The Altar Steps Part 35

I do hope that you're not so much annoyed with me that you don't want to hear anything about my monastic adventures. However, if you are you can send back this long letter unopened. I believe that is the proper way to show one's disapproval by correspondence.

I reached Malford yesterday afternoon, and after a jolly walk between high hazel hedges for about two miles I reached the Abbey.

It doesn't quite fulfil one's preconceived ideas of what an abbey should look like, but I suppose it is the most practicable building that could be erected with the amount of money that the Order had to spare for what in a way is a luxury for a working order like this. What it most resembles is three tin tabernacles put together to form three sides of a square, the fourth and empty side of which is by far the most beautiful, because it consists of a glorious view over a foreground of woods, a middle-distance of park land, and on the horizon the Hamps.h.i.+re downs.

I am an authority on this view, because I had to gaze at it for about a quarter of an hour while I was waiting for somebody to open the Abbey door. At last the porter, Brother Lawrence, after taking a good look at me through the grill, demanded what I wanted. When I said that I wanted to be a monk, he looked very alarmed and hurried away, leaving me to gaze at that view for another ten minutes. He came back at last and let me in, informing me in a somewhat adenoidish voice that the Reverend Brother was busy in the garden and asking me to wait until he came in. Brother Lawrence has a large, pock-marked face, and while he is talking to anybody he stands with his right hand in his left sleeve and his left hand in his right sleeve like a Chinese mandarin or an old washer-woman with her arms folded under her ap.r.o.n. You must make the most of my descriptions in this letter, because if I am accepted as a probationer I shan't be able to indulge in any more personalities about my brethren.

The guest-room like everything else in the monastery is match-boarded; and while I was waiting in it the noise was terrific, because some corrugated iron was being nailed on the roof of a building just outside. I began to regret that Brother Lawrence had opened the door at all and that he had not left me in the cloisters, as by the way I discovered that the s.p.a.ce enclosed by the three tin tabernacles is called! There was nothing to read in the guest-room except one sheet of a six months' old newspaper which had been spread on the table presumably for a guest to mend something with glue. At last the Reverend Brother, looking most beautiful in a white habit with a zucchetto of mauve velvet, came in and welcomed me with much friendliness. I was surprised to find somebody so young as Brother Dunstan in charge of a monastery, especially as he said he was only a novice as yet. It appears that all the bigwigs--or should I say big-cowls?--are away at the moment on business of the Order and that various changes are in the offing, the most important being the giving up of their branch in Malta and the consequent arrival of Brother George, of whom Brother Dunstan spoke in a hushed voice. Father Burrowes, or the Reverend Father as he is called, is preaching in the north of England at the moment, and Brother Dunstan tells me it is quite impossible for him to say anything, still less to do anything, about my admission. However, he urged me to stay on for the present as a guest, an invitation which I accepted without hesitation. He had only just time to show me my cell and the card of rules for guests when a bell rang and, drawing his cowl over his head, he hurried off.

After perusing the rules, I discovered that this was the bell which rings a quarter of an hour before Vespers for solemn silence. I hadn't the slightest idea where the chapel was, and when I asked Brother Lawrence he glared at me and put his finger to his mouth. I was not to be discouraged, however, and in the end he showed me into the ante-chapel which is curtained off from the quire. There was only one other person in the ante-chapel, a florid, well-dressed man with a rather mincing and fussy way of wors.h.i.+pping. The monks led by Brother Lawrence (who is not even a novice yet, but a postulant and wears a black habit, without a hood, tied round the waist with a rope) pa.s.sed from the refectory through the ante-chapel into the quire, and Vespers began. They used an arrangement called "The Day Hours of the English Church,"

but beyond a few extra antiphons there was very little difference from ordinary Evening Prayer. After Vespers I had a simple and solemn meal by myself, and I was wondering how I should get hold of a book to pa.s.s away the evening, when Brother Dunstan came in and asked me if I'd like to sit with the brethren in the library until the bell rang for simple silence a quarter of an hour before Compline at 9.15, after which everybody--guests and monks--are expected to go to bed in solemn silence. The difference between simple silence and solemn silence is that you may ask necessary questions and get necessary replies during simple silence; but as far as I can make out, during solemn silence you wouldn't be allowed to tell anybody that you were dying, or if you did tell anybody, he wouldn't be able to do anything about it until solemn silence was over.

