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The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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Mark turned away from the window and tried to think of some game that
could be played in the dining-room. But it was not a room that fostered
the imagination. The carpet was so much worn that the pattern was now
scarcely visible and, looked one at it never so long and intently, it
was impossible to give it an inner life of its own that gradually
revealed itself to the fanciful observer. The sideboard had nothing on
it except a dirty cloth, a bottle of harvest burgundy, and half a dozen
forks and spoons. The cupboards on either side contained nothing edible
except salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, and oil. There was a plain deal
table without a drawer and without any interesting screws and levers to
make it grow smaller or larger at the will of the creature who sat
beneath it. The eight chairs were just chairs; the wallpaper was like
the inside of the bath, but alas, without the water; of the two
pictures, the one over the mantelpiece was a steel-engraving of the Good
Shepherd and the one over the sideboard was an oleograph of the Sacred
Heart. Mark knew every fly speck on their glasses, every discoloration
of their margins. While he was sighing over the sterility of the room,
he heard the door of his father's study open, and his father and Mr.
Astill do down the passage, both of them still talking unceasingly.
Presently the front door slammed, and Mark watched them walk away in the
direction of the new church. Here was an opportunity to go into his
father's study and look at some of the books. Mark never went in when
his father was there, because once his mother had said to his father:

"Why don't you have Mark to sit with you?"

And his father had answered doubtfully:

"Mark? Oh yes, he can come. But I hope he'll keep quiet, because I
shall be rather busy."

Mark had felt a kind of hostility in his father's manner which had
chilled him; and after that, whenever his mother used to suggest his
going to sit quietly in the study, he had always made some excuse not to
go. But if his father was out he used to like going in, because there
were always books lying about that were interesting to look at, and the
smell of tobacco smoke and leather bindings was grateful to the senses.
The room smelt even more strongly than usual of tobacco smoke this
afternoon, and Mark inhaled the air with relish while he debated which
of the many volumes he should pore over. There was a large Bible with
pictures of palm-trees and camels and long-bearded patriarchs surrounded
by flocks of sheep, pictures of women with handkerchiefs over their
mouths drawing water from wells, of Daniel in the den of lions and of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The frontispiece
was a coloured picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surrounded
by amiable lions, benevolent tigers, ingratiating bears and leopards and
wolves. But more interesting than the pictures were some pages at the
beginning on which, in oval spaces framed in leaves and flowers, were
written the names of his grandfather and grandmother, of his father and
of his father's brother and sister, with the dates on which they were
born and baptized and confirmed. What a long time ago his father was
born! 1840. He asked his mother once about this Uncle Henry and Aunt
Helen; but she told him they had quarrelled with his father, and she had
said nothing more about them. Mark had been struck by the notion that
grown-up people could quarrel: he had supposed quarrelling to be
peculiar to childhood. Further, he noticed that Henry Lidderdale had
married somebody called Ada Prewbody who had died the same year; but
nothing was said in the oval that enshrined his father about his having
married anyone. He asked his mother the reason of this, and she
explained to him that the Bible had belonged to his grandfather who had
kept the entries up to date until he died, when the Bible came to his
eldest son who was Mark's father.

"Does it worry you, darling, that I'm not entered?" his mother had asked
with a smile.

"Well, it does rather," Mark had replied, and then to his great delight
she took a pen and wrote that James Lidderdale had married Grace Alethea
Trehawke on June 28th, 1880, at St. Tugdual's Church, Nancepean,
Cornwall, and to his even greater delight that on April 25th, 1881, Mark
Lidderdale had been born at 142 Lima Street, Notting Dale, London, W.,
and baptized on May 21st, 1881, at St. Wilfred's Mission Church, Lima
Street.

"Happy now?" she had asked.

Mark had nodded, and from that moment, if he went into his father's
study, he always opened the Family Bible and examined solemnly his own
short history wreathed in forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley.

