RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
When Mark was grown up and looked back at his early childhood--he was
seven years old in the year in which his father was able to see the new
St. Wilfred's an edifice complete except for consecration--it seemed to
him that his education had centered in the prevention of his acquiring a
Cockney accent. This was his mother's dread and for this reason he was
not allowed to play more than Christian equality demanded with the boys
of Lima Street. Had his mother had her way, he would never have been
allowed to play with them at all; but his father would sometimes break
out into fierce tirades against snobbery and hustle him out of the house
to amuse himself with half-a-dozen little girls looking after a dozen
babies in dilapidated perambulators, and countless smaller boys and
girls ragged and grubby and mischievous.
"You leave that kebbidge-stalk be, Elfie!"
"Ethel! Jew hear your ma calling you, you naughty girl?"
"Stanlee! will you give over fishing in that puddle, this sminute. I'll
give you such a slepping, you see if I don't."
"Come here, Maybel, and let me blow your nose. Daisy Hawkins, lend us
your henkerchif, there's a love! Our Maybel wants to blow her nose. Oo,
she is a sight! Come here, Maybel, do, and leave off sucking that orange
peel. There's the Father's little boy looking at you. Hold your head up,
do."
Mark would stand gravely to attention while Mabel Williams' toilet was
adjusted, and as gravely follow the shrill raucous procession to watch
pavement games like Hop Scotch or to help in gathering together enough
sickly greenery from the site of the new church to make the summer
grotto, which in Lima Street was a labour of love, since few of the
passers by in that neighbourhood could afford to remember St. James'
grotto with a careless penny.
The fact that all the other little boys and girls called the Missioner
Father made it hard for Mark to understand his own more particular
relationship to him, and Lidderdale was so much afraid of showing any
more affection to one child of his flock than to another that he was
less genial with his own son than with any of the other children. It was
natural that in these circumstances Mark should be even more dependent
than most solitary children upon his mother, and no doubt it was through
his passion to gratify her that he managed to avoid that Cockney accent.
His father wanted his first religious instruction to be of the communal
kind that he provided in the Sunday School. One might have thought that
he distrusted his wife's orthodoxy, so strongly did he disapprove of her
teaching Mark by himself in the nursery.
"It's the curse of the day," he used to assert, "this pampering of
children with an individual religion. They get into the habit of
thinking God is their special property and when they get older and find
he isn't, as often as not they give up religion altogether, because it
doesn't happen to fit in with the spoilt notions they got hold of as
infants."
Mark's bringing up was the only thing in which Mrs. Lidderdale did not
give way to her husband. She was determined that he should not have a
Cockney accent, and without irritating her husband any more than was
inevitable she was determined that he should not gobble down his
religion as a solid indigestible whole. On this point she even went so
far as directly to contradict the boy's father and argue that an
intelligent boy like Mark was likely to vomit up such an indigestible
whole later on, although she did not make use of such a coarse
expression.
"All mothers think their sons are the cleverest in the world."
"But, James, he _is_ an exceptionally clever little boy. Most observant,
with a splendid memory and plenty of imagination."
"Too much imagination. His nights are one long circus."
"But, James, you yourself have insisted so often on the personal Devil;
you can't expect a little boy of Mark's sensitiveness not to be
impressed by your picture."
"He has nothing to fear from the Devil, if he behaves himself. Haven't I
made that clear?"
Mrs. Lidderdale sighed.
"But, James dear, a child's mind is so literal, and though I know you
insist just as much on the reality of the Saints and Angels, a child's
mind is always most impressed by the things that have power to frighten
it."
"I want him to be frightened by Evil," declared James. "But go your own
way. Soften down everything in our Holy Religion that is ugly and
difficult. Sentimentalize the whole business. That's our modern method
in everything."
This was one of many arguments between husband and wife about the
religious education of their son.
Luckily for Mark his father had too many children, real children and
grown up children, in the Mission to be able to spend much time with his
son; and the teaching of Sunday morning, the clear-cut uncompromising
statement of hard religious facts in which the Missioner delighted, was
considerably toned down by his wife's gentle commentary.
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.
"But can God cry?" asked Mark incredulously.
"Oh, darling. God can do everything."
"But fancy crying! If I could do everything I shouldn't cry."
Mrs. Lidderdale perceived that her picture of the wise and compassionate
Eye would require elaboration.
"But do you only cry, Mark dear, when you can't do what you want? Those
are not nice tears. Don't you ever cry because you're sorry you've been
disobedient?"
"I don't think so, Mother," Mark decided after a pause. "No, I don't
think I cry because I'm sorry except when you're sorry, and that
sometimes makes me cry. Not always, though. Sometimes I'm glad you're
sorry. I feel so angry that I like to see you sad."
