precedent in the life of a bishop is like an illegitimate
+child in the life of a respectable churchwarden. No,
+the only thing I fear is that if I devour all your spare time
+you won't get quite what you wanted to get by coming to live
+with us."</p>
+
+<p>He laid a fat hand on Mark's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't bother about me," said Mark. "I get all I
+want and more than I expected if I can be of the least use
+to you. I know I'm rather disappointing you by not behaving
+like half the people who come down here and want to
+get up a concert on Monday, a dance on Tuesday, a conjuring
+entertainment on Wednesday, a street procession on Thursday,
+a day of intercession on Friday, and an amateur dramatic
+entertainment on Saturday, not to mention acting as ceremonarius
+on Sunday. I know you'd like me to propose all
+sorts of energetic diversions, so that you could have the
+pleasure of assuring me that I was only proposing them to
+gratify my own vanity, which of course would be perfectly
+true. Luckily I'm of a retiring disposition, and I don't want
+to do anything to help the ten thousand benighted parishioners
+of Saint Agnes', except indirectly by striving to help
+in my own feeble way the man who really is helping them.
+Now don't throw that inkpot at me, because the room's quite
+dirty enough already, and as I've made you sit still for five
+minutes I've achieved something this evening that mighty few
+people have achieved in Keppel Street. I believe the only
+time you really rest is in the confessional box."</p>
+
+<p>"Mark Anthony, Mark Anthony," said the priest, "you
+talk a great deal too much. Come along now, it's bedtime."</p>
+
+<p>One of the rules of the Mission House was that every
+inmate should be in bed by ten o'clock and all lights out by
+a quarter past. The day began with Mass at seven o'clock
+at which everybody was expected to be present; and from
+that time onward everybody was so fully occupied that it
+was essential to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Guests who
+came down for a night or two were often apt to forget
+how much the regular workers had to do and what a tax
+it put upon the willing servants to manage a house of which
+nobody could say ten minutes before a meal how many
+would sit down to it, nor even until lights out for how many
+people beds must be made. In case any guest should forget
+this rule by coming back after ten o'clock, Father Rowley
+made a point of having the front door bell to ring in his
+bedroom, so that he might get out of bed at any hour of the
+night and admit the loiterer. Guests were warned what
+would be the effect of their lack of consideration, and it was
+seldom that Father Rowley was disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>Among the guests there was one class of which a representative
+was usually to be found at the Mission House.
+This was the drunken clergyman, which sounds as if there
+was at this date a high proportion of drunken clergymen in
+the Church of England; but which means that when one did
+come to St. Agnes' he usually stayed for a long time, because
+he would in most cases have been sent there when everybody
+else had despaired of him to see what Father Rowley could
+effect.</p>
+
+<p>About the time when Mark was beginning to be recognized
+as Father Rowley's personal vassal, it happened that
+the Reverend George Edward Mousley who had been
+handed on from diocese to diocese during the last five years
+had lately reached the Mission House. For more than two
+months now he had spent his time inconspicuously reading
+in his own room, and so well had he behaved, so humbly
+had he presented himself to the notice of his fellow guests,
+that Father Rowley was moved one afternoon to dictate a
+letter about him to Mark, who felt that the Missioner by
+taking him so far into his confidence had surrendered to his
+pertinacity and that thenceforth he might consider himself
+established as his private secretary.</p>
+
+<p>"The letter is to the Lord Bishop Suffragan of Warwick,
+St. Peter's Rectory, Warwick," Father Rowley began. "My
+dear Bishop of Warwick, I have now had poor Mousley here
+for two months. It is not a long time in which to effect a
+lasting reformation of one who has fallen so often and so
+grievously, but I think you know me well enough not to
+accuse me of being too sanguine about drunken priests. I
+have had too many of them here for that. In his case however
+I do feel justified in asking you to agree with me in
+letting him have an opportunity to regain the respect due to
+himself and the reverence due to his priesthood by being
+allowed once more to the altar. I should not dream of allowing
+him to officiate without your permission, because his sad
+history has been so much a personal burden to yourself. I'm
+afraid that after the many disappointments he has inflicted
+upon you, you will be doubtful of my judgment. Yet I do
+think that the critical moment has arrived when by surprising
+him thus we might clinch the matter of his future behaviour
+once and for all. His conduct here has been so humble and
+patient and in every way exemplary that my heart bleeds
+for him. Therefore, my dear Bishop of Warwick, I hope
+you will agree to what I firmly trust will be the completion
+of his spiritual cure. I am writing to you quite impersonally
+and informally, as you see, so that in replying to me you will
+not be involving yourself in the affairs of another diocese.
+You will, of course, put me down as much a Jesuit as ever
+in writing to you like this, but you will equally, I know,
+believe me to be, Yours ever affectionately in Our Blessed
+Lord.</p>
+
+<p>"And I'll sign it as soon as you can type it out," Father
+Rowley wound up.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I do hope he will agree," Mark exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"He will," the Missioner prophesied. "He will because
+he is a wise and tender and godly man and therefore will
+never be more than a Bishop Suffragan as long as he lives.
+Mark!"</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked up at the severity of the tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Mark! Correct me when I fall into the habit of sneering
+at the episcopate."</p>
+
+<p>That night Father Rowley was attending a large temperance
+demonstration in the Town Hall for the purpose of
+securing if possible a smaller proportion of public houses
+than one for every eighty of the population, which was the
+average for Chatsea. The meeting lasted until nearly ten
+o'clock; and it had already struck the hour when Father
+Rowley with Mark and two or three others got back to
+Keppel Street. There was nothing Father Rowley disliked so
+much as arriving home himself after ten, and he hurried
+up to his room without inquiring if everybody was in.</p>
+
+<p>Mark's window looked out on Keppel Street; and the
+May night being warm and his head aching from the effects
+of the meeting, he sat for nearly an hour at the open window
+gazing down at the passers by. There was not much
+to see, nothing more indeed than couples wandering home,
+a bluejacket or two, an occasional cat, and a few women
+carrying jugs of beer. By eleven o'clock even this slight
+traffic had ceased, and there was nothing down the silent
+street except a salt wind from the harbour that roused a
+memory of the beach at Nancepean years ago when he had
+sat there watching the glow-worm and decided to be a lighthouse-keeper
+keeping his lamps bright for mariners homeward
+bound. It was of streets like Keppel Street that they
+would have dreamed, with the Stag Light winking to port,
+and the west wind blowing strong astern. What a lighthouse-keeper
+Father Rowley was! How except by the grace of
+God could one explain such goodness as his? Fashions in
+saintliness might change, but there was one kind of saint
+that always and for every creed spoke plainly of God's
+existence, such saints as St. Francis of Assisi or St. Anthony
+of Padua, who were manifestly the heirs of Christ. With
+what a tender cynicism Our Lord had called St. Peter to be
+the foundation stone of His Church, with what a sorrowful
+foreboding of the failure of Christianity. Such a choice
+appeared as the expression of God's will not to be let down
+again as He was let down by Adam. Jesus Christ, conscious
+at the moment of what He must shortly suffer at the hands
+of mankind, must have been equally conscious of the failure
+of Christianity two thousand years beyond His Agony and
+Bloody Sweat and Crucifixion. Why, within a short time
+after His life on earth it was necessary for that light from
+heaven to shine round about Saul on the Damascus road,
+because already scoffers, while the disciples were still alive,
+may have been talking about the failure of Christianity. It
+must have been another of God's self-imposed limitations
+that He did not give to St. John that capacity of St. Paul
+for organization which might have made practicable the
+Christianity of the master Who loved him. <i>Woman, behold
+thy son! Behold thy mother!</i> That dying charge showed
+that Our Lord considered John the most Christlike of His
+disciples, and he remained the most Christlike man until
+twelve hundred years later St. Francis was born at Assisi.
+St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Dominic, if Christianity could
+only produce mighty individualists of Faith like them, it
+could scarcely have endured as it had endured. <i>And now
+abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of
+these is charity.</i> There was something almost wistful in
+those words coming from the mouth of St. Paul. It was
+scarcely conceivable that St. John or St. Francis could ever
+have said that; it would scarcely have struck either that the
+three virtues were separable.</p>
+
+<p>Keppel Street was empty now. Mark's headache had been
+blown away by the night wind with his memories and the
+incoherent thoughts which had gathered round the contemplation
+of Father Rowley's character. He was just going to
+draw away from the window and undress when he caught
+sight of a figure tacking from one pavement to the other up
+Keppel Street. Mark watched its progress, amused at the
+extraordinary amount of trouble it was giving itself, until
+one tack was brought to a sharp conclusion by a lamp-post
+to which the figure clung long enough to be recognized as
+that of the Reverend George Edward Mousley, who had been
+tacking like this to make the harbour of the Mission House.
+Mark, remembering the letter which had been written to the
+Bishop of Warwick, wondered if he could not at any rate
+for to-night spare Father Rowley the disappointment of
+knowing that his plea for re-instatement was already answered
+by the drunken priest himself. He must make up
+his mind quickly, because even with the zigzag course
+Mousley was taking he would soon be ringing the bell of
+the Mission House, which meant that Father Rowley would
+be woken up and go down to let him in. Of course, he
+would have to know all about it in the morning, but to-night
+when he had gone to bed tired and full of hope for temperance
+in general and the reformation of Mousley in particular
+it was surely right to let him sleep in ignorance.
+Mark decided to take it upon himself to break the rules of
+the house, to open the door to Mousley, and if possible to get
+him upstairs to bed quietly. He went down with a lighted
+candle, crept across the gymnasium, and opened the door.
+Mousley was still tacking from pavement to pavement and
+making very little headway against a strong current of
+drink. Mark thought he had better go out and offer his
+services as pilot, because Mousley was beginning to sing an
+extraordinary song in which the tune and the words of <i>Good-bye,
+Dolly, I must leave you</i>, had got mixed up with <i>O happy
+band of pilgrims</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Mr. Mousley, you mustn't sing now," said
+Mark taking hold of the arm with which the drunkard was
+trying to beat time. "It's after eleven o'clock, and you're
+just outside the Mission House."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been just outside the Mission House for an hour
+and three quarters, old chap," said Mr. Mousley solemnly.
+"Most incompatible thing I've ever known. I got back here
+at a quarter past nine, and I was just going to walk in when
+the house took two paces to the rear, and I've been walking
+after it the whole evening. Most incompatible thing I've
+ever known. Most incompatible thing that's ever happened
+to me in my life, Lidderdale. If I were a superstitious man,
+which I'm not, I should say the house was bewitched. If I
+had a moment to spare, I should sit down at once and write
+an account of my most incompatible experience to the Society
+of Psychical Research, if I were a superstitious man, which
+I'm not. Yes. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mousley tried to focus his glassy eyes upon the arcana
+of spiritualism, rocking ambiguously the while upon the kerb.
+Mark murmured something more about the need for going
+in quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's very kind of you to come out and talk to me like
+this," the drunken priest went on. "But what you ought to
+have done was to have kept hold of the house for a minute
+or two so as to give me time to get in quietly. Now we
+shall probably both be out here all night trying to get in
+quietly. It's impossible to keep warm by this lamp-post.
+Most inadequate heating arrangement. It is a lamp-post,
+isn't it? Yes, I thought it was. I had a fleeting impression
+that it was my bedroom candle, but I see now that I was mistaken,
+I see now perfectly clearly that it is a lamp-post, if
+not two. Of course, that may account for my not being
+able to get into the Mission House. I was trying to decide
+which front door I should go in by, and while I was waiting
+I think I must have gone in by the wrong one, for I hit my
+nose a most severe blow on the nose. One has to remember
+to be very careful with front doors. Of course, if it was
+my own house I should have used a latch-key instanter; for
+I inevitably, I mean invariably, carry a latch-key about with
+me and when it won't open my front door I use it to wind
+my watch. You know, it's one of those small keys you can
+wind up watches with, if you know the kind of key I mean.
+I'd draw you a picture of it if I had a pencil, but I haven't
+got a pencil."</p>
+
+<p>"Now don't stay talking here," Mark urged. "Come along
+back, and do try to come quietly. I keep telling you it's after
+eleven o'clock, and you know Father Rowley likes everybody
+to be in by ten."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I've been saying to myself the whole evening,"
+said Mr. Mousley. "Only what happened, you see,
+was that I met the son of a man who used to know my
+father, a very nice fellow indeed, a very intellectual fellow.
+I never remember spending a more intellectual evening in my
+life. A feast of reason and a flowing bowl, I mean soul,
+s-o-u-l, not b-o-u-l. Did I say bowl? Soul. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Soul. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said Mark. "But if you've had such a jolly
+evening, come in now and don't make a noise."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll come in whenever you like," Mr. Mousley offered.
+"I'm at your disposition entirely. The only request I have
+to make is that you will guarantee that the house stays where
+it was built. It's all very fine for an ordinary house to behave
+like this, but when a mission house behaves like this I
+call it disgraceful. I don't know what I've done to the house
+that it should conceive such a dislike to me. I say, Lidderdale,
+have they been taking up the drains or something in
+this street? Because I distinctly had an impression just then
+that I put my foot into a hole."</p>
+
+<p>"The street's perfectly all right," said Mark. "Nothing
+has been done to it."</p>
+
+<p>"There's no reason why they shouldn't take up the drains
+if they want to, I'm not complaining. Drains have to be
+taken up and I should be the last man to complain; but I
+merely asked a question, and I'm convinced that they have
+been taking up the drains. Yes, I've had a very intellectual
+evening. My head's whirling with philosophy. We've talked
+about everything. My friend talked a good deal about
+Buddhism. And I made rather a good joke about Confucius
+being so confusing, at which I laughed inordinately. Inordinately,
+Lidderdale. I've had a very keen sense of humour
+ever since I was a baby. I say, Lidderdale, you certainly
+know your way about this street. I'm very much obliged to
+me for meeting you. I shall get to know the street in time.
+You see, my object was to get beyond the house, because
+I said to myself 'the house is in Keppel Street, it can dodge
+about <i>in</i> Keppel Street, but it can't be in any other street,'
+so I thought that if I could dodge it into the corner of Keppel
+Street&mdash;you follow what I mean? I may be talking a bit
+above your head, we've been talking philosophy all the evening,
+but if you concentrate you'll follow my meaning."</p>
+
+<p>"Here we are," said Mark, for by this time he had persuaded
+Mr. Mousley to put his foot upon the step of the
+front door.</p>
+
+<p>"You managed the house very well," said the clergyman.
+"It's extraordinary how a house will take to some people and
+not to others. Now I can do anything I like with dogs, and
+you can do anything you like with houses. But it's no good
+patting or stroking a house. You've got to manage a house
+quite differently to that. You've got to keep a house's accounts.
+You haven't got to keep a dog's accounts."</p>
+
+<p>They were in the gymnasium by now, which by the light
+of Mark's small candle loomed as vast as a church.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk as you go upstairs," Mark admonished.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that a dog I see there?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no," said Mark. "It's the horse. Come along."</p>
+
+<p>"A horse?" Mousley echoed. "Well, I can manage horses
+too. Come here, Dobbin. If I'd known we were going to
+meet a horse I should have brought back some sugar with
+me. I suppose it's too late to go back and buy some sugar
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," said Mark impatiently. "Much too late. Come
+along."</p>
+
+<p>"If I had a piece of sugar he'd follow us upstairs. You'll
+find a horse will go anywhere after a piece of sugar. It is a
+horse, isn't it? Not a donkey? Because if it was a donkey
+he would want a thistle, and I don't know where I can get
+a thistle at this time of night. I say, did you prod me in the
+stomach then with anything?" asked Mr. Mousley severely.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Mark. "Come along, it was the parallel
+bars."</p>
+
+<p>"I've not been near any bars to-night, and if you are suggesting
+that I've been in bars you're making an insinuation
+which I very much resent, an insinuation which I resent most
+bitterly, an insinuation which I should not allow anybody to
+make without first pointing out that it was an insinuation."</p>
+
+<p>"Do come down off that ladder," Mark said.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon, Lidderdale. I was under the impression
+for the moment that I was going upstairs. I have really
+been so confused by Confucius and by the extraordinary
+behaviour of the house to-night, recoiling from me as it did,
+that for the moment I was under the impression that I was
+going upstairs."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Mr. Mousley fell from the ladder, luckily
+on one of the gymnasium mats.</p>
+
+<p>"I do think it's a most ridiculous habit," he said, "not to
+place a doormat in what I might describe as a suitable cavity.
+The number of times in my life that I've fallen over doormats
+simply because people will not take the trouble to make the
+necessary depression in the floor with which to contain such
+a useful domestic receptacle you would scarcely believe. I
+must have fallen over thousands of doormats in my life," he
+shouted at the top of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll wake everybody up in the house," Mark exclaimed
+in an agony. "For heaven's sake keep quiet."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we are in the house, are we?" said Mr. Mousley.
+"I'm very much relieved to hear you say that, Lidderdale.
+For a brief moment, I don't know why, I was almost as
+confused as Confucius as to where we were."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment, candle in hand, and in a white flannel
+nightgown looking larger than ever, Father Rowley appeared
+in the gallery above and leaning over demanded who was
+there.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that Father Rowley?" Mr. Mousley inquired with
+intense courtesy. "Or do my eyes deceive me? You'll
+excuse me from replying to your apparently simple question,
+Father Rowley, but I have met such a number of people
+to-night including the son of a man who used to know my
+father that I really don't know who <i>is</i> there, although I'm
+inclined to think that <i>I</i> am here. But I've had a series of
+such a remarkable series of adventures to-night that I should
+like your advice about them. I've been spending a very intellectual
+evening, Father Rowley."</p>
+
+<p>"Go to bed," said the mission priest severely. "I'll speak
+to you in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>"Father Rowley isn't annoyed with me, is he?" Mr.
+Mousley asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I think he's rather annoyed at your being so late," said
+Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Late for what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that you, Mark, down there?" asked the Missioner.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm lighting Mr. Mousley across the gymnasium," Mark
+explained. "I think I'd better take him up to his room."</p>
+
+<p>"If your young friend is as clever at managing rooms as
+he is at managing houses we shall get on splendidly, Father
+Rowley. I have perfect confidence in his manner with rooms.
+He soothed this house in the most remarkable way. It was
+jumping about like a pea in a pod till he caught hold of the
+reins."</p>
+
+<p>"Mark, go to bed. I will see Mr. Mousley to his room."</p>
+
+<p>"Several years ago," said the drunken priest. "I went
+with an old friend to see Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth.
+The resemblance between Father Rowley and Miss Ellen
+Terry is very remarkable. Good-night, Lidderdale, I am
+perfectly comfortable on this mat. Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>In the gallery above Mark, who had not dared to disobey
+Father Rowley's orders, asked him what was to be done to
+get Mr. Mousley to bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and wake Cartwright and Warrender to help me to
+get him upstairs," the Missioner commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"I can help you. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." Mark began.</p>
+
+<p>"Do what I say," said the Missioner curtly.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning Father Rowley sent for Mark to give his
+account of what had happened the night before, and when
+Mark had finished his tale, the priest sat for a while in
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to send him away?" Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Send him away?" Father Rowley repeated. "Where
+would I send him? If he can't keep off drink in this house
+and in these surroundings where else will he keep off drink?
+No, I'm only amused at my optimism."</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock on the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I expect that is Mr. Mousley," said Mark. "I'll leave
+you with him."</p>
+
+<p>"No, don't go away," said the Missioner. "If Mousley
+didn't mind your seeing him as he was last night, there's no
+reason why this morning he should mind your hearing my
+comments upon his behaviour."</p>
+
+<p>The tap on the door was repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in, come in, Mousley, and take a seat."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mousley walked timidly across the room and sat on
+the very edge of the chair offered him by Father Rowley.
+He was a quiet, rather drab little man, the kind of little man
+who always loses his seat in a railway carriage and who
+always gets pushed further up in an omnibus, one of life's
+pawns. The presence of Mark did not seem to affect him,
+for no sooner was he seated than he began to apologize with
+suspicious rapidity, as if by now his apologies had been reduced
+to a formula.</p>
+
+<p>"I really must apologize, Father Rowley, for my lateness
+last night and for coming in, I fear, slightly the worse for
+liquor. The fact is I had a little headache and went to the
+chemist for a pick-me-up, on top of which I met an old college
+friend, and though I don't think I had more than two
+glasses of beer I may have had three. They didn't seem to
+go very well with the pick-me-up. I assure you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Stop," said Father Rowley. "The only assurance of any
+value to me will be your behaviour in the future."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, then I'm not to leave this morning?" Mr. Mousley
+gasped with open mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Where would you go if you left here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to tell you the truth," Mr. Mousley admitted, "I
+have been rather worried over that little problem ever since
+I woke up this morning. I scarcely expected that you would
+tolerate my presence any longer in this house. You will
+excuse me, Father Rowley, but I am rather overwhelmed
+for the moment by your kindness. I scarcely know how to
+express what I feel. I have usually found people so very
+impatient of my weakness. Do you seriously mean I needn't
+go away this morning?"</p>
+
+<p>"You have already been sufficiently punished, I hope,"
+said the Missioner, "by the humiliations you have inflicted
+on yourself both outside and inside this house."</p>
+
+<p>"My thoughts are always humiliating," said Mr. Mousley.
+"I think perhaps that nowadays these humiliating thoughts
+are my chief temptation to drink. Since I have been here
+and shared in your hospitality I have felt more sharply
+than ever my disgrace. I have several times been on the
+point of asking you to let me be given some kind of work,
+but I have always been too much ashamed when it came to
+the point to express my aspirations in words."</p>
+
+<p>"Only yesterday afternoon," said Father Rowley, "I wrote
+to the Bishop of Warwick, who has continued to interest himself
+in you notwithstanding the many occasions you have
+disappointed him, yes, I wrote to the Bishop of Warwick to
+say that since you came to St. Agnes' your behaviour had
+justified my suggesting that you should once again be allowed
+to say Mass."</p>
+
+<p>"You wrote that yesterday afternoon?" Mr. Mousley exclaimed.
+"And the instant afterwards I went out and got
+drunk?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean you took a pick-me-up and two glasses of
+beer," corrected Father Rowley.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no, it wasn't a pick-me-up. I went out and got
+drunk on brandy quite deliberately."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley looked quickly across at Mark, who hastily
+left the two priests together. He divined from the Missioner's
+quick glance that he was going to hear Mr. Mousley's
+confession. A week later Mr. Mousley asked Mark if he
+would serve at Mass the next morning.</p>
+
+<p>"It may seem an odd request," he said, "but inasmuch as
+you have seen the depths to which I can sink, I want you
+equally to see the heights to which Father Rowley has raised
+me."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII" />CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>SILCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was never allowed to be forgotten at St. Agnes' that
+the Mission was the Silchester College Mission; and there
+were few days in the year on which it was possible to visit
+the Mission House without finding there some member of
+the College past or present. Every Sunday during term two
+or three prefects would sit down to dinner; masters turned
+up during the holidays; even the mighty Provost himself paid
+occasional visits, during which he put off most of his majesty
+and became as nearly human as a facetious judge. Nor did
+Father Rowley allow Silchester to forget that it had a Mission.
+He was not at all content with issuing a half yearly
+report of progress and expenses, and he had no intention
+of letting St. Agnes' exist as a subject for an occasional
+school sermon or a religious tax levied on parents. From the
+first moment he had put foot in Chatsea he had done everything
+he could to make St. Agnes' be what it was supposed
+to be&mdash;the Silchester College Mission. He was particularly
+anxious that the new church should be built and beautified
+with money from Silchester sources, even if he also accepted
+money for this purpose from outside. Soon after Mark had
+become recognized as Father Rowley's confidential secretary,
+he visited Silchester for the first time in his company.</p>
+
+<p>It was the custom during the summer for the various
+guilds and clubs connected with the parish to be entertained
+in turn at the College. It had never happened that Mark had
+accompanied any of these outings, which in the early days
+of St. Agnes' had been regarded with dread by the College
+authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was
+stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions
+as you could wish to see. Mark's first visit to Silchester
+was on the occasion of Father Rowley's terminal
+sermon in the June after he was nineteen. He found the
+experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough
+to have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed
+through the ordeal either of a first term at a public school
+or of a first term at the University. Boys are always critical,
+and at Silchester with the tradition of six hundred years
+to give them a corporate self-confidence, the judgment of
+outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world, unless
+it might be in the New Hebrides. Added to their critical
+regard was a chilling politeness which would have made
+downright insolence appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt
+like Gulliver in the presence of the Houyhnms. These noble
+animals, so graceful, so clean, so condescending, appalled
+him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who came to
+visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they,
+without their background were themselves a little shy,
+although their shyness never mastered them so far as to
+make them ill at ease. Here, however, they seemed as imperturbable
+and unbending as the stone saints, row upon row
+on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended
+more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father
+Rowley when he found that these noble young animals
+accorded to him the same quality of respect that they gave
+to a popular master or even to a popular athlete. The Missioner
+seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive
+conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed
+society; he seemed able to chaff them at the right
+moment; to take them seriously when they ought to be taken
+seriously; in a word to have grasped without being a Siltonian
+the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying
+at a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester
+tradition a tradition of its own extending over the forty years
+during which the Reverend William Jex Monkton had been
+a house master. It was difficult for Mark, who had nothing
+but the traditions of Haverton House for a standard to
+understand how with perfect respect the boys could address
+their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline.
+Yet everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and
+when you looked at that delightful old gentleman himself
+with his criss-cross white tie and curly white hair, you
+realized how impossible it was for him to be called anything
+else except Jex.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit
+quadrangle of St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford,
+he regretted for a while his surrender of the scholarship to
+Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had his stammer
+improved in the confidence that his success must surely have
+brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company
+of the four or five men in whose charge he had been left. He
+was tired of being continually rescued from drowning in
+their conversation. Their intentional courtesy galled him.
+He felt like a negro chief being shown the sights of England
+by a tired equerry. It was a fine summer day, and he went
+down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match. He
+sat down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented
+side, unable in the mood he was in to ask against whom the
+College was playing or which side was in. Players and spectators
+alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the sunlight; the
+very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than
+a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees
+and towers of Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the
+horizon, the cattle in the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated
+Mark with his inability to put himself in the picture.
+The grass beneath the oak was scattered with a treasury of
+small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens and
+silver disks that Mark set himself to count.</p>
+
+<p>"Trying not to yearn and trying not to yawn," he muttered.
+"Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six."</p>
+
+<p>"You're ten out," said a voice. "We want fifty-six to tie,
+fifty-seven to win."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked up and saw that a Silchester man whom he
+remembered seeing once at the Mission was preparing to
+sit down beside him. He was a tall youth, fair and freckled
+and clear cut, perfectly self-possessed, but lacking any hint of
+condescension in his manner.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you come over with Rowley?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Mark was going to explain that he was working at the
+Mission when it struck him that a Silchester man might have
+the right to resent that, and he gave no more than a simple
+affirmative.</p>
+
+<p>"I remember seeing you at the Mission," he went on. "My
+name's Hathorne. Oh, well hit, sir, well hit!"</p>
+
+<p>Hathorne's approbation of the batsman made the match
+appear even more remote. It was like the comment of a
+passer-by upon a well-designed figure in a tapestry. It was
+an expression of his own &aelig;sthetic pleasure, and bore no relation
+to the player he applauded.</p>
+
+<p>"I've only been down to the Mission once," he continued,
+turning to Mark. "I felt rather up against it there."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I feel much more up against it in Silchester,"
+replied Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I can understand that," Hathorne nodded. "But
+you're only up against form: I was up against matter. It
+struck me when I was down there what awful cheek it was
+for me to be calmly going down to Chatsea and supposing
+that I had a right to go there, because I had contributed a
+certain amount of money belonging to my father, to help
+spiritually a lot of people who probably need spiritual help
+much less than I do myself. Of course, with anybody else
+except Rowley in charge the effect would be damnable. As
+it is, he manages to keep us from feeling as if we'd paid to
+go and look at the Zoo. You're a lucky chap to be working
+there without the uncomfortable feeling that you're just being
+tolerated because you're a Siltonian."</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking," said Mark, "that I was only being tolerated
+here because I happened to come with Rowley. It's
+impossible to visit a place like this and not regret that one
+must remain an outsider."</p>
+
+<p>"It depends on what you want to do," said Hathorne.
+"I want to be a parson. I'm going up to the Varsity in
+October, and I am beginning to wonder what on earth good
+I shall be at the end of it all."</p>
+
+<p>He gave Mark an opportunity to comment on this announcement;
+but Mark did not know what to say and
+remained silent.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you're not in the mood to be communicative,"
+Hathorne went on with a smile. "I don't blame you. It's
+impossible to be communicative in this place; but some time,
+when I'm down at the Mission again, I'd like to have what
+is called a heart-to-heart talk. That was a good boundary.
+We shall win quite comfortably. So long!"</p>
+
+<p>The tall, fair youth passed on; and although Mark never
+had that heart-to-heart talk with him in the Mission, because
+he was killed in a mountaineering accident in Switzerland
+that August, the memory of him sitting there under the oak
+tree on that fine summer afternoon remained with Mark for
+ever; and after that brief conversation he lost most of his
+shyness, so that he came to enjoy his visits to Silchester as
+much as the Missioner himself did.</p>
+
+<p>As the new church drew near its completion, Mark apprehended
+why Father Rowley attached so much importance to
+as much of the money for it as possible coming directly
+from Silchester. He apprehended how the Missioner felt
+that he was building Silchester in a Chatsea slum; and from
+that moment that landscape like a mirage of the sunlight,
+that landscape into which he had been unable to fit himself
+when he first beheld it became his own, for now beyond the
+chimneypots he could always see the bald hills of Berkshire
+and the trees and towers of Silchester, and at the end of all
+the meanest alleys there were cattle in the meadows and
+birds in the air above.</p>
+
+<p>Silchester was not the only place that Mark visited with
+Father Rowley. It became a recognized custom for him to
+travel up to London whenever the Missioner was preaching,
+and in London he was once more struck by the variety of
+Father Rowley's worldly knowledge and secular friends.
+One week-end will serve as a specimen of many. They left
+Chatsea on a Saturday morning travelling up to town in a
+third class smoker full of bluejackets and soldiers on leave.
+None of them happened to know the Missioner, and for a
+time they talked surlily in undertones, evidently viewing with
+distaste the prospect of having a Holy Joe in their compartment
+all the way to London; but when Father Rowley pulled
+out his pipe, for always when he was away from St. Agnes'
+he allowed himself the privilege of smoking, and began to
+talk to them about their ships and their regiments with unquestionable
+knowledge, they unbent, so that long before
+Waterloo was reached it must have been the jolliest compartment
+in the whole train. It was all done so easily, and yet
+without any of that deliberate descent from a pedestal, which
+is the democratic manner of so many parsons; there was none
+of that Friar Tuck style of aggressive laymanhood, nor that
+subtler way of denying Christ (of course with the best intentions)
+which consists of salting the conversation with a few
+"damns" and peppering it with a couple of "bloodies" to
+show that a parson may be what is called human. Father
+Rowley was simply himself; and a month later two of the
+bluejackets in that compartment and one of the soldiers were
+regular visitors to the Mission House, and what is more
+regular visitors to the Blessed Sacrament.</p>
+
+<p>They reached London soon after midday and went to lunch
+at a restaurant in Jermyn Street famous for a Russian salad
+that Father Rowley sometimes spoke of with affection in
+Chatsea. After lunch they went to a matin&eacute;e of <i>Pelleas
+and M&eacute;lisande</i>, the Missioner having been given two stalls
+by an actor friend. Mark enjoyed the play and was being
+stirred by the imagination of old, unhappy, far off things
+until his companion began to laugh. Several clever women
+who looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge said
+"Hush!"; even Mark, compassionate of the players' feelings
+should they hear Father Rowley laugh at the poignant nonsense
+they were uttering on the stage, begged him to control
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"But this is most unending rubbish," he said. "I've never
+heard anything so ridiculous in my life. Terrible."</p>
+
+<p>The curtain fell on the act at this moment, so that Father
+Rowley was able to give louder voice to his opinions.</p>
+
+<p>"This is unspeakable bosh," he repeated. "I can't understand
+anything at all that is going on. People run on and
+run off again and make the most idiotic remarks. I really
+don't think I can stand any more of this."</p>
+
+<p>The clever women rattled their beads and writhed their
+necks like angry snakes without effect upon the Missioner.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I can stand any more of this," he repeated.
+"I shall have apoplexy if this goes on."</p>
+
+<p>The clever women hissed angrily about the kind of people
+that came to theatres nowadays.</p>
+
+<p>"This man Maeterlinck must have escaped from an
+asylum," Father Rowley went on. "I never heard such deplorable
+nonsense in my life."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall ask an attendant if we can change our seats,"
+snapped one of the clever women in front. "That's the
+worst of coming to a Saturday afternoon performance, such
+extraordinary people come up to town on Saturdays."</p>
+
+<p>"There you are," exclaimed Father Rowley loudly, "even
+that poor woman in front thinks they're extraordinary."</p>
+
+<p>"She's talking about you," said Mark, "not about the
+people in the play."</p>
+
+<p>"My good woman," said Father Rowley, leaning over and
+tapping her on the shoulder. "You don't think that you
+really enjoy this rubbish, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>One of her friends who was near the gangway called out
+to a programme seller:</p>
+
+<p>"Attendant, attendant, is it possible for my friends and
+myself to move into another row? We are being pestered
+with a running commentary by that stout clergyman behind
+that lady in green."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't disturb yourselves, you foolish geese," said Father
+Rowley rising. "I'm not going to sit through another act.
+Come along, Mark, come along, come along. I am not happy.
+I am not happy," he cried in an absurd falsetto.</p>
+
+<p>Then roaring with laughter at his own imitation of
+M&eacute;lisande, he went rolling out of the theatre and sniffed
+contentedly the air of the Strand.</p>
+
+<p>"I told Lady Pechell we shouldn't arrive till tea-time, so
+we'd better go and ride on the top of a bus as far as the
+city."</p>
+
+<p>It was an exhilarating ride, although Mark found that
+Father Rowley occupied much more than half of the seat
+for two. About five o'clock they came to the shadowy house
+in Portman Square in which they were to stay till Monday.
+The Missioner was as much at home here as he was at
+Silchester College or in a railway compartment full of bluejackets.
+He knew as well how to greet the old butler as
+Lady Pechell and her sister Mrs. Mannakay, to all of whom
+equally his visit was an obvious delight. Not even Father
+Rowley's bulk could dwarf the proportions of that double
+drawing-room or of that heavy Victorian furniture. He took
+his place among the cases of stuffed humming birds and
+glass-topped tables of curios, among the brocade curtains
+with shaped vallances and golden tassels, among the chandeliers
+and lacquered cabinets and cages of avadavats, sitting
+there like a great Buddha while he chatted to the two old
+ladies of a society that seemed to Mark as remote as the
+people in <i>Pelleas and M&eacute;lisande</i>. From time to time one of
+the old ladies would try to draw Mark into the conversation;
+but he preferred listening and let them think that his monosyllabic
+answers signified a shyness that did not want to be
+conspicuous. Soon they appeared to forget his existence.
+Deep in the lap of an armchair covered with a glazed chintz
+of S&egrave;vres roses and sable he was enthralled by that chronicle
+of phantoms, that frieze of ghosts passing before his eyes,
+while the present faded away upon the growing quiet of the
+London evening and became remote as the distant roar of
+the traffic, which itself was remote as the sound of the sea in
+a shell. Fox-hunting squires caracoled by with the air of
+paladins; and there was never a lady mentioned that did
+not take the fancy like a princess in an old tale.</p>
+
+<p>"He's universal," Mark thought. "And that's one of the
+secrets of being a great priest. And that's why he can talk
+about Heaven and make you feel that he knows what he's
+talking about. And if I can discern what he is," Mark went
+on to himself, "I can be what he is. And I will be," he
+vowed in the rapture of a sudden revelation.</p>
+
+<p>On Sunday morning Father Rowley preached in the
+fashionable church of St. Cyprian's, South Kensington, after
+which they lunched at the vicarage. The Reverend Drogo
+Mortemer was a dapper little bachelor (it would be inappropriate
+to call such a worldly little fellow a celibate) who
+considered himself the leader of the most advanced section
+of the Catholic Party in the Church of England. He certainly
+had a finger in the pie of every well-cooked intrigue,
+knew everybody worth knowing in London, and had the
+private ears of several bishops. No more skilful place-finder
+existed, and any member of the advanced section who wanted
+a place for himself or for a friend had recourse to Mortemer.</p>
+
+<p>"But the little man is all right," Father Rowley had told
+Mark. "Many people would have used his talents to further
+himself. He has every qualification for the episcopate except
+one&mdash;he believes in the Sacraments."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Mortemer was the only son of James Mortimer of
+the famous firm of Hadley and Mortimer. His father had
+become rich before he married the youngest daughter of an
+ancient but impoverished house, and soon after his marriage
+he died. Mrs. Mortemer brought up her son to forget that
+his father had been a tradesman and to remember that he
+was rich. In order to dissociate herself from a partnership
+which now existed only in name above the plate glass of the
+enormous shop in Oxford Street Mrs. Mortemer took to
+spelling her name with an "e," which as she pointed out was
+the original spelling. She had already gratified her romantic
+fancy by calling her son Drogo. Harrow and Cambridge
+completed what Mrs. Mortemer began, and if Drogo had
+not developed what his mother spoke of as a "mania for
+religion" there is no reason to suppose that he would not one
+day have been a cabinet minister. However, as it was, Mrs.
+Mortemer died cherishing with her last breath a profound
+conviction that her son would soon be a bishop. That he
+was not likely to become a bishop was due to the fact that
+with all his worldliness, with all his wealth, with all his love
+of wire-pulling, with all his respect for rank he held definite
+opinions and was not afraid to belong to a minority unpopular
+in high places. He had too a simple piety that made
+his church a power in spite of fashionable weddings and
+exorbitant pew rents.</p>
+
+<p>"The sort of thing we're trying to do here in a small way,"
+he said to Father Rowley at lunch, "is what the Jesuits are
+doing at Farm Street. My two assistant priests are both
+rather brilliant young people, and I'm always on the look out
+to get more young men of the right type."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better offer Lidderdale a title when he's ready to be
+ordained."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, of course I will," said the dapper little vicar with a
+courteous smile for Mark. "Do take some more claret,
+Father Rowley. It's rather a specialty of ours here. We
+have a friend in Bordeaux who buys for us."</p>
+
+<p>It was typical of Mr. Mortemer to use the plural.</p>
+
+<p>"There you are, Mark Anthony. I've secured you a title."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Mortemer is only being polite," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, my dear boy, on the contrary I meant absolutely
+what I said."</p>
+
+<p>He seemed worried by Mark's distrust of his sincerity,
+and for the rest of lunch he laid himself out to entertain
+his less important guest, talking with a slight excess of charm
+about the lack of vitality, loss of influence, and oriental barbarism
+of the Orthodox Church.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Enfin</i>, Asiatic religion," he said. "Don't you agree with
+me, Mr. Lidderdale? And our Philorthodox brethren who
+would like to bring about reunion with such a Church .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the
+result would be dreadful .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Eurasian .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. yes, I must
+confess that sometimes I sympathize with the behaviour of
+the Venetians in the Fourth Crusade."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley looked at his watch and announced that
+it was time to start for Poplar, where he was to address
+a large gathering of Socialists in the Town Hall. Mr. Mortemer
+made a <i>moue</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless I'm bound to admit that you have a strong
+case. Perhaps I'm like the young man with large possessions,"
+he burst out with a sudden intense gravity. "Perhaps
+after all the St. Cyprian's religion isn't Christianity at
+all. Just Catholicism. Nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better come down to Poplar with Mark and me,"
+Father Rowley suggested.</p>
+
+<p>But Mr. Mortemer shook his head with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>The Poplar meeting was crowded. In an atmosphere of
+good fellowship one speaker after another got up and denounced
+the present order. It was difficult to follow the
+arguments of the speakers, because the audience cheered so
+many isolated statements. A number of people shook hands
+with Father Rowley when he had finished his speech and
+wished that there were more parsons like him. Father
+Rowley had not indulged in political attacks, but had contented
+himself with praise of the poor. He had spoken movingly,
+but Mark was not moved by his words. He had a
+vague feeling that Father Rowley was being exploited. He
+was dazed by the exuberance of the meeting and was glad
+when it was over and he was back in Portman Square talking
+to Lady Pechell and Mrs. Mannakay while Father Rowley
+rested for an hour before he walked round the corner to
+preach in old Jamaica Chapel, a galleried Georgian conventicle
+that was now the Church of the Visitation, but was
+still generally known as Jamaica Chapel. Evensong was half
+over when the preacher arrived, and the church being full
+Mark was given a chair by the sidesman in a dark corner,
+which presently became darker when Father Rowley went
+up into the pulpit, for all the lights were lowered except those
+above the preacher's head, and nothing was visible in the
+church except the luminous crucifix upon the High Altar.
+The warmth and darkness brought out the scent of the many
+women gathered together; the atmosphere was charged with
+human emotion so that Mark sitting in his corner could fancy
+that he was lost in the sensuous glooms behind some <i>Mater
+Addolorata</i> of the seventeenth century. He longed to be
+back in Chatsea. He was dismayed at the prospect of one
+day perhaps having to cope with this quality of devotion.
+He shuddered at the thought, and for the first time he wondered
+if he had not a vocation for the monastic life. But
+was it a vocation if one longed to escape the world? Must
+not a true vocation be a longing to draw nearer to God? Oh,
+this nauseating bouquet of feminine perfumes .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. it was
+impossible to pay attention to the sermon.</p>
+
+<p>Mark went to bed early with a headache; but in the
+morning he woke refreshed with the knowledge that they
+were going back to Chatsea, although before they reached
+home the journey had to be broken at High Thorpe whither
+Father Rowley had been summoned to an interview by the
+Bishop of Silchester on account of refusing to communicate
+some people at the mid-day celebration. Dr. Crawshay was
+at that time so ill that he received the Chatsea Missioner in
+bed, and on hearing that he was accompanied by a young
+man who hoped to take Holy Orders the Bishop sent word
+for Mark to come up to his bedroom, where he gave him his
+blessing. Mark never forgot the picture of the Bishop lying
+there under a chequered coverlet looking like an old ivory
+chessman, a white bishop that had been taken in the game
+and put off the board.</p>
+
+<p>"And now, Mr. Rowley," Dr. Crawshay began when he
+had motioned Mark to a chair. "To return to the subject
+under discussion between us. How can you justify by any
+rubric of the Book of Common Prayer non-communicating
+attendance?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't justify it by any rubric," the Missioner replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you don't, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I justify it by the needs of human nature," the Missioner
+continued. "In order to provide the necessary three communicants
+for the mid-day Mass. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"One moment, Mr. Rowley," the Bishop interrupted. "I
+beg you most earnestly to avoid that word. You know my
+old-fashioned Protestant notions," he added, and his eyes so
+tired with pain twinkled for a moment. "To me there is
+always something distasteful about that word."</p>
+
+<p>"What shall I substitute, my lord?" the Missioner asked.
+"Do you object to the word 'Eucharist'?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't object to that, though why you should want
+a Greek name when we have a beautiful English name like
+the Lord's Supper, why you should want to employ such a
+barbarism as 'Eucharist' I don't know. However, if you
+must use Eucharist, use Eucharist. And now, by wandering
+off into a discussion of terminology I forget where we were.
+Oh yes, you were on the point of justifying non-communicating
+attendance by the needs of human nature."</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid, my lord, that in a district like St. Agnes'
+it is impossible always to ensure communicants for sometimes
+as many as four early Lord's Suppers said by visiting
+priests."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop's eyes twinkled again.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there you rather have me, Mr. Rowley. Four early
+Lord's Suppers does sound, I must admit, a little odd."</p>
+
+<p>"Four early Eucharists followed by another for children
+at half-past nine, and the parochial sung Mass&mdash;sung
+Eucharist."</p>
+
+<p>"Children?" Dr. Crawshay repeated. "You surely don't
+let children go to the Celebration?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them
+not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven</i>," Father Rowley
+reminded the Bishop.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, I happen to have heard that text before. But
+the devil, Mr. Rowley, can cite Scripture to his purpose."</p>
+
+<p>"In the last letter I wrote to your lordship about the
+services at St. Agnes' I particularly mentioned our children's
+Eucharist."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you, Mr. Rowley, did you? I had quite forgotten
+that."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley turned to Mark for verification.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if Mr. Rowley remembers that he did write, there is
+no need to call witnesses. I have had to complain a good
+deal of him, but I have never had to complain of his frankness.
+It must be my fault, but I certainly hadn't understood
+that there was definitely a children's Eucharist. This then,
+I fancy, must be the service at which those three ladies complained
+of your treatment of them."</p>
+
+<p>"What three ladies?" asked the priest.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me, I'm growing very unbusinesslike, I'm afraid. I
+thought I had enclosed you a copy of their letter to me when
+I wrote to invite an explanation of your high-handed action."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop sighed. The details of these ecclesiastical
+squabbles distracted him at a time when he should soon leave
+this fretful earth behind him. He continued wearily:</p>
+
+<p>"These were the three ladies who were refused communion
+by you at, as I understood, the mid-day Celebration, which
+now turns out to be what you call the children's Eucharist."</p>
+
+<p>"It is perfectly true, my lord," Father Rowley admitted,
+"that on Sunday week three women did present themselves
+from a neighbouring parish."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, they were not parishioners?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not, my lord."</p>
+
+<p>"Which is a point in your favour."</p>
+
+<p>"Throughout the service they sat looking through opera-glasses
+at Snaith who was officiating, and greatly scandalizing
+the children, who are not used to such behaviour in
+church."</p>
+
+<p>"Such behaviour was certainly most objectionable," the
+Bishop agreed.</p>
+
+<p>"I happened to be sitting at the back of the church, thinking
+out my sermon, and their behaviour annoyed me so much
+that I sent for the sacristan to go and order a cab. I then
+went up and whispered to them that inasmuch as they were
+strangers it would be better if they went and made their
+Communion in the next parish where the service would be
+more lenient to their theory of worship. I took one of them
+by the arm, led her gently down the aisle and out into the
+street, and handed her into the cab. Her two companions
+followed her; I paid the cabman; and that was the end of
+the matter."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop lay back on the pillows and thought for a
+moment or two in silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said finally, "I think that in this case you were
+justified. At the same time your justification by the Book
+of Common Prayer lay in the fact that these women did not
+give you notice beforehand of their intention to communicate.
+I think I must insist that in future you make some arrangement
+with your workers and helpers to secure the requisite
+minimum of communicants for every celebration. Personally,
+I think six on a Sunday and four on a week-day far too
+many. I think the repetition has a tendency to cheapen the
+Sacrament."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>By Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to
+God continually</i>," Father Rowley quoted from the Epistle
+to the Hebrews.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes, I know," said the Bishop. "But I wish you
+wouldn't drag in these texts. They really have nothing
+whatever to do with the point in question. Please realize,
+Mr. Rowley, that I allow you a great deal of latitude at St.
+Agnes' because I am aware of what a great influence for
+good you have been among these poor people."</p>
+
+<p>"Your lordship has always been consideration itself."</p>
+
+<p>"If that be your opinion, I want you to obey my ruling in
+this small matter. I am continually being involved in correspondence
+on your account with Vigilance Societies of the
+type of the Protestant Alliance, and I shall give myself the
+pleasure of answering their complaints without at the same
+time not, as I hope, impeding your splendid work. I wish
+also, if God allows me to leave this bed again, to take the
+next Confirmation in St. Agnes' myself. My presence there
+will afford you a measure of official support which will not,
+I venture to believe, be a disadvantage to your work. I do
+not expect you to modify your method of conducting the
+service too much. That would savour of hypocrisy, both on
+your side and on mine. But there are one or two things
+which I should prefer not to see again. Last time you dressed
+a number of your choir-boys in red cassocks."</p>
+
+<p>"The servers, you mean, my lord?"</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever you call them, they wear red cassocks, red
+slippers, and red skull caps. That I really cannot stand. You
+must put them into black cassocks and leave their caps and
+slippers in the vestry cupboard. Further, I do not wish that
+most conspicuous processional crucifix to be carried about in
+front of me wherever I go."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you like the crucifix to be taken down from the
+altar as well?" Father Rowley asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No, that can stay: I shan't see that one."</p>
+
+<p>"What date will suit your lordship for the Confirmation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ought not the question to have been rather what date
+will suit you, for I have never yet been fortunate enough,
+and I never hope to be fortunate enough, to fix upon a date
+straight off that will suit you, Mr. Rowley. Let me know that
+later. In any case, my presence must depend, alas, upon the
+state of my health. Now, how are you getting on with your
+new church?"</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be ready to open it in the spring of next year
+if all goes well. Do you think that a new licence will be
+required? The new St. Agnes' is joined to the present church
+by the sacristy."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop considered the question for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I think that the old licence will serve. There is no
+prospect yet of making St. Agnes' into a parish, and I would
+rather take advantage of the technicality, all things being
+considered. Good-bye, Mr. Rowley. God bless you."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop raised his thin arm.</p>
+
+<p>"God bless your lordship."</p>
+
+<p>"You are always in my prayers, Mr. Rowley. I think
+much about you lying here on the threshold of Eternal Life."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop turned to Mark who knelt beside the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Young man, I would fain be spared long enough to ordain
+you to the service of Almighty God, but you are still young
+and I am very near to death. You could not have before you
+a better example of a Christian gentleman than your friend
+and my friend Mr. Rowley. I shall say nothing about his
+example as a clergyman of the Church of England. Remember
+me, both of you, in your prayers."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop sank back exhausted, and his visitors went
+quietly out of the room.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX" />CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ALTAR FOR THE DEAD</h3>
+
+
+<p>All went as well with the new St. Agnes' as the Bishop
+had hoped. Columns of red brick were covered in
+marble and alabaster by the votive offerings of individuals or
+the subscriptions of different Silchester Houses; the
+baldacchino was given by one rich old lady, the pavement of
+the church by another; the Duke of Birmingham contributed
+a thurible; Oxford Old Siltonians decorated the Lady
+Chapel; Cambridge Old Siltonians found the gold mosaic for
+the dome of the apse. Father Rowley begged money for the
+fabric far and wide, and the architect, the contractors, and
+the workmen, all Chatsea men, gave of their best and asked
+as little as possible in return. The new church was to be
+opened on Easter morning. But early in Lent the Bishop of
+Silchester died in the bed from which he had never risen
+since the day Father Rowley and Mark received his blessing.
+The diocese mourned him, for he was a gentle scholar, wise
+in his knowledge of men, simple and pious in his own life.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Harvard Cheesman, the new Bishop, was translated
+from the see of Ipswich to which he had been preferred from
+the Chapel Royal in the Savoy. Bishop Cheesman possessed
+all the episcopal qualities. He had the hands of a physician
+and the brow of a scholar. He was filled with a sense of the
+importance of his position, and in that perhaps was included
+a sense of the importance of himself. He was eloquent in
+public, grandiloquent in private. To him Father Rowley
+wrote shortly after his enthronement.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>St. Agnes' House,</p>
+
+<p>Keppel Street,</p>
+
+<p>Chatsea.</p>
+
+<p>March 24.</p>
+
+<p>My Lord Bishop,</p>
+
+<p>I am unwilling to trouble you at a moment when you must
+be unusually busy; but I shall be glad to hear from you
+about the opening of the new church of the Silchester College
+Mission, which was fixed for Easter Sunday. Your
+predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, did not think that any new
+licence would be necessary, because the new St. Agnes'
+is joined by the sacristy to the old mission church. There
+is no idea at present of asking you to constitute St. Agnes'
+a parish and therefore the question of consecration does not
+arise. I regret to say that Bishop Crawshay thoroughly
+disapproved of our services and ritual, and I think he may
+have felt unwilling to commit himself to endorsing them by
+the formal grant of a new licence. May I hear from you
+at your convenience, and may I respectfully add that your
+lordship has the prayers of all my people?</p>
+
+<p>I am your lordship's obedient servant,</p>
+
+<p>John Rowley.</p></div>
+
+<p>To which the Lord Bishop of Silchester replied as
+follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>High Thorpe Castle.</p>
+
+<p>March 26.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Mr. Rowley,</p>
+
+<p>As my predecessor Bishop Crawshay did not think a new
+licence would be necessary I have no doubt that you can go
+ahead with your plan of opening the new St. Agnes' on
+Easter Sunday. At the same time I cannot help feeling that
+a new licence would be desirable and I am asking Canon
+Whymper as Rural Dean to pay a visit and make the necessary
+report. I have heard much of your work, and I pray
+that it may be as blessed in my time as it was in the time of
+my predecessor. I am grateful to your people for their
+prayers and I am, my dear Mr. Rowley,</p>
+
+<p>Yours very truly,</p>
+
+<p>Harvard Silton.</p></div>
+
+<p>Canon Whymper, the Rector of Chatsea and Rural Dean,
+visited the new church on the Monday of Passion week. On
+Saturday Father Rowley received the following letter from
+the Bishop:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>High Thorpe Castle.</p>
+
+<p>April 9.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Mr. Rowley,</p>
+
+<p>I have just received Canon Whymper's report upon the
+new church of the Silchester College Mission, and I think
+before you open the church on Easter Sunday I should like
+to talk over one or two comparatively unimportant details
+with you personally. Moreover, it would give me pleasure
+to make your acquaintance and hear something of your
+method of work at St. Agnes'. Perhaps you will come to
+High Thorpe on Monday. There is a train which arrives at
+High Thorpe at 2.36. So I shall expect you at the Castle
+at 2.42.</p>
+
+<p>Yours very truly,</p>
+
+<p>Harvard Silton.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mark paid his second visit to High Thorpe Castle on one
+of those serene April mornings that sail like swans across
+the lake of time. The episcopal standard on the highest turret
+hung limp; the castle quivered in the sunlight; the lawns
+wearing their richest green seemed as far from being walked
+upon as the blue sky above them. Whether it was that Mark
+was nervous about the result of the coming interview or
+whether it was that his first visit to High Thorpe had been
+the climax of so many new experiences, he was certainly
+much more sharply aware on this occasion of what the Castle
+stood for. Looking back to the morning when he and Father
+Rowley sat with Bishop Crawshay in his bedroom, he realized
+how much the personality of the dead bishop had
+dominated his surroundings and how little all this dignity
+and splendour, which must have been as imposing then as it
+was now, had impressed his imagination. There came over
+Mark, when he and Father Rowley were walking silently
+along the drive, such a foreboding of the result of this visit
+that he almost asked the priest why they bothered to continue
+their journey, why they did not turn round immediately
+and take the next train back to Chatsea. But before he had
+time to say anything Father Rowley had pulled the chain of
+the door bell, the butler had opened the door, and they were
+waiting the Bishop's pleasure in a room that smelt of the
+best leather and the best furniture polish. It was a room
+that so long as Dr. Cheesman held the see of Silchester would
+be given over to the preliminary nervousness of the diocesan
+clergy, who would one after another look at that steel engraving
+of Jesus Christ preaching by the Sea of Galilee, and who
+when they had finished looking at that would look at those
+two oil paintings of still life, those rich and sombre accumulations
+of fish, fruit and game, that glowed upon the walls
+with a kind of sinister luxury. Waiting rooms are all much
+alike, the doctor's, the dentist's, the bishop's, the railway-station's;
+they may differ slightly in externals, but they
+all possess the same atmosphere of transitory discomfort.
+They have all occupied human beings with the perusal of
+books they would never otherwise have dreamed of opening,
+with the observation of pictures they would never otherwise
+have thought of regarding twice.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you step this way," the butler requested. "His
+lordship is waiting for you in the library."</p>
+
+<p>The two culprits, for by this time Mark was oblivious of
+every other emotion except one of profound guilt, guilt of
+what he could not say, but most unmistakably guilt, walked
+along toward the Bishop's library&mdash;Father Rowley like a fat
+and naughty child who knows he is going to be reproved for
+eating too many tarts.</p>
+
+<p>There was a studied poise in the attitude of the Bishop
+when they entered. One shapely leg trailed negligently
+behind his chair ready at any moment to serve as the pivot
+upon which its owner could swing round again into the
+every-day world; the other leg firmly wedged against the desk
+supported the burden of his concentration. The Bishop
+swung round on the shapely leg in attendance, and in a single
+sweeping gesture blotted the last page of the letter he had
+been writing and shook Father Rowley by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I am delighted to have an opportunity of meeting you,
+Mr. Rowley," he began, and then paused a moment with an
+inquiring look at Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you wouldn't mind, my lord, if I brought with
+me young Lidderdale, who is reading for Holy Orders and
+working with us at St. Agnes'. I am apt to forget sometimes
+exactly to what I have and have not committed myself and
+I thought your lordship would not object. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"To a witness?" interposed the Bishop in a tone of courtly
+banter. "Come, come, Mr. Rowley, had I known you were
+going to be so suspicious of me I should have asked my
+domestic chaplain to be present on my side."</p>
+
+<p>Mark, supposing that the Bishop was annoyed by his presence
+at the interview, made a movement to retire, whereupon
+the Bishop tapped him paternally upon the shoulder and
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense, non-sense, I was merely indulging in a mild
+pleasantry. Sit down, Mr. Rowley. Mr. Lidderdale I think
+you will find that chair quite comfortable. Well, Mr.
+Rowley," he began, "I have heard much of you and your
+work. Our friend Canon Whymper spoke of it with enthusiasm.
+Yes, yes, with enthusiasm. I often regret that
+in the course of my ministry I have never had the good
+fortune to be called to work among the poor, the real poor.
+You have been privileged, Mr. Rowley, if I may be allowed
+to say so, greatly, immensely privileged. You find a wilderness,
+and you make of it a garden. Wonderful.
+Wonderful."</p>
+
+<p>Mark began to feel uncomfortable, and he thought by the
+way Father Rowley was puffing his cheeks that he too was
+beginning to feel uncomfortable. The Missioner looked as
+if he was blowing away the lather of the soap that the Bishop
+was using upon him so prodigally.</p>
+
+<p>"Some other time, Mr. Rowley, when I have a little leisure .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+I perceive the need of making myself acquainted with
+every side of my new diocese&mdash;a little leisure, yes .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+sometime I should like to have a long talk with you about
+all the details of your work at Chatsea, of which as I said
+Canon Whymper has spoken to me most enthusiastically.
+The question, however, immediately before us this morning
+is the licence of your new church. Since writing to you first
+I have thought the matter over most earnestly. I have given
+the matter the gravest consideration. I have consulted Canon
+Whymper and I have come to the conclusion that bearing
+all the circumstances in mind it will be wiser for you to
+apply, and I hope be granted, a new licence. With this decision
+in my mind I asked Canon Whymper in his capacity
+as Rural Dean to report upon the new church. Mr. Rowley,
+his report is extremely favourable. He writes to me of the
+noble fabric, noble is the actual epithet he employs, yes, the
+very phrase. He expresses his conviction that you are to be
+congratulated, most warmly congratulated, Mr. Rowley, upon
+your vigorous work. I believe I am right in saying that all
+the money necessary to erect this noble edifice has been raised
+by yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not all of it," said Father Rowley. "I still owe &pound;3,000."</p>
+
+<p>"A mere trifle," said the Bishop, dismissing the sum with
+the airy gesture of a conjurer who palms a coin. "A mere
+trifle compared with what you have already raised. I know
+that at the moment there is no question of constituting as a
+parish what is at present merely a district; but such a contingency
+must be borne in mind by both of us, and inasmuch
+as that would imply consecration by myself I am unwilling
+to prejudice any decision I might have to take later, should
+the necessity for consecration arise, by allowing you at the
+moment a wider latitude than I might be prepared to allow
+you in the future. Yes, Canon Whymper writes most
+enthusiastically of the noble fabric." The Bishop paused,
+drummed with his fingers on the arm of his chair as if he
+were testing the pitch of his instrument, and then taking a
+deep breath boomed forth: "But Mr. Rowley, in his report
+he informs me that in the middle of the south aisle exists an
+altar or Holy Table expressly and exclusively designed for
+what he was told are known as masses for the dead."</p>
+
+<p>"That is perfectly true," said Father Rowley.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said the Bishop, shaking his head gravely. "I did
+not indeed imagine that Canon Whymper would be misinformed
+about such an important feature; but I did not think
+it right to act without ascertaining first from you that such
+is indeed the case. Mr. Rowley, it would be difficult for me
+to express how grievously it pains me to have to seem to
+interfere in the slightest degree with the successful prosecution
+of your work among the poor of Chatsea, especially to
+make such interference one of the first of my actions in a
+new diocese; but the responsibilities of a bishop are grave.
+He cannot lightly endorse a condition of affairs, a method
+of services which in his inmost heart after the deepest confederation
+he feels is repugnant to the spirit of the Church
+Of England. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"I question that opinion, my lord," said the Missioner.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Rowley, pray allow me to finish. We have little time
+at our disposal for a theological argument which would in
+any case be fruitless, for as I told you I have already examined
+the question with the deepest consideration from every
+standpoint. Though I may respect your opinions in my
+private capacity, for I do not wish to impugn for one moment
+the sincerity of your beliefs, in my episcopal, or what I may
+call my public character, I can only condemn them utterly.
+Utterly, Mr. Rowley, and completely."</p>
+
+<p>"But this altar, my lord," shouted Father Rowley, springing
+to his feet, to the alarm of Mark, who thought he was
+going to shake his fist in the Bishop's face, "this altar was
+subscribed for by the poor of St. Agnes', by all the poor of
+St. Agnes', as a memorial of the lives of sailors and marines
+of St. Agnes' lost in the sinking of the <i>King Harry</i>. Your
+predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, knew of its existence, actually
+saw it and commented on its ugliness; yet when I told him
+the circumstances in which it had been erected he was deeply
+moved by the beautiful idea. This altar has been in use for
+nearly three years. Masses for the dead have been said there
+time after time. This altar is surrounded by memorials of
+my dead people. It is one of the most vital factors in my
+work there. You ask me to remove it, before you have been
+in the diocese a month, before you have had time to see with
+your own eyes what an influence for good it has on the daily
+lives of the poor people who built it. My lord, I will not
+remove the altar."</p>
+
+<p>While Father Rowley was speaking the Bishop of Silchester
+had been looking like a man on a railway platform
+who has been ambushed by a whistling engine.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley," he said, "I pray you to control
+yourself. I beg you to understand that this is not a mere
+question of red tape, if I may use the expression, of one extra
+altar or Holy Table, but it is a question of the services said
+at that altar or Holy Table."</p>
+
+<p>"That is precisely what I am trying to point out to your
+lordship," said Father Rowley angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"You yourself told me when you wrote to me that Bishop
+Crawshay disapproved of much that was done at St. Agnes'.
+It was you who put it into my head at the beginning of our
+correspondence that you were not asking me formally to
+open the new church, because you were doubtful of the effect
+your method of worship might have upon me. I don't wish
+for a moment to suggest that you were trying to bundle on
+one side the question of the licence, before I had had a moment
+to look round me in my new diocese, I say I do <i>not</i>
+think this for a moment; but inasmuch as the question has
+come before me officially, as sooner or later it must have
+come before me officially, I cannot allow my future action to
+be prejudiced by giving you liberties now that I may not
+be prepared to allow you later on. Suppose that in three
+years' time the question of consecrating the new St. Agnes'
+arises and the legality of this third altar or Holy Table is
+questioned, how should I be able to turn round and forbid
+then what I have not forbidden now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your lordship prefers to force me to resign?"</p>
+
+<p>"Force you to resign, Mr. Rowley?" the Bishop repeated
+in aggrieved accents. "What can I possibly have said that
+could lead you to suppose for one moment that I was desirous
+of forcing you to resign? I make allowance for your natural
+disappointment. I make every allowance. Otherwise Mr.
+Rowley I should be tempted to characterize such a statement
+as cruel. As cruel, Mr. Rowley."</p>
+
+<p>"What other alternative have I?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should have said, Mr. Rowley, that you have one other
+very obvious alternative, and that is to accept my ruling upon
+the subject of this third altar or Holy Table. When I shall
+receive an assurance that you will do so, I shall with pleasure,
+with great pleasure, give you a new licence."</p>
+
+<p>"I could not possibly do that," said the Missioner. "I could
+not possibly go back to my people to-night and tell them this
+Holy Week that what I have been teaching them for ten years
+is a lie. I would rather resign a thousand times."</p>
+
+<p>"That is a far more accurate statement than your previous
+assertion that I was forcing you to resign."</p>
+
+<p>"When will you have found a priest to take my place
+temporarily?" the Missioner asked in a chill voice. "It is
+unlikely that the Silchester College authorities will find another
+missioner at once, and I think it rests with your lordship
+to find a locum tenens. I do not wish to disappoint my people
+about the date of the opening of their new church. They
+have been looking forward to this Easter for so long now.
+Poor dears!"</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley sighed out the last ejaculation to himself,
+and his sigh ran through the Bishop's opulent library like a
+dull wind. Mark had a mad impulse to tell the Bishop the
+story of his father and the Lima Street Mission. His father
+had resigned on Palm Sunday. Oh, this ghastly dream. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Father Rowley leave Chatsea! It was unimaginable. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>But the Bishop was overthrowing the work of ten years
+with apparently as little consciousness of the ruin he was
+creating as a boar that has rooted up an ant-heap with his
+snout.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so. Quite so, Mr. Rowley. I certainly see your
+point," the Bishop declared. "I will do my best to secure a
+priest, but meanwhile .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. let me see. I need scarcely
+say how painful your decision has been, what pain it has
+caused me. Let me see, yes, in the circumstances I agree
+with you that it would be inadvisable to postpone the opening.
+I think from every point of view it would be wisest to proceed
+according to schedule. Could not this altar or Holy Table
+be railed off temporarily, I do not say muffled up, but could
+not some indication be given of the fact that I do not sanction
+its use? In that case I should have no objection, indeed on
+the contrary I should be only too happy for you to carry on
+with your work either until I can find a temporary substitute
+or until the Silchester College authorities can appoint a new
+missioner. Dear me, this is dreadfully painful for me."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley stared at the Bishop in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"You want me to continue?" he asked. "Really, my lord,
+you will excuse my plain speaking if I tell you that I am
+amazed at your point of view. A moment ago you told me
+that I must either remove this altar or resign."</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me, Mr. Rowley. I did not mention the word
+'resign.'"</p>
+
+<p>"And now," the Missioner went on without paying any
+attention to the interruption. "You are ready to let me stay
+at St. Agnes' until a successor can conveniently be found. If
+my teaching is as pernicious as you think, I cannot understand
+your lordship's tolerating my officiating for another hour in
+your diocese."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Rowley, you are introducing into this unhappy affair
+a great deal of extraneous feeling. I do not reproach you.
+I know that you are labouring under the stress of strong
+emotion. I overlook the manner which you have adopted
+towards me. I overlook it, Mr. Rowley. Before we close
+this interview, which I must once more assure you is as
+painful for me as for you, I want you to understand how
+deeply I regret having been forced to take the action I have.
+I ask your prayers, Mr. Rowley, and please be sure that you
+always have and always will have my prayers. Have you
+anything more you would like to say? Do not let me give
+you the impression from my alluding to the heavy work of
+entering upon the duties and responsibilities of a new diocese
+that I desire to hurry you in any way this afternoon. You
+will want to catch the 4.10 back to Chatsea I have no doubt.
+Too early perhaps for tea. Good-bye, Mr. Rowley. Good-bye,
+Mr. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." the Bishop paused and looked inquiringly
+at Mark. "Lidderdale, ah, yes," he said. "For the moment
+I forgot. Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale. A simple railing will,
+I think be sufficient for the altar in question, Mr. Rowley.
+I perfectly appreciate your motive in asking the Bishop of
+Barbadoes to officiate at the opening. I quite see that you
+did not wish to commit me to an approval of a ritual which
+might be more advanced than I might consider proper in my
+diocese. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Good-bye, good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>Father Rowley and Mark found themselves once more in
+the drive. The episcopal standard floated in the wind, which
+had sprung up while they were with the Bishop. They walked
+silently to the railway station under a fast clouding sky.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX" />CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<h3>FATHER ROWLEY</h3>
+
+
+<p>The first episcopal act of the Bishop of Silchester drove
+many poor souls away from God. It was a time of
+deep emotional stress for all the St. Agnes' workers, and
+Father Rowley could not show himself in Keppel Street without
+being surrounded by a crowd of supplicants who with
+tears and lamentations begged him to give up the new St.
+Agnes' and to remain in the old mission church rather than
+be lost to them for ever. There were some who even wished
+him to surrender the Third Altar; but in his last sermon
+preached on the Sunday night before he left Chatsea, he
+spoke to them and said:</p>
+
+<p>"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
+Holy Ghost. Amen. The 15th verse of the 21st Chapter of
+the Holy Gospel according to Saint John: <i>Feed my lambs.</i></p>
+
+<p>"It is difficult for me, dear people, to preach to you this
+evening for the last time as your missioner, to preach, moreover,
+the last sermon that will ever be preached in this little
+mission church which has meant so much to you and so
+much to me. By the mercy of God man does not realize at
+the moment all that is implied by an occasion like this. He
+speaks with his mouth words of farewell; but his heart still
+beats to what was and what is, rather than to what will be.</p>
+
+<p>"When I took as my text to-night those three words of
+Our Lord to St. Peter, <i>Feed my Lambs</i>, I took them as
+words that might be applied, first to the Lord Bishop of this
+diocese, secondly to the priest who will take my place in this
+Mission, and thirdly and perhaps most poignantly of all to
+myself. I cannot bring myself to suppose that in this moment
+of grief, in this moment of bitterness, almost of despair I
+am able to speak fairly of the Bishop of Silchester's action in
+compelling me to resign what has counted for all that is most
+precious in my life on earth. And already, in saying that
+the Bishop has compelled me to resign, I am not speaking
+with perfect accuracy, inasmuch as if I had been willing to
+surrender what I considered one of the essential articles of
+our belief, the Bishop would have been glad to licence the
+new St. Agnes' and to give his countenance and his support
+to me, the unworthy priest in charge of it.</p>
+
+<p>"I want you therefore, dear people, to try to look at the
+matter from the standpoint of the Bishop. I want you to
+try to understand that in objecting to our little altar for the
+dead he is objecting not so much to the altar itself as to the
+services said at that altar. If it had merely been a question
+between us of a third altar, whether here or in the new St.
+Agnes', I should have found it possible, however unwillingly,
+to ask you&mdash;you, who out of your hard-earned savings built
+that altar&mdash;to allow it to be removed. Yes, I should have
+been selfish enough to ask you to make that great sacrifice on
+my account. But when the Bishop insisted that I and the
+priests who have borne with me and worked with me and
+preached with me and prayed with me all these years should
+abstain from saying those Masses which we believe and which
+you believe help our dear ones waiting for the Day of Judgment&mdash;why,
+then, I felt that my surrender would have been
+a denial of our dear Lord, such a denial as St. Peter himself
+uttered in the hall of the high-priest's house. But the Bishop
+does not believe that our prayers here below have any efficacy
+or can in any way help the blessed dead. He does not believe
+in such prayers, and he believes that those who do believe
+in such prayers are wrong, not merely according to the teaching
+of the Prayer Book, but also according to the revelation
+of Almighty God. I do not want you to say, as you will be
+tempted to say, that the Bishop of Silchester in condemning
+our method of services at St. Agnes' is condemning them
+with an eye to public opinion or to political advantage. Alas,
+I have myself been tempted to say bitter words about him,
+to think bitter thoughts; but at this moment, with that last
+<i>Nunc Dimittis</i> ringing in my ears, <i>Lord now lettest Thou
+Thy servant depart in peace</i>, I realize that the Bishop is
+acting honestly and sincerely, however much he may be acting
+wrongly and hastily. It is dreadful for me at this moment
+of parting to feel that some of you here to-night may be
+turned from the face of God because you are angered against
+one of God's ministers. If any poor words of mine have
+power to touch your hearts, I beg you to believe that in giving
+us this great trial of our faith God is acting with that mysterious
+justice and omniscience of which we speak idly
+without in the least apprehending what He means. I shall
+say no more in defence and explanation of the Bishop's
+action, and if he should consider my defence and explanation
+of it a piece of presumption I send him at this solemn moment
+of farewell a message that I shall never cease to pray
+that he may long guide you on the way that leads up to
+eternal happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"I can speak more freely of what your attitude should
+be towards Father Hungerford, the priest who is coming
+to take my place and who is going with God's help to do
+far more for you here than ever I have been able to do.
+I want you all to put yourselves in his place; I want you all
+to think of him to-night wondering, fearing, doubting, hoping,
+and praying. I want you to imagine how difficult he
+must be feeling the situation is for him. He will come here
+to-morrow conscious that there is nobody in this district of
+ours who does not feel, whether he be a communicant or not,
+that the Bishop had no right to intervene so soon and without
+greater knowledge of his new diocese in a district like ours.
+I cannot help knowing how much I myself am to blame in
+this particular; but, my dear people, it has been very hard
+for me during these last two weeks always to be brave and
+hopeful. Often I have found those entreaties on my doorstep
+almost more than I could endure to hear, those letters
+on my desk almost more than I could bear to read. So, if
+you want to do the one thing that can comfort me in this
+bitter hour of mine I entreat you to show Father Hungerford
+that your faith and your hope and your love do not depend
+on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that
+deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There
+is only one way in which you can show Father Hungerford
+that Jesus Christ lives in your hearts, and that is by going
+to Confession and to Communion and by hearing Mass as you
+have done all this time. Show him by your behaviour in
+the street, by your kindness and consideration at home, by
+your devotion and reverence in church, that you appreciate
+the mercies of God, that you appreciate what it means to
+have Jesus Christ upon your altar, that you are, in a word,
+Christians.</p>
+
+<p>"And now at last I must think of those words of our dear
+Lord as they apply to myself: <i>Feed my lambs.</i> And as I
+repeat them, I ask myself again if I have done right, for I
+am troubled in spirit, and I wonder if I ought to have given
+up that third altar and to have remained here. But even
+as I wonder this, even as at this moment I stand in this pulpit
+for the last time, a voice within me forbids me to doubt.
+No, my clear folk, I cannot surrender that altar. I
+cannot come to you and say that what I have been teaching
+for ten years was of so little value, of so little importance,
+of so little worth, that for the sake of policy it can be
+abandoned with a stroke of the pen or a nod of the head. I
+stand here looking out into the future, hearing like angelic
+trumpets those three words sounding and resounding upon
+the great void of time: <i>Feed my lambs!</i> I ask myself what
+work lies before me, what lambs I shall have to feed elsewhere;
+I ask myself in my misery whether God has found
+me unworthy of the trust He gave me. I feel that if I leave
+St. Agnes' to-morrow with the thought that you still cherish
+angry and resentful feelings I shall sink to a lower depth of
+humiliation and depression than I have yet reached. But
+if I can leave St. Agnes' with the assurance that my work
+here will go steadily forward to the glory of God from the
+point at which I renounced it, I shall know that God must
+have some other purpose for the remainder of my life, some
+other mission to which He intends to call me. To you, my
+dear people, to you who have borne with me patiently, to
+you who have tolerated so sweetly my infirmities, to you
+who have been kind to my failings, to you who have taught
+me so much more of our dear Lord Jesus Christ than I have
+been able to teach you, to you I say good-bye. I cannot harrow
+your feelings or my own by saying any more. In the
+name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
+Amen."</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding these words, the first episcopal act of the
+Bishop of Silchester drove many poor souls away from God.</p>
+
+<p>The effect upon Mark, had his religion been merely a
+pastime of adolescence, would have been disastrous. Owing
+to human nature's respect for the conspicuous there is nothing
+so demoralizing to faith as the failure of a leader of religion
+to set forth in his own actions the word of God. Mark, however,
+looked at the whole business more from an
+ecclesiastical angle. He had reason to condemn the Bishop
+for unchristian behaviour; but he preferred to condemn him
+for uncatholic behaviour. Dr. Cheesman and the many other
+Dr. Cheesmans of whom the Anglican episcopate was at this
+period composed never succeeded in shaking his belief in
+Christ; they did succeed in shaking for a short time his belief
+in the Church of England. There are few Anglo-Catholics,
+whether priests or laymen, who have never doubted the right
+of their Church to proclaim herself a branch of the Holy
+Catholic Church. This phase of doubt is indeed so common
+that in ecclesiastical circles it has come to be regarded as
+a kind of mental chicken-pox, not very alarming if it catches
+the patient when young, but growing more dangerous in
+proportion to the lateness of its attack. Mark had his attack
+young. When Father Rowley left Chatsea, he was anxious
+to accompany him on what he knew would be an exhausting
+time of travelling round to preach and collect the necessary
+money to pay off what was actually a personal debt. It
+seemed that there must be something fundamentally wrong
+with a Church that allowed a man to perambulate England in
+an endeavour to pay off the debt upon a building from ministrating
+in which he had been debarred. This debt, moreover,
+was presumably going to be paid by people who fully subscribed
+to teaching which had been officially condemned.</p>
+
+<p>When Mark commented on this, Father Rowley pointed
+out that as a matter of fact a great deal of money had been
+sent by people who admired the practical side, or what they
+would have called the practical side of his work among the
+poor, but who at the same time thoroughly disapproved of
+its ecclesiastical form.</p>
+
+<p>"In justice to the poor old Church of England," he said
+to Mark, "it must be pointed out that a good deal of this
+money has been given by devout Anglicans under protest."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but that doesn't seriously affect the argument," said
+Mark. "You collect I don't know how many thousands of
+pounds to put up a magnificent church from which the Bishop
+of Silchester sees fit to turn you out, but for the debt on
+which you are still personally responsible. It's fantastic!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mark Anthony," the priest said with a laugh, "you lack
+the legal mind. The Bishop did not turn me out. The
+Bishop can perfectly well say I turned myself out."</p>
+
+<p>"It is all too subtle for me," said Mark. "But I'm not
+going to worry you with any more arguments. You've had
+enough of them to last you for ever. I do wish you'd let
+me stick to you personally and help you in any way possible."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Mark Anthony," the priest replied. "I've done my
+work at St. Agnes', and you've done yours. Your business
+now is to take advantage of what has happened and to get
+back to your books, which whatever you may say have been
+more and more neglected lately. You'll find it of enormous
+help to be a good theologian. I have never ceased to regret
+my own shortcomings in that respect. Besides, I think you
+ought to spend a certain amount of time with Ogilvie before
+you go to Glastonbury. There is quite a lot of work to do
+if you look for it in a country parish like&mdash;what's the name
+of the place? Wych. Oh, yes, quite a lot of work. Don't
+bother your head about Anglican Orders and Roman Claims
+and the Catholicity of the Church of England. Your business
+is to save souls, your own included. Go back and read
+and get to know the people in Ogilvie's parish. Anybody
+can tackle a district like St. Agnes'; anybody that is who has
+the suitable personality. How many people can tackle an
+English country parish? I hardly know one. I should like
+to have you with me. I'm fond of you, and you're useful;
+but at your age to travel round from town to town listening
+to my begging would be all wrong. I might even go to
+America. I've had most cordial invitations from several
+American bishops, and if I can't raise the money in England
+I shall have to go there. If God has any more work for me
+to do I shall be offered a cure some day somewhere. I want
+you to be one of my assistant priests, and if you're going to
+be useful to me as an assistant priest, you really must have
+some theology behind you. These bishops get more and more
+difficult to deal with every year. Now, it's no good arguing.
+My mind's made up. I won't take you with me."</p>
+
+<p>So Mark went back to Wych-on-the-Wold and brooded
+upon the non-Catholic aspects of the Anglican Church.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI" />CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>POINTS OF VIEW</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark did not find that his guardian was much disturbed
+by his doubts of the validity of Anglican Orders nor
+much alarmed by his suspicion that the Establishment had no
+right to be considered a branch of the Holy Catholic Church.</p>
+
+<p>"The crucial point in the Roman position is their doctrine
+of intention," said Mr. Ogilvie. "It always seems to me that
+this doctrine is a particularly dangerous one for them to
+play with and one that may recoil at any moment upon their
+own heads. There has been a great deal of super-subtle
+dividing of intentions into actual, virtual, habitual, and interpretative;
+but if you are going to take your stand on logic
+you must be ready to face a logical conclusion. Let us agree
+for a moment that Barlow and the other bishops who consecrated
+Matthew Parker had no intention of consecrating him
+as a bishop for the purpose of ordaining priests in the sense
+in which Catholics understand the word priest. Do the
+Romans expect us to believe that all their prelates in the
+time of the Renaissance had a perfect intention when they
+were consecrating? Or leave on one side for a moment the
+sacrament of Orders; the validity of other sacraments is
+affected by their extension of the doctrine beyond the interpretation
+of St. Thomas Aquinas. However improbable it
+may be that at one moment all the priests of the Catholic
+Church should lack the intention let us say of absolution, it
+<i>is</i> a <i>logical</i> possibility, in which case all the faithful would
+logically speaking be damned. It was in order to guard
+against this kind of logical catastrophe that the first split between
+an actual intention and a virtual intention was made.
+The Roman Church teaches that the virtual intention is
+enough; but if we argue that a virtual intention might be
+ascribed to the bishops who consecrated Parker, the Roman
+controversialists present us with another subdivision&mdash;the
+habitual intention, which is one that formerly existed, but
+of the present continuance of which there is no trace. Now
+really, my dear Mark, you must admit that we've reached a
+point very near to nonsense if this kind of logical subtlety
+is to control Faith."</p>
+
+<p>"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "I don't think I should
+ever want to 'vert over the question of the validity of
+Anglican Orders. I haven't any doubts now of their validity,
+and I think it's improbable that I shall have any doubts after
+I'm ordained. At the same time, there <i>is</i> something wrong
+with the Church of England if a situation like that in Chatsea
+can  be created by the whim of a bishop. Our unhappy union
+between Church and State has created a class of bishops
+which has no parallel anywhere else in Christendom. In
+order to become a bishop in England, at any rate of the kind
+that has a seat in the House of Lords, it is necessary to be
+a gentleman, or rather to have the outward and visible signs
+of being a gentleman, to be a scholar, or to be a diplomat.
+Of course, there will be exceptions; but if you look at almost
+all our bishops, you will find they have reached their dignity
+by social attainments or by political utility or sometimes by
+intellectual distinction, but hardly ever by religious fervour,
+or spiritual honesty, or fearless opinion. I can sympathize
+with the dissenters of the seventeenth century in blaming the
+episcopate for all spiritual maladies. I expect there were a
+good many Dr. Cheesmans in the days of Defoe. Look back
+and see how the bishops have always voted in the House of
+Lords with enthusiastic unanimity against every proposal of
+reform that was ever put forward. I wonder what will happen
+when they are called upon to face a real national crisis."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm perfectly ready to agree with everything you say
+about bishops," the Rector volunteered. "But more or less,
+I'm sorry to add, it is a criticism that can be applied to all
+the orders of the priesthood everywhere in Christendom.
+What can we, what dare we say in favour of priests when we
+remember Our Lord?"</p>
+
+<p>"When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more
+closely than the rest," Mark raged, "the bishops down him.
+They exist to maintain the safety of their class. They have
+reached their present position by knowing the right people,
+by condemning the wrong people, and by balancing their fat
+bottoms on fences. Sometimes when their political patrons
+quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is
+either very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed
+as a stop-gap."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," the Rector agreed. "But our present bishops are
+only one more aspect of Victorian materialism. The whole
+of contemporary society can be criticized in the same way.
+After all, we get the bishops we deserve, just as we get the
+politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve and the
+painters we deserve."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think that's any excuse for the bishops. I sometimes
+dream of worming myself up and stopping at nothing in
+order to be made a bishop, and then when I have the mitre
+at last of appearing in my true colours."</p>
+
+<p>"Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our
+right reverend fathers in God do now," the Rector laughed.</p>
+
+<p>These discussions might have continued for ever without
+taking Mark any further. His failure to experience Oxford
+had deprived him of the opportunity to whet his opinions
+upon the grindstone of debate, and there had been no time
+for academic argument in the three years of Keppel Street.
+In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do
+but argue. It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather
+of seeing destroyed, a society that was obviously performing
+useful work and returning to a society that, so far as Mark
+could observe performed no kind of work whatever. He
+was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt that he was
+moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to
+a chasm in which he would be spiritually lost. He seemed
+to be taking his priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be
+content with gratifying his own desire to worship Almighty
+God without troubling about his parishioners. Mark did
+not like to make any suggestions about parochial work, because
+he was afraid of the Rector's retorting with an implied
+criticism of St. Agnes'; and that would have involved him
+in a bitter argument for which he would afterward be sorry.
+Nor was it only in his missionary duties that he felt his old
+friend was allowing himself to rust. Three years ago the
+Rector had said a daily Mass. Now he was content with one
+on Thursdays except on festivals. Mark began to take walks
+far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of
+the life round him rather than the expression of an interest
+in the life beyond. On one of these walks he found himself
+at Wield in the diocese of Kidderminster thirty miles or more
+away from home. He had spent the night in a remote Cotswold
+village, and all the morning he had been travelling
+through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time
+of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line,
+monotonously green, prosperous and complacent. While he
+was eating his bread and cheese at the public bar of the principal
+inn, he picked up one of the local newspapers and
+reading it, as one so often reads in such surroundings, with
+much greater particularity than the journal of a metropolis,
+he came upon the following letter:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>To the Editor of the W<small>IELD</small> O<small>BSERVER AND</small> S<small>OUTH</small> W<small>ORCESTERSHIRE</small>
+C<small>OURANT</small>,</p>
+
+<p>SIR,&mdash;The leader in your issue of last Tuesday upon my
+sermon in St. Andrew's Church on the preceding Sunday
+calls for some corrections. The action of the Bishop of
+Kidderminster in inhibiting Father Rowley from accepting
+an invitation to preach in my church is due either to his
+ignorance of the facts of the case, to his stupidity in appreciating
+them, or, I must regretfully add, to his natural bias
+towards persecution. These are strong words for a parish
+priest to use about his diocesan; but the Bishop of Kidderminster's
+consistent support of latitudinarianism and his consistent
+hostility towards any of his clergy who practise the
+forms of worship which they feel they are bound to practise
+by the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer call for strong
+words. The Bishop in correspondence with me declined to
+give any reason for his inhibition of Father Rowley beyond
+a general disapproval of his teaching. I am informed
+privately that the Bishop is suffering from a delusion that
+Father Rowley disobeyed the Bishop of Silchester, which is
+of course perfectly untrue and which is only one more sign
+of how completely out of accord our bishops are with what
+is going on either in their own diocese or in any other. My
+own inclination was frankly to defy his Lordship and insist
+upon Father Rowley's fulfilling his engagement. I am not
+sure that I do not now regret that I allowed my church-wardens
+to overpersuade me on this point. I take great
+exception to your statement that the offertories both in the
+morning and in the evening were sent by me to Father
+Rowley regardless of the wishes of my parishioners. That
+there are certain parishioners of St. Andrew's who objected
+I have no doubt. But when I send you the attached list of
+parishioners who subscribed no less than &pound;18 to be added to
+the two collections, you will I am sure courteously admit
+that in this case the opinion of the parishioners of St.
+Andrew's was at one with the opinion of their Vicar.&mdash;I am,
+Sir, your obedient servant,</p>
+
+<p>ADRIAN FORSHAW.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mark was so much delighted by this letter that he went
+off at once to call on Mr. Forshaw, but did not find him at
+home; he was amused to hear from the housekeeper that
+his reverence had been summoned to an interview with the
+Bishop of Kidderminster. Mark fancied that it would be
+the prelate who would have the unpleasant quarter of an
+hour. Presently he began to ponder what it meant for such
+a letter to be written and published; his doubts about the
+Church of England returned; and in this condition of mind
+he found himself outside a small Roman Catholic church
+dedicated to St. Joseph, where hopeful of gaining the Divine
+guidance within he passed through the door. It may be that
+he was in a less receptive mood than he thought, for what
+impressed him most was the Anglican atmosphere of this
+Italian outpost. The stale perfume of incense on stone could
+not eclipse that authentic perfume of respectability which
+has been acquired by so many Roman Catholic churches in
+England. There were still hanging on the pillars the framed
+numbers of Sunday's hymns. Mark pictured the choir boy
+who must have slipped the cards in the frame with anxious
+and triumphant and immemorial Anglican zeal; and while
+he was contemplating this symbolical hymn-board, over his
+shoulder floated an authentic Anglican voice, a voice that
+sounded as if it was being choked out of the larynx by the
+clerical collar. It was the Rector, a stumpy little man with
+the purple stock of a monseigneur, who showed the stranger
+round his church and ended by inviting him to lunch. Mark,
+wondering if he had reached a crossroad in his progress,
+accepted the invitation, and prepared himself reverently to
+hear the will of God. Monseigneur Cripps lived in a little
+Gothic house next to St. Joseph's, a trim little Gothic house
+covered with the oiled curls of an ampelopsis still undyed by
+autumn's henna.</p>
+
+<p>"You've chosen a bad day to come to lunch," said Monseigneur
+with a warning shake of the head. "It's Friday,
+you know. And it's hard to get decent fish away from the
+big towns."</p>
+
+<p>While his host went off to consult the housekeeper about
+the extra place for lunch, a proceeding which induced him
+to make a joke about extra 'plaice' and extra 'place,' at which
+he laughed heartily, Mark considered the most tactful way
+of leading up to a discussion of the position of the Anglican
+Church in regard to Roman claims. It should not be difficult,
+he supposed, because Monseigneur at the first hint of
+his guest's desire to be converted would no doubt welcome
+the topic. But when Monseigneur led the way to his little
+Gothic dining-room full of Arundel prints, Mark soon apprehended
+that his host had evidently not had the slightest
+notion of offering an <i>ad hoc</i> hospitality. He paid no attention
+to Mark's tentative advances, and if he was willing to talk
+about Rome, it was only because he had just paid a visit there
+in connexion with a school of which he was a trustee and out
+of which he wanted to make one kind of school and the
+Roman Catholic Bishop of Dudley wanted to make another.</p>
+
+<p>"I had to take the whole question to headquarters," Monseigneur
+explained impressively. "But I was disappointed
+by Rome, oh yes, I was very disappointed. When I was a
+young man I saw it <i>couleur de rose</i>. I did enjoy one thing
+though, and that was going round the Vatican. Yes, they
+looked remarkably smart, the Papal Guards; as soon as they
+saw I was <i>Monsignore</i>, they turned out and presented arms.
+I'm bound to admit that I <i>was</i> impressed by that. But on
+the way down I lost my pipe in the train. And do you think
+I could buy a decent pipe in Rome? I actually had to pay
+five <i>lire</i>&mdash;or was it six?&mdash;for this inadequate tube."</p>
+
+<p>He produced from his pocket the pipe he had been compelled
+to buy, a curved briar all varnish and gold lettering.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been badly treated in Wield. Certainly, they made
+me Monseigneur. But then they couldn't very well do less
+after I built this church. We've been successful here. And
+I venture to think popular. But the Bishop is in the hands
+of the Irish. He cannot grasp that the English people will
+not have Irish priests to rule them. They don't like it, and
+I don't blame them. You're not Irish, are you?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark reassured him.</p>
+
+<p>"This plaice isn't bad, eh? I ordered turbot, but you
+never get the fish you order in these Midland towns. It
+always ends in my having plaice, which is good for the soul!
+Ha-ha! I hate the Irish myself. This school of which I
+am the chief trustee was intended to be a Catholic reformatory.
+That idea fell through, and now my notion is to turn
+it into a decent school run by secular clergy. All the English
+Catholic schools are in the hands of the regular clergy, which
+is a mistake. It puts too much power in the hands of the
+Benedictines and the Jesuits and the rest of them. After all,
+the great strength of the Catholic Church in England will
+always be the secular clergy. And what do we get now? A
+lot of objectionable Irishmen in Trilby hats. Last time I saw
+the Bishop I gave him my frank opinion of his policy. I
+told him my opinion to his face. He won't get me to kowtow
+to him. Yes, I said to him that, if he handed over this
+school to the Dominicans, he was going to spoil one of the
+finest opportunities ever presented of educating the sons of
+decent English gentlemen to be simple parish priests. But
+the Bishop of Dudley is an Irishman himself. He can't think
+of anything educationally better than Ushaw. And, as I was
+telling you, I saw there was nothing for it but to take the
+whole matter right up to headquarters, that is to Rome. Did
+I tell you that the Papal Guards turned out and presented
+arms? Ah, I remember now, I did mention it. I was extraordinarily
+impressed by them. A fine body. But generally
+speaking, Rome disappointed me after many years. Of
+course we English Catholics don't understand that way of
+worshipping. I'm not criticizing it. I realize that it suits
+the Italians. But suppose I started clearing my throat in the
+middle of Mass? My congregation would be disgusted, and
+rightly. It's an astonishing thing that I couldn't buy a good
+pipe in Rome, don't you think? I must have lost mine when
+I got out of the carriage to look at the leaning tower of Pisa,
+and my other one got clogged up with some candle grease.
+I couldn't get the beastly stuff out, so I had to give the pipe
+to a porter. They're keen on English pipes, those Italian
+porters. Poor devils, I'm not surprised. Of course, I need
+hardly say that in Rome they promised to do everything for
+me; but you can't trust them when your back is turned, and
+I need hardly add that the Bishop was pulling strings all
+the time. They showed me one of his letters, which was a
+tissue of mis-statements&mdash;a regular tissue. Now, suppose
+you had a son and you wanted him to be a priest? You don't
+necessarily want him to become a Jesuit or a Benedictine or
+a Dominican. Where can you send him now? Stonyhurst,
+Downside, Beaumont. There isn't a single decent school
+run by the secular clergy. You know what I mean? A
+school for the sons of gentlemen&mdash;a public school. We've
+got magnificent buildings, grounds, everything you could
+wish. I've been promised all the money necessary, and then
+the Bishop of Dudley steps in and says that these Dominicans
+ought to take it on."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I've somehow given you a wrong impression,"
+Mark interposed when Monseigneur Cripps at last filled his
+mouth with plaice. "I'm not a Roman Catholic."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, aren't you?" said Monseigneur indifferently. "Never
+mind, I expect you see my point about the necessity for the
+school to be run by secular clergy. Did I tell you how I
+got the land for my church here? That's rather an interesting
+story. It belonged to Lord Evesham who, as perhaps
+you may know, is very anti-Catholic, but a thorough good
+sportsman. We always get on capitally together. Well, one
+day I said to his agent, Captain Hart: 'What about this
+land, Hart? Don't you think you could get it out of his
+lordship?' 'It's no good, Father Cripps,' said Hart&mdash;I wasn't
+Monseigneur then of course&mdash;'It's no good,' he said, 'his
+lordship absolutely declines to let his land be used for a
+Catholic church.' 'Come along, Hart,' I said, 'let's have a
+round of golf.' Well, when we got to the eighteenth hole we
+were all square, and we'd both of us gone round three better
+than bogie and broken our own records. I was on the green
+with my second shot, and holed out in three. 'My game,'
+I shouted because Hart had foozled his drive and wasn't on
+the green. 'Not at all,' he said. 'You shouldn't be in such
+a hurry. I may hole out in one,' he laughed. 'If you do,' I
+said, 'you ought to get Lord Evesham to give me that land.'
