Compton MacKenzie

“ The practice of her religion was woven into her life like the strand of wool on which all the others depend, but which itself is no more conspicuous than any of the other strands. With so many women religion is a substitute for something else; with Miriam Ogilvie everything else was made as nearly and as beautifully as it could be made a substitute for religion. Mark was intensely aware of her holiness, but he was equally aware of her capable well-tended hands and of her chatelaine glittering in and out of a lawn apron. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Suddenly at the back of the chapel Mark caught sight of Miriam, who must have travelled down from Oxfordshire last night to be present at his Ordination. His mind went back to that Whit-Sunday in Meade Cantorum nearly ten years ago. Miriam's plume of grey hair was no longer visible, for all her hair was grey nowadays; but her face had scarcely altered, and she sat there at this moment with that same expression of austere sweetness which had been shed like a benison upon Mark's dreary boyhood. How dear of Miriam to grace his Ordination, and if only Esther too could have been with him! ”

“ Mark's mother taught him that the desire of a bad boy to be a good boy is a better thing than the goodness of a Jack Horner. She taught him that God was not merely a crotchety old gentleman reclining in a blue dressing-gown on a mattress of cumulus, but that He was an Eye, an all-seeing Eye, an Eye capable indeed of flashing with rage, yet so rarely that whenever her little boy should imagine that Eye he might behold it wet with tears. ”

“ The next day he rose at five o'clock on a glorious morning in early June and walked rapidly away from Slowbridge. By ten o'clock he had reached a country of rolling beech-woods, and turning aside from the high road he wandered over the bare nutbrown soil that gave the glossy leaves high above a green unparagoned, a green so lambent that the glimpses of the sky beyond seemed opaque as turquoises amongst it. In quick succession Mark saw a squirrel, a woodpecker, and a jay, creatures so perfectly expressive of the place, that they appeared to him more like visions than natural objects ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Summer the black-robed dignitaries and white choristers, themselves not more than larger rooks and fantails, passed slowly across the green Close to their dutiful worship. In Winter they battled with the wind like the birds in the sky. In Autumn there was a sound of leaves along the alleys and in the Gothic entries. In Spring there were daisies in the Close, and daffodils nodding among the tombs, and on the grey wall of the Archdeacon's garden a flaming peacock's tail of Japanese quince.
Sometimes Mark was overwhelmed by the tyranny of the past in Silchester ”

“ George. He has always seemed to me an unreal, fairy-tale sort of a saint. I have more faith in St. Benedict and his Holy Rule. But I have no vocation for the contemplative life. I don't feel that my prayers are good enough to save my own soul, let alone the souls of others. I must give Jesus Christ to my fellow-men in the Blessed Sacrament. I long to be a priest for that service. I don't feel that I want by my own efforts to make people better, or to relieve poverty, or to thunder against sin, or to preach them up to and through Heaven's gates. ”

“ I must have fallen over thousands of doormats in my life," he shouted at the top of his voice.
"You'll wake everybody up in the house," Mark exclaimed in an agony. "For heaven's sake keep quiet."
"Oh, we are in the house, are we?" said Mr. Mousley. "I'm very much relieved to hear you say that, Lidderdale. For a brief moment, I don't know why, I was almost as confused as Confucius as to where we were."
At this moment, candle in hand, and in a white flannel nightgown looking larger than ever, Father Rowley appeared in the gallery above and leaning over demanded who was there. ”

“ Mark apprehended more clearly than ever the powerful personality of Father Rowley when he found that these noble young animals accorded to him the same quality of respect that they gave to a popular master or even to a popular athlete. The Missioner seemed able to understand their intimate and allusive conversation, so characteristic of a small and highly developed society; he seemed able to chaff them at the right moment; to take them seriously when they ought to be taken seriously; in a word to have grasped without being a Siltonian the secret of Silchester. ”

“ Mark was hungry, since unlike most of the candidates he had not eaten an enormous breakfast that morning.
Snow was falling outside when the young priests and deacons in their new frock coats sat down to lunch; and when they put on their sleek silk hats and hurried away to catch the afternoon train back to Silchester, it was still falling.
"Even nature is putting on a surplice in our honour," Mark laughed to one of his companions, who not feeling quite sure whether Mark was being poetical or profane, decided that he was being flippant, and looked suitably grieved. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You are a married man, and if you should seek consolation, where several of your fellow priests have lately sought it, in the Church of Rome, you will have to seek it as a layman. I do not pretend to know your private affairs, and I should consider it impertinent if I tried to pry into them at such a moment. But I do know your worth as a priest, and I have no hesitation in begging you once more with a heart almost too full for words to pause, Mr. Lidderdale, to pause and reflect before you take the irreparable step that you are contemplating. ”

