The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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There is nothing that irritates a Kelt so much as the least
consideration for any animal, and there was not a man in the whole of
the Rhos peninsula who did not sympathize with the corpse of William
Day. In the end the dispute was settled by a neighbouring parson's
coming over and reading the burial service over the blacksmith's grave.
Mark apprehended that his grandfather resented bitterly the compromise
as his fellow parson called it, the surrender as he himself called it.
This was the second time that Mark had witnessed the defeat of a
superior being whom he had been taught to regard as invincible, and it
slightly clouded that perfect serenity of being grown up to which, like
most children, he looked forward as the end of life's difficulties. He
argued the justification of his grandfather's action with Cass Dale, and
he found himself confronted by the workings of a mind naturally
nonconformist with its rebellion against authority, its contempt of
tradition, its blend of self-respect and self-importance. When Mark
found himself in danger of being beaten in argument, he took to his
fists, at which method of settling a dispute Cass Dale proved equally
his match; and the end of it was that Mark found himself upside down in
a furze bush with nothing to console him but an unalterable conviction
that he was right and, although tears of pain and mortification were
streaming down his cheeks, a fixed resolve to renew the argument as soon
as he was the right way up again, and if necessary the struggle as well.

Luckily for the friendship between Mark and Cass, a friendship that was
awarded a mystical significance by their two surnames, Lidderdale and
Dale, Parson Trehawke, soon after the burial episode, came forward as
the champion of the Nancepean Fishing Company in a quarrel with those
pirates from Lanyon, the next village down the coast. Inasmuch as a
pilchard catch worth L800 was in dispute, feeling ran high between the
Nancepean Daws and the Lanyon Gulls. All the inhabitants of the Rhos
parishes were called after various birds or animals that were supposed
to indicate their character; and when Parson Trehawke's championship of
his own won the day, his parishioners came to church in a body on the
following Sunday and put one pound five shillings and tenpence halfpenny
in the plate. The reconciliation between the two boys took place with
solemn preliminary handshakes followed by linking of arms as of old
after Cass reckoned audibly to Mark who was standing close by that
Parson Trehawke was a grand old chap, the grandest old chap from
Rosemarket to Rose Head. That afternoon Mark went back to tea with Cass
Dale, and over honey with Cornish cream they were brothers again. Samuel
Dale, the father of Cass, was a typical farmer of that part of the
country with his fifty or sixty acres of land, the capital to work which
had come from fish in the fat pilchard years. Cass was his only son, and
he had an ambition to turn him into a full-fledged minister. He had lost
his wife when Cass was a baby, and it pleased him to think that in
planning such a position for the boy he was carrying out the wishes of
the mother whom outwardly he so much resembled. For housekeeper Samuel
Dale had an unmarried sister whom her neighbours accused of putting on
too much gentility before her nephew's advancement warranted such airs.
Mark liked Aunt Keran and accepted her hospitality as a tribute to
himself rather than to his position as the grandson of the Vicar. Miss
Dale had been a schoolmistress before she came to keep house for her
brother, and she worked hard to supplement what learning Cass could get
from the village school before, some three years after Mark came to
Nancepean, he was sent to Rosemarket Grammar School.

Mark was anxious to attend the Grammar School with Cass; but Mrs.
Lidderdale's dread nowadays was that her son would acquire a West
country burr, and it was considered more prudent, economically and
otherwise, to let him go on learning with his grandfather and herself.
Mark missed Cass when he went to school in Rosemarket, because there was
no such thing as playing truant there, and it was so far away that Cass
did not come home for the midday meal. But in summertime, Mark used to
wait for him outside the town, where a lane branched from the main road
into the unfrequented country behind the Rose Pool and took them the
longest way home along the banks on the Nancepean side, which were low
and rushy unlike those on the Rosemarket side, which were steep and
densely wooded. The great water, though usually described as
heart-shaped, was really more like a pair of Gothic arches, the green
cusp between which was crowned by a lonely farmhouse, El Dorado of Mark
and his friend, and the base of which was the bar of shingle that kept
out the sea. There was much to beguile the boys on the way home, whether
it was the sight of strange wildfowl among the reeds, or the exploration
of a ruined cottage set in an ancient cherry-orchard, or the sailing of
paper boats, or even the mere delight of lying on the grass and
listening above the murmur of insects to the water nagging at the sedge.
So much indeed was there to beguile them that, if after sunset the Pool
had not been a haunted place, they would have lingered there till
nightfall. Sometimes indeed they did miscalculate the distance they had
come and finding themselves likely to be caught by twilight they would
hurry with eyes averted from the grey water lest the kelpie should rise
out of the depths and drown them. There were men and women now alive in
Nancepean who could tell of this happening to belated wayfarers, and it
was Mark who discovered that such a beast was called a kelpie. Moreover,
the bar where earlier in the evening it was pleasant to lie and pluck
the yellow sea-poppies, listening to tales of wrecks and buried treasure
and bygone smuggling, was no place at all in the chill of twilight;
moreover, when the bar had been left behind and before the coastguards'
cottages came into sight there was a two-mile stretch of lonely cliff
that was a famous haunt of ghosts. Drowned light dragoons whose bodies
were tossed ashore here a hundred years ago, wreckers revisiting the
scene of their crimes, murdered excisemen . . . it was not surprising
that the boys hurried along the narrow path, whistling to keep up their
spirits and almost ready to cry for help if nothing more dangerous than
a moth fanned their pale cheeks in passing. And after this Mark had to
undo alone the nine gates between the Vicarage and Nancepean, though
Cass would go with him as far along his road as the last light of the
village could be seen, and what was more stay there whistling for as
long as Mark could hear the heartening sound.