+'That's a bargain,' he said, and he took his mashie. Will
+you believe it? He did the hole in two, sir, won the game,
+and beat the record for the course! And that's how I got
+the land to build my church. I was delighted! I was delighted!
+I've told that story everywhere to show what
+sportsmen are. I told it to the Bishop, but of course he being
+an Irishman didn't see anything funny in it. If he could
+have stopped my being made Monseigneur, he'd have done so.
+But he couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to have as much trouble with your bishops as
+we do with ours in the Anglican Church," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"We shouldn't, if we made the right men bishops," said
+Monseigneur. "But so long as they think at Westminster
+that we're going to convert England with a tagrag and bobtail
+mob of Irish priests, we never shall make the right men.
+You were looking round my church just now. Didn't it
+remind you of an English church?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark agreed that it did very much.</p>
+
+<p>"That's my secret: that's why I've been the most successful
+mission priest in this diocese. I realize as an Englishman
+that it is no use to give the English Irish Catholicism. When
+I was in Rome the other day I was disgusted, I really was.
+I was disgusted. I thoroughly sympathize with Protestants
+who go there and are disgusted. You cannot expect a decent
+English family to confess to an Irish peasant. It's not reasonable.
+We want to create an English tradition."</p>
+
+<p>"What between the Roman party in the Anglican Church
+and the Anglican party in the Roman Church," said Mark,
+"It seems a pity that some kind of reunion cannot be effected."</p>
+
+<p>"So it could," Monseigneur declared. "So it could, if it
+wasn't for the Irish. Look at the way we treat our English
+converts. The clergy, I mean. Why? Because the Irish do
+not want England to be converted."</p>
+
+<p>Mark did not raise with Monseigneur Cripps the question
+of his doubts. Indeed, before the plaice had been taken
+away he had decided that they no longer existed. It became
+clear to him that the English Church was England; and although
+he knew in his heart that Monseigneur Cripps was
+suffering from a sense of grievance and that his criticism
+of Roman policy was too obviously biased, it pleased him
+to believe that it was a fair criticism.</p>
+
+<p>Mark thanked Monseigneur Cripps for his hospitality and
+took a friendly leave of him. An hour later he was walking
+back through the pleasant vale of Wield toward the Cotswolds.
+As he went his way among the green orchards, he
+thought over his late impulse to change allegiance, marvelling
+at it now and considering it irrational, like one astonished at
+his own behaviour in a dream. There came into his mind
+a story of George Fox who drawing near to the city of
+Lichfield took off his shoes in a meadow and cried three times
+in a loud voice "Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield," after
+which he put on his shoes again and proceeded into the
+town. Mark looked back in amazement at his lunch with
+Monseigneur Cripps and his own meditated apostasy. To
+his present mood that intention to forsake his own Church
+appeared as remote from actuality as the malediction of
+George Fox upon the city of Lichfield.</p>
+
+<p>Here among these green orchards in the heart of England
+Roman Catholicism presented itself to Mark's imagination
+as an exotic. The two words "Roman Catholicism" uttered
+aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave him the sensation of
+an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an apple-tree.
+People who talked about bringing the English Church into
+line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense
+of history. Apart from the question whether the English
+Church before the Reformation had accepted the pretensions
+of the Papacy, it was absurd to suppose that contemporary
+Romanism had anything in common with English Catholicism
+of the early sixteenth century. English Catholicism long
+before the Reformation had been a Protestant Catholicism,
+always in revolt against Roman claims, always preserving its
+insularity. It was idle to question the Catholic intentions of
+a priesthood that could produce within a century of the
+Reformation such prelates as Andrews and Ken. It was
+ridiculous at the prompting of the party in the ascendancy
+at Westminster to procure a Papal decision against English
+Orders when two hundred and fifty years ago there was a
+cardinal's hat waiting for Laud if he would leave the Church
+of England. And what about Paul IV and Elizabeth? Was
+he not willing to recognize English Orders if she would
+recognize his headship of Christendom?</p>
+
+<p>But these were controversial arguments, and as Mark
+walked along through the pleasant vale of Wield with the
+Cotswold hills rising taller before him at every mile he
+apprehended that his adhesion to the English Church had
+been secured by the natural scene rather than by argument.
+Nevertheless, it was interesting to speculate why Romanism
+had not made more progress in England, why even now with
+a hierarchy and with such a distinguished line of converts
+beginning with Newman it remained so completely out of
+touch with the national life of the country. While the
+Romans converted one soul to Catholicism, the inheritors of
+the Oxford Movement were converting twenty. Catholicism
+must be accounted a disposition of mind, an attitude toward
+life that did not necessarily imply all that was implied by
+Roman Catholicism. What was the secret of the Roman
+failure? Everywhere else in the world Roman Catholicism
+had known how to adapt itself to national needs; only in
+England did it remain exotic. It was like an Anglo-Indian
+magnate who returns to find himself of no importance in
+his native land, and who but for the flavour of his curries
+and perhaps a black servant or two would be utterly inconspicuous.
+He tries to fit in with the new conditions of his
+readopted country, but he remains an exotic and is regarded
+by his neighbours as one to whom the lesson must be taught
+that he is no longer of importance. What had been the cause
+of this breach in the Roman Catholic tradition, this curious
+incompetency, this Anglo-Indian conservatism and pretentiousness?
+Perhaps it had begun when in the seventeenth
+century the propagation of Roman Catholicism in England
+was handed over to the Jesuits, who mismanaged the country
+hopelessly. By the time Rome had perceived that the conversion
+of England could not be left to the Jesuits the harm
+was done, so that when with greater toleration the time was
+ripe to expand her organization it was necessary to recruit
+her priests in Ireland. What the Jesuits had begun the Irish
+completed. It had been amusing to listen to the lamentations
+of Monseigneur Cripps; but Monseigneur Cripps had expressed,
+however ludicrous his egoism, the failure of his
+Church in England.</p>
+
+<p>Mark's statement of the Anglican position with nobody
+to answer his arguments except the trees and the hedgerows
+seemed flawless. The level road, the gentle breeze in the
+orchards on either side, the scent of the grass, and the busy
+chirping of the birds coincided with the main point of his
+argument that England was most inexpressibly Anglican and
+that Roman Catholicism was most unmistakably not. His
+arguments were really hasty foot-notes to his convictions;
+if each one had separately been proved wrong, that would
+have had no influence on the point of view he had reached.
+He forgot that this very landscape that was seeming incomparable
+England herself had yesterday appeared complacent
+and monotonous. In fact he was as bad as George Fox,
+who after taking off his shoes to curse the bloody city of
+Lichfield should only have put them on again to walk away
+from it.</p>
+
+<p>The grey road was by now beginning to climb the foothills
+of the Cotswolds; a yellow-hammer, keeping always a
+few paces ahead, twittered from quickset boughs nine encouraging
+notes that drowned the echoes of ancient
+controversies. In such a countryside no claims papal or
+episcopal possessed the least importance; and Mark dismissed
+the subject from his mind, abandoning himself to the pleasure
+of the slow ascent. Looking back after a while he could
+see the town of Wield riding like a ship in a sea of verdure,
+and when he surveyed thus England asleep in the sunlight,
+the old ambition to become a preaching friar was kindled
+again in his heart. He would re-establish the extinct and
+absolutely English Order of St. Gilbert so that there should
+be no question of Roman pretensions. Doubtless, St.
+Francis himself would understand a revival of his Order
+without reference to existing Franciscans; but nobody else
+would understand, and it would be foolish to insist upon
+being a Franciscan if the rest of the Order disowned him
+and his followers. If anybody had asked Mark at that moment
+why he wanted to restore the preaching friars, he might
+have found it difficult to answer. He was by no means
+imbued with the missionary spirit just then; his experience
+at Chatsea had made him pessimistic about missionary effort
+in the Church of England. If a man like Father Rowley had
+failed to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark,
+who possessed more humility than is usual at twenty-one,
+did not fancy that he should be successful. The ambition
+to become a friar was revived by an incomprehensible, or
+if not incomprehensible, certainly by an inexplicable impulse
+to put himself in tune with the landscape, to proclaim as it
+were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down
+there in the flowery Vale of Wield: <i>God rest you merry
+gentlemen, let nothing you dismay!</i> There was revealed to
+him with the assurance of absolute faith that all the sorrows,
+all the ugliness, all the soullessness (no other word could
+be found) of England in the first year of the twentieth century
+was due to the Reformation; the desire to become a
+preaching friar was the dramatic expression of this inspired
+conviction. Before his journey through the Vale of Wield
+Mark in any discussion would have been ready to argue the
+mistake of the Reformation: but now there was no longer
+room for argument. What formerly he thought now he
+knew. The song of the yellow-hammer was louder in the
+quickset hedge; the trees burned with a sharper green; the
+road urged his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"If only everybody in England could move as I am moving
+now," he thought. "If only I could be granted the power to
+show a few people, so that they could show others, and those
+others show all the world. How confidently that yellow-hammer
+repeats his song! How well he knows that his song
+is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the
+linnet envies him! The fools that talk of nature's cruelty,
+the blind fatuous sentimental coxcombs!"</p>
+
+<p>Thus apostrophizing, Mark came to a wayside inn; discovering
+that he was hungry, he took his seat at a rustic table
+outside and called for bread and cheese and beer. While he
+was eating, a vehicle approached from the direction in which
+he would soon be travelling. He took it at first for a caravan
+of gipsies, but when it grew near he saw that it was painted
+over with minatory texts and was evidently the vehicle of
+itinerant gospellers. Two young men alighted from the
+caravan when it pulled up before the door of the inn. They
+were long-nosed sallow creatures with that expression of
+complacency which organized morality too often produces,
+and in this quiet countryside they gave an effect of being
+overgrown Sunday-school scholars upon their annual outing.
+Having cast a censorious glance in the direction of Mark's
+jug of ale, they sat down at the farther end of the bench and
+ordered food.</p>
+
+<p>"The preaching friars of to-day," Mark thought gloomily.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," said one of the gospellers. "I notice you've
+been looking very hard at our van. Excuse me, but are you
+saved?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, are you?" Mark countered with an angry blush.</p>
+
+<p>"We are," the gospeller proclaimed. "Or I and Mr.
+Smillie here," he indicated his companion, "wouldn't be
+travelling round trying to save others. Here, read this
+tract, my friend. Don't hurry over it. We can wait all day
+and all night to bring one wandering soul to Jesus."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked at the young men curiously; perceiving that
+they were sincere, he accepted the tract and out of courtesy
+perused it. The tale therein enfolded reminded him of a
+narrative testifying to the efficacy of a patent medicine. The
+process of conversation followed a stereotyped formula.</p>
+
+<p><i>For three and a half years I was unable to keep down
+any sins for more than five minutes after I had committed
+the last one. I had a dizzy feeling in the heart and a sharp
+pain in the small of the soul. A friend of mine recommended
+me to try the good minister in the slum. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. After the
+first text I was able to keep down my sins for six minutes .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+after twenty-two bottles I am as good as I ever was. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+I ascribe my salvation entirely to</i>. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Mark
+handed back the tract with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you convert many people with this literature?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"We don't often convert a soul right off," said Mr. Smillie.
+"But we sow the good seed, if you follow my meaning; and
+we leave the rest to Jesus. Mr. Bullock and I have handed
+over seven hundred tracts in three weeks, and we know that
+they won't all fall on stony ground or be choked by tares
+and thistles."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mind my asking you a question?" Mark said.</p>
+
+<p>The gospel bearers craned their necks like hungry fowls
+in their eagerness to peck at any problems Mark felt inclined
+to scatter before them. A ludicrous fancy passed through his
+mind that much of the good seed was pecked up by the
+scatterers.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you trying to convert people to?" Mark solemnly
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"What are we trying to convert people to?" echoed Mr.
+Bullock and Mr. Smillie in unison. Then the former became
+eloquent. "We're trying to wash ignorant people in the blood
+of the Lamb. We're converting them from the outer darkness,
+where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of
+teeth, to be rocked safe for ever in the arms of Jesus. If
+you'd have read that tract I handed you a bit more slowly
+and a bit more carefully, you wouldn't have had any call to
+ask a question like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I framed my question rather badly," Mark admitted.
+"I understand that you want to bring people to
+believe in Our Lord; but when by a tract or by a personal
+exhortation or by an emotional appeal you've induced them
+to suppose that they are converted, or as you put it saved,
+what more do you give them?"</p>
+
+<p>"What more do we give them?" Mr. Smillie shrilled.
+"What more can we give them after we've given them Christ
+Jesus? We're sitting here offering you Christ Jesus at this
+moment. You're sitting there mocking at us. But Mr.
+Bullock and me don't mind how much you mock. We're
+ready to stay here for hours if we can bring you safe to the
+bosom of Emmanuel."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but suppose I told you that I believe in Our Lord
+Jesus Christ without any persuasion from you?" Mark
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then you're saved," said Mr. Bullock decidedly.
+"And you can ask the landlord for our bill, Mr. Smillie."</p>
+
+<p>"But is nothing more necessary?" Mark persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>By faith are ye justified</i>," Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie
+shouted simultaneously.</p>
+
+<p>Mark paused for a moment to consider whether argument
+was worth while, and then he returned to the attack.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I think that people like you do a great deal
+of damage to Christianity. You only flatter human conceit.
+You get hold of some emotional creature and work upon his
+feelings until in an access of self-absorption he feels that
+the universe is standing still while the necessary measures
+are taken to secure his personal salvation. You flatter this
+poor soul, and then you go away and leave him to work out
+his own salvation."</p>
+
+<p>"If you're dwelling in Christ Jesus and Christ Jesus is
+dwelling in you, you haven't got to work out your own salvation.
+He worked out your salvation on the Cross," said Mr.
+Bullock contemptuously.</p>
+
+<p>"And you think that nothing more is necessary from a
+man? It seems to me that the religion you preach is fatal
+to human character. I'm not trying to be offensive when
+I tell you that it's the religion of a tapeworm. It's a religion
+for parasites. It's a religion which ignores the Holy Ghost."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you'll explain your assertion a little more fully?"
+Mr. Bullock invited with a scowl.</p>
+
+<p>"What I mean is that, if Our Lord's Atonement removed
+all responsibility from human nature, there doesn't seem
+much for the Holy Ghost to do, does there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as it happens," said Mr. Bullock sarcastically, "Mr.
+Smillie and I here do most of our work with the help of the
+Holy Ghost, so you've hit on a bad example to work off your
+sneers on."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not trying to sneer," Mark protested. "But strangely
+enough just before you came along I was thinking to myself
+how much I should like to travel over England preaching
+about Our Lord, because I think that England has need of
+Him. But I also think, now you've answered my question,
+that <i>you</i> are doing more harm than good by your interpretation
+of the Holy Ghost."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Smillie," interrupted Mr. Bullock in an elaborately
+off-hand voice, "if you've counted the change and it's all correct,
+we'd better get a move on. Let's gird up our loins,
+Mr. Smillie, and not sit wrestling here with infidels."</p>
+
+<p>"No, really, you must allow me," Mark persisted. "You've
+had it so much your own way with your tracts and your
+talks this last few weeks that by now you must be in need
+of a sermon yourselves. The gospel you preach is only going
+to add to the complacency of England, and England is too
+complacent already. All Northern nations are, which is why
+they are Protestant. They demand a religion which will
+truckle to them, a religion which will allow them to devote
+six days of the week to what is called business and on the
+seventh day to rest and praise God that they are not as other
+men."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Render unto C&aelig;sar the things that are C&aelig;sar's and unto
+God the things that are God's</i>," said Mr. Smillie, putting the
+change in his pocket and untying the nosebag from the horse.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Ye cannot serve God and mammon</i>," Mark retorted.
+"And I wish you'd let me finish my argument."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Smillie and I aren't touring the Midlands trying to
+find grapes on thorns and figs on thistles," said Mr. Bullock
+scathingly. "We'd have given you a chance, if you'd have
+shown any fruits of the Spirit."</p>
+
+<p>"You've just said you weren't looking for grapes or figs,"
+Mark laughed. "I'm sorry I've made you so cross. But you
+began the argument by asking me if I was saved. Think how
+annoyed you would have been if I had begun a conversation
+by asking you if you were washed."</p>
+
+<p>"My last words to you is," said Mr. Bullock solemnly,
+looking out of the caravan window, "my last words to you
+are," he corrected himself, "is to avoid beer. You can
+touch up the horse, Mr. Smillie."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll come and touch you up, you big-mouthed Bible
+thumpers," a rich voice shouted from the inn door. "Yes,
+you sit outside my public-house and swill minerals when
+you're so full of gas already you could light a corporation
+gasworks. Avoid beer, you walking bellows? Step down
+out of that travelling menagerie, and I'll give you 'avoid
+beer.' You'll avoid more than beer before I've finished with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>But the gospel bearers without paying any attention to the
+tirade went on their way; and Mark who did not wait to
+listen to the innkeeper's abuse of all religion and all religious
+people went on his way in the opposite direction.</p>
+
+<p>Swinging homeward over the Cotswolds Mark flattered
+himself on a victory over heretics, and he imagined his adversaries
+entering Wield that afternoon, the prey of doubt and
+mortification. At the highest point of the road he even ventured
+to suppose that they might find themselves at Evensong
+outside St. Andrew's Church and led within by the grace
+of the Holy Spirit that they might renounce their errors
+before the altar. Indeed, it was not until he was back in
+the Rectory that the futility of his own bearing overwhelmed
+him with shame. Anxious to atone for his self-conceit, Mark
+gave the Rector an account of the incident.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that I behaved very feebly, don't you
+think?"</p>
+
+<p>"That kind of fellow is a hard nut to crack," the Rector
+said consolingly. "And you can't expect just by quoting text
+against text to effect an instant conversion. Don't forget
+that your friends are in their way as great enthusiasts probably
+as yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but it's humiliating to be imagining oneself leading
+a revival of the preaching friars and then to behave like that.
+What strikes me now, when it's too late, is that I ought to
+have waited and taken the opportunity to tackle the innkeeper.
+He was just the ordinary man who supposes that
+religion is his natural enemy. You must admit that I missed
+a chance there."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to check your missionary zeal," said the
+Rector. "But I really don't think you need worry yourself
+about an omission of that kind so long before you are
+ordained. If I didn't know you as well as I do, I might even
+be inclined to consider such a passion for souls at your age
+a little morbid. I wish with all my heart you'd gone to
+Oxford," he added with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, really, do you know," said Mark, "I don't regret
+that. Whatever may be the advantages of a public school
+and university, the education hampers one. One becomes
+identified with a class; and when one has finished with that
+education, the next two or three years have to be spent
+in discovering that public school and university men form a
+very small proportion of the world's population. Sometimes
+I almost regret that my mother did not let me acquire that
+Cockney accent. You can say a lot of things in a Cockney
+accent which said without any accent sound priggish. You
+must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale
+of the gospellers and the innkeeper is 'Dear me! I am afraid
+Mark's turning into a prig.'"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no. I laid particular stress on the point that if I
+didn't know you as well as I do I might perhaps have thought
+that," the Rector protested.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I am a prig," Mark went on slowly. "I
+don't think I have enough confidence in myself to be a prig.
+I think the way I argued with Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie
+was a bit priggish, because at the back of my head all the
+time I was talking I felt in addition to the arrogance of faith
+a kind of confounded snobbishness; and this sense of
+superiority came not from my being a member of the Church,
+but from feeling myself more civilized than they were.
+Looking back now at the conversation, I can remember that
+actually at the very moment I was talking of the Holy Ghost
+I was noticing how Mr. Bullock's dicky would keep escaping
+from his waistcoat. I wonder if the great missionary saints
+of the middle ages had to contend with this accumulation of
+social conventions with which we are faced nowadays. It
+seems to me that in everything&mdash;in art, in religion, in mere
+ordinary everyday life and living&mdash;man is adding daily to
+the wall that separates him from God."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm, yes," said the Rector, "all this only means that you
+are growing up. The child is nearer to God than the man.
+Wordsworth said it better than I can say it. Similarly, the
+human race must grow away from God as it takes upon
+itself the burden of knowledge. That surely is inherent in
+the fall of man. No philosopher has yet improved upon the
+first chapter of Genesis as a symbolical explanation of
+humanity's plight. When man was created&mdash;or if you like
+to put it evolved&mdash;there must have been an exact moment at
+which he had the chance of remaining where he was&mdash;in
+other words, in the Garden of Eden&mdash;or of developing
+further along his own lines with free will. Satan fell from
+pride. It is natural to assume that man, being tempted by
+Satan, would fall from the same sin, though the occasion,
+of his fall might be the less heroic sin of curiosity. Yes,
+I think that first chapter of Genesis, as an attempt to sum
+up the history of millions of years, is astoundingly complete.
+Have you ever thought how far by now the world would
+have grown away from God without the Incarnation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Mark, "and after nineteen hundred years how
+little nearer it has grown."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear boy," said the Rector, "if man has not even yet
+got rid of rudimentary gills or useless paps he is not going
+to grow very visibly nearer to God in nineteen hundred years
+after growing away from God for ninety million. Yet such
+is the mercy of our Father in Heaven that, infinitely remote
+as we have grown from Him, we are still made in His image,
+and in childhood we are allowed a few years of blessed
+innocency. To some children&mdash;and you were one of them&mdash;God
+reveals Himself more directly. But don't, my dear
+fellow, grow up imagining that these visions you were
+accorded as a boy will be accorded to you all through your
+life. You may succeed in remaining pure in act, but you
+will find it hard to remain pure in heart. To me the most
+frightening beatitude is <i>Blessed are the pure in heart, for
+they shall see God.</i> What your present state of mind really
+amounts to is lack of hope, for as soon as you find yourself
+unable to be as miraculously eloquent as St. Anthony of
+Padua you become the prey of despair."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not so foolish as that," Mark replied. "But surely,
+Rector, it behoves me during these years before my ordination
+to criticize myself severely."</p>
+
+<p>"As severely as you like," the Rector agreed, "provided
+that you only criticize yourself, and don't criticize Almighty
+God."</p>
+
+<p>"But surely," Mark went on, "I ought to be asking myself
+now that I am twenty-one how I shall best occupy the next
+three years?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," the Rector assented. "Think it over, and be
+sure that, when you have thought it over and have made
+your decision with the help of prayer, I shall be the first
+to support that decision in every way possible. Even if you
+decide to be a preaching friar," he added with a smile. "And
+now I have some news for you. Esther arrives here tomorrow
+to stay with us for a fortnight before she is professed."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII" />CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<h3>SISTER ESTHER MAGDALENE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Esther's novitiate in the community of St. Mary Magdalene,
+Shoreditch, had lasted six months longer than
+was usual, because the Mother Superior while never doubting
+her vocation for the religious life had feared for her
+ability to stand the strain of that work among penitents to
+which the community was dedicated. In the end, her perseverance
+had been rewarded, and the day of her profession
+was at hand.</p>
+
+<p>During the whole of her nearly four years' novitiate
+Esther had not been home once; although Mark and she had
+corresponded at long intervals, their letters had been nothing
+more than formal records of minor events, and on St. John's
+eve he drove with the dogcart to meet her, wondering all
+the way how much she would have changed. The first thing
+that struck him when he saw her alight from the train on
+Shipcot platform was her neatness. In old days with windblown
+hair and clothes flung on anyhow she had belonged so
+unmistakably to the open air. Now in her grey habit and
+white veil of the novice she was as tranquil as Miriam, and
+for the first time Mark perceived a resemblance between the
+sisters. Her complexion, which formerly was flushed and
+much freckled by the open air, was now like alabaster; and
+although her auburn hair was hidden beneath the veil Mark
+was aware of it like a hidden fire. He had in the very
+moment of welcoming her a swift vision of that auburn hair
+lying on the steps of the altar a fortnight hence, and he was
+filled with a wild desire to be present at her profession and
+gathering up the shorn locks to let them run through his
+fingers like flames. He had no time to be astonished at himself
+before they were shaking hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Esther," he laughed, "you're carrying an umbrella."</p>
+
+<p>"It was raining in London," she said gravely.</p>
+
+<p>He was on the point of exclaiming at such prudence in
+Esther when he blushed in the remembrance that she was a
+nun. During the drive back they talked shyly about the
+characters of the village and the Rectory animals.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel as if you'd just come back from school for the
+holidays," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I feel as if I'd been at school," she agreed. "How
+sweet the country smells."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you miss the country sometimes in Shoreditch?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head and looked at him with puzzled eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I miss anything in Shoreditch?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark was abashed and silent for the rest of the drive,
+because he fancied that Esther might have supposed that he
+was referring to the past, rather than give which impression
+he would have cut out his tongue. When they reached the
+Rectory, Mark was moved almost to tears by the greetings.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear little sister," Miriam murmured. "How happy we
+are to have you with us again."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear child," said Mrs. Ogilvie. "And really she does
+look like a nun."</p>
+
+<p>"My dearest girl, we have missed you every moment of
+these four years," said the Rector, bending to kiss her.
+"How cold your cheek is."</p>
+
+<p>"It was quite chilly driving," said Mark quickly, for there
+had come upon him a sudden dismay lest they should think
+she was a ghost. He was relieved when Miriam announced
+tea half an hour earlier than usual in honour of Esther's
+arrival; it seemed to prove that to her family she was still
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>"After tea I'm going to Wych Maries to pick St. John's
+wort for the church. Would you like to walk as far?" Mark
+suggested, and then stood speechless, horrified at his want of
+tact. He had the presence of mind not to excuse himself,
+and he was grateful to Esther when she replied in a calm
+voice that she should like a walk after tea.</p>
+
+<p>When the opportunity presented itself, Mark apologized
+for his suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>"By why apologize?" she asked. "I assure you I'm not
+at all tired and I really should like to walk to Wych Maries."</p>
+
+<p>He was amazed at her self-possession, and they walked
+along with unhastening conventual steps to where the St.
+John's wort grew amid a tangle of ground ivy in the open
+spaces of a cypress grove, appearing most vividly and richly
+golden like sunlight breaking from black clouds in the western
+sky.</p>
+
+<p>"Gather some sprays quickly, Sister Esther Magdalene,"
+Mark advised. "And you will be safe against the demons
+of this night when evil has such power."</p>
+
+<p>"Are we ever safe against the demons of the night?" she
+asked solemnly. "And has not evil great power always?"</p>
+
+<p>"Always," he assented in a voice that trembled to a sigh,
+like the uncertain wind that comes hesitating at dusk in the
+woods. "Always," he repeated.</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke Mark fell upon his knees among the holy
+flowers, for there had come upon him temptation; and the
+sombre trees standing round watched him like fiends with
+folded wings.</p>
+
+<p>"Go to the chapel," he cried in an agony.</p>
+
+<p>"Mark, what is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go to the chapel. For God's sake, Esther, don't wait."</p>
+
+<p>In another moment he felt that he should tear the white
+veil from her forehead and set loose her auburn hair.</p>
+
+<p>"Mark, are you ill?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, do what I ask," he begged. "Once I prayed for you
+here. Pray for me now."</p>
+
+<p>At that moment she understood, and putting her hands
+to her eyes she stumbled blindly toward the ruined church of
+the two Maries, heavily too, because she was encumbered by
+her holy garb. When she was gone and the last rustle of her
+footsteps had died away upon the mid-summer silence, Mark
+buried his body in the golden flowers.</p>
+
+<p>"How can I ever look any of them in the face again?" he
+cried aloud. "Small wonder that yesterday I was so futile.
+Small wonder indeed! And of all women, to think that I
+should fall in love with Esther. If I had fallen in love with
+her four years ago .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. but now when she is going to be
+professed .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. suddenly without any warning .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. without
+any warning .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. yet perhaps I did love her in those days
+.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and was jealous. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>And even while Mark poured forth his horror of himself
+he held her image to his heart.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought she was a ghost because she was dead to me,
+not because she was dead to them. She is not a ghost to
+them. And is she to me?"</p>
+
+<p>He leapt to his feet, listening.</p>
+
+<p>"Should she come back," he thought with beating heart.
+"Should she come back .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I love her .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she hasn't
+taken her final vows .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. might she not love me? No," he
+shouted at the top of his voice. "I will not do as my father
+did .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I will not .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I will not. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>Mark felt sure of himself again: he felt as he used to
+feel as a little boy when his mother entered on a shaft of
+light to console his childish terrors. When he came to the
+ruined chapel and saw Esther standing with uplifted palms
+before the image of St. Mary Magdalene long since put back
+upon the pedestal from which it had been flung by the squire
+of Rushbrooke Grange, Mark was himself again.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," Esther cried, impulsively taking his hand.
+"You frightened me. What was the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer for a moment or two, because he wanted
+her to hold his hand a little while longer, so much time was
+to come when she would never hold it.</p>
+
+<p>"Whenever I dip my hand in cold water," he said at last,
+"I shall think of you. Why did you say that about the
+demons of the night?"</p>
+
+<p>She dropped his hand in comprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"You're disgusted with me," he murmured. "I'm not
+surprised."</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, you mustn't think of me like that. I'm still a
+very human Esther, so human that the Reverend Mother
+has made me wait an extra year to be professed. But, Mark
+dear, can't you understand, you who know what I endured
+in this place, that I am sometimes tempted by memories of
+him, that I sometimes sin by regrets for giving him up, my
+dead lover so near to me in this place. My dead love," she
+sighed to herself, "to whose memory in my pride of piety I
+thought I should be utterly indifferent."</p>
+
+<p>A spasm of jealousy had shaken Mark while Esther was
+speaking, but by the time she had finished he had fought it
+down.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I must have loved you all this time," he told her.</p>
+
+<p>"Mark dear, I'm ten years older than you. I'm going to
+be a nun for what of my life remains. And I can never love
+anybody else. Don't make this visit of mine a misery to me.
+I've had to conquer so much and I need your prayers."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you needed my kisses."</p>
+
+<p>"Mark!"</p>
+
+<p>"What did I say? Oh, Esther, I'm a brute. Tell me one
+thing."</p>
+
+<p>"I've already told you more than I've told anyone except
+my confessor."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you found happiness in the religious life?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have found myself. The Reverend Mother wanted me
+to leave the community and enter a contemplative order. She
+did not think I should be able to help poor girls."</p>
+
+<p>"Esther, what a stupid woman! Why surely you would
+be wonderful with them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think she is a wise woman," said Esther. "I think since
+we came picking St. John's wort I understand how wise
+she is."</p>
+
+<p>"Esther, dear dear Esther, you make me feel more than
+ever ashamed of myself. I entreat you not to believe what
+the Reverend Mother says."</p>
+
+<p>"You have only a fortnight to convince me," said Esther.</p>
+
+<p>"And I will convince you."</p>
+
+<p>"Mark, do you remember when you made me pray for his
+soul telling me that in that brief second he had time to
+repent?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark nodded grimly.</p>
+
+<p>"You still do think that, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I do. He must have repented."</p>
+
+<p>She thanked him with her eyes; and Mark looking into
+their depths of hope unfathomable put away from him the
+thought that the damned soul of Will Starling was abroad
+to-night with power of evil. Yes, he put this thought behind
+him; but carrying an armful of St. John's wort to hang in
+sprays above the doors of the church he could not rid himself
+of the fancy that his arms were filled with Esther's auburn
+hair.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII" />CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<h3>MALFORD ABBEY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark left Wych-on-the-Wold next day; although he did
+not announce that he should be absent from home so
+long, he intended not to return until Esther had gone back
+to Shoreditch. He hoped that he was not being cowardly in
+thus running away; but after having assured Esther that
+she could count on his behaving normally for the rest of her
+visit, he found his sleep that night so profoundly disturbed
+by feverish visions that when morning came he dreaded his
+inability to behave as both he would wish himself and she
+would wish him to behave. Flight seemed the only way to
+find peace. He was shocked not so much by being in love
+with Esther, but by the suddenness with which his desires
+had overwhelmed him, desires which had never been roused
+since he was born. If in an instant he could be turned upside
+down like that, could he be sure that upon the next
+occasion, supposing that he fell in love with somebody more
+suitable, he should be able to escape so easily? His father
+must have married his mother out of some such violent
+impulse as had seized himself yesterday afternoon, and resentiment
+about his weakness had spoilt his whole life. And
+those dreams! How significant now were the words of the
+Compline hymn, and how much it behoved a Christian soul
+to vanquish these ill dreams against beholding which the
+defence of the Creator was invoked. He had vowed celibacy;
+yet already, three months after his twenty-first birthday, after
+never once being troubled with the slightest hint that the
+vow he had taken might be hard to keep, his security had
+been threatened. How right the Rector had been about that
+frightening beatitude.</p>
+
+<p>Mark had taken the direction of Wychford, and when he
+reached the bridge at the bottom of the road from Wych-on-the-Wold
+he thought he would turn aside and visit the Greys
+whom he had not seen for a long time. He was conscious
+of a curiosity to know if the feelings aroused by Esther
+could be aroused by Monica or Margaret or Pauline. He
+found the dear family unchanged and himself, so far as they
+were concerned, equally unchanged and as much at his ease
+as he had ever been.</p>
+
+<p>"And what are you going to do now?" one of them asked.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean immediately?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark could not bring himself to say that he did not know,
+because such a reply would have seemed to link him with
+the state of mind in which he had been thrown yesterday
+afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, really, I was thinking of going into a monastery,"
+he announced.</p>
+
+<p>Pauline clapped her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I think that is just what you ought to do," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed questions about which Order he proposed
+to join; and Mark ashamed to go back on what he had said
+lest they should think him flippant answered that he thought
+of joining the Order of St. George.</p>
+
+<p>"You know&mdash;Father Burrowes, who works among soldiers."</p>
+
+<p>When Mark was standing by the cross-roads above Wychford
+and was wondering which to take, he decided that
+really the best thing he could do at this moment was to try
+to enter the Order of St. George. He might succeed in being
+ordained without going to a theological college, or if the
+Bishop insisted upon a theological course and he found that
+he had a vocation for the religious life, he could go to Glastonbury
+and rejoin the Order when he was a priest. It was
+true that Father Rowley disapproved of Father Burrowes;
+but he had never expressed more than a general disapproval,
+and Mark was inclined to attribute his attitude to the prejudice
+of a man of strong personality and definite methods
+against another man of strong personality and definite
+methods working on similar lines among similar people.
+Mark remembered now that there had been a question at one
+time of Father Burrowes' opening a priory in the next parish
+to St. Agnes'. Probably that was the reason why Father
+Rowley disapproved of him. Mark had heard the monk
+preach on one occasion and had liked him. Outside the
+pulpit, however, he knew nothing more of him than what he
+had heard from soldiers staying in the Keppel Street Mission
+House, who from Aldershot had visited Malford Abbey, the
+mother house of the Order. The alternative to Malford was
+Clere Abbey on the Berkshire downs where Dom Cuthbert
+Manners ruled over a small community of strict Benedictines.
+Had Mark really been convinced that he was likely to remain
+a monk for the rest of his life, he would have chosen the
+Benedictines; but he did not feel justified in presenting himself
+for admission to Clere on what would seem impulse.
+He hoped that if he was accepted by the Order of St. George
+he should be given an opportunity to work at one of the
+priories in Aldershot or Sandgate, and that the experience
+he might expect to gain would help him later as a parish
+priest. He could not confide in the Rector his reason for
+wanting to subject himself to monastic discipline, and he
+expected a good deal of opposition. It might be better to
+write from whatever village he stayed in to-night and make
+the announcement without going back at all. And this is
+what in the end he decided to do.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Sun Inn,</p>
+
+<p>Ladingford.</p>
+
+<p>June 24.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Rector,</p>
+
+<p>I expect you gathered from our talk the day before yesterday
+that I was feeling dissatisfied with myself, and you
+must know that the problem of occupying my time wisely
+before I am ordained has lately been on my mind. I don't
+feel that I could honestly take up a profession to which I
+had no intention of sticking, and though Father Rowley
+recommended me to stay at home and work with the village
+people I don't feel capable of doing that yet. If it was a
+question of helping you by taking off your shoulders work
+that I could do it would be another matter. But you've
+often said to me that you had more time on your hands than
+you cared for since you gave up coaching me for an Oxford
+scholarship, and so I don't think I'm wrong in supposing
+that you would find it hard to discover for me any parochial
+routine work. I'm not old enough yet to fish for souls, and
+I have no confidence in my ability to hook them. Besides,
+I think it would bore you if I started "missionizing" in
+Wych-on-the-Wold.</p>
+
+<p>I've settled therefore to try to get into the Order of St.
+George. I don't think you know Father Burrowes personally,
+but I've always heard that he does a splendid work
+among soldiers, and I'm hoping that he will accept me as a
+novice.</p>
+
+<p>Latterly, in fact since I left Chatsea, I've been feeling
+the need of a regular existence, and, though I cannot pretend
+that I have a vocation for the monastic life in the highest
+sense, I do feel that I have a vocation for the Order of St.
+George. You will wonder why I have not mentioned this
+to you, but the fact is&mdash;and I hope you'll appreciate my
+frankness&mdash;I did not think of the O.S.G. till this morning.
+Of course they may refuse to have me. But I shall present
+myself without a preliminary letter, and I hope to persuade
+Father Burrowes to have me on probation. If he once does
+that, I'm sure that I shall satisfy him. This sounds like
+the letter of a conceited clerk. It must be the fault of this
+horrible inn pen, which is like writing with a tooth-pick
+dipped in a puddle! I thought it was best not to stay at
+the Rectory, with Esther on the verge of her profession.
+It wouldn't be fair to her at a time like this to make my
+immediate future a matter of prime importance. So do
+forgive my going off in this fashion. I suppose it's just
+possible that some bishop will accept me for ordination from
+Malford, though no doubt it's improbable. This will be a
+matter to discuss with Father Burrowes later.</p>
+
+<p>Do forgive what looks like a most erratic course of procedure.
+But I really should hate a long discussion, and if
+I make a mistake I shall have had a lesson. It really is
+essential for me to be tremendously occupied. I cannot say
+more than this, but I do beg you to believe that I'm not
+taking this apparently unpremeditated step without a very
+strong reason. It's a kind of compromise with my ambition
+to re-establish in the English Church an order of preaching
+friars. I haven't yet given up that idea, but I'm sure that I
+ought not to think about it seriously until I'm a priest.</p>
+
+<p>I'm staying here to-night after a glorious day's tramp,
+and to-morrow morning I shall take the train and go by
+Reading and Basingstoke to Malford. I'll write to you as
+soon as I know if I'm accepted. My best love to everybody,
+and please tell Esther that I shall think about her on St.
+Mary Magdalene's Day.</p>
+
+<p>Yours always affectionately,</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>To Esther he wrote by the same post:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>My dear Sister Esther Magdalene,</p>
+
+<p>Do not be angry with me for running away, and do not
+despise me for trying to enter a monastery in such a mood.
+I'm as much the prey of religion as you are. And I am
+really horrified by the revelation of what I am capable of.
+I saw in your eyes yesterday the passion of your soul for
+Divine things. The memory of them awes me. Pray for
+me, dear sister, that all my passion may be turned to the
+service of God. Defend me to your brother, who will not
+understand my behaviour.</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>Three days later Mark wrote again to the Rector:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Abbey,</p>
+
+<p>Malford,</p>
+
+<p>Surrey.</p>
+
+<p>June 27th.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Rector,</p>
+
+<p>I do hope that you're not so much annoyed with me that
+you don't want to hear anything about my monastic adventures.
+However, if you are you can send back this long
+letter unopened. I believe that is the proper way to show
+one's disapproval by correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>I reached Malford yesterday afternoon, and after a jolly
+walk between high hazel hedges for about two miles I
+reached the Abbey. It doesn't quite fulfil one's preconceived
+ideas of what an abbey should look like, but I suppose
+it is the most practicable building that could be erected
+with the amount of money that the Order had to spare for
+what in a way is a luxury for a working order like this.
+What it most resembles is three tin tabernacles put together
+to form three sides of a square, the fourth and empty side
+of which is by far the most beautiful, because it consists
+of a glorious view over a foreground of woods, a middle-distance
+of park land, and on the horizon the Hampshire
+downs.</p>
+
+<p>I am an authority on this view, because I had to gaze
+at it for about a quarter of an hour while I was waiting for
+somebody to open the Abbey door. At last the porter,
+Brother Lawrence, after taking a good look at me through
+the grill, demanded what I wanted. When I said that I
+wanted to be a monk, he looked very alarmed and hurried
+away, leaving me to gaze at that view for another ten
+minutes. He came back at last and let me in, informing me
+in a somewhat adenoidish voice that the Reverend Brother
+was busy in the garden and asking me to wait until he came
+in. Brother Lawrence has a large, pock-marked face, and
+while he is talking to anybody he stands with his right hand
+in his left sleeve and his left hand in his right sleeve like
+a Chinese mandarin or an old washer-woman with her arms
+folded under her apron. You must make the most of my
+descriptions in this letter, because if I am accepted as a
+probationer I shan't be able to indulge in any more personalities
+about my brethren.</p>
+
+<p>The guest-room like everything else in the monastery is
+match-boarded; and while I was waiting in it the noise was
+terrific, because some corrugated iron was being nailed on
+the roof of a building just outside. I began to regret that
+Brother Lawrence had opened the door at all and that he
+had not left me in the cloisters, as by the way I discovered
+that the space enclosed by the three tin tabernacles is called!
+There was nothing to read in the guest-room except one
+sheet of a six months' old newspaper which had been spread
+on the table presumably for a guest to mend something with
+glue. At last the Reverend Brother, looking most beautiful
+in a white habit with a zucchetto of mauve velvet, came in
+and welcomed me with much friendliness. I was surprised
+to find somebody so young as Brother Dunstan in charge
+of a monastery, especially as he said he was only a novice
+as yet. It appears that all the bigwigs&mdash;or should I say
+big-cowls?&mdash;are away at the moment on business of the
+Order and that various changes are in the offing, the most
+important being the giving up of their branch in Malta and
+the consequent arrival of Brother George, of whom Brother
+Dunstan spoke in a hushed voice. Father Burrowes, or the
+Reverend Father as he is called, is preaching in the north
+of England at the moment, and Brother Dunstan tells me
+it is quite impossible for him to say anything, still less to do
+anything, about my admission. However, he urged me to
+stay on for the present as a guest, an invitation which I
+accepted without hesitation. He had only just time to show
+me my cell and the card of rules for guests when a bell rang
+and, drawing his cowl over his head, he hurried off.</p>
+
+<p>After perusing the rules, I discovered that this was the
+bell which rings a quarter of an hour before Vespers for
+solemn silence. I hadn't the slightest idea where the chapel
+was, and when I asked Brother Lawrence he glared at me
+and put his finger to his mouth. I was not to be discouraged,
+however, and in the end he showed me into the
+ante-chapel which is curtained off from the quire. There
+was only one other person in the ante-chapel, a florid, well-dressed
+man with a rather mincing and fussy way of worshipping.
+The monks led by Brother Lawrence (who is
+not even a novice yet, but a postulant and wears a black
+habit, without a hood, tied round the waist with a rope)
+passed from the refectory through the ante-chapel into the
+quire, and Vespers began. They used an arrangement called
+"The Day Hours of the English Church," but beyond a few
+extra antiphons there was very little difference from ordinary
+Evening Prayer. After Vespers I had a simple and solemn
+meal by myself, and I was wondering how I should get
+hold of a book to pass away the evening, when Brother
+Dunstan came in and asked me if I'd like to sit with the
+brethren in the library until the bell rang for simple silence
+a quarter of an hour before Compline at 9.15, after which
+everybody&mdash;guests and monks&mdash;are expected to go to bed
+in solemn silence. The difference between simple silence
+and solemn silence is that you may ask necessary questions
+and get necessary replies during simple silence; but as far
+as I can make out, during solemn silence you wouldn't be
+allowed to tell anybody that you were dying, or if you did
+tell anybody, he wouldn't be able to do anything about it
+until solemn silence was over.</p>
+
+<p>The other monks are Brother Jerome, the senior novice
+after Brother Dunstan, a pious but rather dull young man
+with fair hair and a squashed face, and Brother Raymond,
+attractive and bird-like, and considered a great Romanizer
+by the others. There is also Brother Walter, who is only
+a probationer and is not even allowed wide sleeves and a
+habit like Brother Lawrence, but has to wear a very moth-eaten
+cassock with a black band tied round it. Brother
+Walter had been marketing in High Thorpe (I wonder what
+the Bishop of Silchester thought if he saw him in the neighbourhood
+of the episcopal castle!) and having lost himself
+on the way home he had arrived back late for Vespers and
+was tremendously teased by the others in consequence.
+Brother Walter is a tall excitable awkward creature with
+black hair that sticks up on end and wide-open frightened
+eyes. His cassock is much too short for him both in the
+arms and in the legs; and as he has very large hands and
+very large feet, his hands and feet look still larger in consequence.
+They didn't talk about much that was interesting
+during recreation. Brother Dunstan and Brother Raymond
+were full of monkish jokes, at all of which Brother Walter
+laughed in a very high voice&mdash;so loudly once that Brother
+Jerome asked him if he would mind making less noise, as
+he was reading Montalembert's Monks of the West, at which
+Brother Walter fell into an abashed gloom.</p>
+
+<p>I asked who the visitor in the ante-chapel was and was
+told that he was a Sir Charles Horner who owns the whole
+of Malford and who has presented the Order with the
+thirty acres on which the Abbey is built. Sir Charles is
+evidently an ecclesiastically-minded person and, I should
+imagine, rather pleased to be able to be the patron of a
+monastic order.</p>
+
+<p>I will write you again when I have seen Father Burrowes.
+For the moment I'm inclined to think that Malford is rather
+playing at being monks; but as I said, the bigwigs are all
+away. Brother Dunstan is a delightful fellow, yet I
+shouldn't imagine that he would make a successful abbot
+for long.</p>
+
+<p>I enjoyed Compline most of all my experiences during
+the day, after which I retired to my cell and slept without
+turning till the bell rang for Lauds and Prime, both said
+as one office at six o'clock, after which I should have liked a
+conventual Mass. But alas, there is no priest here and I
+have been spending the time till breakfast by writing you
+this endless letter.</p>
+
+<p>Yours ever affectionately,</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p>
+
+<p>P.S. They don't say Mattins, which I'm inclined to think
+rather slack. But I suppose I oughtn't to criticize
+so soon.</p></div>
+
+<p>To those two letters of Mark's, the Rector replied as
+follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Rectory,</p>
+
+<p>Wych-on-the-Wold,</p>
+
+<p>Oxon.</p>
+
+<p>June 29th.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Mark,</p>
+
+<p>I cannot say frankly that I approve of your monastic
+scheme. I should have liked an opportunity to talk it over
+with you first of all, and I cannot congratulate you on your
+good manners in going off like that without any word.
+Although you are technically independent now, I think it
+would be a great mistake to sink your small capital of &pound;500
+in the Order of St. George, and you can't very well make
+use of them to pass the next two or three years without
+contributing anything.</p>
+
+<p>The other objection to your scheme is that you may not
+get taken at Glastonbury. In any case the Glastonbury
+people will give the preference to Varsity men, and I'm not
+sure that they would be very keen on having an ex-monk.
+However, as I said, you are independent now and can choose
+yourself what you do. Meanwhile, I suppose it is possible
+that Burrowes may decide you have no vocation, in which
+case I hope you'll give up your monastic ambitions and come
+back here.</p>
+
+<p>Yours affectionately,</p>
+
+<p>Stephen Ogilvie.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mark who had been growing bored in the guest-room of
+Malford Abbey nearly said farewell to it for ever when he
+received the Rector's letter. His old friend and guardian
+was evidently wounded by his behaviour, and Mark considering
+what he owed him felt that he ought to abandon his
+monastic ambitions if by doing so he could repay the Rector
+some of his kindness. His hand was on the bell that should
+summon the guest-brother (when the bell was working and
+the guest-brother was not) in order to tell him that he had
+been called away urgently and to ask if he might have the
+Abbey cart to take him to the station; but at that moment
+Sir Charles Horner came in and began to chat affably to
+Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been intending to come up and see you for the last
+three days. But I've been so confoundedly busy. They
+wonder what we country gentlemen do with ourselves. By
+gad, they ought to try our life for a change."</p>
+
+<p>Mark supposed that the third person plural referred to
+the whole body of Radical critics.</p>
+
+<p>"You're the son of Lidderdale, I hear," Sir Charles went
+on without giving Mark time to comment on the hardship of
+his existence. "I visited Lima Street twenty-five years ago,
+before you were born that was. Your father was a great
+pioneer. We owe him a lot. And you've been with Rowley
+lately? That confounded bishop. He's our bishop, you
+know. But he finds it difficult to get at Burrowes except by
+starving him for priests. The fellow's a time-server, a
+pusher .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>Mark began to like Sir Charles; he would have liked anybody
+who would abuse the Bishop of Silchester.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're thinking of joining my Order," Sir Charles
+went on without giving Mark time to say a word. "I call it
+my Order because I set them up here with thirty acres of
+uncleared copse. It gives the Tommies something to do
+when they come over here on furlough from Aldershot.
+You've never met Burrowes, I hear."</p>
+
+<p>Mark thought that Sir Charles for a busy man had managed
+to learn a great deal about an unimportant person like
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Will Father Burrowes be here soon?" Mark inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pon my word, I don't know. Nobody knows when he'll
+be anywhere. He's preaching all over the place. He begs
+the deuce of a lot of money, you know. Aren't you a friend
+of Dorward's? You were asking Brother Dunstan about
+him. His parish isn't far from here. About fifteen miles,
+that's all. He's an amusing fellow, isn't he? Has tremendous
+rows with his squire, Philip Iredale. A pompous ass
+whose wife ran away from him a little time ago. Served him
+right, Dorward told me in confidence. You must come and
+have lunch with me. There's only Lady Landells. I can't
+afford to live in the big place. Huge affair with Doric portico
+and all that, don't you know. It's let to Lord Middlesborough,
+the shipping man. I live at Malford Lodge. Quite
+a jolly little place I've made of it. Suits me better than that
+great gaunt Georgian pile. You'd better walk down with
+me this morning and stop to lunch."</p>
+
+<p>Mark, who was by now growing tired of his own company
+in the guest-room, accepted Sir Charles' invitation with
+alacrity; and they walked down from the Abbey to the village
+of Malford, which was situated at the confluence of the
+Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the Wey,
+which itself is not a mighty stream.</p>
+
+<p>"A rather charming village, don't you think?" said Sir
+Charles, pointing with his tasselled cane to a particularly
+attractive rose-hung cottage. "It was lucky that the railway
+missed us by a couple of miles; we should have been festering
+with tin bungalows by now on any available land, which
+means on any land that doesn't belong to me. I don't offer
+to show you the church, because I never enter it."</p>
+
+<p>Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate,
+supposing that with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should
+be of unusual interest.</p>
+
+<p>"My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the
+Simeon Trustees, it being the only part of my inheritance he
+could alienate from me, whom he loathed. He knew nothing
+would enrage me more than that, and the result is that I've
+got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has
+evening communion twice a month. That is why I took such
+pleasure in planting a monastery in the parish; and if only
+that old time-server the Bishop of Silchester would licence a
+chaplain to the community, I should get my Sunday Mass
+in my own parish despite my uncle's simeony, as I call it.
+As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I
+don't get a Mass at the Abbey and I have to go to the next
+parish, which is four miles away and appears highly undignified
+for the squire."</p>
+
+<p>"And you can't get him out?" said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another
+one just as bad. The Simeon Trustees only appoint people
+of the stamp of Mr. Choules, my present enemy. He's a
+horrid little man with a gaunt wife six feet high who beats
+her children and, if village gossip be true, her husband as
+well. Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to
+Middlesborough, as I told you."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns
+and cedars and gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns. He
+had seen many of these great houses in the course of his
+tramping; but he had never thought of them before except
+as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people
+could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home
+as the small houses in which Mark had spent his life came
+over him now with a sense of novelty.</p>
+
+<p>"Ghastly affair, isn't it?" said the owner contemptuously.
+"I'd let it stand empty rather than live in it myself. It reeks
+of my uncle's medicine and echoes with his gouty groans.
+Besides what is there in it that's really mine?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark who had been thinking what an easy affair life must
+be for Sir Charles was struck by his tone of disillusionment.
+Perhaps all people who inherited old names and old estates
+were affected by their awareness of transitory possession.
+Sir Charles could not alienate even a piece of furniture. A
+middle-aged bachelor and a cosmopolitan, he would have
+moved about the corridors and halls of that huge house with
+less permanency than Lord Middlesborough who paid him
+so well to walk about in it in his stead, and who was no more
+restricted by the terms of his lease than was his landlord by
+the conditions of the entail. Mark began to feel sorry for
+him; but without cause, for when Sir Charles came in sight
+of Malford Lodge where he lived, he was full of enthusiasm.
+It was indeed a pretty little house of red brick, dating from
+the first quarter of the nineteenth century and like so many
+houses of that period built close to the road, surrounded too
+on three sides by a verandah of iron and copper in the
+pagoda style, thoroughly ugly, but by reason of the mellow
+peacock hues time had given its roof, full of personality and
+charm. They entered by a green door in the brick wall and
+crossed a lawn sloping down to the little river to reach the
+shade of a tulip tree in full bloom, where seated in one of
+those tall wicker garden chairs shaped like an alcove was
+an elderly lady as ugly as Priapus.</p>
+
+<p>"There's Lady Landells, who's a poetess, you know," said
+Sir Charles gravely.</p>
+
+<p>Mark accepted the information with equal gravity. He
+was still unsophisticated enough to be impressed at hearing
+a woman called a poetess.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Lidderdale is going to have lunch with us, Lady
+Landells," Sir Charles announced.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, is he?" Lady Landells replied in a cracked murmur
+of complete indifference.</p>
+
+<p>"He's a great admirer of your poems," added Sir Charles,
+hearing which Lady Landells looked at Mark with her cod's
+eyes and by way of greeting offered him two fingers of her
+left hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't read him any of my poems to-day, Charles, so
+pray don't ask me to do so," the poetess groaned.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going to show Mr. Lidderdale some of our pictures
+before lunch," said Sir Charles.</p>
+
+<p>Lady Landells paid no attention; Mark, supposing her to
+be on the verge of a poetic frenzy, was glad to leave her in
+that wicker alcove under the tulip tree and to follow Sir
+Charles into the house.</p>
+
+<p>It was an astonishing house inside, with Gothic carving
+everywhere and with ancient leaded casements built inside
+the sashed windows of the exterior.</p>
+
+<p>"I took an immense amount of trouble to get this place
+arranged to my taste," said Sir Charles; and Mark wondered
+why he had bothered to retain the outer shell, since that was
+all that was left of the original. In every room there were
+copies, excellently done of pictures by Botticelli and Mantegna
+and other pre-Raphaelite painters; the walls were rich
+with antique brocades and tapestries; the ceilings were gilded
+or elaborately moulded with fan traceries and groining; great
+candlesticks stood in every corner; the doors were all old
+with floriated hinges and huge locks&mdash;it was the sort of house
+in which Victor Hugo might have put on his slippers and
+said, "I am at home."</p>
+
+<p>"I admit nothing after 1520," said Sir Charles proudly.</p>
+
+<p>Mark wondered why so fastidious a medievalist allowed
+the Order of St. George to erect those three tin tabernacles
+and to matchboard the interior of the Abbey. But perhaps
+that was only another outer shell which would gradually be
+filled.</p>
+
+<p>Lunch was a disappointment, because when Sir Charles
+began to talk about the monastery, which was what Mark
+had been wanting to talk about all the morning, Lady Landells
+broke in:</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry, Charles, but I'm afraid that I must beg for
+complete silence at lunch, as I'm in the middle of a sonnet."</p>
+
+<p>The poetess sighed, took a large mouthful of food, and
+sighed again.</p>
+
+<p>After lunch Sir Charles took Mark to see his library,
+which reminded him of a Rossetti interior and lacked only
+a beautiful long-necked creature, full-lipped and auburn-haired,
+to sit by the casement languishing over a cithern or
+gazing out through bottle-glass lights at a forlorn and foreshortened
+landscape of faerie land.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Lady Landells was a little tiresome at lunch," said
+Sir Charles half to himself. "She gets moods. Women
+seem never to grow out of getting moods. But she has
+always been most kind to me, and she insists on giving me
+anything I want for my house. Last year she was good
+enough to buy it from me as it stands, so it's really her
+house, although she has left it back to me in her will. She
+took rather a fancy to you by the way."</p>
+
+<p>Mark, who had supposed that Lady Landells had regarded
+him with aversion and scorn, stared at this.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't she give you her hand when you said good-bye?"
+asked Sir Charles.</p>
+
+<p>"Her left hand," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she never gives her right hand to anybody. She has
+some fad about spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or
+something. Now, what about a walk?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark said he should like to go for a walk very much, but
+wasn't Sir Charles too busy?</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, I've nothing to do at all."</p>
+
+<p>Yet only that morning he had held forth to Mark at great
+length on the amount of work demanded for the management
+of an estate.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, why do you want to join Burrowes?" Sir Charles
+inquired presently.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I hope to be a priest, and I think I should like to
+spend the next two years out of the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that is all very well," said Sir Charles, "but I don't
+know that I altogether recommend the O.S.G. I'm not satisfied
+with the way things are being run. However, they tell
+me that this fellow Brother George has a good deal of
+common-sense. He has been running their house in Malta,
+where he's done some good work. I gave them the land to
+build a mother house so that they could train people for
+active service, as it were; but Burrowes keeps chopping and
+changing and sending untrained novices to take charge of an
+important branch like Sandgate, and now since Rowley left
+he talks of opening a priory in Chatsea. That's all very well,
+and it's quite right of him to bear in mind that the main object
+of the Order is to work among soldiers; but at the same
+time he leaves this place to run itself, and whenever he does
+come down here he plans some hideous addition, to pay for
+which he has to go off preaching for another three months,
+so that the Abbey gets looked after by a young novice of
+twenty-five. It's ridiculous, you know. I was grumbling at
+the Bishop; but really I can understand his disinclination to
+countenance Burrowes. I have hopes of Brother George,
+and I shall take an early opportunity of talking to him."</p>
+
+<p>Mark was discouraged by Sir Charles' criticism of the
+Order; and that it could be criticized like this through the
+conduct of its founder accentuated for him the gulf that lay
+between the English Church and the rest of Catholic
+Christendom.</p>
+
+<p>It was not much solace to remember that every Benedictine
+community was an independent congregation. One
+could not imagine the most independent community's being
+placed in charge of a novice of twenty-five. It made Mark's
+proposed monastic life appear amateurish; and when he
+was back in the matchboarded guest-room the impulse to
+abandon his project was revised. Yet he felt it would be
+wrong to return to Wych-on-the-Wold. The impulse to come
+here, though sudden, had been very strong, and to give it up
+without trial might mean the loss of an experience that one
+day he should regret. The opinion of Sir Charles Horner
+might or might not be well founded; but it was bound to be
+a prejudiced opinion, because by constituting himself to the
+extent he had a patron of the Order he must involuntarily
+expect that it should be conducted according to his views.
+Sir Charles himself, seen in perspective, was a tolerably
+ridiculous figure, too much occupied with the paraphernalia
+of worship, too well pleased with himself, a man of rank
+and wealth who judged by severe standards was an old maid,
+and like all old maids critical, but not creative.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV" />CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ORDER OF ST. GEORGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>The Order of St. George was started by the Reverend
+Edward Burrowes six years before Sir Charles
+Horner's gift of land for a Mother House led him to suppose
+that he had made his foundation a permanent factor in
+the religious life of England.</p>
+
+<p>Edward Burrowes was the only son of a band-master in
+the Royal Artillery who at an impressionable moment in
+the life of his son was stationed at Malta. The religious
+atmosphere of Malta combined with the romantic associations
+of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the
+boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated
+by his son's ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much
+church-going argued an unhealthy preoccupation, and as for
+Edward's rhapsodies about the Auberge of Castile, which
+sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery and the Royal
+Engineers, they made him sick, to use his own expression.</p>
+
+<p>"You make me sick, Ted," he used to declare. "The
+sooner I get quit of Malta and quartered at Woolwich again,
+the better I shall be pleased."</p>
+
+<p>When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he
+hoped that the effect of such prosaic surroundings would
+put an end to Ted's mooning, and that he would settle down
+to a career more likely to reward him in this world rather
+than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his dreams
+aspired. Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who
+had so far submitted to his father's wishes as to be working
+in a solicitor's office, found that the effect of being banished
+from Malta was to stimulate him into a practical attempt to
+express his dreams of religious devotion. He hired a small
+room over a stable in a back street and started a club for
+the sons of soldiers. The band-master would not have
+minded this so much, especially when he was congratulated on
+his son's enterprise by the wife of the Colonel. Unfortunately
+this was not enough for Edward, who having got the
+right side of an unscrupulously romantic curate persuaded
+him to receive his vows of a Benedictine oblate. The band-master,
+proud and fond though he might be of his own
+uniform, objected to his son's arriving home from business
+and walking about the house in a cassock. He objected
+equally to finding that his own musical gifts had with his son
+degenerated into a passion for playing Gregorian chants on a
+vile harmonium. It was only consideration for his delicate
+wife that kept the band-master from pitching both cassock
+and harmonium into the street. The amateur oblate regretted
+his father's hostility; but he persevered with the manner of
+life he had marked out for himself, finding much comfort
+and encouragement in reading the lives of the saintly founders
+of religious orders.</p>
+
+<p>At last, after a long struggle against the difficulties that
+friends and father put in his way, Edward Burrowes managed
+at the age of twenty-seven to get ordained in Canada,
+whither, in despair of escaping otherwise from the solicitor's
+office, he had gone to seek his own fortune. He took with
+him the oblate's cassock; but he left behind the harmonium,
+which his father kicked to pieces in rage at not being able to
+kick his son. Burrowes worked as a curate in a dismal lakeside
+town in Ontario, consoling himself with dreams of
+monasticism and chivalry, and gaining a reputation as a
+preacher. His chief friend was a young farmer, called
+George Harvey, whom he succeeded in firing with his own
+enthusiasm and whom he managed to persuade&mdash;which shows
+that Burrowes must have had great powers of persuasion&mdash;to
+wear the habit of a Benedictine novice, when he came to
+spend Saturday night to Monday morning with his friend.
+By this time Burrowes had passed beyond the oblate stage,
+for having found a Canadian bishop willing to dispense him
+from that portion of the Benedictine rule which was incompatible
+with his work as a curate in Jonesville, Ontario, he
+got himself clothed as a novice. About this period a third
+man joined Burrowes and Harvey in their spare-time monasticism.
+This was John Holcombe, who had emigrated from
+Dorsetshire after an unfortunate love affair and who had
+been taken on by George Harvey as a carter. Holcombe was
+the son of a yeoman farmer that owned several hundred acres
+of land. He had been educated at Sherborne, and soon by
+his capacity and attractive personality he made himself so
+indispensable to his employer that George Harvey's farm was
+turned into a joint concern. No doubt Harvey's example was
+the immediate cause of Holcombe's associating himself with
+the little community: but it still says much for Burrowes'
+powers of persuasion that he should have been able to impress
+this young Dorset farmer with the serious possibility of
+leading the monastic life in Ontario.</p>
+
+<p>When another year had passed, an opportunity arose of
+acquiring a better farm in Alberta. It was the Bishop of
+Alberta who had been so sympathetic with Burrowes'
+monastic aspirations; and, when Harvey and Holcombe decided
+to move to Moose Rib, Burrowes gave up his curacy
+to lead a regular monastic life, so far as one could lead a
+regular monastic life on a farm in the North-west.</p>
+
+<p>Two more years had gone by when a letter arrived from
+England to tell George Harvey that he was the heir to
+&pound;12,000. Burrowes had kept all his influence over the young
+farmer, and he was actually able to persuade Harvey to
+devote this fortune to founding the Order of St. George for
+mission work among soldiers. There was some debate
+whether Father Burrowes, Brother George, and Brother
+Birinus should take their final vows immediately; but in the
+end Father Burrowes had his way, and they were all three
+professed by the sympathetic Bishop of Alberta, who granted
+them a constitution subject to the ratification of the Archbishop
+of Canterbury. Father Burrowes was elected Father
+Superior, Brother George was made Assistant Superior, and
+Brother Birinus had to concentrate in his person various
+monastic offices just as on the Moose Rib Farm he had combined
+in his person the duties of the various hands.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate objective of the new community was Malta,
+where it was proposed to open their first house and where,
+in despite of the outraged dignity of innumerable real monks
+already there, they made a successful beginning. A second
+house was opened at Gibraltar and put in charge of Brother
+Birinus. Neither Malta nor Gibraltar provided much of a
+field for reinforcing the Order, which, if it was to endure,
+required additional members. Father Burrowes proposed
+that he should go to England and open a house at Aldershot,
+and that, if he could obtain a hearing as a preacher, he should
+try to raise enough funds for a house at Sandgate as well.
+Brother George and Brother Birinus in a solemn chapter of
+three accepted the proposal; the house at Gibraltar was given
+up; the Father Superior went to seek the fortunes of the
+Order in England, while the other two remained at their
+work in Malta. Father Burrowes was even more successful
+as a preacher than he hoped; ascribing the steady flow of
+offertories to Divine favour, he instituted during the next
+four years, priories at Aldershot and Sandgate. He began
+to feel the need of a Mother House, having now more than
+enough candidates for the Order of Saint George, where the
+novices could be suitably trained to meet the stress of active
+mission work. One of his moving appeals for this object
+was heard by Sir Charles Horner who, for reasons he had
+already explained to Mark and because underneath all his
+ecclesiasticism there did exist a genuine desire for the glory
+of God, had presented the land at Malford to the Order.
+Father Burrowes preached harder than ever, addressed drawing-room
+meetings, and started a monthly magazine called
+<i>The Dragon</i> to raise the necessary money to build a mighty
+abbey. Meanwhile, he had to be contented with those three
+tin tabernacles. Brother George, who had remained all these
+years in Malta, suggested that it was time for somebody else
+to take his place out there, and the Father Superior, although
+somewhat unwillingly, had agreed to his coming to Malford.
+Not having heard of anybody whom at the moment he considered
+suitable to take charge of what was now a distant
+outpost of the Order, he told Brother George to close the
+house. It was at this stage in the history of the Order that
+Mark presented himself as a candidate for admission.</p>
+
+<p>Father Burrowes arrived unexpectedly two days after the
+lunch at Malford Lodge; and presently Brother Dunstan
+came to tell Mark that the Reverend Father would see him
+in the Abbott's Parlour immediately after Nones. Mark
+thought that Sir Charles might have given a medi&aelig;val lining
+to this room at least, which with its roll-top desk looked like
+the office of the clerk of the works.</p>
+
+<p>"So you want to be a monk?" said Father Burrowes contemptuously.
+"Want to dress up in a beautiful white
+habit, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I really don't mind what I wear," said Mark, trying not
+to appear ruffled by the imputation of wrong motives. "But
+I do want to be a monk, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You can't come here to play at it," said the Superior,
+looking keenly at Mark from his bright blue eyes and lighting
+up a large pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"Curiously enough," said Mark, who had forgotten the
+Benedictine injunction to discourage newcomers that seek to
+enter a community, "I wrote to my guardian a few days ago
+that my impression of Malford Abbey was rather that it was
+playing at being monks."</p>
+
+<p>The Superior flushed to a vivid red. He was a burly man
+of fair complexion, inclined to plumpness, and with a large
+mobile mouth eloquent and sensual. His hands were definitely
+fat, the backs of them covered with golden hairs and
+freckles.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're a critical young gentleman, are you? I suppose
+we're not Catholic enough for you. Well," he snapped,
+"I'm afraid you won't suit us. We don't want you. Sorry."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry too," said Mark. "But I thought you would
+prefer frankness. If you will spare me a few minutes, I'll
+explain why I want to join the Order of St. George. If
+when you've heard what I have to say you still think that
+I'm not suitable, I shall recognize your right to be of that
+opinion from your experience of many young men like myself
+who have been tried and found wanting."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you learn that speech by heart?" the Superior inquired,
+raising his eyebrows mockingly.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you're determined to find fault," Mark laughed.
+"But, Reverend Father, surely you will listen to my reasons
+before deciding against them or me?"</p>
+
+<p>"My instinct tells me you'll be no good to us. But if you
+insist on wasting my time, fire ahead. Only please remember
+that, though I may be a monk, I'm a very busy man."</p>
+
+<p>Mark gave a full account of himself until the present and
+wound up by saying:</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think I have any sentimental reasons for wanting
+to enter a monastery. I like working among soldiers and
+sailors. I am ready to put down &pound;200 and I hope to be of
+use. I wish to be a priest, and if you find or I find that when
+the time comes for me to be ordained I shall make a better
+secular priest, at any rate, I shall have had the advantage of
+a life of discipline and you, I promise, will have had a novice
+who will have regarded himself as such, but yet will have
+learnt somehow to have justified your confidence."</p>
+
+<p>The Superior looked down at his desk pondering. Presently
+he opened a letter and threw a quick suspicious glance
+at Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me that you had an introduction
+from Sir Charles Horner?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know that I had," Mark answered in some
+astonishment. "I only met him here a few days ago for the
+first time. He invited me to lunch, and he was very pleasant;
+but I never asked him to write to you, nor did he suggest
+doing so."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any vices?" Father Burrowes asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think&mdash;what do you mean exactly?" Mark inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Drink?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, certainly not."</p>
+
+<p>"Women?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark flushed.</p>
+
+<p>"No." He wondered if he should speak of the episode
+of St. John's eve such a short time ago; but he could not
+bring himself to do so, and he repeated the denial.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem doubtful," the Superior insisted.</p>
+
+<p>"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "since you press this
+point I ought to tell you that I took a vow of celibacy when
+I was sixteen."</p>
+
+<p>Father Burrowes looked at him sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you indeed? That sounds very morbid. Don't you
+like women?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think a priest ought to marry. I was told by Sir
+Charles that you vowed yourself to the monastic life when
+you were not much more than seventeen. Was that morbid?"</p>
+
+<p>The Superior laughed boisterously, and Mark glad to have
+put him in a good humour laughed with him. It was only
+after the interview was over that the echo of that laugh
+sounded unpleasantly in the caves of memory, that it rang
+false somehow like a denial of himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose we must try you as a probationer at any
+rate," said the Superior. And suddenly his whole manner
+changed. He became affectionate and sentimental as he put
+his hand on Mark's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope, dear lad, that you will find a vocation to serve
+our dear Lord in the religious life. God bless you and give
+you endurance in the path you have chosen."</p>
+
+<p>Mark reproached himself for his inclination to dislike the
+Reverend Father to whom he now owed filial affection, piety,
+and respect, apart from what he owed him as a Christian of
+Christian charity. He should gain but small spiritual benefit
+from his self-chosen experiment if this was the mood in
+which he was beginning his monastic life; and when Brother
+Jerome, who was acting novice-master, began to instruct him
+in his monastic duty, he made up his mind to drive out that
+demon of criticism or rather to tame it to his own service
+by criticizing himself. He wrote on markers for his favourite
+devotional books:</p>
+
+<p><i>Observe at every moment of the day the good in others,
+the evil in thyself; and when thou liest awake in the night
+remember only what good thou hast found in others, what
+evil in thyself.</i></p>
+
+<p>This was Mark's addition to Thomas a Kempis, to Mother
+Juliana of Norwich, to Jeremy Taylor and William Law;
+this was Mark's sprout of holy wisdom among the Little
+Flowers of Saint Francis.</p>
+
+<p>The Rule of Malford was not a very austere adaptation of
+the Rule of Saint Benedict; and, with the Reverend Father
+departing after Mark had been admitted as a probationer
+and leaving the administration of the Abbey to the priority
+of Brother Dunstan, a good deal of what austerity had been
+retained was now relaxed.</p>
+
+<p>The Night Office was not said at Malford, where the
+liturgical worship of the day began with Lauds and Prime
+at six. On Mark devolved the duty of waking the brethren
+in the morning, which was done by striking the door of
+each cell with a hammer and saying: <i>The Lord be with you</i>,
+whereupon the sleeping brother must rise from his couch
+and open the door of his cell to make the customary response.
+After Lauds and Prime, which lasted about half an hour,
+the brethren retired to their cells to put them in order for
+the day and to meditate until seven o'clock, unless they had
+been given tasks out of doors. At seven o'clock, if there was
+a priest in the monastery, Mass was said; otherwise meditation
+and study was prolonged until eight o'clock, when breakfast
+was eaten. Those who had work in the fields or about
+the house departed after breakfast to their tasks. At nine
+Terce was said, which was not attended by the brethren
+working out of doors; at twelve Sext was said attended by
+all the brethren, and at twelve-fifteen dinner was eaten.
+After dinner, the brethren retired to their cells and meditated
+until one o'clock, when their various duties were resumed,
+interrupted only in the case of those working indoors by the
+office of None at three o'clock. At a quarter to five the bell
+rang for tea. Simple silence was relaxed, and the brethren
+enjoyed their recreation until six-fifteen when the bell rang
+for a quarter of an hour's solemn silence before Vespers.
+Supper was eaten after Vespers, and after supper, which was
+finished about eight o'clock, there was reading and recreation
+until the bell rang for Compline at nine-fifteen. This
+office said, solemn silence was not broken until the response
+to the <i>dominus vobiscum</i> in the morning. The rule of simple
+silence was not kept very strictly at this period. Two
+brethren working in the garden in these hot July days found
+that permitted conversation about the immediate matter in
+hand, say the whereabouts of a trowel or a hoe, was easily
+extended into observations about the whereabouts of Brother
+So-and-So during Terce or the way Brother Somebody-else
+was late with the antiphon. From the little incidents of the
+Abbey's daily round the conversation was easily extended
+into a discussion of the policy of the Order in general.
+Speculations where the Reverend Father was preaching that
+evening or that morning and whether his offertories would
+be as large during the summer as they had been during the
+spring were easily amplified from discussions about the general
+policy of the Order into discussions about the general
+policy of Christendom, the pros and cons of the Roman
+position, the disgraceful latitudinarianism of bishops and
+deans; and still more widely amplified from remarks upon
+the general policy of Christendom into arguments about the
+universe and the great philosophies of humanity. Thus
+Mark, who was an ardent Platonist, would find himself at
+odds with Brother Jerome who was an equally ardent Aristotelian,
+while the weeds, taking advantage of the philosophic
+contest, grew faster than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may have been Brother Dunstan's faults of indulgence,
+they sprang from a debonair and kindly personality
+which shone like a sun upon the little family and made
+everybody good-humoured, even Brother Lawrence, who was
+apt to be cross because he had been kept a postulant longer
+than he expected. But perhaps the happiest of all was
+Brother Walter, who though still a probationer was now the
+senior probationer, a status which afforded him the most
+profound satisfaction and gave him a kindly feeling toward
+Mark who was the cause of promotion.</p>
+
+<p>"And the Reverend Father has promised me that I shall
+be clothed as a postulant on August 10th when Brother
+Lawrence is to be clothed as a novice. The thought makes
+me so excited that I hardly know what to do sometimes, and
+I still don't know what saint's name I'm going to take. You
+see, there was some mystery about my birth, and I was called
+Walter because I was found by a policeman in Walter Street,
+and as ill-luck would have it there's no St. Walter. Of
+course, I know I have a very wide choice of names, but that
+is what makes it so difficult. I had rather a fancy to be
+Peter, but he's such a very conspicuous saint that it struck
+me as being a little presumptuous. Of course, I have no
+doubt whatever that St. Peter would take me under his protection,
+for if you remember he was a modest saint, a very
+modest saint indeed who asked to be crucified upside down,
+not liking to show the least sign of competition with our dear
+Lord. I should very much like to call myself Brother Paul,
+because at the school I was at we were taken twice a year
+to see St. Paul's Cathedral and had toffee when we came
+home. I look back to those days as some of the happiest of
+my life. There again it does seem to be putting yourself up
+rather to take the name of a great saint like St. Paul. Then
+I thought of taking William after the little St. William of
+Norwich who was murdered by the Jews. That seems going
+to the other extreme, doesn't it, for though I know that out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings shall come forth praise,
+one would like to feel one had for a patron saint somebody
+a little more conspicuous than a baby. I wish you'd give me
+a word of advice. I think about this problem until sometimes
+my head's in a regular whirl, and I lose my place in
+the Office. Only yesterday at Sext, I found myself saying
+the antiphon proper to St. Peter a fortnight after St. Peter's
+day had passed and gone, which seems to show that my mind
+is really set upon being Brother Peter, doesn't it? And yet
+I don't know. He is so very conspicuous all through the
+Gospels, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then why don't you compromise," suggested Mark, "and
+call yourself Brother Simon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what a splendid idea!" Brother Walter exclaimed,
+clapping his hands. "Oh, thank you, Brother Mark. That
+has solved all my difficulties. Oh, do let me pull up that
+thistle for you."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Walter the probationer resumed his weeding with
+joyful ferocity of purpose, his mind at peace in the expectation
+of shortly becoming Brother Simon the postulant.</p>
+
+<p>What Mark enjoyed most in his personal relations with
+the community were the walks on Sunday afternoons. Sir
+Charles Horner made a habit of joining these to obtain the
+Abbey gossip and also because he took pleasure in hearing
+himself hold forth on the management of his estate. Most
+of his property was woodland, and the walks round Malford
+possessed that rich intimacy of the English countryside at
+its best. Mark was not much interested in what Sir Charles
+had to ask or in what Sir Charles had to tell or in what Sir
+Charles had to show, but to find himself walking with his
+monastic brethren in their habits down glades of mighty
+oaks, or through sparse plantations of birches, beneath which
+grew brakes of wild raspberries that would redden with the
+yellowing corn, gave him as assurance of that old England
+before the Reformation to which he looked back as to a
+Golden Age. Years after, when much that was good and
+much that was bad in his monastic experience had been forgotten,
+he held in his memory one of these walks on a fine
+afternoon at July's end within the octave of St. Mary Magdalene.
+It happened that Sir Charles had not accompanied
+the monks that Sunday; but in his place was an old priest
+who had spent the week-end as a guest in the Abbey and who
+had said Mass for the brethren that morning. This had
+given Mark deep pleasure, because it was the Sunday after
+Esther's profession, and he had been able to make his intention
+her present joy and future happiness. He had been
+silent throughout the walk, seeming to listen in turn to
+Brother Dunstan's rhapsodies about the forthcoming arrival
+of Brother George and Brother Birinus with all that it meant
+to him of responsibility more than he could bear removed
+from his shoulders; or to Brother Raymond's doubts if it
+should not be made a rule that when no priest was in the
+Abbey the brethren ought to walk over to Wivelrod, the
+church Sir Charles attended four miles away, or to Brother
+Jerome's disclaimer of Roman sympathies in voicing his
+opinion that the Office should be said in Latin. Actually he
+paid little attention to any of them, his thoughts being far
+away with Esther. They had chosen Hollybush Down for
+their walk that Sunday, because they thought that the view
+over many miles of country would please the ancient priest.
+Seated on the short aromatic grass in the shade of a massive
+hawthorn full-berried with tawny fruit, the brethren looked
+down across a slope dotted with junipers to the view outspread
+before them. None spoke, for it had been warm work
+in their habits to climb the burnished grass. It would have
+been hard to explain the significance of that group, unless it
+were due to some haphazard achievement of perfect form;
+yet somehow for Mark that moment was taken from time and
+placed in eternity, so that whenever afterward in his life he
+read about the Middle Ages he was able to be what he read,
+merely by re-conjuring that monkish company in the shade
+of that hawthorn tree.</p>
+
+<p>On their way back to the Abbey Mark found himself
+walking with Mr. Lamplugh, the ancient priest, who turned
+out to have known his father.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear me, are you really the son of James Lidderdale?
+Why, I used to go and preach at Lima Street in old days
+long before your father married. And so you're Lidderdale's
+son. Now I wonder why you want to be a monk."</p>
+
+<p>Mark gave an account of himself since he left school and
+tried to give some good reasons why he was at Malford.</p>
+
+<p>"And so you were with Rowley? Well, really you ought
+to know something about missions by now. But perhaps
+you're tired of mission work already?" the old priest inquired
+with a quick glance at Mark as if he would see how
+much of the real stuff existed underneath that probationer's
+cassock.</p>
+
+<p>"This is an active Order, isn't it?" Mark countered. "Of
+course, I'm not tired of mission work. But after being with
+Father Rowley and being kept busy all the time I found
+that being at home in the country made me idle. I told the
+Reverend Father that I hoped to be ordained as a secular
+priest and that I did not imagine I had any vocation for
+the contemplative life. I have as a matter of fact a great
+longing for it. But I don't think that twenty-one is a good
+age for being quite sure if that longing is not mere sentiment.
+I suppose you think I'm just indulging myself with
+the decorative side of religion, Father Lamplugh? I really
+am not. I can assure you that I'm far too much accustomed
+to the decorative side to be greatly influenced by it."</p>
+
+<p>The old priest laid a thin hand on Mark's sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"To tell the truth, my dear boy, I was on the verge of
+violating the decencies of accepted hospitality by criticizing
+the Order of which you have become a probationer. I am
+just a little doubtful about the efficacy of its method of training
+young men. However, it really is not my business, and
+I hope that I am wrong. But I <i>am</i> a little doubtful if all
+these excellent young brethren are really desirous .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. no,
+I'll not say another word, I've already disgracefully exceeded
+the limitations to criticism that courtesy alone demands of
+me. I was carried away by my interest in you when I heard
+whose son you were. What a debt we owe to men like your
+father and Rowley! And here am I at seventy-six after a
+long and useless life presuming to criticize other people. God
+forgive me!" The old man crossed himself.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon and evening recreation was unusually
+noisy, and during Vespers one or two of the brethren were
+seized with an attack of giggles because Brother Lawrence,
+who was in a rapt condition of mind owing to the near
+approach of St. Lawrence's day when he was to be clothed
+as a novice, tripped while he was holding back the cope during
+the censing of the <i>Magnificat</i> and falling on his knees
+almost upset Father Lamplugh. There was no doubt that
+the way Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw when he
+was self-conscious was very funny; but Mark wished that the
+giggling had not occurred in front of Father Lamplugh. He
+wished too that during recreation after supper Brother Raymond
+would be less skittish and Brother Dunstan less arch in
+the manner of reproving him.</p>
+
+<p>"Holy simplicity is all very well," Mark thought. "But
+holy imbecility is a great bore, especially when there is a
+stranger present."</p>
+
+<p>Luckily Father Burrowes came back the following week,
+and Mark's deepening impression of the monastery's futility
+was temporarily obliterated by the exciting news that the
+Bishop of Alberta whom the brethren were taught to reverence
+as a second founder would be the guest of the Order
+on St. Lawrence's day and attend the profession of Brother
+Anselm. Mark had not yet seen Brother Anselm, who was
+the brother in charge of the Aldershot priory, and he welcomed
+the opportunity of witnessing those solemn final vows.
+He felt that he should gain much from meeting Brother
+Anselm, whose work at Aldershot was considered after the
+Reverend Father's preaching to be the chief glory of the
+Order. Brother Lawrence was a little jealous that his name
+day, on which he was to be clothed in Chapter as a novice,
+should be chosen for the much more important ceremony, and
+he spoke sharply to poor Brother Walter when the latter
+rejoiced in the added lustre Brother Anselm's profession
+would shed upon his own promotion.</p>
+
+<p>"You must remember, Brother," he said, "that you'll probably
+remain a postulant for a very long time."</p>
+
+<p>"But not for ever," replied poor Brother Walter in a
+depressed tone of voice.</p>
+
+<p>"There may not be time to attend to you," said Brother
+Lawrence spitefully. "You may have to wait until the
+Bishop has gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh dear, oh dear," sighed Brother Walter looking woeful.
+"Brother Mark, do you hear what they say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," said Mark, "we'll take our final vows together
+when Brother Lawrence is still a doddering old
+novice."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Lawrence clicked his tongue and bit his under lip
+in disgust at such a flippant remark.</p>
+
+<p>"What a thing to say," he muttered, and burying his hands
+in his sleeves he walked off disdainfully, his jaw thrust
+before him.</p>
+
+<p>"Like a cow-catcher," Mark thought with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop of Alberta was a dear old gentleman with
+silvery hair and a complexion as fresh and pink as a boy's.
+With his laced rochet and purple biretta he lent the little
+matchboarded chapel an exotic splendour when he sat in a
+Glastonbury chair beside the altar during the Office. The
+more ritualistic of the brethren greatly enjoyed giving him
+reverent genuflexions and kissing his episcopal ring. Brother
+Raymond's behaviour towards him was like that of a child
+who has been presented with a large doll to play with, a
+large doll that can be dressed and undressed at the pleasure
+of its owner with nothing to deter him except a faint squeak
+of protest such as the Bishop himself occasionally emitted.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV" />CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<h3>SUSCIPE ME, DOMINE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Brother Anselm was to arrive on the vigil of St.
+Lawrence. Normally Brother Walter would have been
+sent to meet him with the Abbey cart at the station three
+miles away. But Brother Walter was in a state of such
+excitement over his near promotion to postulant that it was
+not considered safe to entrust him with the pony. So Mark
+was sent in his place. It was a hot August evening with
+thunder clouds lying heavy on the Malford woods when Mark
+drove down the deep lanes to the junction, wondering what
+Brother Anselm would be like and awed by the imagination
+of Brother Anselm's thoughts in the train that was bringing
+him from Aldershot to this momentous date of his life's
+history. Almost before he knew what he was saying Mark
+was quoting from <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i15"><i>My mind misgives</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>Shall bitterly begin his fearful date</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>With this night's revels.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Now why should I have thought that?" he asked himself,
+and he was just deciding that it was merely a verbal sequence
+of thought when the first far-off peal of thunder muttered
+a kind of menacing contradiction of so easy an explanation.
+It would be raining soon; Mark thumped the pony's angular
+haunches, and tried to feel cheerful in the oppressive air.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Anselm did not appear as Mark had pictured him.
+Instead of the lithe enthusiast with flaming eyes he saw a
+heavily built man with blunted features, wearing powerful
+horn spectacles, his expression morose, his movements ungainly.
+He had, however, a mellow and strangely sympathetic
+voice, in which Mark fancied that he perceived the
+power he was reputed to wield over the soldiers for whose
+well-being he fought so hard. Mark would have liked to
+ask him about life in the Aldershot priory; perhaps if
+Brother Anselm had been less taciturn, he would have broken
+if not the letter at any rate the spirit of the Rule by begging
+the senior to ask for his services in the Priory. But no
+sooner were they jogging back to Malford than the rain
+came down in a deluge, and Brother Anselm, pulling the hood
+of his frock over his head, was more unapproachable than
+ever. Mark wished that he had a novice's frock and hood,
+for the rain was pouring down the back of his neck and the
+threadbare cassock he wore was already drenched.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Brother," said the new-comer when the Abbey
+was attained.</p>
+
+<p>It was dark by now, and, with nothing visible of the
+speaker except his white habit in the gloom, the voice might
+have been the voice of a heavenly visitant, so rarely sweet,
+so gentle and harmonious were the tones. Mark was much
+moved by that brief recognition of himself.</p>
+
+<p>The wind rose high during the night; listening to it roaring
+through the coppice in which the Abbey was built, Mark
+lay awake for a long time in mute prayer that Brother
+Anselm might find peace and felicity in his new state. And
+while he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther
+in Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell
+to cell, rousing the brethren from sleep with his hammer
+and salutation, the sun was climbing a serene and windless
+sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain top.
+Heaven was very near.</p>
+
+<p>Mark was glad that the day was so fair for the profession
+of Brother Anselm, and at Lauds the antiphon, versicle, and
+response proper to St. Lawrence appealed to him by their
+fitness to the occasion,</p>
+
+<p><i>Gold is tried in the fire: and acceptable men in the furnace
+of adversity</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>V. The Righteous shall grow as a lily.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>R. He shall flourish for ever before the Lord</i>.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Mark concerned himself less with his own reception as a
+postulant. The distinction between a probationer and a
+postulant was very slight, really an arbitrary one made by
+Father Burrowes for his own convenience, and until he had
+to decide whether he should petition to be clothed as a novice
+Mark did not feel that he was called upon to take himself
+too seriously as a monk. For that reason he did not change
+his name, but preferred to stay Brother Mark. The little
+ceremony of reception was carried through in Chapter before
+the brethren went into the Oratory to say Terce, and Brother
+Walter was so much excited when he heard himself addressed
+as Brother Simon that for a moment it seemed doubtful if
+he would be sufficiently calm to attend the profession of
+Brother Anselm at the conventual Mass. However, during
+the clothing of Brother Lawrence as a novice Brother Simon
+quieted down, and even gave over counting the three knots
+in the rope with which he had been girdled. Ordinarily,
+Brother Lawrence would have been clothed after Mass, but
+this morning it was felt that such a ceremony coming after
+the profession of Brother Anselm would be an anti-climax,
+and it was carried through in Chapter. It took Brother
+Lawrence all he had ever heard and read about humility and
+obedience not to protest at the way his clothing on his own
+saint's day, for which he had been made to wait nearly a
+year, was being carried through in such a hole in the corner
+fashion. But he fixed his mind upon the torments of the
+blessed archdeacon on the gridiron and succeeded in keeping
+his temper.</p>
+
+<p>Mark felt that the profession of Brother Anselm lost some
+of its dignity by the absence of Brother George and Brother
+Birinus, the only other professed members of the Order
+apart from Father Burrowes himself. It struck him as
+slightly ludicrous that a few young novices and postulants
+should represent the venerable choir-monks whom one pictured
+at such a ceremony from one's reading of the Rule of
+St. Benedict. Moreover, Father Burrowes never presented
+himself to Mark's imagination as an authentic abbot. Nor
+indeed was he such. Malford Abbey was a courtesy title,
+and such monastic euphemisms as the Abbot's Parlour and
+the Abbot's Lodgings to describe the matchboarded apartments
+sacred to the Father Superior, while they might please
+such ecclesiastical enthusiasts as Brother Raymond, appealed
+to Mark as pretentious and somewhat silly. In fact, if it had
+not been for the presence of the Bishop of Alberta in cope
+and mitre Mark would have found it hard, when after Terce
+the brethren assembled in the Chapter-room to hear Brother
+Anselm make his final petition, to believe in the reality of
+what was happening, to believe, when Brother Anselm in
+reply to the Father Superior's exhortation chose the white
+cowl and scapular (which in the Order of St. George differentiated
+the professed monk from the novice) and rejected
+the suit of dittos belonging to his worldly condition, that he
+was passing through moments of greater spiritual importance
+than any since he was baptized or than any he would pass
+through before he stood upon the threshold of eternity.</p>
+
+<p>But this was a transient scepticism, a fleeting discontent,
+which vanished when the brethren formed into procession
+and returned to the oratory singing the psalm: <i>In Convertendo</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then
+were we like unto them, that dream.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue
+with joy.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Then said they among the heathen: The Lord hath done
+great things for them.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already:
+whereof we rejoice.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Turn our captivity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth
+good seed: shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring
+his sheaves with him.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The Father Superior of the Order sang the Mass, while
+the Bishop of Alberta seated in his Glastonbury chair suffered
+with an expression of childlike benignity the ritualistic
+ministrations of Brother Raymond, the ceremonial doffing and
+donning of his mitre. It was very still in the little Oratory,
+for it was the season when birds are hushed; and even Sir
+Charles Horner who was all by himself in the ante-chapel did
+not fidget or try to peep through the heavy brocaded curtains
+that shut out the quire. Mark dared not look up when at
+the offertory Brother Anselm stood before the Altar and
+answered the solemn interrogations of the Father Superior,
+question after question about his faith and endurance in the
+life he desired to enter. And to every question he answered
+clearly <i>I will</i>. The Father Superior took the parchment on
+which were written the vows and read aloud the document.
+Then it was placed upon the Altar, and there upon that
+sacrificial stone Brother Anselm signed his name to a contract
+with Almighty God. The holy calm that shed itself
+upon the scene was like a spell on every heart that was
+beating there in unison with the heart of him who was drawing
+nearer to Heaven. Prostrating himself, the professed
+monk prayed first to God the Father:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>O receive me according to thy word that I may live;
+and let me not be disappointed of my hope.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The hearts that beat in unison with his took up the prayer,
+and the voices of his brethren repeated it word for word.
