The Altar Steps by Compton MacKenzie

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"I must write and ask your father what we ought to do." . . . She
stopped in painful awareness of the possessive pronoun. Mark was
unresponsive, until there came the news from Africa, which made him
throw his arms about his mother's neck while she was still alive. Mrs.
Lidderdale, whatever bitterness she may once have felt for the ruin of
her married life, shed fresh tears of sorrow for her husband, and
supposing that Mark's embrace was the expression of his sympathy wept
more, as people will when others are sorry for them, and then still more
because the future for Mark seemed hopeless. How was she to educate him?
How clothe him? How feed him even? At her age where and how could she
earn money? She reproached herself with having been too ready out of
sensitiveness to sacrifice Mark to her own pride. She had had no right
to leave her husband and live in the country like this. She should have
repressed her own emotion and thought only of the family life, to the
maintenance of which by her marriage she had committed herself. At first
it had seemed the best thing for Mark; but she should have remembered
that her father could not live for ever and that one day she would have
to face the problem of life without his help and his hospitality. She
began to imagine that the disaster of that stormy night had been
contrived by God to punish her, and she prayed to Him that her
chastisement should not be increased, that at least her son might be
spared to her.

Mrs. Lidderdale was able to stay on at the Vicarage for several weeks,
because the new Vicar of Nancepean was not able to take over his charge
immediately. This delay gave her time to hold a sale of her father's
furniture, at which the desire of the neighbours to be generous fought
with their native avarice, so that in the end the furniture fetched
neither more nor less than had been expected, which was little enough.
She kept back enough to establish herself and Mark in rooms, should she
be successful in finding some unfurnished rooms sufficiently cheap to
allow her to take them, although how she was going to live for more than
two years on what she had was a riddle of which after a month of
sleepless nights she had not found the solution.

In the end, and as Mrs. Lidderdale supposed in answer to her prayers,
the solution was provided unexpectedly in the following letter:

Haverton House,

Elmhurst Road,

Slowbridge.

November 29th.

Dear Grace,

I have just received a letter from James written when he was at the
point of death in Africa. It appears that in his zeal to convert
the heathen to Popery he omitted to make any provision for his wife
and child, so that in the event of his death, unless either your
relatives or his relatives came forward to support you I was given
to understand that you would be destitute. I recently read in the
daily paper an account of the way in which your father Mr. Trehawke
lost his life, and I caused inquiries to be made in Rosemarket
about your prospects. These my informant tells me are not any too
bright. You will, I am sure, pardon my having made these inquiries
without reference to you, but I did not feel justified in offering
you and my nephew a home with my sister Helen and myself unless I
had first assured myself that some such offer was necessary. You
are probably aware that for many years my brother James and myself
have not been on the best of terms. I on my side found his
religious teaching so eccentric as to repel me; he on his side was
so bigoted that he could not tolerate my tacit disapproval. Not
being a Ritualist but an Evangelical, I can perhaps bring myself
more easily to forgive my brother's faults and at the same time
indulge my theories of duty, as opposed to forms and ceremonies,
theories that if carried out by everybody would soon transform our
modern Christianity. You are no doubt a Ritualist, and your son has
no doubt been educated in the same school. Let me hasten to give
you my word that I shall not make the least attempt to interfere
either with your religious practices or with his. The quarrel
between myself and James was due almost entirely to James'
inability to let me and my opinions alone.

I am far from being a rich man, in fact I may say at once that I am
scarcely even "comfortably off" as the phrase goes. It would
therefore be outside my capacity to undertake the expense of any
elaborate education for your son; but my own school, which while it
does not pretend to compete with some of the fashionable
establishments of the time is I venture to assert a first class
school and well able to send your son into the world at the age of
sixteen as well equipped, and better equipped than he would be if
he went to one of the famous public schools. I possess some
influence with a firm of solicitors, and I have no doubt that when
my nephew, who is I believe now twelve years old, has had the
necessary schooling I shall be able to secure him a position as an
articled clerk, from which if he is honest and industrious he may
be able to rise to the position of a junior partner. If you have
saved anything from the sale of your father's effects I should
advise you to invest the sum. However small it is, you will find
the extra money useful, for as I remarked before I shall not be
able to afford to do more than lodge and feed you both, educate
your son, find him in clothes, and start him in a career on the
lines I have already indicated. My local informant tells me that
you have kept back a certain amount of your father's furniture in
order to take lodgings elsewhere. As this will now be unnecessary I
hope that you will sell the rest. Haverton House is sufficiently
furnished, and we should not be able to find room for any more
furniture. I suggest your coming to us next Friday. It will be
easiest for you to take the fast train up to Paddington when you
will be able to catch the 6.45 to Slowbridge arriving at 7.15. We
usually dine at 7.30, but on Friday dinner will be at 8 p.m. in
order to give you plenty of time. Helen sends her love. She would
have written also, but I assured her that one letter was enough,
and that a very long one.

