The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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"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.

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