+And now the professed monk prayed to God the Son:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>O receive me according to thy word that I may live;
+and let me not be disappointed of my hope.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Once more his brethren echoed the entreaty.</p>
+
+<p>And lastly the professed monk prayed to God the Holy
+Ghost:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>O receive me according to thy word that I may live;
+and let me not be disappointed of my hope.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>For the third time his brethren echoed the entreaty, and then
+one and all in that Oratory cried:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy
+Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
+shall be, world without end. Amen.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>There followed prayers that the peace of God might be
+granted to the professed monk to enable him worthily to
+perform the vows which he had made, and before the blessing
+and imposition of the scapular the Bishop rose to speak in
+tones of deep emotion:</p>
+
+<p>"Brethren, I scarcely dared to hope, when, now nearly ten
+years ago, I received the vows of your Father Superior as
+a novice, that I should one day be privileged to be present
+at this inspiring ceremony. Nor even when five years ago
+in the far north-west of Canada I professed your Father
+Superior and those two devoted souls who will soon be with
+you, now that their work in Malta is for the time finished,
+did I expect to find myself in this beautiful Oratory which
+your Order owes to the generosity of a true son of the
+Church. My heart goes out to you, and I thank God humbly
+that He has vouchsafed to hear my prayers and bless the
+enterprise from which I had indeed expected much, but which
+Almighty God has allowed to prosper more, far more, than
+I ventured to hope. All my days I have longed to behold the
+restoration of the religious life to our country, and now when
+my eyes are dim with age I am granted the ineffable joy of
+beholding what for too long in my weakness and lack of faith
+I feared was never likely to come to pass.</p>
+
+<p>"The profession of our dear brother this morning is, I
+pray, an earnest of many professions at Malford. May these
+first vows placed upon the Altar of this Oratory be blessed
+by Almighty God! May our brother be steadfast and happy
+in his choice! Brethren, I had meant to speak more and
+with greater eloquence, but my heart is too full. The Lord
+be with you."</p>
+
+<p>Now Brother Anselm was clothed in the blessed habit while
+the brethren sang:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>And lighten with celestial fire.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Father Superior of the Order gave him the paternal
+kiss. He begged the prayers of his brethren there assembled,
+and drawing the hood of his cowl over his head prostrated
+himself again before the Altar. The Mass proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>If the strict Benedictine usage had been followed at Malford,
+Brother Anselm would have remained apart from the
+others for three days ofter his profession, wrapped in his
+cowl, alone with God. But he was anxious to go back to
+Aldershot that very afternoon, excusing himself because
+Brother Chad, left behind in charge of the Priory, would be
+overwhelmed by his various responsibilities. Brother
+Dunstan, who had wept throughout the ceremony of the profession,
+was much upset by Brother Anselm's departure. He
+had hoped to achieve great exaltation of spirit by Brother
+Anselm's silent presence. He began to wonder if the newly
+professed monk appreciated his position. Had himself been
+granted what Brother Anselm had been granted, he should
+have liked to spend a week in contemplation of the wonder
+which had befallen him. Brother Dunstan asked himself if
+his thoughts were worthy of a senior novice, of one who had
+for a while acted as Prior and been accorded the address of
+Reverend Brother. He decided that they were not, and as
+a penance he begged for the nib with which Brother Anselm
+had signed his profession. This he wore round his neck as
+an amulet against unbrotherly thoughts and as a pledge of
+his own determination to vow himself eternally to the service
+of God.</p>
+
+<p>Mark was glad that Brother Anselm was going back so
+soon to his active work. It was an assurance that the Order
+of St. George did have active work to do; and when he was
+called upon to drive Brother Anselm to the station he made
+up his mind to conquer his shyness and hint that he should
+be glad to serve the Order in the Priory at Aldershot.</p>
+
+<p>This time, notwithstanding that he had a good excuse to
+draw his hood close, Brother Anselm showed himself more
+approachable.</p>
+
+<p>"If the Reverend Father suggests your name," he promised
+Mark, "I shall be glad to have you with us. Brother Chad is
+simply splendid, and the Tommies are wonderful. It's quite
+right of course to have a Mother House, but. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." He
+broke off, disinclined to criticize the direction of the Order's
+policy to a member so junior as Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I'm not asking you to do anything yet awhile," Mark
+explained. "I quite realize that I have a great deal to learn
+before I should be any use at Aldershot or Sandgate. I hope
+you don't mind my talking like this. But until this morning
+I had not really intended to remain in the Order. My hope
+was to be ordained as soon as I was old enough. Now since
+this morning I feel that I do long for the spiritual support of
+a community for my own feeble aspirations. The Bishop's
+words moved me tremendously. It wasn't what he said so
+much, but I was filled with all his faith and I could have
+cried out to him a promise that I for one would help to carry
+on the restoration. At the same time, I know that I'm more
+fitted for active work, not by any good I expect to do, but for
+the good it will do me. I suppose you'd say that if I had
+a true vocation I shouldn't be thinking about what part I was
+going to play in the life of the Order, but that I should be
+content to do whatever I was told. I'm boring you?" Mark
+broke off to inquire, for Brother Anselm was staring in front
+of him through his big horn spectacles like an owl.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said the senior. "But I'm not the novice-master.
+Who is, by the way?"</p>
+
+<p>"Brother Jerome."</p>
+
+<p>The other did not comment on this information, but Mark
+was sure that he was trying not to look contemptuous.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the junction came in sight, and from down the line
+the white smoke of a train approaching.</p>
+
+<p>"Hurry, Brother, I don't want to miss it."</p>
+
+<p>Mark thumped the haunches of the pony and drove up
+just in time for Brother Anselm to escape.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Brother," said that same voice which yesterday,
+only yesterday night, had sounded so rarely sweet. Here
+on this mellow August afternoon it was the voice of the
+golden air itself, and the shriek of the engine did not drown
+its echoes in Mark's soul where all the way back to Malford
+it was chiming like a bell.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI" />CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<h3>ADDITION</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark's ambition to go and work at Aldershot was
+gratified before the end of August, because Brother
+Chad fell ill, and it was considered advisable to let him spend
+a long convalescence at the Abbey.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Priory,</p>
+
+<p>17, Farnborough Villas,</p>
+
+<p>Aldershot.</p>
+
+<p>St. Michael and All Angels.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Rector,</p>
+
+<p>I don't think you'll be sorry to read from the above
+address that I've been transferred from Malford to one
+of the active branches of the Order. I don't accept your
+condemnation of the Abbey as pseudo-monasticism, though
+I can quite well understand that my account of it might
+lead you to make such a criticism. The trouble with me is
+that my emotions and judgment are always quarrelling. I
+suppose you might say that is true of most people. It's
+like the palmist who tells everybody that he is ruled by his
+head or his heart, as the case may be. But when one approaches
+the problem of religion (let alone what is called
+the religious life) one is terribly perplexed to know which
+is to be obeyed. I don't think that you can altogether rule
+out emotion as a touchstone of truth. The endless volumes
+of St. Thomas Aquinas, through which I've been wading,
+do not cope with the fact that the whole of his vast intellectual
+and severely logical structure is built up on the
+assumption of faith, which is the gift of emotion, not judgment.
+The whole system is a petitio principii really.</p>
+
+<p>I did not mean to embark on a discussion of the question
+of the Ultimate Cause of religion, but to argue with you
+about the religious life! The Abbot Paphnutius told Cassian
+that there were three sorts of vocation&mdash;ex Deo, per hominem,
+and ex necessitate. Now suppose I have a vocation,
+mine is obviously per hominem. I inherit the missionary
+spirit from my father. That spirit was fostered by association
+with Rowley. My main object in entering the Order
+of St. George was to work among soldiers, not because I
+felt that soldiers needed "missionizing" more than any other
+class, but because the work at Chatsea brought me into
+contact with both sailors and soldiers, and turned my
+thoughts in their direction. I also felt the need of an
+organization behind my efforts. My first impulse was to be
+a preaching friar, but that would have laid too much on me
+as an individual, and from lack of self-confidence, youthfulness,
+want of faith perhaps, I was afraid. Well, to come
+back to the Abbot Paphnutius and his three vocations&mdash;it
+seems fairly clear that the first, direct from God, is a better
+vocation than the one which is inspired by human example,
+or the third, which arises from the failure of everything
+else. At the same time they ARE all three genuine vocations.
+What applies to the vocation seems to me to apply equally
+to the community. What you stigmatize as our pseudo-monasticism
+is still experimental, and I think I can see the
+Reverend Father's idea. He has had a great deal of experience
+with an Order which began so amateurishly, if I may
+use the word, that nobody could have imagined that it would
+grow to the size and strength it has reached in ten years.
+The Bishop of Alberta revealed much to us of our beginnings
+during his stay at the Abbey, and after I had listened
+to him I felt how presumptuous it was for me to criticize
+the central source of the religious life we are hoping to
+spread. You see, Rector, I must have criticized it implicitly
+in my letters to you, for your objections are simply the
+expression of what I did not like to say, but what I managed
+to convey through the medium of would-be humorous
+description. One hears of the saving grace of humour, but
+I'm not sure that humour is a saving grace. I rather wish
+that I had no sense of humour. It's a destructive quality.
+All the great sceptics have been humourists. Humour is really
+a device to secure human comfort. Take me. I am inspired
+to become a preaching friar. I instantly perceive the funny
+side of setting out to be a preaching friar. I tell myself
+that other people will perceive the funny side of it, and that
+consequently I shall do no good as a preaching friar. Yes,
+humour is a moisture which rusts everything except gold.
+As a nation the Jews have the greatest sense of humour, and
+they have been the greatest disintegrating force in the history
+of mankind. The Scotch are reputed to have no sense of
+humour, and they are morally the most impressive nation
+in the world. What humour is allowed them is known as
+dry humour. The corroding moisture has been eliminated.
+They are still capable of laughter, but never so as to interfere
+with their seriousness in the great things of life. I remember
+I once heard a tiresome woman, who was striving to be
+clever, say that Our Lord could not have had much sense of
+humour or He would not have hung so long on the Cross.
+At the time I was indignant with the silly blasphemy, but
+thinking it over since I believe that she was right, and that,
+while her only thought had been to make a remark that
+would create a sensation in the room, she had actually hit on
+the explanation of some of Our Lord's human actions. And
+his lack of humour is the more conspicuous because he was
+a Jew. I was reading the other day a book of essays by
+one of our leading young latitudinarian divines, in which
+he was most anxious to prove that Our Lord had all the
+graces of a well-bred young man about town, including a
+pretty wit. He actually claimed that the pun on Peter's
+name was an example of Our Lord's urbane and genial
+humour! It gives away the latitudinarian position completely.
+They're really ashamed of Christianity. They want
+to bring it into line with modern thought. They hope by
+throwing overboard the Incarnation, the Resurrection of the
+Body, and the Ascension, to lighten the ship so effectually
+that it will ride buoyantly over the billows of modern knowledge.
+But however lightly the ship rides, she will still be
+at sea, and it would be the better if she struck on the rock
+of Peter and perished than that she should ride buoyantly
+but aimlessly over the uneasy oceans of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>I've once more got a long way from the subject of my
+letter, but I've always taken advantage of your patience to
+air my theories, and when I begin to write to you my pen
+runs away with me. The point I want to make is that unless
+there is a mother house which is going to create a reserve
+of spiritual energy, the active work of the Order is going
+to suffer. The impulse to save souls might easily exhaust
+itself in the individual. A few disappointments, unceasing
+hard work, the interference of a bishop, the failure of financial
+support, a long period in which his work seems to have
+come to a standstill, all these are going to react on the
+individual missioner who depends on himself. Looking
+back now at the work done by my father, and by Rowley
+at Chatsea, I'm beginning to understand how dangerous it
+is for one man to make himself the pivot of an enterprise.
+I only really know about my father's work at second hand,
+but look at Chatsea. I hear now that already the work is
+falling to pieces. Although that may not justify the Bishop
+of Silchester, I'm beginning to see that he might argue that
+if Rowley had shown himself sufficiently humble to obey
+the forces of law and order in the Church, he would have
+had accumulated for him a fresh store of energy from which
+he might have drawn to consolidate his influence upon the
+people with whom he worked. Anyway, that's what I'm
+going to try to acquire from the pseudo-monasticism of
+Malford. I'm determined to dry up the critical and humorous
+side of myself. Half of it is nothing more than
+arrogance. I'm grateful for being sent to Aldershot, but
+I'm going to make my work here depend on the central
+source of energy and power. I'm going to say that my
+work is per hominem, but that the success of my work is
+ex Deo. You may tell me that any man with the least conception
+of Christian Grace would know that. Yes, he may
+know it intellectually, but does he know it emotionally? I
+confess I don't yet awhile. But I do know that if the Order
+of St. George proves itself a real force, it will not be per
+hominem, it will not be by the Reverend Father's eloquence
+in the pulpit, but by the vocation of the community ex Deo.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, here I am at Aldershot. Brother Chad, whose
+place I have taken, was a character of infinite sweetness and
+humility. All our Tommies speak of him in a sort of protective
+way, as if he were a little boy they had adopted.
+He had&mdash;has, for after all he's only gone to the Abbey to
+get over a bad attack of influenza on top of months of hard
+work&mdash;he has a strangely youthful look, although he's nearly
+thirty. He hails from Lichfield. I wonder what Dr. Johnson
+would have made of him. I've already told you about
+Brother Anselm. Well, now that I've seen him at home, as
+it were, I can't discover the secret of his influence with our
+men. He's every bit as taciturn with them as he was with
+me on that drive from the station, and yet there is not one
+of them that doesn't seem to regard him as an intimate
+friend. He's extraordinarily good at the practical side of
+the business. He makes the men comfortable. He always
+knows just what they're wanting for tea or for supper, and
+the games always go well when Brother Anselm presides,
+much better than they do when I'm in charge! I think
+perhaps that's because I play myself, and want to win. It
+infects the others. And yet we ought to want to win a
+game&mdash;otherwise it's not worth playing. Also, I must admit
+that there's usually a row in the billiard room on my nights
+on duty. Brother Anselm makes them talk better than I
+do, and I don't think he's a bit interested in their South
+African experiences. I am, and they won't say a word about
+them to me. I've been here a month now, so they ought to
+be used to me by this time.</p>
+
+<p>We've just heard that the guest-house for soldiers at the
+Abbey will be finished by the middle of next month, so we're
+already discussing our Christmas party. The Priory, which
+sounds so grand and gothic, is really the corner house of a
+most depressing row of suburban villas, called Glenview
+and that sort of thing. The last tenant was a traveller in
+tea and had a stable instead of the usual back-garden. This
+we have converted into a billiard room. An officer in one
+of the regiments quartered here told us that it was the only
+thing in Aldershot we had converted. The authorities aren't
+very fond of us. They say we encourage the men to grumble
+and give them too great idea of their own importance.
+Brother Anselm asked a general once with whom we fell out
+if it was possible to give a man whose profession it was to
+defend his country too great an idea of his own importance.
+The general merely blew out his cheeks and looked choleric.
+He had no suspicion that he had been scored off. We don't
+push too much religion into the men at present. We've
+taught them to respect the Crucifix on the wall in the dining-room,
+and sometimes they attend Vespers. But they're still
+rather afraid of chaff, such as being called the Salvation
+Army by their comrades. Well, here's an end to this long
+letter, for I must write now to Brother Jerome, whose
+name-day it is to-morrow. Love to all at the Rectory.</p>
+
+<p>Your ever affectionate</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mark remained at Aldershot until the week before Christmas,
+when with a party of Tommies he went back to the
+Abbey. He found that Brother Chad's convalescence had
+been seriously impeded in its later stages by the prospect
+of having to remain at the Abbey as guest-master, and
+though Mark was sorry to leave Aldershot he saw by the
+way the Tommies greeted their old friend that he was dear
+to their hearts. When after Christmas Brother Chad took
+the party back, Mark made up his mind that the right person
+was going.</p>
+
+<p>Mark found many changes at the Abbey during the four
+months he had been away. The greatest of all was the
+presence of Brother George as Prior. The legend of him
+had led Mark to expect someone out of the ordinary; but he
+had not been prepared for a personality as strong as this.
+Brother George was six feet three inches tall, with a presence
+of great dignity and much personal beauty. He had an
+aquiline nose, strong chin, dark curly hair and bright imperious
+eyes. His complexion, burnt by the Mediterranean
+sun, made him seem in his white habit darker than he really
+was. His manner was of one accustomed to be immediately
+obeyed. Mark could scarcely believe when he saw Brother
+Dunstan beside Brother George that only last June Brother
+Dunstan was acting as Prior. As for Brother Raymond,
+who had always been so voluble at recreation, one look from
+Brother George sent him into a silence that was as solemn
+as the disciplinary silence imposed by the rule. Brother
+Birinus, who was Brother George's right hand in the Abbey
+as much as he had been his right hand on the Moose Rib
+farm, was even taller than the Prior; but he was lanky and
+raw-boned, and had not the proportions of Brother George.
+He was of a swarthy complexion, not given to talking much,
+although when he did speak he always spoke to the point.
+He and Brother George were hard at work ploughing up
+some derelict fields which they had persuaded Sir Charles
+Horner to let to the Abbey rent free on condition that they
+were put back into cultivation. The patron himself had gone
+away for the winter to Rome and Florence, and Mark was
+glad that he had, for he was sure that otherwise his inquisitiveness
+would have been severely snubbed by the Prior.
+Father Burrowes went away as usual to preach after Christmas;
+but before he went Mark was clothed as a novice
+together with two other postulants who had been at Malford
+since September. Of these Brother Giles was a former
+school-master, a dried-up, tobacco-coloured little man of
+about fifty, with a quick and nervous, but always precise
+manner. Mark liked him, and his manual labour was done
+under the direction of Brother Giles, who had been made
+gardener, a post for which he was well suited. The other
+new novice was Brother Nicholas whom, had Mark not been
+the fellow-member of a community, he would have disliked
+immensely. Brother Nicholas was one of those people who
+are in a perpetual state of prurient concern about the sexual
+morality of the human race. He was impervious to snubs,
+of which he received many from Brother George, and he had
+somehow managed to become a favourite of the Reverend
+Father, so that he had been appointed guest-master, a post
+that was always coveted, and one for which nobody felt
+Brother Nicholas was suited.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the increase of numbers there had been considerable
+additions made to the fabric of the Abbey, if such a
+word as fabric may be applied to matchboard, felt, and corrugated
+iron. Mention has already been made of the new
+Guest-house, which accommodated not only soldiers invited
+to spend their furloughs at the Abbey, but also tramps who
+sought a night's lodging. Mark, as Porter, found his time
+considerably taken up with these casuals, because as soon as
+the news spread of a comfortable lodging they came begging
+for shelter in greater numbers than had been anticipated.
+A rule was made that they should pay for their entertainment
+by doing a day's work, and it was one of Mark's duties to
+report on the qualifications of these casuals to Brother
+George, whose whole life was occupied with the farm that
+he was creating out of those derelict fields.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a black man just arrived, Reverend Brother. He
+says he lost his ship at Southampton through a boiler explosion,
+and is tramping to Cardiff," Mark would report.</p>
+
+<p>"Can he plough a straight furrow?" the Prior would
+demand.</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt it," Mark would answer with a smile. "He can't
+walk straight across the dormitory."</p>
+
+<p>"What's he been drinking?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rum, I fancy."</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you let him in?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's such a stormy night."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, send him along to me to-morrow after Lauds, and
+I'll put him to cleaning out the pigsties."</p>
+
+<p>Mark only had to deal with these casuals. Regular guests
+like the soldiers, who were always welcome, and
+ecclesiastically minded inquirers were looked after by Brother
+Nicholas. One of the things for which Mark detested
+Brother Nicholas was the habit he had of showing off his
+poor casuals to the paying guests. It took Mark a stern
+reading of St. Benedict's Rule and the observations therein
+upon humility and obedience not to be rude to Brother
+Nicholas sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>"Brother," he asked one day. "Have you ever read what
+our Holy Father says about gyrovagues and sarabaites?"</p>
+
+<p>Brother Nicholas, who always thought that any long word
+with which he was unfamiliar referred to sexual perversion,
+asked what such people were.</p>
+
+<p>"You evidently haven't," said Mark. "Our Holy Father
+disapproves of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, so should I, Brother Mark," said Brother Nicholas
+quickly. "I hate anything like that."</p>
+
+<p>"It struck me," Mark went on, "that most of our paying
+guests are gyrovagues and sarabaites."</p>
+
+<p>"What an accusation to make," said Brother Nicholas,
+flushing with expectant curiosity and looking down his long
+nose to give the impression that it was the blush of innocence
+and modesty.</p>
+
+<p>When, an hour or so later, he had had leisure to discover
+the meaning of both terms, he came up to Mark and
+exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, brother, how could you?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could I what?" Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"How could you let me think that it meant something much
+worse? Why, it's nothing really. Just wandering monks."</p>
+
+<p>"They annoyed our Holy Father," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, they did seem to make him a bit ratty. Perhaps the
+translation softened it down," surmised Brother Nicholas.
+"I'll get a dictionary to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>The bell for solemn silence clanged, and Brother Nicholas
+must have spent his quarter of an hour in most unprofitable
+meditation.</p>
+
+<p>Another addition to the buildings was a wide, covered
+verandah, which had been built on in front of the central
+block, and which therefore extended the length of the Refectory,
+the Library, the Chapter Room, and the Abbot's
+Parlour. The last was now the Prior's Parlour, because
+lodgings for Father Burrowes were being built in the Gatehouse,
+the only building of stone that was being erected.</p>
+
+<p>This Gatehouse was to be finished as an Easter offering
+to the Father Superior from devout ladies, who had been
+dismayed at the imagination of his discomfort. The verandah
+was granted the title of the Cloister, and the hours of
+recreation were now spent here instead of in the Library as
+formerly, which enabled studious brethren to read in peace.</p>
+
+<p>The Prior made a rule that every Sunday afternoon all
+the brethren should assemble in the Cloister at tea, and spend
+the hour until Vespers in jovial intercourse. He did not
+actually specify that the intercourse was to be jovial, but he
+look care by judicious teazing to see that it was jovial. In
+his anxiety to bring his farm into cultivation, Brother George
+was apt to make any monastic duty give way to manual
+labour on those thistle-grown fields, and it was seldom that
+there were more than a couple of brethren to say the Office
+between Lauds and Vespers. The others had to be content
+with crossing themselves when they heard the bell for Terce
+or None, and even Sext was sparingly attended after the
+Prior instituted the eating of the mid-day meal in the fields
+on fine days. Hence the conversation in the Cloister on
+Sunday afternoons was chiefly agricultural.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to help me drill the ten-acre field tomorrow,
+Brother Giles?" the Prior asked one grey Sunday
+afternoon in the middle of March.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm certainly not, Reverend Brother, unless you put
+me under obedience to do so."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I think I shall," the Prior laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"If you do, Reverend Brother," the gardener retorted,
+"you'll have to put my peas under obedience to sow
+themselves."</p>
+
+<p>"Peas!" the Prior scoffed. "Who cares about peas?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Reverend Brother!" cried Brother Simon, his hair
+standing up with excitement. "We couldn't do without
+peas."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Simon was assistant cook nowadays, a post he
+filled tolerably well under the supervision of the one-legged
+soldier who was cook.</p>
+
+<p>"We couldn't do without oats," said Brother Birinus
+severely.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke so seldom at these gatherings that when he did
+few were found to disagree with him, because they felt his
+words must have been deeply pondered before they were
+allowed utterance.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any flowers in the garden for St. Joseph?"
+asked Brother Raymond, who was sacristan.</p>
+
+<p>"A few daffodils, that's all," Brother Giles replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't think that St. Joseph would like daffodils,"
+exclaimed Brother Raymond. "He's so fond of white
+flowers, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good gracious!" the Prior thundered. "Are we a girls'
+school or a company of able-bodied men?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, St. Joseph is always painted with lilies, Reverend
+Brother," said the sacristan, rather sulkily.</p>
+
+<p>He disapproved of the way the Prior treated what he
+called his pet saints.</p>
+
+<p>"We're not an agricultural college either," he added
+in an undertone to Brother Dunstan, who shook his finger
+and whispered "hush."</p>
+
+<p>"I doubt if we ought to keep St. Joseph's Day," said the
+Prior truculently. There was nothing he enjoyed better on
+these Sunday afternoons than showing his contempt for
+ecclesiasticism.</p>
+
+<p>"Reverend Brother!" gasped Brother Dunstan. "Not keep
+St. Joseph's Day?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's not in our calendar," Brother George argued. "If
+we're going to keep St. Joseph, why not keep St. Alo&mdash;what's
+his name and Philip Neri and Anthony of Padua and
+Bernardine of Sienna and half-a-dozen other Italian
+saints?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" asked Brother Raymond. "At any rate we
+have to keep my patron, who was a dear, even if he was a
+Spaniard."</p>
+
+<p>The Prior looked as if he were wondering if there was
+a clause in the Rule that forbade a prior to throw anything
+within reach at an imbecile sacristan.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you can put St. Joseph in the same class
+as the saints you have just mentioned," pompously interposed
+Brother Jerome, who was cellarer nowadays and fancied that
+the continued existence of the Abbey depended on himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Until you can learn to harness a pair of horses to
+the plough," said the Prior, "your opinions on the relative
+importance of Roman saints will not be accepted."</p>
+
+<p>"I've never been used to horses," said Brother Jerome.</p>
+
+<p>"And you have been used to saints?" the Prior laughed,
+raising his eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Jerome was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Brother Lawrence, what do you say?"</p>
+
+<p>Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw and assumed
+the expression of the good boy in a Sunday School class.</p>
+
+<p>"St. Joseph was the foster-father of Our Blessed Lord,
+Reverend Brother," he said primly. "I think it would be
+most disrespectful both to Our Blessed Lord and to Our
+Blessed Lady if we didn't keep his feast-day, though I am
+sure St. Joseph would have no objection to daffodils. No
+objections at all. His whole life and character show him
+to have been a man of the greatest humility and forbearance."</p>
+
+<p>The Prior rocked with laughter. This was the kind of
+speech that sometimes rewarded his teasing.</p>
+
+<p>"We always kept St. Joseph's day at the Visitation,
+Hornsey," Brother Nicholas volunteered. "In fact we always
+made it a great feature. We found it came as such a
+relief in Lent."</p>
+
+<p>The Prior nodded his head mockingly.</p>
+
+<p>"These young folk can teach us a lot about the way to
+worship God, Brother Birinus," he commented.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Birinus scowled.</p>
+
+<p>"I broke three shares ploughing that bad bit of ground
+by the fir trees," he announced gloomily. "I think I'll drill
+in the oats to-morrow in the ten-acre. It's no good ploughing
+deep," he added reproachfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I believe in deep ploughing," the Prior argued.</p>
+
+<p>Mark realized that Brother Birinus had deliberately
+brought back the conversation to where it started in order
+to put an end to the discussion about St. Joseph. He was
+glad, because he himself was the only one of the brethren
+who had not yet been called upon to face the Prior's contemptuous
+teasing. He wondered if he should have had the
+courage to speak up for St. Joseph's Day. He should have
+found it difficult to oppose Brother George, whom he liked
+and revered. But in this case he was wrong, and perhaps he
+was also wrong to make the observation of St. Joseph's Day
+a cudgel with which to belabour the brethren.</p>
+
+<p>The following afternoon Mark had two casuals who he
+fancied might be useful to the Prior, and leaving the ward of
+the gate to Brother Nicholas he took them down with him
+through the coppice to where over the bleak March furrows
+Brother George was ploughing that rocky strip of bad land
+by the fir trees. The men were told to go and report themselves
+to Brother Birinus, who with Brother Dunstan to
+feed the drill was sowing oats a field or two away.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think Brother Birinus will be sorry to let Brother
+Dunstan go back to his domestic duties," the Prior commented
+sardonically.</p>
+
+<p>Mark was turning to go back to <i>his</i> domestic duties when
+Brother George signed to him to stop.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that like the rest of them you think I've no
+business to be a monk?" Brother George began.</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked at him in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe that anybody thinks that," he said; but
+even as he spoke he looked at the Prior and wondered why
+he had become a monk. He did not appear, standing there in
+breeches and gaiters, his shirt open at the neck, his hair
+tossing in the wind, his face and form of the soil like a
+figure in one of Fred Walker's pictures, no, he certainly did
+not appear the kind of man who could be led away by Father
+Burrowes' eloquence and persuasiveness into choosing the
+method of life he had chosen. Yes, now that the question
+had been put to him Mark wondered why Brother George
+was a monk.</p>
+
+<p>"You too are astonished at me," said the Prior. "Well,
+in a way I don't blame you. You've only seen me on the
+land. This comes of letting myself be tempted by Horner's
+offer to give us this land rent free if I would take it in hand.
+And after all," he went on talking to the wide grey sky
+rather than to Mark, "the old monks were great tillers of the
+soil. It's right that we should maintain the tradition. Besides,
+all those years in Malta I've dreamed just this.
+Brother Birinus and I have stewed on those sun-baked heights
+above Valetta and dreamed of this. What made you join
+our Order?" he asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>Mark told him about himself.</p>
+
+<p>"I see, you want to keep your hand in, eh? Well, I suppose
+you might have done worse for a couple of years. Now,
+I've never wanted to be a priest. The Reverend Father
+would like me to be ordained, but I don't think I should make
+a good priest. I believe if I were to become a priest, I should
+lose my faith. That sounds a queer thing to say, and I'd
+rather you didn't repeat it to any of those young men up
+there."</p>
+
+<p>The monastery bell sounded on the wind.</p>
+
+<p>"Three o'clock already," exclaimed the Prior. And crossing
+himself he said the short prayer offered to God instead
+of the formal attendance at the Office.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I mustn't let the horses get chilled. You'd better
+get back to your casuals. By the way, I'm going to have
+Brother Nicholas to work out here awhile, and I want you to
+act as guest-master. Brother Raymond will be porter, and
+I'm going to send Brother Birinus off the farm to be
+sacristan. I shall miss him out here, of course."</p>
+
+<p>The Prior put his hand once more to the plough, and Mark
+went slowly back to the Abbey. On the brow of the hill
+before he plunged into the coppice he turned to look down
+at the distant figure moving with slow paces across the field
+below.</p>
+
+<p>"He's wrestling with himself," Mark thought, "more than
+he's wrestling with the soil."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII" />CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<h3>MULTIPLICATION</h3>
+
+
+<p>At Easter the Abbey Gatehouse was blessed by the Father
+Superior, who established himself in the rooms above
+and allowed himself to take a holiday from his labour of
+preaching. Mark expected to be made porter again, but the
+Reverend Father did not attempt to change the posts assigned
+to the brethren by the Prior, and Mark remained guest-master,
+a duty that was likely to give him plenty of occupation
+during the summer months now close at hand.</p>
+
+<p>On Low Sunday the Father Superior convened a full
+Chapter of the Order, to which were summoned Brother
+Dominic, the head of the Sandgate house, and Brother
+Anselm. When the brethren, with the exception of Brother
+Simon, who was still a postulant, were gathered together,
+the Father Superior addressed them as follows:</p>
+
+<p>"Brethren, I have called this Chapter of the Order of
+St. George to acquaint you with our financial position, and
+to ask you to make a grave decision. Before I say any more
+I ought to explain that our three professed brethren considered
+that a Chapter convened to make a decision such as I
+am going to ask you to make presently should not include
+the novices. I contended that in the present state of our
+Order where novices are called upon to fill the most responsible
+positions it would be unfair to exclude them; and our
+professed brethren, like true sons of St. Benedict, have
+accepted my ruling. You all know what great additions to
+our Mother House we have made during the past year, and
+you will all realize what a burden of debt this has laid upon
+the Order and on myself what a weight of responsibility.
+The closing of our Malta Priory, which was too far away
+to interest people in England, eased us a little. But if we are
+going to establish ourselves as a permanent force in modern
+religious life, we must establish our Mother House before
+anything. You may say that the Order of St. George is an
+Order devoted to active work among soldiers, and that we
+are not concerned with the establishment of a partially contemplative
+community. But all of you will recognize the
+advantage it has been to you to be asked to stay here and
+prepare yourselves for active work, to gather within yourselves
+a great store of spiritual energy, and hoard within
+your hearts a mighty treasure of spiritual strength.
+Brethren, if the Order of St. George is to be worthy of its
+name and of its claim we must not rest till we have a priory
+in every port and garrison, and in every great city where
+soldiers are stationed. Even if we had the necessary funds
+to endow these priories, have we enough brethren to take
+charge of them? We have not. I cannot help feeling that
+I was too hasty in establishing active houses both at Aldershot
+and at Sandgate, and I have convened you to-day to
+ask you to vote in Chapter that the house at Sandgate be
+temporarily given up, great spiritual influence though it has
+proved itself under our dear Brother Dominic with the men
+of Shorncliffe Camp, not only that we may concentrate our
+resources and pay our debts, but also that we may have
+the help of Brother Dominic himself, and of Brother
+Athanasius, who has remained behind in charge and is not
+here today."</p>
+
+<p>The Father Superior then read a statement of the Order's
+financial liabilities, and invited any Brother who wished, to
+speak his mind. All waited for the Prior, who after a short
+silence rose:</p>
+
+<p>"Reverend Father and Brethren, I don't think that there
+is much to say. Frankly, I am not convinced that we ought
+to have spent so much on the Abbey, but having done so,
+we must obviously try and put ourselves on a sound financial
+basis. I should like to hear what Brother Dominic has to
+say."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Dominic was a slight man with black hair and
+a sallow complexion, whose most prominent feature was an,
+immense hooked nose with thin nostrils. Whether through
+the associations with his name saint, or merely by his personality,
+Mark considered that he looked a typical inquisitor.
+When he spoke, his lips seemed to curl in a sneer. The
+expression was probably quite accidental, perhaps caused
+by some difficulty in breathing, but the effect was sinister,
+and his smooth voice did nothing to counteract the unpleasant
+grimace. Mark wondered if he was really successful with
+the men at Shorncliffe.</p>
+
+<p>"Reverend Father, Reverend Brother, and Brethren," said
+Brother Dominic, "you can imagine that it is no easy matter
+for me to destroy with a few words a house that in a small
+way I had a share in building up."</p>
+
+<p>"The lion's share," interposed the Father Superior.</p>
+
+<p>"You are too generous, Reverend Father," said Brother
+Dominic. "We could have done very little at Sandgate if
+you had not worked so hard for us throughout the length
+and breadth of England. And that is what personally I do
+feel, Brethren," he continued in more emphatic tones. "I
+do feel that the Reverend Father knows better than we what
+is the right policy for us to adopt. I will not pretend that
+I shall be anything but loath to leave Sandgate, but the future
+of the whole order depends on the ability of brethren like
+myself," Brother Dominic paused for the briefest instant to
+flash a quick glance at Brother Anselm, "to recognize that
+our usefulness to the soldiers among whom we are proud
+and happy to spend our lives is bounded by our usefulness to
+the Order of St. George. I give my vote without hesitation
+in favour of closing the Priory at Sandgate, and abandoning
+temporarily the work at Shorncliffe Camp."</p>
+
+<p>Nobody else spoke when Brother Dominic sat down, and
+everybody voted in favour of the course of action proposed
+by the Father Superior.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Dominic, in addition to his other work, had been
+editing <i>The Dragon</i>, the monthly magazine of the Order,
+and it was now decided to print this in future at the Abbey,
+some constant reader having presented a fount of type. The
+opening of a printing-press involved housing room, and it
+was decided to devote the old kitchens to this purpose, so
+that new kitchens could be built, a desirable addition in view
+of the increasing numbers in the Abbey and the likelihood
+of a further increase presently.</p>
+
+<p>Mark had not been touched by the abandonment of the
+Sandgate priory until Brother Athanasius arrived. Brother
+Athanasius was a florid young man with bright blue eyes,
+and so much pent-up energy as sometimes to appear blustering.
+He lacked any kind of ability to hide his feelings, and
+he was loud in his denunciation of the Chapter that abolished
+his work. His criticisms were so loud, aggressive, and
+blatant, that he was nearly ordered to retire from the Order
+altogether. However, the Father Superior went away to
+address a series of drawing-room meetings in London, and
+Brother George, with whom Brother Athanasius, almost
+alone of the brethren, never hesitated to keep his end up,
+discovering that he was as ready to stick up to horses and
+cows, did not pay attention to the Father Superior's threat
+that, if Brother Athanasius could not keep his tongue quiet,
+he must be sent away. Mark made friends with him, and
+when he found that, in spite of all his blatancy and self-assertion,
+Brother Athanasius could not keep the tears from
+his bright blue eyes whenever he spoke of Shorncliffe, he was
+sorry for him and vexed with himself for accepting the surrender
+of Sandgate priory so much as a matter of course,
+because he had no personal experience of its work.</p>
+
+<p>"But was Brother Dominic really good with the men?"
+Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Brother Dominic was all right. Don't you try and
+make me criticize Brother Dominic. He bought the gloves
+and I did the fighting. Good man of business was Brother
+D. I wish we could have some boxing here. Half the
+brethren want punching about in my opinion. Old Brother
+Jerome's face is squashed flat like a prize-fighter's, but I
+bet he's never had the gloves on in his life. I'm fond of
+old Brother J. But, my word, wouldn't I like to punch into
+him when he gives us that pea-soup more than four times
+a week. Chronic, I call it. Well, if he doesn't give us a
+jolly good blow out on my name-day next week I really will
+punch into him. Old Brother Flatface, as I called him the
+other day. And he wasn't half angry either. Didn't we have
+sport last second of May! I took a party of them all round
+Hythe and Folkestone. No end of a spree!"</p>
+
+<p>Mark was soon too much occupied with his duties as
+guestmaster to lament with Brother Athanasius the end of
+the Sandgate priory. The Reverend Father's drawing-room
+addresses were sending fresh visitors down every week to
+see for themselves the size of the foundation that required
+money, and more money, and more money still to keep it
+going. In the old Chatsea days guests who visited the Mission
+House were expected to provide entertainment for their
+hosts. It mattered not who they were, millionaires or
+paupers, parsons or laymen, undergraduates or board-school
+boys, they had to share the common table, face the common
+teasing, and help the common task. Here at the Abbey,
+although the guests had much more opportunity of intercourse
+with the brethren than would have been permitted in
+a less novel monastic house, they were definitely guests, from
+whom nothing was expected beyond observance of the rules
+for guests. They were of all kinds, from the distinguished
+lay leaders of the Catholic party to young men who thought
+emotionally of joining the Order.</p>
+
+<p>Mark tried to conduct himself as impersonally as possible,
+and in doing so he managed to impress all the visitors with
+being a young man intensely preoccupied with his vocation,
+and as such to be treated with gravity and a certain amount
+of deference. Mark himself was anxious not to take advantage
+of his position, and make friends with people that
+otherwise he might not have met. Had he been sure that he
+was going to remain in the Order of St. George, he would
+have allowed himself a greater liberty of intercourse, because
+he would not then have been afraid of one day seeing
+these people in the world. He desired to be forgotten when
+they left the Abbey, or if he was remembered to be remembered
+only as a guestmaster who tried to make the
+Monastery guests comfortable, who treated them with
+courtesy, but also with reserve.</p>
+
+<p>None of the young men who came down to see if they
+would like to be monks got as far as being accepted as a
+probationer until the end of May, when a certain Mr. Arthur
+Yarrell, an undergraduate from Keble College, Oxford,
+whose mind was a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms, was
+accepted and a month later became a postulant as Brother
+Augustine, to the great pleasure of Brother Raymond, who
+said that he really thought he should have been compelled
+to leave the Order if somebody had not joined it with an
+appreciation of historic Catholicism. Early in June Sir
+Charles Horner introduced another young man called Aubrey
+Wyon, whom he had met at Venice in May.</p>
+
+<p>"Take a little trouble over entertaining him," Sir Charles
+counselled. And then, looking round to see that no thieves
+or highwaymen were listening, he whispered to Mark that
+Wyon had money. "He would be an asset, I fancy. And
+he's seriously thinking of joining you," the baronet declared.</p>
+
+<p>To tell the truth, Sir Charles who was beginning to be
+worried by the financial state of the Order of St. George,
+would at this crisis have tried to persuade the Devil to become
+a monk if the Devil would have provided a handsome dowry.
+He had met Aubrey Wyon at an expensive hotel, had noticed
+that he was expensively dressed and drank good wine, had
+found that he was interested in ecclesiastical religion, and,
+having bragged a bit about the land he had presented to the
+Order of St. George, had inspired Wyon to do some bragging
+of what he had done for various churches.</p>
+
+<p>"If I could find happiness at Malford," Wyon had said, "I
+would give them all that I possess."</p>
+
+<p>Sir Charles had warned the Father Superior that he would
+do well to accept Wyon as a probationer, should he propose
+himself; and the Father Superior, who was by now as
+anxious for money as a company-promoter, made himself as
+pleasant to Wyon as he knew how, flattering him carefully
+and giving voice to his dreams for the great stone Abbey to
+be built here in days to come.</p>
+
+<p>Mark took an immediate and violent dislike to the newcomer,
+which, had he been questioned about it, he would
+have attributed to his elaborate choice of socks and tie, or to
+his habit of perpetually tightening the leather belt he wore
+instead of braces, as if he would compel that flabbiness of
+waist caused by soft living to vanish; but to himself he
+admitted that the antipathy was deeper seated.</p>
+
+<p>"It's like the odour of corruption," he murmured, though
+actually it was the odour of hair washes and lotions and scents
+that filled the guest's cell.</p>
+
+<p>However, Aubrey Wyon became for a week a probationer,
+ludicrously known as Brother Aubrey, after which he remained
+a postulant only a fortnight before he was clothed
+as a novice, having by then taken the name of Anthony,
+alleging that the inspiration to become a monk had been due
+to the direct intervention of St. Anthony of Padua on
+June 13th.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Brother Anthony turned the Father Superior's
+head with his promises of what he intended to give the Order
+when he was professed, or whether having once started he
+was unable to stop, there was continuous building all that
+summer, culminating in a decision to begin the Abbey Church.</p>
+
+<p>Mark wondered why Brother George did not protest
+against the expenditure, and he came to the conclusion that
+the Prior was as much bewitched by ambition for his farm
+as the head of the Order was by his hope of a mighty fane.</p>
+
+<p>Thus things drifted during the summer, when, since the
+Father Superior was not away so much, his influence was
+exerted more strongly over the brethren, though at the same
+time he was not attracting as much money as was now always
+required in ever increasing amounts.</p>
+
+<p>Such preaching as he did manage later on during the
+autumn was by no means so financially successful as his
+campaign of the preceding year at the same time. Perhaps
+the natural buoyancy of his spirit led Father Burrowes in
+his disappointment to place more trust than he might otherwise
+have done in Brother Anthony's plan for the benefit of
+the Order. The cloister became like Aladdin's Cave whenever
+there were enough brethren assembled to make an
+audience for his luscious projects and prefigurations. Sundays
+were the days when Brother Anthony was particularly eloquent,
+and one Sunday in mid-September&mdash;it was the Feast
+of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross&mdash;he surpassed himself.</p>
+
+<p>"My notion would be to copy," he proclaimed, "with of
+course certain improvements, the buildings on Monte Cassino.
+We are not quite so high here; but then on the other hand
+that is an advantage, because it will enable us to allot less
+space to the superficial area. Yes, I have a very soft spot
+for the cloisters of Monte Cassino."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Anthony gazed round for the approbation of the
+assembled brethren, none of whom had the least idea what
+the cloisters of Monte Cassino looked like.</p>
+
+<p>"And I think some of our altar furniture is a little mean,"
+Brother Anthony continued. "I'm not advocating undue ostentation;
+but there is room for improvement. They
+understood so well in the Middle Ages the importance of a
+rich equipment. If I'd only known when I was in Sienna
+this spring that I was coming here, I should certainly have
+bought a superb reredos that was offered to me comparatively
+cheap. The columns were of malachite and porphyry, and
+the panels of <i>rosso antico</i> with scrolls of <i>lumachella</i>. They
+only asked 15,000 lire. It was absurdly cheap. However,
+perhaps it would be wiser to wait till we finish the Abbey
+Church before we decide on the reredos. I'm very much in
+favour of beaten gold for the tabernacle. By the way, Reverend
+Father, have you decided to build an ambulatory round
+the clerestory? I must say I think it would be effective, and
+of course for meditation unique. I shall have to find if my
+money will run to it. Oh, and Brother Birinus, weren't you
+saying the other day that the green vestments were rather
+faded? Don't worry. I'm only waiting to make up my mind
+between velvet and brocade for the purple set to order a
+completely new lot, including a set in old rose damask for
+mid-Lent. It always seems to me such a mistake not to take
+advantage of that charming use."</p>
+
+<p>Father Burrowes was transported to the days of his youth
+at Malta when his own imagination was filled with visions
+of precious metals, of rare fabrics and mighty architecture.</p>
+
+<p>"A silver chalice of severe pattern encrusted round the
+stem with blue zircons," Brother Anthony was chanting in
+his melodious voice, his eyes bright with the reflection of
+celestial splendours. "And perhaps another in gold with the
+sacred monogram wrought on the cup in jacinths and orange
+tourmalines. Yes, I'll talk it over with Sir Charles and get
+him to approve the design."</p>
+
+<p>The next morning two detectives came to Malford Abbey,
+and arrested Aubrey Wyon alias Brother Anthony for obtaining
+money under false pretences in various parts of the
+world. With them he departed to prison and a life more
+ascetic than any he had hitherto known. Brother Anthony
+departed indeed, but he was not discredited until it was too
+late. His grandiose projects and extravagant promises had
+already incited Father Burrowes to launch out on several new
+building operations that the Order could ill afford.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the cloister had been less like the Cave of Aladdin
+than the Cave of the Forty Thieves.</p>
+
+<p>After Christmas another Chapter was convened, to which
+Brother Anselm and Brother Chad were both bidden. The
+Father Superior addressed the brethren as he had addressed
+them a year ago, and finished up his speech by announcing
+that, deeply as he regretted it, he felt bound to propose that
+the Aldershot priory should be closed.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" shouted Brother Anselm, leaping to his feet,
+his eyes blazing with wrath through his great horn spectacles.</p>
+
+<p>The Prior quickly rose to say that he could not agree to
+the Reverend Father's suggestion. It was impossible for
+them any longer to claim that they were an active Order if
+they confined themselves entirely to the Abbey. He had not
+opposed the shutting down of the Sandgate priory, nor, he
+would remind the Reverend Father, had he offered any resistance
+to the abandonment of Malta. But he felt obliged
+to give his opinion strongly in favour of making any sacrifice
+to keep alive the Aldershot priory.</p>
+
+<p>Brother George had spoken with force, but without eloquence;
+and Mark was afraid that his speech had not carried
+much weight.</p>
+
+<p>The next to rise was Brother Birinus, who stood up as tall
+as a tree and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I agree with Brother George."</p>
+
+<p>And when he sat down it was as if a tree had been
+uprooted.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause after this, while every brother looked
+at his neighbour, waiting for him to rise at this crisis in the
+history of the Order. At last the Father Superior asked
+Brother Anselm if he did not intend to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"What can I say?" asked Brother Anselm bitterly. "Last
+year I should have been true to myself and voted against
+the closing of the Sandgate house. I was silent then in my
+egoism. I am not fit to defend our house now."</p>
+
+<p>"But I will," cried Brother Chad, rising. "Begging your
+pardon, Reverend Father and Brethren, if I am speaking too
+soon, but I cannot believe that you seriously consider closing
+us down. We're just beginning to get on well with the
+authorities, and we've a regular lot of communicants now.
+We began as just a Club, but we're something more than a
+Club now. We're bringing men to Our Lord, Brethren.
+You will do a great wrong if you let those poor souls think
+that for the sake of your own comfort you are ready to forsake
+them. Forgive me, Reverend Father. Forgive me, dear
+Brethren, if I have said too much and spoken uncharitably."</p>
+
+<p>"He has not spoken uncharitably enough," Brother
+Athanasius shouted, rising to his feet, and as he did so unconsciously
+assuming the attitude of a boxer. "If I'd been
+here last year, I should have spoken much more uncharitably.
+I did not join this Order to sit about playing with vestments.
+I wanted to bring soldiers to God. If this Order is to be
+turned into a kind of male nunnery, I'm off to-morrow. I'm
+boiling over, that's what I am, boiling over. If we can't
+afford to do what we should be doing, we can't afford to
+build gatehouses, and lay out flower-beds, and sit giggling
+in tin cloisters. It's the limit, that's what it is, the limit."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Athanasius stood there flushed with defiance, until
+the Father Superior told him to sit down and not make a fool
+of himself, a command which, notwithstanding that the feeling
+of the Chapter had been so far entirely against the head
+of the Order, such was the Father Superior's authority,
+Brother Athanasius immediately obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Dominic now rose to try, as he said, to bring an
+atmosphere of reasonableness into the discussion.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not think that I can be accused of inconsistency,"
+he pointed out smoothly, "when we look back to our general
+Chapter of a year ago. Whatever my personal feelings were
+about closing the Sandgate priory, I recognized at once that
+the Reverend Father was right. There is really no doubt
+that we must be strong at the roots before we try to grow
+into a tall tree. However flourishing the branches, they will
+wither if the roots are not fed. The Reverend Father has
+no desire, as I understand him, to abandon the activity of the
+Order. He is merely anxious to establish us on a firm basis.
+The Reverend Brother said that we should make any sacrifice
+to maintain the Aldershot house. I have no desire to
+accuse the Reverend Brother of inconsistency, but I would
+ask him if he is willing to give up the farm, which, as you
+know, has cost so far a great deal more than we could afford.
+But of course the Reverend Brother would give up the farm.
+At the same time, we do not want him to give it up. We
+realize that under his capable guidance that farm will presently
+be a source of profit. Therefore, I beg the Reverend
+Brother to understand that I am making a purely rhetorical
+point when I ask him if he is prepared to give up the farm.
+I repeat, we do not want the farm given up.</p>
+
+<p>"Another point which I feel has been missed. In giving
+up Aldershot, we are not giving up active work entirely.
+We have a good deal of active work here. We have our
+guest-house for casuals, and we are always ready to
+feed, clothe, and shelter any old soldiers who come to us.
+We are still young as an Order. We have only four professed
+monks, including the Reverend Father. We want to
+have more than that before we can consider ourselves established.
+I for one should hesitate to take my final vows until
+I had spent a long time in strict religious preparation, which
+in the hurry and scurry of active work is impossible. We
+have listened to a couple of violent speeches, or at any rate
+to one violent speech by a brother who was for a year in
+close touch with myself. I appeal to him not to drag the
+discussion down to the level of lay politics. We are free,
+we novices, to leave to-morrow. Let us remember that, and
+do not let us take advantage of our freedom to impart to this
+Mother House of ours the atmosphere of the world to which
+we may return when we will.</p>
+
+<p>"And let us remember when we oppose the judgment of
+the Reverend Father that we are exalting ourselves without
+reason. Let us remember that it is he who by his eloquence
+and by his devotion and by his endurance and by his personality,
+has given us this wonderful house. Are we to turn
+round and say to him who has worked so hard for us that
+we do not want his gifts, that we are such wonderful fishers
+of men that we can be independent of him? Oh, my dear
+Brethren, let me beg you to vote in favour of abandoning
+all our dependencies until we are ourselves no longer dependent
+on the Reverend Father's eloquence and devotion
+and endurance and personality. God has blessed us infinitely.
+Are we to fling those blessings in His face?"</p>
+
+<p>Brother Dominic sat down; after him in succession Brother
+Raymond, Brother Dunstan, Brother Lawrence, Brother
+Jerome, Brother Nicholas, and Brother Augustine spoke in
+support of the Father Superior. Brother Giles refused to
+speak, and though Mark's heart was thundering in his mouth
+with unuttered eloquence, at the moment he should rise he
+could not find a word, and he indicated with a sign that like
+Brother Giles, he had nothing to say.</p>
+
+<p>"The voting will be by ballot," the Reverend Father announced.
+"It is proposed to give up the Priory at Aldershot.
+Let those brethren who agree write Yes on a strip of paper.
+Let those who disagree write No."</p>
+
+<p>All knelt in silent prayer before they inscribed their will;
+after which they advanced one by one to the ballot-box, into
+which under the eyes of a large crucifix they dropped their
+papers. The Father Superior did not vote. Brother Simon,
+who was still a postulant, and not eligible to sit in Chapter,
+was fetched to count the votes. He was much excited at his
+task, and when he announced that seven papers were inscribed
+Yes, that six were inscribed No, and that one paper was
+blank, his teeth were chattering.</p>
+
+<p>"One paper blank?" somebody repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, really," said Brother Simon. "I looked everywhere,
+and there's not a mark on it."</p>
+
+<p>All turned involuntarily toward Mark, whose paper in
+fact it was, although he gave no sign of being conscious of
+the ownership.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>In a General Chapter of the Order of St. George, held
+upon the Vigil of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ,
+in the year of Grace, 1903, it was resolved to close the Priory
+of the Order in the town of Aldershot.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Father, having invoked the Holy Trinity,
+declared the Chapter dissolved.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII" />CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>DIVISION</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark was vexed with himself for evading the responsibility
+of recording his opinion. His vote would not
+have changed the direction of the policy; but if he had voted
+against giving up the house at Aldershot, the Father Superior
+would have had to record the casting vote in favour of his
+own proposal, and whatever praise or blame was ultimately
+awarded to the decision would have belonged to him alone,
+who as head of the Order was best able to bear it. Mark's
+whole sympathy had been on the side of Brother George,
+and as one who had known at first hand the work in Aldershot,
+he did feel that it ought not to be abandoned so easily.
+Then when Brother Athanasius was speaking, Mark, in his
+embarrassment at such violence of manner and tone, picked
+up a volume lying on the table by his elbow that by reading
+he might avoid the eyes of his brethren until Brother
+Athanasius had ceased to shout. It was the Rule of St.
+Benedict which, with a print of Fra Angelico's Crucifixion
+and an image of St. George, was all the decoration allowed
+to the bare Chapter Room, and the page at which Mark
+opened the leather-bound volume was headed: DE PRAEPOSITO
+MONASTERII.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>"It happens too often that through the appointment of
+the Prior grave scandals arise in monasteries, since some
+there be who, puffed up with a malignant spirit of pride,
+imagining themselves to be second Abbots, and assuming
+unto themselves a tyrannous authority, encourage scandals
+and create dissensions in the community. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"Hence envy is excited, strife, evil-speaking, jealousy,
+discord, confusion; and while the Abbot and the Prior run
+counter to each other, by such dissension their souls must
+of necessity be imperilled; and those who are under them,
+when they take sides, are travelling on the road to perdition. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"On this account we apprehend that it is expedient for
+the preservation of peace and good-will that the management
+of his monastery should be left to the discretion of the
+Abbot. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"Let the Prior carry out with reverence whatever shall be
+enjoined upon him by his Abbot, doing nothing against the
+Abbot's will, nor against his orders. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Mark could not be otherwise than impressed by what he
+read.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Ii qui sub ipsis sunt, dum adulantur partibus, eunt in
+perditionem. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Nihil contra Abbatis voluntatem faciens. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Mark looked up at the figure of St. Benedict standing in
+that holy group at the foot of the Cross.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Ideoque nos proevidemus expedire, propter pacis caritatisque
+custodiam, in Abbatis pendere arbitrio ordinationem
+monasterii sui. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>St. Benedict had more than apprehended; he had actually
+foreseen that the Abbot ought to manage his own monastery.
+It was as if centuries ago, in the cave at Subiaco, he had
+heard that strident voice of Brother Athanasius in this matchboarded
+Chapter-room, as if he had beheld Brother Dominic,
+while apparently he was striving to persuade his brethren to
+accept the Father Superior's advice, nevertheless taking sides,
+and thereby travelling along the road that leads toward
+destruction. This was the thought that paralyzed Mark's
+tongue when it was his turn to speak, and this was why he
+would not commit himself to an opinion. Afterward, his
+neutrality appeared to him a weak compromise, and he regretted
+that he had not definitely allied himself with one
+party or the other.</p>
+
+<p>The announcement in <i>The Dragon</i> that the Order had been
+compelled to give up the Aldershot house produced a large
+sum of sympathetic contributions; and when the Father
+Superior came back just before Lent, he convened another
+Chapter, at which he told the Community that it was imperative
+to establish a priory in London before they tried to
+reopen any houses elsewhere. His argument was cogent, and
+once again there was the appearance of unanimity among
+the Brethren, who all approved of the proposal. It had
+always been the custom of Father Burrowes to preach his
+hardest during Lent, because during that season of self-denial
+he was able to raise more money than at any other
+time, but until now he had never failed to be at the Abbey
+at the beginning of Passion Week, nor to remain there until
+Easter was over.</p>
+
+<p>The Feast of St. Benedict fell upon the Saturday before
+the fifth Sunday in Lent, and the Father Superior, who had
+travelled down from the North in order to be present, announced
+that he considered it would be prudent, so freely
+was the money flowing in, not to give up preaching this year
+during Passion Week and Holy Week. Naturally, he did
+not intend to leave the Community without a priest at such
+a season, and he had made arrangements with the Reverend
+Andrew Hett to act as chaplain until he could come back
+into residence himself.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine were particularly
+thrilled by the prospect of enjoying the ministrations
+of Andrew Hett, less perhaps because they would otherwise
+be debarred from their Easter duties than because they looked
+forward to services and ceremonies of which they felt they
+had been robbed by the austere Anglicanism of Brother
+George.</p>
+
+<p>"Andrew Hett is famous," declared Brother Raymond at
+the pitch of exultation. "It was he who told the Bishop of
+Ipswich that if the Bishop made him give up Benediction he
+would give up singing Morning and Evening Prayer."</p>
+
+<p>"That must have upset the Bishop," said Mark. "I suppose
+he resigned his bishopric."</p>
+
+<p>"I should have thought that you, Brother Mark, would
+have been the last one to take the part of a bishop when he
+persecutes a Catholic priest!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not taking the part of the Bishop," Mark replied.
+"But I think it was a silly remark for a curate to make. It
+merely put him in the wrong, and gave the Bishop an opportunity
+to score."</p>
+
+<p>The Prior had questioned the policy of engaging Andrew
+Hett as Chaplain, even for so brief a period as a month.
+He argued that, inasmuch as the Bishop of Silchester had
+twice refused to licence him to parishes in the diocese, it
+would prejudice the Bishop against the Order of St. George,
+and might lead to his inhibiting the Father Superior later
+on, should an excuse present itself.</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense, my dear Brother George," said the Reverend
+Father. "He won't know anything about it officially, and in
+any case ours is a private oratory, where refusals to licence
+and episcopal inhibitions have no effect."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not my point," argued Brother George. "My point
+is that any communication with a notorious ecclesiastical outlaw
+like this fellow Hett is liable to react unfavourably upon
+us. Why can't we get down somebody else? There must be
+a number of unemployed elderly priests who would be glad
+of the holiday."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid that I've offered Hett the job now, so let us
+make up our minds to be content."</p>
+
+<p>Mark, who was doing secretarial work for the Reverend
+Father, happened to be present during this conversation,
+which distressed him, because it showed him that the Prior
+was still at variance with the Abbot, a state of affairs that
+was ultimately bound to be disastrous for the Community.
+He withdrew almost immediately on some excuse to the
+Superior's inner room, whence he intended to go downstairs
+to the Porter's Lodge until the Prior was gone. Unfortunately,
+the door of the inner room was locked, and before he
+could explain what had happened, a conversation had begun
+which he could not help overhearing, but which he dreaded
+to interrupt.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid, dear Brother George," the Reverend Father
+was saying, "I'm very much afraid that you are beginning
+to think I have outlived my usefulness as Superior of the
+Order."</p>
+
+<p>"I've never suggested that," Brother George replied
+angrily.</p>
+
+<p>"You may not have meant to give that impression, but
+certainly that is what you have succeeded in making me feel
+personally," said the Superior.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been associated with you long enough to be entitled
+to express my opinion in private."</p>
+
+<p>"In private, yes. But are you always careful only to do
+so in private? I'm not complaining. My only desire is the
+prosperity and health of the Order. Next Christmas I am
+ready to resign, and let the brethren elect another Superior-general."</p>
+
+<p>"That's talking nonsense," said the Prior. "You know as
+well as I do that nobody else except you could possibly be
+Superior. But recently I happen to have had a better opportunity
+than you to criticize our Mother House, and frankly
+I'm not satisfied with the men we have. Few of them will
+be any use to us. Birinus, Anselm, Giles, Chad, Athanasius
+if properly suppressed, Mark, these in varying degrees, have
+something in them, but look at the others! Dominic, ambitious
+and sly, Jerome, a pompous prig, Dunstan, a nincompoop,
+Raymond, a milliner, Nicholas, a&mdash;well, you know what
+I think Nicholas is, Augustine, another nincompoop, Lawrence,
+still at Sunday School, and poor Simon, a clown. I've
+had a dozen probationers through my hands, and not one of
+them was as good as what we've got. I'm afraid I'm less
+hopeful of the future than I was in Canada."</p>
+
+<p>"I notice, dear Brother George," said the Father Superior,
+"that you are prejudiced in favour of the brethren who follow
+your lead with a certain amount of enthusiasm. That is
+very natural. But I'm not so pessimistic about the others
+as you are. Perhaps you feel that I am forgetting how much
+the Order owes to your generosity in the past. Believe me, I
+have forgotten nothing. At the same time, you gave your
+money with your eyes open. You took your vows without
+being pressed. Don't you think you owe it to yourself, if
+not to the Order or to me personally, to go through with
+what you undertook? Your three vows were Chastity, Poverty,
+and Obedience."</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer from the Prior; a moment later he
+shut the door behind him, and went downstairs alone. Mark
+came into the room at once.</p>
+
+<p>"Reverend Father," he said. "I'm sorry to have to tell
+you that I overheard what you and the Reverend Brother
+were saying." He went on to explain how this had happened,
+and why he had not liked to make his presence known.</p>
+
+<p>"You thought the Reverend Brother would not bear the
+mortification with as much fortitude as myself?" the Father
+Superior suggested with a faint smile.</p>
+
+<p>It struck Mark how true this was, and he looked in astonishment
+at Father Burrowes, who had offered him the key
+to his action.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we must forget what we heard, my son," said the
+Father Superior. "Sit down, and let's finish off these
+letters."</p>
+
+<p>An hour's work was done, at the end of which the Reverend
+Father asked Mark if his had been the blank paper
+when the votes were counted in Chapter, and when Mark
+admitted that it had been, he pressed him for the reason of
+his neutrality.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure that it oughtn't to be called indecision," said
+Mark. "I was personally interested in the keeping on of
+Aldershot, because I had worked there."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why not have voted for doing so?" the Superior
+asked, in accents that were devoid of the least grudge
+against Mark for disagreeing with himself.</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to get rid of my personal opinion," Mark explained.
+"I tried to look at the question strictly from the
+standpoint of the member of a community. As such I felt
+that the Reverend Brother was wrong to run counter to his
+Superior. At the same time, if you'll forgive me for saying
+so, I felt that you were wrong to give up Aldershot. I simply
+could not arrive at a decision between the two opinions."</p>
+
+<p>"I do not blame you, my son, for your scrupulous cast of
+mind. Only beware of letting it chill your enthusiasm.
+Satan may avail himself of it one day, and attack your faith.
+Solomon was just. Our Blessed Lord, by our cowardly
+standards, was unjust. Remembering the Gadarene swine,
+the barren fig-tree, the parable of the wedding-guest without
+a garment, Martha and Mary. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>"Martha and Mary!" interrupted Mark. "Why, that
+was really the point at issue. And the ointment that might
+have been sold for the benefit of the poor. Yes, Judas would
+have voted with the Reverend Brother."</p>
+
+<p>"And Pontius Pilate would have remained neutral," added
+Father Burrowes, his blue eyes glittering with delight at the
+effect upon Mark of his words.</p>
+
+<p>But when Mark was walking back to the Abbey down the
+winding drive among the hazels, he wished that he and not
+the Reverend Father had used that illustration. However,
+useless regrets for his indecision in the matter of the priory
+at Aldershot were soon obliterated by a new cause of division,
+which was the arrival of the Reverend Andrew Hett on the
+Vigil of the Annunciation, just in time to sing first Vespers.</p>
+
+<p>It fell to Mark's lot to entertain the new chaplain that evening,
+because Brother Jerome who had become guest-master
+when Brother Anselm took his place as cellarer was in the
+infirmary. Mark was scarcely prepared for the kind of personality
+that Hett's proved to be. He had grown accustomed
+during his time at the Abbey to look down upon the protagonists
+of ecclesiastical battles, so little else did any of
+the guests who visited them want to discuss, so much awe
+was lavished upon them by Brother Raymond and Brother
+Augustine. It did not strike Mark that the fight at St.
+Agnes' might appear to the large majority of people as much
+a foolish squabble over trifles, a cherishing of the letter
+rather than the spirit of Christian worship, as the dispute
+between Mr. So-and-so and the Bishop of Somewhere-or-other
+in regard to his use of the Litany of the Saints in
+solemn procession on high days and holy days.</p>
+
+<p>Andrew Hett revived in Mark his admiration of the bigot,
+which would have been a dangerous thing to lose in one's
+early twenties. The chaplain was a young man of perhaps
+thirty-five, tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired, with a complexion
+of extreme pallor. His light-blue eyes were very red round
+the rims, and what eyebrows he possessed slanted up at a
+diabolic angle. His voice was harsh, high, and rasping as a
+guinea fowl's. When Mark brought him his supper, Hett
+asked him several questions about the Abbey time-table, and
+then said abruptly:</p>
+
+<p>"The ugliness of this place must be soul-destroying."</p>
+
+<p>Mark looked at the Guest-chamber with new eyes. There
+was such a force of assertion in Hett's tone that he could
+not contradict him, and indeed it certainly was ugly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody can live with matchboarded walls and ceilings
+and not suffer for it," Hett went on. "Why didn't you buy
+an old tithe barn and live in that? It's an insult to Almighty
+God to worship Him in such surroundings."</p>
+
+<p>"This is only a beginning," Mark pointed out.</p>
+
+<p>"A very bad beginning," Hett growled. "Such brutalizing
+ugliness would be inexcusable if you were leading an active
+life. But I gather that you claim to be contemplative here.
+I've been reading your ridiculous monthly paper <i>The Dragon</i>.
+Full of sentimental bosh about bringing back the glories of
+monasticism to England. Tintern was not built of tin. How
+can you contemplate Almighty God here? It's not possible.
+What Divine purpose is served by collecting men under hundreds
+of square feet of corrugated iron? I'm astonished at
+Charles Horner. I thought he knew better than to encourage
+this kind of abomination."</p>
+
+<p>There was only one answer to make to Hett, which was
+that the religious life of the Community did not depend upon
+any externals, least of all upon its lodging; but when Mark
+tried to frame this answer, his lips would not utter the
+words. In that moment he knew that it was time for him
+to leave Malford and prepare himself to be a priest elsewhere,
+and otherwise than by what the Rector had stigmatized as the
+pseudo-monastic life.</p>
+
+<p>Mark wondered when he had left the chaplain to his
+ferocious meditations what would have been the effect of
+that diatribe upon some of his brethren. He smiled to himself,
+as he sat over his solitary supper in the Refectory,
+to picture the various expressions he could imagine upon their
+faces when they came hotfoot from the Guest-chamber with
+the news of what manner of priest was in their midst. And
+while he was sipping his bowl of pea-soup, he looked up at
+the image of St. George and perceived that the dragon's
+expression bore a distinct resemblance to that of the Reverend
+Andrew Hett. That night it seemed to Mark, in one
+of those waking trances that occur like dreams between one
+disturbed sleep and another, that the presence of the chaplain
+was shaking the flimsy foundations of the Abbey with
+such ruthlessness that the whole structure must soon collapse.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only the wind," he murmured, with that half of his
+mind which was awake. "March is going out like a dragon."</p>
+
+<p>After Mass next day, when Mark was giving the chaplain
+his breakfast, the latter asked who kept the key of the
+tabernacle.</p>
+
+<p>"Brother Birinus, I expect. He is the sacristan."</p>
+
+<p>"It ought to have been given to me before Mass. Please
+go and ask for it," requested the chaplain.</p>
+
+<p>Mark found Brother Birinus in the Sacristy, putting away
+the white vestments in the press. When Mark gave him the
+chaplain's message, Brother Birinus told him that the Reverend
+Brother had the key.</p>
+
+<p>"What does he want the key for?" asked Brother George
+when Mark had repeated to him the chaplain's request.</p>
+
+<p>"He probably wishes to change the Host," Mark suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no need to do that. And I don't believe that
+is the reason. I believe he wants to have Benediction. He's
+not going to have Benediction here."</p>
+
+<p>Mark felt that it was not his place to argue with the
+Reverend Brother, and he merely asked him what reply he
+was to give to the chaplain.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell him that the key of the Tabernacle is kept by me
+while the Reverend Father is away, and that I regret I cannot
+give it to him."</p>
+
+<p>The priest's eyes blazed with anger when Mark returned
+without the key.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is the Reverend Brother?" he rasped.</p>
+
+<p>"Brother George."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but what is he? Apothecary, tailor, ploughboy,
+what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Brother George is the Prior."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, please tell the Prior that I should like to speak to
+him instantly."</p>
+
+<p>When Mark found Brother George he had already doffed
+his habit, and was dressed in his farmer's clothes to go working
+on the land.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll speak to Mr. Hett before Sext. Meanwhile, you can
+assure him that the key of the Tabernacle is perfectly safe.
+I wear it round my neck."</p>
+
+<p>Brother George pulled open his shirt, and showed Mark
+the golden key hanging from a cord.</p>
+
+<p>On receiving the Prior's message, the chaplain asked for
+a railway time-table.</p>
+
+<p>"I see there is a fast train at 10.30. Please order the
+trap."</p>
+
+<p>"You're not going to leave us?" Mark exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you suppose, Brother Mark, that no bishop in the
+Establishment will receive me in his diocese because I am
+accustomed to give way? I should not have asked for the
+key of the Tabernacle unless I thought that it was my duty
+to ask for it. I cannot take it from the Reverend Brother's
+neck. I will not stay here without its being given up to me.
+Please order the trap in time to catch the 10.30 train."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely you will see the Reverend Brother first," Mark
+urged. "I should have made it clear to you that he is out
+in the fields, and that all the work of the farm falls upon
+his shoulders. It cannot make any difference whether you
+have the key now or before Sext. And I'm sure the Reverend
+Brother will see your point of view when you put it
+to him."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not going to argue about the custody of God," said
+the chaplain. "I should consider such an argument blasphemy,
+and I consider the Prior's action in refusing to give
+up the key sacrilege. Please order the trap."</p>
+
+<p>"But if you sent a telegram to the Reverend Father .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Brother Dominic will know where he is .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I'm sure that
+the Reverend Father will put it right with Brother George,
+and that he will at once give you the key."</p>
+
+<p>"I was summoned here as a priest," said the chaplain. "If
+the amateur monk left in charge of this monastery does not
+understand the prerogatives of my priesthood, I am not concerned
+to teach him except directly."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, will you wait until I've found the Reverend Brother
+and told him that you intend to leave us unless he gives you
+the key?" Mark begged, in despair at the prospect of what
+the chaplain's departure would mean to a Community already
+too much divided against itself.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not one of my prerogatives to threaten the prior
+of a monastery, even if he is an amateur," said the chaplain.
+"From the moment that Brother George refuses to recognize
+my position, I cease to hold that position. Please order the
+trap."</p>
+
+<p>"You won't have to leave till half-past nine," said Mark,
+who had made up his mind to wrestle with Brother George
+on his own initiative, and if possible to persuade him to surrender
+the key to the chaplain of his own accord. With this
+object he hurried out, to find Brother George ploughing that
+stony ground by the fir-trees. He was looking ruefully at
+a broken share when Mark approached him.</p>
+
+<p>"Two since I started," he commented.</p>
+
+<p>But he was breaking more precious things than shares,
+thought Mark, if he could but understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Let the fellow go," said Brother George coldly, when
+Mark had related his interview with the chaplain.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Reverend Brother, if he goes we shall have no priest
+for Easter."</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be better off with no priest than with a fellow
+like that."</p>
+
+<p>"Reverend Brother," said Mark miserably, "I have no right
+to remonstrate with you, I know. But I must say something.
+You are making a mistake. You will break up the Community.
+I am not speaking on my own account now, because
+I have already made up my mind to leave, and get
+ordained. But the others! They're not all strong like you.
+They really are not. If they feel that they have been deprived
+of their Easter Communion by you .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and have you
+the right to deprive them? After all, Father Hett has reason
+on his side. He is entitled to keep the key of the Tabernacle.
+If he wishes to hold Benediction, you can forbid him, or at
+least you can forbid the brethren to attend. But the key of
+the Tabernacle belongs to him, if he says Mass there.
+Please forgive me for speaking like this, but I love you and
+respect you, and I cannot bear to see you put yourself in
+the wrong."</p>
+
+<p>The Prior patted Mark on the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Cheer up, Brother," he said. "You mustn't mind if I
+think that I know better than you what is good for the Community.
+I have had a longer time to learn, you must remember.
+And so you're going to leave us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that now," Mark said.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor do I," said Brother George. "I want to get on with
+my ploughing."</p>
+
+<p>Mark saw that it was as useless to argue with him as
+attempt to persuade the chaplain to stay. He turned sadly
+away, and walked back with heavy steps towards the Abbey.
+Overhead, the larks, rising and falling upon their fountains
+of song, seemed to mock the way men worshipped Almighty
+God.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX" />CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+
+<h3>SUBTRACTION</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark had not spent a more unhappy Easter since the
+days of Haverton House. He was oppressed by the
+sense of excommunication that brooded over the Abbey, and
+on the Saturday of Passion Week the versicles and responses
+of the proper Compline had a dreadful irony.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>V. O King most Blessed, govern Thy servants in the right way.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>V. By holy fasts to amend our sinful lives.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>R. O King most Blessed, govern Thy Saints in the right way.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>V. To duly keep Thy Paschal Feast.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Brother Mark," said Brother Augustine, on the morning
+of Palm Sunday, "<i>did</i> you notice that ghastly split infinitive
+in the last versicle at Compline? <i>To duly keep.</i> I can't think
+why we don't say the Office in Latin."</p>
+
+<p>Mark felt inclined to tell Brother Augustine that if nothing
+more vital than an infinitive was split during this holy season,
+the Community might have cause to congratulate itself.
+Here now was Brother Birinus throwing away as useless the
+bundle of palms that lacked the blessing of a priest, throwing
+them away like dead flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Charles Horner, who had been in town, arrived at the
+Abbey on the Tuesday, and announced that he was going to
+spend Holy Week with the Community.</p>
+
+<p>"We have no chaplain," Mark told him.</p>
+
+<p>"No chaplain!" Sir Charles exclaimed. "But I understood
+that Andrew Hett had undertaken the job while Father
+Burrowes was away."</p>
+
+<p>Mark did not think that it was his duty to enlighten Sir
+Charles upon the dispute between Brother George and the
+chaplain. However, it was not long before he found out
+what had occurred from the Prior's own lips and came
+fuming back to the Guest-chamber.</p>
+
+<p>"I consider the whole state of affairs most unsatisfactory,"
+he said. "I really thought that when Brother George took
+charge here the Abbey would be better managed."</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Sir Charles," Mark begged, "you make it very
+uncomfortable for me when you talk like that about the
+Reverend Brother before me."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I must give my opinion. I have a right to
+criticize when I am the person who is responsible for the
+Abbey's existence here. It's all very fine for Brother George
+to ask me to notify Bazely at Wivelrod that the brethren
+wish to go to their Easter duties in his church. Bazely is
+a very timid man. I've already driven him into doing more
+than he really likes, and my presence in his church doesn't
+alarm the parishioners. In fact, they rather like it. But
+they won't like to see the church full of monks on Easter
+morning. They'll be more suspicious than ever of what they
+call poor Bazely's innovations. It's not fair to administer
+such a shock to a remote country parish like Wivelrod,
+especially when they're just beginning to get used to the
+vestments I gave them. It seems to me that you've deliberately
+driven Andrew Hett away from the Abbey, and I
+don't see why poor Bazely should be made to suffer. How
+many monks are you now? Fifteen? Why, fifteen bulls in
+Wivelrod church would create less dismay!"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Charles's protest on behalf of the Vicar of Wivelrod
+was effective, for the Prior announced that after all he had
+decided that it was the duty of the Community to observe
+Easter within the Abbey gates. The Reverend Father would
+return on Easter Tuesday, and their Easter duties would be
+accomplished within the Octave. Withal, it was a gloomy
+Easter for the brethren, and when they began the first Vespers
+with the quadruple Alleluia, it seemed as if they were
+still chanting the sorrowful antiphons of Good Friday.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>My spirit is vexed within Me: and My heart within Me is
+desolate.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by: behold and see if
+there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto
+Me.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which
+I was wounded in the house of My friends.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Nor was there rejoicing in the Community when at Lauds
+of Easter Day they chanted:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>V. In Thy Resurrection, O Christ.</i><br /></span>
+<span><i>R. Let Heaven and earth rejoice, Alleluia.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nor when at Prime and Terce and Sext and None they
+chanted:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice
+and be glad in it.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>And when at the second Vespers the Brethren declared:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>V. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the Feast.</i><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span><i>R. Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and truth. Alleluia.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>scarcely could they who chanted the versicle challenge with
+their eyes those who hung down their heads when they gave
+the response.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The hour of recreation before Compline, which upon great
+Feasts was wont to be so glad, lay heavily upon the brethren
+that night, so that Mark could not bear to sit in the Cloister;
+there being no guests in the Abbey for his attention, he sat
+in the library and wrote to the Rector.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Abbey,</p>
+
+<p>Malford, Surrey.</p>
+
+<p>Easter Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Rector,</p>
+
+<p>I should have written before to wish you all a happy
+Easter, but I've been making up my mind during the last
+fortnight to leave the Order, and I did not want to write
+until my mind was made up. That feat is now achieved.
+I shall stay here until St. George's Day, and then the next
+day, which will be St. Mark's Eve, I shall come home to
+spend my birthday with you. I do not regret the year and
+six months that I have spent at Malford and Aldershot,
+because during that time, if I have decided not to be a monk,
+I am none the less determined to be a priest. I shall be 23
+this birthday, and I hope that I shall find a Bishop to ordain
+me next year and a Theological College to accept responsibility
+for my training and a beneficed priest to give me a
+title. I will give you a full account of myself when we meet
+at the end of the month; but in this letter, written in sad
+circumstances, I want to tell you that I have learnt with the
+soul what I have long spoken with the lips&mdash;the need of God.
+I expect you will tell me that I ought to have learnt that
+lesson long ago upon that Whit-Sunday morning in Meade
+Cantorum church. But I think I was granted then by God
+to desire Him with my heart. I was scarcely old enough
+to realize that I needed Him with my soul. "You're not so
+old now," I hear you say with a smile. But in a place like
+this one learns almost more than one would learn in the
+world in the time. One beholds human nature very intimately.
+I know more about my fellow-men from association
+with two or three dozen people here than I learnt at St.
+Agnes' from association with two or three hundred. This
+much at least my pseudo-monasticism has taught me.</p>
+
+<p>We have passed through a sad time lately at the Abbey,
+and I feel that for the Community sorrows are in store.
+You know from my letters that there have been divisions,
+and you know how hard I have found it to decide which
+party I ought to follow. But of course the truth is that
+from the moment one feels the inclination to side with a
+party in a community it is time to leave that community.
+Owing to an unfortunate disagreement between Brother
+George and the Reverend Andrew Hett, who came down to
+act as chaplain during the absence of the Reverend Father,
+Andrew Hett felt obliged to leave us. The consequence is
+we have had no Mass this Easter, and thus I have learned
+with my soul to need God. I cannot describe to you the
+torment of deprivation which I personally feel, a torment
+that is made worse by the consciousness that all my brethren
+will go to their cells to-night needing God and not finding
+Him, because they like myself are involved in an earthly
+quarrel, so that we are incapable of opening our hearts to
+God this night. You may say that if we were in such a
+state we should have had no right to make our Easter Communion.
+But that surely is what Our Blessed Lord can do
+for us with His Body and Blood. I have been realizing
+that all this Holy Week. I have felt as I have never felt
+before the consciousness of sinning against Him. There has
+not been an antiphon, not a versicle nor a response, that has
+not stabbed me with a consciousness of my sin against His
+Divine Love.</p>
+
+<p>"What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with
+which I was wounded in the house of My friends."</p>
+
+<p>But if on Easter eve we could have confessed our sins
+against His Love, and if this morning we could have partaken
+of Him, He would have been with us, and our hearts
+would have been fit for the presence of God. We should
+have been freed from this spirit of strife, we should have
+come together in Jesus Christ. We should have seen how
+to live "with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and truth."
+God would have revealed His Will, and we, submitting our
+Order to His Will, should have ceased to think for ourselves,
+to judge our brethren, to criticize our seniors, to
+suspect that brother of personal ambition, this brother of
+toadyism. The Community is being devoured by the Dragon
+and, unless St. George comes to the rescue of his Order on
+Thursday week, it will perish. Perhaps I have not much
+faith in St. George. He has always seemed to me an unreal,
+fairy-tale sort of a saint. I have more faith in St. Benedict
+and his Holy Rule. But I have no vocation for the contemplative
+life. I don't feel that my prayers are good enough
+to save my own soul, let alone the souls of others. I <i>must</i>
+give Jesus Christ to my fellow-men in the Blessed Sacrament.
+I long to be a priest for that service. I don't feel
+that I want by my own efforts to make people better, or to
+relieve poverty, or to thunder against sin, or to preach them
+up to and through Heaven's gates. I want to give them the
+Blessed Sacrament, because I know that nothing else will be
+the slightest use to them. I know it more positively to-night
+than I have ever known it, because as I sit here writing to
+you I am starved. God has given me the grace to understand
+why I am starved. It is my duty to bring Our Lord to
+souls who do not know why they are starved. And if after
+nearly two years of Malford this passion to bring the Sacraments
+to human beings consumes me like a fire, then I have
+not wasted my time, and I can look you in the face and ask
+for your blessing upon my determination to be a priest.</p>
+
+<p>Your ever affectionate</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Mark had written this letter, and thus put into
+words what had hitherto been a more or less nebulous intention,
+and when in addition to that he had affixed a date to
+the carrying out of his intention, he felt comparatively at ease.
+He wasted no time in letting the Father Superior know that
+he was going to leave; in fact he told him after he had confessed
+to him before making his Communion on Easter
+Thursday.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry to lose you, my dear boy," said Father Burrowes.
+"Very sorry. We are just going to open a priory
+in London, though that is a secret for the moment, please.
+I shall make the announcement at the Easter Chapter. Yes,
+some kind friends have given us a house in Soho. Splendidly
+central, which is important for our work. I had planned
+that you would be one of the brethren chosen to go there."</p>
+
+<p>"It's very kind of you, Reverend Father," said Mark.
+"But I'm sure that you understand my anxiety not to lose
+any time, now that I feel perfectly convinced that I want
+to be a priest."</p>
+
+<p>"I had my doubts about you when you first came to us.
+Let me see, it was nearly two years ago, wasn't it? How
+time flies! Yes, I had my doubts about you. But I was
+wrong. You seem to possess a real fixity of purpose. I remember
+that you told me then that you were not sure you
+wanted to be a monk. Rare candour! I could have professed
+a hundred monks, had I been willing to profess them
+within ten minutes of their first coming to see me."</p>
+
+<p>The Father Superior gave Mark his blessing and dismissed
+him. Nothing had been said about the dispute between the
+Prior and the Chaplain, and Mark began to wonder if Father
+Burrowes thought the results of it would tell more surely
+in favour of his own influence if he did not allude to it nor
+make any attempt to adjudicate upon the point at issue.
+Now that he was leaving Malford in little more than a week,
+Mark felt that he was completely relieved of the necessity
+of assisting at any conventual legislation, and he would gladly
+have absented himself from the Easter Chapter, which was
+held on the Saturday within the Octave, had not Father
+Burrowes told him that so long as he wore the habit of a
+novice of the Order he was expected to share in every side
+of the Community's life.</p>
+
+<p>"Brethren," said the Father Superior, "I have brought you
+back news that will gladden your hearts, news that will show I
+you how by the Grace of God your confidence in my judgment
+was not misplaced. Some kind friends have taken for
+us the long lease of a splendid house in Soho Square, so that
+we may have our priory in London, and resume the active
+work that was abandoned temporarily last Christmas. Not
+only have these kind friends taken for us this splendid house,
+but other kind friends have come forward to guarantee the
+working expenses up to &pound;20 a week. God is indeed good to
+us, brethren, and when I remember that next Thursday is
+the Feast of our great Patron Saint, my heart is too full for
+words. During the last three or four months there have been
+unhappy differences of opinion in our beloved Order. Do let
+me entreat you to forget all these in gratitude for God's
+bountiful mercies. Do let us, with the arrival once more of
+our patronal festival, resolve to forget our doubts and our
+hesitations, our timidity and our rashness, our suspicions
+and our jealousies. I blame myself for much that has happened,
+because I have been far away from you, dear brethren,
+in moments of great spiritual distress. But this year I hope
+by God's mercy to be with you more. I hope that you will
+never again spend such an Easter as this. I have only one
+more announcement to make, which is that I have appointed
+Brother Dominic to be Prior of St. George's Priory, Soho
+Square, and Brother Chad and Brother Dunstan to work with
+him for God and our soldiers."</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, Brother Simon, whose duty it was nowadays
+to knock with the hammer upon the doors of the cells
+and rouse the brethren from sleep with the customary salutation,
+went running from the dormitory to the Prior's cell,
+his hair standing even more on end than it usually did at
+such an hour.</p>
+
+<p>"Reverend Brother, Reverend Brother," he cried. "I've
+knocked and knocked on Brother Anselm's door, and I've
+said 'The Lord be with you' nine times and shouted 'The
+Lord be with you' twice, but there's no answer, and at last I
+opened the door, though I know it's against the Rule to open
+the door of a brother's cell, but I thought he might be dead,
+and he isn't dead, but he isn't there. He isn't there, Reverend
+Brother, and he isn't anywhere. He's nowhere, Reverend
+Brother, and shall I go and ring the fire-alarm?"</p>
+
+<p>Brother George sternly bade Brother Simon be quiet; but
+when the Brethren sat in choir to sing Lauds and Prime, they
+saw that Brother Anselm's stall was empty, and those who
+had heard Brother Simon's clamour feared that something
+terrible had happened.</p>
+
+<p>After Mass the Community was summoned to the Chapter
+room to learn from the lips of the Father Superior that
+Brother Anselm had broken his vows and left the Order.
+Brother Dunstan, who wore round his neck the nib with
+which Brother Anselm signed his profession, burst into
+tears. Brother Dominic looked down his big nose to avoid
+the glances of his brethren. If Easter Sunday had been
+gloomy, Low Sunday was gloomier still, and as for the Feast
+of St. George nobody had the courage to think what that
+would be like with such a cloud hanging over the Community.</p>
+
+<p>Mark felt that he could not stay even until the patronal
+festival. If Brother George or Brother Birinus had broken
+his vows, he could have borne it more easily, for he had not
+witnessed their profession; fond he might be of the Prior,
+but he had worked for human souls under the orders of
+Brother Anselm. He went to Father Burrowes and begged
+to leave on Monday.</p>
+
+<p>"Brother Athanasius and Brother Chad are leaving tomorrow,"
+said the Father Superior, "Yes, you may go."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Simon drove them to the station. Strange figures
+they seemed to each other in their lay clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been meaning to go for a long time," said Brother
+Athanasius, who was now Percy Wade. "And it's my belief
+that Brother George and Brother Birinus won't stay long."</p>
+
+<p>"I hoped never to go," said Brother Chad, who was now
+Cecil Masters.</p>
+
+<p>"Then why are you going?" asked the late Brother
+Athanasius. "I never do anything I don't want to do."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I shall be more help to Brother Anselm than to
+soldiers in London," said the late Brother Chad.</p>
+
+<p>Mark beamed at him.</p>
+
+<p>"That's just like you, Brother. I am so glad you're going
+to do that."</p>
+
+<p>The train came in, and they all shook hands with Brother
+Simon, who had been cheerful throughout the drive, and
+even now found great difficulty in looking serious.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem very happy, Brother Simon," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I am very happy, Brother Mark. I should say Mr.
+Mark. The Reverend Father has told me that I'm to be
+clothed as a novice on Wednesday. All last week when we
+sung, '<i>The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto
+Simon</i>,' I knew something wonderful was going to happen.
+That's what made me so anxious when Brother Anselm didn't
+answer my knock."</p>
+
+<p>The train left the station, and the three ex-novices settled
+themselves to face the world. They were all glad that
+Brother Simon at least was happy amid so much unhappiness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX" />CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NEW BISHOP OF SILCHESTER</h3>
+
+
+<p>The Rector of Wych thought that Mark's wisest plan if
+he wished to be ordained was to write and ask the
+Bishop of Silchester for an interview.</p>
+
+<p>"The Bishop of Silchester?" Mark exclaimed. "But he's
+the last bishop I should expect to help me."</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary," said the Rector, "you have lived in his
+diocese for more than five years, and if you repair to another
+bishop, he will certainly wonder why you didn't go first to the
+Bishop of Silchester."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't suppose that the Bishop of Silchester is likely
+to help me," Mark objected. "He wasn't so much enamoured
+of Rowley as all that, and I don't gather that he has
+much affection or admiration for Burrowes."</p>
+
+<p>"That's not the point; the point is that you have devoted
+yourself to the religious life, both informally and formally,
+in his diocese. You have shown that you possess some
+capacity for sticking to it, and I fancy that you will find the
+Bishop less unsympathetic than you expect."</p>
+
+<p>However, Mark was not given an opportunity to put the
+Bishop of Silchester's good-will to the test, for no sooner
+had he made up his mind to write to him than the news came
+that he was seriously ill, so seriously ill that he was not expected
+to live, which in fact turned out a true prognostication,
+for on the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the prelate died
+in his Castle of High Thorpe. He was succeeded by the
+Bishop of Warwick, much to Mark's pleasure and surprise,
+for the new Bishop was an old friend of Father Rowley and
+a High Churchman, one who might lend a kindly ear to
+Mark's ambition. Father Rowley had been in the United
+States for nearly two years, where he had been treated with
+much sympathy and where he had collected enough money
+to pay off the debt upon the new St. Agnes'. He had arrived
+home about a week before Mark left Malford, and in answer
+to Mark he wrote immediately to Dr. Oliphant, the new
+Bishop of Silchester, to enlist his interest. Early in June
+Mark received a cordial letter inviting him to visit the Bishop
+at High Thorpe.</p>
+
+<p>The promotion of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the see of Silchester
+was considered at the time to be an indication that
+the political party then in power was going mad in preparation
+for its destruction by the gods. The Press in commenting
+upon the appointment did not attempt to cast a slur
+upon the sanctity and spiritual fervour of the new Bishop,
+but it felt bound to observe that the presence of such a man
+on the episcopal bench was an indication that the party in
+power was oblivious of the existence of an enraged electorate
+already eager to hurl them out of office. At a time when
+thinking men and women were beginning to turn to the
+leaders of the National Church for a social policy, a government
+worn out by eight years of office that included a costly
+war was so little alive to the signs of the times as to select
+for promotion a prelate conspicuously identified with the
+obscurantist tactics of that small but noisy group in the
+Church of England which arrogated to itself the presumptuous
+claim to be the Catholic party. Dr. Oliphant's learning
+was indisputable; his liturgical knowledge was profound;
+his eloquence in the pulpit was not to be gainsaid; his life,
+granted his sacerdotal eccentricities, was a noble example to
+his fellow clergy. But had he shown those qualities of statesmanship,
+that capacity for moderation, which were so marked
+a feature of his predecessor's reign? Was he not identified
+with what might almost be called an unchristian agitation to
+prosecute the holy, wise, and scholarly Dean of Leicester for
+appearing to countenance an opinion that the Virgin Birth
+was not vital to the belief of a Christian? Had he not denounced
+the Reverend Albert Blundell for heresy, and
+thereby exhibited himself in active opposition to his late
+diocesan, the sagacious Bishop of Kidderminster, who had
+been compelled to express disapproval of his Suffragan's
+bigotry by appointing the Reverend Albert Blundell to be one
+of his examining chaplains?</p>
+
+<p>"We view with the gravest apprehension the appointment
+of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the historic see of Silchester,"
+said one great journal. "Such reckless disregard, such contempt
+we might almost say, for the feelings of the English
+people demonstrates that the present government has ceased
+to enjoy the confidence of the electorate. We have for Dr.
+Oliphant personally nothing but the warmest admiration.
+We do not venture for one moment to impugn his sincerity.
+We do not hesitate to affirm most solemnly our disbelief that
+he is actuated by any but the highest motives in lending his
+name to persecutions that recall the spirit of the Star Chamber.
+But in these days when the rapid and relentless march
+of Scientific Knowledge is devastating the plain of Theological
+Speculation we owe it to our readers to observe that
+the appointment of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the Bishopric of
+Silchester must be regarded as an act of intellectual cowardice.
+Not merely is Dr. Oliphant a notorious extremist in
+religious matters, one who for the sake of outworn forms
+and ceremonies is inclined to keep alive the unhappy dissensions
+that tear asunder our National Church, but he is also
+what is called a Christian Socialist of the most advanced
+type, one who by his misreading of the Gospel spreads the
+unwholesome and perilous doctrine that all men are equal.
+This is not the time nor the place to break a controversial
+lance with Dr. Oliphant. We shall content ourselves with
+registering a solemn protest against the unparagoned cynicism
+of a Conservative government which thus gambles not
+merely with its own security, but what is far more unpardonable
+with the security of the Nation and the welfare of
+the State."</p>
+
+<p>The subject of this ponderous censure received Mark in
+the same room where two and a half years ago the late Bishop
+had decided that the Third Altar in St. Agnes' Church was an
+intolerable excrescence. Nowadays the room was less
+imposing, not more imposing indeed than the room of a
+scholarly priest who had been able to collect a few books and
+buy such pieces of ancient furniture as consorted with his
+severe taste. Dr. Oliphant himself, a tall spare man, seeming
+the taller and more spare in his worn purple cassock,
+with clean-shaven hawk's face and black bushy eyebrows
+most conspicuous on account of his grey hair, stood before
+the empty summer grate, his long lean neck out-thrust, his
+arms crossed behind his back, like a gigantic and emaciated
+shadow of Napoleon. Mark felt no embarrassment in genuflecting
+to salute him; the action was spontaneous and was
+not dictated by any ritualistic indulgence. Dr. Oliphant, as
+he might have guessed from the anger with which his appointment
+had been received, was in outward semblance all
+that a prelate should be.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you want to be a priest?" the Bishop asked him
+abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"To administer the Sacraments," Mark replied without
+hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop's head and neck wagged up and down in grave
+approbation.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Rowley, as no doubt he has told you, wrote to me
+about you. And so you've been with the Order of St. George
+lately? Is it any good?"</p>
+
+<p>Mark was at a loss what to reply to this. His impulse was
+to say firmly and frankly that it was no good; but after not
+far short of two years at Malford it would be ungrateful
+and disloyal to criticize the Order, particularly to the Bishop
+of the diocese.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think it is much good yet," Mark said. He felt
+that he simply could not praise the Order without qualification.
