The Altar Steps Part 3

Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about a dead body. He had p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.i.c.kly sh.e.l.l, 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 antic.i.p.ated. 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 a.s.sertive.

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 G.o.d . . . 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 lat.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 lat.i.tude 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 ent.i.tled? 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 ca.s.sock.

"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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sume 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 s.p.a.ce 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 subst.i.tuted "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 gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sage, 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: