HUSBAND AND WIFE
Mark was impressed by the appearance of the Bishop of Devizes; a portly
courtly man, he brought to the dingy little Mission House in Lima Street
that very sense of richness and grandeur which Mark had anticipated. The
Bishop's pink plump hands of which he made such use contrasted with the
lean, scratched, and grimy hands of his father; the Bishop's hair white
and glossy made his father's bristly, badly cut hair look more bristly
and worse cut than ever, and the Bishop's voice ripe and unctuous grew
more and more mellow as his father's became harsher and more assertive.
Mark found himself thinking of some lines in _The Jackdaw of Rheims_
about a cake of soap worthy of washing the hands of the Pope. The Pope
would have hands like the Bishop's, and Mark who had heard a great deal
about the Pope looked at the Bishop of Devizes with added interest.
"While we are at lunch, Mr. Lidderdale, you will I am sure pardon me for
referring again to our conversation of this morning from another point
of view--the point of view, if I may use so crude an expression, the
point of view of--er--expediency. Is it wise?"
"I'm not a wise man, my lord."
"Pardon me, my dear Mr. Lidderdale, but I have not completed my
question. Is it right? Is it right when you have an opportunity to
consolidate your great work . . . I use the adjective advisedly and with
no intention to flatter you, for when I had the privilege this morning
of accompanying you round the beautiful edifice that has been by your
efforts, by your self-sacrifice, by your eloquence, and by your devotion
erected to the glory of God . . . I repeat, Mr. Lidderdale, is it right
to fling all this away for the sake of a few--you will not
misunderstand me--if I call them a few excrescences?"
The Bishop helped himself to the cauliflower and paused to give his
rhetoric time to work.
"What you regard, my lord, as excrescences I regard as fundamentals of
our Holy Religion."
"Come, come, Mr. Lidderdale," the Bishop protested. "I do not think that
you expect to convince me that a ceremony like the--er--Asperges is a
fundamental of Christianity."
"I have taught my people that it is," said the Missioner. "In these days
when Bishops are found who will explain away the Incarnation, the
Atonement, the Resurrection of the Body, I hope you'll forgive a humble
parish priest who will explain away nothing and who would rather resign,
as I told you this morning, than surrender a single one of these
excrescences."
"I do not admit your indictment, your almost wholesale indictment of the
Anglican episcopate; but even were I to admit at lunch that some of my
brethren have been in their anxiety to keep the Man in the Street from
straying too far from the Church, have been as I was saying a little too
ready to tolerate a certain latitude of belief, even as I said just now
were that so, I do not think that you have any cause to suspect me of
what I should repudiate as gross infidelity. It was precisely because
the Bishop of London supposed that I should be more sympathetic with
your ideals that he asked me to represent him in this perfectly
informal--er--"
"Inquest," the Missioner supplied with a fierce smile.
The Bishop encouraged by the first sign of humour he had observed in the
bigoted priest hastened to smile back.
"Well, let us call it an inquest, but not, I hope, I sincerely and
devoutly hope, Mr. Lidderdale, not an inquest upon a dead body." Then
hurriedly he went on. "I may smile with the lips, but believe me, my
dear fellow labourer in the vineyard of Our Lord Jesus Christ, believe
me that my heart is sore at the prospect of your resignation. And the
Bishop of London, if I have to go back to him with such news, will be
pained, bitterly grievously pained. He admires your work, Mr.
Lidderdale, as much as I do, and I have no doubt that if it were not
for the unhappy controversies that are tearing asunder our National
Church, I say I do not doubt that he would give you a free hand. But how
can he give you a free hand when his own hands are tied by the
necessities of the situation? May I venture to observe that some of you
working priests are too ready to criticize men like myself who from no
desire of our own have been called by God to occupy a loftier seat in
the eyes of the world than many men infinitely more worthy. But to
return to the question immediately before us, let me, my dear Mr.
Lidderdale, do let me make to you a personal appeal for moderation. If
you will only consent to abandon one or two--I will not say excrescences
since you object to the word--but if you will only abandon one or two
purely ceremonial additions that cannot possibly be defended by any
rubric in the Book of Common Prayer, if you will only consent to do this
the Bishop of London will, I can guarantee, permit you a discretionary
latitude that he would scarcely be prepared to allow to any other priest
in his diocese. When I was called to be Bishop Suffragan of Devizes, Mr.