+"But I expect that when they've learnt how to combine
+the contemplative with the active side of their religious life
+they will be splendid. At least, I hope they will."</p>
+
+<p>"What's wrong at present?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that anything's exactly wrong."</p>
+
+<p>Mark paused; but the Bishop was evidently waiting for
+him to continue, and feeling that this was perhaps the best
+way to present his own point of view about the life he had
+chosen for himself he plunged into an account of life at
+Malford.</p>
+
+<p>"Capital," said the Bishop when the narrative was done.
+"You have given me a very clear picture of the present state
+of the Order and incidentally a fairly clear picture of yourself.
+Well, I'm going to recommend you to Canon Havelock,
+the Principal of the Theological College here, and if he reports
+well of you and you can pass the Cambridge Preliminary
+Theological Examination, I will ordain you at Advent
+next year, or at any rate, if not in Advent, at Whitsuntide."</p>
+
+<p>"But isn't Silchester Theological College only for graduates?"
+Mark asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I'm going to suggest that Canon Havelock
+stretches a point in your favour. I can, if you like, write to
+the Glastonbury people, but in that case you would be out of
+my diocese where you have spent so much of your time and
+where I have no doubt you will easily find a beneficed priest
+to give you a title. Moreover, in the case of a young man
+like yourself who has been brought up from infancy upon
+Catholic teaching, I think it is advisable to give you an opportunity
+of mixing with the moderate man who wishes to take
+Holy Orders. You can lose nothing by such an association,
+and it may well happen that you will gain a great deal. Silchester
+Theological College is eminently moderate. The
+lecturers are men of real learning, and the Principal is a
+man whom it would be impertinent for me to praise for his
+devout and Christian life."</p>
+
+<p>"I hardly know how to thank you, my lord," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you not, my son?" said the Bishop with a smile. Then
+his head and neck wagged up and down. "Thank me by the
+life you lead as a priest."</p>
+
+<p>"I will try, my lord," Mark promised.</p>
+
+<p>"Of that I am sure. By the way, didn't you come across a
+priest at St. Agnes' Mission House called Mousley?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh rather, I remember him well."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be glad to hear that he has never relapsed since I
+sent him to Rowley. In fact only last week I had the satisfaction
+of recommending him to a friend of mine who had a
+living in his gift."</p>
+
+<p>Mark spent the three months before he went to Silchester
+at the Rectory where he worked hard at Latin and Greek and
+the history of the Church. At the end of August he entered
+Silchester Theological College.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI" />CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+
+<h3>SILCHESTER THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>The theological students of Silchester were housed in a
+red-brick alley of detached Georgian houses, both ends
+of which were closed to traffic by double gates of beautifully
+wrought iron. This alley known as Vicar's Walk had formerly
+been inhabited by the lay vicars of the Cathedral,
+whose music was now performed by minor canons.</p>
+
+<p>There were four little houses on either side of the broad
+pavement, the crevices in which were gay with small rock
+plants, so infrequent were the footsteps that passed over
+them. Each house consisted of four rooms and each room
+held one student. Vicar's Walk led directly into the Close,
+a large green space surrounded by the houses of dignitaries,
+from a quiet road lined with elms, which skirted the wall of
+the Deanery garden and after several twists and turns
+among the shadows of great Gothic walls found its way
+downhill into the narrow streets of the small city. One of
+the houses in the Close had been handed over to the Theological
+College, the Principal of which usually occupied a
+Canon's stall in the Cathedral. Here were the lecture-rooms,
+and here lived Canon Havelock the Principal, Mr. Drakeford
+the Vice-Principal, Mr. Brewis the Chaplain, and Mr. Moore
+and Mr. Waters the Lecturers.</p>
+
+<p>There did not seem to be many arduous rules. Probably
+the most ascetic was one that forbade gentlemen to smoke
+in the streets of Silchester. There was no early Mass except
+on Saints' days at eight; but gentlemen were expected, unless
+prevented by reasonable cause, to attend Matins in the Cathedral
+before breakfast and Evensong in the College Oratory
+at seven. A mutilated Compline was delivered at ten, after
+which gentlemen were requested to retire immediately to their
+rooms. Academic Dress was to be worn at lectures, and
+Mark wondered what costume would be designed for him.
+The lectures took place every morning between nine and
+one, and every afternoon between five and seven. The Principal
+lectured on Dogmatic Theology and Old Testament history;
+the Vice-Principal on the Old and New Testament set
+books; the Chaplain on Christian worship and Church history;
+Mr. Moore on Pastoralia and Old Testament Theology;
+and Mr. Waters on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.</p>
+
+<p>As against the prevailing Gothic of the mighty Cathedral
+Vicar's Walk stood out with a simple and fragrant charm of
+its own, so against the prevailing Gothic of Mark's religious
+experience life at the Theological College remained in his
+memory as an unvexed interlude during which flesh and spirit
+never sought to trouble each other. Perhaps if Mark had not
+been educated at Haverton House, had not experienced conversion,
+had not spent those years at Chatsea and Malford,
+but like his fellow students had gone decorously from public
+school to University and still more decorously from University
+to Theological College, he might with his temperament
+have wondered if this red-brick alley closed to traffic at
+either end by beautifully wrought iron gates was the best
+place to prepare a man for the professional service of Jesus
+Christ.</p>
+
+<p>Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where
+to the sound of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon
+the strife between Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient
+Grace, operating Grace, co-operating Grace and the <i>donum
+perseverantiae</i> all seemed to depend for their importance so
+much more upon a good memory than upon the inscrutable
+favours of Almighty God. Even the Confessions of St.
+Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of
+Africa upon the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched
+upon. Here in this tranquil room St. Augustine lived in
+quotations from his controversial works, or in discussions
+whether he had not wrongly translated &#7952;&#966;&#8125; &#8183; &#960;&#7937;&#957;&#964;&#949;&#987; &#7970;&#956;&#945;&#961;&#964;&#959;&#965;
+in the Epistle to the Romans by <i>in quo omnes peccaverunt</i>
+instead of like the Pelagians by <i>propter quod omnes peccaverunt</i>.
+The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian
+Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in
+Mark's brain; but they only resounded at all, because he
+knew that without being able to display some ability to convey
+the impression that he understood the Thirty-Nine
+Articles he should never be ordained. Mark wondered what
+Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken
+in adultery had been brought into the lecture-room by the
+beadle. Yet such a supposition was really beside the point,
+he thought penitently. After all, human beings would soon
+be degraded to wax-works if they could be lectured upon
+individually in this tranquil and sunny room to the sound of
+rooks cawing in the elms beyond the Deanery garden.</p>
+
+<p>Mark made no intimate friendships among his fellows.
+Perhaps the moderation of their views chilled him into an
+exceptional reserve, or perhaps they were an unusually dull
+company that year. Of the thirty-one students, eighteen were
+from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the thirty-first
+from Durham. Even he was looked at with a good deal of
+suspicion. As for Mark, nothing less than God's prevenient
+grace could explain his presence at Silchester. Naturally, inasmuch
+as they were going to be clergymen, the greatest
+charity, the sweetest toleration was shown to Mark's unfortunate
+lack of advantages; but he was never unaware that
+intercourse with him involved his companions in an effort, a
+distinct, a would-be Christlike effort to make the best of
+him. It was the same kind of effort they would soon be
+making when as Deacons they sought for the sick, poor, and
+impotent people of the Parish. Mark might have expected
+to find among them one or two of whom it might be prophesied
+that they would go far. But he was unlucky. All the
+brilliant young candidates for Ordination must have betaken
+themselves to Cuddesdon or Wells or Lichfield that year.</p>
+
+<p>Of the eighteen graduates from Oxford, half took their
+religion as a hot bath, the other half as a cold one. Nine
+resembled the pale young curates of domestic legend, nine
+the muscular Christian that is for some reason attributed to
+the example of Charles Kingsley. Of the twelve graduates
+from Cambridge, six treated religion as a cricket match
+played before the man in the street with God as umpire, six
+regarded it as a respectable livelihood for young men with
+normal brains, social connexions, and weak digestions. The
+young man from Durham looked upon religion as a more
+than respectable livelihood for one who had plenty of brains,
+an excellent digestion, and no social connexions whatever.</p>
+
+<p>Mark wondered if the Bishop of Silchester's design in placing
+him amid such surroundings was to cure him for ever
+of moderation. As was his custom when he was puzzled, he
+wrote to the Rector.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Theological College,</p>
+
+<p>Silchester.</p>
+
+<p>All Souls, '03.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Rector,</p>
+
+<p>My first impressions have not undergone much change.
+The young men are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold
+is the gold of Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles
+a mild phosphorescence, a dim luminousness as of a bedside
+match-tray in the dark, in their eyes is when they hear of
+somebody's what they call conspicuous moderation. I suppose
+every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his sponge-bag
+or an archbishop's crosier among his golf-clubs. But in this
+lot I simply cannot perceive even an embryonic archdeacon.
+I rather expected when I came here that I should be up
+against men of brains and culture. I was looking forward
+to being trampled on by ruthless logicians. I hoped that
+latitudinarian opinions were going to make my flesh creep
+and my hair stand on end. But nothing of the kind. I've
+always got rather angry when I've read caricatures of
+curates in books with jokes about goloshes and bath-buns.
+Yet honestly, half my fellows might easily serve as models
+to any literary cheapjack of the moment. I'm willing to
+admit that probably most of them will develop under the
+pressure of life, but a few are bound to remain what they
+are. I know we get some eccentrics and hotheads and a
+few sensual knaves among the Catholic clergy, but we do
+not get these an&aelig;mic creatures. I feel that before I came
+here I knew nothing about the Church of England. I've
+been thrown all my life with people who had rich ideas and
+violent beliefs and passionate sympathies and deplorable
+hatreds, so that when I come into contact with what I am
+bound to accept as the typical English parson in the making
+I am really appalled.</p>
+
+<p>I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told
+me to come here. Did he really think that the spectacle of
+moderation in the moulding was good for me? Did he fancy
+that I was a young zealot who required putting in his place?
+Or did he more subtly realize from the account I gave him
+of Malford that I was in danger of becoming moderate,
+even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even stone-cold? Did
+he grasp that I must owe something to party as well as mankind,
+if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind?
+But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to
+his lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal
+eye, than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after
+all, he merely saw in me a young man who had missed the
+advantages of Oxford, etc., and wished out of regard for
+my future to provide me with the best substitute.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, please don't think that I live in a constant state
+of criticism with a correspondingly dangerous increase of
+self-esteem. I really am working hard. I sometimes wonder
+if the preparation of a "good" theological college is the best
+preparation for the priesthood. But so long as bishops
+demand the knowledge they do, it is obvious that this form
+of preparation will continue. There again though, I daresay
+if I imagined myself an inspired pianist I should grumble at
+the amount of scales I was set to practice. I'm not, once I've
+written down or talked out some of my folly, so very foolish
+at bottom.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond a slight inclination to flirt with the opinions of
+most of the great heresiarchs in turn, but only with each one
+until the next comes along, I'm not having any intellectual
+adventures. One of the excitements I had imagined beforehand
+was wrestling with Doubt. But I have no wrestles.
+Shall I always be spared?</p>
+
+<p>Your ever affectionate,</p>
+
+<p>Mark.</p></div>
+
+<p>Gradually, as the months went by, either because the
+students became more mellow in such surroundings or because
+he himself was achieving a wider tolerance, Mark lost
+much of his capacity for criticism and learned to recognize
+in his fellows a simple goodness and sincerity of purpose
+that almost frightened him when he thought of that great
+world outside, in the confusion and complexity of which
+they had pledged themselves to lead souls up to God. He felt
+how much they missed by not relying rather upon the Sacraments
+than upon personal holiness and the upright conduct
+of the individual. They were obsessed with the need of
+setting a good example and of being able from the pulpit
+to direct the wandering lamb to the Good Shepherd. Mark
+scarcely ever argued about his point of view, because he was
+sure that perception of what the Sacraments could do for
+human nature must be given by the grace of God, and that
+the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not
+avail in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had
+not dawned in a swift and comprehensive inspiration of his
+inner life. Sometimes indeed Mark would defend himself
+from attack, as when it was suggested that his reliance upon
+the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by
+Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion
+was prolonged by mechanical aids to worship.</p>
+
+<p>"But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to
+your idolatry of the outward form," he would maintain.</p>
+
+<p>"What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a
+congregation of a good sermon?" they protested.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't claim that a preacher might not bring the whole
+of his congregation to the feet of God," Mark allowed. "But
+I must have less faith in human nature than you have, for
+I cannot believe that any preacher could exercise a permanent
+effect without the Sacraments. You all know the person who
+says that the sound of an organ gives him holy thoughts,
+makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes? I've no doubt
+that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind
+of sensation Sunday after Sunday. But sooner or later they
+will be worshipping the outward form&mdash;that is to say the
+words that issue from the preacher's mouth and produce
+those internal moral rumblings in the pit of the soul which
+other listeners get from the diapason. Have your organs,
+have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but
+don't put them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament.
+The value of that is absolute, and I refuse to consider It
+from the point of view of pragmatic philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation
+upon their argument; what they desired to avoid
+was the substitution of the Blessed Sacrament for the Person
+of the Divine Saviour.</p>
+
+<p>"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with
+the whole of my intellectual, moral, and emotional self that
+the Blessed Sacrament <i>is</i> our Divine Saviour. I maintain
+that only through the Blessed Sacrament can we hope to form
+within our own minds the slightest idea of the Person of the
+Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present
+fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I
+am at the Altar I shall actually give Him to those who will
+take Him. I shall know that I am doing as much for the
+lowest savage as for the finest product of civilization. All
+are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains divided
+into classes. You may rent the best pew from which to see
+and hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which
+to kneel at your Communion."</p>
+
+<p>Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too
+Silchester exerted a mellowing influence, and he gained from
+his sojourn there much of what he might have carried away
+from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that June day
+when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College
+cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian
+who wished to be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps
+soon after Mark met him.</p>
+
+<p>The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve;
+ancient clocks sounded the hour with strikes rusty from
+long service of time; rooks and white fantail-pigeons spoke
+with the slow voice of creatures that are lazily content with
+the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy morrow.
+In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers,
+themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed
+slowly across the green Close to their dutiful worship. In
+Winter they battled with the wind like the birds in the sky.
+In Autumn there was a sound of leaves along the alleys and
+in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were daisies in the
+Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the
+grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's
+tail of Japanese quince.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the
+past in Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was
+worth while except at the end of living to have one's effigy
+in stone upon the walls of the Cathedral, and to rest there
+for ever with viewless eyes and cold prayerful hands, oneself
+in harmony at last with all that had gone before.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet this peace is the peace of God," he told himself.
+"And I who am privileged for a little time to share in it must
+carry away with me enough to make a treasure of peace in
+my own heart, so that I can give from that treasure to those
+who have never known peace."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep
+your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God,
+and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of
+God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be
+amongst you and remain with you always.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>When Mark heard these words sound from the altar far
+away in the golden glooms of the Cathedral, it seemed to him
+that the building bowed like a mighty couchant beast and
+fell asleep in the security of God's presence.</p>
+
+<p>After Mark had been a year at the Theological College he
+received a letter from the Bishop:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>High Thorpe Castle.</p>
+
+<p>Sept. 21, '04.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Lidderdale,</p>
+
+<p>I have heard from Canon Havelock that he considers you
+are ready to be ordained at Advent, having satisfactorily
+passed the Cambridge Preliminary Theological Examination.
+If therefore you succeed in passing my examination
+early in November, I am willing to ordain you on December
+18. It will be necessary of course for you to obtain a title,
+and I have just heard from Mr. Shuter, the Vicar of St.
+Luke's, Galton, that he is anxious to make arrangements for
+a curate. You had better make an appointment, and if I
+hear favourably from him I will licence you for his church.
+It has always been the rule in this diocese that non-graduate
+candidates for Holy Orders should spend at least two years
+over their theological studies, but I am not disposed to
+enforce this rule in your case.</p>
+
+<p>Yours very truly,</p>
+
+<p>Aylmer Silton.</p></div>
+
+<p>This expression of fatherly interest made Mark anxious
+to show his appreciation of it, and whatever he had thought
+of St. Luke's, Galton, or of its incumbent he would have
+done his best to secure the title merely to please the Bishop.
+Moreover, his money was coming to an end, and another
+year at the Theological College would have compelled him to
+borrow from Mr. Ogilvie, a step which he was most anxious
+to avoid. He found that Galton, which he remembered from
+the days when he had sent Cyril Pomeroy there to be met
+by Dorward, was a small county town of some eight or nine
+thousand inhabitants and that St. Luke's was a new church
+which had originally been a chapel of ease to the parish
+church, but which had acquired with the growth of a poor
+population on the outskirts of the town an independent
+parochial status of its own. The Reverend Arnold Shuter,
+who was the first vicar, was at first glance just a nervous
+bearded man, though Mark soon discovered that he possessed
+a great deal of spiritual force. He was a widower and lived
+in the care of a housekeeper who regarded religion as the
+curse of good cooking. Latterly he had suffered from
+acute neurasthenia, and three or four of his wealthier
+parishioners&mdash;they were only relatively wealthy&mdash;had clubbed
+together to guarantee the stipend of a curate. Mark was
+to live at the Vicarage, a detached villa, with pointed windows
+and a front door like a lychgate, which gave the impression
+of having been built with what material was left
+over from building the church.</p>
+
+<p>"You may think that there is not much to do in Galton,"
+said Mr. Shuter when he and Mark were sitting in his study
+after a round of the parish.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope I didn't suggest that," Mark said quickly.</p>
+
+<p>The Vicar tugged nervously at his beard and blinked at
+his prospective curate from pale blue eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem so full of life and energy," he went on, half
+to himself, as though he were wondering if the company of
+this tall, bright-eyed, hatchet-faced young man might not
+prove too bracing for his worn-out nerves.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed.
+"After dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I
+hadn't grown rather too much into a type of that sedate and
+sleepy city."</p>
+
+<p>"But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We
+have the hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried
+to run a mission for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you
+know. And then there's Oaktown."</p>
+
+<p>"Oaktown?" Mark echoed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. A queer collection of people who have settled on a
+derelict farm that was bought up and sold in small plots by
+a land-speculator. They'll give plenty of scope for your
+activity. By the way, I hope you're not too extreme. We
+have to go very slowly here. I manage an early Eucharist
+every Sunday and Thursday, and of course on Saints' days;
+but the attendance is not good. We have vestments during
+the week, but not at the mid-day Celebration."</p>
+
+<p>Mark had not intended to attach himself to what he considered
+a too indefinite Catholicism; but inasmuch as the
+Bishop had found him this job he made up his mind to give
+to it at any rate his deacon's year and his first year as a
+priest.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been brought up in the vanguard of the Movement,"
+he admitted. "But you can rely on me, sir, to be loyal to
+your point of view, even if I disagreed with it. I can't
+pretend to believe much in moderation; but I should always
+be your curate before anything else, and I hope very much
+indeed that you will offer me the title."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll find me dull company," Mr. Shuter sighed. "My
+health has gone all to pieces this last year."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall have a good deal of reading to do for my priest's
+examination," Mark reminded him. "I shall try not to
+bother you."</p>
+
+<p>The result of Mark's visit to Galton was that amongst the
+various testimonials and papers he forwarded two months
+later to the Bishop's Registrar was the following:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>To the Right Reverend Aylmer, Lord Bishop of
+Silchester.</p>
+
+<p>I, Arnold Shuter, Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, in the
+County of Southampton, and your Lordship's Diocese of
+Silchester, do hereby nominate Mark Lidderdale, to perform
+the office of Assistant Curate in my Church of St.
+Luke aforesaid; and do promise to allow him the yearly
+stipend of &pound;120 to be paid by equal quarterly instalments;
+And I do hereby state to your Lordship that the said Mark
+Lidderdale intends to reside in the said Parish in my
+Vicarage; and that the said Mark Lidderdale does not intend
+to serve any other Parish as Incumbent or Curate.</p>
+
+<p>Witness my hand this fourteenth day of November; in
+the year of our Lord, 1904.</p>
+
+<p>Arnold Shuter,</p>
+
+<p>St. Luke's Vicarage,</p>
+
+<p>Galton,</p>
+
+<p>Hants.</p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>I, Arnold Shuter, Incumbent of St. Luke's, Galton, in the
+County of Southampton, bon&acirc; fide undertake to pay Mark
+Lidderdale, of the Rectory, Wych-on-the-Wold, in the
+County of Oxford, the annual sum of one hundred and
+twenty pounds as a stipend for his services as Curate, and
+I, Mark Lidderdale, bon&acirc; fide intend to receive the whole
+of the said stipend. And each of us, Arnold Shuter and
+Mark Lidderdale, declare that no abatement is to be made
+out of the said stipend in respect of rent or consideration
+for the use of the Glebe House; and that I, Arnold Shuter,
+undertake to pay the same, and I, Mark Lidderdale, intend
+to receive the same, without any deduction or abatement
+whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>Arnold Shuter,</p>
+
+<p>Mark Lidderdale.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXII" id="CHAPTER_XXXII" />CHAPTER XXXII</h2>
+
+<h3>EMBER DAYS</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mark, having been notified that he had been successful
+in passing the Bishop's examination for Deacons, was
+summoned to High Thorpe on Thursday. He travelled down
+with the other candidates from Silchester on an iron-grey
+afternoon that threatened snow from the louring North, and
+in the atmosphere of High Thorpe under the rule of Dr.
+Oliphant he found more of the spirit of preparation than he
+would have been likely to find in any other diocese at this
+date. So many of the preliminaries to Ordination had consisted
+of filling up forms, signing documents, and answering
+the questions of the Examining Chaplain that Mark, when
+he was now verily on the threshold of his new life, reproached
+himself with having allowed incidental details and
+petty arrangements to make him for a while oblivious of the
+overwhelming fact of his having been accepted for the service
+of God. Luckily at High Thorpe he was granted a day to
+confront his soul before being harassed again on Ember
+Saturday with further legal formalities and signing of documents.
+He was able to spend the whole of Ember Friday in
+prayer and meditation, in beseeching God to grant him grace
+to serve Him worthily, strength to fulfil his vows, and that
+great <i>donum perseveranti&aelig;</i> to endure faithful unto death.</p>
+
+<p>"Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," Mark
+remembered in the damasked twilight of the Bishop's Chapel,
+where he was kneeling. "Let me keep those words in my
+heart. Not everyone," he repeated aloud. Then perversely
+as always come volatile and impertinent thoughts when the
+mind is concentrated on lofty aspirations Mark began to
+wonder if he had quoted the text correctly. He began to be
+almost sure that he had not, and on that to torment his brain
+in trying to recall what was the exact wording of the text
+he desired to impress upon his heart. "Not everyone that
+saith unto me, Lord, Lord," he repeated once more aloud.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the tall figure of the Bishop passed by.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want me, my son?" he asked kindly.</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to make my confession, reverend father in
+God," said Mark.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop beckoned him into the little sacristy, and putting
+on rochet and purple stole he sat down to hear his
+penitent.</p>
+
+<p>Mark had few sins of which to accuse himself since he
+last went to his duties a month ago. However, he did have
+upon his conscience what he felt was a breach of the Third
+Commandment in that he had allowed himself to obscure
+the mighty fact of his approaching ordination by attaching
+too much importance to and fussing too much about the preliminary
+formalities.</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop did not seem to think that Mark's soul was in
+grave peril on that account, and he took the opportunity to
+warn Mark against an over-scrupulousness that might lead
+him in his confidence to allow sin to enter into his soul by
+some unguarded portal which he supposed firmly and for
+ever secure.</p>
+
+<p>"That is always the danger of a temperament like yours?"
+he mused. "By all means keep your eyes on the high ground
+ahead of you; but do not forget that the more intently you
+look up, the more liable you are to slip on some unnoticed
+slippery stone in your path. If you abandoned yourself to
+the formalities that are a necessary preliminary to Ordination,
+you did wisely. Our Blessed Lord usually gave practical
+advice, and some of His miracles like the turning of
+water into wine at Cana were reproofs to carelessness in
+matters of detail. It was only when people worshipped utility
+unduly that He went to the other extreme as in His rebuke to
+Judas over the cruse of ointment."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop raised his head and gave Mark absolution.
+When they came out of the sacristy he invited him to come
+up to his library and have a talk.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad that you are going to Galton," he said, wagging
+his long neck over a crumpet. "I think you'll find your
+experience in such a parish extraordinarily useful at the
+beginning of your career. So many young men have an idea
+that the only way to serve God is to go immediately to a
+slum. You'll be much more discouraged at Galton than you
+can imagine. You'll learn there more of the difficulties of a
+clergyman's life in a year than you could learn in London in
+a lifetime. Rowley, as no doubt you've heard, has just
+accepted a slum parish in Shoreditch. Well, he wrote to me
+the other day and suggested that you should go to him. But
+I dissented. You'll have an opportunity at Galton to rely
+upon yourself. You'll begin in the ruck. You'll be one of
+many who struggle year in year out with an ordinary parish.
+There won't be any paragraphs about St. Luke's in the
+Church papers. There won't be any enthusiastic pilgrims.
+There'll be nothing but the thought of our Blessed Lord to
+keep you struggling on, only that, only our Blessed Lord
+Jesus Christ."</p>
+
+<p>The Bishop's head wagged slowly to and fro in the silence
+that succeeded his words, and Mark pondering them in that
+silence felt no longer that he was saying "Lord, Lord," but
+that he had been called to follow and that he was ready without
+hesitation to follow Him whithersoever He should lead.</p>
+
+<p>The quiet Ember Friday came to an end, and on the Saturday
+there were more formalities, of which Mark dreaded
+most the taking of the oath before the Registrar. He had
+managed with the help of subtle High Church divines to persuade
+himself that he could swear he assented to the Thirty-nine
+Articles without perjury. Nevertheless he wished that
+he was not bound to take that oath, and he was glad that
+the sense in which the Thirty-nine Articles were to be accepted
+was left to the discretion of him who took the oath.
+Of one thing Mark was positive. He was assuredly not
+assenting to those Thirty-nine Articles that their compilers
+intended when they framed them. However, when it came
+to it, Mark affirmed:</p>
+
+<p>"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy
+Order of Deacons, do solemnly make the following declaration:&mdash;I
+assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and
+to the Book of Common Prayer, and the ordering of Bishops,
+Priests, and Deacons. I believe the doctrine of the Church
+of England, as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the Word
+of God; and in Public Prayer and Administration of the
+Sacraments I will use the Form in the said Book prescribed,
+and none other, except so far as shall be ordered by lawful
+authority.</p>
+
+<p>"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy
+Order of Deacons, do swear that I will be faithful and bear
+true Allegiance to His Majesty King Edward, his heirs and
+successors according to law.</p>
+
+<p>"So help me God."</p>
+
+<p>"But the strange thing is," Mark said to one of his fellow
+candidates, "nobody asks us to take the oath of allegiance to
+God."</p>
+
+<p>"We do that when we're baptized," said the other, a
+serious young man who feared that Mark was being flippant.</p>
+
+<p>"Personally," Mark concluded, "I think the solemn profession
+of a monk speaks more directly to the soul."</p>
+
+<p>And this was the feeling that Mark had throughout the
+Ordination of the Deacons notwithstanding that the Bishop
+of Silchester in cope and mitre was an awe-inspiring figure
+in his own Chapel. But when Mark heard him say:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a
+Priest in the Church of God</i>,</p></div>
+
+<p>he was caught up to the Seventh Heaven and prayed that,
+when a year hence he should be kneeling thus to hear those
+words uttered to him and to feel upon his head those hands
+imposed, he should receive the Holy Ghost more worthily
+than lately he had received authority to execute the office of
+a Deacon in the Church of God.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly at the back of the chapel Mark caught sight of
+Miriam, who must have travelled down from Oxfordshire
+last night to be present at his Ordination. His mind went
+back to that Whit-Sunday in Meade Cantorum nearly ten
+years ago. Miriam's plume of grey hair was no longer
+visible, for all her hair was grey nowadays; but her face
+had scarcely altered, and she sat there at this moment with
+that same expression of austere sweetness which had been
+shed like a benison upon Mark's dreary boyhood. How dear
+of Miriam to grace his Ordination, and if only Esther too
+could have been with him! He knelt down to thank God
+humbly for His mercies, and of those mercies not least for
+the Ogilvies' influence upon his life.</p>
+
+<p>Mark could not find Miriam when they came out from the
+chapel. She must have hurried away to catch some slow
+Sunday train that would get her back to Wych-on-the-Wold
+to-night. She could not have known that he had seen her,
+and when he arrived at the Rectory to-morrow as glossy as
+a beetle in his new clerical attire, Miriam would listen to his
+account of the Ordination, and only when he had finished
+would she murmur how she had been present all the time.</p>
+
+<p>And now there was still the oath of canonical obedience
+to take before lunch; but luckily that was short. Mark was
+hungry, since unlike most of the candidates he had not eaten
+an enormous breakfast that morning.</p>
+
+<p>Snow was falling outside when the young priests and
+deacons in their new frock coats sat down to lunch; and
+when they put on their sleek silk hats and hurried away to
+catch the afternoon train back to Silchester, it was still
+falling.</p>
+
+<p>"Even nature is putting on a surplice in our honour," Mark
+laughed to one of his companions, who not feeling quite sure
+whether Mark was being poetical or profane, decided that he
+was being flippant, and looked suitably grieved.</p>
+
+<p>It was dusk of that short winter day when Mark reached
+Silchester, and wandered back in a dream toward Vicar's
+Walk. Usually on Sunday evenings the streets of the city
+pattered with numerous footsteps; but to-night the snow
+deadened every sound, and the peace of God had gone out
+from the Cathedral to shed itself upon the city.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be Christmas Day in a week," Mark thought,
+listening to the Sabbath bells muffled by the soft snow-laden
+air. For the first time it occurred to him that he should probably
+have to preach next Sunday evening.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>That should be his text, Mark decided; and, passing from
+the snowy streets, he sat thinking in the golden glooms of
+the Cathedral about his sermon.</p>
+
+
+<p>EXPLICIT PR&AElig;LUDIUM</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton MacKenzie
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton MacKenzie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Altar Steps
+
+Author: Compton MacKenzie
+
+Release Date: January 20, 2005 [EBook #14739]
+[Last updated: April 3, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR STEPS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Steven desJardins and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+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 L200 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 Caesar
+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 Dore, 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
+encyclopaedia. 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 L800 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 L500, 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 spending a certain amount of money on him. Once more Mark
+opened his mouth to repay his debt by offering Uncle Henry Eternal Life.
+But Uncle Henry fancied himself already in possession of Eternal Life.
+He definitely labelled himself Evangelical. And again Mark prepared one
+of his unanswerable questions.
+
+"Mark," said Mr. Lidderdale. "If you can't keep from yawning you'd
+better get off to bed. Don't forget school begins to-morrow, and you
+must make the most of your last term."
+
+Mark abandoned for ever the task of converting Uncle Henry, and pondered
+his chance of doing something with Aunt Helen. There instead of
+exsiccation he was confronted by a dreadful humidity, an infertile ooze
+that seemed almost less susceptible to cultivation than the other.
+
+"And I really don't owe _her_ anything," he thought. "Besides, it isn't
+that I want to save people from damnation. I want people to be happy.
+And it isn't quite that even. I want them to understand how happy I am.
+I want people to feel fond of their pillows when they turn over to go to
+sleep, because next morning is going to be what? Well, sort of
+exciting."
+
+Mark suddenly imagined how splendid it would be to give some of his
+happiness to Esther Ogilvie; but a moment later he decided that it would
+be rather cheek, and he abandoned the idea of converting Esther Ogilvie.
+He fell back on wishing again that Mr. Spaull had not died; in him he
+really would have had an ideal subject.
+
+In the end Mark fixed upon a boy of his own age, one of the many sons of
+a Papuan missionary called Pomeroy who was glad to have found in Mr.
+Lidderdale a cheap and evangelical schoolmaster. Cyril Pomeroy was a
+blushful, girlish youth, clever at the routine of school work, but in
+other ways so much undeveloped as to give an impression of stupidity.
+The notion of pointing out to him the beauty and utility of the Catholic
+religion would probably never have occurred to Mark if the boy himself
+had not approached him with a direct complaint of the dreariness of home
+life. Mark had never had any intimate friends at Haverton House; there
+was something in its atmosphere that was hostile to intimacy. Cyril
+Pomeroy appealed to that idea of romantic protection which is the common
+appendage of adolescence, and is the cause of half the extravagant
+affection at which maturity is wont to laugh. In the company of Cyril,
+Mark felt ineffably old than which upon the threshold of sixteen there
+is no sensation more grateful; and while the intercourse flattered his
+own sense of superiority he did feel that he had much to offer his
+friend. Mark regarded Cyril's case as curable if the right treatment
+were followed, and every evening after school during the veiled summer
+of a fine October he paced the Slowbridge streets with his willing
+proselyte, debating the gravest issues of religious practice, the
+subtlest varieties of theological opinion. He also lent Cyril suitable
+books, and finally he demanded from him as a double tribute to piety and
+friendship that he should prove his metal by going to Confession.
+Cyril, who was incapable of refusing whatever Mark demanded, bicycled
+timorously behind him to Meade Cantorum one Saturday afternoon, where he
+gulped out the table of his sins to Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had fetched
+from the Vicarage with the urgency of one who fetches a midwife. Nor was
+he at all abashed when Mr. Ogilvie was angry for not having been told
+that Cyril's father would have disapproved of his son's confession. He
+argued that the priest was applying social standards to religious
+principles, and in the end he enjoyed the triumph of hearing Mr. Ogilvie
+admit that perhaps he was right.
+
+"I know I'm right. Come on, Cyril. You'd better get back home now. Oh,
+and I say, Mr. Ogilvie, can I borrow for Cyril some of the books you
+lent me?"
+
+The priest was amused that Mark did not ask him to lend the books to his
+friend, but to himself. However, when he found that the neophyte seemed
+to flourish under Mark's assiduous priming, and that the fundamental
+weakness of his character was likely to be strengthened by what, though
+it was at present nothing more than an interest in religion, might later
+on develop into a profound conviction of the truths of Christianity,
+Ogilvie overlooked his scruples about deceiving parents and encouraged
+the boy as much as he could.
+
+"But I hope your manipulation of the plastic Cyril isn't going to turn
+_you_ into too much of a ritualist," he said to Mark. "It's splendid of
+course that you should have an opportunity so young of proving your
+ability to get round people in the right way. But let it be the right
+way, old man. At the beginning you were full of the happiness, the
+secret of which you burnt to impart to others. That happiness was the
+revelation of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as He dwells in all
+Christian souls. I am sure that the eloquent exposition I lately
+overheard of the propriety of fiddle-backed chasubles and the
+impropriety of Gothic ones doesn't mean that you are in any real danger
+of supposing chasubles to be anything more important relatively than,
+say, the uniform of a soldier compared with his valour and obedience
+and selflessness. Now don't overwhelm me for a minute or two. I haven't
+finished what I want to say. I wasn't speaking sarcastically when I said
+that, and I wasn't criticizing you. But you are not Cyril. By God's
+grace you have been kept from the temptations of the flesh. Yes, I know
+the subject is distasteful to you. But you are old enough to understand
+that your fastidiousness, if it isn't to be priggish, must be
+safeguarded by your humility. I didn't mean to sandwich a sermon to you
+between my remarks on Cyril, but your disdainful upper lip compelled
+that testimony. Let us leave you and your virtues alone. Cyril is weak.
+He's the weak pink type that may fall to women or drink or anything in
+fact where an opportunity is given him of being influenced by a stronger
+character than his own. At the moment he's being influenced by you to go
+to Confession, and say his rosary, and hear Mass, and enjoy all the
+other treats that our holy religion gives us. In addition to that he's
+enjoying them like the proverbial stolen fruit. You were very severe
+with me when I demurred at hearing his confession without authority from
+his father; but I don't like stolen fruit, and I'm not sure even now if
+I was right in yielding on that point. I shouldn't have yielded if I
+hadn't felt that Cyril might be hurt in the future by my scruples. Now
+look here, Mark, you've got to see that I don't regret my surrender. If
+that youth doesn't get from religion what I hope and pray he will get
+. . . but let that point alone. My scruples are my own affair. Your
+convictions are your own affair. But Cyril is our joint affair. He's
+your convert, but he's my penitent; and Mark, don't overdecorate your
+building until you're sure the foundations are well and truly laid."
+
+Mark was never given an opportunity of proving the excellence of his
+methods by the excellence of Cyril's life, because on the morning after
+this conversation, which took place one wet Sunday evening in Advent he
+was sent for by his uncle, who demanded to know the meaning of This.
+This was a letter from the Reverend Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+     The Limes,
+
+     38, Cranborne Road,
+
+     Slowbridge.
+
+     December 9.
+
+     Dear Mr. Lidderdale,
+
+     My son Cyril will not attend school for the rest of this term.
+     Yesterday evening, being confined to the house by fever, I went up
+     to his bedroom to verify a reference in a book I had recently lent
+     him to assist his divinity studies under you. When I took down the
+     book from the shelf I noticed several books hidden away behind, and
+     my curiosity being aroused I examined them, in case they should be
+     works of an unpleasant nature. To my horror and disgust, I found
+     that they were all works of an extremely Popish character, most of
+     them belonging to a clergyman in this neighbourhood called Ogilvie,
+     whose illegal practices have for several years been a scandal to
+     this diocese. These I am sending to the Bishop that he may see with
+     his own eyes the kind of propaganda that is going on. Two of the
+     books, inscribed Mark Lidderdale, are evidently the property of
+     your nephew to whom I suppose my son is indebted for this wholesale
+     corruption. On questioning my son I found him already so sunk in
+     the mire of the pernicious doctrines he has imbibed that he
+     actually defied his own father. I thrashed him severely in spite of
+     my fever, and he is now under lock and key in his bedroom where he
+     will remain until he sails with me to Sydney next week whither I am
+     summoned to the conference of Australasian missionaries. During the
+     voyage I shall wrestle with the demon that has entered into my son
+     and endeavour to persuade him that Jesus only is necessary for
+     salvation. And when I have done so, I shall leave him in Australia
+     to earn his own living remote from the scene of his corruption. In
+     the circumstances I assume that you will deduct a proportion of his
+     school fees for this term. I know that you will be as much
+     horrified and disgusted as I was by your nephew's conduct, and I
+     trust that you will be able to wrestle with him in the Lord and
+     prove to him that Jesus only is necessary to salvation.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+     P.S. I suggest that instead of L6 6s. 0d. I should pay L5 5s. 0d.
+     for this term, plus, of course, the usual extras.
+
+The pulse in Mr. Lidderdale's temple had never throbbed so remarkably
+as while Mark was reading this letter.
+
+"A fine thing," he ranted, "if this story gets about in Slowbridge. A
+fine reward for all my kindness if you ruin my school. As for this man
+Ogilvie, I'll sue him for damages. Don't look at me with that expression
+of bestial defiance. Do you hear? What prevents my thrashing you as you
+deserve? What prevents me, I say?"
+
+But Mark was not paying any attention to his uncle's fury; he was
+thinking about the unfortunate martyr under lock and key in The Limes,
+Cranborne Road, Slowbridge. He was wondering what would be the effect of
+this violent removal to the Antipodes and how that fundamental weakness
+of character would fare if Cyril were left to himself at his age.
+
+"I think Mr. Pomeroy is a ruffian," said Mark. "Don't you, Uncle Henry?
+If he writes to the Bishop about Mr. Ogilvie, I shall write to the
+Bishop about him. I hate Protestants. I hate them."
+
+"There's your father to the life. You'd like to burn them, wouldn't
+you?"
+
+"Yes, I would," Mark declared.
+
+"You'd like to burn me, I suppose?"
+
+"Not you in particular."
+
+"Will you listen to him, Helen," he shouted to his sister. "Come here
+and listen to him. Listen to the boy we took in and educated and clothed
+and fed, listen to him saying he'd like to burn his uncle. Into Mr.
+Hitchcock's office you go at once. No more education if this is what it
+leads to. Read that letter, Helen, look at that book, Helen. _Catholic
+Prayers for Church of England People by the Reverend A.H. Stanton._ Look
+at this book, Helen. _The Catholic Religion by Vernon Staley._ No wonder
+you hate Protestants, you ungrateful boy. No wonder you're longing to
+burn your uncle and aunt. It'll be in the _Slowbridge Herald_ to-morrow.
+Headlines! Ruin! They'll think I'm a Jesuit in disguise. I ought to have
+got a very handsome sum of money for the good-will. Go back to your
+class-room, and if you have a spark of affection in your nature, don't
+brag about this to the other boys."
+
+Mark, pondering all the morning the best thing to do for Cyril,
+remembered that a boy called Hacking lived at The Laurels, 36, Cranborne
+Road. He did not like Hacking, but wishing to utilize his back garden
+for the purpose of communicating with the prisoner he made himself
+agreeable to him in the interval between first and second school.
+
+"Hullo, Hacking," he began. "I say, do you want a cricket bat? I shan't
+be here next summer, so you may as well have mine."
+
+Hacking looked at Mark suspicious of some hidden catch that would make
+him appear a fool.
+
+"No, really I'm not ragging," said Mark. "I'll bring it round to you
+after dinner. I'll be at your place about a quarter to two. Wait for me,
+won't you?"
+
+Hacking puzzled his brains to account for this generous whim, and at
+last decided that Mark must be "gone" on his sister Edith. He supposed
+that he ought to warn Edith to be about when Mark called; if the bat was
+not forthcoming he could easily prevent a meeting. The bat however
+turned out to be much better than he expected, and Hacking was on the
+point of presenting Cressida to Troilus when Troilus said:
+
+"That's your garden at the back, isn't it?"
+
+Hacking admitted that it was.
+
+"It looks rather decent."
+
+Hacking allowed modestly that it wasn't bad.
+
+"My father's rather dead nuts on gardening. So's my kiddy sister," he
+added.
+
+"I vote we go out there," Mark suggested.
+
+"Shall I give a yell to my kiddy sister?" asked Pandarus.
+
+"Good lord, no," Mark exclaimed. "Don't the Pomeroys live next door to
+you? Look here, Hacking, I want to speak to Cyril Pomeroy."
+
+"He was absent this morning."
+
+Mark considered Hacking as a possible adjutant to the enterprise he was
+plotting. That he finally decided to admit Hacking to his confidence was
+due less to the favourable result of the scrutiny than to the fact that
+unless he confided in Hacking he would find it difficult to communicate
+with Cyril and impossible to manage his escape. Mark aimed as high as
+this. His first impulse had been to approach the Vicar of Meade
+Cantorum, but on second thoughts he had rejected him in favour of Mr.
+Dorward, who was not so likely to suffer from respect for paternal
+authority.
+
+"Look here, Hacking, will you swear not to say a word about what I'm
+going to tell you?"
+
+"Of course," said Hacking, who scenting a scandal would have promised
+much more than this to obtain the details of it.
+
+"What will you swear by?"
+
+"Oh, anything," Hacking offered, without the least hesitation. "I don't
+mind what it is."
+
+"Well, what do you consider the most sacred thing in the world?"
+
+If Hacking had known himself, he would have said food; not knowing
+himself, he suggested the Bible.
+
+"I suppose you know that if you swear something on the Bible and break
+your oath you can be put in prison?" Mark demanded sternly.
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+The oath was administered, and Hacking waited goggle-eyed for the
+revelation.
+
+"Is that all?" he asked when Mark stopped.
+
+"Well, it's enough, isn't it? And now you've got to help him to escape."
+
+"But I didn't swear I'd do that," argued Hacking.
+
+"All right then. Don't. I thought you'd enjoy it."
+
+"We should get into a row. There'd be an awful shine."
+
+"Who's to know it's us? I've got a friend in the country. And I shall
+telegraph to him and ask if he'll hide Pomeroy."
+
+Mark was not sufficiently sure of Hacking's discretion or loyalty to
+mention Dorward's name. After all this business wasn't just a rag.
+
+"The first thing is for you to go out in the garden and attract
+Pomeroy's attention. He's locked in his bedroom."
+
+"But I don't know which is his bedroom," Hacking objected.
+
+"Well, you don't suppose the whole family are locked in their bedrooms,
+do you?" asked Mark scornfully.
+
+"But how do you know his bedroom is on this side of the house?"
+
+"I don't," said Mark. "That's what I want to find out. If it's in the
+front of the house, I shan't want your help, especially as you're so
+funky."
+
+Hacking went out into the garden, and presently he came back with the
+news that Pomeroy was waiting outside to talk to Mark over the wall.
+
+"Waiting outside?" Mark repeated. "What do you mean, waiting outside?
+How can he be waiting outside when he's locked in his bedroom?"
+
+"But he's not," said Hacking.
+
+Sure enough, when Mark went out he found Cyril astride the party wall
+between the two gardens waiting for him.
+
+"You can't let your father drag you off to Australia like this," Mark
+argued. "You'll go all to pieces there. You'll lose your faith, and take
+to drink, and--you must refuse to go."
+
+Cyril smiled weakly and explained to Mark that when once his father had
+made up his mind to do something it was impossible to stop him.
+
+Thereupon Mark explained his scheme.
+
+"I'll get an answer from Dorward to-night and you must escape to-morrow
+afternoon as soon as it's dark. Have you got a rope ladder?"
+
+Cyril smiled more feebly than ever.
+
+"No, I suppose you haven't. Then what you must do is tear up your sheets
+and let yourself down into the garden. Hacking will whistle three times
+if all's clear, and then you must climb over into his garden and run as
+hard as you can to the corner of the road where I'll be waiting for you
+in a cab. I'll go up to London with you and see you off from Waterloo,
+which is the station for Green Lanes where Father Dorward lives. You
+take a ticket to Galton, and I expect he'll meet you, or if he doesn't,
+it's only a seven mile walk. I don't know the way, but you can ask when
+you get to Galton. Only if you could find your way without asking it
+would be better, because if you're pursued and you're seen asking the
+way you'll be caught more easily. Now I must rush off and borrow some
+money from Mr. Ogilvie. No, perhaps it would rouse suspicions if I were
+absent from afternoon school. My uncle would be sure to guess,
+and--though I don't think he would--he might try to lock me up in my
+room. But I say," Mark suddenly exclaimed in indignation, "how on earth
+did you manage to come and talk to me out here?"
+
+Cyril explained that he had only been locked in his bedroom last night
+when his father was so angry. He had freedom to move about in the house
+and garden, and, he added to Mark's annoyance, there would be no need
+for him to use rope ladders or sheets to escape. If Mark would tell him
+what time to be at the corner of the road and would wait for him a
+little while in case his father saw him going out and prevented him, he
+would easily be able to escape.
+
+"Then I needn't have told Hacking," said Mark. "However, now I have told
+him, he must do something, or else he's sure to let out what he knows. I
+wish I knew where to get the money for the fare."
+
+"I've got a pound in my money box."
+
+"Have you?" said Mark, a little mortified, but at the same time relieved
+that he could keep Mr. Ogilvie from being involved. "Well, that ought to
+be enough. I've got enough to send a telegram to Dorward. As soon as I
+get his answer I'll send you word by Hacking. Now don't hang about in
+the garden all the afternoon or your people will begin to think
+something's up. If you could, it would be a good thing for you to be
+heard praying and groaning in your room."
+
+Cyril smiled his feeble smile, and Mark felt inclined to abandon him to
+his fate; but he decided on reflection that the importance of
+vindicating the claims of the Church to a persecuted son was more
+important than the foolishness and the feebleness of the son.
+
+"Do you want me to do anything more?" Hacking asked.
+
+Mark suggested that Hacking's name and address should be given for Mr.
+Dorward's answer, but this Hacking refused.
+
+"If a telegram came to our house, everybody would want to read it. Why
+can't it be sent to you?"
+
+Mark sighed for his fellow-conspirator's stupidity. To this useless clod
+he had presented a valuable bat.
+
+"All right," he said impatiently, "you needn't do anything more except
+tell Pomeroy what time he's to be at the corner of the road to-morrow."
+
+"I'll do that, Lidderdale."
+
+"I should think you jolly well would," Mark exclaimed scornfully.
+
+Mark spent a long time over the telegram to Dorward; in the end he
+decided that it would be safer to assume that the priest would shelter
+and hide Cyril rather than take the risk of getting an answer. The final
+draft was as follows:--
+
+     Dorward Green Lanes Medworth Hants
+
+     Am sending persecuted Catholic boy by 7.30 from Waterloo Tuesday
+     please send conveyance Mark Lidderdale.
+
+Mark only had eightpence, and this message would cost tenpence. He took
+out the _am_, changed _by 7.30 from Waterloo_ to _arriving 9.35_ and
+_send conveyance_ to _meet_. If he had only borrowed Cyril's sovereign,
+he could have been more explicit. However, he flattered himself that he
+was getting full value for his eightpence. He then worked out the cost
+of Cyril's escape.
+
+                                                s.   d.
+Third Class single to Paddington                1    6
+Third Class return to Paddington (for self)     2    6
+Third Class single Waterloo to Galton           3   11
+Cab from Paddington to Waterloo                 3    6?
+Cab from Waterloo to Paddington (for self)      3    6?
+Sandwiches for Cyril and Self                   1    0
+Ginger-beer for Cyril and Self (4 bottles)           8
+                                               ________
+Total                                          16    7
+
+The cab of course might cost more, and he must take back the eightpence
+out of it for himself. But Cyril would have at least one and sixpence
+in his pocket when he arrived, which he could put in the offertory at
+the Mass of thanksgiving for his escape that he would attend on the
+following morning. Cyril would be useful to old Dorward, and he (Mark)
+would give him some tips on serving if they had an empty compartment
+from Slowbridge to Paddington. Mark's original intention had been to
+wait at the corner of Cranborne Road in a closed cab like the proverbial
+postchaise of elopements, but he discarded this idea for reasons of
+economy. He hoped that Cyril would not get frightened on the way to the
+station and turn back. Perhaps after all it would be wiser to order a
+cab and give up the ginger-beer, or pay for the ginger-beer with the
+money for the telegram. Once inside a cab Cyril was bound to go on.
+Hacking might be committed more completely to the enterprise by waiting
+inside until he arrived with Cyril. It was a pity that Cyril was not
+locked in his room, and yet when it came to it he would probably have
+funked letting himself down from the window by knotted sheets. Mark
+walked home with Hacking after school, to give his final instructions
+for the following day.
+
+"I'm telling you now," he said, "because we oughtn't to be seen together
+at all to-morrow, in case of arousing suspicion. You must get hold of
+Pomeroy and tell him to run to the corner of the road at half-past-five,
+and jump straight into the fly that'll be waiting there with you
+inside."
+
+"But where will you be?"
+
+"I shall be waiting outside the ticket barrier with the tickets."
+
+"Supposing he won't?"
+
+"I'll risk seeing him once more. Go and ask if you can speak to him a
+minute, and tell him to come out in the garden presently. Say you've
+knocked a ball over or something and will Master Cyril throw it back. I
+say, we might really put a message inside a ball and throw it over. That
+was the way the Duc de Beaufort escaped in _Twenty Years After_."
+
+Hacking looked blankly at Mark.
+
+"But it's dark and wet," he objected. "I shouldn't knock a ball over on
+a wet evening like this."
+
+"Well, the skivvy won't think of that, and Pomeroy will guess that
+we're trying to communicate with him."
+
+Mark thought how odd it was that Hacking should be so utterly blind to
+the romance of the enterprise. After a few more objections which were
+disposed of by Mark, Hacking agreed to go next door and try to get the
+prisoner into the garden. He succeeded in this, and Mark rated Cyril for
+not having given him the sovereign yesterday.
+
+"However, bunk in and get it now, because I shan't see you again till
+to-morrow at the station, and I must have some money to buy the
+tickets."
+
+He explained the details of the escape and exacted from Cyril a promise
+not to back out at the last moment.
+
+"You've got nothing to do. It's as simple as A B C. It's too simple,
+really, to be much of a rag. However, as it isn't a rag, but serious, I
+suppose we oughtn't to grumble. Now, you are coming, aren't you?"
+
+Cyril promised that nothing but physical force should prevent him.
+
+"If you funk, don't forget that you'll have betrayed your faith and
+. . ."
+
+At this moment Mark in his enthusiasm slipped off the wall, and after
+uttering one more solemn injunction against backing out at the last
+minute he left Cyril to the protection of Angels for the next
+twenty-four hours.
+
+Although he would never have admitted as much, Mark was rather
+astonished when Cyril actually did present himself at Slowbridge station
+in time to catch the 5.47 train up to town. Their compartment was not
+empty, so that Mark was unable to give Cyril that lesson in serving at
+the altar which he had intended to give him. Instead, as Cyril seemed in
+his reaction to the excitement of the escape likely to burst into tears
+at any moment, he drew for him a vivid picture of the enjoyable life to
+which the train was taking him.
+
+"Father Dorward says that the country round Green Lanes is ripping. And
+his church is Norman. I expect he'll make you his ceremonarius. You're
+an awfully lucky chap, you know. He says that next Corpus Christi, he's
+going to have Mass on the village green. Nobody will know where you
+are, and I daresay later on you can become a hermit. You might become a
+saint. The last English saint to be canonized was St. Thomas Cantilupe
+of Hereford. But of course Charles the First ought to have been properly
+canonized. By the time you die I should think we should have got back
+canonization in the English Church, and if I'm alive then I'll propose
+your canonization. St. Cyril Pomeroy you'd be."
+
+Such were the bright colours in which Mark painted Cyril's future; when
+he had watched him wave his farewells from the window of the departing
+train at Waterloo, he felt as if he were watching the bodily assumption
+of a saint.
+
+"Where have you been all the evening?" asked Uncle Henry, when Mark came
+back about nine o'clock.
+
+"In London," said Mark.
+
+"Your insolence is becoming insupportable. Get away to your room."
+
+It never struck Mr. Lidderdale that his nephew was telling the truth.
+
+The hue and cry for Cyril Pomeroy began at once, and though Mark
+maintained at first that the discovery of Cyril's hiding-place was due
+to nothing else except the cowardice of Hacking, who when confronted by
+a detective burst into tears and revealed all he knew, he was bound to
+admit afterward that, if Mr. Ogilvie had been questioned much more, he
+would have had to reveal the secret himself. Mark was hurt that his
+efforts to help a son of Holy Church should not be better appreciated by
+Mr. Ogilvie; but he forgave his friend in view of the nuisance that it
+undoubtedly must have been to have Meade Cantorum beleaguered by half a
+dozen corpulent detectives. The only person in the Vicarage who seemed
+to approve of what he had done was Esther; she who had always seemed to
+ignore him, even sometimes in a sensitive mood to despise him, was full
+of congratulations.
+
+"How did you manage it, Mark?"
+
+"Oh, I took a cab," said Mark modestly. "One from the corner of
+Cranborne Road to Slowbridge, and another from Paddington to Waterloo.
+We had some sandwiches, and a good deal of ginger-beer at Paddington
+because we thought we mightn't be able to get any at Waterloo, but at
+Waterloo we had some more ginger-beer. I wish I hadn't told Hacking. If
+I hadn't, we should probably have pulled it off. Old Dorward was up to
+anything. But Hacking is a hopeless ass."
+
+"What does your uncle say?"
+
+"He's rather sick," Mark admitted. "He refused to let me go to school
+any more, which as you may imagine doesn't upset me very much, and I'm
+to go into Hitchcock's office after Christmas. As far as I can make out
+I shall be a kind of servant."
+
+"Have you talked to Stephen about it?"
+
+"Well, he's a bit annoyed with me about this kidnapping. I'm afraid I
+have rather let him in for it. He says he doesn't mind so much if it's
+kept out of the papers."
+
+"Anyway, I think it was a sporting effort by you," said Esther. "I
+wasn't particularly keen on you until you brought this off. I hate pious
+boys. I wish you'd told me beforehand. I'd have loved to help."
+
+"Would you? I say, I am sorry. I never thought of you," said Mark much
+disappointed at the lost opportunity. "You'd have been much better than
+that ass Hacking. If you and I had been the only people in it, I'll bet
+the detectives would never have found him."
+
+"And what's going to happen to the youth now?"
+
+"Oh, his father's going to take him to Australia as he arranged. They
+sail to-morrow. There's one thing," Mark added with a kind of gloomy
+relish. "He's bound to go to the bad, and perhaps that'll be a lesson to
+his father."
+
+The hope of the Vicar of Meade Cantorum and equally it may be added the
+hope of Mr. Lidderdale that the affair would be kept out of the papers
+was not fulfilled. The day after Mr. Pomeroy and his son sailed from
+Tilbury the following communication appeared in _The Times_:
+
+     Sir,--The accompanying letter was handed to me by my friend the
+     Reverend Eustace Pomeroy to be used as I thought fit and subject to
+     only one stipulation--that it should not be published until he and
+     his son were out of England. As President of the Society for the
+     Protection of the English Church against Romish Aggression I feel
+     that it is my duty to lay the facts before the country. I need
+     scarcely add that I have been at pains to verify the surprising and
+     alarming accusations made by a clergyman against two other
+     clergymen, and I earnestly request the publicity of your columns
+     for what I venture to believe is positive proof of the dangerous
+     conspiracy existing in our very midst to romanize the Established
+     Church of England. I shall be happy to produce for any of your
+     readers who find Mr. Pomeroy's story incredible at the close of the
+     nineteenth century the signed statements of witnesses and other
+     documentary evidence.
+
+     I am, Sir,
+
+     Your obedient servant,
+
+     Danvers.
+
+
+     The Right Honble. the Lord Danvers, P.C.
+
+     President of the Society for the Protection of the English Church
+     against Romish Aggression.
+
+     My Lord,
+
+     I have to bring to your notice as President of the S.P.E. C.R.A.
+     what I venture to assert is one of the most daring plots to subvert
+     home and family life in the interests of priestcraft that has ever
+     been discovered. In taking this step I am fully conscious of its
+     seriousness, and if I ask your lordship to delay taking any
+     measures for publicity until the unhappy principal is upon the high
+     seas in the guardianship of his even more unhappy father, I do so
+     for the sake of the wretched boy whose future has been nearly
+     blasted by the Jesuitical behaviour of two so-called Protestant
+     clergymen.
+
+     Four years ago, my lord, I retired from a lifelong career as a
+     missionary in New Guinea to give my children the advantages of
+     English education and English climate, and it is surely hard that I
+     should live to curse the day on which I did so. My third son Cyril
+     was sent to school at Haverton House, Slowbridge, to an educational
+     establishment kept by a Mr. Henry Lidderdale, reputed to be a
+     strong Evangelical and I believe I am justified in saying rightly
+     so reputed. At the same time I regret that Mr. Lidderdale, whose
+     brother was a notorious Romanizer I have since discovered, should
+     not have exercised more care in the supervision of his nephew, a
+     fellow scholar with my own son at Haverton House. It appears that
+     Mr. Lidderdale was so lax as to permit his nephew to frequent the
+     services of the Reverend Stephen Ogilvie at Meade Cantorum, where
+     every excess such as incense, lighted candles, mariolatry and
+     creeping to the cross is openly practised. The Revd. S. Ogilvie I
+     may add is a member of the S.S.C., that notorious secret society
+     whose machinations have been so often exposed and the originators
+     of that filthy book "The Priest in Absolution." He is also a member
+     of the Guild of All Souls which has for its avowed object the
+     restoration of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory with all its
+     attendant horrors, and finally I need scarcely add he is a member
+     of the Confraternity of the "Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly
+     to popularize the idolatrous and blasphemous cult of the Mass.
+
+     Young Lidderdale presumably under the influence of this disloyal
+     Protestant clergyman sought to corrupt my son, and was actually so
+     far successful as to lure him to attend the idolatrous services at
+     Meade Cantorum church, which of course he was only able to do by
+     inventing lies and excuses to his father to account for his absence
+     from the simple worship to which all his life he had been
+     accustomed. Not content with this my unhappy son was actually
+     persuaded to confess his sins to this self-styled "priest"! I
+     wonder if he confessed the sin of deceiving his own father to
+     "Father" Ogilvie who supplied him with numerous Mass books, several
+     of which I enclose for your lordship's inspection. You will be
+     amused if you are not too much horrified by these puerile and
+     degraded works, and in one of them, impudently entitled "Catholic
+     Prayers for Church of England People" you will actually see in cold
+     print a prayer for the "Pope of Rome." This work emanates from that
+     hotbed of sacerdotal disloyalty, St. Alban's, Holborn.
+
+     These vile books I discovered by accident carefully hidden away in
+     my son's bedroom. "Facilis descensus Averni!" You will easily
+     imagine the humiliation of a parent who, having devoted his life to
+     bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen, finds that his own
+     son has fallen as low as the lowest savage. As soon as I made my
+     discovery, I removed him from Haverton House, and warned the
+     proprietor of the risk he was running by not taking better care of
+     his pupils. Having been summoned to a conference of missionaries in
+     Sydney, N.S.W., I determined to take my son with me in the hope
+     that a long voyage in the company of a loving parent, eager to help
+     him back to the path of Truth and Salvation from which he had
+     strayed, might cure him of his idolatrous fancies, and restore him
+     to Jesus.
+
+     What followed is, as I write this, scarcely credible to myself;
+     but however incredible, it is true. Young Lidderdale, acting no
+     doubt at the instigation of "Father" Ogilvie (as my son actually
+     called him to my face, not realizing the blasphemy of according to
+     a mortal clergyman the title that belongs to God alone), entered
+     into a conspiracy with another Romanizing clergyman, the Reverend
+     Oliver Dorward, Vicar of Green Lanes, Hants, to abduct my son from
+     his own father's house, with what ultimate intention I dare not
+     think. Incredible as it must sound to modern ears, they were so far
+     successful that for a whole week I was in ignorance of his
+     whereabouts, while detectives were hunting for him up and down
+     England. The abduction was carried out by young Lidderdale, with
+     the assistance of a youth called Hacking, so coolly and skilfully
+     as to indicate that the abettors behind the scenes are USED TO SUCH
+     ABDUCTIONS. This, my lord, points to a very grave state of affairs
+     in our midst. If the son of a Protestant clergyman like myself can
+     be spirited away from a populous but nevertheless comparatively
+     small town like Slowbridge, what must be going on in great cities
+     like London? Moreover, everything is done to make it attractive for
+     the unhappy youth who is thus lured away from his father's hearth.
+     My own son is even now still impenitent, and I have the greatest
+     fears for his moral and religious future, so rapid has been the
+     corruption set up by evil companionship.
+
+     These, my lord, are the facts set out as shortly as possible and
+     written on the eve of my departure in circumstances that militate
+     against elegance of expression. I am, to tell the truth, still
+     staggered by this affair, and if I make public my sorrow and my
+     shame I do so in the hope that the Society of which your lordship
+     is President, may see its way to take some kind of action that will
+     make a repetition of such an outrage upon family life for ever
+     impossible.
+
+     Believe me to be,
+
+     Your lordship's obedient servant,
+
+     Eustace Pomeroy.
+
+The publication of this letter stirred England. _The Times_ in a leading
+article demanded a full inquiry into the alleged circumstances. _The
+English Churchman_ said that nothing like it had happened since the days
+of Bloody Mary. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, and
+finally when it became known that Lord Danvers would ask a question in
+the House of Lords, Mr. Ogilvie took Mark to see Lord Hull who wished to
+be in possession of the facts before he rose to correct some
+misapprehensions of Lord Danvers. Mark also had to interview two
+Bishops, an Archdeacon, and a Rural Dean. He did not realize that for a
+few weeks he was a central figure in what was called THE CHURCH CRISIS.
+He was indignant at Mr. Pomeroy's exaggeration and perversions of fact,
+and he was so evidently speaking the truth that everybody from Lord Hull
+to a reporter of _The Sun_ was impressed by his account of the affair,
+so that in the end the Pomeroy Abduction was decided to be less
+revolutionary than the Gunpowder Plot.
+
+Mr. Lidderdale, however, believed that his nephew had deliberately tried
+to ruin him out of malice, and when two parents seized the opportunity
+of such a scandal to remove their sons from Haverton House without
+paying the terminal fees, Mr. Lidderdale told Mark that he should recoup
+himself for the loss out of the money left by his mother.
+
+"How much did she leave?" his nephew asked.
+
+"Don't ask impertinent questions."
+
+"But it's my money, isn't it?"
+
+"It will be your money in another six years, if you behave yourself.
+Meanwhile half of it will be devoted to paying your premium at the
+office of my friend Mr. Hitchcock."
+
+"But I don't want to be a solicitor. I want to be a priest," said Mark.
+
+Uncle Henry produced a number of cogent reasons that would make his
+nephew's ambition unattainable.
+
+"Very well, if I can't be a priest, I don't want the money, and you can
+keep it yourself," said Mark. "But I'm not going to be a solicitor."
+
+"And what are you going to be, may I inquire?" asked Uncle Henry.
+
+"In the end I probably _shall_ be a priest," Mark prophesied. "But I
+haven't quite decided yet how. I warn you that I shall run away."
+
+"Run away," his uncle echoed in amazement. "Good heavens, boy, haven't
+you had enough of running away over this deplorable Pomeroy affair?
+Where are you going to run to?"
+
+"I couldn't tell you, could I, even if I knew?" Mark asked as tactfully
+as he was able. "But as a matter of fact, I don't know. I only know that
+I won't go into Mr. Hitchcock's office. If you try to force me, I shall
+write to _The Times_ about it."
+
+Such a threat would have sounded absurd in the mouth of a schoolboy
+before the Pomeroy business; but now Mr. Lidderdale took it seriously
+and began to wonder if Haverton House would survive any more of such
+publicity. When a few days later Mr. Ogilvie, whom Mark had consulted
+about his future, wrote to propose that Mark should live with him and
+work under his superintendence with the idea of winning a scholarship at
+Oxford, Mr. Lidderdale was inclined to treat his suggestion as a
+solution of the problem, and he replied encouragingly:
+
+     Haverton House,
+
+     Slowbridge.
+
+     Jan. 15.
+
+     Dear Sir,
+
+     Am I to understand from your letter that you are offering to make
+     yourself responsible for my nephew's future, for I must warn you
+     that I could not accept your suggestion unless such were the case?
+     I do not approve of what I assume will be the trend of your
+     education, and I should have to disclaim any further responsibility
+     in the matter of my nephew's future. I may inform you that I hold
+     in trust for him until he comes of age the sum of L522 8s. 7d.
+     which was left by his mother. The annual interest upon this I have
+     used until now as a slight contribution to the expense to which I
+     have been put on his account; but I have not thought it right to
+     use any of the capital sum. This I am proposing to transfer to you.
+     His mother did not execute any legal document and I have nothing
+     more binding than a moral obligation. If you undertake the
+     responsibility of looking after him until such time as he is able
+     to earn his own living, I consider that you are entitled to use
+     this money in any way you think right. I hope that the boy will
+     reward your confidence more amply than he has rewarded mine. I need
+     not allude to the Pomeroy business to you, for notwithstanding your
+     public denials I cannot but consider that you were as deeply
+     implicated in that disgraceful affair as he was. I note what you
+     say about the admiration you had for my brother. I wish I could
+     honestly say that I shared that admiration. But my brother and I
+     were not on good terms, for which state of affairs he was entirely
+     responsible. I am more ready to surrender to you all my authority
+     over Mark because I am only too well aware how during the last year
+     you have consistently undermined that authority and encouraged my
+     nephew's rebellious spirit. I have had a great experience of boys
+     during thirty-five years of schoolmastering, and I can assure you
+     that I have never had to deal with a boy so utterly insensible to
+     kindness as my nephew. His conduct toward his aunt I can only
+     characterize as callous. Of his conduct towards me I prefer to say
+     no more. I came forward at a moment when he was likely to be sunk
+     in the most abject poverty, and my reward has been ingratitude. I
+     pray that his dark and stubborn temperament may not turn to vice
+     and folly as he grows older, but I have little hope of its not
+     doing so. I confess that to me his future seems dismally black. You
+     may have acquired some kind of influence over his emotions, if he
+     has any emotions, but I am not inclined to suppose that it will
+     endure.
+
+     On hearing from you that you persist in your offer to assume
+     complete responsibility for my nephew, I will hand him over to your
+     care at once. I cannot pretend that I shall be sorry to see the
+     last of him, for I am not a hypocrite. I may add that his clothes
+     are in rather a sorry state. I had intended to equip him upon his
+     entering the office of my old friend Mr. Hitchcock and with that
+     intention I have been letting him wear out what he has. This, I may
+     say, he has done most effectually.
+
+     I am, Sir,
+
+     Yours faithfully,
+
+     Henry Lidderdale.
+
+To which Mr. Ogilvie replied:
+
+     The Vicarage,
+
+     Meade Cantorum,
+
+     Bucks.
+
+     Jan. 16.
+
+     Dear Mr. Lidderdale,
+
+     I accept full responsibility for Mark and for Mark's money. Send
+     both of them along whenever you like. I'm not going to embark on
+     another controversy about the "rights" of boys. I've exhausted
+     every argument on this subject since Mark involved me in his
+     drastic measures of a month ago. But please let me assure you that
+     I will do my best for him and that I am convinced he will do his
+     best for me.
+
+     Yours truly,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+WYCH-ON-THE-WOLD
+
+
+Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went to live at Meade
+Cantorum; and the break was made complete soon afterward when the living
+of Wych-on-the-Wold was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that
+he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five years later;
+Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where she took up palmistry
+and became indispensable to the success of charitable bazaars in East
+Sussex.
+
+Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was actually in
+Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that all the windows looked
+down into Gloucestershire, except those in the Rectory; they looked out
+across a flat country of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing
+spire in Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a high
+windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of the numbers of
+pigeons that were always circling round the church tower. There was
+hardly a house in Wych that did not have its pigeon-cote, from the great
+round columbary in the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of
+some steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as most
+Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford in the vale
+below, that was because the exposed position had kept its successive
+builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was
+an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape
+whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old
+wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient
+observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing
+with their windows; the result of such solicitude for the comfort of the
+inmates was a succession of blank spaces of freestone that delighted
+the eye with an effect of strength and leisure, of cleanliness and
+tranquillity.
+
+The Rectory, dating from the reign of Charles II, did not arrogate to
+itself the right to retire behind trees from the long line of the single
+village street; but being taller than the other houses it brought the
+street to a dignified conclusion, and it was not unworthy of the noble
+church which stood apart from the village, a landmark for miles, upon
+the brow of the rolling wold. There was little traffic on the road that
+climbed up from Wychford in the valley of the swift Greenrush five miles
+away, and there was less traffic on the road beyond, which for eight
+miles sent branch after branch to remote farms and hamlets until itself
+became no more than a sheep track and faded out upon a hilly pasturage.
+Yet even this unfrequented road only bisected the village at the end of
+its wide street, where in the morning when the children were at school
+and the labourers at work in the fields the silence was cloistral, where
+one could stand listening to the larks high overhead, and where the
+lightest footstep aroused curiosity, so that one turned the head to peep
+and peer for the cause of so strange a sound.
+
+Mr. Ogilvie's parish had a large superficial area; but his parishioners
+were not many outside the village, and in that country of wide pastures
+the whole of his cure did not include half-a-dozen farms. There was no
+doctor and no squire, unless Will Starling of Rushbrooke Grange could be
+counted as the squire.
+
+Halfway to Wychford and close to the boundary of the two parishes an
+infirm signpost managed with the aid of a stunted hawthorn to keep
+itself partially upright and direct the wayfarer to Wych Maries. Without
+the signpost nobody would have suspected that the grassgrown track thus
+indicated led anywhere except over the top of the wold.
+
+"You must go and explore Wych Maries," the Rector had said to Mark soon
+after they arrived. "You'll find it rather attractive. There's a disused
+chapel dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. My
+predecessor took me there when we drove round the parish on my first
+visit; but I haven't yet had time to go again. And you ought to have a
+look at the gardens of Rushbrooke Grange. The present squire is away. In
+the South Seas, I believe. But the housekeeper, Mrs. Honeybone, will
+show you round."
+
+It was in response to this advice that Mark and Esther set out on a
+golden May evening to explore Wych Maries. Esther had continued to be
+friendly with Mark after the Pomeroy affair; and when he came to live at
+Meade Cantorum she had expressed her pleasure at the prospect of having
+him for a brother.
+
+"But you'll keep off religion, won't you?" she had demanded.
+
+Mark promised that he would, wondering why she should suppose that he
+was incapable of perceiving who was and who was not interested in it.
+
+"I suppose you've guessed my fear?" she had continued. "Haven't you?
+Haven't you guessed that I'm frightened to death of becoming religious?"
+
+The reassuring contradiction that one naturally gives to anybody who
+voices a dread of being overtaken by some misfortune might perhaps have
+sounded inappropriate, and Mark had held his tongue.
+
+"My father was very religious. My mother is more or less religious.
+Stephen is religious. Miriam is religious. Oh, Mark, and I sometimes
+feel that I too must fall on my knees and surrender. But I won't.
+Because it spoils life. I shall be beaten in the end of course, and I'll
+probably get religious mania when I am beaten. But until then--" She did
+not finish her sentence; only her blue eyes glittered at the challenge
+of life.
+
+That was the last time religion was mentioned between Mark and Esther,
+and since both of them enjoyed the country they became friends. On this
+May evening they stood by the signpost and looked across the shimmering
+grass to where the sun hung in his web of golden haze above the edge of
+the wold.
+
+"If we take the road to Wych Maries," said Mark, "we shall be walking
+right into the sun."
+
+Esther did not reply, but Mark understood that she assented to his
+truism, and they walked on as silent as the long shadows that followed
+them. A quarter of a mile from the high road the path reached the edge
+of the wold and dipped over into a wood which was sparse just below the
+brow, but which grew denser down the slope with many dark evergreens
+interspersed, and in the valley below became a jungle. After the bare
+upland country this volume of May verdure seemed indescribably rich and
+the valley beyond, where the Greenrush flowed through kingcups toward
+the sun, indescribably alluring. Esther and Mark forgot that they were
+exploring Wych Maries and thinking only of reaching that wide valley
+they ran down through the wood, rejoicing in the airy green of the
+ash-trees above them and shouting as they ran. But presently cypresses
+and sombre yews rose on either side of the path, and the road to Wych
+Maries was soft and silent, and the serene sun was lost, and their
+whispering footsteps forbade them to shout any more. At the bottom of
+the hill the trees increased in number and variety; the sun shone
+through pale oak-leaves and the warm green of sycamores. Nevertheless a
+sadness haunted the wood, where the red campions made only a mist of
+colour with no reality of life and flowers behind.
+
+"This wood's awfully jolly, isn't it?" said Mark, hoping to gain from
+Esther's agreement the dispersal of his gloom.
+
+"I don't care for it much," she replied. "There doesn't seem to be any
+life in it."
+
+"I heard a cuckoo just now," said Mark.
+
+"Yes, out of tune already."
+
+"Mm, rather out of tune. Mind those nettles," he warned her.
+
+"I thought Stephen said he drove here."
+
+"Perhaps we've come the wrong way. I believe the road forked by the ash
+wood above. Anyway if we go toward the sun we shall come out in the
+valley, and we can walk back along the banks of the river to Wychford."
+
+"We can always go back through the wood," said Esther.
+
+"Yes, if you don't mind going back the way you came."
+
+"Come on," she snapped. She was not going to be laughed at by Mark, and
+she dared him to deny that he was not as much aware as herself of an
+eeriness in the atmosphere.
+
+"Only because it seems dark in here after that dazzling sunlight on the
+wold. Hark! I hear the sound of water."
+
+They struggled through the undergrowth toward the sound; soon from a
+steep wooded bank they were gazing down into a millpool, the surface of
+which reflected with a gloomy deepening of their hue the colour but not
+the form of the trees above. Water was flowing through a rotten sluice
+gate down from the level of the stream upon a slimy water-wheel that
+must have been out of action for many years.
+
+"The dark tarn of Auber in the misty mid region of Weir!" Mark
+exclaimed. "Don't you love _Ulalume_? I think it's about my favourite
+poem."
+
+"Never heard of it," Esther replied indifferently. He might have taken
+advantage of this confession to give her a lecture on poetry, if the
+millpool and the melancholy wood had not been so affecting as to make
+the least attempt at literary exposition impertinent.
+
+"And there's the chapel," Mark exclaimed, pointing to a ruined edifice
+of stone, the walls of which were stained with the damp of years rising
+from the pool. "But how shall we reach it? We must have come the wrong
+way."
+
+"Let's go back! Let's go back!" Esther exclaimed, surrendering to the
+command of an intuition that overcame her pride. "This place is
+unlucky."
+
+Mark looking at her wild eyes, wilder in the dark that came so early in
+this overshadowed place, was half inclined to turn round at her behest;
+but at that moment he perceived a possible path through the nettles and
+briers at the farther end of the pool and unwilling to go back to the
+Rectory without having visited the ruined chapel of Wych Maries he
+called on her to follow him. This she did fearfully at first; but
+gradually regaining her composure she emerged on the other side as cool
+and scornful as the Esther with whom he was familiar.
+
+"What frightened you?" he asked, when they were standing on a grassgrown
+road that wound through a rank pasturage browsed on by a solitary black
+cow and turned the corner by a clump of cedars toward a large building,
+the presence of which was felt rather than seen beyond the trees.
+
+"I was bored by the brambles," Esther offered for explanation.
+
+"This must be the driving road," Mark proclaimed. "I say, this chapel is
+rather ripping, isn't it?"
+
+But Esther had wandered away across the rank meadow, where her
+meditative form made the solitary black cow look lonelier than ever.
+Mark turned aside to examine the chapel. He had been warned by the
+Rector to look at the images of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary
+Magdalene that had survived the ruin of the holy place of which they
+were tutelary and to which they had given their name. The history of the
+chapel was difficult to trace. It was so small as to suggest that it was
+a chantry; but there was no historical justification for linking its
+fortunes with the Starlings who owned Rushbrooke Grange, and there was
+no record of any lost hamlet here. That it was called Wych Maries might
+show a connexion either with Wychford or with Wych-on-the-Wold; it lay
+about midway between the two, and in days gone by there had been
+controversy on this point between the two parishes. The question had
+been settled by a squire of Rushbrooke's buying it in the eighteenth
+century, since when a legend had arisen that it was built and endowed by
+some crusading Starling of the thirteenth century. There was record
+neither of its glory nor of its decline, nor of what manner of folk
+worshipped there, nor of those who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of
+bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that
+covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its
+floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of
+the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six
+hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the
+place and speculated upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy
+that covered the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit
+of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two
+austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that
+enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom
+from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed
+upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the
+chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which
+marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly
+assured that he would neither marry nor beget children. He was
+astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had
+never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor
+even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite
+purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be
+considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of
+mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to
+illuminate with reason's eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to
+the stone an illusion of life's bloom.
+
+"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from the field beyond
+the black cow lowed a melancholy negative. Whether the stone had spoken
+or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour,
+and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the
+place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.
+
+"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field,
+and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led
+round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.
+
+"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.
+
+They were standing before the house.
+
+"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it
+seems later than it really is."
+
+Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average
+Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied building it occupied a large
+superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the
+outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation
+that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of
+this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as
+if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the
+trees by which it was surrounded. The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had
+never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had
+grown smaller with each succeeding generation. There was no conspicuous
+author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose
+ownership the family's ruin could be dated. There was indeed nothing of
+interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of
+armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century, when the squire's wife and two little girls were
+murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag
+Inn at Wychford four miles away. Mark did not feel much inclined to
+blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange
+under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther
+perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her
+excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit. By now it was a
+pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths' wings, heavy with
+the scent of apple blossom.
+
+"Well, you must explain who we are," said Mark while the echoes of the
+bell died away on the silence within the house and they waited for the
+footsteps that should answer their summons. The answer came from a
+window above the porch where Mrs. Honeybone's face, wreathed in
+wistaria, looked down and demanded in accents that were harsh with alarm
+who was there.
+
+"I am the Rector's sister, Mrs. Honeybone," Esther explained.
+
+"I don't care who you are," said Mrs. Honeybone. "You have no business
+to go ringing the bell at this time of the evening. It frightened me to
+death."
+
+"The Rector asked me to call on you," she pressed.
+
+Mark had already been surprised by Esther's using her brother as an
+excuse to visit the house and he was still more surprised by hearing her
+speak so politely, so ingratiatingly, it seemed, to this grim woman
+embowered in wistaria.
+
+"We lost our way," Esther explained, "and that's why we're so late. The
+Rector told me about the water-lily pool, and I should so much like to
+see it."
+
+Mrs. Honeybone debated with herself for a moment, until at last with a
+grunt of disapproval she came downstairs and opened the front door. The
+lily pool, now a lily pool only in name, for it was covered with an
+integument of duckweed which in twilight took on the texture of velvet,
+was an attractive place set in an enclosure of grass between high grey
+walls.
+
+"That's all there is to see," said Mrs. Honeybone.
+
+"Mr. Starling is abroad?" Esther asked.
+
+The housekeeper nodded.
+
+"And when is he coming back?" she went on.
+
+"That's for him to say," said the housekeeper disagreeably. "He might
+come back to-night for all I know."
+
+Almost before the sentence was out of her mouth the hall bell jangled,
+and a distant voice shouted:
+
+"Nanny, Nanny, hurry up and open the door!"
+
+Mrs. Honeybone could not have looked more startled if the voice had been
+that of a ghost. Mark began to talk of going until Esther cut him short.
+
+"I don't think Mr. Starling will mind our being here so much as that,"
+she said.
+
+Mrs. Honeybone had already hurried off to greet her master; and when she
+was gone Mark looked at Esther, saw that her face was strangely flushed,
+and in an instant of divination apprehended either that she had already
+met the squire of Rushbrooke Grange or that she expected to meet him
+here to-night; so that, when presently a tall man of about thirty-five
+with brick-dust cheeks came into the close, he was not taken aback when
+Esther greeted him by name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was
+he astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks should
+deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with recognition,
+and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a moment its immobility and
+gape, yes, gape, in the amazement of meeting somebody whom he never
+could have expected to meet at such an hour in such a place.
+
+"You," he exclaimed. "You here!"
+
+By the way he quickly looked behind him as if to intercept a prying
+glance Mark knew that, whatever the relationship between Esther and the
+squire had been in the past, it had been a relationship in which
+secrecy had played a part. In that moment between him and Will Starling
+there was enmity.
+
+"You couldn't have expected him to make a great fuss about a boy," said
+Esther brutally on their way back to the Rectory.
+
+"I suppose you think that's the reason why I don't like him," said Mark.
+"I don't want him to take any notice of me, but I think it's very odd
+that you shouldn't have said a word about knowing him even to his
+housekeeper."
+
+"It was a whim of mine," she murmured. "Besides, I don't know him very
+well. We met at Eastbourne once when I was staying there with Mother."
+
+"Well, why didn't he say 'How do you do, Miss Ogilvie?' instead of
+breathing out 'you' like that?"
+
+Esther turned furiously upon Mark.
+
+"What has it got to do with you?"
+
+"Nothing whatever to do with me," he said deliberately. "But if you
+think you're going to make a fool of me, you're not. Are you going to
+tell your brother you knew him?"
+
+Esther would not answer, and separated by several yards they walked
+sullenly back to the Rectory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ST. MARK'S DAY
+
+
+Mark tried next day to make up his difference with Esther; but she
+repulsed his advances, and the friendship that had blossomed after the
+Pomeroy affair faded and died. There was no apparent dislike on either
+side, nothing more than a coolness as of people too well used to each
+other's company. In a way this was an advantage for Mark, who was having
+to apply himself earnestly to the amount of study necessary to win a
+scholarship at Oxford. Companionship with Esther would have meant
+considerable disturbance of his work, for she was a woman who depended
+on the inspiration of the moment for her pastimes and pleasures, who was
+impatient of any postponement and always avowedly contemptuous of Mark's
+serious side. His classical education at Haverton House had made little
+of the material bequeathed to him by his grandfather's tuition at
+Nancepean. None of his masters had been enough of a scholar or enough of
+a gentleman (and to teach Latin and Greek well one must be one or the
+other) to educate his taste. The result was an assortment of grammatical
+facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of
+Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair
+the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to
+Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark
+had been reading with him six months he did find a really first-class
+scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of Little Fairfield. Mark worked
+steadily, and existence in Oxfordshire went by without any great
+adventures of mind, body, or spirit. Life at the Rectory had a kind of
+graceful austerity like the well-proportioned Rectory itself. If Mark
+had bothered to analyze the cause of this graceful austerity, he might
+have found it in the personality of the Rector's elder sister Miriam.
+Even at Meade Cantorum, when he was younger, Mark had been fully
+conscious of her qualities; but here they found a background against
+which they could display themselves more perfectly. When they moved from
+Buckinghamshire and the new rector was seeing how much Miriam
+appreciated the new surroundings, he sold out some stock and presented
+her with enough ready money to express herself in the outward beauty of
+the Rectory's refurbishing. He was luckily not called upon to spend a
+great deal on the church, both his predecessors having maintained the
+fabric with care, and the fabric itself being sound enough and
+magnificent enough to want no more than that. Miriam, though shaking one
+of those capable and well-tended fingers at her beloved brother's
+extravagance, accepted the gift with an almost childish determination to
+give full value of beauty in return, so that there should not be a
+servant's bedroom nor a cupboard nor a corridor that did not display the
+evidence of her appreciation in loving care. The garden was handed over
+to Mrs. Ogilvie, who as soon as May warmed its high enclosures bloomed
+there like one of her own favourite peonies, rosy of face and fragrant,
+ample of girth, golden-hearted.
+
+Outside the Rectory Mark spent most of his time with Richard Ford, the
+son of the Vicar of Little Fairfield, with whom he went to work in the
+autumn after his arrival in Oxfordshire. Here again Mark was lucky, for
+Richard, who was a year or two older than himself and a student at
+Cooper's Hill whence he would emerge as a civil engineer bound for
+India, was one of those entirely admirable young men who succeed in
+being saintly without any rapture or righteousness.
+
+Mark said one day:
+
+"Rector, you know, Richard Ford really is a saint; only for goodness'
+sake don't tell him I said so, because he'd be furious."
+
+The Rector stopped humming a joyful _Miserere_ to give Mark an assurance
+of his discretion. But Mark having said so much in praise of Richard
+could say no more, and indeed he would have found it hard to express in
+words what he felt about his friend.
+
+Mark accompanied Richard on his visits to Wychford Rectory where in
+this fortunate corner of England existed a third perfect family. Richard
+was deeply in love with Margaret Grey, the second daughter, and if Mark
+had ever been intended to fall in love he would certainly have fallen in
+love with Pauline, the youngest daughter, who was fourteen.
+
+"I could look at her for ever," he confided in Richard. "Walking down
+the road from Wych-on-the-Wold this morning I saw two blue butterflies
+on a wild rose, and they were like Pauline's eyes and the rose was like
+her cheek."
+
+"She's a decent kid," Richard agreed fervently.
+
+Mark had had such a limited experience of the world that the amenities
+of the society in which he found himself incorporated did not strike his
+imagination as remarkable. It was in truth one of those eclectic,
+somewhat exquisite, even slightly rarefied coteries which are produced
+partly by chance, partly by interests shared in common, but most of all,
+it would seem, by the very genius of the place. The genius of Cotswolds
+imparts to those who come beneath his influence the art of existing
+appropriately in the houses that were built at his inspiration. They do
+not boast of their privilege like the people of Sussex. They are not
+living up to a landscape so much as to an architecture, and their voices
+lowered harmoniously with the sigh of the wind through willows and
+aspens have not to compete with the sea-gales or the sea.
+
+Mark accepted the manners of the society in which good fortune had set
+him as the natural expression of an inward orderliness, a traditional
+respect for beauty like the ritual of Christian worship. That the three
+daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who
+failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
+him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other
+standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected
+to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to
+him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but
+it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of
+wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the
+age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when
+they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his
+youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
+form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from
+the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for
+those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the
+utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of
+those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home, the
+Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all Richard Ford at
+Fairfield gave him in a few months the poise he would have received more
+gradually from a public school education.
+
+So Mark read Greek with the Vicar of Little Fairfield and Latin with the
+Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold, who, amiable and holy man, had to work
+nearly twice as hard as his pupil to maintain his reserve of
+instruction. Mark took long walks with Richard Ford when Richard was
+home in his vacations, and long walks by himself when Richard was at
+Cooper's Hill. He often went to Wychford Rectory, where he learnt to
+enjoy Schumann and Beethoven and Bach and Brahms.
+
+"You're like three Saint Cecilias," he told them. "Monica is by Luini
+and Margaret is by Perugino and Pauline. . . ."
+
+"Oh, who am I by?" Pauline exclaimed, clapping her hands.
+
+"I give it up. You're just Saint Cecilia herself at fourteen."
+
+"Isn't Mark foolish?" Pauline laughed.
+
+"It's my birthday to-morrow," said Mark, "so I'm allowed to be foolish."
+
+"It's my birthday in a week," said Pauline. "And as I'm two years
+younger than you I can be two years more foolish."
+
+Mark looked at her, and he was filled with wonder at the sanctity of her
+maidenhood. Thenceforth meditating upon the Annunciation he should
+always clothe Pauline in a robe of white samite and set her in his
+mind's eye for that other maid of Jewry, even as painters found holy
+maids in Florence or Perugia for their bright mysteries.
+
+While Mark was walking back to Wych and when on the brow of the first
+rise of the road he stood looking down at Wychford in the valley below,
+a chill lisping wind from the east made him shiver and he thought of the
+lines in Keats' _Eve of St. Mark_:
+
+    _The chilly sunset faintly told_
+    _Of unmatured green vallies cold,_
+    _Of the green thorny bloomless hedge,_
+    _Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge,_
+    _Of primroses by shelter'd rills,_
+    _And daisies on the aguish hills._
+
+The sky in the west was an unmatured green valley tonight, where Venus
+bloomed like a solitary primrose; and on the dark hills of Heaven the
+stars were like daisies. He turned his back on the little town and set
+off up the hill again, while the wind slipped through the hedge beside
+him in and out of the blackthorn boughs, lisping, whispering, snuffling,
+sniffing, like a small inquisitive animal. He thought of Monica,
+Margaret, and Pauline playing in their warm, candle-lit room behind him,
+and he thought of Miriam reading in her tall-back chair before dinner,
+for Evensong would be over by now. Yes, Evensong would be over, he
+remembered penitently, and he ought to have gone this evening, which was
+the vigil of St. Mark and of his birthday. At this moment he caught
+sight of the Wych Maries signpost black against that cold green sky. He
+gave a momentary start, because seen thus the signpost had a human look;
+and when his heart beat normally it was roused again, this time by the
+sight of a human form indeed, the form of Esther, the wind blowing her
+skirts before her, hurrying along the road to which the signpost so
+crookedly pointed. Mark who had been climbing higher and higher now felt
+the power of that wind full on his cheeks. It was as if it had found
+what it wanted, for it no longer whispered and lisped among the boughs
+of the blackthorn, but blew fiercely over the wide pastures, driving
+Esther before it, cutting through Mark like a sword. By the time he had
+reached the signpost she had disappeared in the wood.
+
+Mark asked himself why she was going to Rushbrooke Grange.
+
+"To Rushbrooke Grange," he said aloud. "Why should I think she is going
+to Rushbrooke Grange?"
+
+Though even in this desolate place he would not say it aloud, the answer
+came back from this very afternoon when somebody had mentioned casually
+that the Squire was come home again. Mark half turned to follow Esther,
+but in the moment of turning he set his face resolutely in the direction
+of home. If Esther were really on her way to meet Will Starling, he
+would do more harm than good by appearing to pry.
+
+Esther was the flaw in Mark's crystal clear world. When a year ago they
+had quarrelled over his avowed dislike of Will Starling, she had gone
+back to her solitary walks and he conscious, painfully conscious, that
+she regarded him as a young prig, had with that foolish pride of youth
+resolved to be so far as she was concerned what she supposed him to be.
+His admiration for the Greys and the Fords had driven her into jeering
+at them; throughout the year Mark and she had been scarcely polite to
+each other even in public. The Rector and Miriam probably excused Mark's
+rudeness whenever he let himself give way to it, because their sister
+did not spare either of them, and they were made aware with exasperating
+insistence of the dullness of the country and of the dreariness of
+everybody who lived in the neighbourhood. Yet, Mark could never achieve
+that indifference to her attitude either toward himself or toward other
+people that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he should
+have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because in his thoughts
+about her she always appeared to him like the wind, restlessly sighing
+and fluttering round a comfortable house. However steady the
+candle-light, however bright the fire, however absorbing the book,
+however secure one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there;
+and throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been most
+unmistakably there.
+
+In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion. It was a
+strangely calm morning; through the unstained windows of the clerestory
+the sun sloped quivering ladders of golden light. He looked round with
+half a hope that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and
+throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit across the
+cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his imagination, so that
+for all the rich peace of this interior he was troubled in spirit, and
+the intention to make this Mass upon his seventeenth birthday another
+spiritual experience was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping
+mechanically, and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to
+make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began to apprehend
+how he was asking fresh favours from God without having moved a step
+forward to deserve them.
+
+"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think I'm
+suffering from spiritual pride. I think. . . ."
+
+He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an intuition that God
+was about to play some horrible trick on him. Mark discussed with the
+Rector the theological aspects of this intuition.
+
+"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps you are
+leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your
+intuition is your soul's perception of this. Indeed, once or twice
+lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get
+into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world
+so gentle as here."
+
+"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite long enough
+at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here."
+
+"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House it was a passive
+ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty. After our Lord had fasted
+forty days in the desert, accumulating reserves of spiritual energy,
+just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves
+of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He
+was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on
+earth. The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed
+of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual
+perfection displays the same phenomena. In the action and reaction of
+experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of
+the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm. No, I
+fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those
+movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."
+
+Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He
+wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of
+spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh
+seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear
+to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector
+was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a
+horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an
+academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
+probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some
+hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone
+Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own
+troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been
+and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
+brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or
+if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till
+nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark,
+remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a
+moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe
+that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to
+wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night. Did Mrs.
+Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in
+perplexity at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their
+attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips,
+Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing. He
+debated now the notion of warning Miriam in veiled language about her
+sister; but such an idea would strike Miriam as monstrous, as a mad and
+horrible nightmare. Mark shivered at the mere fancy of the chill that
+would come over her and of the disdain in her eyes. Besides, what right
+had he on the little he knew to involve Esther with her family?