The other monks are Brother Jerome, the senior novice after Brother Dunstan, a pious but rather dull young man with fair hair and a squashed face, and Brother Raymond, attractive and bird-like, and considered a great Romanizer by the others. There is also Brother Walter, who is only a probationer and is not even allowed wide sleeves and a habit like Brother Lawrence, but has to wear a very moth-eaten ca.s.sock with a black band tied round it. Brother Walter had been marketing in High Thorpe (I wonder what the Bishop of Silchester thought if he saw him in the neighbourhood of the episcopal castle!) and having lost himself on the way home he had arrived back late for Vespers and was tremendously teased by the others in consequence. Brother Walter is a tall excitable awkward creature with black hair that sticks up on end and wide-open frightened eyes. His ca.s.sock is much too short for him both in the arms and in the legs; and as he has very large hands and very large feet, his hands and feet look still larger in consequence. They didn't talk about much that was interesting during recreation.

Brother Dunstan and Brother Raymond were full of monkish jokes, at all of which Brother Walter laughed in a very high voice--so loudly once that Brother Jerome asked him if he would mind making less noise, as he was reading Montalembert's Monks of the West, at which Brother Walter fell into an abashed gloom.

I asked who the visitor in the ante-chapel was and was told that he was a Sir Charles Horner who owns the whole of Malford and who has presented the Order with the thirty acres on which the Abbey is built. Sir Charles is evidently an ecclesiastically-minded person and, I should imagine, rather pleased to be able to be the patron of a monastic order.

I will write you again when I have seen Father Burrowes. For the moment I'm inclined to think that Malford is rather playing at being monks; but as I said, the bigwigs are all away. Brother Dunstan is a delightful fellow, yet I shouldn't imagine that he would make a successful abbot for long.

I enjoyed Compline most of all my experiences during the day, after which I retired to my cell and slept without turning till the bell rang for Lauds and Prime, both said as one office at six o'clock, after which I should have liked a conventual Ma.s.s. But alas, there is no priest here and I have been spending the time till breakfast by writing you this endless letter.

Yours ever affectionately,

Mark.

P.S. They don't say Mattins, which I'm inclined to think rather slack. But I suppose I oughtn't to criticize so soon.

To those two letters of Mark's, the Rector replied as follows:

The Rectory,

Wych-on-the-Wold,

Oxon.

June 29th.

My dear Mark,

I cannot say frankly that I approve of your monastic scheme. I should have liked an opportunity to talk it over with you first of all, and I cannot congratulate you on your good manners in going off like that without any word. Although you are technically independent now, I think it would be a great mistake to sink your small capital of 500 in the Order of St. George, and you can't very well make use of them to pa.s.s the next two or three years without contributing anything.

The other objection to your scheme is that you may not get taken at Glas...o...b..ry. In any case the Glas...o...b..ry people will give the preference to Varsity men, and I'm not sure that they would be very keen on having an ex-monk. However, as I said, you are independent now and can choose yourself what you do. Meanwhile, I suppose it is possible that Burrowes may decide you have no vocation, in which case I hope you'll give up your monastic ambitions and come back here.

Yours affectionately,

Stephen Ogilvie.

Mark who had been growing bored in the guest-room of Malford Abbey nearly said farewell to it for ever when he received the Rector's letter. His old friend and guardian was evidently wounded by his behaviour, and Mark considering what he owed him felt that he ought to abandon his monastic ambitions if by doing so he could repay the Rector some of his kindness. His hand was on the bell that should summon the guest-brother (when the bell was working and the guest-brother was not) in order to tell him that he had been called away urgently and to ask if he might have the Abbey cart to take him to the station; but at that moment Sir Charles Horner came in and began to chat affably to Mark.

"I've been intending to come up and see you for the last three days. But I've been so confoundedly busy. They wonder what we country gentlemen do with ourselves. By gad, they ought to try our life for a change."

Mark supposed that the third person plural referred to the whole body of Radical critics.

"You're the son of Lidderdale, I hear," Sir Charles went on without giving Mark time to comment on the hards.h.i.+p of his existence. "I visited Lima Street twenty-five years ago, before you were born that was. Your father was a great pioneer. We owe him a lot. And you've been with Rowley lately? That confounded bishop. He's our bishop, you know. But he finds it difficult to get at Burrowes except by starving him for priests. The fellow's a time-server, a pusher . . ."

Mark began to like Sir Charles; he would have liked anybody who would abuse the Bishop of Silchester.

"So you're thinking of joining my Order," Sir Charles went on without giving Mark time to say a word. "I call it my Order because I set them up here with thirty acres of uncleared copse. It gives the Tommies something to do when they come over here on furlough from Aldershot.

You've never met Burrowes, I hear."

Mark thought that Sir Charles for a busy man had managed to learn a great deal about an unimportant person like himself.

"Will Father Burrowes be here soon?" Mark inquired.