Lidderdale, do you suppose that I did not give up something? Do you
suppose that I was anxious to abandon some of the riches to which by my
reading of the Ornaments Rubric we are entitled? But I felt that I could
do something to help the position of my fellow priests struggling
against the prejudice of ignorance and the prey of political moves. In
twenty years from now, Mr. Lidderdale, you will be glad you took my
advice. Ceremonies that to-day are the privilege of the few will then be
the privilege of the many. Do not forget that by what I might almost
describe as the exorbitance of your demands you have gained more freedom
than any other priest in England. Be moderate. Do not resign. You will
be inhibited in every diocese; you will have the millstone of an unpaid
debt round your neck; you are a married man."
"That has nothing . . ." Lidderdale interrupted angrily.
"Pray let me finish. 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. I have already talked too much, and I see that your good
wife is looking anxiously at my plate. No more cauliflower, thank you,
Mrs. Lidderdale, no more of anything, thank you. Ah, there is a pudding
on the way? Dear me, that sounds very tempting, I'm afraid."
The Bishop now turned his attention entirely to Mrs. Lidderdale at the
other end of the table; the Missioner sat biting his nails; and Mark
wondered what all this conversation was about.
While the Bishop was waiting for his cab, which, he explained to his
hosts, was not so much a luxury as a necessity owing to his having to
address at three o'clock precisely a committee of ladies who were
meeting in Portman Square to discuss the dreadful condition of the
London streets, he laid a fatherly arm on the Missioner's threadbare
cassock.
"Take two or three days to decide, my dear Mr. Lidderdale. The Bishop of
London, who is always consideration personified, insisted that you were
to take two or three days to decide. Once more, for I hear my
cab-wheels, once more let me beg you to yield on the following points.
Let me just refer to my notes to be sure that I have not omitted
anything of importance. Oh, yes, the following points: no Asperges, no
unusual Good Friday services, except of course the Three Hours. _Is_ not
that enough?"
"The Three Hours I _would_ give up. It's a modern invention of the
Jesuits. The Adoration of the Cross goes back. . . ."
"Please, please, Mr. Lidderdale, my cab is at the door. We must not
embark on controversy. No celebrations without communicants. No direct
invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Saints. Oh, yes, and on
this the Bishop is particularly firm: no juggling with the _Gloria in
Excelsis_. Good-bye, Mr. Lidderdale, good-bye, Mrs. Lidderdale. Many
thanks for your delicious luncheon. Good-bye, young man. I had a little
boy like you once, but he is grown up now, and I am glad to say a
soldier."
The Bishop waved his umbrella, which looked much like a pastoral staff,
and lightly mounted the step of his cab.
"Was the Bishop cross with Father?" Mark inquired afterward; he could
find no other theory that would explain so much talking to his father,
so little talking by his father.
"Dearest, I'd rather you didn't ask questions about the Bishop," his
mother replied, and discerning that she was on the verge of one of those
headaches that while they lasted obliterated the world for Mark, he was
silent. Later in the afternoon Mr. Astill, the Vicar, came round to see
the Missioner and they had a long talk together, the murmur of which now
softer now louder was audible in Mark's nursery where he was playing by
himself with the cork-bottomed grenadiers. His instinct was to play a
quiet game, partly on account of his mother's onrushing headache, which
had already driven her to her room, partly because he knew that when his
father was closeted like this it was essential not to make the least
noise. So he tiptoed about the room and disposed the cork-bottomed
grenadiers as sentinels before the coal-scuttle, the washstand, and
other similar strongholds. Then he took his gun, the barrel of which,
broken before it was given to him, had been replaced by a thin bamboo
curtain-rod, and his finger on the trigger (a wooden match) he waited
for an invader. After ten minutes of statuesque silence Mark began to
think that this was a dull game, and he wished that his mother had not
gone to her room with a headache, because if she had been with him she
could have undoubtedly invented, so clever was she, a method of invading
the nursery without either the attackers or the defenders making any
noise about it. In her gentle voice she would have whispered of the
hordes that were stealthily creeping up the mountain side until Mark and
his vigilant cork-bottomed grenadiers would have been in a state of
suppressed exultation ready to die in defence of the nursery, to die
stolidly and silently at their posts with nobody else in the house aware
of their heroism.
"Rorke's Drift," said Mark to himself, trying to fancy that he heard in
the distance a Zulu _impi_ and whispering to his cork-bottomed
grenadiers to keep a good look-out. One of them who was guarding the
play-cupboard fell over on his face, and in the stillness the noise
sounded so loud that Mark did not dare cross the room to put him up
again, but had to assume that he had been shot where he stood. It was no
use. The game was a failure; Mark decided to look at _Battles of the
British Army_. He knew the pictures in every detail, and he could have
recited without a mistake the few lines of explanation at the bottom of
each page; but the book still possessed a capacity to thrill, and he
turned over the pages not pausing over Crecy or Poitiers or Blenheim or
Dettingen; but enjoying the storming of Badajoz with soldiers impaled on
_chevaux de frise_ and lingering over the rich uniforms and plumed
helmets in the picture of Joseph Bonaparte's flight at Vittoria. There
was too a grim picture of the Guards at Inkerman fighting in their
greatcoats with clubbed muskets against thousands of sinister dark green
Russians looming in the snow; and there was an attractive picture of a
regiment crossing the Alma and eating the grapes as they clambered up
the banks where they grew. Finally there was the Redan, a mysterious
wall, apparently of wickerwork, with bombs bursting and broken
scaling-ladders and dead English soldiers in the open space before it.
Mark did not feel that he wanted to look through the book again, and he
put it away, wondering how long that murmur of voices rising and falling
from his father's study below would continue. He wondered whether Dora
would be annoyed if he went down to the kitchen. She had been
discouraging on the last two or three occasions he had visited her, but
that had been because he could not keep his fingers out of the currants.
Fancy having a large red jar crammed full of currants on the floor of
the larder and never wanting to eat one! The thought of those currants
produced in Mark's mouth a craving for something sweet, and as quietly
as possible he stole off downstairs to quench this craving somehow or
other if it were only with a lump of sugar. But when he reached the
kitchen he found Dora in earnest talk with two women in bonnets, who
were nodding away and clicking their tongues with pleasure.
"Now whatever do you want down here?" Dora demanded ungraciously.
"I wanted," Mark paused. He longed to say "some currants," but he had
failed before, and he substituted "a lump of sugar." The two women in
bonnets looked at him and nodded their heads and clicked their tongues.
"Did you ever?" said one.
"Fancy! A lump of sugar! Goodness gracious!"
"What a sweet tooth!" commented the first.
The sugar happened to be close to Dora's hand on the kitchen-table, and
she gave him two lumps with the command to "sugar off back upstairs as
fast as you like." The craving for sweetness was allayed; but when Mark
had crunched up the two lumps on the dark kitchen-stairs, he was as
lonely as he had been before he left the nursery. He wished now that he
had not eaten up the sugar so fast, that he had taken it back with him
to the nursery and eked it out to wile away this endless afternoon. The
prospect of going back to the nursery depressed him; and he turned aside
to linger in the dining-room whence there was a view of Lima Street,
down which a dirty frayed man was wheeling a barrow and shouting for
housewives to bring out their old rags and bottles and bones. Mark felt
the thrill of trade and traffick, and he longed to be big enough to open
the window and call out that he had several rags and bottles and bones
to sell; but instead he had to be content with watching two
self-important little girls chaffer on behalf of their mothers, and go
off counting their pennies. The voice of the rag-and-bone man, grew
fainter and fainter round corners out of sight; Lima Street became as
empty and uninteresting as the nursery. Mark wished that a knife-grinder
would come along and that he would stop under the dining-room window so
that he could watch the sparks flying from the grindstone. Or that a
gipsy would sit down on the steps and begin to mend the seat of a chair.
Whenever he had seen those gipsy chair-menders at work, he had been out
of doors and afraid to linger watching them in case he should be stolen
and his face stained with walnut juice and all his clothes taken away
from him. But from the security of the dining-room of the Mission House
he should enjoy watching them. However, no gipsy came, nor anybody else
except women with men's caps pinned to their skimpy hair and little
girls with wrinkled stockings carrying jugs to and from the public
houses that stood at every corner.
Mark turned away from the window and tried to think of some game that
could be played in the dining-room. But it was not a room that fostered
the imagination. The carpet was so much worn that the pattern was now
scarcely visible and, looked one at it never so long and intently, it
was impossible to give it an inner life of its own that gradually
revealed itself to the fanciful observer. The sideboard had nothing on
it except a dirty cloth, a bottle of harvest burgundy, and half a dozen
forks and spoons. The cupboards on either side contained nothing edible
except salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, and oil. There was a plain deal
table without a drawer and without any interesting screws and levers to
make it grow smaller or larger at the will of the creature who sat
beneath it. The eight chairs were just chairs; the wallpaper was like
the inside of the bath, but alas, without the water; of the two
pictures, the one over the mantelpiece was a steel-engraving of the Good
Shepherd and the one over the sideboard was an oleograph of the Sacred
Heart. Mark knew every fly speck on their glasses, every discoloration
of their margins. While he was sighing over the sterility of the room,
he heard the door of his father's study open, and his father and Mr.
Astill do down the passage, both of them still talking unceasingly.