Your affectionate brother-in-law,

Henry Lidderdale.

Mrs. Lidderdale would no doubt have criticized this letter more sharply
if she had not regarded it as inspired, almost actually written by the
hand of God. Whatever in it was displeasing to her she accepted as the
Divine decree, and if anybody had pointed out the inconsistency of some
of the opinions therein expressed with its Divine authorship, she would
have dismissed the objection as made by somebody who was incapable of
comprehending the mysterious action of God.

"Mark," she called to her son. "What do you think has happened? Your
Uncle Henry has offered us a home. I want you to write to him like a
dear boy and thank him for his kindness." She explained in detail what
Uncle Henry intended to do for them; but Mark would not be enthusiastic.
He on his side had been praying to God to put it into the mind of Samuel
Dale to offer him a job on his farm; Slowbridge was a poor substitute
for that.

"Where is Slowbridge?" he asked in a gloomy voice.

"It's a fairly large place near London," his mother told him. "It's near
Eton and Windsor and Stoke Poges where Gray wrote his Elegy, which we
learned last summer. You remember, don't you?" she asked anxiously, for
she wanted Mark to cut a figure with his uncle.

"Wolfe liked it," said Mark. "And I like it too," he added ungraciously.
He wished that he could have said he hated it; but Mark always found it
difficult to tell a lie about his personal feelings, or about any facts
that involved him in a false position.

"And now before you go down to tea with Cass Dale, you will write to
your uncle, won't you, and show me the letter?"

Mark groaned.

"It's so difficult to thank people. It makes me feel silly."

"Well, darling, mother wants you to. So sit down like a dear boy and get
it done."

"I think my nib is crossed."

"Is it? You'll find another in my desk."

"But, mother, yours are so thick."

"Please, Mark, don't make any more excuses. Don't you want to do
everything you can to help me just now?"

"Yes, of course," said Mark penitently, and sitting down in the window
he stared out at the yellow November sky, and at the magpies flying
busily from one side of the valley to the other.

The Vicarage,

Nancepean,

South Cornwall.

My dear Uncle Henry,

Thank you very much for your kind invitation to come and live with
you. We should enjoy it very much. I am going to tea with a friend
of mine called Cass Dale who lives in Nancepean, and so I must stop
now. With love,

I remain,

Your loving nephew,

Mark.

And then the pen must needs go and drop a blot like a balloon right over
his name, so that the whole letter had to be copied out again before his
mother would say that she was satisfied, by which time the yellow sky
was dun and the magpies were gone to rest.

Mark left the Dales about half past six, and was accompanied by Cass to
the brow of Pendhu. At this point Cass declined to go any farther in
spite of Mark's reminder that this would be one of the last walks they
would take together, if it were not absolutely the very last.

"No," said Cass. "I wouldn't come up from Church Cove myself not for
anything."

"But I'm going down by myself," Mark argued. "If I hadn't thought you'd
come all the way with me, I'd have gone home by the fields. What are you
afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of nothing, but I don't want to walk so far by myself.
I've come up the hill with 'ee. Now 'tis all down hill for both of us,
and that's fair."

"Oh, all right," said Mark, turning away in resentment at his friend's
desertion.