This afternoon, after looking as usual at the entry of his birth and
baptism written in his mother's pretty pointed handwriting, he searched
for Dante's _Inferno_ illustrated by Gustave Dore, a large copy of which
had recently been presented to his father by the Servers and Choir of
St. Wilfred's. The last time he had been looking at this volume he had
caught a glimpse of a lot of people buried in the ground with only their
heads sticking out, a most attractive picture which he had only just
discovered when he had heard his father's footsteps and had closed the
book in a hurry.

Mark tried to find this picture, but the volume was large and the
pictures on the way of such fascination that it was long before he found
it. When he did, he thought it even more satisfying at a second glance,
although he wished he knew what they were all doing buried in the ground
like that. Mark was not satisfied with horrors even after he had gone
right through the Dante; in fact, his appetite was only whetted, and he
turned with relish to a large folio of Chinese tortures, in the coloured
prints of which a feature was made of blood profusely outpoured and
richly tinted. One picture of a Chinaman apparently impervious to the
pain of being slowly sawn in two held him entranced for five minutes.
It was growing dusk by now, and as it needed the light of the window to
bring out the full quality of the blood, Mark carried over the big
volume, propped it up in a chair behind the curtains, and knelt down to
gloat over these remote oriental barbarities without pausing to remember
that his father might come back at any moment, and that although he had
never actually been forbidden to look at this book, the thrill of
something unlawful always brooded over it. Suddenly the door of the
study opened and Mark sat transfixed by terror as completely as the
Chinaman on the page before him was transfixed by a sharpened bamboo;
then he heard his mother's voice, and before he could discover himself a
conversation between her and his father had begun of which Mark
understood enough to know that both of them would be equally angry if
they knew that he was listening. Mark was not old enough to escape
tactfully from such a difficult situation, and the only thing he could
think of doing was to stay absolutely still in the hope that they would
presently go out of the room and never know that he had been behind the
curtain while they were talking.

"I didn't mean you to dress yourself and come downstairs," his father
was saying ungraciously.

"My dear, I should have come down to tea in any case, and I was anxious
to hear the result of your conversation with Mr. Astill."

"You can guess, can't you?" said the husband.

Mark had heard his father speak angrily before; but he had never heard
his voice sound like a growl. He shrank farther back in affright behind
the curtains.

"You're going to give way to the Bishop?" the wife asked gently.

"Ah, you've guessed, have you? You've guessed by my manner? You've
realized, I hope, what this resolution has cost me and what it's going
to cost me in the future. I'm a coward. I'm a traitor. _Before the cock
crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice._ A coward and a traitor."

"Neither, James--at any rate to me."

"To you," the husband scoffed. "I should hope not to you, considering
that it is on your account I am surrendering. Do you suppose that if I
were free, as to serve God I ought to be free, do you suppose then that
I should give up my principles like this? Never! But because I'm a
married priest, because I've a wife and family to support, my hands are
tied. Oh, yes, Astill was very tactful. He kept insisting on my duty to
the parish; but did he once fail to rub in the position in which I
should find myself if I did resign? No bishop would license me; I should
be inhibited in every diocese--in other words I should starve. The
beliefs I hold most dear, the beliefs I've fought for all these years
surrendered for bread and butter! _Woman, what have I to do with thee?_
Our Blessed Lord could speak thus even to His Blessed Mother. But I! _He
that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he
that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of
me._"

The Missioner threw himself into his worn armchair and stared into the
unlighted grate. His wife came behind him and laid a white hand upon his
forehead; but her touch seemed to madden him, and he sprang away from
her.

"No more of that," he cried. "If I was weak when I married you I will
never be weak again. You have your child. Let that be enough for your
tenderness. I want none of it myself. Do you hear? I wish to devote
myself henceforth to my parish. My parish! The parish of a coward and a
traitor."

Mark heard his mother now speaking in a voice that was strange to him,
in a voice that did not belong to her, but that seemed to come from far
away, as if she were lost in a snowstorm and calling for help.