Presently the front door slammed, and Mark watched them walk away in the
direction of the new church. Here was an opportunity to go into his
father's study and look at some of the books. Mark never went in when
his father was there, because once his mother had said to his father:
"Why don't you have Mark to sit with you?"
And his father had answered doubtfully:
"Mark? Oh yes, he can come. But I hope he'll keep quiet, because I
shall be rather busy."
Mark had felt a kind of hostility in his father's manner which had
chilled him; and after that, whenever his mother used to suggest his
going to sit quietly in the study, he had always made some excuse not to
go. But if his father was out he used to like going in, because there
were always books lying about that were interesting to look at, and the
smell of tobacco smoke and leather bindings was grateful to the senses.
The room smelt even more strongly than usual of tobacco smoke this
afternoon, and Mark inhaled the air with relish while he debated which
of the many volumes he should pore over. There was a large Bible with
pictures of palm-trees and camels and long-bearded patriarchs surrounded
by flocks of sheep, pictures of women with handkerchiefs over their
mouths drawing water from wells, of Daniel in the den of lions and of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The frontispiece
was a coloured picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden surrounded
by amiable lions, benevolent tigers, ingratiating bears and leopards and
wolves. But more interesting than the pictures were some pages at the
beginning on which, in oval spaces framed in leaves and flowers, were
written the names of his grandfather and grandmother, of his father and
of his father's brother and sister, with the dates on which they were
born and baptized and confirmed. What a long time ago his father was
born! 1840. He asked his mother once about this Uncle Henry and Aunt
Helen; but she told him they had quarrelled with his father, and she had
said nothing more about them. Mark had been struck by the notion that
grown-up people could quarrel: he had supposed quarrelling to be
peculiar to childhood. Further, he noticed that Henry Lidderdale had
married somebody called Ada Prewbody who had died the same year; but
nothing was said in the oval that enshrined his father about his having
married anyone. He asked his mother the reason of this, and she
explained to him that the Bible had belonged to his grandfather who had
kept the entries up to date until he died, when the Bible came to his
eldest son who was Mark's father.
"Does it worry you, darling, that I'm not entered?" his mother had asked
with a smile.
"Well, it does rather," Mark had replied, and then to his great delight
she took a pen and wrote that James Lidderdale had married Grace Alethea
Trehawke on June 28th, 1880, at St. Tugdual's Church, Nancepean,
Cornwall, and to his even greater delight that on April 25th, 1881, Mark
Lidderdale had been born at 142 Lima Street, Notting Dale, London, W.,
and baptized on May 21st, 1881, at St. Wilfred's Mission Church, Lima
Street.
"Happy now?" she had asked.
Mark had nodded, and from that moment, if he went into his father's
study, he always opened the Family Bible and examined solemnly his own
short history wreathed in forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley.
This afternoon, after looking as usual at the entry of his birth and
baptism written in his mother's pretty pointed handwriting, he searched
for Dante's _Inferno_ illustrated by Gustave Doré, a large copy of which
had recently been presented to his father by the Servers and Choir of
St. Wilfred's. The last time he had been looking at this volume he had
caught a glimpse of a lot of people buried in the ground with only their
heads sticking out, a most attractive picture which he had only just
discovered when he had heard his father's footsteps and had closed the
book in a hurry.
Mark tried to find this picture, but the volume was large and the
pictures on the way of such fascination that it was long before he found
it. When he did, he thought it even more satisfying at a second glance,
although he wished he knew what they were all doing buried in the ground
like that. Mark was not satisfied with horrors even after he had gone
right through the Dante; in fact, his appetite was only whetted, and he
turned with relish to a large folio of Chinese tortures, in the coloured
prints of which a feature was made of blood profusely outpoured and
richly tinted. One picture of a Chinaman apparently impervious to the
pain of being slowly sawn in two held him entranced for five minutes.
It was growing dusk by now, and as it needed the light of the window to
bring out the full quality of the blood, Mark carried over the big
volume, propped it up in a chair behind the curtains, and knelt down to
gloat over these remote oriental barbarities without pausing to remember
that his father might come back at any moment, and that although he had
never actually been forbidden to look at this book, the thrill of
something unlawful always brooded over it. Suddenly the door of the
study opened and Mark sat transfixed by terror as completely as the
Chinaman on the page before him was transfixed by a sharpened bamboo;
then he heard his mother's voice, and before he could discover himself a
conversation between her and his father had begun of which Mark
understood enough to know that both of them would be equally angry if
they knew that he was listening. Mark was not old enough to escape
tactfully from such a difficult situation, and the only thing he could
think of doing was to stay absolutely still in the hope that they would
presently go out of the room and never know that he had been behind the
curtain while they were talking.