"'Pon my word, I don't know. n.o.body knows when he'll be anywhere. He's preaching all over the place. He begs the deuce of a lot of money, you know. Aren't you a friend of Dorward's? You were asking Brother Dunstan about him. His parish isn't far from here. About fifteen miles, that's all. He's an amusing fellow, isn't he? Has tremendous rows with his squire, Philip Iredale. A pompous a.s.s whose wife ran away from him a little time ago. Served him right, Dorward told me in confidence. You must come and have lunch with me. There's only Lady Landells. I can't afford to live in the big place. Huge affair with Doric portico and all that, don't you know. It's let to Lord Middlesborough, the s.h.i.+pping man.

I live at Malford Lodge. Quite a jolly little place I've made of it.

Suits me better than that great gaunt Georgian pile. You'd better walk down with me this morning and stop to lunch."

Mark, who was by now growing tired of his own company in the guest-room, accepted Sir Charles' invitation with alacrity; and they walked down from the Abbey to the village of Malford, which was situated at the confluence of the Mall and the Nodder, two diminutive tributaries of the Wey, which itself is not a mighty stream.

"A rather charming village, don't you think?" said Sir Charles, pointing with his ta.s.selled cane to a particularly attractive rose-hung cottage.

"It was lucky that the railway missed us by a couple of miles; we should have been festering with tin bungalows by now on any available land, which means on any land that doesn't belong to me. I don't offer to show you the church, because I never enter it."

Mark had paused as a matter of course by the lychgate, supposing that with a squire like Sir Charles the inside should be of unusual interest.

"My uncle most outrageously sold the advowson to the Simeon Trustees, it being the only part of my inheritance he could alienate from me, whom he loathed. He knew nothing would enrage me more than that, and the result is that I've got a fellow as vicar who preaches in a black gown and has evening communion twice a month. That is why I took such pleasure in planting a monastery in the parish; and if only that old time-server the Bishop of Silchester would licence a chaplain to the community, I should get my Sunday Ma.s.s in my own parish despite my uncle's simeony, as I call it. As it is with Burrowes away all the time raising funds, I don't get a Ma.s.s at the Abbey and I have to go to the next parish, which is four miles away and appears highly undignified for the squire."

"And you can't get him out?" said Mark.

"If I did get him out, I should be afflicted with another one just as bad. The Simeon Trustees only appoint people of the stamp of Mr.

Choules, my present enemy. He's a horrid little man with a gaunt wife six feet high who beats her children and, if village gossip be true, her husband as well. Now you can see Malford Place, which is let to Middlesborough, as I told you."

Mark looked at the great Georgian house with its lawns and cedars and gateposts surmounted by stone wyverns. He had seen many of these great houses in the course of his tramping; but he had never thought of them before except as natural features in the landscape; the idea that people could consider a gigantic building like that as much a home as the small houses in which Mark had spent his life came over him now with a sense of novelty.

"Ghastly affair, isn't it?" said the owner contemptuously. "I'd let it stand empty rather than live in it myself. It reeks of my uncle's medicine and echoes with his gouty groans. Besides what is there in it that's really mine?"

Mark who had been thinking what an easy affair life must be for Sir Charles was struck by his tone of disillusionment. Perhaps all people who inherited old names and old estates were affected by their awareness of transitory possession. Sir Charles could not alienate even a piece of furniture. A middle-aged bachelor and a cosmopolitan, he would have moved about the corridors and halls of that huge house with less permanency than Lord Middlesborough who paid him so well to walk about in it in his stead, and who was no more restricted by the terms of his lease than was his landlord by the conditions of the entail. Mark began to feel sorry for him; but without cause, for when Sir Charles came in sight of Malford Lodge where he lived, he was full of enthusiasm. It was indeed a pretty little house of red brick, dating from the first quarter of the nineteenth century and like so many houses of that period built close to the road, surrounded too on three sides by a verandah of iron and copper in the paG.o.da style, thoroughly ugly, but by reason of the mellow peac.o.c.k hues time had given its roof, full of personality and charm. They entered by a green door in the brick wall and crossed a lawn sloping down to the little river to reach the shade of a tulip tree in full bloom, where seated in one of those tall wicker garden chairs shaped like an alcove was an elderly lady as ugly as Priapus.

"There's Lady Landells, who's a poetess, you know," said Sir Charles gravely.

Mark accepted the information with equal gravity. He was still unsophisticated enough to be impressed at hearing a woman called a poetess.

"Mr. Lidderdale is going to have lunch with us, Lady Landells," Sir Charles announced.

"Oh, is he?" Lady Landells replied in a cracked murmur of complete indifference.

"He's a great admirer of your poems," added Sir Charles, hearing which Lady Landells looked at Mark with her cod's eyes and by way of greeting offered him two fingers of her left hand.

"I can't read him any of my poems to-day, Charles, so pray don't ask me to do so," the poetess groaned.