The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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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?

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