But if these adventures demanded the companionship of Cass, the
inspiration of them was Mark's mother. Just as in the nursery games of
Lima Street it had always been she who had made it worth while to play
with his grenadiers, which by the way had perished in a troopship like
their predecessors the light dragoons a century before, sinking one by
one and leaving nothing behind except their cork-stands bobbing on the
waves.

Mrs. Lidderdale knew every legend of the coast, so that it was thrilling
to sit beside her and turn over the musty pages of the church registers,
following from equinox to equinox in the entries of the burials the
wrecks since the year 1702:

The bodies of fifteen seamen from the brigantine _Ann Pink_ wrecked
in Church Cove, on the afternoon of Dec. 19, 1757.

The body of a child washed into Pendhu Cove from the high seas
during the night of Jan. 24, 1760.

The body of an unknown sailor, the breast tattooed with a heart and
the initials M. V. found in Hanover Cove on the morning of March 3,
1801.

Such were the inscriptions below the wintry dates of two hundred years,
and for each one Mark's mother had a moving legend of fortune's malice.
She had tales too of treasure, from the golden doubloons of a Spanish
galleon wrecked on the Rose Bar in the sixteenth century to the silver
dollars of Portugal, a million of them, lost in the narrow cove on the
other side of the Castle Cliff in the lee of which was built St.
Tugdual's Church. At low spring tides it was possible to climb down and
sift the wet sand through one's fingers on the chance of finding a
dollar, and when the tide began to rise it was jolly to climb back to
the top of the cliff and listen to tales of mermaids while a gentle wind
blew the perfume of the sea-campion along the grassy slopes. It was here
that Mark first heard the story of the two princesses who were wrecked
in what was now called Church Cove and of how they were washed up on the
cliff and vowed to build a church in gratitude to God and St. Tugdual on
the very spot where they escaped from the sea, of how they quarrelled
about the site because each sister wished to commemorate the exact spot
where she was saved, and of how finally one built the tower on her spot
and the other built the church on hers, which was the reason why the
church and the tower were not joined to this day. When Mark went home
that afternoon, he searched among his grandfather's books until he found
the story of St. Tugdual who, it seemed, was a holy man in Brittany, so
holy that he was summoned to be Pope of Rome. When he had been Pope for
a few months, an angel appeared to him and said that he must come back
at once to Brittany, because since he went to Rome all the women were
become barren.

"But how am I to go back all the way from Rome to Brittany?" St. Tugdual
asked.

"I have a white horse waiting for you," the angel replied.

And sure enough there was a beautiful white horse with wings, which
carried St. Tugdual back to Brittany in a few minutes.

"What does it mean when a woman becomes barren?" Mark inquired of his
mother.

"It means when she does not have any more children, darling," said Mrs.
Lidderdale, who did not believe in telling lies about anything.

And because she answered her son simply, her son did not perplex himself
with shameful speculations, but was glad that St. Tugdual went back home
so that the women of Brittany were able to have children again.