Both boys ran off in opposite directions, Cass past the splash of light
thrown across the road by the windows of the Hanover Inn, and on toward
the scattered lights of Nancepean, Mark into the gloom of the deep lane
down to Church Cove. It was a warm and humid evening that brought out
the smell of the ferns and earth in the high banks on either side, and
presently at the bottom of the hill the smell of the seaweed heaped up
in Church Cove by weeks of gales. The moon, about three days from the
full, was already up, shedding her aqueous lustre over the towans of
Chypie, which slowly penetrated the black gulfs of shadow in the
countryside until Mark could perceive the ghost of a familiar landscape.
There came over him, whose emotion had already been sprung by the
insensibility of Cass, an overwhelming awareness of parting, and he
gave to the landscape the expression of sentiment he had yearned to give
his friend. His fear of seeing the spirits of the drowned sailors, or as
he passed the churchyard gate of perceiving behind that tamarisk the
tall spectre of his grandfather, which on the way down from Pendhu had
seemed impossible to combat, had died away; and in his despair at losing
this beloved scene he wandered on past the church until he stood at the
edge of the tide. On this humid autumnal night the oily sea collapsed
upon the beach as if it, like everything else in nature, was overcome by
the prevailing heaviness. Mark sat down upon some tufts of samphire and
watched the Stag Light occulting out across St. Levan's Bay, distant
forty miles and more, and while he sat he perceived a glow-worm at his
feet creeping along a sprig of samphire that marked the limit of the
tide's advance. How did the samphire know that it was safe to grow where
it did, and how did the glow-worm know that the samphire was safe?

Mark was suddenly conscious of the protection of God, for might not he
expect as much as the glow-worm and the samphire? The ache of separation
from Nancepean was assuaged. That dread of the future, with which the
impact of death had filled him, was allayed.

"Good-night, sister glow-worm," he said aloud in imitation of St.
Francis. "Good-night, brother samphire."

A drift of distant fog had obliterated the Stag Light; but of her
samphire the glow-worm had made a moonlit forest, so brightly was she
shining, yes, a green world of interlacing, lucid boughs.

_Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works,
and glorify your Father which is in heaven._

And Mark, aspiring to thank God Who had made manifest His protection,
left Nancepean three days later with the determination to become a
lighthouse-keeper, to polish well his lamp and tend it with care, so
that men passing by in ships should rejoice at his good works and call
him brother lighthouse-keeper, and glorify God their Father when they
walked again upon the grass, harking to the pleasant song of birds and
the hum of bees.

CHAPTER IX

SLOWBRIDGE

When Mark came to live with Uncle Henry Lidderdale at Slowbridge, he was
large for his age, or at any rate he was so loosely jointed as to appear
large; a swart complexion, prominent cheek-bones, and straight lank hair
gave him a melancholic aspect, the impression of which remained with the
observer until he heard the boy laugh in a paroxysm of merriment that
left his dark blue eyes dancing long after the outrageous noise had died
down. If Mark had occasion to relate some episode that appealed to him,
his laughter would accompany the narrative like a pack of hounds in full
cry, would as it were pursue the tale to its death, and communicate its
zest to the listener, who would think what a sense of humour Mark had,
whereas it was more truly the gusto of life.

Uncle Henry found this laughter boisterous and irritating; if his nephew
had been a canary in a cage, he would have covered him with a
table-cloth. Aunt Helen, if she was caught up in one of Mark's
narratives, would twitch until it was finished, when she would rub her
forehead with an acorn of menthol and wrap herself more closely in a
shawl of soft Shetland wool. The antipathy that formerly existed between
Mark and his father was much sharper between Mark and his uncle. It was
born in the instant of their first meeting, when Uncle Henry bent over,
his trunk at right angles to his legs, so that one could fancy the
pelvic bones to be clicking like the wooden joints of a monkey on a
stick, and offered his nephew an acrid whisker to be saluted.

"And what is Mark going to be?" Uncle Henry inquired.

"A lighthouse-keeper."

"Ah, we all have suchlike ambitions when we are young. I remember that
for nearly a year I intended to be a muffin-man," said Uncle Henry
severely.

Mark hated his uncle from that moment, and he fixed upon the throbbing
pulse of his scraped-out temples as the feature upon which that dislike
should henceforth be concentrated. Uncle Henry's pulse seemed to express
all the vitality that was left to him; Mark thought that Our Lord must
have felt about the barren fig-tree much as he felt about Uncle Henry.