"I didn't mean you to dress yourself and come downstairs," his father
was saying ungraciously.
"My dear, I should have come down to tea in any case, and I was anxious
to hear the result of your conversation with Mr. Astill."
"You can guess, can't you?" said the husband.
Mark had heard his father speak angrily before; but he had never heard
his voice sound like a growl. He shrank farther back in affright behind
the curtains.
"You're going to give way to the Bishop?" the wife asked gently.
"Ah, you've guessed, have you? You've guessed by my manner? You've
realized, I hope, what this resolution has cost me and what it's going
to cost me in the future. I'm a coward. I'm a traitor. _Before the cock
crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice._ A coward and a traitor."
"Neither, James--at any rate to me."
"To you," the husband scoffed. "I should hope not to you, considering
that it is on your account I am surrendering. Do you suppose that if I
were free, as to serve God I ought to be free, do you suppose then that
I should give up my principles like this? Never! But because I'm a
married priest, because I've a wife and family to support, my hands are
tied. Oh, yes, Astill was very tactful. He kept insisting on my duty to
the parish; but did he once fail to rub in the position in which I
should find myself if I did resign? No bishop would license me; I should
be inhibited in every diocese--in other words I should starve. The
beliefs I hold most dear, the beliefs I've fought for all these years
surrendered for bread and butter! _Woman, what have I to do with thee?_
Our Blessed Lord could speak thus even to His Blessed Mother. But I! _He
that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he
that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of
me._"
The Missioner threw himself into his worn armchair and stared into the
unlighted grate. His wife came behind him and laid a white hand upon his
forehead; but her touch seemed to madden him, and he sprang away from
her.
"No more of that," he cried. "If I was weak when I married you I will
never be weak again. You have your child. Let that be enough for your
tenderness. I want none of it myself. Do you hear? I wish to devote
myself henceforth to my parish. My parish! The parish of a coward and a
traitor."
Mark heard his mother now speaking in a voice that was strange to him,
in a voice that did not belong to her, but that seemed to come from far
away, as if she were lost in a snowstorm and calling for help.
"James, if you feel this hatred for me and for poor little Mark, it is
better that we leave you. We can go to my father in Cornwall, and you
will not feel hampered by the responsibility of having to provide for
us. After what you have said to me, after the way you have looked at me,
I could never live with you as your wife again."
"That sounds a splendid scheme," said the Missioner bitterly. "But do
you think I have so little logic that I should be able to escape from my
responsibilities by planting them on the shoulders of another? No, I
sinned when I married you. I did not believe and I do not believe that a
priest ought to marry; but having done so I must face the situation and
do my duty to my family, so that I may also do my duty to God."
"Do you think that God will accept duty offered in that spirit? If he
does, he is not the God in Whom I believe. He is a devil that can be
propitiated with burnt offerings," exclaimed the woman passionately.
"Do not blaspheme," the priest commanded.
"Blaspheme!" she echoed. "It is you, James, who have blasphemed nature
this afternoon. You have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
may you be forgiven by your God. I can never forgive you."
"You're becoming hysterical."
"How dare you say that? How dare you? I have loved you, James, with all
the love that I could give you. 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."
During this storm of words Mark had been thinking how wicked it was of
his father to upset his mother like that when she had a headache. He had
thought also how terrible it was that he should apparently be the cause
of this frightening quarrel. Often in Lima Street he had heard tales of
wives who were beaten by their husbands and now he supposed that his own
mother was going to be beaten. Suddenly he heard her crying. This was
too much for him; he sprang from his hiding place and ran to put his
arms round her in protection.
"Mother, mother, don't cry. You are bad, you are bad," he told his
father. "You are wicked and bad to make her cry."
"Have you been in the room all this time?" his father asked.
Mark did not even bother to nod his head, so intent was he upon
consoling his mother. She checked her emotion when her son put his arms
round her neck, and whispered to him not to speak. It was almost dark in
the study now, and what little light was still filtering in at the
window from the grey nightfall was obscured by the figure of the
Missioner gazing out at the lantern spire of his new church. There was a
tap at the door, and Mrs. Lidderdale snatched up the volume that Mark
had let fall upon the floor when he emerged from the curtains, so that
when Dora came in to light the gas and say that tea was ready, nothing
of the stress of the last few minutes was visible. The Missioner was
looking out of the window at his new church; his wife and son were
contemplating the picture of an impervious Chinaman suspended in a cage
where he could neither stand nor sit nor lie.