The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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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.

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