+Superficially he might count himself her younger brother; but if he
+presumed too far, with what a deadly retort might she not annihilate his
+claim. Most certainly he was not entitled to intervene unless he
+intervened bravely and directly. Mark shook his head at the prospect of
+doing that. He could not imagine anybody's tackling Esther directly on
+such a subject. Seventeen to-day! He looked out of the window and felt
+that he was bearing upon his shoulders the whole of that green world
+outspread before him.
+
+The serene morning ripened to a splendid noontide, and Mark who had
+intended to celebrate his birthday by enjoying every moment of it had
+allowed the best of the hours to slip away in a stupor of indecision.
+More and more the vision of Esther last night haunted him, and he felt
+that he could not go and see the Greys as he had intended. He could not
+bear the contemplation of the three girls with the weight of Esther on
+his mind. He decided to walk over to Little Fairfield and persuade
+Richard to make a journey of exploration up the Greenrush in a canoe. He
+would ask Richard his opinion of Will Starling. What a foolish notion!
+He knew perfectly well Richard's opinion of the Squire, and to lure him
+into a restatement of it would be the merest self-indulgence.
+
+"Well, I must go somewhere to-day," Mark shouted at himself. He secured
+a packet of sandwiches from the Rectory cook and set out to walk away
+his worries.
+
+"Why shouldn't I go down to Wych Maries? I needn't meet that chap. And
+if I see him I needn't speak to him. He's always been only too jolly
+glad to be offensive to me."
+
+Mark turned aside from the high road by the crooked signpost and took
+the same path down under the ash-trees as he had taken with Esther for
+the first time nearly a year ago. Spring was much more like Spring in
+these wooded hollows; the noise of bees in the blossom of the elms was
+murmurous as limes in June. Mark congratulated himself on the spot in
+which he had chosen to celebrate this fine birthday, a day robbed from
+time like the day of a dream. He ate his lunch by the old mill dam,
+feeding the roach with crumbs until an elderly pike came up from the
+deeps and frightened the smaller fish away. He searched for a
+bullfinch's nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the
+birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples
+they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after
+speculating idly for a little while upon its former state he fell as he
+usually did when he visited Wych Maries into a contemplation of the two
+images of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a
+hummock of grass before the old West doorway he received an impression
+that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased to be
+mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved from ruin, but
+that they had somehow regained their importance. It was not that he
+discerned in them any miraculous quality of living, still less of
+winking or sweating as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the
+faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them
+thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the
+point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well
+aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the
+rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he
+climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel,
+that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed
+by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of fancy and
+discover why they should give him this impression of having regained
+their utility, yes, that was the word, utility, not importance. They
+were revitalized not from within, but from without; and even as his mind
+leapt at this explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the
+shadowy yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that
+hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself been sitting.
+
+For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation of the
+strange impression the images had made upon him, Mark supposed that she
+was come there for a tryst. This vanished almost at once in the
+conviction that Esther's soul waited there either in question or appeal.
+He restrained an impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt
+that he was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy
+the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that Esther's pride
+would be so deeply outraged at having been discovered in a moment of
+weakness thus upon her knees, for she had by now fallen upon her knees
+in prayer, that it might easily happen she would never in all her life
+pray more. There was no escape for Mark without disturbing her, and he
+sat breathless in the yew-tree, thinking that soon she must perceive his
+glittering eye in the depths of the dark foliage as in passing a
+hedgerow one may perceive the eye of a nested bird. From his position he
+could see the images, and out of the spiritual agony of Esther kneeling
+there, the force of which was communicated to himself, he watched them
+close, scarcely able to believe that they would not stoop from their
+pedestals and console the suppliant woman with benediction of those
+stone hands now clasped aspiringly to God, themselves for centuries
+suppliant like the woman at their feet. Mark could think of nothing
+better to do than to turn his face from Esther's face and to say for her
+many _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. At first he thought that he was praying
+in a silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his position
+began to affect his concentration, and he found that he was saying the
+words mechanically, listening the while to the voices of birds. He
+compelled his attention to the prayers; but the birds were too loud. The
+_Paternosters_ and the _Aves_ were absorbed in their singing and
+chirping and twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a
+rosary to help his feeble attention. Yet could he have used a rosary
+without falling out of the yew-tree? He took his hands from the bough
+for a moment and nearly overbalanced. _Make not your rosary of yew
+berries_, he found himself saying. Who wrote that? _Make not your rosary
+of yew berries._ Why, of course, it was Keats. It was the first line of
+the _Ode to Melancholy_. Esther was still kneeling out there in the
+sunlight. And how did the poem continue? _Make not your rosary of yew
+berries._ What was the second line? It was ridiculous to sit astride a
+bough and say _Paternosters_ and _Aves_. He could not sit there much
+longer. And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw that
+Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling was standing in
+the doorway of the chapel looking at her, not speaking but waiting for
+her to speak, while he wound a strand of ivy round his fingers and
+unwound it again, and wound it round again until it broke and he was
+saying:
+
+"I thought we agreed after your last display here that you'd give this
+cursed chapel the go by?"
+
+"I can't escape from it," Esther cried. "You don't understand, Will,
+what it means. You never have understood."
+
+"Dearest Essie, I understand only too well. I've paid pretty handsomely
+in having to listen to reproaches, in having to dry your tears and stop
+your sighs with kisses. Your damned religion is a joke. Can't you grasp
+that? It's not my fault we can't get married. If I were really the
+scoundrel you torment yourself into thinking I am, I would have married
+and taken the risk of my strumpet of a wife turning up. But I've treated
+you honestly, Essie. I can't help loving you. I went away once. I went
+away again. And a third time I went just to relieve your soul of the sin
+of loving me. But I'm sick of suffering for the sake of a myth, a
+superstition."
+
+Esther had moved close to him, and now she put a hand upon his arm.
+
+"To you, Will. Not to me."
+
+"Look here, Essie," said her lover. "If you knew that you were liable to
+these dreadful attacks of remorse and penitence, why did you ever
+encourage me?"
+
+"How dare you say I encouraged you?"
+
+"Now don't let your religion make you dishonest," he stabbed. "No man
+seduces a woman of your character without as much goodwill as deserves
+to be called encouragement, and by God _is_ encouragement," he went on
+furiously. "Let's cut away some of the cant before we begin arguing
+again about religion."
+
+"You don't know what a hell you're making for me when you talk like
+that," she gasped. "If I did encourage you, then my sin is a thousand
+times blacker."
+
+"Oh, don't exaggerate, my dear girl," he said wearily. "It isn't a sin
+for two people to love each other."
+
+"I've tried my best to think as you do, but I can't. I've avoided going
+to church. I've tried to hate religion, I've mocked at God . . ." she
+broke off in despair of explaining the force of grace, against the gift
+of which she had contended in vain.
+
+"I always thought you were brave, Essie. But you're a real coward. The
+reason for all this is your fear of being pitchforked into a big bonfire
+by a pantomime demon with horns and a long tail." He laughed bitterly.
+"To think that you, my adored Essie, should really have the soul of a
+Sunday school teacher. You, a Bacchante of passion, to be puling about
+your sins. You! You! Girl, you're mad! I tell you there is no such thing
+as damnation. It's a bogey invented by priests to enchain mankind. But
+if there is and if that muddle-headed old gentleman you call God really
+exists and if he's a just God, why then let him damn me and let him give
+you your harp and your halo while I burn for both. Essie, my mad foolish
+frightened Essie, can't you understand that if you give me up for this
+God of yours you'll drive me to murder. If I must marry you to hold you,
+why then I'll kill that cursed wife of mine. . . ."
+
+It was his turn now to break off in despair of being able to express his
+will to keep Esther for his own, and because argument seemed so hopeless
+he tried to take her in his arms, whereupon Mark who was aching with the
+effort to maintain himself unobserved upon the bough of the yew-tree
+said his _Paternosters_ and _Aves_ faster than ever, that she might have
+the strength to resist that scoundrel of Rushbrooke Grange. He longed to
+have the eloquence to make some wonderful prayer to the Blessed Virgin
+and St. Mary Magdalene so that a miracle might happen and their images
+point accusing hands at the blasphemer below.
+
+And then it seemed as if a miracle did happen, for out of the jangle of
+recriminations and appeals that now signified no more than the noise of
+trees in a storm he heard the voice of Esther gradually gain its right
+to be heard, gradually win from its rival silence until the tale was
+told.
+
+"I know that I am overcome by the saving grace of God," she was saying.
+"And I know that I owe it to them." She pointed to the holy women above
+the door. The squire shook his fist; but he still kept silence. "I have
+run away from God since I knew you, Will. I have loved you as much as
+that. I have gone to church only when I had to go for my brother's sake,
+but I have actually stuffed my ears with cotton wool so that no word
+there spoken might shake my faith in my right to love you. But it was
+all to no purpose. You know that it was you who told me always to come
+to our meetings through the wood and past the chapel. And however fast I
+went and however tight I shut myself up in thoughts of you and your love
+and my love I have always felt that these images spoke to me
+reproachfully in passing. It's not mere imagination, Will. Why, before
+we came to Wych-on-the-Wold when you went away to the Pacific that I
+might have peace of mind, I used always to be haunted by the idea that
+God was calling me back to Him, and I would run, yes, actually run
+through the woods until my legs have been torn by brambles."
+
+"Madness! Madness!" cried Starling.
+
+"Let it be madness. If God chooses to pursue a human soul with madness,
+the pursuit is not less swift and relentless for that. And I shook Him
+off. I escaped from religion; I prayed to the Devil to keep me wicked,
+so utterly did I love you. Then when my brother was offered
+Wych-on-the-Wold I felt that the Devil had heard my prayer and had
+indeed made me his own. That frightened me for a moment. When I wrote to
+you and said we were coming here and you hurried back, I can't describe
+to you the fear that overcame me when I first entered this hollow where
+you lived. Several times I'd tried to come down before you arrived here,
+but I'd always been afraid, and that was why the first night I brought
+Mark with me."
+
+"That long-legged prig and puppy," grunted the squire.
+
+Mark could have shouted for joy when he heard this, shouted because he
+was helping with his _Paternosters_ and his _Aves_ to drive this
+ruffian out of Esther's life for ever, shouted because his long legs
+were strong enough to hold on to this yew-tree bough.
+
+"He's neither a prig nor a puppy," Esther said. "I've treated him badly
+ever since he came to live with us, and I treated him badly on your
+account, because whenever I was with him I found it harder to resist the
+pursuit of God. Now let's leave Mark out of this. Everything was in your
+favour, I tell you. I was sure that the Devil. . . ."
+
+"The Devil!" Starling interrupted. "Your Devil, dear Essie, is as
+ridiculous as your God. It's only your poor old God with his face
+painted black like the bogey man of childhood."
+
+"I was sure that the Devil," Esther repeated without seeming to hear the
+blasphemy, "had taken me for his own and given us to each other. You to
+me. Me to you, my darling. I didn't care. I was ready to burn in Hell
+for you. So, don't call me coward, for mad though you think me I was
+ready to be damned for you, and _I_ believe in damnation. You don't. Yet
+the first time I passed by this chapel on my way to meet you again after
+that endless horrible parting I had to run away from the holy influence.
+I remember that there was a black cow in the field near the gates of the
+Grange, and I waited there while Mark poked about in this chapel, waited
+in the twilight afraid to go back and tell him to hurry in case I should
+be recaptured by God and meet you only to meet you never more."
+
+"I suppose you thought my old Kerry cow was the Devil, eh?" he sneered.
+
+She paid no attention, but continued enthralled by the passion of her
+spiritual adventure.
+
+"It was no use. I couldn't come by here every day and not go back. Why,
+once I opened the Bible at hazard just to show my defiance and I read
+_Her sins which are many are forgiven for she loved much._ This must be
+the end of our love, my lover, for I can't go on. Those two stone Maries
+have brought me back to God. No more with you, my own beloved. No more,
+my darling, no more. And yet if even now with one kiss you could give me
+strength to sin I should rejoice. But they have made my lips as cold as
+their own, and my arms that once knew how to clasp you to my heart they
+have lifted up to Heaven like their own. I am going into a convent at
+once, where until I die I shall pray for you, my own love."
+
+The birds no longer sang nor twittered nor cheeped in the thickets
+around, but all passion throbbed in the voice of Esther when she spoke
+these words. She stood there with her hair in disarray transfigured like
+a tree in autumn on which the sunlight shines when the gale has died,
+but from which the leaves will soon fall because winter is at hand. Yet
+her lover was so little moved by her ordeal that he went back to
+mouthing his blasphemies.
+
+"Go then," he shouted. "But these two stone dolls shall not have power
+to drive my next mistress into folly. Wasn't Mary Magdalene a sinner?
+Didn't she fall in love with Christ? Of course, she did! And I'll make
+an example of her just as Christians make an example of all women who
+love much."
+
+The squire pulled himself up by the ivy and struck the image of St. Mary
+Magdalene on the face.
+
+"When you pray for me, dear Essie, in your convent of greensick women,
+don't forget that your patron saint was kicked from her pedestal by your
+lover."
+
+Starling was as good as his word; but the effort he made to overthrow
+the saint carried him with it; his foot catching in the ivy fell head
+downward and striking upon a stone was killed.
+
+Mark hesitated before he jumped down from his bough, because he dreaded
+to add to Esther's despair the thought of his having overheard all that
+went before. But seeing her in the sunlight now filled again with the
+voices of birds, seeing her blue eyes staring in horror and the nervous
+twitching of her hands he felt that the shock of his irruption might
+save her reason and in a moment he was standing beside her looking down
+at the dead man.
+
+"Let me die too," she cried.
+
+Mark found himself answering in a kind of inspiration:
+
+"No, Esther, you must live to pray for his soul."
+
+"He was struck dead for his blasphemy. He is in Hell. Of what use to
+pray for his soul?"
+
+"But Esther while he was falling, even in that second, he had time to
+repent. Live, Esther. Live to pray for him."
+
+Mark was overcome with a desire to laugh at the stilted way in which he
+was talking, and, from the suppression of the desire, to laugh wildly at
+everything in the scene, and not least at the comic death of Will
+Starling, even at the corpse itself lying with a broken neck at his
+feet. By an effort of will he regained control of his muscles, and the
+tension of the last half hour finding no relief in bodily relaxation was
+stamped ineffaceably upon his mind to take its place with that afternoon
+in his father's study at the Lima Street Mission which first inspired
+him with dread of the sexual relation of man to woman, a dread that was
+now made permanent by what he had endured on the bough of that yew-tree.
+
+Thanks to Mark's intervention the business was explained without
+scandal; nobody doubted that the squire of Rushbrooke Grange died a
+martyr to his dislike of ivy's encroaching upon ancient images. Esther's
+stormy soul took refuge in a convent, and there it seemed at peace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SCHOLARSHIP
+
+
+The encounter between Esther and Will Starling had the effect of
+strengthening Mark's intention to be celibate. He never imagined himself
+as a possible protagonist in such a scene; but the impression of that
+earlier encounter between his mother and father which gave him a horror
+of human love was now renewed. It was renewed, moreover, with the light
+of a miracle to throw it into high relief. And this miracle could not be
+explained away as a coincidence, but was an old-fashioned miracle that
+required no psychical buttressing, a hard and fast miracle able to
+withstand any criticism. It was a pity that out of regard for Esther he
+could not publish it for the encouragement of the faithful and the
+confusion of the unbelievers.
+
+The miracle of St. Mary Magdalene's intervention on his seventeenth
+birthday was the last violent impression of Mark's boyhood.
+Thenceforward life moved placidly through the changing weeks of a
+country calendar until the date of the scholarship examination held by
+the group of colleges that contained St. Mary's, the college he aspired
+to enter, but for which he failed to win even an exhibition. Mr. Ogilvie
+was rather glad, for he had been worried how Mark was going to support
+himself for three or four years at an expensive college like St. Mary's.
+But when Mark was no more successful with another group of colleges, his
+tutors began to be alarmed, wondering if their method of teaching Latin
+and Greek lacked the tradition of the public school necessary to
+success.
+
+"Oh, no, it's obviously my fault," said Mark. "I expect I go to pieces
+in examinations, or perhaps I'm not intended to go to Oxford."
+
+"I beg you, my dear boy," said the Rector a little irritably, "not to
+apply such a loose fatalism to your career. What will you do if you
+don't go to the University?"
+
+"It's not absolutely essential for a priest to have been to the
+University," Mark argued.
+
+"No, but in your case I think it's highly advisable. You haven't had a
+public school education, and inasmuch as I stand to you _in loco
+parentis_ I should consider myself most culpable if I didn't do
+everything possible to give you a fair start. You haven't got a very
+large sum of money to launch yourself upon the world, and I want you to
+spend what you have to the best advantage. Of course, if you can't get a
+scholarship, you can't and that's the end of it. But, rather than that
+you should miss the University I will supplement from my own savings
+enough to carry you through three years as a commoner."
+
+Tears stood in Mark's eyes.
+
+"You've already been far too generous," he said. "You shan't spend any
+more on me. I'm sorry I talked in that foolish way. It was really only a
+kind of affectation of indifference. I'm feeling pretty sore with myself
+for being such a failure; but I'll have another shot and I hope I shall
+do better."
+
+Mark as a last chance tried for a close scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall
+for the sons of clergymen.
+
+"It's a tiny place of course," said the Rector. "But it's authentic
+Oxford, and in some ways perhaps you would be happier at a very small
+college. Certainly you'd find your money went much further."
+
+The examination was held in the Easter vacation, and when Mark arrived
+at the college he found only one other candidate besides himself. St.
+Osmund's Hall with its miniature quadrangle, miniature hall, miniature
+chapel, empty of undergraduates and with only the Principal and a couple
+of tutors in residence, was more like an ancient almshouse than an
+Oxford college. Mark and his rival, a raw-boned youth called Emmett who
+was afflicted with paroxysms of stammering, moved about the precincts
+upon tiptoe like people trespassing from a high road.
+
+On their first evening the two candidates were invited to dine with the
+Principal, who read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner, only
+pausing from their perusal to ask occasionally in a courtly tone if Mr.
+Lidderdale or Mr. Emmett would not take another glass of wine. After
+dinner they sat in his library where the Principal addressed himself to
+the evidently uncongenial task of estimating the comparative fitness of
+his two guests to receive Mr. Tweedle's bounty. The Reverend Thomas
+Tweedle was a benevolent parson of the eighteenth century who by his
+will had provided the money to educate the son of one indigent clergyman
+for four years. Mark was shy enough under the Principal's courtly
+inquisition, but poor Emmett had a paroxysm each time he was asked the
+simplest question about his tastes or his ambitions. His tongue
+appearing like a disturbed mollusc waved its tip slowly round in an
+agonized endeavour to give utterance to such familiar words as "yes" or
+"no." Several times Mark feared that he would never get it back at all
+and that Emmett would either have to spend the rest of his life with it
+protruding before him or submit it to amputation and become a mute. When
+the ordeal with the Principal was over and the two guests were strolling
+back across the quadrangle to their rooms, Emmett talked normally and
+without a single paroxysm about the effect his stammer must have had
+upon the Principal. Mark did his best to reassure poor Emmett.
+
+"Really," he said, "it was scarcely noticeable to anybody else. You
+noticed it, because you felt your tongue getting wedged like that
+between your teeth; but other people would hardly have noticed it at
+all. When the Principal asked you if you were going to take Holy Orders
+yourself, I'm sure he only thought you hadn't quite made up your mind
+yet."
+
+"But I'm sure he did notice something," poor Emmett bewailed. "Because
+he began to hum."
+
+"Well, but he was always humming," said Mark. "He hummed all through
+dinner while he was reading those book catalogues."
+
+"It's very kind of you, Lidderdale," said Emmett, "to make the best of
+it for me, but I'm not such a fool as I look, and the Principal
+certainly hummed six times as loud whenever he asked me a question as
+he did over those catalogues. I know what I look like when I get into
+one of those states. I once caught sight of myself in a glass by
+accident, and now whenever my tongue gets caught up like that I'm
+wondering all the time why everybody doesn't get up and run out of the
+room."
+
+"But I assure you," Mark persisted, "that little things like that--"
+
+"Little things like that!" Emmett interrupted furiously. "It's all very
+well for you, Lidderdale, to talk about little things like that. If you
+had a tongue like mine which seems to get bigger instead of smaller
+every year, you'd feel very differently."
+
+"But people always grow out of stammering," Mark pointed out.
+
+"Thanks very much," said Emmett bitterly, "but where shall I be by the
+time I've grown out of it? You don't suppose I shall win this
+scholarship, do you, after they've seen me gibbering and mouthing at
+them like that? But if only I could manage somehow to get to Oxford I
+should have a chance of being ordained, and--" he broke off, perhaps
+unwilling to embarrass his rival by any more lamentations.
+
+"Do forget about this evening," Mark begged, "and come up to my room and
+have a talk before you turn in."
+
+"No, thanks very much," said Emmett. "I must sit up and do some work.
+We've got that general knowledge paper to-morrow morning."
+
+"But you won't be able to acquire much more general knowledge in one
+evening," Mark protested.
+
+"I might," said Emmett darkly. "I noticed a Whitaker's almanack in the
+rooms I have. My only chance to get this scholarship is to do really
+well in my papers; and though I know it's no good and that this is my
+last chance, I'm not going to neglect anything that could possibly help.
+I've got a splendid memory for statistics, and if they'll only ask a few
+statistics in the general knowledge paper I may have some luck
+to-morrow. Good-night, Lidderdale, I'm sorry to have inflicted myself on
+you like this."
+
+Emmett hurried away up the staircase leading to his room and left his
+rival standing on the moonlit grass of the quadrangle. Mark was turning
+toward his own staircase when he heard a window open above and Emmett's
+voice:
+
+"I've found another Whitaker of the year before," it proclaimed. "I'll
+read that, and you'd better read this year's. If by any chance I did win
+this scholarship, I shouldn't like to think I'd taken an unfair
+advantage of you, Lidderdale."
+
+"Thanks very much, Emmett," said Mark. "But I think I'll have a shot at
+getting to bed early."
+
+"Ah, you're not worrying," said Emmett gloomily, retiring from the
+window.
+
+When Mark was sitting by the fire in his room and thinking over the
+dinner with the Principal and poor Emmett's stammering and poor Emmett's
+words in the quad afterwards, he began to imagine what it would mean to
+poor Emmett if he failed to win the scholarship. Mark had not been so
+successful himself in these examinations as to justify a grand
+self-confidence; but he could not regard Emmett as a dangerous
+competitor. Had he the right in view of Emmett's handicap to accept this
+scholarship at his expense? To be sure, he might urge on his own behalf
+that without it he should himself be debarred from Oxford. What would
+the loss of it mean? It would mean, first of all, that Mr. Ogilvie would
+make the financial effort to maintain him for three years as a commoner,
+an effort which he could ill afford to make and which Mark had not the
+slightest intention of allowing him to make. It would mean, next, that
+he should have to occupy himself during the years before his ordination
+with some kind of work among people. He obviously could not go on
+reading theology at Wych-on-the-Wold until he went to Glastonbury. Such
+an existence, however attractive, was no preparation for the active life
+of a priest. It would mean, thirdly, a great disappointment to his
+friend and patron, and considering the social claims of the Church of
+England it would mean a handicap for himself. There was everything to be
+said for winning this scholarship, nothing to be said against it on the
+grounds of expediency. On the grounds of expediency, no, but on other
+grounds? Should he not be playing the better part if he allowed Emmett
+to win? No doubt all that was implied in the necessity for him to win a
+scholarship was equally implied in the necessity for Emmett to win one.
+It was obvious that Emmett was no better off than himself; it was
+obvious that Emmett was competing in a kind of despair. Mark remembered
+how a few minutes ago his rival had offered him this year's Whitaker,
+keeping for himself last year's almanack. Looked at from the point of
+view of Emmett who really believed that something might be gained at
+this eleventh hour from a study of the more recent volume, it had been a
+fine piece of self-denial. It showed that Emmett had Christian talents
+which surely ought not to be wasted because he was handicapped by a
+stammer.
+
+The spell that Oxford had already cast on Mark, the glamour of the
+firelight on the walls and raftered ceiling of this room haunted by
+centuries of youthful hope, did not persuade him how foolish it was to
+surrender all this. On the contrary, this prospect of Oxford so
+beautiful in the firelight within, so fair in the moonlight without,
+impelled him to renounce it, and the very strength of his temptation to
+enjoy all this by winning the scholarship helped him to make up his mind
+to lose it. But how? The obvious course was to send in idiotic answers
+for the rest of his papers. Yet examinations were so mysterious that
+when he thought he was being most idiotic he might actually be gaining
+his best marks. Moreover, the examiners might ascribe his answers to ill
+health, to some sudden attack of nerves, especially if his papers to-day
+had been tolerably good. Looking back at the Principal's attitude after
+dinner that night, Mark could not help feeling that there had been
+something in his manner which had clearly shown a determination not to
+award the scholarship to poor Emmett if it could possibly be avoided.
+The safest way would be to escape to-morrow morning, put up at some
+country inn for the next two days, and go back to Wych-on-the-Wold; but
+if he did that, the college authorities might write to Mr. Ogilvie to
+demand the reason for such extraordinary behaviour. And how should he
+explain it? If he really intended to deny himself, he must take care
+that nobody knew he was doing so. It would give him an air of
+unbearable condescension, should it transpire that he had deliberately
+surrendered his scholarship to Emmett. Moreover, poor Emmett would be so
+dreadfully mortified if he found out. No, he must complete his papers,
+do them as badly as he possibly could, and leave the result to the
+wisdom of God. If God wished Emmett to stammer forth His praises and
+stutter His precepts from the pulpit, God would know how to manage that
+seemingly so intractable Principal. Or God might hear his prayers and
+cure poor Emmett of his impediment. Mark wondered to what saint was
+entrusted the patronage of stammerers; but he could not remember. The
+man in whose rooms he was lodging possessed very few books, and those
+few were mostly detective stories.
+
+It amused Mark to make a fool of himself next morning in the general
+knowledge paper. He flattered himself that no candidate for a
+scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall had ever shown such black ignorance of
+the facts of every-day life. Had he been dropped from Mars two days
+before, he could scarcely have shown less knowledge of the Earth. Mark
+tried to convey an impression that he had been injudiciously crammed
+with Latin and Greek, and in the afternoon he produced a Latin prose
+that would have revolted the easy conscience of a fourth form boy.
+Finally, on the third day, in an unseen passage set from the Georgics he
+translated _tonsisque ferunt mantelia villis_ by _having pulled down the
+villas (i. e. literally shaved) they carry off the mantelpieces_ which
+he followed up with translating _Maeonii carchesia Bacchi_ as the _lees
+of Maeonian wine (i.e. literally carcases of Maeonian Bacchus)_.
+
+"I say, Lidderdale," said Emmett, when they came out of the lecture room
+where the examination was being held. "I had a tremendous piece of luck
+this afternoon."
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"Yes, I've just been reading the fourth Georgics last term, and I don't
+think I made a single mistake in that unseen."
+
+"Good work," said Mark.
+
+"I wonder when they'll let us know who's got the scholarship," said
+Emmett. "But of course you've won," he added with a sigh.
+
+"I did very badly both yesterday and to-day."
+
+"Oh, you're only saying that to encourage me," Emmett sighed. "It sounds
+a dreadful thing to say and I ought not to say it because it'll make you
+uncomfortable, but if I don't succeed, I really think I shall kill
+myself."
+
+"All right, that's a bargain," Mark laughed; and when his rival shook
+hands with him at parting he felt that poor Emmett was going home to
+Rutland convinced that Mark was just as hard-hearted as the rest of the
+world and just as ready to laugh at his misfortune.
+
+It was Saturday when the examination was finished, and Mark wished he
+could be granted the privilege of staying over Sunday in college. He had
+no regrets for what he had done; he was content to let this experience
+be all that he should ever intimately gain of Oxford; but he should like
+to have the courage to accost one of the tutors and to tell him that
+being convinced he should never come to Oxford again he desired the
+privilege of remaining until Monday morning, so that he might
+crystallize in that short space of time an impression which, had he been
+successful in gaining the scholarship, would have been spread over four
+years. Mark was not indulging in sentiment; he really felt that by the
+intensity of the emotion with which he would live those twenty-four
+hours he should be able to achieve for himself as much as he should
+achieve in four years. So far as the world was concerned, this
+experience would be valueless; for himself it would be beyond price. So
+far as the world was concerned, he would never have been to Oxford; but
+could he be granted this privilege, Oxford would live for ever in his
+heart, a refuge and a meditation until the grave. Yet this coveted
+experience must be granted from without to make it a perfect experience.
+To ask and to be refused leave to stay till Monday would destroy for him
+the value of what he had already experienced in three days' residence;
+even to ask and to be granted the privilege would spoil it in
+retrospect. He went down the stairs from his room and stood in the
+little quadrangle, telling himself that at any rate he might postpone
+his departure until twilight and walk the seven miles from Shipcot to
+Wych-on-the-Wold. While he was on his way to notify the porter of the
+time of his departure he met the Principal, who stopped him and asked
+how he had got on with his papers. Mark wondered if the Principal had
+been told about his lamentable performance and was making inquiries on
+his own account to find out if the unsuccessful candidate really was a
+lunatic.
+
+"Rather badly, I'm afraid, sir."
+
+"Well, I shall see you at dinner to-night," said the Principal
+dismissing Mark with a gesture before he had time even to look
+surprised. This was a new perplexity, for Mark divined from the
+Principal's manner that he had entirely forgotten that the scholarship
+examination was over and that the candidates had already dined with him.
+He went into the lodge and asked the porter's advice.
+
+"The Principal's a most absent-minded gentleman," said the porter. "Most
+absent-minded, he is. He's the talk of Oxford sometimes is the
+Principal. What do you think he went and did only last term. Why, he was
+having some of the senior men to tea and was going to put some coal on
+the fire with the tongs and some sugar in his cup. Bothered if he didn't
+put the sugar in the fire and a lump of coal in his cup. It didn't so
+much matter him putting sugar in the fire. That's all according, as they
+say. But fancy--well, I tell you we had a good laugh over it in the
+lodge when the gentlemen came out and told me."
+
+"Ought I to explain that I've already dined with him?" Mark asked.
+
+"Are you in any what you might call immediate hurry to get away?" the
+porter asked judicially.
+
+"I'm in no hurry at all. I'd like to stay a bit longer."
+
+"Then you'd better go to dinner with him again to-night and stay in
+college over the Sunday. I'll take it upon myself to explain to the Dean
+why you're still here. If it had been tea I should have said 'don't
+bother about it,' but dinner's another matter, isn't it? And he always
+has dinner laid for two or more in case he's asked anybody and
+forgotten."
+
+Thus it came about that for the second time Mark dined with the
+Principal, who disconcerted him by saying when he arrived:
+
+"I remember now that you dined with me the night before last. You should
+have told me. I forget these things. But never mind, you'd better stay
+now you're here."
+
+The Principal read second-hand book catalogues all through dinner just
+as he had done two nights ago, and he only interrupted his perusal to
+inquire in courtly tones if Mark would take another glass of wine. The
+only difference between now and the former occasion was the absence of
+poor Emmett and his paroxysms. After dinner with some misgivings if he
+ought not to leave his host to himself Mark followed him upstairs to the
+library. The principal was one of those scholars who live in an
+atmosphere of their own given off by old calf-bound volumes and who
+apparently can only inhale the air of the world in which ordinary men
+move when they are smoking their battered old pipes. Mark sitting
+opposite to him by the fireside was tempted to pour out the history of
+himself and Emmett, to explain how he had come to make such a mess of
+the examination. Perhaps if the Principal had alluded to his papers Mark
+would have found the courage to talk about himself; but the Principal
+was apparently unaware that his guest had any ambitions to enter St.
+Osmund's Hall, and whatever questions he asked related to the ancient
+folios and quartos he took down in turn from his shelves. A clock struck
+ten in the moonlight without, and Mark rose to go. He felt a pang as he
+walked from the cloudy room and looked for the last time at that tall
+remote scholar, who had forgotten his guest's existence at the moment he
+ceased to shake his hand and who by the time he had reached the doorway
+was lost again in the deeps of the crabbed volume resting upon his
+knees. Mark sighed as he closed the library door behind him, for he knew
+that he was shutting out a world. But when he stood in the small silver
+quadrangle Mark was glad that he had not given way to the temptation of
+confiding in the Principal. It would have been a feeble end to his first
+denial of self. He was sure that he had done right in surrendering his
+place to Emmett, for was not the unexpected opportunity to spend these
+few more hours in Oxford a sign of God's approval? _Bright as the
+glimpses of eternity to saints accorded in their mortal hour._ Such was
+Oxford to-night.
+
+Mark sat for a long while at the open window of his room until the moon
+had passed on her way and the quadrangle was in shadow; and while he sat
+there he was conscious of how many people had inhabited this small
+quadrangle and of how they too had passed on their way like the moon,
+leaving behind them no more than he should leave behind from this one
+hour of rapture, no more than the moon had left of her silver upon the
+dim grass below.
+
+Mark was not given to gazing at himself in mirrors, but he looked at
+himself that night in the mirror of the tiny bedroom, into which the
+April air came up sweet and frore from the watermeadows of the Cherwell
+close at hand.
+
+"What will you do now?" he asked his reflection. "Yet, you have such a
+dark ecclesiastical face that I'm sure you'll be a priest whether you go
+to Oxford or not."
+
+Mark was right in supposing his countenance to be ecclesiastical. But it
+was something more than that: it was religious. Even already, when he
+was barely eighteen, the high cheekbones and deepset burning eyes gave
+him an ascetic look, while the habit of prayer and meditation had added
+to his expression a steadfast purpose that is rarely seen in people as
+young as him. What his face lacked were those contours that come from
+association with humanity; the ripeness that is bestowed by long
+tolerance of folly, the mellowness that has survived the icy winds of
+disillusion. It was the absence of these contours that made Mark think
+his face so ecclesiastical; however, if at eighteen he had possessed
+contours and soft curves, they would have been nothing but the contours
+and soft curves of that rose, youth; and this ecclesiastical bonyness
+would not fade and fall as swiftly as that.
+
+Mark turned from the glass in sudden irritation at his selfishness in
+speculating about his appearance and his future, when in a short time he
+should have to break the news to his guardian that he had thrown away
+for a kindly impulse the fruit of so many months of diligence and care.
+
+"What am I going to say to Ogilvie?" he exclaimed. "I can't go back to
+Wych and live there in pleasant idleness until it's time to go to
+Glastonbury. I must have some scheme for the immediate future."
+
+In bed when the light was out and darkness made the most fantastic
+project appear practical, Mark had an inspiration to take the habit of a
+preaching friar. Why should he not persuade Dorward to join him?
+Together they would tramp the English country, compelling even the
+dullest yokels to hear the word of God . . . discalced . . . over hill,
+down dale . . . telling stories of the saints and martyrs in remote inns
+. . . deep lanes . . . the butterflies and the birds . . . Dorward
+should say Mass in the heart of great woods . . . over hill, down dale
+. . . discalced . . . preaching to men of Christ. . . .
+
+Mark fell asleep.
+
+In the morning Mark heard Mass at the church of the Cowley Fathers, a
+strengthening experience, because the Gregorian there so strictly and so
+austerely chanted without any consideration for sentimental humanity
+possessed that very effect of liberating and purifying spirit held in
+the bonds of flesh which is conveyed by the wind blowing through a grove
+of pines or by waves quiring below a rocky shore.
+
+If Mark had had the least inclination to be sorry for himself and
+indulge in the flattery of regret, it vanished in this music. Rolling
+down through time on the billows of the mighty Gregorian it were as
+grotesque to pity oneself as it were for an Arctic explorer to build a
+snowman for company at the North Pole.
+
+Mark came out of St. John's, Cowley, into the suburban prettiness of
+Iffley Road, where men and women in their Sunday best tripped along in
+the April sunlight, tripped along in their Sunday best like newly
+hatched butterflies and beetles. Mark went in and out of colleges all
+day long, forgetting about the problem of his immediate future just as
+he forgot that the people in the sunny streets were not really
+butterflies and beetles. At twilight he decided to attend Evensong at
+St. Barnabas'. Perhaps the folk in the sunny April streets had turned
+his thoughts unconsciously toward the simple aspirations of simple
+human nature. He felt when he came into the warm candle-lit church like
+one who has voyaged far and is glad to be at home again. How everybody
+sang together that night, and how pleasant Mark found this
+congregational outburst. It was all so jolly that if the organist had
+suddenly turned round like an Italian organ-grinder and kissed his
+fingers to the congregation, his action would have seemed perfectly
+appropriate. Even during the _Magnificat_, when the altar was being
+censed, the tinkling of the thurible reminded Mark of a tambourine; and
+the lighting and extinction of the candles was done with as much
+suppressed excitement as if the candles were going to shoot red and
+green stars or go leaping and cracking all round the chancel.
+
+It happened this evening that the preacher was Father Rowley, that
+famous priest of the Silchester College Mission in the great naval port
+of Chatsea. Father Rowley was a very corpulent man with a voice of such
+compassion and with an eloquence so simple that when he ascended into
+the pulpit, closed his eyes, and began to speak, his listeners
+involuntarily closed their eyes and followed that voice whithersoever it
+led them. He neither changed the expression of his face nor made use of
+dramatic gestures; he scarcely varied his tone, yet he could keep a
+congregation breathlessly attentive for an hour. Although he seemed to
+be speaking in a kind of trance, it was evident that he was unusually
+conscious of his hearers, for if by chance some pious woman coughed or
+turned the pages of a prayer-book he would hold up the thread of his
+sermon and without any change of tone reprove her. It was strange to
+watch him at such a moment, his eyes still tightly shut and yet giving
+the impression of looking directly at the offending member of the
+congregation. This evening he was preaching about a naval disaster which
+had lately occurred, the sinking of a great battleship by another great
+battleship through a wrong signal. He was describing the scene when the
+news reached Chatsea, telling of the sweethearts and wives of the lost
+bluejackets who waited hoping against hope to hear that their loved ones
+had escaped death and hearing nearly always the worst news.
+
+"So many of our own dear bluejackets and marines, some of whom only
+last Christmas had been eating their plum duff at our Christmas dinner,
+so many of my own dear boys whom I prepared for Confirmation, whose
+first Confession I had heard, and to whom I had given for the first time
+the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
+
+He spoke too of what it meant in the future of material suffering on top
+of their mental agony. He asked for money to help these women
+immediately, and he spoke fiercely of the Admiralty red tape and of the
+obstruction of the official commission appointed to administer the
+relief fund.
+
+The preacher went on to tell stories from the lives of these boys,
+finding in each of them some illustration of a Christian virtue and
+conveying to his listeners a sense of the extraordinary preciousness of
+human life, so that there was no one who heard him but was fain to weep
+for those young bluejackets and marines taken in their prime. He
+inspired in Mark a sense of shame that he had ever thought of people in
+the aggregate, that he had ever walked along a crowded street without
+perceiving the importance of every single human being that helped to
+compose its variety. While he sat there listening to the Missioner and
+watching the large tears roll slowly down his cheeks from beneath the
+closed lids, Mark wondered how he could have dared to suppose last night
+that he was qualified to become a friar and preach the Gospel to the
+poor. While Father Rowley was speaking, he began to apprehend that
+before he could aspire to do that he must himself first of all learn
+about Christ from those very poor whom he had planned to convert.
+
+This sermon was another milestone in Mark's religious life. It
+discovered in him a hidden treasure of humility, and it taught him to
+build upon the rock of human nature. He divined the true meaning of Our
+Lord's words to St. Peter: _Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build
+my church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it._ John was
+the disciple whom Jesus loved, but he chose Peter with all his failings
+and all his follies, with his weakness and his cowardice and his vanity.
+He chose Peter, the bedrock of human nature, and to him he gave the keys
+of Heaven.
+
+Mark knew that somehow he must pluck up courage to ask Father Rowley to
+let him come and work under him at Chatsea. He was sure that if he could
+only make him grasp the spirit in which he would offer himself, the
+spirit of complete humility devoid of any kind of thought that he was
+likely to be of the least use to the Mission, Father Rowley might accept
+his oblation. He would have liked to wait behind after Evensong and
+approach the Missioner directly, so that before speaking to Mr. Ogilvie
+he might know what chance the offer had of being accepted; but he
+decided against this course, because he felt that Father Rowley's
+compassion might be embarrassed if he had to refuse his request, a point
+of view that was characteristic of the mood roused in him by the sermon.
+He went back to sleep for the last time in an Oxford college, profoundly
+reassured of the rightness of his action in giving up the scholarship to
+Emmett, although, which was characteristic of his new mood, he had by
+this time begun to tell himself that he had really done nothing at all
+and that probably in any case Emmett would have been the chosen scholar.
+
+If Mark had still any doubts of his behaviour, they would have vanished
+when on getting into the train for Shipcot he found himself in an
+otherwise empty third-class smoking carriage opposite Father Rowley
+himself, who with a small black bag beside him, so small that Mark
+wondered how it could possibly contain the night attire of so fat a man,
+was sitting back in the corner with a large pipe in his mouth. He was
+wearing one of those square felt hats sometimes seen on the heads of
+farmers, and if one had only seen his head and hat without the grubby
+clerical attire beneath one might have guessed him to be a farmer. Mark
+noticed now that his eyes of a limpid blue were like a child's, and he
+realized that in his voice while he was preaching there had been the
+same sweet gravity of childhood. Just at this moment Father Rowley
+caught sight of someone he knew on the platform and shouting from the
+window of the compartment he attracted the attention of a young man
+wearing an Old Siltonian tie.
+
+"My dear man," he cried, "how are you? I've just made a most idiotic
+mistake. I got it into my head that I should be preaching here on the
+first Sunday in term and was looking forward to seeing so many
+Silchester men. I can't think how I came to make such a muddle."
+
+Father Rowley's shoulders filled up all the space of the window, so that
+Mark only heard scattered fragments of the conversation, which was
+mostly about Silchester and the Siltonians he had hoped to see at
+Oxford.
+
+"Good-bye, my dear man, good-bye," the Missioner shouted, as the train
+moved out of the station. "Come down and see us soon at Chatsea. The
+more of you men who come, the more we shall be pleased."
+
+Mark's heart leapt at these words, which seemed of good omen to his own
+suit. When Father Rowley was ensconced in his corner and once more
+puffing away at his pipe, Mark thought how ridiculous it would sound to
+say that he had heard him preach last night at St. Barnabas' and that,
+having been much moved by the sermon, he was anxious to be taken on at
+St. Agnes' as a lay helper. He wished that Father Rowley would make some
+remark to him that would lead up to his request, but all that Father
+Rowley said was:
+
+"This is a slow train to Birmingham, isn't it?"
+
+This led to a long conversation about trains, and slow though this one
+might be it was going much too fast for Mark, who would be at Shipcot in
+another twenty minutes without having taken any advantage of his lucky
+encounter.
+
+"Are you up at Oxford?" the priest at last inquired.
+
+It was now or never; and Mark took the opportunity given him by that one
+question to tell Father Rowley twenty disjointed facts about his life,
+which ended with a request to be allowed to come and work at Chatsea.
+
+"You can come and see us whenever you like," said the Missioner.
+
+"But I don't want just to come and pay a visit," said Mark. "I really do
+want to be given something to do, and I shan't be any expense. I only
+want to keep enough money to go to Glastonbury in four years' time. If
+you'd only see how I got on for a month. I don't pretend I can be of any
+help to you. I don't suppose I can. But I do so tremendously want you
+to help me."
+
+"Who did you say your father was?"
+
+"Lidderdale, James Lidderdale. He was priest-in-charge of the Lima
+Street Mission, which belonged to St. Simon's, Notting Hill, in those
+days. St. Wilfred's, Notting Dale, it is now."
+
+"Lidderdale," Father Rowley echoed. "I knew him. I knew him well. Lima
+Street. Viner's there now, a dear good fellow. So you're Lidderdale's
+son?"
+
+"I say, here's my station," Mark exclaimed in despair, "and you haven't
+said whether I can come or not."
+
+"Come down on Tuesday week," said Father Rowley. "Hurry up, or you'll
+get carried on to the next station."
+
+Mark waved his farewell, and he knew, as he drove back on the omnibus
+over the rolling wold to Wych that he had this morning won something
+much better than a scholarship at St. Osmund's Hall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+CHATSEA
+
+
+When Mark had been exactly a week at Chatsea he celebrated his
+eighteenth birthday by writing a long letter to the Rector of Wych:
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     St. Mark's Day.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     Thank you very much for sending me the money. I've handed it over
+     to a splendid fellow called Gurney who keeps all the accounts
+     (private or otherwise) in the Mission House. Poor chap, he's
+     desperately ill with asthma, and nobody thinks he can live much
+     longer. He suffers tortures, particularly at night, and as I sleep
+     in the next room I can hear him.
+
+     You mustn't think me inconsiderate because I haven't written
+     sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had seen a bit of this place
+     before I wrote to you so that you might have some idea what I was
+     doing and be able to realize that it is the one and only place
+     where I ought to be at the moment.
+
+     But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I want to try
+     to express a little of what your kindness has meant to me during
+     the last two years. I look back at myself just before my sixteenth
+     birthday when I was feeling that I should have to run away to sea
+     or do something mad in order to escape that solicitor's office, and
+     I simply gasp! What and where should I be now if it hadn't been for
+     you? You have always made light of the burden I must have been, and
+     though I have tried to show you my gratitude I'm afraid it hasn't
+     been very successful. I'm not being very successful now in putting
+     it into words. I know my failure to gain a scholarship at Oxford
+     has been a great disappointment to you, especially after you had
+     worked so hard yourself to coach me. Please don't be anxious about
+     my letting my books go to the wall here. I had a talk about this
+     with Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to do
+     in the district must only be done when I have a good morning's work
+     with my books behind me. I quite realize the importance of a
+     priest's education. One of the assistant priests here, a man called
+     Snaith, took a good degree at Cambridge both in classics and
+     theology, so I shall have somebody to keep me on the lines. If I
+     stay here three years and then have two years at Glastonbury I
+     don't honestly think that I shall start off much handicapped by
+     having missed both public school and university. I expect you're
+     smiling to read after one week of my staying here three years! But
+     I assure you that the moment I sat down to supper on the evening of
+     my arrival I felt at home. I think at first they all thought I was
+     an eager young Ritualist, but when they found that they didn't get
+     any rises out of ragging me, they shut up.
+
+     This house is a most extraordinary place. It is an old
+     Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has been made
+     into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty or ever likely
+     to be empty so far as I can see! I should think it must be rather
+     like what the guest house of a monastery used to be like in the old
+     days before the Reformation. The ground floor of the chapel has
+     been turned into a gymnasium, and twice a week the apparatus is
+     cleared away and we have a dance. Every other evening it's used
+     furiously by Father Rowley's "boys." They're such a jolly lot, and
+     most of them splendid gymnasts. Quite a few have become
+     professional acrobats since they opened the gymnasium. The first
+     morning after my arrival I asked Father Rowley if he'd got anything
+     special for me to do and he told me to catalogue the books in his
+     library. Everybody laughed at this, and I thought at first that
+     some joke was intended, but when I got to his room I found it
+     really was in utter confusion with masses of books lying about
+     everywhere. So I set to work pretty hard and after about three days
+     I got them catalogued and in good order. When I told him I had
+     finished he looked very surprised, and a solemn visit of inspection
+     was ordered. As the room was looking quite tidy at last, I didn't
+     mind. I've realized since that Father Rowley always sets people the
+     task of cataloguing and arranging his books when he doubts if they
+     are really worth their salt, and now he complains that I have
+     spoilt one of his best ordeals for slackers. I said to him that he
+     needn't be afraid because from what I could see of the way he
+     treated books they would be just as untidy as ever in another week.
+     Everybody laughed, though I was afraid at first they might consider
+     it rather cheek my talking like this, but you've got to stand up
+     for yourself here because there never was such a place for turning
+     a man inside out. It's a real discipline, and I think if I manage
+     to deserve to stay here three years I shall have the right to feel
+     I've had the finest training for Holy Orders anybody could possibly
+     have.
+
+     You know enough about Father Rowley yourself to understand how
+     impossible it would be for me to give any impression of his
+     personality in a letter. I have never felt so strongly the absolute
+     goodness of anybody. I suppose that some of the great mediaeval
+     saints like St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua must have been
+     like that. One reads about them and what they did, but the facts
+     one reads don't really tell anything. I always feel that what we
+     really depend on is a kind of tradition of their absolute
+     saintliness handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose
+     in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't
+     matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries
+     to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was
+     God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met
+     Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes
+     with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good
+     because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't
+     have ever been anything else but good, but I always feel that
+     people like him remain practically out of reach of the ordinary
+     person and that the goodness is all their own and dies with them
+     just as it was born with them. What I feel about a man like Father
+     Rowley is that he probably had a tremendous fight to be good. Of
+     course, I may be perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at
+     all. I know one of the people at the Mission House told me that,
+     though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or more
+     enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up both at St.
+     Agnes merely to set an example to weak people. I feel that his
+     goodness was with such energy fought for that it now exists as a
+     kind of complete thing and will go on existing when Father Rowley
+     himself is dead. I begin to understand the doctrine of the treasury
+     of merit. I remember you once told me how grateful I ought to be to
+     God because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack
+     most boys. I am grateful; but at the same time I can't claim any
+     merit for it! The only time in my life when I might have acquired
+     any merit was when I was at Haverton House. Instead of doing that,
+     I just dried up, and if I hadn't had that wonderful experience at
+     Whitsuntide in Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I
+     should be spiritually dead by now.
+
+     This is a very long letter, and I don't seem to have left myself
+     any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It reminds me of my
+     father's mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new
+     church is being built almost next door just as one was being built
+     in Lima Street. I went to the children's Mass last Sunday, and I
+     seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I
+     thought to myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for
+     his soul. Will you do so now next time you say a black Mass? This
+     is a wretched letter, and it doesn't succeed in the least in
+     expressing what I owe to you and what I already owe to Father
+     Rowley. I used to think that the Sacred Heart was a rather material
+     device for attracting the multitude, but I'm beginning to realize
+     in the atmosphere of St. Agnes' that it is a gloriously simple
+     devotion and that it is human nature's attempt to express the
+     inexpressible. I'll write to you again next week. Please give my
+     love to everybody at the Rectory.
+
+     Always your most affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+Father Rowley had been at St. Agnes' seven or eight years when Mark
+found himself attached to the Mission, in which time he had transformed
+the district completely. It was a small parish (actually of course it
+was not a parish at all, although it was fast qualifying to become one)
+of something over a thousand small houses, few of which were less than a
+century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after
+bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque
+quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but
+heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of
+its overcrowded and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness
+of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets
+and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always in view, and the windows of
+the pawnbrokers were filled with the relics of long voyages, with idols
+and large shells, with savage weapons and the handiwork of remote
+islands.
+
+When Mark came to live in Keppel Street, most of the brothels and many
+of the public houses had been eliminated from the district, and in their
+place flourished various clubs and guilds. The services in the church
+were crowded: there was a long roll of communicants; the civilization of
+the city of God was visible in this Chatsea slum. One or two of the lay
+helpers used to horrify Mark with stories of early days there, and when
+he seemed inclined to regret that he had arrived so late upon the scene,
+they used to tease him about his missionary spirit.
+
+"If he can't reform the people," said Cartwright, one of the lay
+helpers, a tall thin young man with a long nose and a pleasant smile,
+"he still has us to reform."
+
+"Come along, Mark Anthony," said Warrender, another lay helper, who
+after working for seven years among the poor had at last been charily
+accepted by the Bishop for ordination. "Come along. Why don't you try
+your hand on us?"
+
+"You people seem to think," said Mark, "that I've got a mania for
+reforming. I don't mean that I should like to see St. Agnes' where it
+was merely for my own personal amusement. The only thing I'm sorry about
+is that I didn't actually see the work being done."
+
+Father Rowley came in at this moment, and everybody shouted that Mark
+was going to preach a sermon.
+
+"Splendid," said the Missioner whose voice when not moved by emotion was
+rich in a natural unction that encouraged everyone round to suppose he
+was being successfully humorous, such a savour did it add to the most
+innutritious chaff. Those who were privileged to share his ordinary life
+never ceased to wonder how in the pulpit or in the confessional or at
+prayer this unction was replaced by a remote beauty of tone, a plangent
+and thrilling compassion that played upon the hearts of all who heard
+him.
+
+"Now really, Father Rowley," Mark protested. "Do I preach a great deal?
+I'm always being chaffed by Cartwright and Warrender about an alleged
+mania for reforming people, which only exists in their imagination."
+
+Indeed Mark had long ago grown out of the desire to reform or to convert
+anybody, although had he wished to keep his hand in, he could have had
+plenty of practice among the guests of the Mission House. Nobody had
+ever succeeded in laying down the exact number of casual visitors that
+could be accommodated therein. However full it appeared, there was
+always room for one more. Taking an average, day in, day out through the
+year, one might fairly say that there were always eight or nine casual
+guests in addition to the eight or nine permanent residents, of whom
+Mark was soon glad to be able to count himself one. The company was
+sufficiently mixed to have been offered as a proof to the sceptical that
+there was something after all in simple Christianity. There would
+usually be a couple of prefects from Silchester, one or two 'Varsity
+men, two or three bluejackets or marines, an odd soldier or so, a naval
+officer perhaps, a stray priest sometimes, an earnest seeker after
+Christian example often, and often a drunkard who had been dumped down
+at the door of St. Agnes' Mission House in the hope that where everybody
+else had failed Father Rowley might succeed. Then there were the tramps,
+some who had heard of a comfortable night's lodging, some who came
+whining and cringing with a pretence of religion. This last class was
+discouraged as much as possible, for one of the first rules of the
+Mission House was to show no favour to any man who claimed to be
+religious, it being Father Rowley's chief dread to make anybody's
+religion a paying concern. Sometimes a jailbird just released from
+prison would find in the Mission House an opportunity to recover his
+self-respect. But whoever the guest was, soldier, sailor, tinker,
+tailor, apothecary, ploughboy, or thief, he was judged at the Mission
+House as a man. Some of the visitors repaid their host by theft or
+fraud; but when they did, nobody uttered proverbs or platitudes about
+mistaken kindness. If one lame dog bit the hand that was helping him
+over the stile, the next dog that came limping along was helped over
+just as freely.
+
+"What right has one miserable mortal to be disillusioned by another
+miserable mortal?" Father Rowley demanded. "Our dear Lord when he was
+nailed to the cross said 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what
+they do.' He did not say, 'I am fed up with these people I have come
+down from Heaven to save. I've had enough of it. Send an angel with a
+pair of pincers to pull out these nails.'"
+
+If the Missioner's patience ever failed, it was when he had to deal with
+High Church young men who made pilgrimages to St. Agnes' because they
+had heard that this or that service was conducted there with a finer
+relish of Romanism than anywhere else at the moment in England. On one
+occasion a pietistic young creature, who brought with him his own lace
+cotta but forgot to bring his nightshirt, begged to be allowed the joy
+of serving Father Rowley at early Mass next morning. When they came back
+and were sitting round the breakfast table, this young man simpered in a
+ladylike voice:
+
+"Oh, Father, couldn't you keep your fingers closed when you give the
+_Dominus vobiscum_?"
+
+"Et cum spiritu tuo," shouted Father Rowley. "I can keep my fingers
+closed when I box your ears."
+
+And he proved it.
+
+It was a real box on the ears, so hard a blow that the ladylike young
+man burst into tears to the great indignation of a Chief Petty Officer
+staying in the Mission House, who declared that he was half in a mind to
+catch the young swab such a snitch on the conk as really would give him
+something to blubber about. Father Rowley evidently had no remorse for
+his violence, and the young man went away that afternoon saying how
+sorry he was that the legend of the good work being done at St. Agnes'
+had been so much exaggerated.
+
+Mark wrote an account of this incident, which had given him intense
+pleasure, to Mr. Ogilvie. Perhaps the Rector was afraid that Mark in his
+ambition to avoid "churchiness" was inclining toward the opposite
+extreme; or perhaps, charitable and saintly man though he was, he felt a
+pang of jealousy at Mark's unbounded admiration of his new friend; or
+perhaps it was merely that the east wind was blowing more sharply than
+usual that morning over the wold into the Rectory garden. Whatever the
+cause, his answering letter made Mark feel that the Rector did not
+appreciate Father Rowley as thoroughly as he ought.
+
+     The Rectory,
+
+     Wych-on-the-Wold.
+
+     Oxon.
+
+     Dec. 1.
+
+     My dear Mark,
+
+     I was glad to get your long and amusing letter of last week. I am
+     delighted to think that as the months go by you are finding work
+     among the poor more and more congenial. I would not for the world
+     suggest your coming back here for Christmas after what you tell me
+     of the amount of extra work it will entail for everybody in the
+     Mission House; at the same time it would be useless to pretend that
+     we shan't all be disappointed not to see you until the New Year.
+
+     On reading through your last letter again I feel just a little
+     worried lest, in the pleasure you derive from Father Rowley's
+     treatment of what was no doubt a very irritating young man, you may
+     be inclined to go to the opposite extreme and be too ready to laugh
+     at real piety when it is not accompanied by geniality and good
+     fellowship, or by an obvious zeal for good works. I know you will
+     acquit me of any desire to defend extreme "churchiness," and I have
+     no doubt you will remember one or two occasions in the past when I
+     was rather afraid that you were tending that way yourself. I am not
+     in the least criticizing Father Rowley's method of dealing with it,
+     but I am a trifle uneasy at the inordinate delight it seems to have
+     afforded you. Of course, it is intolerable for any young man
+     serving a priest at Mass to watch his fingers all the time, but I
+     don't think you have any right to assume because on this occasion
+     the young man showed himself so sensitive to mere externals that he
+     is always aware only of externals. Unfortunately a very great deal
+     of true and fervid piety exists under this apparent passion for
+     externals. Remember that the ordinary criticism by the man in the
+     street of Catholic ceremonies and of Catholic methods of worship
+     involves us all in this condemnation. I suppose that you would
+     consider yourself justified, should the circumstances permit (which
+     in this case of course they do not), in protesting against a
+     priest's not taking the Eastward Position when he said Mass. I was
+     talking to Colonel Fraser the other day, and he was telling me how
+     much he had enjoyed the ministrations of the Reverend Archibald
+     Tait, the Leicestershire cricketer, who throughout the "second
+     service" never once turned his back on the congregation, and, so
+     far as I could gather from the Colonel's description, conducted
+     this "second service" very much as a conjuror performs his tricks.
+     When I ventured to argue with the Colonel, he said to me: "That is
+     the worst of you High Churchmen, you make the ritual more important
+     than the Communion itself." All human judgments, my dear Mark, are
+     relative, and I have no doubt that this unpleasant young man (who,
+     as I have already said, was no doubt justly punished by Father
+     Rowley) may have felt the same kind of feeling in a different
+     degree that I should feel if I assisted at the jugglery of the
+     Reverend Archibald Tait. At any rate you, my dear boy, are bound to
+     credit this young man with as much sincerity as yourself, otherwise
+     you commit a sin against charity. You must acquire at least as much
+     toleration for the Ritualist as I am glad to notice you are
+     acquiring for the thief. When you are a priest yourself, and in a
+     comparatively short time you will be a priest, I do hope you won't,
+     without his experience, try to imitate Father Rowley too closely in
+     his summary treatment of what I have already I hope made myself
+     quite clear in believing to be in this case a most insufferable
+     young man. Don't misunderstand this letter. I have such great hopes
+     of you in the stormy days to come, and the stormy days are coming,
+     that I should feel I was wrong if I didn't warn you of your
+     attitude towards the merest trifles, for I shall always judge you
+     and your conduct by standards that I should be very cautious of
+     setting for most of my penitents.
+
+     Your ever affectionate,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+
+     My mother and Miriam send you much love. We miss you greatly at
+     Wych. Esther seems happy in her convent and will soon be clothed as
+     a novice.
+
+When Mark read this letter, he was prompt to admit himself in the
+wrong; but he could not bear the least implied criticism of Father
+Rowley.
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     Dec. 3.
+
+     My dear Mr. Ogilvie,
+
+     I'm afraid I must have expressed myself very badly in my last
+     letter if I gave you the least idea that Father Rowley was not
+     always charity personified. He had probably come to the conclusion
+     that the young man was not much good and no doubt he deliberately
+     made it impossible for him to stay on at the Mission House. We do
+     get an awful lot of mere loafers here; I don't suppose that anybody
+     who keeps open house can avoid getting them. After all, if the
+     young man had been worth anything he would have realized that he
+     had made a fool of himself and by the way he took his snubbing have
+     re-established himself. What he actually did was to sulk and clear
+     out with a sneer at the work done here. I'm sorry I gave you the
+     impression that I was triumphing so tremendously over his
+     discomfiture. By writing about it I probably made the incident
+     appear much more important than it really was. I've no doubt I did
+     triumph a little, and I'm afraid I shall never be able not to feel
+     rather glad when a fellow like that is put in his place. I am not
+     for a moment going to try to argue that you can carry Christian
+     charity too far. The more one meditates on the words, and actions
+     of Our Lord, the more one grasps how impossible it is to carry
+     charity too far. All the same, one owes as much charity to Father
+     Rowley as to the young man. This sounds now I have written it down
+     as if I were getting in a hit at you, and that is the worst of
+     writing letters to justify oneself. What I am trying to say is that
+     if I were to have taken up arms for the young man and supposed him
+     to be ill-used or misjudged I should be criticizing Father Rowley.
+     I think that perhaps you don't quite realize what a saint he is in
+     every way. This is my fault, no doubt, because in my letters to you
+     I have always emphasized anything that would bring into relief his
+     personality. I expect that I've been too much concerned to draw a
+     picture of him as a man, in doing which I've perhaps been
+     unsuccessful in giving you a picture of him as a priest. It's
+     always difficult to talk or write about one's intimate religious
+     feelings, and you've been the only person to whom I ever have been
+     able to talk about them. However much I admire and revere Father
+     Rowley I doubt if I could talk or write to him about myself as I do
+     to you.
+
+     Until I came here I don't think I ever quite realized all that the
+     Blessed Sacrament means. I had accepted the Sacrifice of the Mass
+     as one accepts so much in our creed, without grasping its full
+     implication. If anybody were to have put me through a catechism
+     about the dogma I should have answered with theological exactitude,
+     without any appearance of misapprehending the meaning of it; but it
+     was not until I came here that its practical reality--I don't know
+     if I'm expressing myself properly or not, I'm pretty sure I'm not;
+     I don't mean practical application and I don't mean any kind of
+     addition to my faith; perhaps what I mean is that I've learnt to
+     grasp the mystery of the Mass outside myself, outside that is to
+     say my own devotion, my own awe, as a practical fact alive to these
+     people here. Sometimes when I go to Mass I feel as people who
+     watched Our Lord with His disciples and followers must have felt. I
+     feel like one of those people who ran after Him and asked Him what
+     they could do to be saved. I feel when I look at what has been done
+     here as if I must go to each of these poor people in turn and beg
+     them to bring me to the feet of Christ, just as I suppose on the
+     shores of the sea of Galilee people must have begged St. Peter or
+     St. Andrew or St. James or St. John to introduce them, if one can
+     use such a word for such an occasion. This seems to me the great
+     work that Father Rowley has effected in this parish. I have only
+     had one rather shy talk with him about religion, and in the course
+     of it I said something in praise of what his personality had
+     effected.
+
+     "My personality has effected nothing," he answered. "Everything
+     here is effected by the Blessed Sacrament."
+
+     That is why he surely has the right without any consideration for
+     the dignity of churchy young men to box their ears if they question
+     his outward respect for the Blessed Sacrament. Even Our Lord found
+     it necessary at least on one occasion to chase the buyers and
+     sellers out of the Temple, and though it is not recorded that He
+     boxed the ears of any Pharisee, it seems to me quite permissible to
+     believe that He did! He lashed them with scorn anyway.
+
+     To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry of the
+     so-called Evangelical party "Jesus only"? Well, Father Rowley has
+     really managed to make out of what was becoming a sort of
+     ecclesiastical party cry something that really is evangelical and
+     at the same time Catholic. These people are taught to make the
+     Blessed Sacrament the central fact of their lives in a way that I
+     venture to say no Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has
+     ever made Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts,
+     because with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them, Which
+     is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures. I could fill a
+     book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls.
+     The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has
+     such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that
+     by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his
+     flock. Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly
+     that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not
+     believe, and I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any
+     use without Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of
+     Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed
+     Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural service.
+     Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself, so
+     that the poor people may flock round Him. He does not go round
+     arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their
+     lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every
+     difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers
+     them the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a great
+     use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who
+     considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions
+     revolve round that one great fact. "Jesus Christ is what you need,"
+     he says, "and Jesus Christ is here in your church, here upon your
+     altar."
+
+     You can't go into the little church without finding fifty people
+     praying before the Blessed Sacrament. The other day when the "King
+     Harry" was sunk by the "Trafalgar," the people here subscribed I
+     forget how many pounds for the widows and children of the
+     bluejackets and marines of the Mission who were drowned, and when
+     it was finished and the subscription list was closed, they
+     subscribed all over again to erect an altar at which to say Masses
+     for the dead. And the old women living in Father Rowley's free
+     houses that were once brothels gave up their summer outing so that
+     the money spent on them might be added to the fund. When the Bishop
+     of Silchester came here last week for Confirmation he asked Father
+     Rowley what that altar was.
+
+     "That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," he said. But when
+     Father Rowley told him about the poor people and the old women who
+     had no money of their own, he said: "That is the most beautiful
+     thing I've ever heard."
+
+     I am beginning to write as if it was necessary to convince you of
+     the necessity of making the Blessed Sacrament the central feature
+     of the religious life to-day and for ever until the end of the
+     world. But, I know you won't think I'm doing anything of the kind,
+     for really I am only trying to show you how much my faith has been
+     strengthened and how much my outlook has deepened and how much more
+     than ever I long to be a priest to be able to give poor people
+     Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE DRUNKEN PRIEST
+
+
+Gradually, Mark found to his pleasure and his pride that he was
+becoming, if not indispensable to Father Rowley (the Missioner found no
+human being indispensable) at any rate quite evidently useful. Perhaps
+Father Rowley though that in allowing himself to rely considerably upon
+Mark's secretarial talent he was indulging himself in a luxury to which
+he was not entitled. That was Father Rowley's way. The moment he
+discovered himself enjoying anything too much, whether it was a cigar or
+a secretary, he cut himself off from it, and this not in any spirit of
+mortification for mortification's sake, but because he dreaded the
+possibility of putting the slightest drag upon his freedom to criticize
+others. He had no doubt at all in his own mind that he was perfectly
+justified in making use of Mark's intelligence and energy. But in a
+place like the Mission House, where everybody from lay helper to casual
+guest was supposed to stand on his own feet, the Missioner himself felt
+that he must offer an example of independence.
+
+"You're spoiling me, Mark Anthony," he said one day. "There's nothing
+for me to do this evening."
+
+"I know," Mark agreed contentedly. "I want to give you a rest for once."
+
+"Rest?" the priest echoed. "You don't seriously expect a fat man like me
+to sit down in an armchair and rest, do you? Besides, you've got your
+own reading to do, and you didn't come to Chatsea as my punkah walla."
+
+Mark insisted that he was getting along in his own way quite fast
+enough, and that he had plenty of time on his hands to keep Father
+Rowley's correspondence in some kind of order.
+
+"All these other people have any amount to do," said Mark. "Cartwright
+has his boys every evening and Warrender has his men."
+
+"And Mark Anthony has nothing but a fat, poverty-stricken, slothful
+mission priest," Father Rowley gurgled.
+
+"Yes, and you're more trouble than all the rest put together. Look here,
+I've written to the Bishop's chaplain about that confirmation; I
+explained why we wanted to hold a special confirmation for these two
+boys we are emigrating, and he has written back to say that the Bishop
+has no objection to a special confirmation's being held by the Bishop of
+Matabeleland when he comes to stay here next week. At the same time, he
+says the Bishop doesn't want it to become a precedent."
+
+"No. I can quite understand that," Father Rowley chuckled. "Bishops are
+haunted by the creation of precedents. A precedent in the life of a
+bishop is like an illegitimate child in the life of a respectable
+churchwarden. No, the only thing I fear is that if I devour all your
+spare time you won't get quite what you wanted to get by coming to live
+with us."
+
+He laid a fat hand on Mark's shoulder.
+
+"Please don't bother about me," said Mark. "I get all I want and more
+than I expected if I can be of the least use to you. I know I'm rather
+disappointing you by not behaving like half the people who come down
+here and want to get up a concert on Monday, a dance on Tuesday, a
+conjuring entertainment on Wednesday, a street procession on Thursday, a
+day of intercession on Friday, and an amateur dramatic entertainment on
+Saturday, not to mention acting as ceremonarius on Sunday. I know you'd
+like me to propose all sorts of energetic diversions, so that you could
+have the pleasure of assuring me that I was only proposing them to
+gratify my own vanity, which of course would be perfectly true. Luckily
+I'm of a retiring disposition, and I don't want to do anything to help
+the ten thousand benighted parishioners of Saint Agnes', except
+indirectly by striving to help in my own feeble way the man who really
+is helping them. Now don't throw that inkpot at me, because the room's
+quite dirty enough already, and as I've made you sit still for five
+minutes I've achieved something this evening that mighty few people
+have achieved in Keppel Street. I believe the only time you really rest
+is in the confessional box."
+
+"Mark Anthony, Mark Anthony," said the priest, "you talk a great deal
+too much. Come along now, it's bedtime."
+
+One of the rules of the Mission House was that every inmate should be in
+bed by ten o'clock and all lights out by a quarter past. The day began
+with Mass at seven o'clock at which everybody was expected to be
+present; and from that time onward everybody was so fully occupied that
+it was essential to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Guests who came down
+for a night or two were often apt to forget how much the regular workers
+had to do and what a tax it put upon the willing servants to manage a
+house of which nobody could say ten minutes before a meal how many would
+sit down to it, nor even until lights out for how many people beds must
+be made. In case any guest should forget this rule by coming back after
+ten o'clock, Father Rowley made a point of having the front door bell to
+ring in his bedroom, so that he might get out of bed at any hour of the
+night and admit the loiterer. Guests were warned what would be the
+effect of their lack of consideration, and it was seldom that Father
+Rowley was disturbed.
+
+Among the guests there was one class of which a representative was
+usually to be found at the Mission House. This was the drunken
+clergyman, which sounds as if there was at this date a high proportion
+of drunken clergymen in the Church of England; but which means that when
+one did come to St. Agnes' he usually stayed for a long time, because he
+would in most cases have been sent there when everybody else had
+despaired of him to see what Father Rowley could effect.
+
+About the time when Mark was beginning to be recognized as Father
+Rowley's personal vassal, it happened that the Reverend George Edward
+Mousley who had been handed on from diocese to diocese during the last
+five years had lately reached the Mission House. For more than two
+months now he had spent his time inconspicuously reading in his own
+room, and so well had he behaved, so humbly had he presented himself to
+the notice of his fellow guests, that Father Rowley was moved one
+afternoon to dictate a letter about him to Mark, who felt that the
+Missioner by taking him so far into his confidence had surrendered to
+his pertinacity and that thenceforth he might consider himself
+established as his private secretary.
+
+"The letter is to the Lord Bishop Suffragan of Warwick, St. Peter's
+Rectory, Warwick," Father Rowley began. "My dear Bishop of Warwick, I
+have now had poor Mousley here for two months. It is not a long time in
+which to effect a lasting reformation of one who has fallen so often and
+so grievously, but I think you know me well enough not to accuse me of
+being too sanguine about drunken priests. I have had too many of them
+here for that. In his case however I do feel justified in asking you to
+agree with me in letting him have an opportunity to regain the respect
+due to himself and the reverence due to his priesthood by being allowed
+once more to the altar. I should not dream of allowing him to officiate
+without your permission, because his sad history has been so much a
+personal burden to yourself. I'm afraid that after the many
+disappointments he has inflicted upon you, you will be doubtful of my
+judgment. Yet I do think that the critical moment has arrived when by
+surprising him thus we might clinch the matter of his future behaviour
+once and for all. His conduct here has been so humble and patient and in
+every way exemplary that my heart bleeds for him. Therefore, my dear
+Bishop of Warwick, I hope you will agree to what I firmly trust will be
+the completion of his spiritual cure. I am writing to you quite
+impersonally and informally, as you see, so that in replying to me you
+will not be involving yourself in the affairs of another diocese. You
+will, of course, put me down as much a Jesuit as ever in writing to you
+like this, but you will equally, I know, believe me to be, Yours ever
+affectionately in Our Blessed Lord.
+
+"And I'll sign it as soon as you can type it out," Father Rowley wound
+up.
+
+"Oh, I do hope he will agree," Mark exclaimed.
+
+"He will," the Missioner prophesied. "He will because he is a wise and
+tender and godly man and therefore will never be more than a Bishop
+Suffragan as long as he lives. Mark!"
+
+Mark looked up at the severity of the tone.
+
+"Mark! Correct me when I fall into the habit of sneering at the
+episcopate."
+
+That night Father Rowley was attending a large temperance demonstration
+in the Town Hall for the purpose of securing if possible a smaller
+proportion of public houses than one for every eighty of the population,
+which was the average for Chatsea. The meeting lasted until nearly ten
+o'clock; and it had already struck the hour when Father Rowley with Mark
+and two or three others got back to Keppel Street. There was nothing
+Father Rowley disliked so much as arriving home himself after ten, and
+he hurried up to his room without inquiring if everybody was in.
+
+Mark's window looked out on Keppel Street; and the May night being warm
+and his head aching from the effects of the meeting, he sat for nearly
+an hour at the open window gazing down at the passers by. There was not
+much to see, nothing more indeed than couples wandering home, a
+bluejacket or two, an occasional cat, and a few women carrying jugs of
+beer. By eleven o'clock even this slight traffic had ceased, and there
+was nothing down the silent street except a salt wind from the harbour
+that roused a memory of the beach at Nancepean years ago when he had sat
+there watching the glow-worm and decided to be a lighthouse-keeper
+keeping his lamps bright for mariners homeward bound. It was of streets
+like Keppel Street that they would have dreamed, with the Stag Light
+winking to port, and the west wind blowing strong astern. What a
+lighthouse-keeper Father Rowley was! How except by the grace of God
+could one explain such goodness as his? Fashions in saintliness might
+change, but there was one kind of saint that always and for every creed
+spoke plainly of God's existence, such saints as St. Francis of Assisi
+or St. Anthony of Padua, who were manifestly the heirs of Christ. With
+what a tender cynicism Our Lord had called St. Peter to be the
+foundation stone of His Church, with what a sorrowful foreboding of the
+failure of Christianity. Such a choice appeared as the expression of
+God's will not to be let down again as He was let down by Adam. Jesus
+Christ, conscious at the moment of what He must shortly suffer at the
+hands of mankind, must have been equally conscious of the failure of
+Christianity two thousand years beyond His Agony and Bloody Sweat and
+Crucifixion. Why, within a short time after His life on earth it was
+necessary for that light from heaven to shine round about Saul on the
+Damascus road, because already scoffers, while the disciples were still
+alive, may have been talking about the failure of Christianity. It must
+have been another of God's self-imposed limitations that He did not give
+to St. John that capacity of St. Paul for organization which might have
+made practicable the Christianity of the master Who loved him. _Woman,
+behold thy son! Behold thy mother!_ That dying charge showed that Our
+Lord considered John the most Christlike of His disciples, and he
+remained the most Christlike man until twelve hundred years later St.
+Francis was born at Assisi. St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Dominic, if
+Christianity could only produce mighty individualists of Faith like
+them, it could scarcely have endured as it had endured. _And now abideth
+faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is
+charity._ There was something almost wistful in those words coming from
+the mouth of St. Paul. It was scarcely conceivable that St. John or St.
+Francis could ever have said that; it would scarcely have struck either
+that the three virtues were separable.
+
+Keppel Street was empty now. Mark's headache had been blown away by the
+night wind with his memories and the incoherent thoughts which had
+gathered round the contemplation of Father Rowley's character. He was
+just going to draw away from the window and undress when he caught sight
+of a figure tacking from one pavement to the other up Keppel Street.
+Mark watched its progress, amused at the extraordinary amount of trouble
+it was giving itself, until one tack was brought to a sharp conclusion
+by a lamp-post to which the figure clung long enough to be recognized as
+that of the Reverend George Edward Mousley, who had been tacking like
+this to make the harbour of the Mission House. Mark, remembering the
+letter which had been written to the Bishop of Warwick, wondered if he
+could not at any rate for to-night spare Father Rowley the
+disappointment of knowing that his plea for re-instatement was already
+answered by the drunken priest himself. He must make up his mind
+quickly, because even with the zigzag course Mousley was taking he would
+soon be ringing the bell of the Mission House, which meant that Father
+Rowley would be woken up and go down to let him in. Of course, he would
+have to know all about it in the morning, but to-night when he had gone
+to bed tired and full of hope for temperance in general and the
+reformation of Mousley in particular it was surely right to let him
+sleep in ignorance. Mark decided to take it upon himself to break the
+rules of the house, to open the door to Mousley, and if possible to get
+him upstairs to bed quietly. He went down with a lighted candle, crept
+across the gymnasium, and opened the door. Mousley was still tacking
+from pavement to pavement and making very little headway against a
+strong current of drink. Mark thought he had better go out and offer his
+services as pilot, because Mousley was beginning to sing an
+extraordinary song in which the tune and the words of _Good-bye, Dolly,
+I must leave you_, had got mixed up with _O happy band of pilgrims_.
+
+"Look here, Mr. Mousley, you mustn't sing now," said Mark taking hold of
+the arm with which the drunkard was trying to beat time. "It's after
+eleven o'clock, and you're just outside the Mission House."
+
+"I've been just outside the Mission House for an hour and three
+quarters, old chap," said Mr. Mousley solemnly. "Most incompatible thing
+I've ever known. I got back here at a quarter past nine, and I was just
+going to walk in when the house took two paces to the rear, and I've
+been walking after it the whole evening. Most incompatible thing I've
+ever known. Most incompatible thing that's ever happened to me in my
+life, Lidderdale. If I were a superstitious man, which I'm not, I should
+say the house was bewitched. If I had a moment to spare, I should sit
+down at once and write an account of my most incompatible experience to
+the Society of Psychical Research, if I were a superstitious man, which
+I'm not. Yes. . . ."
+
+Mr. Mousley tried to focus his glassy eyes upon the arcana of
+spiritualism, rocking ambiguously the while upon the kerb. Mark murmured
+something more about the need for going in quietly.
+
+"It's very kind of you to come out and talk to me like this," the
+drunken priest went on. "But what you ought to have done was to have
+kept hold of the house for a minute or two so as to give me time to get
+in quietly. Now we shall probably both be out here all night trying to
+get in quietly. It's impossible to keep warm by this lamp-post. Most
+inadequate heating arrangement. It is a lamp-post, isn't it? Yes, I
+thought it was. I had a fleeting impression that it was my bedroom
+candle, but I see now that I was mistaken, I see now perfectly clearly
+that it is a lamp-post, if not two. Of course, that may account for my
+not being able to get into the Mission House. I was trying to decide
+which front door I should go in by, and while I was waiting I think I
+must have gone in by the wrong one, for I hit my nose a most severe blow
+on the nose. One has to remember to be very careful with front doors. Of
+course, if it was my own house I should have used a latch-key instanter;
+for I inevitably, I mean invariably, carry a latch-key about with me and
+when it won't open my front door I use it to wind my watch. You know,
+it's one of those small keys you can wind up watches with, if you know
+the kind of key I mean. I'd draw you a picture of it if I had a pencil,
+but I haven't got a pencil."
+
+"Now don't stay talking here," Mark urged. "Come along back, and do try
+to come quietly. I keep telling you it's after eleven o'clock, and you
+know Father Rowley likes everybody to be in by ten."
+
+"That's what I've been saying to myself the whole evening," said Mr.
+Mousley. "Only what happened, you see, was that I met the son of a man
+who used to know my father, a very nice fellow indeed, a very
+intellectual fellow. I never remember spending a more intellectual
+evening in my life. A feast of reason and a flowing bowl, I mean soul,
+s-o-u-l, not b-o-u-l. Did I say bowl? Soul. . . . Soul. . . ."
+
+"All right," said Mark. "But if you've had such a jolly evening, come in
+now and don't make a noise."
+
+"I'll come in whenever you like," Mr. Mousley offered. "I'm at your
+disposition entirely. The only request I have to make is that you will
+guarantee that the house stays where it was built. It's all very fine
+for an ordinary house to behave like this, but when a mission house
+behaves like this I call it disgraceful. I don't know what I've done to
+the house that it should conceive such a dislike to me. I say,
+Lidderdale, have they been taking up the drains or something in this
+street? Because I distinctly had an impression just then that I put my
+foot into a hole."
+
+"The street's perfectly all right," said Mark. "Nothing has been done to
+it."
+
+"There's no reason why they shouldn't take up the drains if they want
+to, I'm not complaining. Drains have to be taken up and I should be the
+last man to complain; but I merely asked a question, and I'm convinced
+that they have been taking up the drains. Yes, I've had a very
+intellectual evening. My head's whirling with philosophy. We've talked
+about everything. My friend talked a good deal about Buddhism. And I
+made rather a good joke about Confucius being so confusing, at which I
+laughed inordinately. Inordinately, Lidderdale. I've had a very keen
+sense of humour ever since I was a baby. I say, Lidderdale, you
+certainly know your way about this street. I'm very much obliged to me
+for meeting you. I shall get to know the street in time. You see, my
+object was to get beyond the house, because I said to myself 'the house
+is in Keppel Street, it can dodge about _in_ Keppel Street, but it can't
+be in any other street,' so I thought that if I could dodge it into the
+corner of Keppel Street--you follow what I mean? I may be talking a bit
+above your head, we've been talking philosophy all the evening, but if
+you concentrate you'll follow my meaning."
+
+"Here we are," said Mark, for by this time he had persuaded Mr. Mousley
+to put his foot upon the step of the front door.
+
+"You managed the house very well," said the clergyman. "It's
+extraordinary how a house will take to some people and not to others.
+Now I can do anything I like with dogs, and you can do anything you like
+with houses. But it's no good patting or stroking a house. You've got to
+manage a house quite differently to that. You've got to keep a house's
+accounts. You haven't got to keep a dog's accounts."
+
+They were in the gymnasium by now, which by the light of Mark's small
+candle loomed as vast as a church.
+
+"Don't talk as you go upstairs," Mark admonished.
+
+"Isn't that a dog I see there?"
+
+"No, no, no," said Mark. "It's the horse. Come along."
+
+"A horse?" Mousley echoed. "Well, I can manage horses too. Come here,
+Dobbin. If I'd known we were going to meet a horse I should have brought
+back some sugar with me. I suppose it's too late to go back and buy some
+sugar now?"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mark impatiently. "Much too late. Come along."
+
+"If I had a piece of sugar he'd follow us upstairs. You'll find a horse
+will go anywhere after a piece of sugar. It is a horse, isn't it? Not a
+donkey? Because if it was a donkey he would want a thistle, and I don't
+know where I can get a thistle at this time of night. I say, did you
+prod me in the stomach then with anything?" asked Mr. Mousley severely.
+
+"No, no," said Mark. "Come along, it was the parallel bars."
+
+"I've not been near any bars to-night, and if you are suggesting that
+I've been in bars you're making an insinuation which I very much resent,
+an insinuation which I resent most bitterly, an insinuation which I
+should not allow anybody to make without first pointing out that it was
+an insinuation."
+
+"Do come down off that ladder," Mark said.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Lidderdale. I was under the impression for the
+moment that I was going upstairs. I have really been so confused by
+Confucius and by the extraordinary behaviour of the house to-night,
+recoiling from me as it did, that for the moment I was under the
+impression that I was going upstairs."
+
+At this moment Mr. Mousley fell from the ladder, luckily on one of the
+gymnasium mats.
+
+"I do think it's a most ridiculous habit," he said, "not to place a
+doormat in what I might describe as a suitable cavity. The number of
+times in my life that I've fallen over doormats simply because people
+will not take the trouble to make the necessary depression in the floor
+with which to contain such a useful domestic receptacle you would
+scarcely believe. I must have fallen over thousands of doormats in my
+life," he shouted at the top of his voice.
+
+"You'll wake everybody up in the house," Mark exclaimed in an agony.
+"For heaven's sake keep quiet."
+
+"Oh, we are in the house, are we?" said Mr. Mousley. "I'm very much
+relieved to hear you say that, Lidderdale. For a brief moment, I don't
+know why, I was almost as confused as Confucius as to where we were."
+
+At this moment, candle in hand, and in a white flannel nightgown looking
+larger than ever, Father Rowley appeared in the gallery above and
+leaning over demanded who was there.
+
+"Is that Father Rowley?" Mr. Mousley inquired with intense courtesy. "Or
+do my eyes deceive me? You'll excuse me from replying to your apparently
+simple question, Father Rowley, but I have met such a number of people
+to-night including the son of a man who used to know my father that I
+really don't know who _is_ there, although I'm inclined to think that
+_I_ am here. But I've had a series of such a remarkable series of
+adventures to-night that I should like your advice about them. I've been
+spending a very intellectual evening, Father Rowley."
+
+"Go to bed," said the mission priest severely. "I'll speak to you in the
+morning."
+
+"Father Rowley isn't annoyed with me, is he?" Mr. Mousley asked.
+
+"I think he's rather annoyed at your being so late," said Mark.
+
+"Late for what?"
+
+"Is that you, Mark, down there?" asked the Missioner.
+
+"I'm lighting Mr. Mousley across the gymnasium," Mark explained. "I
+think I'd better take him up to his room."
+
+"If your young friend is as clever at managing rooms as he is at
+managing houses we shall get on splendidly, Father Rowley. I have
+perfect confidence in his manner with rooms. He soothed this house in
+the most remarkable way. It was jumping about like a pea in a pod till
+he caught hold of the reins."
+
+"Mark, go to bed. I will see Mr. Mousley to his room."
+
+"Several years ago," said the drunken priest. "I went with an old friend
+to see Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. The resemblance between Father
+Rowley and Miss Ellen Terry is very remarkable. Good-night, Lidderdale,
+I am perfectly comfortable on this mat. Good-night."
+
+In the gallery above Mark, who had not dared to disobey Father Rowley's
+orders, asked him what was to be done to get Mr. Mousley to bed.
+
+"Go and wake Cartwright and Warrender to help me to get him upstairs,"
+the Missioner commanded.
+
+"I can help you. . . ." Mark began.
+
+"Do what I say," said the Missioner curtly.
+
+In the morning Father Rowley sent for Mark to give his account of what
+had happened the night before, and when Mark had finished his tale, the
+priest sat for a while in silence.
+
+"Are you going to send him away?" Mark asked.
+
+"Send him away?" Father Rowley repeated. "Where would I send him? If he
+can't keep off drink in this house and in these surroundings where else
+will he keep off drink? No, I'm only amused at my optimism."
+
+There was a knock on the door.
+
+"I expect that is Mr. Mousley," said Mark. "I'll leave you with him."
+
+"No, don't go away," said the Missioner. "If Mousley didn't mind your
+seeing him as he was last night, there's no reason why this morning he
+should mind your hearing my comments upon his behaviour."
+
+The tap on the door was repeated.
+
+"Come in, come in, Mousley, and take a seat."
+
+Mr. Mousley walked timidly across the room and sat on the very edge of
+the chair offered him by Father Rowley. He was a quiet, rather drab
+little man, the kind of little man who always loses his seat in a
+railway carriage and who always gets pushed further up in an omnibus,
+one of life's pawns. The presence of Mark did not seem to affect him,
+for no sooner was he seated than he began to apologize with suspicious
+rapidity, as if by now his apologies had been reduced to a formula.
+
+"I really must apologize, Father Rowley, for my lateness last night and
+for coming in, I fear, slightly the worse for liquor. The fact is I had
+a little headache and went to the chemist for a pick-me-up, on top of
+which I met an old college friend, and though I don't think I had more
+than two glasses of beer I may have had three. They didn't seem to go
+very well with the pick-me-up. I assure you--"
+
+"Stop," said Father Rowley. "The only assurance of any value to me will
+be your behaviour in the future."
+
+"Oh, then I'm not to leave this morning?" Mr. Mousley gasped with open
+mouth.
+
+"Where would you go if you left here?"
+
+"Well, to tell you the truth," Mr. Mousley admitted, "I have been rather
+worried over that little problem ever since I woke up this morning. I
+scarcely expected that you would tolerate my presence any longer in this
+house. You will excuse me, Father Rowley, but I am rather overwhelmed
+for the moment by your kindness. I scarcely know how to express what I
+feel. I have usually found people so very impatient of my weakness. Do
+you seriously mean I needn't go away this morning?"
+
+"You have already been sufficiently punished, I hope," said the
+Missioner, "by the humiliations you have inflicted on yourself both
+outside and inside this house."
+
+"My thoughts are always humiliating," said Mr. Mousley. "I think perhaps
+that nowadays these humiliating thoughts are my chief temptation to
+drink. Since I have been here and shared in your hospitality I have felt
+more sharply than ever my disgrace. I have several times been on the
+point of asking you to let me be given some kind of work, but I have
+always been too much ashamed when it came to the point to express my
+aspirations in words."
+
+"Only yesterday afternoon," said Father Rowley, "I wrote to the Bishop
+of Warwick, who has continued to interest himself in you notwithstanding
+the many occasions you have disappointed him, yes, I wrote to the Bishop
+of Warwick to say that since you came to St. Agnes' your behaviour had
+justified my suggesting that you should once again be allowed to say
+Mass."
+
+"You wrote that yesterday afternoon?" Mr. Mousley exclaimed. "And the
+instant afterwards I went out and got drunk?"
+
+"You mean you took a pick-me-up and two glasses of beer," corrected
+Father Rowley.
+
+"No, no, no, it wasn't a pick-me-up. I went out and got drunk on brandy
+quite deliberately."
+
+Father Rowley looked quickly across at Mark, who hastily left the two
+priests together. He divined from the Missioner's quick glance that he
+was going to hear Mr. Mousley's confession. A week later Mr. Mousley
+asked Mark if he would serve at Mass the next morning.
+
+"It may seem an odd request," he said, "but inasmuch as you have seen
+the depths to which I can sink, I want you equally to see the heights to
+which Father Rowley has raised me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SILCHESTER COLLEGE MISSION
+
+
+It was never allowed to be forgotten at St. Agnes' that the Mission was
+the Silchester College Mission; and there were few days in the year on
+which it was possible to visit the Mission House without finding there
+some member of the College past or present. Every Sunday during term two
+or three prefects would sit down to dinner; masters turned up during the
+holidays; even the mighty Provost himself paid occasional visits, during
+which he put off most of his majesty and became as nearly human as a
+facetious judge. Nor did Father Rowley allow Silchester to forget that
+it had a Mission. He was not at all content with issuing a half yearly
+report of progress and expenses, and he had no intention of letting St.
+Agnes' exist as a subject for an occasional school sermon or a religious
+tax levied on parents. From the first moment he had put foot in Chatsea
+he had done everything he could to make St. Agnes' be what it was
+supposed to be--the Silchester College Mission. He was particularly
+anxious that the new church should be built and beautified with money
+from Silchester sources, even if he also accepted money for this purpose
+from outside. Soon after Mark had become recognized as Father Rowley's
+confidential secretary, he visited Silchester for the first time in his
+company.
+
+It was the custom during the summer for the various guilds and clubs
+connected with the parish to be entertained in turn at the College. It
+had never happened that Mark had accompanied any of these outings, which
+in the early days of St. Agnes' had been regarded with dread by the
+College authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was
+stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions as you
+could wish to see. Mark's first visit to Silchester was on the occasion
+of Father Rowley's terminal sermon in the June after he was nineteen. He
+found the experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough to
+have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed through the ordeal
+either of a first term at a public school or of a first term at the
+University. Boys are always critical, and at Silchester with the
+tradition of six hundred years to give them a corporate self-confidence,
+the judgment of outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world,
+unless it might be in the New Hebrides. Added to their critical regard
+was a chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence
+appear cordial in comparison. Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of
+the Houyhnms. These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so
+condescending, appalled him. Yet he had found the Silchester men who
+came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with. No doubt they,
+without their background were themselves a little shy, although their
+shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease. Here,
+however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints,
+row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral. Mark apprehended
+more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he
+found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of
+respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete.
+The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive
+conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society;
+he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously
+when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without
+being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. He and Mark were staying at
+a house which possessed super-imposed upon the Silchester tradition a
+tradition of its own extending over the forty years during which the
+Reverend William Jex Monkton had been a house master. It was difficult
+for Mark, who had nothing but the traditions of Haverton House for a
+standard to understand how with perfect respect the boys could address
+their master by his second name without prejudice to discipline. Yet
+everybody in Jex's house called him Jex; and when you looked at that
+delightful old gentleman himself with his criss-cross white tie and
+curly white hair, you realized how impossible it was for him to be
+called anything else except Jex.
+
+For the first time since Mark, brooding upon the moonlit quadrangle of
+St. Osmund's Hall, bade farewell to Oxford, he regretted for a while his
+surrender of the scholarship to Emmett. What was Emmett doing now? Had
+his stammer improved in the confidence that his success must surely have
+brought him? Mark made an excuse to forsake the company of the four or
+five men in whose charge he had been left. He was tired of being
+continually rescued from drowning in their conversation. Their
+intentional courtesy galled him. He felt like a negro chief being shown
+the sights of England by a tired equerry. It was a fine summer day, and
+he went down to the playing fields to watch the cricket match. He sat
+down in the shade of an oak tree on the unfrequented side, unable in the
+mood he was in to ask against whom the College was playing or which side
+was in. Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the
+sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than
+a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees and towers of
+Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, the cattle in
+the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated Mark with his inability to
+put himself in the picture. The grass beneath the oak was scattered with
+a treasury of small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens
+and silver disks that Mark set himself to count.
+
+"Trying not to yearn and trying not to yawn," he muttered. "Forty-four,
+forty-five, forty-six."
+
+"You're ten out," said a voice. "We want fifty-six to tie, fifty-seven
+to win."