"But you don't often feel like that?"
"No, not often," he admitted.
"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some poor dog or cat
being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to cry?"
"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me, and I want to
kick the people who is doing it."
"Well, now you can understand why God sometimes gets angry. But even if
He gets angry," Mrs. Lidderdale went on, for she was rather afraid of
her son's capacity for logic, "God never lets His anger get the better
of Him. He is not only sorry for the poor dog, but He is also sorry for
the poor person who is ill-treating the dog. He knows that the poor
person has perhaps never been taught better, and then the Eye fills with
tears again."
"I think I like Jesus better than God," said Mark, going off at a
tangent. He felt that there were too many points of resemblance between
his own father and God to make it prudent to persevere with the
discussion. On the subject of his father he always found his mother
strangely uncomprehending, and the only times she was really angry with
him was when he refused out of his basic honesty to admit that he loved
his father.
"But Our Lord _is_ God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.
Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal
puzzle.
"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?"
Mark sighed.
"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in Kensington
Gardens?"
"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"
"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I want you to think
about the Holy Trinity."
"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he protested.
"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great mystery."
"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled
him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant
when she could not find her rolling-pin.
"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.
Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about
a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been
corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora
about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery
stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:"
Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity,
had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense
tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed
in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Cæsar
landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was
asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had
landed.
"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."
It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies
huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.
But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were
the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter
whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not
matter you were able to remember so much more easily. He could have
listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their
pods when the donkey was trotting with the boy Christ and His mother and
St. Joseph far away from cruel Herod into Egypt and how the noise of the
rattling seeds nearly betrayed their flight and how the plant was cursed
for evermore and made as hungry as a wolf. And the story of how the
robin tried to loosen one of the cruel nails so that the blood from the
poor Saviour drenched his breast and stained it red for evermore, and of
that other bird, the crossbill, who pecked at the nails until his beak
became crossed. He could listen for ever to the tale of St. Cuthbert who
was fed by ravens, of St. Martin who cut off his cloak and gave it to a
beggar, of St. Anthony who preached to the fishes, of St. Raymond who
put up his cowl and floated from Spain to Africa like a nautilus, of St.
Nicolas who raised three boys from the dead after they had been killed
and cut up and salted in a tub by a cruel man that wanted to eat them,
and of that strange insect called a Praying Mantis which alighted upon
St. Francis' sleeve and sang the _Nunc Dimittis_ before it flew away.
These were all stories that made bedtime sweet, stories to remember and
brood upon gratefully in the darkness of the night when he lay awake and
when, alas, other stories less pleasant to recall would obtrude
themselves.
Mark was not brought up luxuriously in the Lima Street Mission House,
and the scarcity of toys stimulated his imagination. All his toys were
old and broken, because he was only allowed to have the toys left over
at the annual Christmas Tree in the Mission Hall; and since even the
best of toys on that tree were the cast-offs of rich little children
whose parents performed a vicarious act of charity in presenting them to
the poor, it may be understood that Mark's share of these was not
calculated to spoil him. His most conspicuous toy was a box of mutilated
grenadiers, whose stands had been melted by their former owner in the
first rapture of discovering that lead melts in fire and who in
consequence were only able to stand up uncertainly when stuck into
sliced corks.
Luckily Mark had better armies of his own in the coloured lines that
crossed the blankets of his bed. There marched the crimson army of St.
George, the blue army of St. Andrew, the green army of St. Patrick, the
yellow army of St. David, the rich sunset-hued army of St. Denis, the
striped armies of St. Anthony and St. James. When he lay awake in the
golden light of the morning, as golden in Lima Street as anywhere else,
he felt ineffably protected by the Seven Champions of Christendom; and
sometimes even at night he was able to think that with their bright
battalions they were still marching past. He used to lie awake,
listening to the sparrows and wondering what the country was like and
most of all the sea. His father would not let him go into the country
until he was considered old enough to go with one of the annual school
treats. His mother told him that the country in Cornwall was infinitely
more beautiful than Kensington Gardens, and that compared with the sea
the Serpentine was nothing at all. The sea! He had heard it once in a
prickly shell, and it had sounded beautiful. As for the country he had
read a story by Mrs. Ewing called _Our Field_, and if the country was
the tiniest part as wonderful as that, well . . . meanwhile Dora brought
him back from the greengrocer's a pot of musk, which Mark used to sniff
so enthusiastically that Dora said he would sniff it right away if he
wasn't careful. Later on when Lima Street was fetid in the August sun he
gave this pot of musk to a little girl with a broken leg, and when she
died in September her mother put it on her grave.