“ Not even Father Rowley's bulk could dwarf the proportions of that double drawing-room or of that heavy Victorian furniture. He took his place among the cases of stuffed humming birds and glass-topped tables of curios, among the brocade curtains with shaped vallances and golden tassels, among the chandeliers and lacquered cabinets and cages of avadavats, sitting there like a great Buddha while he chatted to the two old ladies of a society that seemed to Mark as remote as the people in Pelleas and Mélisande. From time to time one of the old ladies would try to draw Mark into the conversation ”

“ I don't accept your condemnation of the Abbey as pseudo-monasticism, though I can quite well understand that my account of it might lead you to make such a criticism. The trouble with me is that my emotions and judgment are always quarrelling. I suppose you might say that is true of most people. It's like the palmist who tells everybody that he is ruled by his head or his heart, as the case may be. But when one approaches the problem of religion (let alone what is called the religious life) one is terribly perplexed to know which is to be obeyed. ”

“ If a man like Father Rowley had failed to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should be successful. The ambition to become a friar was revived by an incomprehensible, or if not incomprehensible, certainly by an inexplicable impulse to put himself in tune with the landscape, to proclaim as it were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down there in the flowery Vale of Wield: God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay! ”

“ So, if you want to do the one thing that can comfort me in this bitter hour of mine I entreat you to show Father Hungerford that your faith and your hope and your love do not depend on your affection for an unworthy priest, but upon that deeper, greater, nobler affection for the word of God. There is only one way in which you can show Father Hungerford that Jesus Christ lives in your hearts, and that is by going to Confession and to Communion and by hearing Mass as you have done all this time. ”

“ Mousley walked timidly across the room and sat on the very edge of the chair offered him by Father Rowley. He was a quiet, rather drab little man, the kind of little man who always loses his seat in a railway carriage and who always gets pushed further up in an omnibus, one of life's pawns. The presence of Mark did not seem to affect him, for no sooner was he seated than he began to apologize with suspicious rapidity, as if by now his apologies had been reduced to a formula. ”

“ I don't suppose that many human beings are granted such an experience as yours. I myself tremble at the thought of it, knowing that God considers me too weak a subject for such a test."
"Oh, Mr. Ogilvie," Mark expostulated.
"I'm not talking to you as Mark Lidderdale, but as the recipient of the grace of God, to one who before my own unworthy eyes has been lightened by celestial fire. Mine eyes have seen thy salvation, O Lord. ”

“ Those who were privileged to share his ordinary life never ceased to wonder how in the pulpit or in the confessional or at prayer this unction was replaced by a remote beauty of tone, a plangent and thrilling compassion that played upon the hearts of all who heard him.
"Now really, Father Rowley," Mark protested. "Do I preach a great deal? I'm always being chaffed by Cartwright and Warrender about an alleged mania for reforming people, which only exists in their imagination." ”

“ Now when Mark was ringing the Sanctus-bell, it was with a sense of his place in the scheme of worship. If one listens to the twitter of a single linnet in open country or to the buzz of a solitary fly upon a window pane, how incredible it is that myriads of them twittering and buzzing together should be the song of April, the murmur of June. ”

“ But in a place like the Mission House, where everybody from lay helper to casual guest was supposed to stand on his own feet, the Missioner himself felt that he must offer an example of independence.
"You're spoiling me, Mark Anthony," he said one day. "There's nothing for me to do this evening."
"I know," Mark agreed contentedly. "I want to give you a rest for once."
"Rest?" the priest echoed. "You don't seriously expect a fat man like me to sit down in an armchair and rest, do you? Besides, you've got your own reading to do, and you didn't come to Chatsea as my punkah walla." ”

“ George and perceived that the dragon's expression bore a distinct resemblance to that of the Reverend Andrew Hett. That night it seemed to Mark, in one of those waking trances that occur like dreams between one disturbed sleep and another, that the presence of the chaplain was shaking the flimsy foundations of the Abbey with such ruthlessness that the whole structure must soon collapse.
"It's only the wind," he murmured, with that half of his mind which was awake. "March is going out like a dragon." ”

“ 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. ”

“ What can we, what dare we say in favour of priests when we remember Our Lord?"
"When a man does try to follow the Gospel a little more closely than the rest," Mark raged, "the bishops down him. They exist to maintain the safety of their class. They have reached their present position by knowing the right people, by condemning the wrong people, and by balancing their fat bottoms on fences. Sometimes when their political patrons quarrel over a pair of mediocrities, a saintly man who is either very old or very ill like Bishop Crawshay is appointed as a stop-gap." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Players and spectators alike appeared unreal, a mirage of the sunlight; the very landscape ceased to be anything more substantial than a landscape perceived by dreamers in the clouds. The trees and towers of Silchester, the bald hills of Berkshire on the horizon, the cattle in the meadows, the birds in the air exasperated Mark with his inability to put himself in the picture. The grass beneath the oak was scattered with a treasury of small suns minted by the leaves above, trembling patens and silver disks that Mark set himself to count. ”

“ 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. ”