Everything was simple at Nancepean except the parishioners; but Mark was
still too young and too simple himself to apprehend their complicacy.
The simplest thing of all was the Vicar's religion, and at an age when
for most children religion means being dressed up to go into the
drawing-room and say how d'you do to God, Mark was allowed to go to
church in his ordinary clothes and after church to play at whatever he
wanted to play, so that he learned to regard the assemblage of human
beings to worship God as nothing more remarkable than the song of birds.
He was too young to have experienced yet a personal need of religion;
but he had already been touched by that grace of fellowship which is
conferred upon a small congregation, the individual members of which are
in church to please themselves rather than to impress others. This was
always the case in the church of Nancepean, which had to contend not
merely with the popularity of methodism, but also with the situation of
the Chapel in the middle of the village. On the dark December evenings
there would be perhaps not more than half a dozen worshippers, each one
of whom would have brought his own candle and stuck it on the shelf of
the pew. The organist would have two candles for the harmonium; the
choir of three little boys and one little girl would have two between
them; the altar would have two; the Vicar would have two. But when all
the candle-light was put together, it left most of the church in shadow;
indeed, it scarcely even illuminated the space between the worshippers,
so that each one seemed wrapped in a golden aura of prayer, most of all
when at Evensong the people knelt in silence for a minute while the
sound of the sea without rose and fell and the noise of the wind
scuttling through the ivy on the walls was audible. When the
congregation had gone out and the Vicar was standing at the churchyard
gate saying "good night," Mark used to think that they must all be
feeling happy to go home together up the long hill to Pendhu and down
into twinkling Nancepean. And it did not matter whether it was a night
of clear or clouded moonshine or a night of windy stars or a night of
darkness; for when it was dark he could always look back from the valley
road and see a company of lanthorns moving homeward; and that more than
anything shed upon his young spirit the grace of human fellowship and
the love of mankind.

CHAPTER VIII

THE WRECK

One wild night in late October of the year before he would be thirteen,
Mark was lying awake hoping, as on such nights he always hoped, to hear
somebody shout "A wreck! A wreck!" A different Mark from that one who
used to lie trembling in Lima Street lest he should hear a shout of
"Fire! or Thieves!"

And then it happened! It happened as a hundred times he had imagined its
happening, so exactly that he could hardly believe for a moment he was
not dreaming. There was the flash of a lanthorn on the ceiling, a
thunderous, knocking on the Vicarage door. Mark leapt out of bed;
flinging open his window through which the wind rushed in like a flight
of angry birds, he heard voices below in the garden shouting "Parson!
Parson! Parson Trehawke! There's a brig driving in fast toward Church
Cove." He did not wait to hear more, but dashed along the passage to
rouse first his grandfather, then his mother, and then Emma, the Vicar's
old cook.

"And you must get soup ready," he cried, standing over the old woman in
his flannel pyjamas and waving his arms excitedly, while downstairs the
cuckoo popped in and out of his door in the clock twelve times. Emma
blinked at him in terror, and Mark pulled off all the bedclothes to
convince the old woman that he was not playing a practical joke. Then he
rushed back to his own room and began to dress for dear life.

"Mother," he shouted, while he was dressing, "the Captain can sleep in
my bed, if he isn't drowned, can't he?"

"Darling, do you really want to go down to the sea on such a night?"

"Oh, mother," he gasped, "I'm practically dressed. And you will see
that Emma has lots of hot soup ready, won't you? Because it'll be much
better to bring all the crew back here. I don't think they'd want to
walk all that way over Pendhu to Nancepean after they'd been wrecked, do
you?"

"Well, you must ask grandfather first before you make arrangements for
his house."

"Grandfather's simply tearing into his clothes; Ernie Hockin and Joe
Dunstan have both got lanthorns, and I'll carry ours, so if one blows
out we shall be all right. Oh, mother, the wind's simply shrieking
through the trees. Can you hear it?"

"Yes, dearest, I certainly can. I think you'd better shut your windows.
It's blowing everything about in your room most uncomfortably."

Mark's soul expanded in gratitude to God when he found himself neither
in a dream nor in a story, but actually, and without any possibility of
self-deception hurrying down the drive toward the sea beside Ernie and
Joe, who had come from the village to warn the Vicar of the wreck and
were wearing oilskins and sou'westers, thus striking the keynote as it
were of the night's adventure. At first in the shelter of the holm-oaks
the storm seemed far away overhead; but when they turned the corner and
took the road along the valley, the wind caught them full in the face
and Mark was blown back violently against the swinging gate of the
drive. The light of the lanthorns shining on a rut in the road showed a
field-mouse hurrying inland before the rushing gale. Mark bent double to
force himself to keep up with the others, lest somebody should think, by
his inability to maintain an equal pace that he ought to follow the
field-mouse back home. After they had struggled on for a while a bend of
the valley gave them a few minutes of easy progress and Mark listened
while Ernie Hockin explained to the Vicar what had happened:

"Just before dark Eddowes the coastguard said he reckoned there was a
brig making very heavy weather of it and he shouldn't be surprised if
she come ashore tonight. Couldn't seem to beat out of the bay noways, he
said. And afterwards about nine o'clock when me and Joe here and some
of the chaps were in the bar to the Hanover, Eddowes come in again and
said she was in a bad way by the looks of her last thing he saw, and he
telephoned along to Lanyon to ask if they'd seen her down to the
lifeboat house. They reckoned she was all right to the lifeboat, and old
man Timbury who do always go against anything Eddowes do say shouted
that of course she was all right because he'd taken a look at her
through his glass before it grew dark. Of course she was all right.
'She's on a lee shore,' said Eddowes. 'It don't take a coastguard to
tell that,' said old man Timbury. And then they got to talking one
against the other the same as they belong, and they'd soon got back to
the same old talk whether Jackie Fisher was the finest admiral who ever
lived or no use at all. 'What's the good in your talking to me?' old man
Timbury was saying. 'Why afore you was born I've seen' . . . and we all
started in to shout 'ships o' the line, frigates, and cavattes,' because
we belong to mock him like that, when somebody called 'Hark, listen,
wasn't that a rocket?' That fetched us all outside into the road where
we stood listening. The wind was blowing harder than ever, and there was
a parcel of sea rising. You could hear it against Shag Rock over the
wind. Eddowes, he were a bit upset to think he should have been talking
and not a-heard the rocket. But there wasn't a light in the sky, and
when we went home along about half past nine we saw Eddowes again and he
said he'd been so far as Church Cove and should walk up along to the
Bar. No mistake, Mr. Trehawke, he's a handy chap is Eddowes for the
coastguard job. And then about eleven o'clock he saw two rockets close
in to Church Cove and he come running back and telephoned to Lanyon, but
they said no one couldn't launch a boat to-night, and Eddowes he come
banging on the doors and windows shouting 'A Wreck' and some of us took
ropes along with Eddowes, and me and Joe here come and fetched you
along. Eddowes said he's afeard she'll strike in Dollar Cove unless
she's lucky and come ashore in Church Cove."

"How's the tide?" asked the Vicar.

"About an hour of the ebb," said Ernie Hockin. "And the moon's been up
this hour and more."

Just then the road turned the corner, and the world became a waste of
wind and spindrift driving inland. The noise of the gale made it
impossible for anybody to talk, and Mark was left wondering whether the
ship had actually struck or not. The wind drummed in his ears, the
flying grit and gravel and spray stung his face; but he struggled on
hoping that this midnight walk would not come to an abrupt end by his
grandfather's declining to go any farther. Above the drumming of the
wind the roar of the sea became more audible every moment; the spume was
thicker; the end of the valley, ordinarily the meeting-place of sand and
grass and small streams with their yellow flags and forget-me-nots, was
a desolation of white foam beyond which against the cliffs showing black
in the nebulous moonlight the breakers leapt high with frothy tongues.
Mark thought that they resembled immense ghosts clawing up to reach the
summit of the cliff. It was incredible that this hell-broth was Church
Cove.

"Hullo!" yelled Ernie Hockin. "Here's the bridge."

It was true. One wave at the moment of high tide had swept snarling over
the stream and carried the bridge into the meadow beyond.

"We'll have to get round by the road," shouted the Vicar.

They turned to the right across a ploughed field and after scrambling
through the hedge emerged in the comparative shelter of the road down
from Pendhu.

"I hope the churchyard wall is all right," said the Vicar. "I never
remember such a night since I came to Nancepean."

"Sure 'nough, 'tis blowing very fierce," Joe Dunstan agreed. "But don't
you worry about the wall, Mr. Trehawke. The worst of the water is broken
by the Castle and only comes in sideways, as you might say."