+
+Mark looked up and saw that a Silchester man whom he remembered seeing
+once at the Mission was preparing to sit down beside him. He was a tall
+youth, fair and freckled and clear cut, perfectly self-possessed, but
+lacking any hint of condescension in his manner.
+
+"Didn't you come over with Rowley?" he inquired.
+
+Mark was going to explain that he was working at the Mission when it
+struck him that a Silchester man might have the right to resent that,
+and he gave no more than a simple affirmative.
+
+"I remember seeing you at the Mission," he went on. "My name's Hathorne.
+Oh, well hit, sir, well hit!"
+
+Hathorne's approbation of the batsman made the match appear even more
+remote. It was like the comment of a passer-by upon a well-designed
+figure in a tapestry. It was an expression of his own aesthetic pleasure,
+and bore no relation to the player he applauded.
+
+"I've only been down to the Mission once," he continued, turning to
+Mark. "I felt rather up against it there."
+
+"Well, I feel much more up against it in Silchester," replied Mark.
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," Hathorne nodded. "But you're only up
+against form: I was up against matter. It struck me when I was down
+there what awful cheek it was for me to be calmly going down to Chatsea
+and supposing that I had a right to go there, because I had contributed
+a certain amount of money belonging to my father, to help spiritually a
+lot of people who probably need spiritual help much less than I do
+myself. Of course, with anybody else except Rowley in charge the effect
+would be damnable. As it is, he manages to keep us from feeling as if
+we'd paid to go and look at the Zoo. You're a lucky chap to be working
+there without the uncomfortable feeling that you're just being tolerated
+because you're a Siltonian."
+
+"I was thinking," said Mark, "that I was only being tolerated here
+because I happened to come with Rowley. It's impossible to visit a place
+like this and not regret that one must remain an outsider."
+
+"It depends on what you want to do," said Hathorne. "I want to be a
+parson. I'm going up to the Varsity in October, and I am beginning to
+wonder what on earth good I shall be at the end of it all."
+
+He gave Mark an opportunity to comment on this announcement; but Mark
+did not know what to say and remained silent.
+
+"I see you're not in the mood to be communicative," Hathorne went on
+with a smile. "I don't blame you. It's impossible to be communicative in
+this place; but some time, when I'm down at the Mission again, I'd like
+to have what is called a heart-to-heart talk. That was a good boundary.
+We shall win quite comfortably. So long!"
+
+The tall, fair youth passed on; and although Mark never had that
+heart-to-heart talk with him in the Mission, because he was killed in a
+mountaineering accident in Switzerland that August, the memory of him
+sitting there under the oak tree on that fine summer afternoon remained
+with Mark for ever; and after that brief conversation he lost most of
+his shyness, so that he came to enjoy his visits to Silchester as much
+as the Missioner himself did.
+
+As the new church drew near its completion, Mark apprehended why Father
+Rowley attached so much importance to as much of the money for it as
+possible coming directly from Silchester. He apprehended how the
+Missioner felt that he was building Silchester in a Chatsea slum; and
+from that moment that landscape like a mirage of the sunlight, that
+landscape into which he had been unable to fit himself when he first
+beheld it became his own, for now beyond the chimneypots he could always
+see the bald hills of Berkshire and the trees and towers of Silchester,
+and at the end of all the meanest alleys there were cattle in the
+meadows and birds in the air above.
+
+Silchester was not the only place that Mark visited with Father Rowley.
+It became a recognized custom for him to travel up to London whenever
+the Missioner was preaching, and in London he was once more struck by
+the variety of Father Rowley's worldly knowledge and secular friends.
+One week-end will serve as a specimen of many. They left Chatsea on a
+Saturday morning travelling up to town in a third class smoker full of
+bluejackets and soldiers on leave. None of them happened to know the
+Missioner, and for a time they talked surlily in undertones, evidently
+viewing with distaste the prospect of having a Holy Joe in their
+compartment all the way to London; but when Father Rowley pulled out his
+pipe, for always when he was away from St. Agnes' he allowed himself the
+privilege of smoking, and began to talk to them about their ships and
+their regiments with unquestionable knowledge, they unbent, so that long
+before Waterloo was reached it must have been the jolliest compartment
+in the whole train. It was all done so easily, and yet without any of
+that deliberate descent from a pedestal, which is the democratic manner
+of so many parsons; there was none of that Friar Tuck style of
+aggressive laymanhood, nor that subtler way of denying Christ (of course
+with the best intentions) which consists of salting the conversation
+with a few "damns" and peppering it with a couple of "bloodies" to show
+that a parson may be what is called human. Father Rowley was simply
+himself; and a month later two of the bluejackets in that compartment
+and one of the soldiers were regular visitors to the Mission House, and
+what is more regular visitors to the Blessed Sacrament.
+
+They reached London soon after midday and went to lunch at a restaurant
+in Jermyn Street famous for a Russian salad that Father Rowley sometimes
+spoke of with affection in Chatsea. After lunch they went to a matinee
+of _Pelleas and Melisande_, the Missioner having been given two stalls
+by an actor friend. Mark enjoyed the play and was being stirred by the
+imagination of old, unhappy, far off things until his companion began to
+laugh. Several clever women who looked as if they had been dragged
+through a hedge said "Hush!"; even Mark, compassionate of the players'
+feelings should they hear Father Rowley laugh at the poignant nonsense
+they were uttering on the stage, begged him to control himself.
+
+"But this is most unending rubbish," he said. "I've never heard anything
+so ridiculous in my life. Terrible."
+
+The curtain fell on the act at this moment, so that Father Rowley was
+able to give louder voice to his opinions.
+
+"This is unspeakable bosh," he repeated. "I can't understand anything at
+all that is going on. People run on and run off again and make the most
+idiotic remarks. I really don't think I can stand any more of this."
+
+The clever women rattled their beads and writhed their necks like angry
+snakes without effect upon the Missioner.
+
+"I don't think I can stand any more of this," he repeated. "I shall
+have apoplexy if this goes on."
+
+The clever women hissed angrily about the kind of people that came to
+theatres nowadays.
+
+"This man Maeterlinck must have escaped from an asylum," Father Rowley
+went on. "I never heard such deplorable nonsense in my life."
+
+"I shall ask an attendant if we can change our seats," snapped one of
+the clever women in front. "That's the worst of coming to a Saturday
+afternoon performance, such extraordinary people come up to town on
+Saturdays."
+
+"There you are," exclaimed Father Rowley loudly, "even that poor woman
+in front thinks they're extraordinary."
+
+"She's talking about you," said Mark, "not about the people in the
+play."
+
+"My good woman," said Father Rowley, leaning over and tapping her on the
+shoulder. "You don't think that you really enjoy this rubbish, do you?"
+
+One of her friends who was near the gangway called out to a programme
+seller:
+
+"Attendant, attendant, is it possible for my friends and myself to move
+into another row? We are being pestered with a running commentary by
+that stout clergyman behind that lady in green."
+
+"Don't disturb yourselves, you foolish geese," said Father Rowley
+rising. "I'm not going to sit through another act. Come along, Mark,
+come along, come along. I am not happy. I am not happy," he cried in an
+absurd falsetto.
+
+Then roaring with laughter at his own imitation of Melisande, he went
+rolling out of the theatre and sniffed contentedly the air of the
+Strand.
+
+"I told Lady Pechell we shouldn't arrive till tea-time, so we'd better
+go and ride on the top of a bus as far as the city."
+
+It was an exhilarating ride, although Mark found that Father Rowley
+occupied much more than half of the seat for two. About five o'clock
+they came to the shadowy house in Portman Square in which they were to
+stay till Monday. The Missioner was as much at home here as he was at
+Silchester College or in a railway compartment full of bluejackets. He
+knew as well how to greet the old butler as Lady Pechell and her sister
+Mrs. Mannakay, to all of whom equally his visit was an obvious delight.
+Not even Father Rowley's bulk could dwarf the proportions of that double
+drawing-room or of that heavy Victorian furniture. He took his place
+among the cases of stuffed humming birds and glass-topped tables of
+curios, among the brocade curtains with shaped vallances and golden
+tassels, among the chandeliers and lacquered cabinets and cages of
+avadavats, sitting there like a great Buddha while he chatted to the two
+old ladies of a society that seemed to Mark as remote as the people in
+_Pelleas and Melisande_. From time to time one of the old ladies would
+try to draw Mark into the conversation; but he preferred listening and
+let them think that his monosyllabic answers signified a shyness that
+did not want to be conspicuous. Soon they appeared to forget his
+existence. Deep in the lap of an armchair covered with a glazed chintz
+of Sevres roses and sable he was enthralled by that chronicle of
+phantoms, that frieze of ghosts passing before his eyes, while the
+present faded away upon the growing quiet of the London evening and
+became remote as the distant roar of the traffic, which itself was
+remote as the sound of the sea in a shell. Fox-hunting squires caracoled
+by with the air of paladins; and there was never a lady mentioned that
+did not take the fancy like a princess in an old tale.
+
+"He's universal," Mark thought. "And that's one of the secrets of being
+a great priest. And that's why he can talk about Heaven and make you
+feel that he knows what he's talking about. And if I can discern what he
+is," Mark went on to himself, "I can be what he is. And I will be," he
+vowed in the rapture of a sudden revelation.
+
+On Sunday morning Father Rowley preached in the fashionable church of
+St. Cyprian's, South Kensington, after which they lunched at the
+vicarage. The Reverend Drogo Mortemer was a dapper little bachelor (it
+would be inappropriate to call such a worldly little fellow a celibate)
+who considered himself the leader of the most advanced section of the
+Catholic Party in the Church of England. He certainly had a finger in
+the pie of every well-cooked intrigue, knew everybody worth knowing in
+London, and had the private ears of several bishops. No more skilful
+place-finder existed, and any member of the advanced section who wanted
+a place for himself or for a friend had recourse to Mortemer.
+
+"But the little man is all right," Father Rowley had told Mark. "Many
+people would have used his talents to further himself. He has every
+qualification for the episcopate except one--he believes in the
+Sacraments."
+
+Mr. Mortemer was the only son of James Mortimer of the famous firm of
+Hadley and Mortimer. His father had become rich before he married the
+youngest daughter of an ancient but impoverished house, and soon after
+his marriage he died. Mrs. Mortemer brought up her son to forget that
+his father had been a tradesman and to remember that he was rich. In
+order to dissociate herself from a partnership which now existed only in
+name above the plate glass of the enormous shop in Oxford Street Mrs.
+Mortemer took to spelling her name with an "e," which as she pointed out
+was the original spelling. She had already gratified her romantic fancy
+by calling her son Drogo. Harrow and Cambridge completed what Mrs.
+Mortemer began, and if Drogo had not developed what his mother spoke of
+as a "mania for religion" there is no reason to suppose that he would
+not one day have been a cabinet minister. However, as it was, Mrs.
+Mortemer died cherishing with her last breath a profound conviction that
+her son would soon be a bishop. That he was not likely to become a
+bishop was due to the fact that with all his worldliness, with all his
+wealth, with all his love of wire-pulling, with all his respect for rank
+he held definite opinions and was not afraid to belong to a minority
+unpopular in high places. He had too a simple piety that made his church
+a power in spite of fashionable weddings and exorbitant pew rents.
+
+"The sort of thing we're trying to do here in a small way," he said to
+Father Rowley at lunch, "is what the Jesuits are doing at Farm Street.
+My two assistant priests are both rather brilliant young people, and I'm
+always on the look out to get more young men of the right type."
+
+"You'd better offer Lidderdale a title when he's ready to be ordained."
+
+"Why, of course I will," said the dapper little vicar with a courteous
+smile for Mark. "Do take some more claret, Father Rowley. It's rather a
+specialty of ours here. We have a friend in Bordeaux who buys for us."
+
+It was typical of Mr. Mortemer to use the plural.
+
+"There you are, Mark Anthony. I've secured you a title."
+
+"Mr. Mortemer is only being polite," said Mark.
+
+"No, no, my dear boy, on the contrary I meant absolutely what I said."
+
+He seemed worried by Mark's distrust of his sincerity, and for the rest
+of lunch he laid himself out to entertain his less important guest,
+talking with a slight excess of charm about the lack of vitality, loss
+of influence, and oriental barbarism of the Orthodox Church.
+
+"_Enfin_, Asiatic religion," he said. "Don't you agree with me, Mr.
+Lidderdale? And our Philorthodox brethren who would like to bring about
+reunion with such a Church . . . the result would be dreadful . . .
+Eurasian . . . yes, I must confess that sometimes I sympathize with the
+behaviour of the Venetians in the Fourth Crusade."
+
+Father Rowley looked at his watch and announced that it was time to
+start for Poplar, where he was to address a large gathering of
+Socialists in the Town Hall. Mr. Mortemer made a _moue_.
+
+"Nevertheless I'm bound to admit that you have a strong case. Perhaps
+I'm like the young man with large possessions," he burst out with a
+sudden intense gravity. "Perhaps after all the St. Cyprian's religion
+isn't Christianity at all. Just Catholicism. Nothing else."
+
+"You'd better come down to Poplar with Mark and me," Father Rowley
+suggested.
+
+But Mr. Mortemer shook his head with a smile.
+
+The Poplar meeting was crowded. In an atmosphere of good fellowship one
+speaker after another got up and denounced the present order. It was
+difficult to follow the arguments of the speakers, because the audience
+cheered so many isolated statements. A number of people shook hands
+with Father Rowley when he had finished his speech and wished that
+there were more parsons like him. Father Rowley had not indulged in
+political attacks, but had contented himself with praise of the poor. He
+had spoken movingly, but Mark was not moved by his words. He had a vague
+feeling that Father Rowley was being exploited. He was dazed by the
+exuberance of the meeting and was glad when it was over and he was back
+in Portman Square talking to Lady Pechell and Mrs. Mannakay while Father
+Rowley rested for an hour before he walked round the corner to preach in
+old Jamaica Chapel, a galleried Georgian conventicle that was now the
+Church of the Visitation, but was still generally known as Jamaica
+Chapel. Evensong was half over when the preacher arrived, and the church
+being full Mark was given a chair by the sidesman in a dark corner,
+which presently became darker when Father Rowley went up into the
+pulpit, for all the lights were lowered except those above the
+preacher's head, and nothing was visible in the church except the
+luminous crucifix upon the High Altar. The warmth and darkness brought
+out the scent of the many women gathered together; the atmosphere was
+charged with human emotion so that Mark sitting in his corner could
+fancy that he was lost in the sensuous glooms behind some _Mater
+Addolorata_ of the seventeenth century. He longed to be back in Chatsea.
+He was dismayed at the prospect of one day perhaps having to cope with
+this quality of devotion. He shuddered at the thought, and for the first
+time he wondered if he had not a vocation for the monastic life. But was
+it a vocation if one longed to escape the world? Must not a true
+vocation be a longing to draw nearer to God? Oh, this nauseating bouquet
+of feminine perfumes . . . it was impossible to pay attention to the
+sermon.
+
+Mark went to bed early with a headache; but in the morning he woke
+refreshed with the knowledge that they were going back to Chatsea,
+although before they reached home the journey had to be broken at High
+Thorpe whither Father Rowley had been summoned to an interview by the
+Bishop of Silchester on account of refusing to communicate some people
+at the mid-day celebration. Dr. Crawshay was at that time so ill that
+he received the Chatsea Missioner in bed, and on hearing that he was
+accompanied by a young man who hoped to take Holy Orders the Bishop sent
+word for Mark to come up to his bedroom, where he gave him his blessing.
+Mark never forgot the picture of the Bishop lying there under a
+chequered coverlet looking like an old ivory chessman, a white bishop
+that had been taken in the game and put off the board.
+
+"And now, Mr. Rowley," Dr. Crawshay began when he had motioned Mark to a
+chair. "To return to the subject under discussion between us. How can
+you justify by any rubric of the Book of Common Prayer non-communicating
+attendance?"
+
+"I don't justify it by any rubric," the Missioner replied.
+
+"Oh, you don't, don't you?"
+
+"I justify it by the needs of human nature," the Missioner continued.
+"In order to provide the necessary three communicants for the mid-day
+Mass. . . ."
+
+"One moment, Mr. Rowley," the Bishop interrupted. "I beg you most
+earnestly to avoid that word. You know my old-fashioned Protestant
+notions," he added, and his eyes so tired with pain twinkled for a
+moment. "To me there is always something distasteful about that word."
+
+"What shall I substitute, my lord?" the Missioner asked. "Do you object
+to the word 'Eucharist'?"
+
+"No, I don't object to that, though why you should want a Greek name
+when we have a beautiful English name like the Lord's Supper, why you
+should want to employ such a barbarism as 'Eucharist' I don't know.
+However, if you must use Eucharist, use Eucharist. And now, by wandering
+off into a discussion of terminology I forget where we were. Oh yes, you
+were on the point of justifying non-communicating attendance by the
+needs of human nature."
+
+"I am afraid, my lord, that in a district like St. Agnes' it is
+impossible always to ensure communicants for sometimes as many as four
+early Lord's Suppers said by visiting priests."
+
+The Bishop's eyes twinkled again.
+
+"Yes, there you rather have me, Mr. Rowley. Four early Lord's Suppers
+does sound, I must admit, a little odd."
+
+"Four early Eucharists followed by another for children at half-past
+nine, and the parochial sung Mass--sung Eucharist."
+
+"Children?" Dr. Crawshay repeated. "You surely don't let children go to
+the Celebration?"
+
+"_Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of
+such is the Kingdom of Heaven_," Father Rowley reminded the Bishop.
+
+"Yes, yes, I happen to have heard that text before. But the devil, Mr.
+Rowley, can cite Scripture to his purpose."
+
+"In the last letter I wrote to your lordship about the services at St.
+Agnes' I particularly mentioned our children's Eucharist."
+
+"Did you, Mr. Rowley, did you? I had quite forgotten that."
+
+Father Rowley turned to Mark for verification.
+
+"Oh, if Mr. Rowley remembers that he did write, there is no need to call
+witnesses. I have had to complain a good deal of him, but I have never
+had to complain of his frankness. It must be my fault, but I certainly
+hadn't understood that there was definitely a children's Eucharist. This
+then, I fancy, must be the service at which those three ladies
+complained of your treatment of them."
+
+"What three ladies?" asked the priest.
+
+"Dear me, I'm growing very unbusinesslike, I'm afraid. I thought I had
+enclosed you a copy of their letter to me when I wrote to invite an
+explanation of your high-handed action."
+
+The Bishop sighed. The details of these ecclesiastical squabbles
+distracted him at a time when he should soon leave this fretful earth
+behind him. He continued wearily:
+
+"These were the three ladies who were refused communion by you at, as I
+understood, the mid-day Celebration, which now turns out to be what you
+call the children's Eucharist."
+
+"It is perfectly true, my lord," Father Rowley admitted, "that on Sunday
+week three women did present themselves from a neighbouring parish."
+
+"Ah, they were not parishioners?"
+
+"Certainly not, my lord."
+
+"Which is a point in your favour."
+
+"Throughout the service they sat looking through opera-glasses at Snaith
+who was officiating, and greatly scandalizing the children, who are not
+used to such behaviour in church."
+
+"Such behaviour was certainly most objectionable," the Bishop agreed.
+
+"I happened to be sitting at the back of the church, thinking out my
+sermon, and their behaviour annoyed me so much that I sent for the
+sacristan to go and order a cab. I then went up and whispered to them
+that inasmuch as they were strangers it would be better if they went and
+made their Communion in the next parish where the service would be more
+lenient to their theory of worship. I took one of them by the arm, led
+her gently down the aisle and out into the street, and handed her into
+the cab. Her two companions followed her; I paid the cabman; and that
+was the end of the matter."
+
+The Bishop lay back on the pillows and thought for a moment or two in
+silence.
+
+"Yes," he said finally, "I think that in this case you were justified.
+At the same time your justification by the Book of Common Prayer lay in
+the fact that these women did not give you notice beforehand of their
+intention to communicate. I think I must insist that in future you make
+some arrangement with your workers and helpers to secure the requisite
+minimum of communicants for every celebration. Personally, I think six
+on a Sunday and four on a week-day far too many. I think the repetition
+has a tendency to cheapen the Sacrament."
+
+"_By Him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God
+continually_," Father Rowley quoted from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
+
+"Yes, yes, I know," said the Bishop. "But I wish you wouldn't drag in
+these texts. They really have nothing whatever to do with the point in
+question. Please realize, Mr. Rowley, that I allow you a great deal of
+latitude at St. Agnes' because I am aware of what a great influence for
+good you have been among these poor people."
+
+"Your lordship has always been consideration itself."
+
+"If that be your opinion, I want you to obey my ruling in this small
+matter. I am continually being involved in correspondence on your
+account with Vigilance Societies of the type of the Protestant Alliance,
+and I shall give myself the pleasure of answering their complaints
+without at the same time not, as I hope, impeding your splendid work. I
+wish also, if God allows me to leave this bed again, to take the next
+Confirmation in St. Agnes' myself. My presence there will afford you a
+measure of official support which will not, I venture to believe, be a
+disadvantage to your work. I do not expect you to modify your method of
+conducting the service too much. That would savour of hypocrisy, both on
+your side and on mine. But there are one or two things which I should
+prefer not to see again. Last time you dressed a number of your
+choir-boys in red cassocks."
+
+"The servers, you mean, my lord?"
+
+"Whatever you call them, they wear red cassocks, red slippers, and red
+skull caps. That I really cannot stand. You must put them into black
+cassocks and leave their caps and slippers in the vestry cupboard.
+Further, I do not wish that most conspicuous processional crucifix to be
+carried about in front of me wherever I go."
+
+"Would you like the crucifix to be taken down from the altar as well?"
+Father Rowley asked.
+
+"No, that can stay: I shan't see that one."
+
+"What date will suit your lordship for the Confirmation?"
+
+"Ought not the question to have been rather what date will suit you, for
+I have never yet been fortunate enough, and I never hope to be fortunate
+enough, to fix upon a date straight off that will suit you, Mr. Rowley.
+Let me know that later. In any case, my presence must depend, alas, upon
+the state of my health. Now, how are you getting on with your new
+church?"
+
+"We shall be ready to open it in the spring of next year if all goes
+well. Do you think that a new licence will be required? The new St.
+Agnes' is joined to the present church by the sacristy."
+
+The Bishop considered the question for a moment.
+
+"No, I think that the old licence will serve. There is no prospect yet
+of making St. Agnes' into a parish, and I would rather take advantage of
+the technicality, all things being considered. Good-bye, Mr. Rowley. God
+bless you."
+
+The Bishop raised his thin arm.
+
+"God bless your lordship."
+
+"You are always in my prayers, Mr. Rowley. I think much about you lying
+here on the threshold of Eternal Life."
+
+The Bishop turned to Mark who knelt beside the bed.
+
+"Young man, I would fain be spared long enough to ordain you to the
+service of Almighty God, but you are still young and I am very near to
+death. You could not have before you a better example of a Christian
+gentleman than your friend and my friend Mr. Rowley. I shall say nothing
+about his example as a clergyman of the Church of England. Remember me,
+both of you, in your prayers."
+
+The Bishop sank back exhausted, and his visitors went quietly out of the
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE ALTAR FOR THE DEAD
+
+
+All went as well with the new St. Agnes' as the Bishop had hoped.
+Columns of red brick were covered in marble and alabaster by the votive
+offerings of individuals or the subscriptions of different Silchester
+Houses; the baldacchino was given by one rich old lady, the pavement of
+the church by another; the Duke of Birmingham contributed a thurible;
+Oxford Old Siltonians decorated the Lady Chapel; Cambridge Old
+Siltonians found the gold mosaic for the dome of the apse. Father Rowley
+begged money for the fabric far and wide, and the architect, the
+contractors, and the workmen, all Chatsea men, gave of their best and
+asked as little as possible in return. The new church was to be opened
+on Easter morning. But early in Lent the Bishop of Silchester died in
+the bed from which he had never risen since the day Father Rowley and
+Mark received his blessing. The diocese mourned him, for he was a gentle
+scholar, wise in his knowledge of men, simple and pious in his own life.
+
+Dr. Harvard Cheesman, the new Bishop, was translated from the see of
+Ipswich to which he had been preferred from the Chapel Royal in the
+Savoy. Bishop Cheesman possessed all the episcopal qualities. He had the
+hands of a physician and the brow of a scholar. He was filled with a
+sense of the importance of his position, and in that perhaps was
+included a sense of the importance of himself. He was eloquent in
+public, grandiloquent in private. To him Father Rowley wrote shortly
+after his enthronement.
+
+     St. Agnes' House,
+
+     Keppel Street,
+
+     Chatsea.
+
+     March 24.
+
+     My Lord Bishop,
+
+     I am unwilling to trouble you at a moment when you must be
+     unusually busy; but I shall be glad to hear from you about the
+     opening of the new church of the Silchester College Mission, which
+     was fixed for Easter Sunday. Your predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, did
+     not think that any new licence would be necessary, because the new
+     St. Agnes' is joined by the sacristy to the old mission church.
+     There is no idea at present of asking you to constitute St. Agnes'
+     a parish and therefore the question of consecration does not arise.
+     I regret to say that Bishop Crawshay thoroughly disapproved of our
+     services and ritual, and I think he may have felt unwilling to
+     commit himself to endorsing them by the formal grant of a new
+     licence. May I hear from you at your convenience, and may I
+     respectfully add that your lordship has the prayers of all my
+     people?
+
+     I am your lordship's obedient servant,
+
+     John Rowley.
+
+To which the Lord Bishop of Silchester replied as follows:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     March 26.
+
+     Dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     As my predecessor Bishop Crawshay did not think a new licence would
+     be necessary I have no doubt that you can go ahead with your plan
+     of opening the new St. Agnes' on Easter Sunday. At the same time I
+     cannot help feeling that a new licence would be desirable and I am
+     asking Canon Whymper as Rural Dean to pay a visit and make the
+     necessary report. I have heard much of your work, and I pray that
+     it may be as blessed in my time as it was in the time of my
+     predecessor. I am grateful to your people for their prayers and I
+     am, my dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Harvard Silton.
+
+Canon Whymper, the Rector of Chatsea and Rural Dean, visited the new
+church on the Monday of Passion week. On Saturday Father Rowley received
+the following letter from the Bishop:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     April 9.
+
+     Dear Mr. Rowley,
+
+     I have just received Canon Whymper's report upon the new church of
+     the Silchester College Mission, and I think before you open the
+     church on Easter Sunday I should like to talk over one or two
+     comparatively unimportant details with you personally. Moreover, it
+     would give me pleasure to make your acquaintance and hear something
+     of your method of work at St. Agnes'. Perhaps you will come to High
+     Thorpe on Monday. There is a train which arrives at High Thorpe at
+     2.36. So I shall expect you at the Castle at 2.42.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Harvard Silton.
+
+Mark paid his second visit to High Thorpe Castle on one of those serene
+April mornings that sail like swans across the lake of time. The
+episcopal standard on the highest turret hung limp; the castle quivered
+in the sunlight; the lawns wearing their richest green seemed as far
+from being walked upon as the blue sky above them. Whether it was that
+Mark was nervous about the result of the coming interview or whether it
+was that his first visit to High Thorpe had been the climax of so many
+new experiences, he was certainly much more sharply aware on this
+occasion of what the Castle stood for. Looking back to the morning when
+he and Father Rowley sat with Bishop Crawshay in his bedroom, he
+realized how much the personality of the dead bishop had dominated his
+surroundings and how little all this dignity and splendour, which must
+have been as imposing then as it was now, had impressed his imagination.
+There came over Mark, when he and Father Rowley were walking silently
+along the drive, such a foreboding of the result of this visit that he
+almost asked the priest why they bothered to continue their journey, why
+they did not turn round immediately and take the next train back to
+Chatsea. But before he had time to say anything Father Rowley had pulled
+the chain of the door bell, the butler had opened the door, and they
+were waiting the Bishop's pleasure in a room that smelt of the best
+leather and the best furniture polish. It was a room that so long as Dr.
+Cheesman held the see of Silchester would be given over to the
+preliminary nervousness of the diocesan clergy, who would one after
+another look at that steel engraving of Jesus Christ preaching by the
+Sea of Galilee, and who when they had finished looking at that would
+look at those two oil paintings of still life, those rich and sombre
+accumulations of fish, fruit and game, that glowed upon the walls with a
+kind of sinister luxury. Waiting rooms are all much alike, the doctor's,
+the dentist's, the bishop's, the railway-station's; they may differ
+slightly in externals, but they all possess the same atmosphere of
+transitory discomfort. They have all occupied human beings with the
+perusal of books they would never otherwise have dreamed of opening,
+with the observation of pictures they would never otherwise have thought
+of regarding twice.
+
+"Would you step this way," the butler requested. "His lordship is
+waiting for you in the library."
+
+The two culprits, for by this time Mark was oblivious of every other
+emotion except one of profound guilt, guilt of what he could not say,
+but most unmistakably guilt, walked along toward the Bishop's
+library--Father Rowley like a fat and naughty child who knows he is
+going to be reproved for eating too many tarts.
+
+There was a studied poise in the attitude of the Bishop when they
+entered. One shapely leg trailed negligently behind his chair ready at
+any moment to serve as the pivot upon which its owner could swing round
+again into the every-day world; the other leg firmly wedged against the
+desk supported the burden of his concentration. The Bishop swung round
+on the shapely leg in attendance, and in a single sweeping gesture
+blotted the last page of the letter he had been writing and shook Father
+Rowley by the hand.
+
+"I am delighted to have an opportunity of meeting you, Mr. Rowley," he
+began, and then paused a moment with an inquiring look at Mark.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't mind, my lord, if I brought with me young
+Lidderdale, who is reading for Holy Orders and working with us at St.
+Agnes'. I am apt to forget sometimes exactly to what I have and have not
+committed myself and I thought your lordship would not object. . . ."
+
+"To a witness?" interposed the Bishop in a tone of courtly banter.
+"Come, come, Mr. Rowley, had I known you were going to be so suspicious
+of me I should have asked my domestic chaplain to be present on my
+side."
+
+Mark, supposing that the Bishop was annoyed by his presence at the
+interview, made a movement to retire, whereupon the Bishop tapped him
+paternally upon the shoulder and said:
+
+"Nonsense, non-sense, I was merely indulging in a mild pleasantry. Sit
+down, Mr. Rowley. Mr. Lidderdale I think you will find that chair quite
+comfortable. Well, Mr. Rowley," he began, "I have heard much of you and
+your work. Our friend Canon Whymper spoke of it with enthusiasm. Yes,
+yes, with enthusiasm. I often regret that in the course of my ministry I
+have never had the good fortune to be called to work among the poor, the
+real poor. You have been privileged, Mr. Rowley, if I may be allowed to
+say so, greatly, immensely privileged. You find a wilderness, and you
+make of it a garden. Wonderful. Wonderful."
+
+Mark began to feel uncomfortable, and he thought by the way Father
+Rowley was puffing his cheeks that he too was beginning to feel
+uncomfortable. The Missioner looked as if he was blowing away the lather
+of the soap that the Bishop was using upon him so prodigally.
+
+"Some other time, Mr. Rowley, when I have a little leisure . . . I
+perceive the need of making myself acquainted with every side of my new
+diocese--a little leisure, yes . . . sometime I should like to have a
+long talk with you about all the details of your work at Chatsea, of
+which as I said Canon Whymper has spoken to me most enthusiastically.
+The question, however, immediately before us this morning is the licence
+of your new church. Since writing to you first I have thought the matter
+over most earnestly. I have given the matter the gravest consideration.
+I have consulted Canon Whymper and I have come to the conclusion that
+bearing all the circumstances in mind it will be wiser for you to apply,
+and I hope be granted, a new licence. With this decision in my mind I
+asked Canon Whymper in his capacity as Rural Dean to report upon the new
+church. Mr. Rowley, his report is extremely favourable. He writes to me
+of the noble fabric, noble is the actual epithet he employs, yes, the
+very phrase. He expresses his conviction that you are to be
+congratulated, most warmly congratulated, Mr. Rowley, upon your vigorous
+work. I believe I am right in saying that all the money necessary to
+erect this noble edifice has been raised by yourself?"
+
+"Not all of it," said Father Rowley. "I still owe L3,000."
+
+"A mere trifle," said the Bishop, dismissing the sum with the airy
+gesture of a conjurer who palms a coin. "A mere trifle compared with
+what you have already raised. I know that at the moment there is no
+question of constituting as a parish what is at present merely a
+district; but such a contingency must be borne in mind by both of us,
+and inasmuch as that would imply consecration by myself I am unwilling
+to prejudice any decision I might have to take later, should the
+necessity for consecration arise, by allowing you at the moment a wider
+latitude than I might be prepared to allow you in the future. Yes, Canon
+Whymper writes most enthusiastically of the noble fabric." The Bishop
+paused, drummed with his fingers on the arm of his chair as if he were
+testing the pitch of his instrument, and then taking a deep breath
+boomed forth: "But Mr. Rowley, in his report he informs me that in the
+middle of the south aisle exists an altar or Holy Table expressly and
+exclusively designed for what he was told are known as masses for the
+dead."
+
+"That is perfectly true," said Father Rowley.
+
+"Ah," said the Bishop, shaking his head gravely. "I did not indeed
+imagine that Canon Whymper would be misinformed about such an important
+feature; but I did not think it right to act without ascertaining first
+from you that such is indeed the case. Mr. Rowley, it would be difficult
+for me to express how grievously it pains me to have to seem to
+interfere in the slightest degree with the successful prosecution of
+your work among the poor of Chatsea, especially to make such
+interference one of the first of my actions in a new diocese; but the
+responsibilities of a bishop are grave. He cannot lightly endorse a
+condition of affairs, a method of services which in his inmost heart
+after the deepest confederation he feels is repugnant to the spirit of
+the Church Of England. . . ."
+
+"I question that opinion, my lord," said the Missioner.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, pray allow me to finish. We have little time at our
+disposal for a theological argument which would in any case be
+fruitless, for as I told you I have already examined the question with
+the deepest consideration from every standpoint. Though I may respect
+your opinions in my private capacity, for I do not wish to impugn for
+one moment the sincerity of your beliefs, in my episcopal, or what I may
+call my public character, I can only condemn them utterly. Utterly, Mr.
+Rowley, and completely."
+
+"But this altar, my lord," shouted Father Rowley, springing to his feet,
+to the alarm of Mark, who thought he was going to shake his fist in the
+Bishop's face, "this altar was subscribed for by the poor of St. Agnes',
+by all the poor of St. Agnes', as a memorial of the lives of sailors and
+marines of St. Agnes' lost in the sinking of the _King Harry_. Your
+predecessor, Bishop Crawshay, knew of its existence, actually saw it and
+commented on its ugliness; yet when I told him the circumstances in
+which it had been erected he was deeply moved by the beautiful idea.
+This altar has been in use for nearly three years. Masses for the dead
+have been said there time after time. This altar is surrounded by
+memorials of my dead people. It is one of the most vital factors in my
+work there. You ask me to remove it, before you have been in the diocese
+a month, before you have had time to see with your own eyes what an
+influence for good it has on the daily lives of the poor people who
+built it. My lord, I will not remove the altar."
+
+While Father Rowley was speaking the Bishop of Silchester had been
+looking like a man on a railway platform who has been ambushed by a
+whistling engine.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley," he said, "I pray you to control yourself. I
+beg you to understand that this is not a mere question of red tape, if I
+may use the expression, of one extra altar or Holy Table, but it is a
+question of the services said at that altar or Holy Table."
+
+"That is precisely what I am trying to point out to your lordship,"
+said Father Rowley angrily.
+
+"You yourself told me when you wrote to me that Bishop Crawshay
+disapproved of much that was done at St. Agnes'. It was you who put it
+into my head at the beginning of our correspondence that you were not
+asking me formally to open the new church, because you were doubtful of
+the effect your method of worship might have upon me. I don't wish for a
+moment to suggest that you were trying to bundle on one side the
+question of the licence, before I had had a moment to look round me in
+my new diocese, I say I do _not_ think this for a moment; but inasmuch
+as the question has come before me officially, as sooner or later it
+must have come before me officially, I cannot allow my future action to
+be prejudiced by giving you liberties now that I may not be prepared to
+allow you later on. Suppose that in three years' time the question of
+consecrating the new St. Agnes' arises and the legality of this third
+altar or Holy Table is questioned, how should I be able to turn round
+and forbid then what I have not forbidden now?"
+
+"Your lordship prefers to force me to resign?"
+
+"Force you to resign, Mr. Rowley?" the Bishop repeated in aggrieved
+accents. "What can I possibly have said that could lead you to suppose
+for one moment that I was desirous of forcing you to resign? I make
+allowance for your natural disappointment. I make every allowance.
+Otherwise Mr. Rowley I should be tempted to characterize such a
+statement as cruel. As cruel, Mr. Rowley."
+
+"What other alternative have I?"
+
+"I should have said, Mr. Rowley, that you have one other very obvious
+alternative, and that is to accept my ruling upon the subject of this
+third altar or Holy Table. When I shall receive an assurance that you
+will do so, I shall with pleasure, with great pleasure, give you a new
+licence."
+
+"I could not possibly do that," said the Missioner. "I could not
+possibly go back to my people to-night and tell them this Holy Week that
+what I have been teaching them for ten years is a lie. I would rather
+resign a thousand times."
+
+"That is a far more accurate statement than your previous assertion
+that I was forcing you to resign."
+
+"When will you have found a priest to take my place temporarily?" the
+Missioner asked in a chill voice. "It is unlikely that the Silchester
+College authorities will find another missioner at once, and I think it
+rests with your lordship to find a locum tenens. I do not wish to
+disappoint my people about the date of the opening of their new church.
+They have been looking forward to this Easter for so long now. Poor
+dears!"
+
+Father Rowley sighed out the last ejaculation to himself, and his sigh
+ran through the Bishop's opulent library like a dull wind. Mark had a
+mad impulse to tell the Bishop the story of his father and the Lima
+Street Mission. His father had resigned on Palm Sunday. Oh, this ghastly
+dream. . . . Father Rowley leave Chatsea! It was unimaginable. . . .
+
+But the Bishop was overthrowing the work of ten years with apparently as
+little consciousness of the ruin he was creating as a boar that has
+rooted up an ant-heap with his snout.
+
+"Quite so. Quite so, Mr. Rowley. I certainly see your point," the Bishop
+declared. "I will do my best to secure a priest, but meanwhile . . . let
+me see. I need scarcely say how painful your decision has been, what
+pain it has caused me. Let me see, yes, in the circumstances I agree
+with you that it would be inadvisable to postpone the opening. I think
+from every point of view it would be wisest to proceed according to
+schedule. Could not this altar or Holy Table be railed off temporarily,
+I do not say muffled up, but could not some indication be given of the
+fact that I do not sanction its use? In that case I should have no
+objection, indeed on the contrary I should be only too happy for you to
+carry on with your work either until I can find a temporary substitute
+or until the Silchester College authorities can appoint a new missioner.
+Dear me, this is dreadfully painful for me."
+
+Father Rowley stared at the Bishop in astonishment.
+
+"You want me to continue?" he asked. "Really, my lord, you will excuse
+my plain speaking if I tell you that I am amazed at your point of view.
+A moment ago you told me that I must either remove this altar or
+resign."
+
+"Pardon me, Mr. Rowley. I did not mention the word 'resign.'"
+
+"And now," the Missioner went on without paying any attention to the
+interruption. "You are ready to let me stay at St. Agnes' until a
+successor can conveniently be found. If my teaching is as pernicious as
+you think, I cannot understand your lordship's tolerating my officiating
+for another hour in your diocese."
+
+"Mr. Rowley, you are introducing into this unhappy affair a great deal
+of extraneous feeling. I do not reproach you. I know that you are
+labouring under the stress of strong emotion. I overlook the manner
+which you have adopted towards me. I overlook it, Mr. Rowley. Before we
+close this interview, which I must once more assure you is as painful
+for me as for you, I want you to understand how deeply I regret having
+been forced to take the action I have. I ask your prayers, Mr. Rowley,
+and please be sure that you always have and always will have my prayers.
+Have you anything more you would like to say? Do not let me give you the
+impression from my alluding to the heavy work of entering upon the
+duties and responsibilities of a new diocese that I desire to hurry you
+in any way this afternoon. You will want to catch the 4.10 back to
+Chatsea I have no doubt. Too early perhaps for tea. Good-bye, Mr.
+Rowley. Good-bye, Mr. . . ." the Bishop paused and looked inquiringly at
+Mark. "Lidderdale, ah, yes," he said. "For the moment I forgot.
+Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale. A simple railing will, I think be sufficient
+for the altar in question, Mr. Rowley. I perfectly appreciate your
+motive in asking the Bishop of Barbadoes to officiate at the opening. I
+quite see that you did not wish to commit me to an approval of a ritual
+which might be more advanced than I might consider proper in my diocese.
+. . . Good-bye, good-bye."
+
+Father Rowley and Mark found themselves once more in the drive. The
+episcopal standard floated in the wind, which had sprung up while they
+were with the Bishop. They walked silently to the railway station under
+a fast clouding sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FATHER ROWLEY
+
+
+The first episcopal act of the Bishop of Silchester drove many poor
+souls away from God. It was a time of deep emotional stress for all the
+St. Agnes' workers, and Father Rowley could not show himself in Keppel
+Street without being surrounded by a crowd of supplicants who with tears
+and lamentations begged him to give up the new St. Agnes' and to remain
+in the old mission church rather than be lost to them for ever. There
+were some who even wished him to surrender the Third Altar; but in his
+last sermon preached on the Sunday night before he left Chatsea, he
+spoke to them and said:
+
+"In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
+The 15th verse of the 21st Chapter of the Holy Gospel according to Saint
+John: _Feed my lambs._
+
+"It is difficult for me, dear people, to preach to you this evening for
+the last time as your missioner, to preach, moreover, the last sermon
+that will ever be preached in this little mission church which has meant
+so much to you and so much to me. By the mercy of God man does not
+realize at the moment all that is implied by an occasion like this. He
+speaks with his mouth words of farewell; but his heart still beats to
+what was and what is, rather than to what will be.
+
+"When I took as my text to-night those three words of Our Lord to St.
+Peter, _Feed my Lambs_, I took them as words that might be applied,
+first to the Lord Bishop of this diocese, secondly to the priest who
+will take my place in this Mission, and thirdly and perhaps most
+poignantly of all to myself. I cannot bring myself to suppose that in
+this moment of grief, in this moment of bitterness, almost of despair I
+am able to speak fairly of the Bishop of Silchester's action in
+compelling me to resign what has counted for all that is most precious
+in my life on earth. And already, in saying that the Bishop has
+compelled me to resign, I am not speaking with perfect accuracy,
+inasmuch as if I had been willing to surrender what I considered one of
+the essential articles of our belief, the Bishop would have been glad to
+licence the new St. Agnes' and to give his countenance and his support
+to me, the unworthy priest in charge of it.
+
+"I want you therefore, dear people, to try to look at the matter from
+the standpoint of the Bishop. I want you to try to understand that in
+objecting to our little altar for the dead he is objecting not so much
+to the altar itself as to the services said at that altar. If it had
+merely been a question between us of a third altar, whether here or in
+the new St. Agnes', I should have found it possible, however
+unwillingly, to ask you--you, who out of your hard-earned savings built
+that altar--to allow it to be removed. Yes, I should have been selfish
+enough to ask you to make that great sacrifice on my account. But when
+the Bishop insisted that I and the priests who have borne with me and
+worked with me and preached with me and prayed with me all these years
+should abstain from saying those Masses which we believe and which you
+believe help our dear ones waiting for the Day of Judgment--why, then, I
+felt that my surrender would have been a denial of our dear Lord, such a
+denial as St. Peter himself uttered in the hall of the high-priest's
+house. But the Bishop does not believe that our prayers here below have
+any efficacy or can in any way help the blessed dead. He does not
+believe in such prayers, and he believes that those who do believe in
+such prayers are wrong, not merely according to the teaching of the
+Prayer Book, but also according to the revelation of Almighty God. I do
+not want you to say, as you will be tempted to say, that the Bishop of
+Silchester in condemning our method of services at St. Agnes' is
+condemning them with an eye to public opinion or to political advantage.
+Alas, I have myself been tempted to say bitter words about him, to think
+bitter thoughts; but at this moment, with that last _Nunc Dimittis_
+ringing in my ears, _Lord now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace_,
+I realize that the Bishop is acting honestly and sincerely, however
+much he may be acting wrongly and hastily. It is dreadful for me at this
+moment of parting to feel that some of you here to-night may be turned
+from the face of God because you are angered against one of God's
+ministers. If any poor words of mine have power to touch your hearts, I
+beg you to believe that in giving us this great trial of our faith God
+is acting with that mysterious justice and omniscience of which we speak
+idly without in the least apprehending what He means. I shall say no
+more in defence and explanation of the Bishop's action, and if he should
+consider my defence and explanation of it a piece of presumption I send
+him at this solemn moment of farewell a message that I shall never cease
+to pray that he may long guide you on the way that leads up to eternal
+happiness.
+
+"I can speak more freely of what your attitude should be towards Father
+Hungerford, the priest who is coming to take my place and who is going
+with God's help to do far more for you here than ever I have been able
+to do. I want you all to put yourselves in his place; I want you all to
+think of him to-night wondering, fearing, doubting, hoping, and praying.
+I want you to imagine how difficult he must be feeling the situation is
+for him. He will come here to-morrow conscious that there is nobody in
+this district of ours who does not feel, whether he be a communicant or
+not, that the Bishop had no right to intervene so soon and without
+greater knowledge of his new diocese in a district like ours. I cannot
+help knowing how much I myself am to blame in this particular; but, my
+dear people, it has been very hard for me during these last two weeks
+always to be brave and hopeful. Often I have found those entreaties on
+my doorstep almost more than I could endure to hear, those letters on my
+desk almost more than I could bear to read. So, if you want to do the
+one thing that can comfort me in this bitter hour of mine I entreat you
+to show Father Hungerford that your faith and your hope and your love do
+not depend on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that
+deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There is only one
+way in which you can show Father Hungerford that Jesus Christ lives in
+your hearts, and that is by going to Confession and to Communion and by
+hearing Mass as you have done all this time. Show him by your behaviour
+in the street, by your kindness and consideration at home, by your
+devotion and reverence in church, that you appreciate the mercies of
+God, that you appreciate what it means to have Jesus Christ upon your
+altar, that you are, in a word, Christians.
+
+"And now at last I must think of those words of our dear Lord as they
+apply to myself: _Feed my lambs._ And as I repeat them, I ask myself
+again if I have done right, for I am troubled in spirit, and I wonder if
+I ought to have given up that third altar and to have remained here. But
+even as I wonder this, even as at this moment I stand in this pulpit for
+the last time, a voice within me forbids me to doubt. No, my clear folk,
+I cannot surrender that altar. I cannot come to you and say that what I
+have been teaching for ten years was of so little value, of so little
+importance, of so little worth, that for the sake of policy it can be
+abandoned with a stroke of the pen or a nod of the head. I stand here
+looking out into the future, hearing like angelic trumpets those three
+words sounding and resounding upon the great void of time: _Feed my
+lambs!_ I ask myself what work lies before me, what lambs I shall have
+to feed elsewhere; I ask myself in my misery whether God has found me
+unworthy of the trust He gave me. I feel that if I leave St. Agnes'
+to-morrow with the thought that you still cherish angry and resentful
+feelings I shall sink to a lower depth of humiliation and depression
+than I have yet reached. But if I can leave St. Agnes' with the
+assurance that my work here will go steadily forward to the glory of God
+from the point at which I renounced it, I shall know that God must have
+some other purpose for the remainder of my life, some other mission to
+which He intends to call me. To you, my dear people, to you who have
+borne with me patiently, to you who have tolerated so sweetly my
+infirmities, to you who have been kind to my failings, to you who have
+taught me so much more of our dear Lord Jesus Christ than I have been
+able to teach you, to you I say good-bye. I cannot harrow your feelings
+or my own by saying any more. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
+and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
+
+Notwithstanding these words, the first episcopal act of the Bishop of
+Silchester drove many poor souls away from God.
+
+The effect upon Mark, had his religion been merely a pastime of
+adolescence, would have been disastrous. Owing to human nature's respect
+for the conspicuous there is nothing so demoralizing to faith as the
+failure of a leader of religion to set forth in his own actions the word
+of God. Mark, however, looked at the whole business more from an
+ecclesiastical angle. He had reason to condemn the Bishop for
+unchristian behaviour; but he preferred to condemn him for uncatholic
+behaviour. Dr. Cheesman and the many other Dr. Cheesmans of whom the
+Anglican episcopate was at this period composed never succeeded in
+shaking his belief in Christ; they did succeed in shaking for a short
+time his belief in the Church of England. There are few Anglo-Catholics,
+whether priests or laymen, who have never doubted the right of their
+Church to proclaim herself a branch of the Holy Catholic Church. This
+phase of doubt is indeed so common that in ecclesiastical circles it has
+come to be regarded as a kind of mental chicken-pox, not very alarming
+if it catches the patient when young, but growing more dangerous in
+proportion to the lateness of its attack. Mark had his attack young.
+When Father Rowley left Chatsea, he was anxious to accompany him on what
+he knew would be an exhausting time of travelling round to preach and
+collect the necessary money to pay off what was actually a personal
+debt. It seemed that there must be something fundamentally wrong with a
+Church that allowed a man to perambulate England in an endeavour to pay
+off the debt upon a building from ministrating in which he had been
+debarred. This debt, moreover, was presumably going to be paid by people
+who fully subscribed to teaching which had been officially condemned.
+
+When Mark commented on this, Father Rowley pointed out that as a matter
+of fact a great deal of money had been sent by people who admired the
+practical side, or what they would have called the practical side of his
+work among the poor, but who at the same time thoroughly disapproved of
+its ecclesiastical form.
+
+"In justice to the poor old Church of England," he said to Mark, "it
+must be pointed out that a good deal of this money has been given by
+devout Anglicans under protest."
+
+"Yes, but that doesn't seriously affect the argument," said Mark. "You
+collect I don't know how many thousands of pounds to put up a
+magnificent church from which the Bishop of Silchester sees fit to turn
+you out, but for the debt on which you are still personally responsible.
+It's fantastic!"
+
+"Mark Anthony," the priest said with a laugh, "you lack the legal mind.
+The Bishop did not turn me out. The Bishop can perfectly well say I
+turned myself out."
+
+"It is all too subtle for me," said Mark. "But I'm not going to worry
+you with any more arguments. You've had enough of them to last you for
+ever. I do wish you'd let me stick to you personally and help you in any
+way possible."
+
+"No, Mark Anthony," the priest replied. "I've done my work at St.
+Agnes', and you've done yours. Your business now is to take advantage of
+what has happened and to get back to your books, which whatever you may
+say have been more and more neglected lately. You'll find it of enormous
+help to be a good theologian. I have never ceased to regret my own
+shortcomings in that respect. Besides, I think you ought to spend a
+certain amount of time with Ogilvie before you go to Glastonbury. There
+is quite a lot of work to do if you look for it in a country parish
+like--what's the name of the place? Wych. Oh, yes, quite a lot of work.
+Don't bother your head about Anglican Orders and Roman Claims and the
+Catholicity of the Church of England. Your business is to save souls,
+your own included. Go back and read and get to know the people in
+Ogilvie's parish. Anybody can tackle a district like St. Agnes'; anybody
+that is who has the suitable personality. How many people can tackle an
+English country parish? I hardly know one. I should like to have you
+with me. I'm fond of you, and you're useful; but at your age to travel
+round from town to town listening to my begging would be all wrong. I
+might even go to America. I've had most cordial invitations from several
+American bishops, and if I can't raise the money in England I shall
+have to go there. If God has any more work for me to do I shall be
+offered a cure some day somewhere. I want you to be one of my assistant
+priests, and if you're going to be useful to me as an assistant priest,
+you really must have some theology behind you. These bishops get more
+and more difficult to deal with every year. Now, it's no good arguing.
+My mind's made up. I won't take you with me."
+
+So Mark went back to Wych-on-the-Wold and brooded upon the non-Catholic
+aspects of the Anglican Church.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+POINTS OF VIEW
+
+
+Mark did not find that his guardian was much disturbed by his doubts of
+the validity of Anglican Orders nor much alarmed by his suspicion that
+the Establishment had no right to be considered a branch of the Holy
+Catholic Church.
+
+"The crucial point in the Roman position is their doctrine of
+intention," said Mr. Ogilvie. "It always seems to me that this doctrine
+is a particularly dangerous one for them to play with and one that may
+recoil at any moment upon their own heads. There has been a great deal
+of super-subtle dividing of intentions into actual, virtual, habitual,
+and interpretative; but if you are going to take your stand on logic you
+must be ready to face a logical conclusion. Let us agree for a moment
+that Barlow and the other bishops who consecrated Matthew Parker had no
+intention of consecrating him as a bishop for the purpose of ordaining
+priests in the sense in which Catholics understand the word priest. Do
+the Romans expect us to believe that all their prelates in the time of
+the Renaissance had a perfect intention when they were consecrating? Or
+leave on one side for a moment the sacrament of Orders; the validity of
+other sacraments is affected by their extension of the doctrine beyond
+the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas. However improbable it may be
+that at one moment all the priests of the Catholic Church should lack
+the intention let us say of absolution, it _is_ a _logical_ possibility,
+in which case all the faithful would logically speaking be damned. It
+was in order to guard against this kind of logical catastrophe that the
+first split between an actual intention and a virtual intention was
+made. The Roman Church teaches that the virtual intention is enough; but
+if we argue that a virtual intention might be ascribed to the bishops
+who consecrated Parker, the Roman controversialists present us with
+another subdivision--the habitual intention, which is one that formerly
+existed, but of the present continuance of which there is no trace. Now
+really, my dear Mark, you must admit that we've reached a point very
+near to nonsense if this kind of logical subtlety is to control Faith."
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "I don't think I should ever want to
+'vert over the question of the validity of Anglican Orders. I haven't
+any doubts now of their validity, and I think it's improbable that I
+shall have any doubts after I'm ordained. At the same time, there _is_
+something wrong with the Church of England if a situation like that in
+Chatsea can be created by the whim of a bishop. Our unhappy union
+between Church and State has created a class of bishops which has no
+parallel anywhere else in Christendom. In order to become a bishop in
+England, at any rate of the kind that has a seat in the House of Lords,
+it is necessary to be a gentleman, or rather to have the outward and
+visible signs of being a gentleman, to be a scholar, or to be a
+diplomat. Of course, there will be exceptions; but if you look at almost
+all our bishops, you will find they have reached their dignity by social
+attainments or by political utility or sometimes by intellectual
+distinction, but hardly ever by religious fervour, or spiritual honesty,
+or fearless opinion. I can sympathize with the dissenters of the
+seventeenth century in blaming the episcopate for all spiritual
+maladies. I expect there were a good many Dr. Cheesmans in the days of
+Defoe. Look back and see how the bishops have always voted in the House
+of Lords with enthusiastic unanimity against every proposal of reform
+that was ever put forward. I wonder what will happen when they are
+called upon to face a real national crisis."
+
+"I'm perfectly ready to agree with everything you say about bishops,"
+the Rector volunteered. "But more or less, I'm sorry to add, it is a
+criticism that can be applied to all the orders of the priesthood
+everywhere in Christendom. What can we, what dare we say in favour of
+priests when we remember Our Lord?"
+
+"When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more closely than
+the rest," Mark raged, "the bishops down him. They exist to maintain the
+safety of their class. They have reached their present position by
+knowing the right people, by condemning the wrong people, and by
+balancing their fat bottoms on fences. Sometimes when their political
+patrons quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is either
+very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed as a stop-gap."
+
+"Yes," the Rector agreed. "But our present bishops are only one more
+aspect of Victorian materialism. The whole of contemporary society can
+be criticized in the same way. After all, we get the bishops we deserve,
+just as we get the politicians we deserve and the generals we deserve
+and the painters we deserve."
+
+"I don't think that's any excuse for the bishops. I sometimes dream of
+worming myself up and stopping at nothing in order to be made a bishop,
+and then when I have the mitre at last of appearing in my true colours."
+
+"Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our right reverend
+fathers in God do now," the Rector laughed.
+
+These discussions might have continued for ever without taking Mark any
+further. His failure to experience Oxford had deprived him of the
+opportunity to whet his opinions upon the grindstone of debate, and
+there had been no time for academic argument in the three years of
+Keppel Street. In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do
+but argue. It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather of seeing
+destroyed, a society that was obviously performing useful work and
+returning to a society that, so far as Mark could observe performed no
+kind of work whatever. He was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt
+that he was moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to a
+chasm in which he would be spiritually lost. He seemed to be taking his
+priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be content with gratifying his
+own desire to worship Almighty God without troubling about his
+parishioners. Mark did not like to make any suggestions about parochial
+work, because he was afraid of the Rector's retorting with an implied
+criticism of St. Agnes'; and that would have involved him in a bitter
+argument for which he would afterward be sorry. Nor was it only in his
+missionary duties that he felt his old friend was allowing himself to
+rust. Three years ago the Rector had said a daily Mass. Now he was
+content with one on Thursdays except on festivals. Mark began to take
+walks far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of
+the life round him rather than the expression of an interest in the life
+beyond. On one of these walks he found himself at Wield in the diocese
+of Kidderminster thirty miles or more away from home. He had spent the
+night in a remote Cotswold village, and all the morning he had been
+travelling through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time
+of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line, monotonously
+green, prosperous and complacent. While he was eating his bread and
+cheese at the public bar of the principal inn, he picked up one of the
+local newspapers and reading it, as one so often reads in such
+surroundings, with much greater particularity than the journal of a
+metropolis, he came upon the following letter:
+
+     To the Editor of the WIELD OBSERVER AND SOUTH WORCESTERSHIRE
+     COURANT,
+
+     SIR,--The leader in your issue of last Tuesday upon my sermon in
+     St. Andrew's Church on the preceding Sunday calls for some
+     corrections. The action of the Bishop of Kidderminster in
+     inhibiting Father Rowley from accepting an invitation to preach in
+     my church is due either to his ignorance of the facts of the case,
+     to his stupidity in appreciating them, or, I must regretfully add,
+     to his natural bias towards persecution. These are strong words for
+     a parish priest to use about his diocesan; but the Bishop of
+     Kidderminster's consistent support of latitudinarianism and his
+     consistent hostility towards any of his clergy who practise the
+     forms of worship which they feel they are bound to practise by the
+     rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer call for strong words. The
+     Bishop in correspondence with me declined to give any reason for
+     his inhibition of Father Rowley beyond a general disapproval of his
+     teaching. I am informed privately that the Bishop is suffering from
+     a delusion that Father Rowley disobeyed the Bishop of Silchester,
+     which is of course perfectly untrue and which is only one more sign
+     of how completely out of accord our bishops are with what is going
+     on either in their own diocese or in any other. My own inclination
+     was frankly to defy his Lordship and insist upon Father Rowley's
+     fulfilling his engagement. I am not sure that I do not now regret
+     that I allowed my church-wardens to overpersuade me on this point.
+     I take great exception to your statement that the offertories both
+     in the morning and in the evening were sent by me to Father Rowley
+     regardless of the wishes of my parishioners. That there are certain
+     parishioners of St. Andrew's who objected I have no doubt. But when
+     I send you the attached list of parishioners who subscribed no less
+     than L18 to be added to the two collections, you will I am sure
+     courteously admit that in this case the opinion of the parishioners
+     of St. Andrew's was at one with the opinion of their Vicar.--I am,
+     Sir, your obedient servant,
+
+     ADRIAN FORSHAW.
+
+Mark was so much delighted by this letter that he went off at once to
+call on Mr. Forshaw, but did not find him at home; he was amused to hear
+from the housekeeper that his reverence had been summoned to an
+interview with the Bishop of Kidderminster. Mark fancied that it would
+be the prelate who would have the unpleasant quarter of an hour.
+Presently he began to ponder what it meant for such a letter to be
+written and published; his doubts about the Church of England returned;
+and in this condition of mind he found himself outside a small Roman
+Catholic church dedicated to St. Joseph, where hopeful of gaining the
+Divine guidance within he passed through the door. It may be that he was
+in a less receptive mood than he thought, for what impressed him most
+was the Anglican atmosphere of this Italian outpost. The stale perfume
+of incense on stone could not eclipse that authentic perfume of
+respectability which has been acquired by so many Roman Catholic
+churches in England. There were still hanging on the pillars the framed
+numbers of Sunday's hymns. Mark pictured the choir boy who must have
+slipped the cards in the frame with anxious and triumphant and
+immemorial Anglican zeal; and while he was contemplating this symbolical
+hymn-board, over his shoulder floated an authentic Anglican voice, a
+voice that sounded as if it was being choked out of the larynx by the
+clerical collar. It was the Rector, a stumpy little man with the purple
+stock of a monseigneur, who showed the stranger round his church and
+ended by inviting him to lunch. Mark, wondering if he had reached a
+crossroad in his progress, accepted the invitation, and prepared himself
+reverently to hear the will of God. Monseigneur Cripps lived in a little
+Gothic house next to St. Joseph's, a trim little Gothic house covered
+with the oiled curls of an ampelopsis still undyed by autumn's henna.
+
+"You've chosen a bad day to come to lunch," said Monseigneur with a
+warning shake of the head. "It's Friday, you know. And it's hard to get
+decent fish away from the big towns."
+
+While his host went off to consult the housekeeper about the extra place
+for lunch, a proceeding which induced him to make a joke about extra
+'plaice' and extra 'place,' at which he laughed heartily, Mark
+considered the most tactful way of leading up to a discussion of the
+position of the Anglican Church in regard to Roman claims. It should not
+be difficult, he supposed, because Monseigneur at the first hint of his
+guest's desire to be converted would no doubt welcome the topic. But
+when Monseigneur led the way to his little Gothic dining-room full of
+Arundel prints, Mark soon apprehended that his host had evidently not
+had the slightest notion of offering an _ad hoc_ hospitality. He paid no
+attention to Mark's tentative advances, and if he was willing to talk
+about Rome, it was only because he had just paid a visit there in
+connexion with a school of which he was a trustee and out of which he
+wanted to make one kind of school and the Roman Catholic Bishop of
+Dudley wanted to make another.
+
+"I had to take the whole question to headquarters," Monseigneur
+explained impressively. "But I was disappointed by Rome, oh yes, I was
+very disappointed. When I was a young man I saw it _couleur de rose_. I
+did enjoy one thing though, and that was going round the Vatican. Yes,
+they looked remarkably smart, the Papal Guards; as soon as they saw I
+was _Monsignore_, they turned out and presented arms. I'm bound to admit
+that I _was_ impressed by that. But on the way down I lost my pipe in
+the train. And do you think I could buy a decent pipe in Rome? I
+actually had to pay five _lire_--or was it six?--for this inadequate
+tube."
+
+He produced from his pocket the pipe he had been compelled to buy, a
+curved briar all varnish and gold lettering.
+
+"I've been badly treated in Wield. Certainly, they made me Monseigneur.
+But then they couldn't very well do less after I built this church.
+We've been successful here. And I venture to think popular. But the
+Bishop is in the hands of the Irish. He cannot grasp that the English
+people will not have Irish priests to rule them. They don't like it, and
+I don't blame them. You're not Irish, are you?"
+
+Mark reassured him.
+
+"This plaice isn't bad, eh? I ordered turbot, but you never get the fish
+you order in these Midland towns. It always ends in my having plaice,
+which is good for the soul! Ha-ha! I hate the Irish myself. This school
+of which I am the chief trustee was intended to be a Catholic
+reformatory. That idea fell through, and now my notion is to turn it
+into a decent school run by secular clergy. All the English Catholic
+schools are in the hands of the regular clergy, which is a mistake. It
+puts too much power in the hands of the Benedictines and the Jesuits and
+the rest of them. After all, the great strength of the Catholic Church
+in England will always be the secular clergy. And what do we get now? A
+lot of objectionable Irishmen in Trilby hats. Last time I saw the Bishop
+I gave him my frank opinion of his policy. I told him my opinion to his
+face. He won't get me to kowtow to him. Yes, I said to him that, if he
+handed over this school to the Dominicans, he was going to spoil one of
+the finest opportunities ever presented of educating the sons of decent
+English gentlemen to be simple parish priests. But the Bishop of Dudley
+is an Irishman himself. He can't think of anything educationally better
+than Ushaw. And, as I was telling you, I saw there was nothing for it
+but to take the whole matter right up to headquarters, that is to Rome.
+Did I tell you that the Papal Guards turned out and presented arms? Ah,
+I remember now, I did mention it. I was extraordinarily impressed by
+them. A fine body. But generally speaking, Rome disappointed me after
+many years. Of course we English Catholics don't understand that way of
+worshipping. I'm not criticizing it. I realize that it suits the
+Italians. But suppose I started clearing my throat in the middle of
+Mass? My congregation would be disgusted, and rightly. It's an
+astonishing thing that I couldn't buy a good pipe in Rome, don't you
+think? I must have lost mine when I got out of the carriage to look at
+the leaning tower of Pisa, and my other one got clogged up with some
+candle grease. I couldn't get the beastly stuff out, so I had to give
+the pipe to a porter. They're keen on English pipes, those Italian
+porters. Poor devils, I'm not surprised. Of course, I need hardly say
+that in Rome they promised to do everything for me; but you can't trust
+them when your back is turned, and I need hardly add that the Bishop was
+pulling strings all the time. They showed me one of his letters, which
+was a tissue of mis-statements--a regular tissue. Now, suppose you had a
+son and you wanted him to be a priest? You don't necessarily want him to
+become a Jesuit or a Benedictine or a Dominican. Where can you send him
+now? Stonyhurst, Downside, Beaumont. There isn't a single decent school
+run by the secular clergy. You know what I mean? A school for the sons
+of gentlemen--a public school. We've got magnificent buildings, grounds,
+everything you could wish. I've been promised all the money necessary,
+and then the Bishop of Dudley steps in and says that these Dominicans
+ought to take it on."
+
+"I'm afraid I've somehow given you a wrong impression," Mark interposed
+when Monseigneur Cripps at last filled his mouth with plaice. "I'm not a
+Roman Catholic."
+
+"Oh, aren't you?" said Monseigneur indifferently. "Never mind, I expect
+you see my point about the necessity for the school to be run by secular
+clergy. Did I tell you how I got the land for my church here? That's
+rather an interesting story. It belonged to Lord Evesham who, as perhaps
+you may know, is very anti-Catholic, but a thorough good sportsman. We
+always get on capitally together. Well, one day I said to his agent,
+Captain Hart: 'What about this land, Hart? Don't you think you could get
+it out of his lordship?' 'It's no good, Father Cripps,' said Hart--I
+wasn't Monseigneur then of course--'It's no good,' he said, 'his
+lordship absolutely declines to let his land be used for a Catholic
+church.' 'Come along, Hart,' I said, 'let's have a round of golf.' Well,
+when we got to the eighteenth hole we were all square, and we'd both of
+us gone round three better than bogie and broken our own records. I was
+on the green with my second shot, and holed out in three. 'My game,' I
+shouted because Hart had foozled his drive and wasn't on the green. 'Not
+at all,' he said. 'You shouldn't be in such a hurry. I may hole out in
+one,' he laughed. 'If you do,' I said, 'you ought to get Lord Evesham to
+give me that land.' 'That's a bargain,' he said, and he took his mashie.
+Will you believe it? He did the hole in two, sir, won the game, and beat
+the record for the course! And that's how I got the land to build my
+church. I was delighted! I was delighted! I've told that story
+everywhere to show what sportsmen are. I told it to the Bishop, but of
+course he being an Irishman didn't see anything funny in it. If he could
+have stopped my being made Monseigneur, he'd have done so. But he
+couldn't."
+
+"You seem to have as much trouble with your bishops as we do with ours
+in the Anglican Church," said Mark.
+
+"We shouldn't, if we made the right men bishops," said Monseigneur. "But
+so long as they think at Westminster that we're going to convert England
+with a tagrag and bobtail mob of Irish priests, we never shall make the
+right men. You were looking round my church just now. Didn't it remind
+you of an English church?"
+
+Mark agreed that it did very much.
+
+"That's my secret: that's why I've been the most successful mission
+priest in this diocese. I realize as an Englishman that it is no use to
+give the English Irish Catholicism. When I was in Rome the other day I
+was disgusted, I really was. I was disgusted. I thoroughly sympathize
+with Protestants who go there and are disgusted. You cannot expect a
+decent English family to confess to an Irish peasant. It's not
+reasonable. We want to create an English tradition."
+
+"What between the Roman party in the Anglican Church and the Anglican
+party in the Roman Church," said Mark, "It seems a pity that some kind
+of reunion cannot be effected."
+
+"So it could," Monseigneur declared. "So it could, if it wasn't for the
+Irish. Look at the way we treat our English converts. The clergy, I
+mean. Why? Because the Irish do not want England to be converted."
+
+Mark did not raise with Monseigneur Cripps the question of his doubts.
+Indeed, before the plaice had been taken away he had decided that they
+no longer existed. It became clear to him that the English Church was
+England; and although he knew in his heart that Monseigneur Cripps was
+suffering from a sense of grievance and that his criticism of Roman
+policy was too obviously biased, it pleased him to believe that it was a
+fair criticism.
+
+Mark thanked Monseigneur Cripps for his hospitality and took a friendly
+leave of him. An hour later he was walking back through the pleasant
+vale of Wield toward the Cotswolds. As he went his way among the green
+orchards, he thought over his late impulse to change allegiance,
+marvelling at it now and considering it irrational, like one astonished
+at his own behaviour in a dream. There came into his mind a story of
+George Fox who drawing near to the city of Lichfield took off his shoes
+in a meadow and cried three times in a loud voice "Woe unto the bloody
+city of Lichfield," after which he put on his shoes again and proceeded
+into the town. Mark looked back in amazement at his lunch with
+Monseigneur Cripps and his own meditated apostasy. To his present mood
+that intention to forsake his own Church appeared as remote from
+actuality as the malediction of George Fox upon the city of Lichfield.
+
+Here among these green orchards in the heart of England Roman
+Catholicism presented itself to Mark's imagination as an exotic. The two
+words "Roman Catholicism" uttered aloud in the quiet June sunlight gave
+him the sensation of an allamanda or of a gardenia blossoming in an
+apple-tree. People who talked about bringing the English Church into
+line with the trend of Western Christianity lacked a sense of history.
+Apart from the question whether the English Church before the
+Reformation had accepted the pretensions of the Papacy, it was absurd
+to suppose that contemporary Romanism had anything in common with
+English Catholicism of the early sixteenth century. English Catholicism
+long before the Reformation had been a Protestant Catholicism, always in
+revolt against Roman claims, always preserving its insularity. It was
+idle to question the Catholic intentions of a priesthood that could
+produce within a century of the Reformation such prelates as Andrews and
+Ken. It was ridiculous at the prompting of the party in the ascendancy
+at Westminster to procure a Papal decision against English Orders when
+two hundred and fifty years ago there was a cardinal's hat waiting for
+Laud if he would leave the Church of England. And what about Paul IV and
+Elizabeth? Was he not willing to recognize English Orders if she would
+recognize his headship of Christendom?
+
+But these were controversial arguments, and as Mark walked along through
+the pleasant vale of Wield with the Cotswold hills rising taller before
+him at every mile he apprehended that his adhesion to the English Church
+had been secured by the natural scene rather than by argument.
+Nevertheless, it was interesting to speculate why Romanism had not made
+more progress in England, why even now with a hierarchy and with such a
+distinguished line of converts beginning with Newman it remained so
+completely out of touch with the national life of the country. While the
+Romans converted one soul to Catholicism, the inheritors of the Oxford
+Movement were converting twenty. Catholicism must be accounted a
+disposition of mind, an attitude toward life that did not necessarily
+imply all that was implied by Roman Catholicism. What was the secret of
+the Roman failure? Everywhere else in the world Roman Catholicism had
+known how to adapt itself to national needs; only in England did it
+remain exotic. It was like an Anglo-Indian magnate who returns to find
+himself of no importance in his native land, and who but for the flavour
+of his curries and perhaps a black servant or two would be utterly
+inconspicuous. He tries to fit in with the new conditions of his
+readopted country, but he remains an exotic and is regarded by his
+neighbours as one to whom the lesson must be taught that he is no
+longer of importance. What had been the cause of this breach in the
+Roman Catholic tradition, this curious incompetency, this Anglo-Indian
+conservatism and pretentiousness? Perhaps it had begun when in the
+seventeenth century the propagation of Roman Catholicism in England was
+handed over to the Jesuits, who mismanaged the country hopelessly. By
+the time Rome had perceived that the conversion of England could not be
+left to the Jesuits the harm was done, so that when with greater
+toleration the time was ripe to expand her organization it was necessary
+to recruit her priests in Ireland. What the Jesuits had begun the Irish
+completed. It had been amusing to listen to the lamentations of
+Monseigneur Cripps; but Monseigneur Cripps had expressed, however
+ludicrous his egoism, the failure of his Church in England.
+
+Mark's statement of the Anglican position with nobody to answer his
+arguments except the trees and the hedgerows seemed flawless. The level
+road, the gentle breeze in the orchards on either side, the scent of the
+grass, and the busy chirping of the birds coincided with the main point
+of his argument that England was most inexpressibly Anglican and that
+Roman Catholicism was most unmistakably not. His arguments were really
+hasty foot-notes to his convictions; if each one had separately been
+proved wrong, that would have had no influence on the point of view he
+had reached. He forgot that this very landscape that was seeming
+incomparable England herself had yesterday appeared complacent and
+monotonous. In fact he was as bad as George Fox, who after taking off
+his shoes to curse the bloody city of Lichfield should only have put
+them on again to walk away from it.
+
+The grey road was by now beginning to climb the foothills of the
+Cotswolds; a yellow-hammer, keeping always a few paces ahead, twittered
+from quickset boughs nine encouraging notes that drowned the echoes of
+ancient controversies. In such a countryside no claims papal or
+episcopal possessed the least importance; and Mark dismissed the subject
+from his mind, abandoning himself to the pleasure of the slow ascent.
+Looking back after a while he could see the town of Wield riding like a
+ship in a sea of verdure, and when he surveyed thus England asleep in
+the sunlight, the old ambition to become a preaching friar was kindled
+again in his heart. He would re-establish the extinct and absolutely
+English Order of St. Gilbert so that there should be no question of
+Roman pretensions. Doubtless, St. Francis himself would understand a
+revival of his Order without reference to existing Franciscans; but
+nobody else would understand, and it would be foolish to insist upon
+being a Franciscan if the rest of the Order disowned him and his
+followers. If anybody had asked Mark at that moment why he wanted to
+restore the preaching friars, he might have found it difficult to
+answer. He was by no means imbued with the missionary spirit just then;
+his experience at Chatsea had made him pessimistic about missionary
+effort in the Church of England. If a man like Father Rowley had failed
+to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed
+more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should
+be successful. The ambition to become a friar was revived by an
+incomprehensible, or if not incomprehensible, certainly by an
+inexplicable impulse to put himself in tune with the landscape, to
+proclaim as it were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down
+there in the flowery Vale of Wield: _God rest you merry gentlemen, let
+nothing you dismay!_ There was revealed to him with the assurance of
+absolute faith that all the sorrows, all the ugliness, all the
+soullessness (no other word could be found) of England in the first year
+of the twentieth century was due to the Reformation; the desire to
+become a preaching friar was the dramatic expression of this inspired
+conviction. Before his journey through the Vale of Wield Mark in any
+discussion would have been ready to argue the mistake of the
+Reformation: but now there was no longer room for argument. What
+formerly he thought now he knew. The song of the yellow-hammer was
+louder in the quickset hedge; the trees burned with a sharper green; the
+road urged his feet.
+
+"If only everybody in England could move as I am moving now," he
+thought. "If only I could be granted the power to show a few people, so
+that they could show others, and those others show all the world. How
+confidently that yellow-hammer repeats his song! How well he knows that
+his song is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the
+linnet envies him! The fools that talk of nature's cruelty, the blind
+fatuous sentimental coxcombs!"
+
+Thus apostrophizing, Mark came to a wayside inn; discovering that he was
+hungry, he took his seat at a rustic table outside and called for bread
+and cheese and beer. While he was eating, a vehicle approached from the
+direction in which he would soon be travelling. He took it at first for
+a caravan of gipsies, but when it grew near he saw that it was painted
+over with minatory texts and was evidently the vehicle of itinerant
+gospellers. Two young men alighted from the caravan when it pulled up
+before the door of the inn. They were long-nosed sallow creatures with
+that expression of complacency which organized morality too often
+produces, and in this quiet countryside they gave an effect of being
+overgrown Sunday-school scholars upon their annual outing. Having cast a
+censorious glance in the direction of Mark's jug of ale, they sat down
+at the farther end of the bench and ordered food.
+
+"The preaching friars of to-day," Mark thought gloomily.
+
+"Excuse me," said one of the gospellers. "I notice you've been looking
+very hard at our van. Excuse me, but are you saved?"
+
+"No, are you?" Mark countered with an angry blush.
+
+"We are," the gospeller proclaimed. "Or I and Mr. Smillie here," he
+indicated his companion, "wouldn't be travelling round trying to save
+others. Here, read this tract, my friend. Don't hurry over it. We can
+wait all day and all night to bring one wandering soul to Jesus."
+
+Mark looked at the young men curiously; perceiving that they were
+sincere, he accepted the tract and out of courtesy perused it. The tale
+therein enfolded reminded him of a narrative testifying to the efficacy
+of a patent medicine. The process of conversation followed a stereotyped
+formula.
+
+_For three and a half years I was unable to keep down any sins for more
+than five minutes after I had committed the last one. I had a dizzy
+feeling in the heart and a sharp pain in the small of the soul. A friend
+of mine recommended me to try the good minister in the slum. . . . After
+the first text I was able to keep down my sins for six minutes . . .
+after twenty-two bottles I am as good as I ever was. . . . I ascribe my
+salvation entirely to_. . . . Mark handed back the tract with a smile.
+
+"Do you convert many people with this literature?" he asked.
+
+"We don't often convert a soul right off," said Mr. Smillie. "But we sow
+the good seed, if you follow my meaning; and we leave the rest to Jesus.
+Mr. Bullock and I have handed over seven hundred tracts in three weeks,
+and we know that they won't all fall on stony ground or be choked by
+tares and thistles."
+
+"Do you mind my asking you a question?" Mark said.
+
+The gospel bearers craned their necks like hungry fowls in their
+eagerness to peck at any problems Mark felt inclined to scatter before
+them. A ludicrous fancy passed through his mind that much of the good
+seed was pecked up by the scatterers.
+
+"What are you trying to convert people to?" Mark solemnly inquired.
+
+"What are we trying to convert people to?" echoed Mr. Bullock and Mr.
+Smillie in unison. Then the former became eloquent. "We're trying to
+wash ignorant people in the blood of the Lamb. We're converting them
+from the outer darkness, where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing
+of teeth, to be rocked safe for ever in the arms of Jesus. If you'd have
+read that tract I handed you a bit more slowly and a bit more carefully,
+you wouldn't have had any call to ask a question like that."
+
+"Perhaps I framed my question rather badly," Mark admitted. "I
+understand that you want to bring people to believe in Our Lord; but
+when by a tract or by a personal exhortation or by an emotional appeal
+you've induced them to suppose that they are converted, or as you put it
+saved, what more do you give them?"
+
+"What more do we give them?" Mr. Smillie shrilled. "What more can we
+give them after we've given them Christ Jesus? We're sitting here
+offering you Christ Jesus at this moment. You're sitting there mocking
+at us. But Mr. Bullock and me don't mind how much you mock. We're ready
+to stay here for hours if we can bring you safe to the bosom of
+Emmanuel."
+
+"Yes, but suppose I told you that I believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ
+without any persuasion from you?" Mark inquired.
+
+"Well, then you're saved," said Mr. Bullock decidedly. "And you can ask
+the landlord for our bill, Mr. Smillie."
+
+"But is nothing more necessary?" Mark persisted.
+
+"_By faith are ye justified_," Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie shouted
+simultaneously.
+
+Mark paused for a moment to consider whether argument was worth while,
+and then he returned to the attack.
+
+"I'm afraid I think that people like you do a great deal of damage to
+Christianity. You only flatter human conceit. You get hold of some
+emotional creature and work upon his feelings until in an access of
+self-absorption he feels that the universe is standing still while the
+necessary measures are taken to secure his personal salvation. You
+flatter this poor soul, and then you go away and leave him to work out
+his own salvation."
+
+"If you're dwelling in Christ Jesus and Christ Jesus is dwelling in you,
+you haven't got to work out your own salvation. He worked out your
+salvation on the Cross," said Mr. Bullock contemptuously.
+
+"And you think that nothing more is necessary from a man? It seems to me
+that the religion you preach is fatal to human character. I'm not trying
+to be offensive when I tell you that it's the religion of a tapeworm.
+It's a religion for parasites. It's a religion which ignores the Holy
+Ghost."
+
+"Perhaps you'll explain your assertion a little more fully?" Mr. Bullock
+invited with a scowl.
+
+"What I mean is that, if Our Lord's Atonement removed all responsibility
+from human nature, there doesn't seem much for the Holy Ghost to do,
+does there?"
+
+"Well, as it happens," said Mr. Bullock sarcastically, "Mr. Smillie and
+I here do most of our work with the help of the Holy Ghost, so you've
+hit on a bad example to work off your sneers on."
+
+"I'm not trying to sneer," Mark protested. "But strangely enough just
+before you came along I was thinking to myself how much I should like to
+travel over England preaching about Our Lord, because I think that
+England has need of Him. But I also think, now you've answered my
+question, that _you_ are doing more harm than good by your
+interpretation of the Holy Ghost."
+
+"Mr. Smillie," interrupted Mr. Bullock in an elaborately off-hand voice,
+"if you've counted the change and it's all correct, we'd better get a
+move on. Let's gird up our loins, Mr. Smillie, and not sit wrestling
+here with infidels."
+
+"No, really, you must allow me," Mark persisted. "You've had it so much
+your own way with your tracts and your talks this last few weeks that by
+now you must be in need of a sermon yourselves. The gospel you preach is
+only going to add to the complacency of England, and England is too
+complacent already. All Northern nations are, which is why they are
+Protestant. They demand a religion which will truckle to them, a
+religion which will allow them to devote six days of the week to what is
+called business and on the seventh day to rest and praise God that they
+are not as other men."
+
+"_Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things
+that are God's_," said Mr. Smillie, putting the change in his pocket and
+untying the nosebag from the horse.
+
+"_Ye cannot serve God and mammon_," Mark retorted. "And I wish you'd let
+me finish my argument."
+
+"Mr. Smillie and I aren't touring the Midlands trying to find grapes on
+thorns and figs on thistles," said Mr. Bullock scathingly. "We'd have
+given you a chance, if you'd have shown any fruits of the Spirit."
+
+"You've just said you weren't looking for grapes or figs," Mark laughed.
+"I'm sorry I've made you so cross. But you began the argument by asking
+me if I was saved. Think how annoyed you would have been if I had begun
+a conversation by asking you if you were washed."
+
+"My last words to you is," said Mr. Bullock solemnly, looking out of
+the caravan window, "my last words to you are," he corrected himself,
+"is to avoid beer. You can touch up the horse, Mr. Smillie."
+
+"I'll come and touch you up, you big-mouthed Bible thumpers," a rich
+voice shouted from the inn door. "Yes, you sit outside my public-house
+and swill minerals when you're so full of gas already you could light a
+corporation gasworks. Avoid beer, you walking bellows? Step down out of
+that travelling menagerie, and I'll give you 'avoid beer.' You'll avoid
+more than beer before I've finished with you."
+
+But the gospel bearers without paying any attention to the tirade went
+on their way; and Mark who did not wait to listen to the innkeeper's
+abuse of all religion and all religious people went on his way in the
+opposite direction.
+
+Swinging homeward over the Cotswolds Mark flattered himself on a victory
+over heretics, and he imagined his adversaries entering Wield that
+afternoon, the prey of doubt and mortification. At the highest point of
+the road he even ventured to suppose that they might find themselves at
+Evensong outside St. Andrew's Church and led within by the grace of the
+Holy Spirit that they might renounce their errors before the altar.
+Indeed, it was not until he was back in the Rectory that the futility of
+his own bearing overwhelmed him with shame. Anxious to atone for his
+self-conceit, Mark gave the Rector an account of the incident.
+
+"It seems to me that I behaved very feebly, don't you think?"
+
+"That kind of fellow is a hard nut to crack," the Rector said
+consolingly. "And you can't expect just by quoting text against text to
+effect an instant conversion. Don't forget that your friends are in
+their way as great enthusiasts probably as yourself."
+
+"Yes, but it's humiliating to be imagining oneself leading a revival of
+the preaching friars and then to behave like that. What strikes me now,
+when it's too late, is that I ought to have waited and taken the
+opportunity to tackle the innkeeper. He was just the ordinary man who
+supposes that religion is his natural enemy. You must admit that I
+missed a chance there."
+
+"I don't want to check your missionary zeal," said the Rector. "But I
+really don't think you need worry yourself about an omission of that
+kind so long before you are ordained. If I didn't know you as well as I
+do, I might even be inclined to consider such a passion for souls at
+your age a little morbid. I wish with all my heart you'd gone to
+Oxford," he added with a sigh.
+
+"Well, really, do you know," said Mark, "I don't regret that. Whatever
+may be the advantages of a public school and university, the education
+hampers one. One becomes identified with a class; and when one has
+finished with that education, the next two or three years have to be
+spent in discovering that public school and university men form a very
+small proportion of the world's population. Sometimes I almost regret
+that my mother did not let me acquire that Cockney accent. You can say a
+lot of things in a Cockney accent which said without any accent sound
+priggish. You must admit, Rector, that your inner comment on my tale of
+the gospellers and the innkeeper is 'Dear me! I am afraid Mark's turning
+into a prig.'"
+
+"No, no. I laid particular stress on the point that if I didn't know you
+as well as I do I might perhaps have thought that," the Rector
+protested.
+
+"I don't think I am a prig," Mark went on slowly. "I don't think I have
+enough confidence in myself to be a prig. I think the way I argued with
+Mr. Bullock and Mr. Smillie was a bit priggish, because at the back of
+my head all the time I was talking I felt in addition to the arrogance
+of faith a kind of confounded snobbishness; and this sense of
+superiority came not from my being a member of the Church, but from
+feeling myself more civilized than they were. Looking back now at the
+conversation, I can remember that actually at the very moment I was
+talking of the Holy Ghost I was noticing how Mr. Bullock's dicky would
+keep escaping from his waistcoat. I wonder if the great missionary
+saints of the middle ages had to contend with this accumulation of
+social conventions with which we are faced nowadays. It seems to me
+that in everything--in art, in religion, in mere ordinary everyday life
+and living--man is adding daily to the wall that separates him from
+God."
+
+"H'm, yes," said the Rector, "all this only means that you are growing
+up. The child is nearer to God than the man. Wordsworth said it better
+than I can say it. Similarly, the human race must grow away from God as
+it takes upon itself the burden of knowledge. That surely is inherent in
+the fall of man. No philosopher has yet improved upon the first chapter
+of Genesis as a symbolical explanation of humanity's plight. When man
+was created--or if you like to put it evolved--there must have been an
+exact moment at which he had the chance of remaining where he was--in
+other words, in the Garden of Eden--or of developing further along his
+own lines with free will. Satan fell from pride. It is natural to assume
+that man, being tempted by Satan, would fall from the same sin, though
+the occasion, of his fall might be the less heroic sin of curiosity.
+Yes, I think that first chapter of Genesis, as an attempt to sum up the
+history of millions of years, is astoundingly complete. Have you ever
+thought how far by now the world would have grown away from God without
+the Incarnation?"
+
+"Yes," said Mark, "and after nineteen hundred years how little nearer it
+has grown."
+
+"My dear boy," said the Rector, "if man has not even yet got rid of
+rudimentary gills or useless paps he is not going to grow very visibly
+nearer to God in nineteen hundred years after growing away from God for
+ninety million. Yet such is the mercy of our Father in Heaven that,
+infinitely remote as we have grown from Him, we are still made in His
+image, and in childhood we are allowed a few years of blessed innocency.
+To some children--and you were one of them--God reveals Himself more
+directly. But don't, my dear fellow, grow up imagining that these
+visions you were accorded as a boy will be accorded to you all through
+your life. You may succeed in remaining pure in act, but you will find
+it hard to remain pure in heart. To me the most frightening beatitude is
+_Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God._ What your
+present state of mind really amounts to is lack of hope, for as soon as
+you find yourself unable to be as miraculously eloquent as St. Anthony
+of Padua you become the prey of despair."
+
+"I am not so foolish as that," Mark replied. "But surely, Rector, it
+behoves me during these years before my ordination to criticize myself
+severely."
+
+"As severely as you like," the Rector agreed, "provided that you only
+criticize yourself, and don't criticize Almighty God."
+
+"But surely," Mark went on, "I ought to be asking myself now that I am
+twenty-one how I shall best occupy the next three years?"
+
+"Certainly," the Rector assented. "Think it over, and be sure that, when
+you have thought it over and have made your decision with the help of
+prayer, I shall be the first to support that decision in every way
+possible. Even if you decide to be a preaching friar," he added with a
+smile. "And now I have some news for you. Esther arrives here tomorrow
+to stay with us for a fortnight before she is professed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+SISTER ESTHER MAGDALENE
+
+
+Esther's novitiate in the community of St. Mary Magdalene, Shoreditch,
+had lasted six months longer than was usual, because the Mother Superior
+while never doubting her vocation for the religious life had feared for
+her ability to stand the strain of that work among penitents to which
+the community was dedicated. In the end, her perseverance had been
+rewarded, and the day of her profession was at hand.
+
+During the whole of her nearly four years' novitiate Esther had not been
+home once; although Mark and she had corresponded at long intervals,
+their letters had been nothing more than formal records of minor events,
+and on St. John's eve he drove with the dogcart to meet her, wondering
+all the way how much she would have changed. The first thing that struck
+him when he saw her alight from the train on Shipcot platform was her
+neatness. In old days with windblown hair and clothes flung on anyhow
+she had belonged so unmistakably to the open air. Now in her grey habit
+and white veil of the novice she was as tranquil as Miriam, and for the
+first time Mark perceived a resemblance between the sisters. Her
+complexion, which formerly was flushed and much freckled by the open
+air, was now like alabaster; and although her auburn hair was hidden
+beneath the veil Mark was aware of it like a hidden fire. He had in the
+very moment of welcoming her a swift vision of that auburn hair lying on
+the steps of the altar a fortnight hence, and he was filled with a wild
+desire to be present at her profession and gathering up the shorn locks
+to let them run through his fingers like flames. He had no time to be
+astonished at himself before they were shaking hands.
+
+"Why, Esther," he laughed, "you're carrying an umbrella."
+
+"It was raining in London," she said gravely.
+
+He was on the point of exclaiming at such prudence in Esther when he
+blushed in the remembrance that she was a nun. During the drive back
+they talked shyly about the characters of the village and the Rectory
+animals.
+
+"I feel as if you'd just come back from school for the holidays," he
+said.
+
+"Yes, I feel as if I'd been at school," she agreed. "How sweet the
+country smells."
+
+"Don't you miss the country sometimes in Shoreditch?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head and looked at him with puzzled eyes.
+
+"Why should I miss anything in Shoreditch?"
+
+Mark was abashed and silent for the rest of the drive, because he
+fancied that Esther might have supposed that he was referring to the
+past, rather than give which impression he would have cut out his
+tongue. When they reached the Rectory, Mark was moved almost to tears by
+the greetings.
+
+"Dear little sister," Miriam murmured. "How happy we are to have you
+with us again."
+
+"Dear child," said Mrs. Ogilvie. "And really she does look like a nun."
+
+"My dearest girl, we have missed you every moment of these four years,"
+said the Rector, bending to kiss her. "How cold your cheek is."
+
+"It was quite chilly driving," said Mark quickly, for there had come
+upon him a sudden dismay lest they should think she was a ghost. He was
+relieved when Miriam announced tea half an hour earlier than usual in
+honour of Esther's arrival; it seemed to prove that to her family she
+was still alive.
+
+"After tea I'm going to Wych Maries to pick St. John's wort for the
+church. Would you like to walk as far?" Mark suggested, and then stood
+speechless, horrified at his want of tact. He had the presence of mind
+not to excuse himself, and he was grateful to Esther when she replied in
+a calm voice that she should like a walk after tea.
+
+When the opportunity presented itself, Mark apologized for his
+suggestion.
+
+"By why apologize?" she asked. "I assure you I'm not at all tired and I
+really should like to walk to Wych Maries."
+
+He was amazed at her self-possession, and they walked along with
+unhastening conventual steps to where the St. John's wort grew amid a
+tangle of ground ivy in the open spaces of a cypress grove, appearing
+most vividly and richly golden like sunlight breaking from black clouds
+in the western sky.
+
+"Gather some sprays quickly, Sister Esther Magdalene," Mark advised.
+"And you will be safe against the demons of this night when evil has
+such power."
+
+"Are we ever safe against the demons of the night?" she asked solemnly.
+"And has not evil great power always?"
+
+"Always," he assented in a voice that trembled to a sigh, like the
+uncertain wind that comes hesitating at dusk in the woods. "Always," he
+repeated.
+
+As he spoke Mark fell upon his knees among the holy flowers, for there
+had come upon him temptation; and the sombre trees standing round
+watched him like fiends with folded wings.
+
+"Go to the chapel," he cried in an agony.
+
+"Mark, what is the matter?"
+
+"Go to the chapel. For God's sake, Esther, don't wait."
+
+In another moment he felt that he should tear the white veil from her
+forehead and set loose her auburn hair.
+
+"Mark, are you ill?"
+
+"Oh, do what I ask," he begged. "Once I prayed for you here. Pray for me
+now."
+
+At that moment she understood, and putting her hands to her eyes she
+stumbled blindly toward the ruined church of the two Maries, heavily
+too, because she was encumbered by her holy garb. When she was gone and
+the last rustle of her footsteps had died away upon the mid-summer
+silence, Mark buried his body in the golden flowers.
+
+"How can I ever look any of them in the face again?" he cried aloud.