Aunt Helen annoyed Mark in the way that one is annoyed by a cushion in
an easy chair. It is soft and apparently comfortable, but after a minute
or two one realizes that it is superfluous, and it is pushed over the
arm to the floor. Unfortunately Aunt Helen could not be treated like a
cushion; and there she was soft and comfortable in appearance, but
forever in Mark's way. Aunt Helen was the incarnation of her own
drawing-room. Her face was round and stupid like a clock's; she wore
brocaded gowns and carpet slippers; her shawls resembled antimacassars;
her hair was like the stuff that is put in grates during the summer; her
caps were like lace curtains tied back with velvet ribbons; cameos leant
against her bosom as if they were upon a mantelpiece. Mark never
overcame his dislike of kissing Aunt Helen, for it gave him a sensation
every time that a bit of her might stick to his lips. He lacked that
solemn sense of relationship with which most children are imbued, and
the compulsory intimacy offended him, particularly when his aunt
referred to little boys generically as if they were beetles or mice. Her
inability to appreciate that he was Mark outraged his young sense of
personality which was further dishonoured by the manner in which she
spoke of herself as Aunt Helen, thus seeming to imply that he was only
human at all in so far as he was her nephew. She continually shocked his
dignity by prescribing medicine for him without regard to the presence
of servants or visitors; and nothing gave her more obvious pleasure than
to get Mark into the drawing-room on afternoons when dreary mothers of
pupils came to call, so that she might bully him under the appearance of
teaching good manners, and impress the parents with the advantages of a
Haverton House education.

As long as his mother remained alive, Mark tried to make her happy by
pretending that he enjoyed living at Haverton House, that he enjoyed his
uncle's Preparatory School for the Sons of Gentlemen, that he enjoyed
Slowbridge with its fogs and laburnums, its perambulators and
tradesmen's carts and noise of whistling trains; but a year after they
left Nancepean Mrs. Lidderdale died of pneumonia, and Mark was left
alone with his uncle and aunt.

"He doesn't realize what death means," said Aunt Helen, when Mark on the
very afternoon of the funeral without even waiting to change out of his
best clothes began to play with soldiers instead of occupying himself
with the preparation of lessons that must begin again on the morrow.

"I wonder if you will play with soldiers when Aunt Helen dies?" she
pressed.

"No," said Mark quickly, "I shall work at my lessons when you die."

His uncle and aunt looked at him suspiciously. They could find no fault
with the answer; yet something in the boy's tone, some dreadful
suppressed exultation made them feel that they ought to find severe
fault with the answer.

"Wouldn't it be kinder to your poor mother's memory," Aunt Helen
suggested, "wouldn't it be more becoming now to work harder at your
lessons when your mother is watching you from above?"

Mark would not condescend to explain why he was playing with soldiers,
nor with what passionate sorrow he was recalling every fleeting
expression on his mother's face, every slight intonation of her voice
when she was able to share in his game; he hated his uncle and aunt so
profoundly that he revelled in their incapacity to understand him, and
he would have accounted it a desecration of her memory to share his
grief with them.

Haverton House School was a depressing establishment; in after years
when Mark looked back at it he used to wonder how it had managed to
survive so long, for when he came to live at Slowbridge it had actually
been in existence for twenty years, and his uncle was beginning to look
forward to the time when Old Havertonians, as he called them, would be
bringing their sons to be educated at the old place. There were about
fifty pupils, most of them the sons of local tradesmen, who left when
they were about fourteen, though a certain number lingered on until they
were as much as sixteen in what was called the Modern Class, where they
were supposed to receive at least as practical an education as they
would have received behind the counter, and certainly a more genteel
one. Fine fellows those were in the Modern Class at Haverton House,
stalwart heroes who made up the cricket and football teams and strode
about the playing fields of Haverton House with as keen a sense of their
own importance as Etonians of comparable status in their playing fields
not more than two miles away. Mark when everything else in his school
life should be obliterated by time would remember their names and
prowess. . . . Borrow, Tull, Yarde, Corke, Vincent, Macdougal, Skinner,
they would keep throughout his life some of that magic which clings to
Diomed and Deiphobus, to Hector and Achilles.