"James, if you feel this hatred for me and for poor little Mark, it is
better that we leave you. We can go to my father in Cornwall, and you
will not feel hampered by the responsibility of having to provide for
us. After what you have said to me, after the way you have looked at me,
I could never live with you as your wife again."

"That sounds a splendid scheme," said the Missioner bitterly. "But do
you think I have so little logic that I should be able to escape from my
responsibilities by planting them on the shoulders of another? No, I
sinned when I married you. I did not believe and I do not believe that a
priest ought to marry; but having done so I must face the situation and
do my duty to my family, so that I may also do my duty to God."

"Do you think that God will accept duty offered in that spirit? If he
does, he is not the God in Whom I believe. He is a devil that can be
propitiated with burnt offerings," exclaimed the woman passionately.

"Do not blaspheme," the priest commanded.

"Blaspheme!" she echoed. "It is you, James, who have blasphemed nature
this afternoon. You have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
may you be forgiven by your God. I can never forgive you."

"You're becoming hysterical."

"How dare you say that? How dare you? I have loved you, James, with all
the love that I could give you. I have suffered in silence when I saw
how you regarded family life, how unkind you were to Mark, how utterly
wrapped up in the outward forms of religion. You are a Pharisee, James,
you should have lived before Our Lord came down to earth. But I will not
suffer any longer. You need not worry about the evasion of your
responsibilities. You cannot make me stay with you. You will not dare
keep Mark. Save your own soul in your own way; but Mark's soul is as
much mine as yours to save."

During this storm of words Mark had been thinking how wicked it was of
his father to upset his mother like that when she had a headache. He had
thought also how terrible it was that he should apparently be the cause
of this frightening quarrel. Often in Lima Street he had heard tales of
wives who were beaten by their husbands and now he supposed that his own
mother was going to be beaten. Suddenly he heard her crying. This was
too much for him; he sprang from his hiding place and ran to put his
arms round her in protection.

"Mother, mother, don't cry. You are bad, you are bad," he told his
father. "You are wicked and bad to make her cry."

"Have you been in the room all this time?" his father asked.

Mark did not even bother to nod his head, so intent was he upon
consoling his mother. She checked her emotion when her son put his arms
round her neck, and whispered to him not to speak. It was almost dark in
the study now, and what little light was still filtering in at the
window from the grey nightfall was obscured by the figure of the
Missioner gazing out at the lantern spire of his new church. There was a
tap at the door, and Mrs. Lidderdale snatched up the volume that Mark
had let fall upon the floor when he emerged from the curtains, so that
when Dora came in to light the gas and say that tea was ready, nothing
of the stress of the last few minutes was visible. The Missioner was
looking out of the window at his new church; his wife and son were
contemplating the picture of an impervious Chinaman suspended in a cage
where he could neither stand nor sit nor lie.




CHAPTER V

PALM SUNDAY


Mark's dream from which he woke to wonder if the end of the world was at
hand had been a shadow cast by coming events. So far as the world of
Lima Street was concerned, it was the end of it. The night after that
scene in his father's study, which made a deeper impression on him than
anything before that date in his short life, his mother came to sleep in
the nursery with him, to keep him company so that he should not be
frightened any more, she offered as the explanation of her arrival. But
Mark, although of course he never said so to her, was sure that she had
come to him to be protected against his father.

Mark did not overhear any more discussions between his parents, and he
was taken by surprise when one day a week after his mother had come to
sleep in his room, she asked him how he should like to go and live in
the country. To Mark the country was as remote as Paradise, and at first
he was inclined to regard the question as rhetorical to which a
conventional reply was expected. If anybody had asked him how he should
like to go to Heaven, he would have answered that he should like to go
to Heaven very much. Cows, sheep, saints, angels, they were all equally
unreal outside a picture book.

"I would like to go to the country very much," he said. "And I would
like to go to the Zoological Gardens very much. Perhaps we can go there
soon, can we, mother?"

"We can't go there if we're in the country."

Mark stared at her.

"But really go in the country?"

"Yes, darling, really go."