+"Small wonder that yesterday I was so futile. Small wonder indeed! And
+of all women, to think that I should fall in love with Esther. If I had
+fallen in love with her four years ago . . . but now when she is going
+to be professed . . . suddenly without any warning . . . without any
+warning . . . yet perhaps I did love her in those days . . . and was
+jealous. . . ."
+
+And even while Mark poured forth his horror of himself he held her image
+to his heart.
+
+"I thought she was a ghost because she was dead to me, not because she
+was dead to them. She is not a ghost to them. And is she to me?"
+
+He leapt to his feet, listening.
+
+"Should she come back," he thought with beating heart. "Should she come
+back . . . I love her . . . she hasn't taken her final vows . . . might
+she not love me? No," he shouted at the top of his voice. "I will not do
+as my father did . . . I will not . . . I will not. . . ."
+
+Mark felt sure of himself again: he felt as he used to feel as a little
+boy when his mother entered on a shaft of light to console his childish
+terrors. When he came to the ruined chapel and saw Esther standing with
+uplifted palms before the image of St. Mary Magdalene long since put
+back upon the pedestal from which it had been flung by the squire of
+Rushbrooke Grange, Mark was himself again.
+
+"My dear," Esther cried, impulsively taking his hand. "You frightened
+me. What was the matter?"
+
+He did not answer for a moment or two, because he wanted her to hold his
+hand a little while longer, so much time was to come when she would
+never hold it.
+
+"Whenever I dip my hand in cold water," he said at last, "I shall think
+of you. Why did you say that about the demons of the night?"
+
+She dropped his hand in comprehension.
+
+"You're disgusted with me," he murmured. "I'm not surprised."
+
+"No, no, you mustn't think of me like that. I'm still a very human
+Esther, so human that the Reverend Mother has made me wait an extra year
+to be professed. But, Mark dear, can't you understand, you who know what
+I endured in this place, that I am sometimes tempted by memories of
+him, that I sometimes sin by regrets for giving him up, my dead lover
+so near to me in this place. My dead love," she sighed to herself, "to
+whose memory in my pride of piety I thought I should be utterly
+indifferent."
+
+A spasm of jealousy had shaken Mark while Esther was speaking, but by
+the time she had finished he had fought it down.
+
+"I think I must have loved you all this time," he told her.
+
+"Mark dear, I'm ten years older than you. I'm going to be a nun for what
+of my life remains. And I can never love anybody else. Don't make this
+visit of mine a misery to me. I've had to conquer so much and I need
+your prayers."
+
+"I wish you needed my kisses."
+
+"Mark!"
+
+"What did I say? Oh, Esther, I'm a brute. Tell me one thing."
+
+"I've already told you more than I've told anyone except my confessor."
+
+"Have you found happiness in the religious life?"
+
+"I have found myself. The Reverend Mother wanted me to leave the
+community and enter a contemplative order. She did not think I should be
+able to help poor girls."
+
+"Esther, what a stupid woman! Why surely you would be wonderful with
+them?"
+
+"I think she is a wise woman," said Esther. "I think since we came
+picking St. John's wort I understand how wise she is."
+
+"Esther, dear dear Esther, you make me feel more than ever ashamed of
+myself. I entreat you not to believe what the Reverend Mother says."
+
+"You have only a fortnight to convince me," said Esther.
+
+"And I will convince you."
+
+"Mark, do you remember when you made me pray for his soul telling me
+that in that brief second he had time to repent?"
+
+Mark nodded grimly.
+
+"You still do think that, don't you?"
+
+"Of course I do. He must have repented."
+
+She thanked him with her eyes; and Mark looking into their depths of
+hope unfathomable put away from him the thought that the damned soul of
+Will Starling was abroad to-night with power of evil. Yes, he put this
+thought behind him; but carrying an armful of St. John's wort to hang in
+sprays above the doors of the church he could not rid himself of the
+fancy that his arms were filled with Esther's auburn hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+MALFORD ABBEY
+
+
+Mark left Wych-on-the-Wold next day; although he did not announce that
+he should be absent from home so long, he intended not to return until
+Esther had gone back to Shoreditch. He hoped that he was not being
+cowardly in thus running away; but after having assured Esther that she
+could count on his behaving normally for the rest of her visit, he found
+his sleep that night so profoundly disturbed by feverish visions that
+when morning came he dreaded his inability to behave as both he would
+wish himself and she would wish him to behave. Flight seemed the only
+way to find peace. He was shocked not so much by being in love with
+Esther, but by the suddenness with which his desires had overwhelmed
+him, desires which had never been roused since he was born. If in an
+instant he could be turned upside down like that, could he be sure that
+upon the next occasion, supposing that he fell in love with somebody
+more suitable, he should be able to escape so easily? His father must
+have married his mother out of some such violent impulse as had seized
+himself yesterday afternoon, and resentiment about his weakness had
+spoilt his whole life. And those dreams! How significant now were the
+words of the Compline hymn, and how much it behoved a Christian soul to
+vanquish these ill dreams against beholding which the defence of the
+Creator was invoked. He had vowed celibacy; yet already, three months
+after his twenty-first birthday, after never once being troubled with
+the slightest hint that the vow he had taken might be hard to keep, his
+security had been threatened. How right the Rector had been about that
+frightening beatitude.
+
+Mark had taken the direction of Wychford, and when he reached the
+bridge at the bottom of the road from Wych-on-the-Wold he thought he
+would turn aside and visit the Greys whom he had not seen for a long
+time. He was conscious of a curiosity to know if the feelings aroused by
+Esther could be aroused by Monica or Margaret or Pauline. He found the
+dear family unchanged and himself, so far as they were concerned,
+equally unchanged and as much at his ease as he had ever been.
+
+"And what are you going to do now?" one of them asked.
+
+"You mean immediately?"
+
+Mark could not bring himself to say that he did not know, because such a
+reply would have seemed to link him with the state of mind in which he
+had been thrown yesterday afternoon.
+
+"Well, really, I was thinking of going into a monastery," he announced.
+
+Pauline clapped her hands.
+
+"Now I think that is just what you ought to do," she said.
+
+Then followed questions about which Order he proposed to join; and Mark
+ashamed to go back on what he had said lest they should think him
+flippant answered that he thought of joining the Order of St. George.
+
+"You know--Father Burrowes, who works among soldiers."
+
+When Mark was standing by the cross-roads above Wychford and was
+wondering which to take, he decided that really the best thing he could
+do at this moment was to try to enter the Order of St. George. He might
+succeed in being ordained without going to a theological college, or if
+the Bishop insisted upon a theological course and he found that he had a
+vocation for the religious life, he could go to Glastonbury and rejoin
+the Order when he was a priest. It was true that Father Rowley
+disapproved of Father Burrowes; but he had never expressed more than a
+general disapproval, and Mark was inclined to attribute his attitude to
+the prejudice of a man of strong personality and definite methods
+against another man of strong personality and definite methods working
+on similar lines among similar people. Mark remembered now that there
+had been a question at one time of Father Burrowes' opening a priory in
+the next parish to St. Agnes'. Probably that was the reason why Father
+Rowley disapproved of him. Mark had heard the monk preach on one
+occasion and had liked him. Outside the pulpit, however, he knew nothing
+more of him than what he had heard from soldiers staying in the Keppel
+Street Mission House, who from Aldershot had visited Malford Abbey, the
+mother house of the Order. The alternative to Malford was Clere Abbey on
+the Berkshire downs where Dom Cuthbert Manners ruled over a small
+community of strict Benedictines. Had Mark really been convinced that he
+was likely to remain a monk for the rest of his life, he would have
+chosen the Benedictines; but he did not feel justified in presenting
+himself for admission to Clere on what would seem impulse. He hoped that
+if he was accepted by the Order of St. George he should be given an
+opportunity to work at one of the priories in Aldershot or Sandgate, and
+that the experience he might expect to gain would help him later as a
+parish priest. He could not confide in the Rector his reason for wanting
+to subject himself to monastic discipline, and he expected a good deal
+of opposition. It might be better to write from whatever village he
+stayed in to-night and make the announcement without going back at all.
+And this is what in the end he decided to do.
+
+     The Sun Inn,
+
+     Ladingford.
+
+     June 24.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I expect you gathered from our talk the day before yesterday that I
+     was feeling dissatisfied with myself, and you must know that the
+     problem of occupying my time wisely before I am ordained has lately
+     been on my mind. I don't feel that I could honestly take up a
+     profession to which I had no intention of sticking, and though
+     Father Rowley recommended me to stay at home and work with the
+     village people I don't feel capable of doing that yet. If it was a
+     question of helping you by taking off your shoulders work that I
+     could do it would be another matter. But you've often said to me
+     that you had more time on your hands than you cared for since you
+     gave up coaching me for an Oxford scholarship, and so I don't think
+     I'm wrong in supposing that you would find it hard to discover for
+     me any parochial routine work. I'm not old enough yet to fish for
+     souls, and I have no confidence in my ability to hook them.
+     Besides, I think it would bore you if I started "missionizing" in
+     Wych-on-the-Wold.
+
+     I've settled therefore to try to get into the Order of St. George.
+     I don't think you know Father Burrowes personally, but I've always
+     heard that he does a splendid work among soldiers, and I'm hoping
+     that he will accept me as a novice.
+
+     Latterly, in fact since I left Chatsea, I've been feeling the need
+     of a regular existence, and, though I cannot pretend that I have a
+     vocation for the monastic life in the highest sense, I do feel that
+     I have a vocation for the Order of St. George. You will wonder why
+     I have not mentioned this to you, but the fact is--and I hope
+     you'll appreciate my frankness--I did not think of the O.S.G. till
+     this morning. Of course they may refuse to have me. But I shall
+     present myself without a preliminary letter, and I hope to persuade
+     Father Burrowes to have me on probation. If he once does that, I'm
+     sure that I shall satisfy him. This sounds like the letter of a
+     conceited clerk. It must be the fault of this horrible inn pen,
+     which is like writing with a tooth-pick dipped in a puddle! I
+     thought it was best not to stay at the Rectory, with Esther on the
+     verge of her profession. It wouldn't be fair to her at a time like
+     this to make my immediate future a matter of prime importance. So
+     do forgive my going off in this fashion. I suppose it's just
+     possible that some bishop will accept me for ordination from
+     Malford, though no doubt it's improbable. This will be a matter to
+     discuss with Father Burrowes later.
+
+     Do forgive what looks like a most erratic course of procedure. But
+     I really should hate a long discussion, and if I make a mistake I
+     shall have had a lesson. It really is essential for me to be
+     tremendously occupied. I cannot say more than this, but I do beg
+     you to believe that I'm not taking this apparently unpremeditated
+     step without a very strong reason. It's a kind of compromise with
+     my ambition to re-establish in the English Church an order of
+     preaching friars. I haven't yet given up that idea, but I'm sure
+     that I ought not to think about it seriously until I'm a priest.
+
+     I'm staying here to-night after a glorious day's tramp, and
+     to-morrow morning I shall take the train and go by Reading and
+     Basingstoke to Malford. I'll write to you as soon as I know if I'm
+     accepted. My best love to everybody, and please tell Esther that I
+     shall think about her on St. Mary Magdalene's Day.
+
+     Yours always affectionately,
+
+     Mark.
+
+To Esther he wrote by the same post:
+
+     My dear Sister Esther Magdalene,
+
+     Do not be angry with me for running away, and do not despise me for
+     trying to enter a monastery in such a mood. I'm as much the prey of
+     religion as you are. And I am really horrified by the revelation of
+     what I am capable of. I saw in your eyes yesterday the passion of
+     your soul for Divine things. The memory of them awes me. Pray for
+     me, dear sister, that all my passion may be turned to the service
+     of God. Defend me to your brother, who will not understand my
+     behaviour.
+
+     Mark.
+
+Three days later Mark wrote again to the Rector:
+
+     The Abbey,
+
+     Malford,
+
+     Surrey.
+
+     June 27th.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I do hope that you're not so much annoyed with me that you don't
+     want to hear anything about my monastic adventures. However, if you
+     are you can send back this long letter unopened. I believe that is
+     the proper way to show one's disapproval by correspondence.
+
+     I reached Malford yesterday afternoon, and after a jolly walk
+     between high hazel hedges for about two miles I reached the Abbey.
+     It doesn't quite fulfil one's preconceived ideas of what an abbey
+     should look like, but I suppose it is the most practicable building
+     that could be erected with the amount of money that the Order had
+     to spare for what in a way is a luxury for a working order like
+     this. What it most resembles is three tin tabernacles put together
+     to form three sides of a square, the fourth and empty side of which
+     is by far the most beautiful, because it consists of a glorious
+     view over a foreground of woods, a middle-distance of park land,
+     and on the horizon the Hampshire downs.
+
+     I am an authority on this view, because I had to gaze at it for
+     about a quarter of an hour while I was waiting for somebody to open
+     the Abbey door. At last the porter, Brother Lawrence, after taking
+     a good look at me through the grill, demanded what I wanted. When I
+     said that I wanted to be a monk, he looked very alarmed and hurried
+     away, leaving me to gaze at that view for another ten minutes. He
+     came back at last and let me in, informing me in a somewhat
+     adenoidish voice that the Reverend Brother was busy in the garden
+     and asking me to wait until he came in. Brother Lawrence has a
+     large, pock-marked face, and while he is talking to anybody he
+     stands with his right hand in his left sleeve and his left hand in
+     his right sleeve like a Chinese mandarin or an old washer-woman
+     with her arms folded under her apron. You must make the most of my
+     descriptions in this letter, because if I am accepted as a
+     probationer I shan't be able to indulge in any more personalities
+     about my brethren.
+
+     The guest-room like everything else in the monastery is
+     match-boarded; and while I was waiting in it the noise was
+     terrific, because some corrugated iron was being nailed on the roof
+     of a building just outside. I began to regret that Brother Lawrence
+     had opened the door at all and that he had not left me in the
+     cloisters, as by the way I discovered that the space enclosed by
+     the three tin tabernacles is called! There was nothing to read in
+     the guest-room except one sheet of a six months' old newspaper
+     which had been spread on the table presumably for a guest to mend
+     something with glue. At last the Reverend Brother, looking most
+     beautiful in a white habit with a zucchetto of mauve velvet, came
+     in and welcomed me with much friendliness. I was surprised to find
+     somebody so young as Brother Dunstan in charge of a monastery,
+     especially as he said he was only a novice as yet. It appears that
+     all the bigwigs--or should I say big-cowls?--are away at the moment
+     on business of the Order and that various changes are in the
+     offing, the most important being the giving up of their branch in
+     Malta and the consequent arrival of Brother George, of whom
+     Brother Dunstan spoke in a hushed voice. Father Burrowes, or the
+     Reverend Father as he is called, is preaching in the north of
+     England at the moment, and Brother Dunstan tells me it is quite
+     impossible for him to say anything, still less to do anything,
+     about my admission. However, he urged me to stay on for the present
+     as a guest, an invitation which I accepted without hesitation. He
+     had only just time to show me my cell and the card of rules for
+     guests when a bell rang and, drawing his cowl over his head, he
+     hurried off.
+
+     After perusing the rules, I discovered that this was the bell which
+     rings a quarter of an hour before Vespers for solemn silence. I
+     hadn't the slightest idea where the chapel was, and when I asked
+     Brother Lawrence he glared at me and put his finger to his mouth. I
+     was not to be discouraged, however, and in the end he showed me
+     into the ante-chapel which is curtained off from the quire. There
+     was only one other person in the ante-chapel, a florid,
+     well-dressed man with a rather mincing and fussy way of
+     worshipping. The monks led by Brother Lawrence (who is not even a
+     novice yet, but a postulant and wears a black habit, without a
+     hood, tied round the waist with a rope) passed from the refectory
+     through the ante-chapel into the quire, and Vespers began. They
+     used an arrangement called "The Day Hours of the English Church,"
+     but beyond a few extra antiphons there was very little difference
+     from ordinary Evening Prayer. After Vespers I had a simple and
+     solemn meal by myself, and I was wondering how I should get hold of
+     a book to pass away the evening, when Brother Dunstan came in and
+     asked me if I'd like to sit with the brethren in the library until
+     the bell rang for simple silence a quarter of an hour before
+     Compline at 9.15, after which everybody--guests and monks--are
+     expected to go to bed in solemn silence. The difference between
+     simple silence and solemn silence is that you may ask necessary
+     questions and get necessary replies during simple silence; but as
+     far as I can make out, during solemn silence you wouldn't be
+     allowed to tell anybody that you were dying, or if you did tell
+     anybody, he wouldn't be able to do anything about it until solemn
+     silence was over.
+
+     The other monks are Brother Jerome, the senior novice after Brother
+     Dunstan, a pious but rather dull young man with fair hair and a
+     squashed face, and Brother Raymond, attractive and bird-like, and
+     considered a great Romanizer by the others. There is also Brother
+     Walter, who is only a probationer and is not even allowed wide
+     sleeves and a habit like Brother Lawrence, but has to wear a very
+     moth-eaten cassock with a black band tied round it. Brother Walter
+     had been marketing in High Thorpe (I wonder what the Bishop of
+     Silchester thought if he saw him in the neighbourhood of the
+     episcopal castle!) and having lost himself on the way home he had
+     arrived back late for Vespers and was tremendously teased by the
+     others in consequence. Brother Walter is a tall excitable awkward
+     creature with black hair that sticks up on end and wide-open
+     frightened eyes. His cassock is much too short for him both in the
+     arms and in the legs; and as he has very large hands and very large
+     feet, his hands and feet look still larger in consequence. They
+     didn't talk about much that was interesting during recreation.
+     Brother Dunstan and Brother Raymond were full of monkish jokes, at
+     all of which Brother Walter laughed in a very high voice--so loudly
+     once that Brother Jerome asked him if he would mind making less
+     noise, as he was reading Montalembert's Monks of the West, at which
+     Brother Walter fell into an abashed gloom.
+
+     I asked who the visitor in the ante-chapel was and was told that he
+     was a Sir Charles Horner who owns the whole of Malford and who has
+     presented the Order with the thirty acres on which the Abbey is
+     built. Sir Charles is evidently an ecclesiastically-minded person
+     and, I should imagine, rather pleased to be able to be the patron
+     of a monastic order.
+
+     I will write you again when I have seen Father Burrowes. For the
+     moment I'm inclined to think that Malford is rather playing at
+     being monks; but as I said, the bigwigs are all away. Brother
+     Dunstan is a delightful fellow, yet I shouldn't imagine that he
+     would make a successful abbot for long.
+
+     I enjoyed Compline most of all my experiences during the day, after
+     which I retired to my cell and slept without turning till the bell
+     rang for Lauds and Prime, both said as one office at six o'clock,
+     after which I should have liked a conventual Mass. But alas, there
+     is no priest here and I have been spending the time till breakfast
+     by writing you this endless letter.
+
+     Yours ever affectionately,
+
+     Mark.
+
+     P.S. They don't say Mattins, which I'm inclined to think rather
+     slack. But I suppose I oughtn't to criticize so soon.
+
+To those two letters of Mark's, the Rector replied as follows:
+
+     The Rectory,
+
+     Wych-on-the-Wold,
+
+     Oxon.
+
+     June 29th.
+
+     My dear Mark,
+
+     I cannot say frankly that I approve of your monastic scheme. I
+     should have liked an opportunity to talk it over with you first of
+     all, and I cannot congratulate you on your good manners in going
+     off like that without any word. Although you are technically
+     independent now, I think it would be a great mistake to sink your
+     small capital of L500 in the Order of St. George, and you can't
+     very well make use of them to pass the next two or three years
+     without contributing anything.
+
+     The other objection to your scheme is that you may not get taken at
+     Glastonbury. In any case the Glastonbury people will give the
+     preference to Varsity men, and I'm not sure that they would be very
+     keen on having an ex-monk. However, as I said, you are independent
+     now and can choose yourself what you do. Meanwhile, I suppose it is
+     possible that Burrowes may decide you have no vocation, in which
+     case I hope you'll give up your monastic ambitions and come back
+     here.
+
+     Yours affectionately,
+
+     Stephen Ogilvie.
+
+Mark who had been growing bored in the guest-room of Malford Abbey
+nearly said farewell to it for ever when he received the Rector's
+letter. His old friend and guardian was evidently wounded by his
+behaviour, and Mark considering what he owed him felt that he ought to
+abandon his monastic ambitions if by doing so he could repay the Rector
+some of his kindness. His hand was on the bell that should summon the
+guest-brother (when the bell was working and the guest-brother was not)
+in order to tell him that he had been called away urgently and to ask if
+he might have the Abbey cart to take him to the station; but at that
+moment Sir Charles Horner came in and began to chat affably to Mark.
+
+"I've been intending to come up and see you for the last three days. But
+I've been so confoundedly busy. They wonder what we country gentlemen do
+with ourselves. By gad, they ought to try our life for a change."
+
+Mark supposed that the third person plural referred to the whole body of
+Radical critics.
+
+"You're the son of Lidderdale, I hear," Sir Charles went on without
+giving Mark time to comment on the hardship of his existence. "I visited
+Lima Street twenty-five years ago, before you were born that was. Your
+father was a great pioneer. We owe him a lot. And you've been with
+Rowley lately? That confounded bishop. He's our bishop, you know. But he
+finds it difficult to get at Burrowes except by starving him for
+priests. The fellow's a time-server, a pusher . . ."
+
+Mark began to like Sir Charles; he would have liked anybody who would
+abuse the Bishop of Silchester.
+
+"So you're thinking of joining my Order," Sir Charles went on without
+giving Mark time to say a word. "I call it my Order because I set them
+up here with thirty acres of uncleared copse. It gives the Tommies
+something to do when they come over here on furlough from Aldershot.
+You've never met Burrowes, I hear."
+
+Mark thought that Sir Charles for a busy man had managed to learn a
+great deal about an unimportant person like himself.
+
+"Will Father Burrowes be here soon?" Mark inquired.
+
+"'Pon my word, I don't know. Nobody knows when he'll be anywhere. He's
+preaching all over the place. He begs the deuce of a lot of money, you
+know. Aren't you a friend of Dorward's? You were asking Brother Dunstan
+about him. His parish isn't far from here. About fifteen miles, that's
+all. He's an amusing fellow, isn't he? Has tremendous rows with his
+squire, Philip Iredale. A pompous ass whose wife ran away from him a
+little time ago. Served him right, Dorward told me in confidence. You
+must come and have lunch with me. There's only Lady Landells. I can't
+afford to live in the big place. Huge affair with Doric portico and all
+that, don't you know. It's let to Lord Middlesborough, the shipping man.
+I live at Malford Lodge. Quite a jolly little place I've made of it.
+Suits me better than that great gaunt Georgian pile. You'd better walk
+down with me this morning and stop to lunch."
+
+Mark, who was by now growing tired of his own company in the guest-room,
+accepted Sir Charles' invitation with alacrity; and they walked down
+from the Abbey to the village of Malford, which was situated at the
+confluence of the Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the
+Wey, which itself is not a mighty stream.
+
+"A rather charming village, don't you think?" said Sir Charles, pointing
+with his tasselled cane to a particularly attractive rose-hung cottage.
+"It was lucky that the railway missed us by a couple of miles; we should
+have been festering with tin bungalows by now on any available land,
+which means on any land that doesn't belong to me. I don't offer to show
+you the church, because I never enter it."
+
+Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate, supposing that
+with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should be of unusual interest.
+
+"My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the Simeon Trustees, it
+being the only part of my inheritance he could alienate from me, whom he
+loathed. He knew nothing would enrage me more than that, and the result
+is that I've got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has
+evening communion twice a month. That is why I took such pleasure in
+planting a monastery in the parish; and if only that old time-server the
+Bishop of Silchester would licence a chaplain to the community, I should
+get my Sunday Mass in my own parish despite my uncle's simeony, as I
+call it. As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I don't
+get a Mass at the Abbey and I have to go to the next parish, which is
+four miles away and appears highly undignified for the squire."
+
+"And you can't get him out?" said Mark.
+
+"If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another one just as
+bad. The Simeon Trustees only appoint people of the stamp of Mr.
+Choules, my present enemy. He's a horrid little man with a gaunt wife
+six feet high who beats her children and, if village gossip be true, her
+husband as well. Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to
+Middlesborough, as I told you."
+
+Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns and cedars and
+gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns. He had seen many of these great
+houses in the course of his tramping; but he had never thought of them
+before except as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people
+could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home as the small
+houses in which Mark had spent his life came over him now with a sense
+of novelty.
+
+"Ghastly affair, isn't it?" said the owner contemptuously. "I'd let it
+stand empty rather than live in it myself. It reeks of my uncle's
+medicine and echoes with his gouty groans. Besides what is there in it
+that's really mine?"
+
+Mark who had been thinking what an easy affair life must be for Sir
+Charles was struck by his tone of disillusionment. Perhaps all people
+who inherited old names and old estates were affected by their awareness
+of transitory possession. Sir Charles could not alienate even a piece of
+furniture. A middle-aged bachelor and a cosmopolitan, he would have
+moved about the corridors and halls of that huge house with less
+permanency than Lord Middlesborough who paid him so well to walk about
+in it in his stead, and who was no more restricted by the terms of his
+lease than was his landlord by the conditions of the entail. Mark began
+to feel sorry for him; but without cause, for when Sir Charles came in
+sight of Malford Lodge where he lived, he was full of enthusiasm. It was
+indeed a pretty little house of red brick, dating from the first quarter
+of the nineteenth century and like so many houses of that period built
+close to the road, surrounded too on three sides by a verandah of iron
+and copper in the pagoda style, thoroughly ugly, but by reason of the
+mellow peacock hues time had given its roof, full of personality and
+charm. They entered by a green door in the brick wall and crossed a
+lawn sloping down to the little river to reach the shade of a tulip tree
+in full bloom, where seated in one of those tall wicker garden chairs
+shaped like an alcove was an elderly lady as ugly as Priapus.
+
+"There's Lady Landells, who's a poetess, you know," said Sir Charles
+gravely.
+
+Mark accepted the information with equal gravity. He was still
+unsophisticated enough to be impressed at hearing a woman called a
+poetess.
+
+"Mr. Lidderdale is going to have lunch with us, Lady Landells," Sir
+Charles announced.
+
+"Oh, is he?" Lady Landells replied in a cracked murmur of complete
+indifference.
+
+"He's a great admirer of your poems," added Sir Charles, hearing which
+Lady Landells looked at Mark with her cod's eyes and by way of greeting
+offered him two fingers of her left hand.
+
+"I can't read him any of my poems to-day, Charles, so pray don't ask me
+to do so," the poetess groaned.
+
+"I'm going to show Mr. Lidderdale some of our pictures before lunch,"
+said Sir Charles.
+
+Lady Landells paid no attention; Mark, supposing her to be on the verge
+of a poetic frenzy, was glad to leave her in that wicker alcove under
+the tulip tree and to follow Sir Charles into the house.
+
+It was an astonishing house inside, with Gothic carving everywhere and
+with ancient leaded casements built inside the sashed windows of the
+exterior.
+
+"I took an immense amount of trouble to get this place arranged to my
+taste," said Sir Charles; and Mark wondered why he had bothered to
+retain the outer shell, since that was all that was left of the
+original. In every room there were copies, excellently done of pictures
+by Botticelli and Mantegna and other pre-Raphaelite painters; the walls
+were rich with antique brocades and tapestries; the ceilings were gilded
+or elaborately moulded with fan traceries and groining; great
+candlesticks stood in every corner; the doors were all old with
+floriated hinges and huge locks--it was the sort of house in which
+Victor Hugo might have put on his slippers and said, "I am at home."
+
+"I admit nothing after 1520," said Sir Charles proudly.
+
+Mark wondered why so fastidious a medievalist allowed the Order of St.
+George to erect those three tin tabernacles and to matchboard the
+interior of the Abbey. But perhaps that was only another outer shell
+which would gradually be filled.
+
+Lunch was a disappointment, because when Sir Charles began to talk about
+the monastery, which was what Mark had been wanting to talk about all
+the morning, Lady Landells broke in:
+
+"I am sorry, Charles, but I'm afraid that I must beg for complete
+silence at lunch, as I'm in the middle of a sonnet."
+
+The poetess sighed, took a large mouthful of food, and sighed again.
+
+After lunch Sir Charles took Mark to see his library, which reminded him
+of a Rossetti interior and lacked only a beautiful long-necked creature,
+full-lipped and auburn-haired, to sit by the casement languishing over a
+cithern or gazing out through bottle-glass lights at a forlorn and
+foreshortened landscape of faerie land.
+
+"Poor Lady Landells was a little tiresome at lunch," said Sir Charles
+half to himself. "She gets moods. Women seem never to grow out of
+getting moods. But she has always been most kind to me, and she insists
+on giving me anything I want for my house. Last year she was good enough
+to buy it from me as it stands, so it's really her house, although she
+has left it back to me in her will. She took rather a fancy to you by
+the way."
+
+Mark, who had supposed that Lady Landells had regarded him with aversion
+and scorn, stared at this.
+
+"Didn't she give you her hand when you said good-bye?" asked Sir
+Charles.
+
+"Her left hand," said Mark.
+
+"Oh, she never gives her right hand to anybody. She has some fad about
+spoiling the magnetic current of Apollo or something. Now, what about a
+walk?"
+
+Mark said he should like to go for a walk very much, but wasn't Sir
+Charles too busy?
+
+"Oh, no, I've nothing to do at all."
+
+Yet only that morning he had held forth to Mark at great length on the
+amount of work demanded for the management of an estate.
+
+"Now, why do you want to join Burrowes?" Sir Charles inquired presently.
+
+"Well, I hope to be a priest, and I think I should like to spend the
+next two years out of the world."
+
+"Yes, that is all very well," said Sir Charles, "but I don't know that I
+altogether recommend the O.S.G. I'm not satisfied with the way things
+are being run. However, they tell me that this fellow Brother George has
+a good deal of common-sense. He has been running their house in Malta,
+where he's done some good work. I gave them the land to build a mother
+house so that they could train people for active service, as it were;
+but Burrowes keeps chopping and changing and sending untrained novices
+to take charge of an important branch like Sandgate, and now since
+Rowley left he talks of opening a priory in Chatsea. That's all very
+well, and it's quite right of him to bear in mind that the main object
+of the Order is to work among soldiers; but at the same time he leaves
+this place to run itself, and whenever he does come down here he plans
+some hideous addition, to pay for which he has to go off preaching for
+another three months, so that the Abbey gets looked after by a young
+novice of twenty-five. It's ridiculous, you know. I was grumbling at the
+Bishop; but really I can understand his disinclination to countenance
+Burrowes. I have hopes of Brother George, and I shall take an early
+opportunity of talking to him."
+
+Mark was discouraged by Sir Charles' criticism of the Order; and that it
+could be criticized like this through the conduct of its founder
+accentuated for him the gulf that lay between the English Church and the
+rest of Catholic Christendom.
+
+It was not much solace to remember that every Benedictine community was
+an independent congregation. One could not imagine the most independent
+community's being placed in charge of a novice of twenty-five. It made
+Mark's proposed monastic life appear amateurish; and when he was back in
+the matchboarded guest-room the impulse to abandon his project was
+revised. Yet he felt it would be wrong to return to Wych-on-the-Wold.
+The impulse to come here, though sudden, had been very strong, and to
+give it up without trial might mean the loss of an experience that one
+day he should regret. The opinion of Sir Charles Horner might or might
+not be well founded; but it was bound to be a prejudiced opinion,
+because by constituting himself to the extent he had a patron of the
+Order he must involuntarily expect that it should be conducted according
+to his views. Sir Charles himself, seen in perspective, was a tolerably
+ridiculous figure, too much occupied with the paraphernalia of worship,
+too well pleased with himself, a man of rank and wealth who judged by
+severe standards was an old maid, and like all old maids critical, but
+not creative.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE ORDER OF ST. GEORGE
+
+
+The Order of St. George was started by the Reverend Edward Burrowes six
+years before Sir Charles Horner's gift of land for a Mother House led
+him to suppose that he had made his foundation a permanent factor in the
+religious life of England.
+
+Edward Burrowes was the only son of a band-master in the Royal Artillery
+who at an impressionable moment in the life of his son was stationed at
+Malta. The religious atmosphere of Malta combined with the romantic
+associations of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the
+boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated by his son's
+ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much church-going argued an
+unhealthy preoccupation, and as for Edward's rhapsodies about the
+Auberge of Castile, which sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery
+and the Royal Engineers, they made him sick, to use his own expression.
+
+"You make me sick, Ted," he used to declare. "The sooner I get quit of
+Malta and quartered at Woolwich again, the better I shall be pleased."
+
+When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he hoped that the
+effect of such prosaic surroundings would put an end to Ted's mooning,
+and that he would settle down to a career more likely to reward him in
+this world rather than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his
+dreams aspired. Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who had so
+far submitted to his father's wishes as to be working in a solicitor's
+office, found that the effect of being banished from Malta was to
+stimulate him into a practical attempt to express his dreams of
+religious devotion. He hired a small room over a stable in a back street
+and started a club for the sons of soldiers. The band-master would not
+have minded this so much, especially when he was congratulated on his
+son's enterprise by the wife of the Colonel. Unfortunately this was not
+enough for Edward, who having got the right side of an unscrupulously
+romantic curate persuaded him to receive his vows of a Benedictine
+oblate. The band-master, proud and fond though he might be of his own
+uniform, objected to his son's arriving home from business and walking
+about the house in a cassock. He objected equally to finding that his
+own musical gifts had with his son degenerated into a passion for
+playing Gregorian chants on a vile harmonium. It was only consideration
+for his delicate wife that kept the band-master from pitching both
+cassock and harmonium into the street. The amateur oblate regretted his
+father's hostility; but he persevered with the manner of life he had
+marked out for himself, finding much comfort and encouragement in
+reading the lives of the saintly founders of religious orders.
+
+At last, after a long struggle against the difficulties that friends and
+father put in his way, Edward Burrowes managed at the age of
+twenty-seven to get ordained in Canada, whither, in despair of escaping
+otherwise from the solicitor's office, he had gone to seek his own
+fortune. He took with him the oblate's cassock; but he left behind the
+harmonium, which his father kicked to pieces in rage at not being able
+to kick his son. Burrowes worked as a curate in a dismal lakeside town
+in Ontario, consoling himself with dreams of monasticism and chivalry,
+and gaining a reputation as a preacher. His chief friend was a young
+farmer, called George Harvey, whom he succeeded in firing with his own
+enthusiasm and whom he managed to persuade--which shows that Burrowes
+must have had great powers of persuasion--to wear the habit of a
+Benedictine novice, when he came to spend Saturday night to Monday
+morning with his friend. By this time Burrowes had passed beyond the
+oblate stage, for having found a Canadian bishop willing to dispense him
+from that portion of the Benedictine rule which was incompatible with
+his work as a curate in Jonesville, Ontario, he got himself clothed as a
+novice. About this period a third man joined Burrowes and Harvey in
+their spare-time monasticism. This was John Holcombe, who had emigrated
+from Dorsetshire after an unfortunate love affair and who had been taken
+on by George Harvey as a carter. Holcombe was the son of a yeoman farmer
+that owned several hundred acres of land. He had been educated at
+Sherborne, and soon by his capacity and attractive personality he made
+himself so indispensable to his employer that George Harvey's farm was
+turned into a joint concern. No doubt Harvey's example was the immediate
+cause of Holcombe's associating himself with the little community: but
+it still says much for Burrowes' powers of persuasion that he should
+have been able to impress this young Dorset farmer with the serious
+possibility of leading the monastic life in Ontario.
+
+When another year had passed, an opportunity arose of acquiring a better
+farm in Alberta. It was the Bishop of Alberta who had been so
+sympathetic with Burrowes' monastic aspirations; and, when Harvey and
+Holcombe decided to move to Moose Rib, Burrowes gave up his curacy to
+lead a regular monastic life, so far as one could lead a regular
+monastic life on a farm in the North-west.
+
+Two more years had gone by when a letter arrived from England to tell
+George Harvey that he was the heir to L12,000. Burrowes had kept all his
+influence over the young farmer, and he was actually able to persuade
+Harvey to devote this fortune to founding the Order of St. George for
+mission work among soldiers. There was some debate whether Father
+Burrowes, Brother George, and Brother Birinus should take their final
+vows immediately; but in the end Father Burrowes had his way, and they
+were all three professed by the sympathetic Bishop of Alberta, who
+granted them a constitution subject to the ratification of the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. Father Burrowes was elected Father Superior,
+Brother George was made Assistant Superior, and Brother Birinus had to
+concentrate in his person various monastic offices just as on the Moose
+Rib Farm he had combined in his person the duties of the various hands.
+
+The immediate objective of the new community was Malta, where it was
+proposed to open their first house and where, in despite of the
+outraged dignity of innumerable real monks already there, they made a
+successful beginning. A second house was opened at Gibraltar and put in
+charge of Brother Birinus. Neither Malta nor Gibraltar provided much of
+a field for reinforcing the Order, which, if it was to endure, required
+additional members. Father Burrowes proposed that he should go to
+England and open a house at Aldershot, and that, if he could obtain a
+hearing as a preacher, he should try to raise enough funds for a house
+at Sandgate as well. Brother George and Brother Birinus in a solemn
+chapter of three accepted the proposal; the house at Gibraltar was given
+up; the Father Superior went to seek the fortunes of the Order in
+England, while the other two remained at their work in Malta. Father
+Burrowes was even more successful as a preacher than he hoped; ascribing
+the steady flow of offertories to Divine favour, he instituted during
+the next four years, priories at Aldershot and Sandgate. He began to
+feel the need of a Mother House, having now more than enough candidates
+for the Order of Saint George, where the novices could be suitably
+trained to meet the stress of active mission work. One of his moving
+appeals for this object was heard by Sir Charles Horner who, for reasons
+he had already explained to Mark and because underneath all his
+ecclesiasticism there did exist a genuine desire for the glory of God,
+had presented the land at Malford to the Order. Father Burrowes preached
+harder than ever, addressed drawing-room meetings, and started a monthly
+magazine called _The Dragon_ to raise the necessary money to build a
+mighty abbey. Meanwhile, he had to be contented with those three tin
+tabernacles. Brother George, who had remained all these years in Malta,
+suggested that it was time for somebody else to take his place out
+there, and the Father Superior, although somewhat unwillingly, had
+agreed to his coming to Malford. Not having heard of anybody whom at the
+moment he considered suitable to take charge of what was now a distant
+outpost of the Order, he told Brother George to close the house. It was
+at this stage in the history of the Order that Mark presented himself as
+a candidate for admission.
+
+Father Burrowes arrived unexpectedly two days after the lunch at
+Malford Lodge; and presently Brother Dunstan came to tell Mark that the
+Reverend Father would see him in the Abbott's Parlour immediately after
+Nones. Mark thought that Sir Charles might have given a mediaeval lining
+to this room at least, which with its roll-top desk looked like the
+office of the clerk of the works.
+
+"So you want to be a monk?" said Father Burrowes contemptuously. "Want
+to dress up in a beautiful white habit, eh?"
+
+"I really don't mind what I wear," said Mark, trying not to appear
+ruffled by the imputation of wrong motives. "But I do want to be a monk,
+yes."
+
+"You can't come here to play at it," said the Superior, looking keenly
+at Mark from his bright blue eyes and lighting up a large pipe.
+
+"Curiously enough," said Mark, who had forgotten the Benedictine
+injunction to discourage newcomers that seek to enter a community, "I
+wrote to my guardian a few days ago that my impression of Malford Abbey
+was rather that it was playing at being monks."
+
+The Superior flushed to a vivid red. He was a burly man of fair
+complexion, inclined to plumpness, and with a large mobile mouth
+eloquent and sensual. His hands were definitely fat, the backs of them
+covered with golden hairs and freckles.
+
+"So you're a critical young gentleman, are you? I suppose we're not
+Catholic enough for you. Well," he snapped, "I'm afraid you won't suit
+us. We don't want you. Sorry."
+
+"I'm sorry too," said Mark. "But I thought you would prefer frankness.
+If you will spare me a few minutes, I'll explain why I want to join the
+Order of St. George. If when you've heard what I have to say you still
+think that I'm not suitable, I shall recognize your right to be of that
+opinion from your experience of many young men like myself who have been
+tried and found wanting."
+
+"Did you learn that speech by heart?" the Superior inquired, raising his
+eyebrows mockingly.
+
+"I see you're determined to find fault," Mark laughed. "But, Reverend
+Father, surely you will listen to my reasons before deciding against
+them or me?"
+
+"My instinct tells me you'll be no good to us. But if you insist on
+wasting my time, fire ahead. Only please remember that, though I may be
+a monk, I'm a very busy man."
+
+Mark gave a full account of himself until the present and wound up by
+saying:
+
+"I don't think I have any sentimental reasons for wanting to enter a
+monastery. I like working among soldiers and sailors. I am ready to put
+down L200 and I hope to be of use. I wish to be a priest, and if you
+find or I find that when the time comes for me to be ordained I shall
+make a better secular priest, at any rate, I shall have had the
+advantage of a life of discipline and you, I promise, will have had a
+novice who will have regarded himself as such, but yet will have learnt
+somehow to have justified your confidence."
+
+The Superior looked down at his desk pondering. Presently he opened a
+letter and threw a quick suspicious glance at Mark.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me that you had an introduction from Sir Charles
+Horner?"
+
+"I didn't know that I had," Mark answered in some astonishment. "I only
+met him here a few days ago for the first time. He invited me to lunch,
+and he was very pleasant; but I never asked him to write to you, nor did
+he suggest doing so."
+
+"Have you any vices?" Father Burrowes asked abruptly.
+
+"I don't think--what do you mean exactly?" Mark inquired.
+
+"Drink?"
+
+"No, certainly not."
+
+"Women?"
+
+Mark flushed.
+
+"No." He wondered if he should speak of the episode of St. John's eve
+such a short time ago; but he could not bring himself to do so, and he
+repeated the denial.
+
+"You seem doubtful," the Superior insisted.
+
+"As a matter of fact," said Mark, "since you press this point I ought
+to tell you that I took a vow of celibacy when I was sixteen."
+
+Father Burrowes looked at him sharply.
+
+"Did you indeed? That sounds very morbid. Don't you like women?"
+
+"I don't think a priest ought to marry. I was told by Sir Charles that
+you vowed yourself to the monastic life when you were not much more than
+seventeen. Was that morbid?"
+
+The Superior laughed boisterously, and Mark glad to have put him in a
+good humour laughed with him. It was only after the interview was over
+that the echo of that laugh sounded unpleasantly in the caves of memory,
+that it rang false somehow like a denial of himself.
+
+"Well, I suppose we must try you as a probationer at any rate," said the
+Superior. And suddenly his whole manner changed. He became affectionate
+and sentimental as he put his hand on Mark's shoulder.
+
+"I hope, dear lad, that you will find a vocation to serve our dear Lord
+in the religious life. God bless you and give you endurance in the path
+you have chosen."
+
+Mark reproached himself for his inclination to dislike the Reverend
+Father to whom he now owed filial affection, piety, and respect, apart
+from what he owed him as a Christian of Christian charity. He should
+gain but small spiritual benefit from his self-chosen experiment if this
+was the mood in which he was beginning his monastic life; and when
+Brother Jerome, who was acting novice-master, began to instruct him in
+his monastic duty, he made up his mind to drive out that demon of
+criticism or rather to tame it to his own service by criticizing
+himself. He wrote on markers for his favourite devotional books:
+
+_Observe at every moment of the day the good in others, the evil in
+thyself; and when thou liest awake in the night remember only what good
+thou hast found in others, what evil in thyself._
+
+This was Mark's addition to Thomas a Kempis, to Mother Juliana of
+Norwich, to Jeremy Taylor and William Law; this was Mark's sprout of
+holy wisdom among the Little Flowers of Saint Francis.
+
+The Rule of Malford was not a very austere adaptation of the Rule of
+Saint Benedict; and, with the Reverend Father departing after Mark had
+been admitted as a probationer and leaving the administration of the
+Abbey to the priority of Brother Dunstan, a good deal of what austerity
+had been retained was now relaxed.
+
+The Night Office was not said at Malford, where the liturgical worship
+of the day began with Lauds and Prime at six. On Mark devolved the duty
+of waking the brethren in the morning, which was done by striking the
+door of each cell with a hammer and saying: _The Lord be with you_,
+whereupon the sleeping brother must rise from his couch and open the
+door of his cell to make the customary response. After Lauds and Prime,
+which lasted about half an hour, the brethren retired to their cells to
+put them in order for the day and to meditate until seven o'clock,
+unless they had been given tasks out of doors. At seven o'clock, if
+there was a priest in the monastery, Mass was said; otherwise meditation
+and study was prolonged until eight o'clock, when breakfast was eaten.
+Those who had work in the fields or about the house departed after
+breakfast to their tasks. At nine Terce was said, which was not attended
+by the brethren working out of doors; at twelve Sext was said attended
+by all the brethren, and at twelve-fifteen dinner was eaten. After
+dinner, the brethren retired to their cells and meditated until one
+o'clock, when their various duties were resumed, interrupted only in the
+case of those working indoors by the office of None at three o'clock. At
+a quarter to five the bell rang for tea. Simple silence was relaxed, and
+the brethren enjoyed their recreation until six-fifteen when the bell
+rang for a quarter of an hour's solemn silence before Vespers. Supper
+was eaten after Vespers, and after supper, which was finished about
+eight o'clock, there was reading and recreation until the bell rang for
+Compline at nine-fifteen. This office said, solemn silence was not
+broken until the response to the _dominus vobiscum_ in the morning. The
+rule of simple silence was not kept very strictly at this period. Two
+brethren working in the garden in these hot July days found that
+permitted conversation about the immediate matter in hand, say the
+whereabouts of a trowel or a hoe, was easily extended into observations
+about the whereabouts of Brother So-and-So during Terce or the way
+Brother Somebody-else was late with the antiphon. From the little
+incidents of the Abbey's daily round the conversation was easily
+extended into a discussion of the policy of the Order in general.
+Speculations where the Reverend Father was preaching that evening or
+that morning and whether his offertories would be as large during the
+summer as they had been during the spring were easily amplified from
+discussions about the general policy of the Order into discussions about
+the general policy of Christendom, the pros and cons of the Roman
+position, the disgraceful latitudinarianism of bishops and deans; and
+still more widely amplified from remarks upon the general policy of
+Christendom into arguments about the universe and the great philosophies
+of humanity. Thus Mark, who was an ardent Platonist, would find himself
+at odds with Brother Jerome who was an equally ardent Aristotelian,
+while the weeds, taking advantage of the philosophic contest, grew
+faster than ever.
+
+Whatever may have been Brother Dunstan's faults of indulgence, they
+sprang from a debonair and kindly personality which shone like a sun
+upon the little family and made everybody good-humoured, even Brother
+Lawrence, who was apt to be cross because he had been kept a postulant
+longer than he expected. But perhaps the happiest of all was Brother
+Walter, who though still a probationer was now the senior probationer, a
+status which afforded him the most profound satisfaction and gave him a
+kindly feeling toward Mark who was the cause of promotion.
+
+"And the Reverend Father has promised me that I shall be clothed as a
+postulant on August 10th when Brother Lawrence is to be clothed as a
+novice. The thought makes me so excited that I hardly know what to do
+sometimes, and I still don't know what saint's name I'm going to take.
+You see, there was some mystery about my birth, and I was called Walter
+because I was found by a policeman in Walter Street, and as ill-luck
+would have it there's no St. Walter. Of course, I know I have a very
+wide choice of names, but that is what makes it so difficult. I had
+rather a fancy to be Peter, but he's such a very conspicuous saint that
+it struck me as being a little presumptuous. Of course, I have no doubt
+whatever that St. Peter would take me under his protection, for if you
+remember he was a modest saint, a very modest saint indeed who asked to
+be crucified upside down, not liking to show the least sign of
+competition with our dear Lord. I should very much like to call myself
+Brother Paul, because at the school I was at we were taken twice a year
+to see St. Paul's Cathedral and had toffee when we came home. I look
+back to those days as some of the happiest of my life. There again it
+does seem to be putting yourself up rather to take the name of a great
+saint like St. Paul. Then I thought of taking William after the little
+St. William of Norwich who was murdered by the Jews. That seems going to
+the other extreme, doesn't it, for though I know that out of the mouths
+of babes and sucklings shall come forth praise, one would like to feel
+one had for a patron saint somebody a little more conspicuous than a
+baby. I wish you'd give me a word of advice. I think about this problem
+until sometimes my head's in a regular whirl, and I lose my place in the
+Office. Only yesterday at Sext, I found myself saying the antiphon
+proper to St. Peter a fortnight after St. Peter's day had passed and
+gone, which seems to show that my mind is really set upon being Brother
+Peter, doesn't it? And yet I don't know. He is so very conspicuous all
+through the Gospels, isn't he?"
+
+"Then why don't you compromise," suggested Mark, "and call yourself
+Brother Simon?"
+
+"Oh, what a splendid idea!" Brother Walter exclaimed, clapping his
+hands. "Oh, thank you, Brother Mark. That has solved all my
+difficulties. Oh, do let me pull up that thistle for you."
+
+Brother Walter the probationer resumed his weeding with joyful ferocity
+of purpose, his mind at peace in the expectation of shortly becoming
+Brother Simon the postulant.
+
+What Mark enjoyed most in his personal relations with the community were
+the walks on Sunday afternoons. Sir Charles Horner made a habit of
+joining these to obtain the Abbey gossip and also because he took
+pleasure in hearing himself hold forth on the management of his estate.
+Most of his property was woodland, and the walks round Malford possessed
+that rich intimacy of the English countryside at its best. Mark was not
+much interested in what Sir Charles had to ask or in what Sir Charles
+had to tell or in what Sir Charles had to show, but to find himself
+walking with his monastic brethren in their habits down glades of mighty
+oaks, or through sparse plantations of birches, beneath which grew
+brakes of wild raspberries that would redden with the yellowing corn,
+gave him as assurance of that old England before the Reformation to
+which he looked back as to a Golden Age. Years after, when much that was
+good and much that was bad in his monastic experience had been
+forgotten, he held in his memory one of these walks on a fine afternoon
+at July's end within the octave of St. Mary Magdalene. It happened that
+Sir Charles had not accompanied the monks that Sunday; but in his place
+was an old priest who had spent the week-end as a guest in the Abbey and
+who had said Mass for the brethren that morning. This had given Mark
+deep pleasure, because it was the Sunday after Esther's profession, and
+he had been able to make his intention her present joy and future
+happiness. He had been silent throughout the walk, seeming to listen in
+turn to Brother Dunstan's rhapsodies about the forthcoming arrival of
+Brother George and Brother Birinus with all that it meant to him of
+responsibility more than he could bear removed from his shoulders; or to
+Brother Raymond's doubts if it should not be made a rule that when no
+priest was in the Abbey the brethren ought to walk over to Wivelrod, the
+church Sir Charles attended four miles away, or to Brother Jerome's
+disclaimer of Roman sympathies in voicing his opinion that the Office
+should be said in Latin. Actually he paid little attention to any of
+them, his thoughts being far away with Esther. They had chosen Hollybush
+Down for their walk that Sunday, because they thought that the view over
+many miles of country would please the ancient priest. Seated on the
+short aromatic grass in the shade of a massive hawthorn full-berried
+with tawny fruit, the brethren looked down across a slope dotted with
+junipers to the view outspread before them. None spoke, for it had been
+warm work in their habits to climb the burnished grass. It would have
+been hard to explain the significance of that group, unless it were due
+to some haphazard achievement of perfect form; yet somehow for Mark that
+moment was taken from time and placed in eternity, so that whenever
+afterward in his life he read about the Middle Ages he was able to be
+what he read, merely by re-conjuring that monkish company in the shade
+of that hawthorn tree.
+
+On their way back to the Abbey Mark found himself walking with Mr.
+Lamplugh, the ancient priest, who turned out to have known his father.
+
+"Dear me, are you really the son of James Lidderdale? Why, I used to go
+and preach at Lima Street in old days long before your father married.
+And so you're Lidderdale's son. Now I wonder why you want to be a monk."
+
+Mark gave an account of himself since he left school and tried to give
+some good reasons why he was at Malford.
+
+"And so you were with Rowley? Well, really you ought to know something
+about missions by now. But perhaps you're tired of mission work
+already?" the old priest inquired with a quick glance at Mark as if he
+would see how much of the real stuff existed underneath that
+probationer's cassock.
+
+"This is an active Order, isn't it?" Mark countered. "Of course, I'm not
+tired of mission work. But after being with Father Rowley and being kept
+busy all the time I found that being at home in the country made me
+idle. I told the Reverend Father that I hoped to be ordained as a
+secular priest and that I did not imagine I had any vocation for the
+contemplative life. I have as a matter of fact a great longing for it.
+But I don't think that twenty-one is a good age for being quite sure if
+that longing is not mere sentiment. I suppose you think I'm just
+indulging myself with the decorative side of religion, Father Lamplugh?
+I really am not. I can assure you that I'm far too much accustomed to
+the decorative side to be greatly influenced by it."
+
+The old priest laid a thin hand on Mark's sleeve.
+
+"To tell the truth, my dear boy, I was on the verge of violating the
+decencies of accepted hospitality by criticizing the Order of which you
+have become a probationer. I am just a little doubtful about the
+efficacy of its method of training young men. However, it really is not
+my business, and I hope that I am wrong. But I _am_ a little doubtful if
+all these excellent young brethren are really desirous . . . no, I'll
+not say another word, I've already disgracefully exceeded the
+limitations to criticism that courtesy alone demands of me. I was
+carried away by my interest in you when I heard whose son you were. What
+a debt we owe to men like your father and Rowley! And here am I at
+seventy-six after a long and useless life presuming to criticize other
+people. God forgive me!" The old man crossed himself.
+
+That afternoon and evening recreation was unusually noisy, and during
+Vespers one or two of the brethren were seized with an attack of giggles
+because Brother Lawrence, who was in a rapt condition of mind owing to
+the near approach of St. Lawrence's day when he was to be clothed as a
+novice, tripped while he was holding back the cope during the censing of
+the _Magnificat_ and falling on his knees almost upset Father Lamplugh.
+There was no doubt that the way Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw
+when he was self-conscious was very funny; but Mark wished that the
+giggling had not occurred in front of Father Lamplugh. He wished too
+that during recreation after supper Brother Raymond would be less
+skittish and Brother Dunstan less arch in the manner of reproving him.
+
+"Holy simplicity is all very well," Mark thought. "But holy imbecility
+is a great bore, especially when there is a stranger present."
+
+Luckily Father Burrowes came back the following week, and Mark's
+deepening impression of the monastery's futility was temporarily
+obliterated by the exciting news that the Bishop of Alberta whom the
+brethren were taught to reverence as a second founder would be the guest
+of the Order on St. Lawrence's day and attend the profession of Brother
+Anselm. Mark had not yet seen Brother Anselm, who was the brother in
+charge of the Aldershot priory, and he welcomed the opportunity of
+witnessing those solemn final vows. He felt that he should gain much
+from meeting Brother Anselm, whose work at Aldershot was considered
+after the Reverend Father's preaching to be the chief glory of the
+Order. Brother Lawrence was a little jealous that his name day, on which
+he was to be clothed in Chapter as a novice, should be chosen for the
+much more important ceremony, and he spoke sharply to poor Brother
+Walter when the latter rejoiced in the added lustre Brother Anselm's
+profession would shed upon his own promotion.
+
+"You must remember, Brother," he said, "that you'll probably remain a
+postulant for a very long time."
+
+"But not for ever," replied poor Brother Walter in a depressed tone of
+voice.
+
+"There may not be time to attend to you," said Brother Lawrence
+spitefully. "You may have to wait until the Bishop has gone."
+
+"Oh dear, oh dear," sighed Brother Walter looking woeful. "Brother Mark,
+do you hear what they say?"
+
+"Never mind," said Mark, "we'll take our final vows together when
+Brother Lawrence is still a doddering old novice."
+
+Brother Lawrence clicked his tongue and bit his under lip in disgust at
+such a flippant remark.
+
+"What a thing to say," he muttered, and burying his hands in his sleeves
+he walked off disdainfully, his jaw thrust before him.
+
+"Like a cow-catcher," Mark thought with a smile.
+
+The Bishop of Alberta was a dear old gentleman with silvery hair and a
+complexion as fresh and pink as a boy's. With his laced rochet and
+purple biretta he lent the little matchboarded chapel an exotic
+splendour when he sat in a Glastonbury chair beside the altar during the
+Office. The more ritualistic of the brethren greatly enjoyed giving him
+reverent genuflexions and kissing his episcopal ring. Brother Raymond's
+behaviour towards him was like that of a child who has been presented
+with a large doll to play with, a large doll that can be dressed and
+undressed at the pleasure of its owner with nothing to deter him except
+a faint squeak of protest such as the Bishop himself occasionally
+emitted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+SUSCIPE ME, DOMINE
+
+
+Brother Anselm was to arrive on the vigil of St. Lawrence. Normally
+Brother Walter would have been sent to meet him with the Abbey cart at
+the station three miles away. But Brother Walter was in a state of such
+excitement over his near promotion to postulant that it was not
+considered safe to entrust him with the pony. So Mark was sent in his
+place. It was a hot August evening with thunder clouds lying heavy on
+the Malford woods when Mark drove down the deep lanes to the junction,
+wondering what Brother Anselm would be like and awed by the imagination
+of Brother Anselm's thoughts in the train that was bringing him from
+Aldershot to this momentous date of his life's history. Almost before he
+knew what he was saying Mark was quoting from _Romeo and Juliet_:
+
+                       _My mind misgives_
+    _Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,_
+    _Shall bitterly begin his fearful date_
+    _With this night's revels._
+
+"Now why should I have thought that?" he asked himself, and he was just
+deciding that it was merely a verbal sequence of thought when the first
+far-off peal of thunder muttered a kind of menacing contradiction of so
+easy an explanation. It would be raining soon; Mark thumped the pony's
+angular haunches, and tried to feel cheerful in the oppressive air.
+
+Brother Anselm did not appear as Mark had pictured him. Instead of the
+lithe enthusiast with flaming eyes he saw a heavily built man with
+blunted features, wearing powerful horn spectacles, his expression
+morose, his movements ungainly. He had, however, a mellow and strangely
+sympathetic voice, in which Mark fancied that he perceived the power he
+was reputed to wield over the soldiers for whose well-being he fought so
+hard. Mark would have liked to ask him about life in the Aldershot
+priory; perhaps if Brother Anselm had been less taciturn, he would have
+broken if not the letter at any rate the spirit of the Rule by begging
+the senior to ask for his services in the Priory. But no sooner were
+they jogging back to Malford than the rain came down in a deluge, and
+Brother Anselm, pulling the hood of his frock over his head, was more
+unapproachable than ever. Mark wished that he had a novice's frock and
+hood, for the rain was pouring down the back of his neck and the
+threadbare cassock he wore was already drenched.
+
+"Thank you, Brother," said the new-comer when the Abbey was attained.
+
+It was dark by now, and, with nothing visible of the speaker except his
+white habit in the gloom, the voice might have been the voice of a
+heavenly visitant, so rarely sweet, so gentle and harmonious were the
+tones. Mark was much moved by that brief recognition of himself.
+
+The wind rose high during the night; listening to it roaring through the
+coppice in which the Abbey was built, Mark lay awake for a long time in
+mute prayer that Brother Anselm might find peace and felicity in his new
+state. And while he prayed for Brother Anselm he prayed for Esther in
+Shoreditch. In the morning when Mark went from cell to cell, rousing the
+brethren from sleep with his hammer and salutation, the sun was climbing
+a serene and windless sky. The familiar landscape was become a mountain
+top. Heaven was very near.
+
+Mark was glad that the day was so fair for the profession of Brother
+Anselm, and at Lauds the antiphon, versicle, and response proper to St.
+Lawrence appealed to him by their fitness to the occasion,
+
+_Gold is tried in the fire: and acceptable men in the furnace of
+adversity._
+
+    _V. The Righteous shall grow as a lily._
+    _R. He shall flourish for ever before the Lord._
+
+Mark concerned himself less with his own reception as a postulant. The
+distinction between a probationer and a postulant was very slight,
+really an arbitrary one made by Father Burrowes for his own convenience,
+and until he had to decide whether he should petition to be clothed as a
+novice Mark did not feel that he was called upon to take himself too
+seriously as a monk. For that reason he did not change his name, but
+preferred to stay Brother Mark. The little ceremony of reception was
+carried through in Chapter before the brethren went into the Oratory to
+say Terce, and Brother Walter was so much excited when he heard himself
+addressed as Brother Simon that for a moment it seemed doubtful if he
+would be sufficiently calm to attend the profession of Brother Anselm at
+the conventual Mass. However, during the clothing of Brother Lawrence as
+a novice Brother Simon quieted down, and even gave over counting the
+three knots in the rope with which he had been girdled. Ordinarily,
+Brother Lawrence would have been clothed after Mass, but this morning it
+was felt that such a ceremony coming after the profession of Brother
+Anselm would be an anti-climax, and it was carried through in Chapter.
+It took Brother Lawrence all he had ever heard and read about humility
+and obedience not to protest at the way his clothing on his own saint's
+day, for which he had been made to wait nearly a year, was being carried
+through in such a hole in the corner fashion. But he fixed his mind upon
+the torments of the blessed archdeacon on the gridiron and succeeded in
+keeping his temper.
+
+Mark felt that the profession of Brother Anselm lost some of its dignity
+by the absence of Brother George and Brother Birinus, the only other
+professed members of the Order apart from Father Burrowes himself. It
+struck him as slightly ludicrous that a few young novices and postulants
+should represent the venerable choir-monks whom one pictured at such a
+ceremony from one's reading of the Rule of St. Benedict. Moreover,
+Father Burrowes never presented himself to Mark's imagination as an
+authentic abbot. Nor indeed was he such. Malford Abbey was a courtesy
+title, and such monastic euphemisms as the Abbot's Parlour and the
+Abbot's Lodgings to describe the matchboarded apartments sacred to the
+Father Superior, while they might please such ecclesiastical enthusiasts
+as Brother Raymond, appealed to Mark as pretentious and somewhat silly.
+In fact, if it had not been for the presence of the Bishop of Alberta in
+cope and mitre Mark would have found it hard, when after Terce the
+brethren assembled in the Chapter-room to hear Brother Anselm make his
+final petition, to believe in the reality of what was happening, to
+believe, when Brother Anselm in reply to the Father Superior's
+exhortation chose the white cowl and scapular (which in the Order of St.
+George differentiated the professed monk from the novice) and rejected
+the suit of dittos belonging to his worldly condition, that he was
+passing through moments of greater spiritual importance than any since
+he was baptized or than any he would pass through before he stood upon
+the threshold of eternity.
+
+But this was a transient scepticism, a fleeting discontent, which
+vanished when the brethren formed into procession and returned to the
+oratory singing the psalm: _In Convertendo_.
+
+     _When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we
+     like unto them, that dream._
+
+     _Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy._
+
+     _Then said they among the heathen: The Lord hath done great things
+     for them._
+
+     _Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already: whereof we
+     rejoice._
+
+     _Turn our captivity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south._
+
+     _They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy._
+
+     _He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed:
+     shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring his sheaves with
+     him._
+
+The Father Superior of the Order sang the Mass, while the Bishop of
+Alberta seated in his Glastonbury chair suffered with an expression of
+childlike benignity the ritualistic ministrations of Brother Raymond,
+the ceremonial doffing and donning of his mitre. It was very still in
+the little Oratory, for it was the season when birds are hushed; and
+even Sir Charles Horner who was all by himself in the ante-chapel did
+not fidget or try to peep through the heavy brocaded curtains that shut
+out the quire. Mark dared not look up when at the offertory Brother
+Anselm stood before the Altar and answered the solemn interrogations of
+the Father Superior, question after question about his faith and
+endurance in the life he desired to enter. And to every question he
+answered clearly _I will_. The Father Superior took the parchment on
+which were written the vows and read aloud the document. Then it was
+placed upon the Altar, and there upon that sacrificial stone Brother
+Anselm signed his name to a contract with Almighty God. The holy calm
+that shed itself upon the scene was like a spell on every heart that was
+beating there in unison with the heart of him who was drawing nearer to
+Heaven. Prostrating himself, the professed monk prayed first to God the
+Father:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+The hearts that beat in unison with his took up the prayer, and the
+voices of his brethren repeated it word for word. And now the professed
+monk prayed to God the Son:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+Once more his brethren echoed the entreaty.
+
+And lastly the professed monk prayed to God the Holy Ghost:
+
+     _O receive me according to thy word that I may live; and let me not
+     be disappointed of my hope._
+
+For the third time his brethren echoed the entreaty, and then one and
+all in that Oratory cried:
+
+     _Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it
+     was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
+     Amen._
+
+There followed prayers that the peace of God might be granted to the
+professed monk to enable him worthily to perform the vows which he had
+made, and before the blessing and imposition of the scapular the Bishop
+rose to speak in tones of deep emotion:
+
+"Brethren, I scarcely dared to hope, when, now nearly ten years ago, I
+received the vows of your Father Superior as a novice, that I should one
+day be privileged to be present at this inspiring ceremony. Nor even
+when five years ago in the far north-west of Canada I professed your
+Father Superior and those two devoted souls who will soon be with you,
+now that their work in Malta is for the time finished, did I expect to
+find myself in this beautiful Oratory which your Order owes to the
+generosity of a true son of the Church. My heart goes out to you, and I
+thank God humbly that He has vouchsafed to hear my prayers and bless the
+enterprise from which I had indeed expected much, but which Almighty God
+has allowed to prosper more, far more, than I ventured to hope. All my
+days I have longed to behold the restoration of the religious life to
+our country, and now when my eyes are dim with age I am granted the
+ineffable joy of beholding what for too long in my weakness and lack of
+faith I feared was never likely to come to pass.
+
+"The profession of our dear brother this morning is, I pray, an earnest
+of many professions at Malford. May these first vows placed upon the
+Altar of this Oratory be blessed by Almighty God! May our brother be
+steadfast and happy in his choice! Brethren, I had meant to speak more
+and with greater eloquence, but my heart is too full. The Lord be with
+you."
+
+Now Brother Anselm was clothed in the blessed habit while the brethren
+sang:
+
+    _Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,_
+    _And lighten with celestial fire._
+
+The Father Superior of the Order gave him the paternal kiss. He begged
+the prayers of his brethren there assembled, and drawing the hood of his
+cowl over his head prostrated himself again before the Altar. The Mass
+proceeded.
+
+If the strict Benedictine usage had been followed at Malford, Brother
+Anselm would have remained apart from the others for three days ofter
+his profession, wrapped in his cowl, alone with God. But he was anxious
+to go back to Aldershot that very afternoon, excusing himself because
+Brother Chad, left behind in charge of the Priory, would be overwhelmed
+by his various responsibilities. Brother Dunstan, who had wept
+throughout the ceremony of the profession, was much upset by Brother
+Anselm's departure. He had hoped to achieve great exaltation of spirit
+by Brother Anselm's silent presence. He began to wonder if the newly
+professed monk appreciated his position. Had himself been granted what
+Brother Anselm had been granted, he should have liked to spend a week in
+contemplation of the wonder which had befallen him. Brother Dunstan
+asked himself if his thoughts were worthy of a senior novice, of one who
+had for a while acted as Prior and been accorded the address of Reverend
+Brother. He decided that they were not, and as a penance he begged for
+the nib with which Brother Anselm had signed his profession. This he
+wore round his neck as an amulet against unbrotherly thoughts and as a
+pledge of his own determination to vow himself eternally to the service
+of God.
+
+Mark was glad that Brother Anselm was going back so soon to his active
+work. It was an assurance that the Order of St. George did have active
+work to do; and when he was called upon to drive Brother Anselm to the
+station he made up his mind to conquer his shyness and hint that he
+should be glad to serve the Order in the Priory at Aldershot.
+
+This time, notwithstanding that he had a good excuse to draw his hood
+close, Brother Anselm showed himself more approachable.
+
+"If the Reverend Father suggests your name," he promised Mark, "I shall
+be glad to have you with us. Brother Chad is simply splendid, and the
+Tommies are wonderful. It's quite right of course to have a Mother
+House, but. . . ." He broke off, disinclined to criticize the direction
+of the Order's policy to a member so junior as Mark.
+
+"Oh, I'm not asking you to do anything yet awhile," Mark explained. "I
+quite realize that I have a great deal to learn before I should be any
+use at Aldershot or Sandgate. I hope you don't mind my talking like
+this. But until this morning I had not really intended to remain in the
+Order. My hope was to be ordained as soon as I was old enough. Now since
+this morning I feel that I do long for the spiritual support of a
+community for my own feeble aspirations. The Bishop's words moved me
+tremendously. It wasn't what he said so much, but I was filled with all
+his faith and I could have cried out to him a promise that I for one
+would help to carry on the restoration. At the same time, I know that
+I'm more fitted for active work, not by any good I expect to do, but for
+the good it will do me. I suppose you'd say that if I had a true
+vocation I shouldn't be thinking about what part I was going to play in
+the life of the Order, but that I should be content to do whatever I was
+told. I'm boring you?" Mark broke off to inquire, for Brother Anselm was
+staring in front of him through his big horn spectacles like an owl.
+
+"No, no," said the senior. "But I'm not the novice-master. Who is, by
+the way?"
+
+"Brother Jerome."
+
+The other did not comment on this information, but Mark was sure that he
+was trying not to look contemptuous.
+
+Soon the junction came in sight, and from down the line the white smoke
+of a train approaching.
+
+"Hurry, Brother, I don't want to miss it."
+
+Mark thumped the haunches of the pony and drove up just in time for
+Brother Anselm to escape.
+
+"Thank you, Brother," said that same voice which yesterday, only
+yesterday night, had sounded so rarely sweet. Here on this mellow August
+afternoon it was the voice of the golden air itself, and the shriek of
+the engine did not drown its echoes in Mark's soul where all the way
+back to Malford it was chiming like a bell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+ADDITION
+
+
+Mark's ambition to go and work at Aldershot was gratified before the end
+of August, because Brother Chad fell ill, and it was considered
+advisable to let him spend a long convalescence at the Abbey.
+
+     The Priory,
+
+     17, Farnborough Villas,
+
+     Aldershot.
+
+     St. Michael and All Angels.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I don't think you'll be sorry to read from the above address that
+     I've been transferred from Malford to one of the active branches of
+     the Order. I don't accept your condemnation of the Abbey as
+     pseudo-monasticism, though I can quite well understand that my
+     account of it might lead you to make such a criticism. The trouble
+     with me is that my emotions and judgment are always quarrelling. I
+     suppose you might say that is true of most people. It's like the
+     palmist who tells everybody that he is ruled by his head or his
+     heart, as the case may be. But when one approaches the problem of
+     religion (let alone what is called the religious life) one is
+     terribly perplexed to know which is to be obeyed. I don't think
+     that you can altogether rule out emotion as a touchstone of truth.
+     The endless volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, through which I've been
+     wading, do not cope with the fact that the whole of his vast
+     intellectual and severely logical structure is built up on the
+     assumption of faith, which is the gift of emotion, not judgment.
+     The whole system is a petitio principii really.
+
+     I did not mean to embark on a discussion of the question of the
+     Ultimate Cause of religion, but to argue with you about the
+     religious life! The Abbot Paphnutius told Cassian that there were
+     three sorts of vocation--ex Deo, per hominem, and ex necessitate.
+     Now suppose I have a vocation, mine is obviously per hominem. I
+     inherit the missionary spirit from my father. That spirit was
+     fostered by association with Rowley. My main object in entering the
+     Order of St. George was to work among soldiers, not because I felt
+     that soldiers needed "missionizing" more than any other class, but
+     because the work at Chatsea brought me into contact with both
+     sailors and soldiers, and turned my thoughts in their direction. I
+     also felt the need of an organization behind my efforts. My first
+     impulse was to be a preaching friar, but that would have laid too
+     much on me as an individual, and from lack of self-confidence,
+     youthfulness, want of faith perhaps, I was afraid. Well, to come
+     back to the Abbot Paphnutius and his three vocations--it seems
+     fairly clear that the first, direct from God, is a better vocation
+     than the one which is inspired by human example, or the third,
+     which arises from the failure of everything else. At the same time
+     they ARE all three genuine vocations. What applies to the vocation
+     seems to me to apply equally to the community. What you stigmatize
+     as our pseudo-monasticism is still experimental, and I think I can
+     see the Reverend Father's idea. He has had a great deal of
+     experience with an Order which began so amateurishly, if I may use
+     the word, that nobody could have imagined that it would grow to the
+     size and strength it has reached in ten years. The Bishop of
+     Alberta revealed much to us of our beginnings during his stay at
+     the Abbey, and after I had listened to him I felt how presumptuous
+     it was for me to criticize the central source of the religious life
+     we are hoping to spread. You see, Rector, I must have criticized it
+     implicitly in my letters to you, for your objections are simply the
+     expression of what I did not like to say, but what I managed to
+     convey through the medium of would-be humorous description. One
+     hears of the saving grace of humour, but I'm not sure that humour
+     is a saving grace. I rather wish that I had no sense of humour.
+     It's a destructive quality. All the great sceptics have been
+     humourists. Humour is really a device to secure human comfort. Take
+     me. I am inspired to become a preaching friar. I instantly perceive
+     the funny side of setting out to be a preaching friar. I tell
+     myself that other people will perceive the funny side of it, and
+     that consequently I shall do no good as a preaching friar. Yes,
+     humour is a moisture which rusts everything except gold. As a
+     nation the Jews have the greatest sense of humour, and they have
+     been the greatest disintegrating force in the history of mankind.
+     The Scotch are reputed to have no sense of humour, and they are
+     morally the most impressive nation in the world. What humour is
+     allowed them is known as dry humour. The corroding moisture has
+     been eliminated. They are still capable of laughter, but never so
+     as to interfere with their seriousness in the great things of life.
+     I remember I once heard a tiresome woman, who was striving to be
+     clever, say that Our Lord could not have had much sense of humour
+     or He would not have hung so long on the Cross. At the time I was
+     indignant with the silly blasphemy, but thinking it over since I
+     believe that she was right, and that, while her only thought had
+     been to make a remark that would create a sensation in the room,
+     she had actually hit on the explanation of some of Our Lord's human
+     actions. And his lack of humour is the more conspicuous because he
+     was a Jew. I was reading the other day a book of essays by one of
+     our leading young latitudinarian divines, in which he was most
+     anxious to prove that Our Lord had all the graces of a well-bred
+     young man about town, including a pretty wit. He actually claimed
+     that the pun on Peter's name was an example of Our Lord's urbane
+     and genial humour! It gives away the latitudinarian position
+     completely. They're really ashamed of Christianity. They want to
+     bring it into line with modern thought. They hope by throwing
+     overboard the Incarnation, the Resurrection of the Body, and the
+     Ascension, to lighten the ship so effectually that it will ride
+     buoyantly over the billows of modern knowledge. But however lightly
+     the ship rides, she will still be at sea, and it would be the
+     better if she struck on the rock of Peter and perished than that
+     she should ride buoyantly but aimlessly over the uneasy oceans of
+     knowledge.
+
+     I've once more got a long way from the subject of my letter, but
+     I've always taken advantage of your patience to air my theories,
+     and when I begin to write to you my pen runs away with me. The
+     point I want to make is that unless there is a mother house which
+     is going to create a reserve of spiritual energy, the active work
+     of the Order is going to suffer. The impulse to save souls might
+     easily exhaust itself in the individual. A few disappointments,
+     unceasing hard work, the interference of a bishop, the failure of
+     financial support, a long period in which his work seems to have
+     come to a standstill, all these are going to react on the
+     individual missioner who depends on himself. Looking back now at
+     the work done by my father, and by Rowley at Chatsea, I'm beginning
+     to understand how dangerous it is for one man to make himself the
+     pivot of an enterprise. I only really know about my father's work
+     at second hand, but look at Chatsea. I hear now that already the
+     work is falling to pieces. Although that may not justify the Bishop
+     of Silchester, I'm beginning to see that he might argue that if
+     Rowley had shown himself sufficiently humble to obey the forces of
+     law and order in the Church, he would have had accumulated for him
+     a fresh store of energy from which he might have drawn to
+     consolidate his influence upon the people with whom he worked.
+     Anyway, that's what I'm going to try to acquire from the
+     pseudo-monasticism of Malford. I'm determined to dry up the
+     critical and humorous side of myself. Half of it is nothing more
+     than arrogance. I'm grateful for being sent to Aldershot, but I'm
+     going to make my work here depend on the central source of energy
+     and power. I'm going to say that my work is per hominem, but that
+     the success of my work is ex Deo. You may tell me that any man with
+     the least conception of Christian Grace would know that. Yes, he
+     may know it intellectually, but does he know it emotionally? I
+     confess I don't yet awhile. But I do know that if the Order of St.
+     George proves itself a real force, it will not be per hominem, it
+     will not be by the Reverend Father's eloquence in the pulpit, but
+     by the vocation of the community ex Deo.
+
+     Meanwhile, here I am at Aldershot. Brother Chad, whose place I have
+     taken, was a character of infinite sweetness and humility. All our
+     Tommies speak of him in a sort of protective way, as if he were a
+     little boy they had adopted. He had--has, for after all he's only
+     gone to the Abbey to get over a bad attack of influenza on top of
+     months of hard work--he has a strangely youthful look, although
+     he's nearly thirty. He hails from Lichfield. I wonder what Dr.
+     Johnson would have made of him. I've already told you about Brother
+     Anselm. Well, now that I've seen him at home, as it were, I can't
+     discover the secret of his influence with our men. He's every bit
+     as taciturn with them as he was with me on that drive from the
+     station, and yet there is not one of them that doesn't seem to
+     regard him as an intimate friend. He's extraordinarily good at the
+     practical side of the business. He makes the men comfortable. He
+     always knows just what they're wanting for tea or for supper, and
+     the games always go well when Brother Anselm presides, much better
+     than they do when I'm in charge! I think perhaps that's because I
+     play myself, and want to win. It infects the others. And yet we
+     ought to want to win a game--otherwise it's not worth playing.
+     Also, I must admit that there's usually a row in the billiard room
+     on my nights on duty. Brother Anselm makes them talk better than I
+     do, and I don't think he's a bit interested in their South African
+     experiences. I am, and they won't say a word about them to me. I've
+     been here a month now, so they ought to be used to me by this time.
+
+     We've just heard that the guest-house for soldiers at the Abbey
+     will be finished by the middle of next month, so we're already
+     discussing our Christmas party. The Priory, which sounds so grand
+     and gothic, is really the corner house of a most depressing row of
+     suburban villas, called Glenview and that sort of thing. The last
+     tenant was a traveller in tea and had a stable instead of the usual
+     back-garden. This we have converted into a billiard room. An
+     officer in one of the regiments quartered here told us that it was
+     the only thing in Aldershot we had converted. The authorities
+     aren't very fond of us. They say we encourage the men to grumble
+     and give them too great idea of their own importance. Brother
+     Anselm asked a general once with whom we fell out if it was
+     possible to give a man whose profession it was to defend his
+     country too great an idea of his own importance. The general merely
+     blew out his cheeks and looked choleric. He had no suspicion that
+     he had been scored off. We don't push too much religion into the
+     men at present. We've taught them to respect the Crucifix on the
+     wall in the dining-room, and sometimes they attend Vespers. But
+     they're still rather afraid of chaff, such as being called the
+     Salvation Army by their comrades. Well, here's an end to this long
+     letter, for I must write now to Brother Jerome, whose name-day it
+     is to-morrow. Love to all at the Rectory.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+Mark remained at Aldershot until the week before Christmas, when with a
+party of Tommies he went back to the Abbey. He found that Brother Chad's
+convalescence had been seriously impeded in its later stages by the
+prospect of having to remain at the Abbey as guest-master, and though
+Mark was sorry to leave Aldershot he saw by the way the Tommies greeted
+their old friend that he was dear to their hearts. When after Christmas
+Brother Chad took the party back, Mark made up his mind that the right
+person was going.
+
+Mark found many changes at the Abbey during the four months he had been
+away. The greatest of all was the presence of Brother George as Prior.
+The legend of him had led Mark to expect someone out of the ordinary;
+but he had not been prepared for a personality as strong as this.
+Brother George was six feet three inches tall, with a presence of great
+dignity and much personal beauty. He had an aquiline nose, strong chin,
+dark curly hair and bright imperious eyes. His complexion, burnt by the
+Mediterranean sun, made him seem in his white habit darker than he
+really was. His manner was of one accustomed to be immediately obeyed.
+Mark could scarcely believe when he saw Brother Dunstan beside Brother
+George that only last June Brother Dunstan was acting as Prior. As for
+Brother Raymond, who had always been so voluble at recreation, one look
+from Brother George sent him into a silence that was as solemn as the
+disciplinary silence imposed by the rule. Brother Birinus, who was
+Brother George's right hand in the Abbey as much as he had been his
+right hand on the Moose Rib farm, was even taller than the Prior; but he
+was lanky and raw-boned, and had not the proportions of Brother George.
+He was of a swarthy complexion, not given to talking much, although when
+he did speak he always spoke to the point. He and Brother George were
+hard at work ploughing up some derelict fields which they had persuaded
+Sir Charles Horner to let to the Abbey rent free on condition that they
+were put back into cultivation. The patron himself had gone away for the
+winter to Rome and Florence, and Mark was glad that he had, for he was
+sure that otherwise his inquisitiveness would have been severely
+snubbed by the Prior. Father Burrowes went away as usual to preach after
+Christmas; but before he went Mark was clothed as a novice together with
+two other postulants who had been at Malford since September. Of these
+Brother Giles was a former school-master, a dried-up, tobacco-coloured
+little man of about fifty, with a quick and nervous, but always precise
+manner. Mark liked him, and his manual labour was done under the
+direction of Brother Giles, who had been made gardener, a post for which
+he was well suited. The other new novice was Brother Nicholas whom, had
+Mark not been the fellow-member of a community, he would have disliked
+immensely. Brother Nicholas was one of those people who are in a
+perpetual state of prurient concern about the sexual morality of the
+human race. He was impervious to snubs, of which he received many from
+Brother George, and he had somehow managed to become a favourite of the
+Reverend Father, so that he had been appointed guest-master, a post that
+was always coveted, and one for which nobody felt Brother Nicholas was
+suited.
+
+Besides the increase of numbers there had been considerable additions
+made to the fabric of the Abbey, if such a word as fabric may be applied
+to matchboard, felt, and corrugated iron. Mention has already been made
+of the new Guest-house, which accommodated not only soldiers invited to
+spend their furloughs at the Abbey, but also tramps who sought a night's
+lodging. Mark, as Porter, found his time considerably taken up with
+these casuals, because as soon as the news spread of a comfortable
+lodging they came begging for shelter in greater numbers than had been
+anticipated. A rule was made that they should pay for their
+entertainment by doing a day's work, and it was one of Mark's duties to
+report on the qualifications of these casuals to Brother George, whose
+whole life was occupied with the farm that he was creating out of those
+derelict fields.
+
+"There's a black man just arrived, Reverend Brother. He says he lost his
+ship at Southampton through a boiler explosion, and is tramping to
+Cardiff," Mark would report.
+
+"Can he plough a straight furrow?" the Prior would demand.
+
+"I doubt it," Mark would answer with a smile. "He can't walk straight
+across the dormitory."
+
+"What's he been drinking?"
+
+"Rum, I fancy."
+
+"Why did you let him in?"
+
+"It's such a stormy night."
+
+"Well, send him along to me to-morrow after Lauds, and I'll put him to
+cleaning out the pigsties."
+
+Mark only had to deal with these casuals. Regular guests like the
+soldiers, who were always welcome, and ecclesiastically minded inquirers
+were looked after by Brother Nicholas. One of the things for which Mark
+detested Brother Nicholas was the habit he had of showing off his poor
+casuals to the paying guests. It took Mark a stern reading of St.
+Benedict's Rule and the observations therein upon humility and obedience
+not to be rude to Brother Nicholas sometimes.
+
+"Brother," he asked one day. "Have you ever read what our Holy Father
+says about gyrovagues and sarabaites?"
+
+Brother Nicholas, who always thought that any long word with which he
+was unfamiliar referred to sexual perversion, asked what such people
+were.
+
+"You evidently haven't," said Mark. "Our Holy Father disapproves of
+them."
+
+"Oh, so should I, Brother Mark," said Brother Nicholas quickly. "I hate
+anything like that."
+
+"It struck me," Mark went on, "that most of our paying guests are
+gyrovagues and sarabaites."
+
+"What an accusation to make," said Brother Nicholas, flushing with
+expectant curiosity and looking down his long nose to give the
+impression that it was the blush of innocence and modesty.
+
+When, an hour or so later, he had had leisure to discover the meaning of
+both terms, he came up to Mark and exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, brother, how could you?"
+
+"How could I what?" Mark asked.
+
+"How could you let me think that it meant something much worse? Why,
+it's nothing really. Just wandering monks."
+
+"They annoyed our Holy Father," said Mark.
+
+"Yes, they did seem to make him a bit ratty. Perhaps the translation
+softened it down," surmised Brother Nicholas. "I'll get a dictionary
+to-morrow."
+
+The bell for solemn silence clanged, and Brother Nicholas must have
+spent his quarter of an hour in most unprofitable meditation.
+
+Another addition to the buildings was a wide, covered verandah, which
+had been built on in front of the central block, and which therefore
+extended the length of the Refectory, the Library, the Chapter Room, and
+the Abbot's Parlour. The last was now the Prior's Parlour, because
+lodgings for Father Burrowes were being built in the Gatehouse, the only
+building of stone that was being erected.
+
+This Gatehouse was to be finished as an Easter offering to the Father
+Superior from devout ladies, who had been dismayed at the imagination of
+his discomfort. The verandah was granted the title of the Cloister, and
+the hours of recreation were now spent here instead of in the Library as
+formerly, which enabled studious brethren to read in peace.
+
+The Prior made a rule that every Sunday afternoon all the brethren
+should assemble in the Cloister at tea, and spend the hour until Vespers
+in jovial intercourse. He did not actually specify that the intercourse
+was to be jovial, but he look care by judicious teazing to see that it
+was jovial. In his anxiety to bring his farm into cultivation, Brother
+George was apt to make any monastic duty give way to manual labour on
+those thistle-grown fields, and it was seldom that there were more than
+a couple of brethren to say the Office between Lauds and Vespers. The
+others had to be content with crossing themselves when they heard the
+bell for Terce or None, and even Sext was sparingly attended after the
+Prior instituted the eating of the mid-day meal in the fields on fine
+days. Hence the conversation in the Cloister on Sunday afternoons was
+chiefly agricultural.
+
+"Are you going to help me drill the ten-acre field tomorrow, Brother
+Giles?" the Prior asked one grey Sunday afternoon in the middle of
+March.
+
+"No, I'm certainly not, Reverend Brother, unless you put me under
+obedience to do so."
+
+"Then I think I shall," the Prior laughed.
+
+"If you do, Reverend Brother," the gardener retorted, "you'll have to
+put my peas under obedience to sow themselves."
+
+"Peas!" the Prior scoffed. "Who cares about peas?"
+
+"Oh, Reverend Brother!" cried Brother Simon, his hair standing up with
+excitement. "We couldn't do without peas."
+
+Brother Simon was assistant cook nowadays, a post he filled tolerably
+well under the supervision of the one-legged soldier who was cook.
+
+"We couldn't do without oats," said Brother Birinus severely.
+
+He spoke so seldom at these gatherings that when he did few were found
+to disagree with him, because they felt his words must have been deeply
+pondered before they were allowed utterance.
+
+"Have you any flowers in the garden for St. Joseph?" asked Brother
+Raymond, who was sacristan.
+
+"A few daffodils, that's all," Brother Giles replied.
+
+"Oh, I don't think that St. Joseph would like daffodils," exclaimed
+Brother Raymond. "He's so fond of white flowers, isn't he?"
+
+"Good gracious!" the Prior thundered. "Are we a girls' school or a
+company of able-bodied men?"
+
+"Well, St. Joseph is always painted with lilies, Reverend Brother," said
+the sacristan, rather sulkily.
+
+He disapproved of the way the Prior treated what he called his pet
+saints.
+
+"We're not an agricultural college either," he added in an undertone to
+Brother Dunstan, who shook his finger and whispered "hush."
+
+"I doubt if we ought to keep St. Joseph's Day," said the Prior
+truculently. There was nothing he enjoyed better on these Sunday
+afternoons than showing his contempt for ecclesiasticism.
+
+"Reverend Brother!" gasped Brother Dunstan. "Not keep St. Joseph's Day?"
+
+"He's not in our calendar," Brother George argued. "If we're going to
+keep St. Joseph, why not keep St. Alo--what's his name and Philip Neri
+and Anthony of Padua and Bernardine of Sienna and half-a-dozen other
+Italian saints?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Brother Raymond. "At any rate we have to keep my
+patron, who was a dear, even if he was a Spaniard."
+
+The Prior looked as if he were wondering if there was a clause in the
+Rule that forbade a prior to throw anything within reach at an imbecile
+sacristan.
+
+"I don't think you can put St. Joseph in the same class as the saints
+you have just mentioned," pompously interposed Brother Jerome, who was
+cellarer nowadays and fancied that the continued existence of the Abbey
+depended on himself.
+
+"Until you can learn to harness a pair of horses to the plough," said
+the Prior, "your opinions on the relative importance of Roman saints
+will not be accepted."
+
+"I've never been used to horses," said Brother Jerome.
+
+"And you have been used to saints?" the Prior laughed, raising his
+eyebrows.
+
+Brother Jerome was silent.
+
+"Well, Brother Lawrence, what do you say?"
+
+Brother Lawrence stuck out his lower jaw and assumed the expression of
+the good boy in a Sunday School class.
+
+"St. Joseph was the foster-father of Our Blessed Lord, Reverend
+Brother," he said primly. "I think it would be most disrespectful both
+to Our Blessed Lord and to Our Blessed Lady if we didn't keep his
+feast-day, though I am sure St. Joseph would have no objection to
+daffodils. No objections at all. His whole life and character show him
+to have been a man of the greatest humility and forbearance."
+
+The Prior rocked with laughter. This was the kind of speech that
+sometimes rewarded his teasing.
+
+"We always kept St. Joseph's day at the Visitation, Hornsey," Brother
+Nicholas volunteered. "In fact we always made it a great feature. We
+found it came as such a relief in Lent."
+
+The Prior nodded his head mockingly.
+
+"These young folk can teach us a lot about the way to worship God,
+Brother Birinus," he commented.
+
+Brother Birinus scowled.
+
+"I broke three shares ploughing that bad bit of ground by the fir
+trees," he announced gloomily. "I think I'll drill in the oats to-morrow
+in the ten-acre. It's no good ploughing deep," he added reproachfully.
+
+"Well, I believe in deep ploughing," the Prior argued.
+
+Mark realized that Brother Birinus had deliberately brought back the
+conversation to where it started in order to put an end to the
+discussion about St. Joseph. He was glad, because he himself was the
+only one of the brethren who had not yet been called upon to face the
+Prior's contemptuous teasing. He wondered if he should have had the
+courage to speak up for St. Joseph's Day. He should have found it
+difficult to oppose Brother George, whom he liked and revered. But in
+this case he was wrong, and perhaps he was also wrong to make the
+observation of St. Joseph's Day a cudgel with which to belabour the
+brethren.
+
+The following afternoon Mark had two casuals who he fancied might be
+useful to the Prior, and leaving the ward of the gate to Brother
+Nicholas he took them down with him through the coppice to where over
+the bleak March furrows Brother George was ploughing that rocky strip of
+bad land by the fir trees. The men were told to go and report themselves
+to Brother Birinus, who with Brother Dunstan to feed the drill was
+sowing oats a field or two away.
+
+"I don't think Brother Birinus will be sorry to let Brother Dunstan go
+back to his domestic duties," the Prior commented sardonically.
+
+Mark was turning to go back to _his_ domestic duties when Brother George
+signed to him to stop.
+
+"I suppose that like the rest of them you think I've no business to be a
+monk?" Brother George began.
+
+Mark looked at him in surprise.
+
+"I don't believe that anybody thinks that," he said; but even as he
+spoke he looked at the Prior and wondered why he had become a monk. He
+did not appear, standing there in breeches and gaiters, his shirt open
+at the neck, his hair tossing in the wind, his face and form of the soil
+like a figure in one of Fred Walker's pictures, no, he certainly did not
+appear the kind of man who could be led away by Father Burrowes'
+eloquence and persuasiveness into choosing the method of life he had
+chosen. Yes, now that the question had been put to him Mark wondered why
+Brother George was a monk.
+
+"You too are astonished at me," said the Prior. "Well, in a way I don't
+blame you. You've only seen me on the land. This comes of letting myself
+be tempted by Horner's offer to give us this land rent free if I would
+take it in hand. And after all," he went on talking to the wide grey sky
+rather than to Mark, "the old monks were great tillers of the soil. It's
+right that we should maintain the tradition. Besides, all those years in
+Malta I've dreamed just this. Brother Birinus and I have stewed on those
+sun-baked heights above Valetta and dreamed of this. What made you join
+our Order?" he asked abruptly.
+
+Mark told him about himself.
+
+"I see, you want to keep your hand in, eh? Well, I suppose you might
+have done worse for a couple of years. Now, I've never wanted to be a
+priest. The Reverend Father would like me to be ordained, but I don't
+think I should make a good priest. I believe if I were to become a
+priest, I should lose my faith. That sounds a queer thing to say, and
+I'd rather you didn't repeat it to any of those young men up there."
+
+The monastery bell sounded on the wind.
+
+"Three o'clock already," exclaimed the Prior. And crossing himself he
+said the short prayer offered to God instead of the formal attendance at
+the Office.
+
+"Well, I mustn't let the horses get chilled. You'd better get back to
+your casuals. By the way, I'm going to have Brother Nicholas to work out
+here awhile, and I want you to act as guest-master. Brother Raymond
+will be porter, and I'm going to send Brother Birinus off the farm to be
+sacristan. I shall miss him out here, of course."
+
+The Prior put his hand once more to the plough, and Mark went slowly
+back to the Abbey. On the brow of the hill before he plunged into the
+coppice he turned to look down at the distant figure moving with slow
+paces across the field below.