Apart from these heroic names the atmosphere of Haverton House was not
inspiring. It reduced the world to the size and quality of one of those
scratched globes with which Uncle Henry demonstrated geography. Every
subject at Haverton House, no matter how interesting it promised to be,
was ruined from an educative point of view by its impedimenta of dates,
imports, exports, capitals, capes, and Kings of Israel and Judah.
Neither Uncle Henry nor his assistants Mr. Spaull and Mr. Palmer
believed in departing from the book. Whatever books were chosen for the
term's curriculum were regarded as something for which money had been
paid and from which the last drop of information must be squeezed to
justify in the eyes of parents the expenditure. The teachers considered
the notes more important than the text; genealogical tables were exalted
above anything on the same page. Some books of history were adorned with
illustrations; but no use was made of them by the masters, and for the
pupils they merely served as outlines to which, were they the outlines
of human beings, inky beards and moustaches had to be affixed, or were
they landscapes, flights of birds.

Mr. Spaull was a fat flabby young man with a heavy fair moustache, who
was reading for Holy Orders; Mr. Palmer was a stocky bow-legged young
man in knickerbockers, who was good at football and used to lament the
gentle birth that prevented his becoming a professional. The boys called
him Gentleman Joe; but they were careful not to let Mr. Palmer hear
them, for he had a punch and did not believe in cuddling the young. He
used to jeer openly at his colleague, Mr. Spaull, who never played
football, never did anything in the way of exercise except wrestle
flirtatiously with the boys, while Mr. Palmer was bellowing up and down
the field of play and charging his pupils with additional vigour to
counteract the feebleness of Mr. Spaull. Poor Mr. Spaull, he was
ordained about three years after Mark came to Slowbridge, and a week
later he was run over by a brewer's dray and killed.

CHAPTER X

WHIT-SUNDAY

Mark at the age of fifteen was a bitter, lonely, and unattractive boy.
Three years of Haverton House, three years of Uncle Henry's desiccated
religion, three years of Mr. Palmer's athletic education and Mr.
Spaull's milksop morality, three years of wearing clothes that were too
small for him, three years of Haverton House cooking, three years of
warts and bad haircutting, of ink and Aunt Helen's confident purging had
destroyed that gusto for life which when Mark first came to Slowbridge
used to express itself in such loud laughter. Uncle Henry probably
supposed that the cure of his nephew's irritating laugh was the
foundation stone of that successful career, which it would soon be time
to discuss in detail. The few months between now and Mark's sixteenth
birthday would soon pass, however dreary the restrictions of Haverton
House, and then it would be time to go and talk to Mr. Hitchcock about
that articled clerkship toward the fees for which the small sum left by
his mother would contribute. Mark was so anxious to be finished with
Haverton House that he would have welcomed a prospect even less
attractive than Mr. Hitchcock's office in Finsbury Square; it never
occurred to him that the money left by his mother could be spent to
greater advantage for himself. By now it was over L500, and Uncle Henry
on Sunday evenings when he was feeling comfortably replete with the
day's devotion would sometimes allude to his having left the interest to
accumulate and would urge Mark to be up and doing in order to show his
gratitude for all that he and Aunt Helen had conferred upon him. Mark
felt no gratitude; in fact at this period he felt nothing except a kind
of surly listlessness. He was like somebody who through the carelessness
of his nurse or guardian has been crippled in youth, and who is
preparing to enter the world with a suppressed resentment against
everybody and everything.

"Not still hankering after a lighthouse?" Uncle Henry asked, and one
seemed to hear his words snapping like dry twigs beneath the heavy tread
of his mind.

"I'm not hankering after anything," Mark replied sullenly.

"But you're looking forward to Mr. Hitchcock's office?" his uncle
proceeded.

Mark grunted an assent in order to be left alone, and the entrance of
Mr. Palmer who always had supper with his headmaster and employer on
Sunday evening, brought the conversation to a close.

At supper Mr. Palmer asked suddenly if the headmaster wanted Mark to go
into the Confirmation Class this term.

"No thanks," said Mark.

Uncle Henry raised his eyebrows.

"I fancy that is for me to decide."

"Neither my father nor my mother nor my grandfather would have wanted me
to be confirmed against my will," Mark declared. He was angry without
knowing his reasons, angry in response to some impulse of the existence
of which he had been unaware until he began to speak. He only knew that
if he surrendered on this point he should never be able to act for
himself again.

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