"Oh, mother," and immediately he checked his enthusiasm with a sceptical
"when?"

"Next Monday."

"And shall I see cows?"

"Yes."

"And donkeys? And horses? And pigs? And goats?"

To every question she nodded.

"Oh, mother, I will be good," he promised of his own accord. "And can I
take my grenadiers?"

"You can take everything you have, darling."

"Will Dora come?" He did not inquire about his father.

"No."

"Just you and me?"

She nodded, and Mark flung his arms round her neck to press upon her
lips a long fragrant kiss, such a kiss as only a child can give.

On Sunday morning, the last Sunday morning he would worship in the
little tin mission church, the last Sunday morning indeed that any of
the children of Lima Street would worship there, Mark sat close beside
his mother at the children's Mass. His father looking as he always
looked, took off his chasuble, and in his alb walked up and down the
aisle preaching his short sermon interspersed with questions.

"What is this Sunday called?"

There was a silence until a well-informed little girl breathed through
her nose that it was called Passion Sunday.

"Quite right. And next Sunday?"

"Palm Sunday," all the children shouted with alacrity, for they looked
forward to it almost more than to any Sunday in the year.

"Next Sunday, dear children, I had hoped to give you the blessed palms
in our beautiful new church, but God has willed otherwise, and another
priest will come in my place. I hope you will listen to him as
attentively as you have listened to me, and I hope you will try to
encourage him by your behaviour both in and out of the church, by your
punctuality and regular attendance at Mass, and by your example to other
children who have not had the advantage of learning all about our
glorious Catholic faith. I shall think about you all when I am gone and
I shall never cease to ask our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ to guard you
and keep you safe for Him. And I want you to pray to Our Blessed Lady
and to our great patron Saint Wilfred that they will intercede for you
and me. Will you all do this?"

There was a unanimous and sibilant "Yes, father," from the assembled
children, and then one little girl after being prodded by her companions
on either side of her spoke up and asked the Missioner why he was going.

"Ah, that is a very difficult question to answer; but I will try to
explain it to you by a parable. What is a parable?"

"Something that isn't true," sang out a too ready boy from the back of
the church.

"No, no, Arthur Williams. Surely some other boy or girl can correct
Arthur Williams? How many times have we had that word explained to us! A
parable is a story with a hidden meaning. Now please, every boy and
girl, repeat that answer after me. A parable is a story with a hidden
meaning."

And all the children baa'd in unison:

"A parable is a story with a hidden meaning."

"That's better," said the Missioner. "And now I will tell you my
parable. Once upon a time there was a little boy or a little girl, it
doesn't matter which, whose father put him in charge of a baby. He was
told not to let anybody take it away from him and he was told to look
after it and wheel it about in the perambulator, which was a very old
one, and not only very old but very small for the baby, who was growing
bigger and bigger every day. Well, a lot of kind people clubbed together
and bought a new perambulator, bigger than the other and more
comfortable. They told him to take this perambulator home to his father
and show him what a beautiful present they had made. Well, the boy
wheeled it home and his father was very pleased with it. But when the
boy took the baby out again, the nursemaid told him that the baby had
too many clothes on and said that he must either take some of the
clothes off or else she must take away the new perambulator. Well, the
little boy had promised his father, who had gone far away on a journey,
that nobody should touch the baby, and so he said he would not take off
any of the clothes. And when the nurse took away the perambulator the
little boy wrote to his father to ask what he should do and his father
wrote to him that he would put one of his brothers in charge who would
know how to do what the nurse wanted." The Missioner paused to see the
effect of his story. "Now, children, let us see if you can understand my
parable. Who is the little boy?"

A concordance of opinion cried "God."

"No. Now think. The father surely was God. And now once more, who was
the little boy?"

Several children said "Jesus Christ," and one little boy who evidently
thought that any connexion between babies and religion must have
something to do with the Holy Innocents confidently called out "Herod."

"No, no, no," said the Missioner. "Surely the little boy is myself. And
what is the baby?"