+
+"He's wrestling with himself," Mark thought, "more than he's wrestling
+with the soil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+MULTIPLICATION
+
+
+At Easter the Abbey Gatehouse was blessed by the Father Superior, who
+established himself in the rooms above and allowed himself to take a
+holiday from his labour of preaching. Mark expected to be made porter
+again, but the Reverend Father did not attempt to change the posts
+assigned to the brethren by the Prior, and Mark remained guest-master, a
+duty that was likely to give him plenty of occupation during the summer
+months now close at hand.
+
+On Low Sunday the Father Superior convened a full Chapter of the Order,
+to which were summoned Brother Dominic, the head of the Sandgate house,
+and Brother Anselm. When the brethren, with the exception of Brother
+Simon, who was still a postulant, were gathered together, the Father
+Superior addressed them as follows:
+
+"Brethren, I have called this Chapter of the Order of St. George to
+acquaint you with our financial position, and to ask you to make a grave
+decision. Before I say any more I ought to explain that our three
+professed brethren considered that a Chapter convened to make a decision
+such as I am going to ask you to make presently should not include the
+novices. I contended that in the present state of our Order where
+novices are called upon to fill the most responsible positions it would
+be unfair to exclude them; and our professed brethren, like true sons of
+St. Benedict, have accepted my ruling. You all know what great additions
+to our Mother House we have made during the past year, and you will all
+realize what a burden of debt this has laid upon the Order and on myself
+what a weight of responsibility. The closing of our Malta Priory, which
+was too far away to interest people in England, eased us a little. But
+if we are going to establish ourselves as a permanent force in modern
+religious life, we must establish our Mother House before anything. You
+may say that the Order of St. George is an Order devoted to active work
+among soldiers, and that we are not concerned with the establishment of
+a partially contemplative community. But all of you will recognize the
+advantage it has been to you to be asked to stay here and prepare
+yourselves for active work, to gather within yourselves a great store of
+spiritual energy, and hoard within your hearts a mighty treasure of
+spiritual strength. Brethren, if the Order of St. George is to be worthy
+of its name and of its claim we must not rest till we have a priory in
+every port and garrison, and in every great city where soldiers are
+stationed. Even if we had the necessary funds to endow these priories,
+have we enough brethren to take charge of them? We have not. I cannot
+help feeling that I was too hasty in establishing active houses both at
+Aldershot and at Sandgate, and I have convened you to-day to ask you to
+vote in Chapter that the house at Sandgate be temporarily given up,
+great spiritual influence though it has proved itself under our dear
+Brother Dominic with the men of Shorncliffe Camp, not only that we may
+concentrate our resources and pay our debts, but also that we may have
+the help of Brother Dominic himself, and of Brother Athanasius, who has
+remained behind in charge and is not here today."
+
+The Father Superior then read a statement of the Order's financial
+liabilities, and invited any Brother who wished, to speak his mind. All
+waited for the Prior, who after a short silence rose:
+
+"Reverend Father and Brethren, I don't think that there is much to say.
+Frankly, I am not convinced that we ought to have spent so much on the
+Abbey, but having done so, we must obviously try and put ourselves on a
+sound financial basis. I should like to hear what Brother Dominic has to
+say."
+
+Brother Dominic was a slight man with black hair and a sallow
+complexion, whose most prominent feature was an, immense hooked nose
+with thin nostrils. Whether through the associations with his name
+saint, or merely by his personality, Mark considered that he looked a
+typical inquisitor. When he spoke, his lips seemed to curl in a sneer.
+The expression was probably quite accidental, perhaps caused by some
+difficulty in breathing, but the effect was sinister, and his smooth
+voice did nothing to counteract the unpleasant grimace. Mark wondered if
+he was really successful with the men at Shorncliffe.
+
+"Reverend Father, Reverend Brother, and Brethren," said Brother Dominic,
+"you can imagine that it is no easy matter for me to destroy with a few
+words a house that in a small way I had a share in building up."
+
+"The lion's share," interposed the Father Superior.
+
+"You are too generous, Reverend Father," said Brother Dominic. "We could
+have done very little at Sandgate if you had not worked so hard for us
+throughout the length and breadth of England. And that is what
+personally I do feel, Brethren," he continued in more emphatic tones. "I
+do feel that the Reverend Father knows better than we what is the right
+policy for us to adopt. I will not pretend that I shall be anything but
+loath to leave Sandgate, but the future of the whole order depends on
+the ability of brethren like myself," Brother Dominic paused for the
+briefest instant to flash a quick glance at Brother Anselm, "to
+recognize that our usefulness to the soldiers among whom we are proud
+and happy to spend our lives is bounded by our usefulness to the Order
+of St. George. I give my vote without hesitation in favour of closing
+the Priory at Sandgate, and abandoning temporarily the work at
+Shorncliffe Camp."
+
+Nobody else spoke when Brother Dominic sat down, and everybody voted in
+favour of the course of action proposed by the Father Superior.
+
+Brother Dominic, in addition to his other work, had been editing _The
+Dragon_, the monthly magazine of the Order, and it was now decided to
+print this in future at the Abbey, some constant reader having presented
+a fount of type. The opening of a printing-press involved housing room,
+and it was decided to devote the old kitchens to this purpose, so that
+new kitchens could be built, a desirable addition in view of the
+increasing numbers in the Abbey and the likelihood of a further increase
+presently.
+
+Mark had not been touched by the abandonment of the Sandgate priory
+until Brother Athanasius arrived. Brother Athanasius was a florid young
+man with bright blue eyes, and so much pent-up energy as sometimes to
+appear blustering. He lacked any kind of ability to hide his feelings,
+and he was loud in his denunciation of the Chapter that abolished his
+work. His criticisms were so loud, aggressive, and blatant, that he was
+nearly ordered to retire from the Order altogether. However, the Father
+Superior went away to address a series of drawing-room meetings in
+London, and Brother George, with whom Brother Athanasius, almost alone
+of the brethren, never hesitated to keep his end up, discovering that he
+was as ready to stick up to horses and cows, did not pay attention to
+the Father Superior's threat that, if Brother Athanasius could not keep
+his tongue quiet, he must be sent away. Mark made friends with him, and
+when he found that, in spite of all his blatancy and self-assertion,
+Brother Athanasius could not keep the tears from his bright blue eyes
+whenever he spoke of Shorncliffe, he was sorry for him and vexed with
+himself for accepting the surrender of Sandgate priory so much as a
+matter of course, because he had no personal experience of its work.
+
+"But was Brother Dominic really good with the men?" Mark asked.
+
+"Oh, Brother Dominic was all right. Don't you try and make me criticize
+Brother Dominic. He bought the gloves and I did the fighting. Good man
+of business was Brother D. I wish we could have some boxing here. Half
+the brethren want punching about in my opinion. Old Brother Jerome's
+face is squashed flat like a prize-fighter's, but I bet he's never had
+the gloves on in his life. I'm fond of old Brother J. But, my word,
+wouldn't I like to punch into him when he gives us that pea-soup more
+than four times a week. Chronic, I call it. Well, if he doesn't give us
+a jolly good blow out on my name-day next week I really will punch into
+him. Old Brother Flatface, as I called him the other day. And he wasn't
+half angry either. Didn't we have sport last second of May! I took a
+party of them all round Hythe and Folkestone. No end of a spree!"
+
+Mark was soon too much occupied with his duties as guestmaster to lament
+with Brother Athanasius the end of the Sandgate priory. The Reverend
+Father's drawing-room addresses were sending fresh visitors down every
+week to see for themselves the size of the foundation that required
+money, and more money, and more money still to keep it going. In the old
+Chatsea days guests who visited the Mission House were expected to
+provide entertainment for their hosts. It mattered not who they were,
+millionaires or paupers, parsons or laymen, undergraduates or
+board-school boys, they had to share the common table, face the common
+teasing, and help the common task. Here at the Abbey, although the
+guests had much more opportunity of intercourse with the brethren than
+would have been permitted in a less novel monastic house, they were
+definitely guests, from whom nothing was expected beyond observance of
+the rules for guests. They were of all kinds, from the distinguished lay
+leaders of the Catholic party to young men who thought emotionally of
+joining the Order.
+
+Mark tried to conduct himself as impersonally as possible, and in doing
+so he managed to impress all the visitors with being a young man
+intensely preoccupied with his vocation, and as such to be treated with
+gravity and a certain amount of deference. Mark himself was anxious not
+to take advantage of his position, and make friends with people that
+otherwise he might not have met. Had he been sure that he was going to
+remain in the Order of St. George, he would have allowed himself a
+greater liberty of intercourse, because he would not then have been
+afraid of one day seeing these people in the world. He desired to be
+forgotten when they left the Abbey, or if he was remembered to be
+remembered only as a guestmaster who tried to make the Monastery guests
+comfortable, who treated them with courtesy, but also with reserve.
+
+None of the young men who came down to see if they would like to be
+monks got as far as being accepted as a probationer until the end of
+May, when a certain Mr. Arthur Yarrell, an undergraduate from Keble
+College, Oxford, whose mind was a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms,
+was accepted and a month later became a postulant as Brother Augustine,
+to the great pleasure of Brother Raymond, who said that he really
+thought he should have been compelled to leave the Order if somebody had
+not joined it with an appreciation of historic Catholicism. Early in
+June Sir Charles Horner introduced another young man called Aubrey Wyon,
+whom he had met at Venice in May.
+
+"Take a little trouble over entertaining him," Sir Charles counselled.
+And then, looking round to see that no thieves or highwaymen were
+listening, he whispered to Mark that Wyon had money. "He would be an
+asset, I fancy. And he's seriously thinking of joining you," the baronet
+declared.
+
+To tell the truth, Sir Charles who was beginning to be worried by the
+financial state of the Order of St. George, would at this crisis have
+tried to persuade the Devil to become a monk if the Devil would have
+provided a handsome dowry. He had met Aubrey Wyon at an expensive hotel,
+had noticed that he was expensively dressed and drank good wine, had
+found that he was interested in ecclesiastical religion, and, having
+bragged a bit about the land he had presented to the Order of St.
+George, had inspired Wyon to do some bragging of what he had done for
+various churches.
+
+"If I could find happiness at Malford," Wyon had said, "I would give
+them all that I possess."
+
+Sir Charles had warned the Father Superior that he would do well to
+accept Wyon as a probationer, should he propose himself; and the Father
+Superior, who was by now as anxious for money as a company-promoter,
+made himself as pleasant to Wyon as he knew how, flattering him
+carefully and giving voice to his dreams for the great stone Abbey to be
+built here in days to come.
+
+Mark took an immediate and violent dislike to the newcomer, which, had
+he been questioned about it, he would have attributed to his elaborate
+choice of socks and tie, or to his habit of perpetually tightening the
+leather belt he wore instead of braces, as if he would compel that
+flabbiness of waist caused by soft living to vanish; but to himself he
+admitted that the antipathy was deeper seated.
+
+"It's like the odour of corruption," he murmured, though actually it was
+the odour of hair washes and lotions and scents that filled the guest's
+cell.
+
+However, Aubrey Wyon became for a week a probationer, ludicrously known
+as Brother Aubrey, after which he remained a postulant only a fortnight
+before he was clothed as a novice, having by then taken the name of
+Anthony, alleging that the inspiration to become a monk had been due to
+the direct intervention of St. Anthony of Padua on June 13th.
+
+Whether Brother Anthony turned the Father Superior's head with his
+promises of what he intended to give the Order when he was professed, or
+whether having once started he was unable to stop, there was continuous
+building all that summer, culminating in a decision to begin the Abbey
+Church.
+
+Mark wondered why Brother George did not protest against the
+expenditure, and he came to the conclusion that the Prior was as much
+bewitched by ambition for his farm as the head of the Order was by his
+hope of a mighty fane.
+
+Thus things drifted during the summer, when, since the Father Superior
+was not away so much, his influence was exerted more strongly over the
+brethren, though at the same time he was not attracting as much money as
+was now always required in ever increasing amounts.
+
+Such preaching as he did manage later on during the autumn was by no
+means so financially successful as his campaign of the preceding year at
+the same time. Perhaps the natural buoyancy of his spirit led Father
+Burrowes in his disappointment to place more trust than he might
+otherwise have done in Brother Anthony's plan for the benefit of the
+Order. The cloister became like Aladdin's Cave whenever there were
+enough brethren assembled to make an audience for his luscious projects
+and prefigurations. Sundays were the days when Brother Anthony was
+particularly eloquent, and one Sunday in mid-September--it was the Feast
+of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross--he surpassed himself.
+
+"My notion would be to copy," he proclaimed, "with of course certain
+improvements, the buildings on Monte Cassino. We are not quite so high
+here; but then on the other hand that is an advantage, because it will
+enable us to allot less space to the superficial area. Yes, I have a
+very soft spot for the cloisters of Monte Cassino."
+
+Brother Anthony gazed round for the approbation of the assembled
+brethren, none of whom had the least idea what the cloisters of Monte
+Cassino looked like.
+
+"And I think some of our altar furniture is a little mean," Brother
+Anthony continued. "I'm not advocating undue ostentation; but there is
+room for improvement. They understood so well in the Middle Ages the
+importance of a rich equipment. If I'd only known when I was in Sienna
+this spring that I was coming here, I should certainly have bought a
+superb reredos that was offered to me comparatively cheap. The columns
+were of malachite and porphyry, and the panels of _rosso antico_ with
+scrolls of _lumachella_. They only asked 15,000 lire. It was absurdly
+cheap. However, perhaps it would be wiser to wait till we finish the
+Abbey Church before we decide on the reredos. I'm very much in favour of
+beaten gold for the tabernacle. By the way, Reverend Father, have you
+decided to build an ambulatory round the clerestory? I must say I think
+it would be effective, and of course for meditation unique. I shall have
+to find if my money will run to it. Oh, and Brother Birinus, weren't you
+saying the other day that the green vestments were rather faded? Don't
+worry. I'm only waiting to make up my mind between velvet and brocade
+for the purple set to order a completely new lot, including a set in old
+rose damask for mid-Lent. It always seems to me such a mistake not to
+take advantage of that charming use."
+
+Father Burrowes was transported to the days of his youth at Malta when
+his own imagination was filled with visions of precious metals, of rare
+fabrics and mighty architecture.
+
+"A silver chalice of severe pattern encrusted round the stem with blue
+zircons," Brother Anthony was chanting in his melodious voice, his eyes
+bright with the reflection of celestial splendours. "And perhaps another
+in gold with the sacred monogram wrought on the cup in jacinths and
+orange tourmalines. Yes, I'll talk it over with Sir Charles and get him
+to approve the design."
+
+The next morning two detectives came to Malford Abbey, and arrested
+Aubrey Wyon alias Brother Anthony for obtaining money under false
+pretences in various parts of the world. With them he departed to prison
+and a life more ascetic than any he had hitherto known. Brother Anthony
+departed indeed, but he was not discredited until it was too late. His
+grandiose projects and extravagant promises had already incited Father
+Burrowes to launch out on several new building operations that the Order
+could ill afford.
+
+Perhaps the cloister had been less like the Cave of Aladdin than the
+Cave of the Forty Thieves.
+
+After Christmas another Chapter was convened, to which Brother Anselm
+and Brother Chad were both bidden. The Father Superior addressed the
+brethren as he had addressed them a year ago, and finished up his speech
+by announcing that, deeply as he regretted it, he felt bound to propose
+that the Aldershot priory should be closed.
+
+"What?" shouted Brother Anselm, leaping to his feet, his eyes blazing
+with wrath through his great horn spectacles.
+
+The Prior quickly rose to say that he could not agree to the Reverend
+Father's suggestion. It was impossible for them any longer to claim that
+they were an active Order if they confined themselves entirely to the
+Abbey. He had not opposed the shutting down of the Sandgate priory, nor,
+he would remind the Reverend Father, had he offered any resistance to
+the abandonment of Malta. But he felt obliged to give his opinion
+strongly in favour of making any sacrifice to keep alive the Aldershot
+priory.
+
+Brother George had spoken with force, but without eloquence; and Mark
+was afraid that his speech had not carried much weight.
+
+The next to rise was Brother Birinus, who stood up as tall as a tree and
+said:
+
+"I agree with Brother George."
+
+And when he sat down it was as if a tree had been uprooted.
+
+There was a pause after this, while every brother looked at his
+neighbour, waiting for him to rise at this crisis in the history of the
+Order. At last the Father Superior asked Brother Anselm if he did not
+intend to speak.
+
+"What can I say?" asked Brother Anselm bitterly. "Last year I should
+have been true to myself and voted against the closing of the Sandgate
+house. I was silent then in my egoism. I am not fit to defend our house
+now."
+
+"But I will," cried Brother Chad, rising. "Begging your pardon, Reverend
+Father and Brethren, if I am speaking too soon, but I cannot believe
+that you seriously consider closing us down. We're just beginning to get
+on well with the authorities, and we've a regular lot of communicants
+now. We began as just a Club, but we're something more than a Club now.
+We're bringing men to Our Lord, Brethren. You will do a great wrong if
+you let those poor souls think that for the sake of your own comfort you
+are ready to forsake them. Forgive me, Reverend Father. Forgive me, dear
+Brethren, if I have said too much and spoken uncharitably."
+
+"He has not spoken uncharitably enough," Brother Athanasius shouted,
+rising to his feet, and as he did so unconsciously assuming the attitude
+of a boxer. "If I'd been here last year, I should have spoken much more
+uncharitably. I did not join this Order to sit about playing with
+vestments. I wanted to bring soldiers to God. If this Order is to be
+turned into a kind of male nunnery, I'm off to-morrow. I'm boiling over,
+that's what I am, boiling over. If we can't afford to do what we should
+be doing, we can't afford to build gatehouses, and lay out flower-beds,
+and sit giggling in tin cloisters. It's the limit, that's what it is,
+the limit."
+
+Brother Athanasius stood there flushed with defiance, until the Father
+Superior told him to sit down and not make a fool of himself, a command
+which, notwithstanding that the feeling of the Chapter had been so far
+entirely against the head of the Order, such was the Father Superior's
+authority, Brother Athanasius immediately obeyed.
+
+Brother Dominic now rose to try, as he said, to bring an atmosphere of
+reasonableness into the discussion.
+
+"I do not think that I can be accused of inconsistency," he pointed out
+smoothly, "when we look back to our general Chapter of a year ago.
+Whatever my personal feelings were about closing the Sandgate priory, I
+recognized at once that the Reverend Father was right. There is really
+no doubt that we must be strong at the roots before we try to grow into
+a tall tree. However flourishing the branches, they will wither if the
+roots are not fed. The Reverend Father has no desire, as I understand
+him, to abandon the activity of the Order. He is merely anxious to
+establish us on a firm basis. The Reverend Brother said that we should
+make any sacrifice to maintain the Aldershot house. I have no desire to
+accuse the Reverend Brother of inconsistency, but I would ask him if he
+is willing to give up the farm, which, as you know, has cost so far a
+great deal more than we could afford. But of course the Reverend Brother
+would give up the farm. At the same time, we do not want him to give it
+up. We realize that under his capable guidance that farm will presently
+be a source of profit. Therefore, I beg the Reverend Brother to
+understand that I am making a purely rhetorical point when I ask him if
+he is prepared to give up the farm. I repeat, we do not want the farm
+given up.
+
+"Another point which I feel has been missed. In giving up Aldershot, we
+are not giving up active work entirely. We have a good deal of active
+work here. We have our guest-house for casuals, and we are always ready
+to feed, clothe, and shelter any old soldiers who come to us. We are
+still young as an Order. We have only four professed monks, including
+the Reverend Father. We want to have more than that before we can
+consider ourselves established. I for one should hesitate to take my
+final vows until I had spent a long time in strict religious
+preparation, which in the hurry and scurry of active work is impossible.
+We have listened to a couple of violent speeches, or at any rate to one
+violent speech by a brother who was for a year in close touch with
+myself. I appeal to him not to drag the discussion down to the level of
+lay politics. We are free, we novices, to leave to-morrow. Let us
+remember that, and do not let us take advantage of our freedom to impart
+to this Mother House of ours the atmosphere of the world to which we may
+return when we will.
+
+"And let us remember when we oppose the judgment of the Reverend Father
+that we are exalting ourselves without reason. Let us remember that it
+is he who by his eloquence and by his devotion and by his endurance and
+by his personality, has given us this wonderful house. Are we to turn
+round and say to him who has worked so hard for us that we do not want
+his gifts, that we are such wonderful fishers of men that we can be
+independent of him? Oh, my dear Brethren, let me beg you to vote in
+favour of abandoning all our dependencies until we are ourselves no
+longer dependent on the Reverend Father's eloquence and devotion and
+endurance and personality. God has blessed us infinitely. Are we to
+fling those blessings in His face?"
+
+Brother Dominic sat down; after him in succession Brother Raymond,
+Brother Dunstan, Brother Lawrence, Brother Jerome, Brother Nicholas, and
+Brother Augustine spoke in support of the Father Superior. Brother Giles
+refused to speak, and though Mark's heart was thundering in his mouth
+with unuttered eloquence, at the moment he should rise he could not find
+a word, and he indicated with a sign that like Brother Giles, he had
+nothing to say.
+
+"The voting will be by ballot," the Reverend Father announced. "It is
+proposed to give up the Priory at Aldershot. Let those brethren who
+agree write Yes on a strip of paper. Let those who disagree write No."
+
+All knelt in silent prayer before they inscribed their will; after which
+they advanced one by one to the ballot-box, into which under the eyes of
+a large crucifix they dropped their papers. The Father Superior did not
+vote. Brother Simon, who was still a postulant, and not eligible to sit
+in Chapter, was fetched to count the votes. He was much excited at his
+task, and when he announced that seven papers were inscribed Yes, that
+six were inscribed No, and that one paper was blank, his teeth were
+chattering.
+
+"One paper blank?" somebody repeated.
+
+"Yes, really," said Brother Simon. "I looked everywhere, and there's not
+a mark on it."
+
+All turned involuntarily toward Mark, whose paper in fact it was,
+although he gave no sign of being conscious of the ownership.
+
+"_In a General Chapter of the Order of St. George, held upon the Vigil
+of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the year of Grace, 1903, it
+was resolved to close the Priory of the Order in the town of
+Aldershot._"
+
+The Reverend Father, having invoked the Holy Trinity, declared the
+Chapter dissolved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+DIVISION
+
+
+Mark was vexed with himself for evading the responsibility of recording
+his opinion. His vote would not have changed the direction of the
+policy; but if he had voted against giving up the house at Aldershot,
+the Father Superior would have had to record the casting vote in favour
+of his own proposal, and whatever praise or blame was ultimately awarded
+to the decision would have belonged to him alone, who as head of the
+Order was best able to bear it. Mark's whole sympathy had been on the
+side of Brother George, and as one who had known at first hand the work
+in Aldershot, he did feel that it ought not to be abandoned so easily.
+Then when Brother Athanasius was speaking, Mark, in his embarrassment at
+such violence of manner and tone, picked up a volume lying on the table
+by his elbow that by reading he might avoid the eyes of his brethren
+until Brother Athanasius had ceased to shout. It was the Rule of St.
+Benedict which, with a print of Fra Angelico's Crucifixion and an image
+of St. George, was all the decoration allowed to the bare Chapter Room,
+and the page at which Mark opened the leather-bound volume was headed:
+DE PRAEPOSITO MONASTERII.
+
+     "_It happens too often that through the appointment of the Prior
+     grave scandals arise in monasteries, since some there be who,
+     puffed up with a malignant spirit of pride, imagining themselves to
+     be second Abbots, and assuming unto themselves a tyrannous
+     authority, encourage scandals and create dissensions in the
+     community. . . ._
+
+     "_Hence envy is excited, strife, evil-speaking, jealousy, discord,
+     confusion; and while the Abbot and the Prior run counter to each
+     other, by such dissension their souls must of necessity be
+     imperilled; and those who are under them, when they take sides, are
+     travelling on the road to perdition. . . ._
+
+     "_On this account we apprehend that it is expedient for the
+     preservation of peace and good-will that the management of his
+     monastery should be left to the discretion of the Abbot. . . ._
+
+     "_Let the Prior carry out with reverence whatever shall be enjoined
+     upon him by his Abbot, doing nothing against the Abbot's will, nor
+     against his orders. . . ._"
+
+Mark could not be otherwise than impressed by what he read.
+
+     _Ii qui sub ipsis sunt, dum adulantur partibus, eunt in
+     perditionem. . . ._
+
+     _Nihil contra Abbatis voluntatem faciens. . . ._
+
+Mark looked up at the figure of St. Benedict standing in that holy group
+at the foot of the Cross.
+
+     _Ideoque nos proevidemus expedire, propter pacis caritatisque
+     custodiam, in Abbatis pendere arbitrio ordinationem monasterii
+     sui. . . ._
+
+St. Benedict had more than apprehended; he had actually foreseen that
+the Abbot ought to manage his own monastery. It was as if centuries ago,
+in the cave at Subiaco, he had heard that strident voice of Brother
+Athanasius in this matchboarded Chapter-room, as if he had beheld
+Brother Dominic, while apparently he was striving to persuade his
+brethren to accept the Father Superior's advice, nevertheless taking
+sides, and thereby travelling along the road that leads toward
+destruction. This was the thought that paralyzed Mark's tongue when it
+was his turn to speak, and this was why he would not commit himself to
+an opinion. Afterward, his neutrality appeared to him a weak compromise,
+and he regretted that he had not definitely allied himself with one
+party or the other.
+
+The announcement in _The Dragon_ that the Order had been compelled to
+give up the Aldershot house produced a large sum of sympathetic
+contributions; and when the Father Superior came back just before Lent,
+he convened another Chapter, at which he told the Community that it was
+imperative to establish a priory in London before they tried to reopen
+any houses elsewhere. His argument was cogent, and once again there was
+the appearance of unanimity among the Brethren, who all approved of the
+proposal. It had always been the custom of Father Burrowes to preach his
+hardest during Lent, because during that season of self-denial he was
+able to raise more money than at any other time, but until now he had
+never failed to be at the Abbey at the beginning of Passion Week, nor to
+remain there until Easter was over.
+
+The Feast of St. Benedict fell upon the Saturday before the fifth Sunday
+in Lent, and the Father Superior, who had travelled down from the North
+in order to be present, announced that he considered it would be
+prudent, so freely was the money flowing in, not to give up preaching
+this year during Passion Week and Holy Week. Naturally, he did not
+intend to leave the Community without a priest at such a season, and he
+had made arrangements with the Reverend Andrew Hett to act as chaplain
+until he could come back into residence himself.
+
+Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine were particularly thrilled by the
+prospect of enjoying the ministrations of Andrew Hett, less perhaps
+because they would otherwise be debarred from their Easter duties than
+because they looked forward to services and ceremonies of which they
+felt they had been robbed by the austere Anglicanism of Brother George.
+
+"Andrew Hett is famous," declared Brother Raymond at the pitch of
+exultation. "It was he who told the Bishop of Ipswich that if the Bishop
+made him give up Benediction he would give up singing Morning and
+Evening Prayer."
+
+"That must have upset the Bishop," said Mark. "I suppose he resigned
+his bishopric."
+
+"I should have thought that you, Brother Mark, would have been the last
+one to take the part of a bishop when he persecutes a Catholic priest!"
+
+"I'm not taking the part of the Bishop," Mark replied. "But I think it
+was a silly remark for a curate to make. It merely put him in the wrong,
+and gave the Bishop an opportunity to score."
+
+The Prior had questioned the policy of engaging Andrew Hett as Chaplain,
+even for so brief a period as a month. He argued that, inasmuch as the
+Bishop of Silchester had twice refused to licence him to parishes in the
+diocese, it would prejudice the Bishop against the Order of St. George,
+and might lead to his inhibiting the Father Superior later on, should an
+excuse present itself.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear Brother George," said the Reverend Father. "He won't
+know anything about it officially, and in any case ours is a private
+oratory, where refusals to licence and episcopal inhibitions have no
+effect."
+
+"That's not my point," argued Brother George. "My point is that any
+communication with a notorious ecclesiastical outlaw like this fellow
+Hett is liable to react unfavourably upon us. Why can't we get down
+somebody else? There must be a number of unemployed elderly priests who
+would be glad of the holiday."
+
+"I'm afraid that I've offered Hett the job now, so let us make up our
+minds to be content."
+
+Mark, who was doing secretarial work for the Reverend Father, happened
+to be present during this conversation, which distressed him, because it
+showed him that the Prior was still at variance with the Abbot, a state
+of affairs that was ultimately bound to be disastrous for the Community.
+He withdrew almost immediately on some excuse to the Superior's inner
+room, whence he intended to go downstairs to the Porter's Lodge until
+the Prior was gone. Unfortunately, the door of the inner room was
+locked, and before he could explain what had happened, a conversation
+had begun which he could not help overhearing, but which he dreaded to
+interrupt.
+
+"I'm afraid, dear Brother George," the Reverend Father was saying, "I'm
+very much afraid that you are beginning to think I have outlived my
+usefulness as Superior of the Order."
+
+"I've never suggested that," Brother George replied angrily.
+
+"You may not have meant to give that impression, but certainly that is
+what you have succeeded in making me feel personally," said the
+Superior.
+
+"I have been associated with you long enough to be entitled to express
+my opinion in private."
+
+"In private, yes. But are you always careful only to do so in private?
+I'm not complaining. My only desire is the prosperity and health of the
+Order. Next Christmas I am ready to resign, and let the brethren elect
+another Superior-general."
+
+"That's talking nonsense," said the Prior. "You know as well as I do
+that nobody else except you could possibly be Superior. But recently I
+happen to have had a better opportunity than you to criticize our Mother
+House, and frankly I'm not satisfied with the men we have. Few of them
+will be any use to us. Birinus, Anselm, Giles, Chad, Athanasius if
+properly suppressed, Mark, these in varying degrees, have something in
+them, but look at the others! Dominic, ambitious and sly, Jerome, a
+pompous prig, Dunstan, a nincompoop, Raymond, a milliner, Nicholas,
+a--well, you know what I think Nicholas is, Augustine, another
+nincompoop, Lawrence, still at Sunday School, and poor Simon, a clown.
+I've had a dozen probationers through my hands, and not one of them was
+as good as what we've got. I'm afraid I'm less hopeful of the future
+than I was in Canada."
+
+"I notice, dear Brother George," said the Father Superior, "that you are
+prejudiced in favour of the brethren who follow your lead with a certain
+amount of enthusiasm. That is very natural. But I'm not so pessimistic
+about the others as you are. Perhaps you feel that I am forgetting how
+much the Order owes to your generosity in the past. Believe me, I have
+forgotten nothing. At the same time, you gave your money with your eyes
+open. You took your vows without being pressed. Don't you think you owe
+it to yourself, if not to the Order or to me personally, to go through
+with what you undertook? Your three vows were Chastity, Poverty, and
+Obedience."
+
+There was no answer from the Prior; a moment later he shut the door
+behind him, and went downstairs alone. Mark came into the room at once.
+
+"Reverend Father," he said. "I'm sorry to have to tell you that I
+overheard what you and the Reverend Brother were saying." He went on to
+explain how this had happened, and why he had not liked to make his
+presence known.
+
+"You thought the Reverend Brother would not bear the mortification with
+as much fortitude as myself?" the Father Superior suggested with a faint
+smile.
+
+It struck Mark how true this was, and he looked in astonishment at
+Father Burrowes, who had offered him the key to his action.
+
+"Well, we must forget what we heard, my son," said the Father Superior.
+"Sit down, and let's finish off these letters."
+
+An hour's work was done, at the end of which the Reverend Father asked
+Mark if his had been the blank paper when the votes were counted in
+Chapter, and when Mark admitted that it had been, he pressed him for the
+reason of his neutrality.
+
+"I'm not sure that it oughtn't to be called indecision," said Mark. "I
+was personally interested in the keeping on of Aldershot, because I had
+worked there."
+
+"Then why not have voted for doing so?" the Superior asked, in accents
+that were devoid of the least grudge against Mark for disagreeing with
+himself.
+
+"I tried to get rid of my personal opinion," Mark explained. "I tried to
+look at the question strictly from the standpoint of the member of a
+community. As such I felt that the Reverend Brother was wrong to run
+counter to his Superior. At the same time, if you'll forgive me for
+saying so, I felt that you were wrong to give up Aldershot. I simply
+could not arrive at a decision between the two opinions."
+
+"I do not blame you, my son, for your scrupulous cast of mind. Only
+beware of letting it chill your enthusiasm. Satan may avail himself of
+it one day, and attack your faith. Solomon was just. Our Blessed Lord,
+by our cowardly standards, was unjust. Remembering the Gadarene swine,
+the barren fig-tree, the parable of the wedding-guest without a garment,
+Martha and Mary. . . ."
+
+"Martha and Mary!" interrupted Mark. "Why, that was really the point at
+issue. And the ointment that might have been sold for the benefit of the
+poor. Yes, Judas would have voted with the Reverend Brother."
+
+"And Pontius Pilate would have remained neutral," added Father Burrowes,
+his blue eyes glittering with delight at the effect upon Mark of his
+words.
+
+But when Mark was walking back to the Abbey down the winding drive among
+the hazels, he wished that he and not the Reverend Father had used that
+illustration. However, useless regrets for his indecision in the matter
+of the priory at Aldershot were soon obliterated by a new cause of
+division, which was the arrival of the Reverend Andrew Hett on the Vigil
+of the Annunciation, just in time to sing first Vespers.
+
+It fell to Mark's lot to entertain the new chaplain that evening,
+because Brother Jerome who had become guest-master when Brother Anselm
+took his place as cellarer was in the infirmary. Mark was scarcely
+prepared for the kind of personality that Hett's proved to be. He had
+grown accustomed during his time at the Abbey to look down upon the
+protagonists of ecclesiastical battles, so little else did any of the
+guests who visited them want to discuss, so much awe was lavished upon
+them by Brother Raymond and Brother Augustine. It did not strike Mark
+that the fight at St. Agnes' might appear to the large majority of
+people as much a foolish squabble over trifles, a cherishing of the
+letter rather than the spirit of Christian worship, as the dispute
+between Mr. So-and-so and the Bishop of Somewhere-or-other in regard to
+his use of the Litany of the Saints in solemn procession on high days
+and holy days.
+
+Andrew Hett revived in Mark his admiration of the bigot, which would
+have been a dangerous thing to lose in one's early twenties. The
+chaplain was a young man of perhaps thirty-five, tall, raw-boned,
+sandy-haired, with a complexion of extreme pallor. His light-blue eyes
+were very red round the rims, and what eyebrows he possessed slanted up
+at a diabolic angle. His voice was harsh, high, and rasping as a guinea
+fowl's. When Mark brought him his supper, Hett asked him several
+questions about the Abbey time-table, and then said abruptly:
+
+"The ugliness of this place must be soul-destroying."
+
+Mark looked at the Guest-chamber with new eyes. There was such a force
+of assertion in Hett's tone that he could not contradict him, and indeed
+it certainly was ugly.
+
+"Nobody can live with matchboarded walls and ceilings and not suffer for
+it," Hett went on. "Why didn't you buy an old tithe barn and live in
+that? It's an insult to Almighty God to worship Him in such
+surroundings."
+
+"This is only a beginning," Mark pointed out.
+
+"A very bad beginning," Hett growled. "Such brutalizing ugliness would
+be inexcusable if you were leading an active life. But I gather that you
+claim to be contemplative here. I've been reading your ridiculous
+monthly paper _The Dragon_. Full of sentimental bosh about bringing back
+the glories of monasticism to England. Tintern was not built of tin. How
+can you contemplate Almighty God here? It's not possible. What Divine
+purpose is served by collecting men under hundreds of square feet of
+corrugated iron? I'm astonished at Charles Horner. I thought he knew
+better than to encourage this kind of abomination."
+
+There was only one answer to make to Hett, which was that the religious
+life of the Community did not depend upon any externals, least of all
+upon its lodging; but when Mark tried to frame this answer, his lips
+would not utter the words. In that moment he knew that it was time for
+him to leave Malford and prepare himself to be a priest elsewhere, and
+otherwise than by what the Rector had stigmatized as the pseudo-monastic
+life.
+
+Mark wondered when he had left the chaplain to his ferocious
+meditations what would have been the effect of that diatribe upon some
+of his brethren. He smiled to himself, as he sat over his solitary
+supper in the Refectory, to picture the various expressions he could
+imagine upon their faces when they came hotfoot from the Guest-chamber
+with the news of what manner of priest was in their midst. And while he
+was sipping his bowl of pea-soup, he looked up at the image of St.
+George and perceived that the dragon's expression bore a distinct
+resemblance to that of the Reverend Andrew Hett. That night it seemed to
+Mark, in one of those waking trances that occur like dreams between one
+disturbed sleep and another, that the presence of the chaplain was
+shaking the flimsy foundations of the Abbey with such ruthlessness that
+the whole structure must soon collapse.
+
+"It's only the wind," he murmured, with that half of his mind which was
+awake. "March is going out like a dragon."
+
+After Mass next day, when Mark was giving the chaplain his breakfast,
+the latter asked who kept the key of the tabernacle.
+
+"Brother Birinus, I expect. He is the sacristan."
+
+"It ought to have been given to me before Mass. Please go and ask for
+it," requested the chaplain.
+
+Mark found Brother Birinus in the Sacristy, putting away the white
+vestments in the press. When Mark gave him the chaplain's message,
+Brother Birinus told him that the Reverend Brother had the key.
+
+"What does he want the key for?" asked Brother George when Mark had
+repeated to him the chaplain's request.
+
+"He probably wishes to change the Host," Mark suggested.
+
+"There is no need to do that. And I don't believe that is the reason. I
+believe he wants to have Benediction. He's not going to have Benediction
+here."
+
+Mark felt that it was not his place to argue with the Reverend Brother,
+and he merely asked him what reply he was to give to the chaplain.
+
+"Tell him that the key of the Tabernacle is kept by me while the
+Reverend Father is away, and that I regret I cannot give it to him."
+
+The priest's eyes blazed with anger when Mark returned without the key.
+
+"Who is the Reverend Brother?" he rasped.
+
+"Brother George."
+
+"Yes, but what is he? Apothecary, tailor, ploughboy, what?"
+
+"Brother George is the Prior."
+
+"Well, please tell the Prior that I should like to speak to him
+instantly."
+
+When Mark found Brother George he had already doffed his habit, and was
+dressed in his farmer's clothes to go working on the land.
+
+"I'll speak to Mr. Hett before Sext. Meanwhile, you can assure him that
+the key of the Tabernacle is perfectly safe. I wear it round my neck."
+
+Brother George pulled open his shirt, and showed Mark the golden key
+hanging from a cord.
+
+On receiving the Prior's message, the chaplain asked for a railway
+time-table.
+
+"I see there is a fast train at 10.30. Please order the trap."
+
+"You're not going to leave us?" Mark exclaimed.
+
+"Do you suppose, Brother Mark, that no bishop in the Establishment will
+receive me in his diocese because I am accustomed to give way? I should
+not have asked for the key of the Tabernacle unless I thought that it
+was my duty to ask for it. I cannot take it from the Reverend Brother's
+neck. I will not stay here without its being given up to me. Please
+order the trap in time to catch the 10.30 train."
+
+"Surely you will see the Reverend Brother first," Mark urged. "I should
+have made it clear to you that he is out in the fields, and that all the
+work of the farm falls upon his shoulders. It cannot make any difference
+whether you have the key now or before Sext. And I'm sure the Reverend
+Brother will see your point of view when you put it to him."
+
+"I am not going to argue about the custody of God," said the chaplain.
+"I should consider such an argument blasphemy, and I consider the
+Prior's action in refusing to give up the key sacrilege. Please order
+the trap."
+
+"But if you sent a telegram to the Reverend Father . . . Brother Dominic
+will know where he is . . . I'm sure that the Reverend Father will put
+it right with Brother George, and that he will at once give you the
+key."
+
+"I was summoned here as a priest," said the chaplain. "If the amateur
+monk left in charge of this monastery does not understand the
+prerogatives of my priesthood, I am not concerned to teach him except
+directly."
+
+"Well, will you wait until I've found the Reverend Brother and told him
+that you intend to leave us unless he gives you the key?" Mark begged,
+in despair at the prospect of what the chaplain's departure would mean
+to a Community already too much divided against itself.
+
+"It is not one of my prerogatives to threaten the prior of a monastery,
+even if he is an amateur," said the chaplain. "From the moment that
+Brother George refuses to recognize my position, I cease to hold that
+position. Please order the trap."
+
+"You won't have to leave till half-past nine," said Mark, who had made
+up his mind to wrestle with Brother George on his own initiative, and if
+possible to persuade him to surrender the key to the chaplain of his own
+accord. With this object he hurried out, to find Brother George
+ploughing that stony ground by the fir-trees. He was looking ruefully at
+a broken share when Mark approached him.
+
+"Two since I started," he commented.
+
+But he was breaking more precious things than shares, thought Mark, if
+he could but understand.
+
+"Let the fellow go," said Brother George coldly, when Mark had related
+his interview with the chaplain.
+
+"But, Reverend Brother, if he goes we shall have no priest for Easter."
+
+"We shall be better off with no priest than with a fellow like that."
+
+"Reverend Brother," said Mark miserably, "I have no right to remonstrate
+with you, I know. But I must say something. You are making a mistake.
+You will break up the Community. I am not speaking on my own account
+now, because I have already made up my mind to leave, and get ordained.
+But the others! They're not all strong like you. They really are not. If
+they feel that they have been deprived of their Easter Communion by you
+. . . and have you the right to deprive them? After all, Father Hett has
+reason on his side. He is entitled to keep the key of the Tabernacle. If
+he wishes to hold Benediction, you can forbid him, or at least you can
+forbid the brethren to attend. But the key of the Tabernacle belongs to
+him, if he says Mass there. Please forgive me for speaking like this,
+but I love you and respect you, and I cannot bear to see you put
+yourself in the wrong."
+
+The Prior patted Mark on the shoulder.
+
+"Cheer up, Brother," he said. "You mustn't mind if I think that I know
+better than you what is good for the Community. I have had a longer time
+to learn, you must remember. And so you're going to leave us?"
+
+"Yes, but I don't want to talk about that now," Mark said.
+
+"Nor do I," said Brother George. "I want to get on with my ploughing."
+
+Mark saw that it was as useless to argue with him as attempt to persuade
+the chaplain to stay. He turned sadly away, and walked back with heavy
+steps towards the Abbey. Overhead, the larks, rising and falling upon
+their fountains of song, seemed to mock the way men worshipped Almighty
+God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+SUBTRACTION
+
+
+Mark had not spent a more unhappy Easter since the days of Haverton
+House. He was oppressed by the sense of excommunication that brooded
+over the Abbey, and on the Saturday of Passion Week the versicles and
+responses of the proper Compline had a dreadful irony.
+
+    _V. O King most Blessed, govern Thy servants in the right way._
+    _R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed._
+    _V. By holy fasts to amend our sinful lives._
+    _R. O King most Blessed, govern Thy Saints in the right way._
+    _V. To duly keep Thy Paschal Feast._
+    _R. Among Thy Saints, O King most Blessed._
+
+"Brother Mark," said Brother Augustine, on the morning of Palm Sunday,
+"_did_ you notice that ghastly split infinitive in the last versicle at
+Compline? _To duly keep._ I can't think why we don't say the Office in
+Latin."
+
+Mark felt inclined to tell Brother Augustine that if nothing more vital
+than an infinitive was split during this holy season, the Community
+might have cause to congratulate itself. Here now was Brother Birinus
+throwing away as useless the bundle of palms that lacked the blessing of
+a priest, throwing them away like dead flowers.
+
+Sir Charles Horner, who had been in town, arrived at the Abbey on the
+Tuesday, and announced that he was going to spend Holy Week with the
+Community.
+
+"We have no chaplain," Mark told him.
+
+"No chaplain!" Sir Charles exclaimed. "But I understood that Andrew
+Hett had undertaken the job while Father Burrowes was away."
+
+Mark did not think that it was his duty to enlighten Sir Charles upon
+the dispute between Brother George and the chaplain. However, it was not
+long before he found out what had occurred from the Prior's own lips and
+came fuming back to the Guest-chamber.
+
+"I consider the whole state of affairs most unsatisfactory," he said. "I
+really thought that when Brother George took charge here the Abbey would
+be better managed."
+
+"Please, Sir Charles," Mark begged, "you make it very uncomfortable for
+me when you talk like that about the Reverend Brother before me."
+
+"Yes, but I must give my opinion. I have a right to criticize when I am
+the person who is responsible for the Abbey's existence here. It's all
+very fine for Brother George to ask me to notify Bazely at Wivelrod that
+the brethren wish to go to their Easter duties in his church. Bazely is
+a very timid man. I've already driven him into doing more than he really
+likes, and my presence in his church doesn't alarm the parishioners. In
+fact, they rather like it. But they won't like to see the church full of
+monks on Easter morning. They'll be more suspicious than ever of what
+they call poor Bazely's innovations. It's not fair to administer such a
+shock to a remote country parish like Wivelrod, especially when they're
+just beginning to get used to the vestments I gave them. It seems to me
+that you've deliberately driven Andrew Hett away from the Abbey, and I
+don't see why poor Bazely should be made to suffer. How many monks are
+you now? Fifteen? Why, fifteen bulls in Wivelrod church would create
+less dismay!"
+
+Sir Charles's protest on behalf of the Vicar of Wivelrod was effective,
+for the Prior announced that after all he had decided that it was the
+duty of the Community to observe Easter within the Abbey gates. The
+Reverend Father would return on Easter Tuesday, and their Easter duties
+would be accomplished within the Octave. Withal, it was a gloomy Easter
+for the brethren, and when they began the first Vespers with the
+quadruple Alleluia, it seemed as if they were still chanting the
+sorrowful antiphons of Good Friday.
+
+     _My spirit is vexed within Me: and My heart within Me is desolate._
+
+     _Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by: behold and see if there
+     be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me._
+
+     _What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which I was wounded
+     in the house of My friends._
+
+Nor was there rejoicing in the Community when at Lauds of Easter Day
+they chanted:
+
+    _V. In Thy Resurrection, O Christ._
+    _R. Let Heaven and earth rejoice, Alleluia._
+
+Nor when at Prime and Terce and Sext and None they chanted:
+
+     _This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be
+     glad in it._
+
+And when at the second Vespers the Brethren declared:
+
+    _V. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep
+        the Feast._
+
+    _R. Not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and
+        wickedness; but with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and
+        truth. Alleluia._
+
+scarcely could they who chanted the versicle challenge with their eyes
+those who hung down their heads when they gave the response.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hour of recreation before Compline, which upon great Feasts was wont
+to be so glad, lay heavily upon the brethren that night, so that Mark
+could not bear to sit in the Cloister; there being no guests in the
+Abbey for his attention, he sat in the library and wrote to the Rector.
+
+     The Abbey,
+
+     Malford, Surrey.
+
+     Easter Sunday.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     I should have written before to wish you all a happy Easter, but
+     I've been making up my mind during the last fortnight to leave the
+     Order, and I did not want to write until my mind was made up. That
+     feat is now achieved. I shall stay here until St. George's Day, and
+     then the next day, which will be St. Mark's Eve, I shall come home
+     to spend my birthday with you. I do not regret the year and six
+     months that I have spent at Malford and Aldershot, because during
+     that time, if I have decided not to be a monk, I am none the less
+     determined to be a priest. I shall be 23 this birthday, and I hope
+     that I shall find a Bishop to ordain me next year and a Theological
+     College to accept responsibility for my training and a beneficed
+     priest to give me a title. I will give you a full account of myself
+     when we meet at the end of the month; but in this letter, written
+     in sad circumstances, I want to tell you that I have learnt with
+     the soul what I have long spoken with the lips--the need of God. I
+     expect you will tell me that I ought to have learnt that lesson
+     long ago upon that Whit-Sunday morning in Meade Cantorum church.
+     But I think I was granted then by God to desire Him with my heart.
+     I was scarcely old enough to realize that I needed Him with my
+     soul. "You're not so old now," I hear you say with a smile. But in
+     a place like this one learns almost more than one would learn in
+     the world in the time. One beholds human nature very intimately. I
+     know more about my fellow-men from association with two or three
+     dozen people here than I learnt at St. Agnes' from association with
+     two or three hundred. This much at least my pseudo-monasticism has
+     taught me.
+
+     We have passed through a sad time lately at the Abbey, and I feel
+     that for the Community sorrows are in store. You know from my
+     letters that there have been divisions, and you know how hard I
+     have found it to decide which party I ought to follow. But of
+     course the truth is that from the moment one feels the inclination
+     to side with a party in a community it is time to leave that
+     community. Owing to an unfortunate disagreement between Brother
+     George and the Reverend Andrew Hett, who came down to act as
+     chaplain during the absence of the Reverend Father, Andrew Hett
+     felt obliged to leave us. The consequence is we have had no Mass
+     this Easter, and thus I have learned with my soul to need God. I
+     cannot describe to you the torment of deprivation which I
+     personally feel, a torment that is made worse by the consciousness
+     that all my brethren will go to their cells to-night needing God
+     and not finding Him, because they like myself are involved in an
+     earthly quarrel, so that we are incapable of opening our hearts to
+     God this night. You may say that if we were in such a state we
+     should have had no right to make our Easter Communion. But that
+     surely is what Our Blessed Lord can do for us with His Body and
+     Blood. I have been realizing that all this Holy Week. I have felt
+     as I have never felt before the consciousness of sinning against
+     Him. There has not been an antiphon, not a versicle nor a response,
+     that has not stabbed me with a consciousness of my sin against His
+     Divine Love.
+
+     "What are these wounds in Thy Hands: Those with which I was wounded
+     in the house of My friends."
+
+     But if on Easter eve we could have confessed our sins against His
+     Love, and if this morning we could have partaken of Him, He would
+     have been with us, and our hearts would have been fit for the
+     presence of God. We should have been freed from this spirit of
+     strife, we should have come together in Jesus Christ. We should
+     have seen how to live "with the unleavened Bread of sincerity and
+     truth." God would have revealed His Will, and we, submitting our
+     Order to His Will, should have ceased to think for ourselves, to
+     judge our brethren, to criticize our seniors, to suspect that
+     brother of personal ambition, this brother of toadyism. The
+     Community is being devoured by the Dragon and, unless St. George
+     comes to the rescue of his Order on Thursday week, it will perish.
+     Perhaps I have not much faith in St. George. He has always seemed
+     to me an unreal, fairy-tale sort of a saint. I have more faith in
+     St. Benedict and his Holy Rule. But I have no vocation for the
+     contemplative life. I don't feel that my prayers are good enough to
+     save my own soul, let alone the souls of others. I _must_ give
+     Jesus Christ to my fellow-men in the Blessed Sacrament. I long to
+     be a priest for that service. I don't feel that I want by my own
+     efforts to make people better, or to relieve poverty, or to thunder
+     against sin, or to preach them up to and through Heaven's gates. I
+     want to give them the Blessed Sacrament, because I know that
+     nothing else will be the slightest use to them. I know it more
+     positively to-night than I have ever known it, because as I sit
+     here writing to you I am starved. God has given me the grace to
+     understand why I am starved. It is my duty to bring Our Lord to
+     souls who do not know why they are starved. And if after nearly two
+     years of Malford this passion to bring the Sacraments to human
+     beings consumes me like a fire, then I have not wasted my time, and
+     I can look you in the face and ask for your blessing upon my
+     determination to be a priest.
+
+     Your ever affectionate
+
+     Mark.
+
+When Mark had written this letter, and thus put into words what had
+hitherto been a more or less nebulous intention, and when in addition to
+that he had affixed a date to the carrying out of his intention, he felt
+comparatively at ease. He wasted no time in letting the Father Superior
+know that he was going to leave; in fact he told him after he had
+confessed to him before making his Communion on Easter Thursday.
+
+"I'm sorry to lose you, my dear boy," said Father Burrowes. "Very sorry.
+We are just going to open a priory in London, though that is a secret
+for the moment, please. I shall make the announcement at the Easter
+Chapter. Yes, some kind friends have given us a house in Soho.
+Splendidly central, which is important for our work. I had planned that
+you would be one of the brethren chosen to go there."
+
+"It's very kind of you, Reverend Father," said Mark. "But I'm sure that
+you understand my anxiety not to lose any time, now that I feel
+perfectly convinced that I want to be a priest."
+
+"I had my doubts about you when you first came to us. Let me see, it was
+nearly two years ago, wasn't it? How time flies! Yes, I had my doubts
+about you. But I was wrong. You seem to possess a real fixity of
+purpose. I remember that you told me then that you were not sure you
+wanted to be a monk. Rare candour! I could have professed a hundred
+monks, had I been willing to profess them within ten minutes of their
+first coming to see me."
+
+The Father Superior gave Mark his blessing and dismissed him. Nothing
+had been said about the dispute between the Prior and the Chaplain, and
+Mark began to wonder if Father Burrowes thought the results of it would
+tell more surely in favour of his own influence if he did not allude to
+it nor make any attempt to adjudicate upon the point at issue. Now that
+he was leaving Malford in little more than a week, Mark felt that he was
+completely relieved of the necessity of assisting at any conventual
+legislation, and he would gladly have absented himself from the Easter
+Chapter, which was held on the Saturday within the Octave, had not
+Father Burrowes told him that so long as he wore the habit of a novice
+of the Order he was expected to share in every side of the Community's
+life.
+
+"Brethren," said the Father Superior, "I have brought you back news that
+will gladden your hearts, news that will show I you how by the Grace of
+God your confidence in my judgment was not misplaced. Some kind friends
+have taken for us the long lease of a splendid house in Soho Square, so
+that we may have our priory in London, and resume the active work that
+was abandoned temporarily last Christmas. Not only have these kind
+friends taken for us this splendid house, but other kind friends have
+come forward to guarantee the working expenses up to L20 a week. God is
+indeed good to us, brethren, and when I remember that next Thursday is
+the Feast of our great Patron Saint, my heart is too full for words.
+During the last three or four months there have been unhappy differences
+of opinion in our beloved Order. Do let me entreat you to forget all
+these in gratitude for God's bountiful mercies. Do let us, with the
+arrival once more of our patronal festival, resolve to forget our doubts
+and our hesitations, our timidity and our rashness, our suspicions and
+our jealousies. I blame myself for much that has happened, because I
+have been far away from you, dear brethren, in moments of great
+spiritual distress. But this year I hope by God's mercy to be with you
+more. I hope that you will never again spend such an Easter as this. I
+have only one more announcement to make, which is that I have appointed
+Brother Dominic to be Prior of St. George's Priory, Soho Square, and
+Brother Chad and Brother Dunstan to work with him for God and our
+soldiers."
+
+In the morning, Brother Simon, whose duty it was nowadays to knock with
+the hammer upon the doors of the cells and rouse the brethren from sleep
+with the customary salutation, went running from the dormitory to the
+Prior's cell, his hair standing even more on end than it usually did at
+such an hour.
+
+"Reverend Brother, Reverend Brother," he cried. "I've knocked and
+knocked on Brother Anselm's door, and I've said 'The Lord be with you'
+nine times and shouted 'The Lord be with you' twice, but there's no
+answer, and at last I opened the door, though I know it's against the
+Rule to open the door of a brother's cell, but I thought he might be
+dead, and he isn't dead, but he isn't there. He isn't there, Reverend
+Brother, and he isn't anywhere. He's nowhere, Reverend Brother, and
+shall I go and ring the fire-alarm?"
+
+Brother George sternly bade Brother Simon be quiet; but when the
+Brethren sat in choir to sing Lauds and Prime, they saw that Brother
+Anselm's stall was empty, and those who had heard Brother Simon's
+clamour feared that something terrible had happened.
+
+After Mass the Community was summoned to the Chapter room to learn from
+the lips of the Father Superior that Brother Anselm had broken his vows
+and left the Order. Brother Dunstan, who wore round his neck the nib
+with which Brother Anselm signed his profession, burst into tears.
+Brother Dominic looked down his big nose to avoid the glances of his
+brethren. If Easter Sunday had been gloomy, Low Sunday was gloomier
+still, and as for the Feast of St. George nobody had the courage to
+think what that would be like with such a cloud hanging over the
+Community.
+
+Mark felt that he could not stay even until the patronal festival. If
+Brother George or Brother Birinus had broken his vows, he could have
+borne it more easily, for he had not witnessed their profession; fond he
+might be of the Prior, but he had worked for human souls under the
+orders of Brother Anselm. He went to Father Burrowes and begged to leave
+on Monday.
+
+"Brother Athanasius and Brother Chad are leaving tomorrow," said the
+Father Superior, "Yes, you may go."
+
+Brother Simon drove them to the station. Strange figures they seemed to
+each other in their lay clothes.
+
+"I've been meaning to go for a long time," said Brother Athanasius, who
+was now Percy Wade. "And it's my belief that Brother George and Brother
+Birinus won't stay long."
+
+"I hoped never to go," said Brother Chad, who was now Cecil Masters.
+
+"Then why are you going?" asked the late Brother Athanasius. "I never do
+anything I don't want to do."
+
+"I think I shall be more help to Brother Anselm than to soldiers in
+London," said the late Brother Chad.
+
+Mark beamed at him.
+
+"That's just like you, Brother. I am so glad you're going to do that."
+
+The train came in, and they all shook hands with Brother Simon, who had
+been cheerful throughout the drive, and even now found great difficulty
+in looking serious.
+
+"You seem very happy, Brother Simon," said Mark.
+
+"Oh, I am very happy, Brother Mark. I should say Mr. Mark. The Reverend
+Father has told me that I'm to be clothed as a novice on Wednesday. All
+last week when we sung, '_The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared
+unto Simon_,' I knew something wonderful was going to happen. That's
+what made me so anxious when Brother Anselm didn't answer my knock."
+
+The train left the station, and the three ex-novices settled themselves
+to face the world. They were all glad that Brother Simon at least was
+happy amid so much unhappiness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE NEW BISHOP OF SILCHESTER
+
+
+The Rector of Wych thought that Mark's wisest plan if he wished to be
+ordained was to write and ask the Bishop of Silchester for an interview.
+
+"The Bishop of Silchester?" Mark exclaimed. "But he's the last bishop I
+should expect to help me."
+
+"On the contrary," said the Rector, "you have lived in his diocese for
+more than five years, and if you repair to another bishop, he will
+certainly wonder why you didn't go first to the Bishop of Silchester."
+
+"But I don't suppose that the Bishop of Silchester is likely to help
+me," Mark objected. "He wasn't so much enamoured of Rowley as all that,
+and I don't gather that he has much affection or admiration for
+Burrowes."
+
+"That's not the point; the point is that you have devoted yourself to
+the religious life, both informally and formally, in his diocese. You
+have shown that you possess some capacity for sticking to it, and I
+fancy that you will find the Bishop less unsympathetic than you expect."
+
+However, Mark was not given an opportunity to put the Bishop of
+Silchester's good-will to the test, for no sooner had he made up his
+mind to write to him than the news came that he was seriously ill, so
+seriously ill that he was not expected to live, which in fact turned out
+a true prognostication, for on the Feast of St. Philip and St. James the
+prelate died in his Castle of High Thorpe. He was succeeded by the
+Bishop of Warwick, much to Mark's pleasure and surprise, for the new
+Bishop was an old friend of Father Rowley and a High Churchman, one who
+might lend a kindly ear to Mark's ambition. Father Rowley had been in
+the United States for nearly two years, where he had been treated with
+much sympathy and where he had collected enough money to pay off the
+debt upon the new St. Agnes'. He had arrived home about a week before
+Mark left Malford, and in answer to Mark he wrote immediately to Dr.
+Oliphant, the new Bishop of Silchester, to enlist his interest. Early in
+June Mark received a cordial letter inviting him to visit the Bishop at
+High Thorpe.
+
+The promotion of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the see of Silchester was
+considered at the time to be an indication that the political party then
+in power was going mad in preparation for its destruction by the gods.
+The Press in commenting upon the appointment did not attempt to cast a
+slur upon the sanctity and spiritual fervour of the new Bishop, but it
+felt bound to observe that the presence of such a man on the episcopal
+bench was an indication that the party in power was oblivious of the
+existence of an enraged electorate already eager to hurl them out of
+office. At a time when thinking men and women were beginning to turn to
+the leaders of the National Church for a social policy, a government
+worn out by eight years of office that included a costly war was so
+little alive to the signs of the times as to select for promotion a
+prelate conspicuously identified with the obscurantist tactics of that
+small but noisy group in the Church of England which arrogated to itself
+the presumptuous claim to be the Catholic party. Dr. Oliphant's learning
+was indisputable; his liturgical knowledge was profound; his eloquence
+in the pulpit was not to be gainsaid; his life, granted his sacerdotal
+eccentricities, was a noble example to his fellow clergy. But had he
+shown those qualities of statesmanship, that capacity for moderation,
+which were so marked a feature of his predecessor's reign? Was he not
+identified with what might almost be called an unchristian agitation to
+prosecute the holy, wise, and scholarly Dean of Leicester for appearing
+to countenance an opinion that the Virgin Birth was not vital to the
+belief of a Christian? Had he not denounced the Reverend Albert Blundell
+for heresy, and thereby exhibited himself in active opposition to his
+late diocesan, the sagacious Bishop of Kidderminster, who had been
+compelled to express disapproval of his Suffragan's bigotry by
+appointing the Reverend Albert Blundell to be one of his examining
+chaplains?
+
+"We view with the gravest apprehension the appointment of Dr. Aylmer
+Oliphant to the historic see of Silchester," said one great journal.
+"Such reckless disregard, such contempt we might almost say, for the
+feelings of the English people demonstrates that the present government
+has ceased to enjoy the confidence of the electorate. We have for Dr.
+Oliphant personally nothing but the warmest admiration. We do not
+venture for one moment to impugn his sincerity. We do not hesitate to
+affirm most solemnly our disbelief that he is actuated by any but the
+highest motives in lending his name to persecutions that recall the
+spirit of the Star Chamber. But in these days when the rapid and
+relentless march of Scientific Knowledge is devastating the plain of
+Theological Speculation we owe it to our readers to observe that the
+appointment of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the Bishopric of Silchester must
+be regarded as an act of intellectual cowardice. Not merely is Dr.
+Oliphant a notorious extremist in religious matters, one who for the
+sake of outworn forms and ceremonies is inclined to keep alive the
+unhappy dissensions that tear asunder our National Church, but he is
+also what is called a Christian Socialist of the most advanced type, one
+who by his misreading of the Gospel spreads the unwholesome and perilous
+doctrine that all men are equal. This is not the time nor the place to
+break a controversial lance with Dr. Oliphant. We shall content
+ourselves with registering a solemn protest against the unparagoned
+cynicism of a Conservative government which thus gambles not merely with
+its own security, but what is far more unpardonable with the security of
+the Nation and the welfare of the State."
+
+The subject of this ponderous censure received Mark in the same room
+where two and a half years ago the late Bishop had decided that the
+Third Altar in St. Agnes' Church was an intolerable excrescence.
+Nowadays the room was less imposing, not more imposing indeed than the
+room of a scholarly priest who had been able to collect a few books and
+buy such pieces of ancient furniture as consorted with his severe taste.
+Dr. Oliphant himself, a tall spare man, seeming the taller and more
+spare in his worn purple cassock, with clean-shaven hawk's face and
+black bushy eyebrows most conspicuous on account of his grey hair, stood
+before the empty summer grate, his long lean neck out-thrust, his arms
+crossed behind his back, like a gigantic and emaciated shadow of
+Napoleon. Mark felt no embarrassment in genuflecting to salute him; the
+action was spontaneous and was not dictated by any ritualistic
+indulgence. Dr. Oliphant, as he might have guessed from the anger with
+which his appointment had been received, was in outward semblance all
+that a prelate should be.
+
+"Why do you want to be a priest?" the Bishop asked him abruptly.
+
+"To administer the Sacraments," Mark replied without hesitation.
+
+The Bishop's head and neck wagged up and down in grave approbation.
+
+"Mr. Rowley, as no doubt he has told you, wrote to me about you. And so
+you've been with the Order of St. George lately? Is it any good?"
+
+Mark was at a loss what to reply to this. His impulse was to say firmly
+and frankly that it was no good; but after not far short of two years at
+Malford it would be ungrateful and disloyal to criticize the Order,
+particularly to the Bishop of the diocese.
+
+"I don't think it is much good yet," Mark said. He felt that he simply
+could not praise the Order without qualification. "But I expect that
+when they've learnt how to combine the contemplative with the active
+side of their religious life they will be splendid. At least, I hope
+they will."
+
+"What's wrong at present?"
+
+"I don't know that anything's exactly wrong."
+
+Mark paused; but the Bishop was evidently waiting for him to continue,
+and feeling that this was perhaps the best way to present his own point
+of view about the life he had chosen for himself he plunged into an
+account of life at Malford.
+
+"Capital," said the Bishop when the narrative was done. "You have given
+me a very clear picture of the present state of the Order and
+incidentally a fairly clear picture of yourself. Well, I'm going to
+recommend you to Canon Havelock, the Principal of the Theological
+College here, and if he reports well of you and you can pass the
+Cambridge Preliminary Theological Examination, I will ordain you at
+Advent next year, or at any rate, if not in Advent, at Whitsuntide."
+
+"But isn't Silchester Theological College only for graduates?" Mark
+asked.
+
+"Yes, but I'm going to suggest that Canon Havelock stretches a point in
+your favour. I can, if you like, write to the Glastonbury people, but in
+that case you would be out of my diocese where you have spent so much of
+your time and where I have no doubt you will easily find a beneficed
+priest to give you a title. Moreover, in the case of a young man like
+yourself who has been brought up from infancy upon Catholic teaching, I
+think it is advisable to give you an opportunity of mixing with the
+moderate man who wishes to take Holy Orders. You can lose nothing by
+such an association, and it may well happen that you will gain a great
+deal. Silchester Theological College is eminently moderate. The
+lecturers are men of real learning, and the Principal is a man whom it
+would be impertinent for me to praise for his devout and Christian
+life."
+
+"I hardly know how to thank you, my lord," said Mark.
+
+"Do you not, my son?" said the Bishop with a smile. Then his head and
+neck wagged up and down. "Thank me by the life you lead as a priest."
+
+"I will try, my lord," Mark promised.
+
+"Of that I am sure. By the way, didn't you come across a priest at St.
+Agnes' Mission House called Mousley?"
+
+"Oh rather, I remember him well."
+
+"You'll be glad to hear that he has never relapsed since I sent him to
+Rowley. In fact only last week I had the satisfaction of recommending
+him to a friend of mine who had a living in his gift."
+
+Mark spent the three months before he went to Silchester at the Rectory
+where he worked hard at Latin and Greek and the history of the Church.
+At the end of August he entered Silchester Theological College.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+SILCHESTER THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE
+
+
+The theological students of Silchester were housed in a red-brick alley
+of detached Georgian houses, both ends of which were closed to traffic
+by double gates of beautifully wrought iron. This alley known as Vicar's
+Walk had formerly been inhabited by the lay vicars of the Cathedral,
+whose music was now performed by minor canons.
+
+There were four little houses on either side of the broad pavement, the
+crevices in which were gay with small rock plants, so infrequent were
+the footsteps that passed over them. Each house consisted of four rooms
+and each room held one student. Vicar's Walk led directly into the
+Close, a large green space surrounded by the houses of dignitaries, from
+a quiet road lined with elms, which skirted the wall of the Deanery
+garden and after several twists and turns among the shadows of great
+Gothic walls found its way downhill into the narrow streets of the small
+city. One of the houses in the Close had been handed over to the
+Theological College, the Principal of which usually occupied a Canon's
+stall in the Cathedral. Here were the lecture-rooms, and here lived
+Canon Havelock the Principal, Mr. Drakeford the Vice-Principal, Mr.
+Brewis the Chaplain, and Mr. Moore and Mr. Waters the Lecturers.
+
+There did not seem to be many arduous rules. Probably the most ascetic
+was one that forbade gentlemen to smoke in the streets of Silchester.
+There was no early Mass except on Saints' days at eight; but gentlemen
+were expected, unless prevented by reasonable cause, to attend Matins in
+the Cathedral before breakfast and Evensong in the College Oratory at
+seven. A mutilated Compline was delivered at ten, after which gentlemen
+were requested to retire immediately to their rooms. Academic Dress was
+to be worn at lectures, and Mark wondered what costume would be designed
+for him. The lectures took place every morning between nine and one, and
+every afternoon between five and seven. The Principal lectured on
+Dogmatic Theology and Old Testament history; the Vice-Principal on the
+Old and New Testament set books; the Chaplain on Christian worship and
+Church history; Mr. Moore on Pastoralia and Old Testament Theology; and
+Mr. Waters on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
+
+As against the prevailing Gothic of the mighty Cathedral Vicar's Walk
+stood out with a simple and fragrant charm of its own, so against the
+prevailing Gothic of Mark's religious experience life at the Theological
+College remained in his memory as an unvexed interlude during which
+flesh and spirit never sought to trouble each other. Perhaps if Mark had
+not been educated at Haverton House, had not experienced conversion, had
+not spent those years at Chatsea and Malford, but like his fellow
+students had gone decorously from public school to University and still
+more decorously from University to Theological College, he might with
+his temperament have wondered if this red-brick alley closed to traffic
+at either end by beautifully wrought iron gates was the best place to
+prepare a man for the professional service of Jesus Christ.
+
+Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where to the sound
+of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon the strife between
+Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient Grace, operating Grace,
+co-operating Grace and the _donum perseverantiae_ all seemed to depend
+for their importance so much more upon a good memory than upon the
+inscrutable favours of Almighty God. Even the Confessions of St.
+Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of Africa upon
+the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched upon. Here in this
+tranquil room St. Augustine lived in quotations from his controversial
+works, or in discussions whether he had not wrongly translated [Greek]
+in the Epistle to the Romans by _in quo omnes
+peccaverunt_ instead of like the Pelagians by _propter quod omnes
+peccaverunt_. The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian
+Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in Mark's brain;
+but they only resounded at all, because he knew that without being able
+to display some ability to convey the impression that he understood the
+Thirty-Nine Articles he should never be ordained. Mark wondered what
+Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken in adultery had
+been brought into the lecture-room by the beadle. Yet such a supposition
+was really beside the point, he thought penitently. After all, human
+beings would soon be degraded to wax-works if they could be lectured
+upon individually in this tranquil and sunny room to the sound of rooks
+cawing in the elms beyond the Deanery garden.
+
+Mark made no intimate friendships among his fellows. Perhaps the
+moderation of their views chilled him into an exceptional reserve, or
+perhaps they were an unusually dull company that year. Of the thirty-one
+students, eighteen were from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the
+thirty-first from Durham. Even he was looked at with a good deal of
+suspicion. As for Mark, nothing less than God's prevenient grace could
+explain his presence at Silchester. Naturally, inasmuch as they were
+going to be clergymen, the greatest charity, the sweetest toleration was
+shown to Mark's unfortunate lack of advantages; but he was never unaware
+that intercourse with him involved his companions in an effort, a
+distinct, a would-be Christlike effort to make the best of him. It was
+the same kind of effort they would soon be making when as Deacons they
+sought for the sick, poor, and impotent people of the Parish. Mark might
+have expected to find among them one or two of whom it might be
+prophesied that they would go far. But he was unlucky. All the brilliant
+young candidates for Ordination must have betaken themselves to
+Cuddesdon or Wells or Lichfield that year.
+
+Of the eighteen graduates from Oxford, half took their religion as a hot
+bath, the other half as a cold one. Nine resembled the pale young
+curates of domestic legend, nine the muscular Christian that is for some
+reason attributed to the example of Charles Kingsley. Of the twelve
+graduates from Cambridge, six treated religion as a cricket match played
+before the man in the street with God as umpire, six regarded it as a
+respectable livelihood for young men with normal brains, social
+connexions, and weak digestions. The young man from Durham looked upon
+religion as a more than respectable livelihood for one who had plenty of
+brains, an excellent digestion, and no social connexions whatever.
+
+Mark wondered if the Bishop of Silchester's design in placing him amid
+such surroundings was to cure him for ever of moderation. As was his
+custom when he was puzzled, he wrote to the Rector.
+
+     The Theological College,
+
+     Silchester.
+
+     All Souls, '03.
+
+     My dear Rector,
+
+     My first impressions have not undergone much change. The young men
+     are as good as gold, but oh dear, the gold is the gold of
+     Mediocritas. The only thing that kindles a mild phosphorescence, a
+     dim luminousness as of a bedside match-tray in the dark, in their
+     eyes is when they hear of somebody's what they call conspicuous
+     moderation. I suppose every deacon carries a bishop's apron in his
+     sponge-bag or an archbishop's crosier among his golf-clubs. But in
+     this lot I simply cannot perceive even an embryonic archdeacon. I
+     rather expected when I came here that I should be up against men of
+     brains and culture. I was looking forward to being trampled on by
+     ruthless logicians. I hoped that latitudinarian opinions were going
+     to make my flesh creep and my hair stand on end. But nothing of the
+     kind. I've always got rather angry when I've read caricatures of
+     curates in books with jokes about goloshes and bath-buns. Yet
+     honestly, half my fellows might easily serve as models to any
+     literary cheapjack of the moment. I'm willing to admit that
+     probably most of them will develop under the pressure of life, but
+     a few are bound to remain what they are. I know we get some
+     eccentrics and hotheads and a few sensual knaves among the Catholic
+     clergy, but we do not get these anaemic creatures. I feel that
+     before I came here I knew nothing about the Church of England. I've
+     been thrown all my life with people who had rich ideas and violent
+     beliefs and passionate sympathies and deplorable hatreds, so that
+     when I come into contact with what I am bound to accept as the
+     typical English parson in the making I am really appalled.
+
+     I've been wondering why the Bishop of Silchester told me to come
+     here. Did he really think that the spectacle of moderation in the
+     moulding was good for me? Did he fancy that I was a young zealot
+     who required putting in his place? Or did he more subtly realize
+     from the account I gave him of Malford that I was in danger of
+     becoming moderate, even luke-warm, even tepid, perhaps even
+     stone-cold? Did he grasp that I must owe something to party as well
+     as mankind, if I was to give up anything worth giving to mankind?
+     But perhaps in my egoism I am attributing much more to his
+     lordship's paternal interest, a keener glance to his episcopal eye,
+     than I have any right to attribute. Perhaps, after all, he merely
+     saw in me a young man who had missed the advantages of Oxford,
+     etc., and wished out of regard for my future to provide me with the
+     best substitute.
+
+     Anyway, please don't think that I live in a constant state of
+     criticism with a correspondingly dangerous increase of self-esteem.
+     I really am working hard. I sometimes wonder if the preparation of
+     a "good" theological college is the best preparation for the
+     priesthood. But so long as bishops demand the knowledge they do, it
+     is obvious that this form of preparation will continue. There again
+     though, I daresay if I imagined myself an inspired pianist I should
+     grumble at the amount of scales I was set to practice. I'm not,
+     once I've written down or talked out some of my folly, so very
+     foolish at bottom.
+
+     Beyond a slight inclination to flirt with the opinions of most of
+     the great heresiarchs in turn, but only with each one until the
+     next comes along, I'm not having any intellectual adventures. One
+     of the excitements I had imagined beforehand was wrestling with
+     Doubt. But I have no wrestles. Shall I always be spared?
+
+     Your ever affectionate,
+
+     Mark.
+
+Gradually, as the months went by, either because the students became
+more mellow in such surroundings or because he himself was achieving a
+wider tolerance, Mark lost much of his capacity for criticism and
+learned to recognize in his fellows a simple goodness and sincerity of
+purpose that almost frightened him when he thought of that great world
+outside, in the confusion and complexity of which they had pledged
+themselves to lead souls up to God. He felt how much they missed by not
+relying rather upon the Sacraments than upon personal holiness and the
+upright conduct of the individual. They were obsessed with the need of
+setting a good example and of being able from the pulpit to direct the
+wandering lamb to the Good Shepherd. Mark scarcely ever argued about his
+point of view, because he was sure that perception of what the
+Sacraments could do for human nature must be given by the grace of God,
+and that the most exhaustive process of inductive logic would not avail
+in the least to convince somebody on whom the fact had not dawned in a
+swift and comprehensive inspiration of his inner life. Sometimes indeed
+Mark would defend himself from attack, as when it was suggested that his
+reliance upon the Sacraments was only another aspect of Justification by
+Faith Alone, in which the effect of a momentary conversion was prolonged
+by mechanical aids to worship.
+
+"But I should prefer my idolatry of the outward form to your idolatry of
+the outward form," he would maintain.
+
+"What possible idolatry can come from the effect upon a congregation of
+a good sermon?" they protested.
+
+"I don't claim that a preacher might not bring the whole of his
+congregation to the feet of God," Mark allowed. "But I must have less
+faith in human nature than you have, for I cannot believe that any
+preacher could exercise a permanent effect without the Sacraments. You
+all know the person who says that the sound of an organ gives him holy
+thoughts, makes him feel good, as the cant phrase goes? I've no doubt
+that people who sit under famous preachers get the same kind of
+sensation Sunday after Sunday. But sooner or later they will be
+worshipping the outward form--that is to say the words that issue from
+the preacher's mouth and produce those internal moral rumblings in the
+pit of the soul which other listeners get from the diapason. Have your
+organs, have your sermons, have your matins and evensong; but don't put
+them on the same level as the Blessed Sacrament. The value of that is
+absolute, and I refuse to consider It from the point of view of
+pragmatic philosophy."
+
+All would protest that Mark was putting a wrong interpretation upon
+their argument; what they desired to avoid was the substitution of the
+Blessed Sacrament for the Person of the Divine Saviour.
+
+"But I believe," Mark argued, "I believe profoundly with the whole of my
+intellectual, moral, and emotional self that the Blessed Sacrament _is_
+our Divine Saviour. I maintain that only through the Blessed Sacrament
+can we hope to form within our own minds the slightest idea of the
+Person of the Divine Saviour. In the pulpit I would undertake to present
+fifty human characters as moving as our Lord; but when I am at the Altar
+I shall actually give Him to those who will take Him. I shall know that
+I am doing as much for the lowest savage as for the finest product of
+civilization. All are equal on the altar steps. Elsewhere man remains
+divided into classes. You may rent the best pew from which to see and
+hear the preacher; but you cannot rent a stone on which to kneel at your
+Communion."
+
+Mark rarely indulged in these outbursts. On him too Silchester exerted a
+mellowing influence, and he gained from his sojourn there much of what
+he might have carried away from Oxford; he recaptured the charm of that
+June day when in the shade of the oak-tree he had watched a College
+cricket match, and conversed with Hathorne the Siltonian who wished to
+be a priest, but who was killed in the Alps soon after Mark met him.
+
+The bells chimed from early morning until sombre eve; ancient clocks
+sounded the hour with strikes rusty from long service of time; rooks and
+white fantail-pigeons spoke with the slow voice of creatures that are
+lazily content with the slumbrous present and undismayed by the sleepy
+morrow. In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers,
+themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed slowly across
+the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with
+the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of
+leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were
+daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the
+grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's tail of
+Japanese quince.
+
+Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in
+Silchester; sometimes it seemed that nothing was worth while except at
+the end of living to have one's effigy in stone upon the walls of the
+Cathedral, and to rest there for ever with viewless eyes and cold
+prayerful hands, oneself in harmony at last with all that had gone
+before.
+
+"Yet this peace is the peace of God," he told himself. "And I who am
+privileged for a little time to share in it must carry away with me
+enough to make a treasure of peace in my own heart, so that I can give
+from that treasure to those who have never known peace."
+
+     _The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your
+     hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son
+     Jesus Christ our Lord; and the blessing of God Almighty, the
+     Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be amongst you and remain with
+     you always._
+
+When Mark heard these words sound from the altar far away in the golden
+glooms of the Cathedral, it seemed to him that the building bowed like a
+mighty couchant beast and fell asleep in the security of God's presence.
+
+After Mark had been a year at the Theological College he received a
+letter from the Bishop:
+
+     High Thorpe Castle.
+
+     Sept. 21, '04.
+
+     Dear Lidderdale,
+
+     I have heard from Canon Havelock that he considers you are ready to
+     be ordained at Advent, having satisfactorily passed the Cambridge
+     Preliminary Theological Examination. If therefore you succeed in
+     passing my examination early in November, I am willing to ordain
+     you on December 18. It will be necessary of course for you to
+     obtain a title, and I have just heard from Mr. Shuter, the Vicar of
+     St. Luke's, Galton, that he is anxious to make arrangements for a
+     curate. You had better make an appointment, and if I hear
+     favourably from him I will licence you for his church. It has
+     always been the rule in this diocese that non-graduate candidates
+     for Holy Orders should spend at least two years over their
+     theological studies, but I am not disposed to enforce this rule in
+     your case.
+
+     Yours very truly,
+
+     Aylmer Silton.
+
+This expression of fatherly interest made Mark anxious to show his
+appreciation of it, and whatever he had thought of St. Luke's, Galton,
+or of its incumbent he would have done his best to secure the title
+merely to please the Bishop. Moreover, his money was coming to an end,
+and another year at the Theological College would have compelled him to
+borrow from Mr. Ogilvie, a step which he was most anxious to avoid. He
+found that Galton, which he remembered from the days when he had sent
+Cyril Pomeroy there to be met by Dorward, was a small county town of
+some eight or nine thousand inhabitants and that St. Luke's was a new
+church which had originally been a chapel of ease to the parish church,
+but which had acquired with the growth of a poor population on the
+outskirts of the town an independent parochial status of its own. The
+Reverend Arnold Shuter, who was the first vicar, was at first glance
+just a nervous bearded man, though Mark soon discovered that he
+possessed a great deal of spiritual force. He was a widower and lived in
+the care of a housekeeper who regarded religion as the curse of good
+cooking. Latterly he had suffered from acute neurasthenia, and three or
+four of his wealthier parishioners--they were only relatively
+wealthy--had clubbed together to guarantee the stipend of a curate. Mark
+was to live at the Vicarage, a detached villa, with pointed windows and
+a front door like a lychgate, which gave the impression of having been
+built with what material was left over from building the church.
+
+"You may think that there is not much to do in Galton," said Mr. Shuter
+when he and Mark were sitting in his study after a round of the parish.
+
+"I hope I didn't suggest that," Mark said quickly.
+
+The Vicar tugged nervously at his beard and blinked at his prospective
+curate from pale blue eyes.
+
+"You seem so full of life and energy," he went on, half to himself, as
+though he were wondering if the company of this tall, bright-eyed,
+hatchet-faced young man might not prove too bracing for his worn-out
+nerves.
+
+"Indeed I'm glad I do strike you that way," Mark laughed. "After
+dreaming at Silchester I'd begun to wonder if I hadn't grown rather too
+much into a type of that sedate and sleepy city."
+
+"But there is plenty of work," Mr. Shuter insisted. "We have the
+hop-pickers at the end of the summer, and I've tried to run a mission
+for them. Out in the hop-gardens, you know. And then there's Oaktown."
+
+"Oaktown?" Mark echoed.
+
+"Yes. A queer collection of people who have settled on a derelict farm
+that was bought up and sold in small plots by a land-speculator. They'll
+give plenty of scope for your activity. By the way, I hope you're not
+too extreme. We have to go very slowly here. I manage an early Eucharist
+every Sunday and Thursday, and of course on Saints' days; but the
+attendance is not good. We have vestments during the week, but not at
+the mid-day Celebration."
+
+Mark had not intended to attach himself to what he considered a too
+indefinite Catholicism; but inasmuch as the Bishop had found him this
+job he made up his mind to give to it at any rate his deacon's year and
+his first year as a priest.
+
+"I've been brought up in the vanguard of the Movement," he admitted.
+"But you can rely on me, sir, to be loyal to your point of view, even if
+I disagreed with it. I can't pretend to believe much in moderation; but
+I should always be your curate before anything else, and I hope very
+much indeed that you will offer me the title."
+
+"You'll find me dull company," Mr. Shuter sighed. "My health has gone
+all to pieces this last year."
+
+"I shall have a good deal of reading to do for my priest's examination,"
+Mark reminded him. "I shall try not to bother you."
+
+The result of Mark's visit to Galton was that amongst the various
+testimonials and papers he forwarded two months later to the Bishop's
+Registrar was the following:
+
+     To the Right Reverend Aylmer, Lord Bishop of Silchester.
+
+     I, Arnold Shuter, Vicar of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
+     Southampton, and your Lordship's Diocese of Silchester, do hereby
+     nominate Mark Lidderdale, to perform the office of Assistant Curate
+     in my Church of St. Luke aforesaid; and do promise to allow him the
+     yearly stipend of L120 to be paid by equal quarterly instalments;
+     And I do hereby state to your Lordship that the said Mark
+     Lidderdale intends to reside in the said Parish in my Vicarage; and
+     that the said Mark Lidderdale does not intend to serve any other
+     Parish as Incumbent or Curate.
+
+     Witness my hand this fourteenth day of November; in the year of our
+     Lord, 1904.
+
+     Arnold Shuter,
+
+     St. Luke's Vicarage,
+
+     Galton,
+
+     Hants.
+
+
+     I, Arnold Shuter, Incumbent of St. Luke's, Galton, in the County of
+     Southampton, bona fide undertake to pay Mark Lidderdale, of the
+     Rectory, Wych-on-the-Wold, in the County of Oxford, the annual sum
+     of one hundred and twenty pounds as a stipend for his services as
+     Curate, and I, Mark Lidderdale, bona fide intend to receive the
+     whole of the said stipend. And each of us, Arnold Shuter and Mark
+     Lidderdale, declare that no abatement is to be made out of the said
+     stipend in respect of rent or consideration for the use of the
+     Glebe House; and that I, Arnold Shuter, undertake to pay the same,
+     and I, Mark Lidderdale, intend to receive the same, without any
+     deduction or abatement whatsoever.
+
+     Arnold Shuter,
+
+     Mark Lidderdale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+EMBER DAYS
+
+
+Mark, having been notified that he had been successful in passing the
+Bishop's examination for Deacons, was summoned to High Thorpe on
+Thursday. He travelled down with the other candidates from Silchester on
+an iron-grey afternoon that threatened snow from the louring North, and
+in the atmosphere of High Thorpe under the rule of Dr. Oliphant he found
+more of the spirit of preparation than he would have been likely to find
+in any other diocese at this date. So many of the preliminaries to
+Ordination had consisted of filling up forms, signing documents, and
+answering the questions of the Examining Chaplain that Mark, when he was
+now verily on the threshold of his new life, reproached himself with
+having allowed incidental details and petty arrangements to make him for
+a while oblivious of the overwhelming fact of his having been accepted
+for the service of God. Luckily at High Thorpe he was granted a day to
+confront his soul before being harassed again on Ember Saturday with
+further legal formalities and signing of documents. He was able to spend
+the whole of Ember Friday in prayer and meditation, in beseeching God to
+grant him grace to serve Him worthily, strength to fulfil his vows, and
+that great _donum perseverantiae_ to endure faithful unto death.
+
+"Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," Mark remembered in the
+damasked twilight of the Bishop's Chapel, where he was kneeling. "Let me
+keep those words in my heart. Not everyone," he repeated aloud. Then
+perversely as always come volatile and impertinent thoughts when the
+mind is concentrated on lofty aspirations Mark began to wonder if he had
+quoted the text correctly. He began to be almost sure that he had not,
+and on that to torment his brain in trying to recall what was the exact
+wording of the text he desired to impress upon his heart. "Not everyone
+that saith unto me, Lord, Lord," he repeated once more aloud.
+
+At that moment the tall figure of the Bishop passed by.
+
+"Do you want me, my son?" he asked kindly.
+
+"I should like to make my confession, reverend father in God," said
+Mark.
+
+The Bishop beckoned him into the little sacristy, and putting on rochet
+and purple stole he sat down to hear his penitent.
+
+Mark had few sins of which to accuse himself since he last went to his
+duties a month ago. However, he did have upon his conscience what he
+felt was a breach of the Third Commandment in that he had allowed
+himself to obscure the mighty fact of his approaching ordination by
+attaching too much importance to and fussing too much about the
+preliminary formalities.
+
+The Bishop did not seem to think that Mark's soul was in grave peril on
+that account, and he took the opportunity to warn Mark against an
+over-scrupulousness that might lead him in his confidence to allow sin
+to enter into his soul by some unguarded portal which he supposed firmly
+and for ever secure.
+
+"That is always the danger of a temperament like yours?" he mused. "By
+all means keep your eyes on the high ground ahead of you; but do not
+forget that the more intently you look up, the more liable you are to
+slip on some unnoticed slippery stone in your path. If you abandoned
+yourself to the formalities that are a necessary preliminary to
+Ordination, you did wisely. Our Blessed Lord usually gave practical
+advice, and some of His miracles like the turning of water into wine at
+Cana were reproofs to carelessness in matters of detail. It was only
+when people worshipped utility unduly that He went to the other extreme
+as in His rebuke to Judas over the cruse of ointment."
+
+The Bishop raised his head and gave Mark absolution. When they came out
+of the sacristy he invited him to come up to his library and have a
+talk.
+
+"I'm glad that you are going to Galton," he said, wagging his long neck
+over a crumpet. "I think you'll find your experience in such a parish
+extraordinarily useful at the beginning of your career. So many young
+men have an idea that the only way to serve God is to go immediately to
+a slum. You'll be much more discouraged at Galton than you can imagine.
+You'll learn there more of the difficulties of a clergyman's life in a
+year than you could learn in London in a lifetime. Rowley, as no doubt
+you've heard, has just accepted a slum parish in Shoreditch. Well, he
+wrote to me the other day and suggested that you should go to him. But I
+dissented. You'll have an opportunity at Galton to rely upon yourself.
+You'll begin in the ruck. You'll be one of many who struggle year in
+year out with an ordinary parish. There won't be any paragraphs about
+St. Luke's in the Church papers. There won't be any enthusiastic
+pilgrims. There'll be nothing but the thought of our Blessed Lord to
+keep you struggling on, only that, only our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ."
+
+The Bishop's head wagged slowly to and fro in the silence that succeeded
+his words, and Mark pondering them in that silence felt no longer that
+he was saying "Lord, Lord," but that he had been called to follow and
+that he was ready without hesitation to follow Him whithersoever He
+should lead.
+
+The quiet Ember Friday came to an end, and on the Saturday there were
+more formalities, of which Mark dreaded most the taking of the oath
+before the Registrar. He had managed with the help of subtle High Church
+divines to persuade himself that he could swear he assented to the
+Thirty-nine Articles without perjury. Nevertheless he wished that he was
+not bound to take that oath, and he was glad that the sense in which the
+Thirty-nine Articles were to be accepted was left to the discretion of
+him who took the oath. Of one thing Mark was positive. He was assuredly
+not assenting to those Thirty-nine Articles that their compilers
+intended when they framed them. However, when it came to it, Mark
+affirmed:
+
+"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy Order of Deacons,
+do solemnly make the following declaration:--I assent to the Thirty-nine
+Articles of Religion, and to the Book of Common Prayer, and the
+ordering of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. I believe the doctrine of the
+Church of England, as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the Word of
+God; and in Public Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments I will
+use the Form in the said Book prescribed, and none other, except so far
+as shall be ordered by lawful authority.
+
+"I, Mark Lidderdale, about to be admitted to the Holy Order of Deacons,
+do swear that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty
+King Edward, his heirs and successors according to law.
+
+"So help me God."
+
+"But the strange thing is," Mark said to one of his fellow candidates,
+"nobody asks us to take the oath of allegiance to God."
+
+"We do that when we're baptized," said the other, a serious young man
+who feared that Mark was being flippant.
+
+"Personally," Mark concluded, "I think the solemn profession of a monk
+speaks more directly to the soul."
+
+And this was the feeling that Mark had throughout the Ordination of the
+Deacons notwithstanding that the Bishop of Silchester in cope and mitre
+was an awe-inspiring figure in his own Chapel. But when Mark heard him
+say:
+
+     _Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the
+     Church of God_,
+
+he was caught up to the Seventh Heaven and prayed that, when a year
+hence he should be kneeling thus to hear those words uttered to him and
+to feel upon his head those hands imposed, he should receive the Holy
+Ghost more worthily than lately he had received authority to execute the
+office of a Deacon in the Church of God.
+
+Suddenly at the back of the chapel Mark caught sight of Miriam, who must
+have travelled down from Oxfordshire last night to be present at his
+Ordination. His mind went back to that Whit-Sunday in Meade Cantorum
+nearly ten years ago. Miriam's plume of grey hair was no longer visible,
+for all her hair was grey nowadays; but her face had scarcely altered,
+and she sat there at this moment with that same expression of austere
+sweetness which had been shed like a benison upon Mark's dreary boyhood.
+How dear of Miriam to grace his Ordination, and if only Esther too could
+have been with him! He knelt down to thank God humbly for His mercies,
+and of those mercies not least for the Ogilvies' influence upon his
+life.
+
+Mark could not find Miriam when they came out from the chapel. She must
+have hurried away to catch some slow Sunday train that would get her
+back to Wych-on-the-Wold to-night. She could not have known that he had
+seen her, and when he arrived at the Rectory to-morrow as glossy as a
+beetle in his new clerical attire, Miriam would listen to his account of
+the Ordination, and only when he had finished would she murmur how she
+had been present all the time.
+
+And now there was still the oath of canonical obedience to take before
+lunch; but luckily that was short. Mark was hungry, since unlike most of
+the candidates he had not eaten an enormous breakfast that morning.
+
+Snow was falling outside when the young priests and deacons in their new
+frock coats sat down to lunch; and when they put on their sleek silk
+hats and hurried away to catch the afternoon train back to Silchester,
+it was still falling.
+
+"Even nature is putting on a surplice in our honour," Mark laughed to
+one of his companions, who not feeling quite sure whether Mark was being
+poetical or profane, decided that he was being flippant, and looked
+suitably grieved.
+
+It was dusk of that short winter day when Mark reached Silchester, and
+wandered back in a dream toward Vicar's Walk. Usually on Sunday evenings
+the streets of the city pattered with numerous footsteps; but to-night
+the snow deadened every sound, and the peace of God had gone out from
+the Cathedral to shed itself upon the city.
+
+"It will be Christmas Day in a week," Mark thought, listening to the
+Sabbath bells muffled by the soft snow-laden air. For the first time it
+occurred to him that he should probably have to preach next Sunday
+evening.
+
+     _And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us._
+
+That should be his text, Mark decided; and, passing from the snowy
+streets, he sat thinking in the golden glooms of the Cathedral about his
+sermon.
+
+
+EXPLICIT PRAELUDIUM
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Altar Steps, by Compton MacKenzie
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