When they drew near the gate of the churchyard, the rain of sand and
small pebbles was agonizing, as it swept across up the low sandstone
cliffs on that side of the Castle. Two or three excited figures shouted
for them to hurry because she was going to strike in Dollar Cove, and
everybody began to scramble up the grassy slope, clutching at the
tuffets of thrift to aid their progress. It was calm here in the lee;
and Mark panting up the face thought of those two princesses who were
wrecked here ages ago, and he understood now why one of them had
insisted on planting the tower deep in the foundation of this green
fortress against the wind and weather. While he was thinking this, his
head came above the sky line, his breath left him at the assault of the
wind, and he had to crawl on all fours toward the sea. He reached the
edge of the cliff just as something like the wings of a gigantic bat
flapped across the dim wet moonlight, and before he realized that this
was the brig he heard the crashing of her spars. The watchers stood up
against the wind, battling with it to fling lines in the vain hope of
saving some sailor who was being churned to death in that dreadful
creaming of the sea below. Yes, and there were forms of men visible on
board; two had climbed the mainmast, which crashed before they could
clutch at the ropes that were being flung to them from land, crashed and
carried them down shrieking into the surge. Mark found it hard to
believe that last summer he had spent many sunlit hours dabbling in the
sand for silver dollars of Portugal lost perhaps on such a night as this
a hundred years ago, exactly where these two poor mariners were lost. A
few minutes after the mainmast the hull went also; but in the nebulous
moonlight nothing could be seen of any bodies alive or dead, nothing
except wreckage tossing upon the surge. The watchers on the cliff turned
away from the wind to gather new breath and give their cheeks a rest
from the stinging fragments of rock and earth. Away up over the towans
they could see the bobbing lanthorns of men hurrying down from Chypie
where news of the wreck had reached; and on the road from Lanyon they
could see lanthorns on the other side of Church Cove waiting until the
tide had ebbed far enough to let them cross the beach.

Suddenly the Vicar shouted:

"I can see a poor fellow hanging on to a ledge of rock. Bring a rope!
Bring a rope!"

Eddowes the coastguard took charge of the operation, and Mark with
beating pulses watched the end of the rope touch the huddled form below.
But either from exhaustion or because he feared to let go of the
slippery ledge for one moment the sailor made no attempt to grasp the
rope. The men above shouted to him, begged him to make an effort; but he
remained there inert.

"Somebody must go down with the rope and get a slip knot under his
arms," the Vicar shouted.

Nobody seemed to pay attention to this proposal, and Mark wondered if he
was the only one who had heard it. However, when the Vicar repeated his
suggestion, Eddowes came forward, knelt down by the edge of the cliff,
shook himself like a bather who is going to plunge into what he knows
will be very cold water, and then vanished down the rope. Everybody
crawled on hand and knees to see what would happen. Mark prayed that
Eddowes, who was a great friend of his, would not come to any harm, but
that he would rescue the sailor and be given the Albert medal for saving
life. It was Eddowes who had made him medal wise. The coastguard
struggled to slip the loop under the man's shoulders along his legs; but
it must have been impossible, for presently he made a signal to be
raised.

"I can't do it alone," he shouted. "He's got a hold like a limpet."

Nobody seemed anxious to suppose that the addition of another rescuer
would be any more successful.

"If there was two of us," Eddowes went on, "we might do something."

The people on the cliff shook their heads doubtfully.

"Isn't anybody coming down along with me to have a try?" the coastguard
demanded at the top of his voice.

Mark did not hear his grandfather's reply; he only saw him go over the
cliff's edge at the end of one rope while Eddowes went down on another.
A minute later the slipknot came untied (or that was how the accident
was explained) and the Vicar went to join the drowned mariners,
dislodging as he fell the man whom he had tried to save, so that of the
crew of the brig _Happy Return_ not one ever came to port.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the effect upon Mark Lidderdale of
that night. He was twelve years old at the time; but the years in
Cornwall had retarded that precocious development to which he seemed
destined by the surroundings of his early childhood in Lima Street, and
in many ways he was hardly any older than he was when he left London. In
after years he looked back with gratitude upon the shock he received
from what was as it were an experience of the material impact of death,
because it made him think about death, not morbidly as so many children
and young people will, but with the apprehension of something that
really does come in a moment and for which it is necessary for every
human being to prepare his soul. The platitudes of age may often be for
youth divine revelations, and there is nothing so stimulating as the
unaided apprehension of a great commonplace of existence. The awe with
which Mark was filled that night was too vast to evaporate in sentiment,
and when two days after this there came news from Africa that his father
had died of black-water fever that awe was crystallized indeed. Mark
looking round at his small world perceived that nobody was safe.
To-morrow his mother might die; to-morrow he might die himself. In any
case the death of his grandfather would have meant a profound change in
the future of his mother's life and his own; the living of Nancepean
would fall to some other priest and with it the house in which they
lived. Parson Trehawke had left nothing of any value except Gould's
_Birds of Great Britain_ and a few other works of ornithology. The
furniture of the Vicarage was rich neither in quality nor in quantity.
Three or four hundred pounds was the most his daughter could inherit.
She had spoken to Mark of their poverty, because in her dismay for the
future of her son she had no heart to pretend that the dead man's money
was of little importance.

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