Without hesitation the boys and girls all together shouted "Jesus
Christ."

"No, no. The baby is our Holy Catholic Faith. For which we are ready if
necessary to--?"

There was no answer.

"To do what?"

"To be baptized," one boy hazarded.

"To die," said the Missioner reproachfully.

"To die," the class complacently echoed.

"And now what is the perambulator?"

This was a puzzle, but at last somebody tried:

"The Body and Blood of Our Lord, Jesus Christ."

"No, no. The perambulator is our Mission here in Lima Street. The old
perambulator is the Church where we are sitting at Mass and the new
perambulator is--"

"The new church," two children answered simultaneously.

"Quite right. And now, who is the nursemaid? The nursemaid is the Bishop
of London. You remember that last Sunday we talked about bishops. What
is a bishop?"

"A high-priest."

"Well, that is not a bad answer, but don't you remember we said that
bishop meant 'overseer,' and you all know what an overseer is. Any of
your fathers who go out to work will tell you that. So the Bishop like
the nursemaid in my parable thought he knew better what clothes the baby
ought to wear in the new perambulator, that is to say what services we
ought to have in the new St. Wilfred's. And as God is far away and we
can only speak to Him by prayer, I have asked Him what I ought to do,
and He has told me that I ought to go away and that He will put a
brother in charge of the baby in the new perambulator. Who then is the
brother?"

"Jesus Christ," said the class, convinced that this time it must be He.

"No, no. The brother is the priest who will come to take charge of the
new St. Wilfred's. He will be called the Vicar, and St. Wilfred's,
instead of being called the Lima Street Mission, will become a parish.
And now, dear children, there is no time to say any more words to you.
My heart is sore at leaving you, but in my sorrow I shall be comforted
if I can have the certainty that you are growing up to be good and loyal
Catholics, loving Our Blessed Lord and His dear Mother, honouring the
Holy Saints and Martyrs, hating the Evil One and all his Spirits and
obeying God with whose voice the Church speaks. Now, for the last time
children, let me hear you sing _We are but little children weak_."

They all sang more loudly than usual to express a vague and troubled
sympathy:

_There's not a child so small and weak_
_But has his little cross to take,_
_His little work of love and praise_
_That he may do for Jesus' sake._

And they bleated a most canorous _Amen_.

Mark noticed that his mother clutched his hand tightly while his father
was speaking, and when once he looked up at her to show how loudly he
too was singing, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

The next morning was Monday.

"Good-bye, Mark, be a good boy and obedient to your mother," said his
father on the platform at Paddington.

"Who is that man?" Mark whispered when the guard locked them in.

His mother explained, and Mark looked at him with as much awe as if he
were St. Peter with the keys of Heaven at his girdle. He waved his
handkerchief from the window while the train rushed on through tunnels
and between gloomy banks until suddenly the world became green, and
there was the sun in a great blue and white sky. Mark looked at his
mother and saw that again there were tears in her eyes, but that they
sparkled like diamonds.




CHAPTER VI

NANCEPEAN


The Rhos or, as it is popularly written and pronounced, the Rose is a
tract of land in the south-west of the Duchy of Cornwall, ten miles long
and six at its greatest breadth, which on account of its remoteness from
the railway, its unusual geological formation, and its peninsular shape
possesses both in the character of its inhabitants and in the peculiar
aspects of the natural scene all the limitations and advantages of an
island. The main road running south to Rose Head from Rosemarket cuts
the peninsula into two unequal portions, the eastern and by far the
larger of which consists of a flat tableland two or three hundred feet
above the sea covered with a bushy heath, which flourishes in the
magnesian soil and which when in bloom is of such a clear rosy pink,
with nothing to break the level monochrome except scattered drifts of
cotton grass, pools of silver water and a few stunted pines, that
ignorant observers have often supposed that the colour gave its name to
the whole peninsula. The ancient town of Rosemarket, which serves as the
only channel of communication with the rest of Cornwall, lies in the
extreme north-west of the peninsula between a wide creek of the Roseford
river and the Rose Pool, an irregular heart-shaped water about four
miles in circumference which on the west is only separated from the
Atlantic by a bar of fine shingle fifty yards across.

The parish of Nancepean, of which Mark's grandfather the Reverend
Charles Elphinstone Trehawke had been vicar for nearly thirty years, ran
southward from the Rose Pool between the main road and the sea for three
miles. It was a country of green valleys unfolding to the ocean, and of
small farms fertile enough when they were sheltered from the prevailing
wind; but on the southern confines of the parish the soil became
shallow and stony, the arable fields degenerated into a rough open
pasturage full of gorse and foxgloves and gradually widening patches of
heather, until finally the level monochrome of the Rhos absorbed the
last vestiges of cultivation, and the parish came to an end.

The actual village of Nancepean, set in a hollow about a quarter of a
mile from the sea, consisted of a smithy, a grocer's shop, a parish hall
and some two dozen white cottages with steep thatched roofs lying in
their own gardens on either side of the unfrequented road that branched
from the main road to follow the line of the coast. Where this road made
the turn south a track strewn with grey shingle ran down between the
cliffs, at this point not much more than grassy hummocks, to Nancepean
beach which extended northward in a wide curve until it disappeared two
miles away in the wooded heights above the Rose Pool. The metalled coast
road continued past the Hanover Inn, an isolated house standing at the
head of a small cove, to make the long ascent of Pendhu Cliff three
hundred and fifty feet high, from the brow of which it descended between
banks of fern past St. Tugdual's Church to the sands of Church Cove,
whence it emerged to climb in a steep zigzag the next headland, beyond
which it turned inland again to Lanyon and rejoined the main road to
Rose Head. The church itself had no architectural distinction; but the
solitary position, the churchyard walls sometimes washed by high spring
tides, the squat tower built into the rounded grassy cliff that
protected it from the direct attack of the sea, and its impressive
antiquity combined to give it more than the finest architecture could
give. Nowhere in the surrounding landscape was there a sign of human
habitation, neither on the road down from Pendhu nor on the road up
toward Lanyon, not on the bare towans sweeping from the beach to the sky
in undulating waves of sandy grass, nor in the valley between the towans
and Pendhu, a wide green valley watered by a small stream that flowed
into the cove, where it formed a miniature estuary, the configuration of
whose effluence changed with every tide.

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Marguerite Stockman Dickson - "Vocational Guidance for Girls"

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Tell us your literary dreams
Articles published by guardian.co.uk Books

John Crace digests A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

My English teacher is wearing a barrister's wig. He turns and points towards me as I sit trembling in the dock. "Members of the jury, I put it to you that this man, Tom Robinson, is innocent," he says, rather lugubriously. I want to protest. I want to shout that no, I am not Tom Robinson, but yes, I am innocent! But the words won't come out.

Then I wake up. It's another literary dream – one that's troubled me ever since I studied Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for GCSE.

Most of the time I'm disappointed to leave my literary dreams, waking to realise that I'm not really ensconced with with the boozing Welsh pensioners from Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils or haven't really been thrashing Harry Potter's Quidditch team. I remember with fondness a skiing trip with William Shakespeare and the delightful discovery that Don DeLillo was serving drinks behind the bar in my local pub.

It's not all sunshine, though. Tom Wolfe once ruined a trip to New York, shouting at me across Fifth Avenue: "You're not even familiar with my work – get outta town, asshole!" But that's nothing on Howard Jacobson. I spent a summer discovering his novels during my waking hours and bumping into him in my sleep. I'd see him in a local restaurant and tell him how much I was enjoying his novels. "Oh right," he'd snap, "that old chestnut, huh?" When I met him for real last year he was, in fact, charm personified. I didn't tell him about the dreams.

But enough about my subconscious, what about yours? It's Friday: forget about work and tell me all about your literary dreams. Don't hold back – it's not like we'll read anything into it.

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