Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗

definite impression,

beyond those of a new voice in church and an extraordinary bashfulness

before the hamlet housewives; but two or three stayed longer and became,

for a time, part of the life of the parish. There was Mr. Dallas, who

was said to be ‘in a decline’. A pale, thin wraith of a man, who, in

foggy weather wore a respirator, which looked like a heavy black

moustache. Laura remembered him chiefly because when she was awarded the

prize for Scripture he congratulated her—the first time she was ever

congratulated upon anything in her life. On his next visit to her home

he asked to see the prize prayerbook, and when she brought it, said:

‘The binding is calf—my favourite binding—but it is very susceptible

to damp. You must keep it in a room with a fire.’ He was talking a

language foreign to the children, who knew nothing of bindings or

editions, a book to them being simply a book; but his expression and the

gentle caressing way in which he turned the pages, told Laura that he,

too, was a book-lover.

 

After he had left came Mr. Alport; a big, fat-faced young man, who had

been a medical student. He kept a small dispensary at his lodgings and

it was his delight to doctor any one who was ailing, both advice and

medicine being gratis. As usual, supply created demand. Before he came,

illness had been rare in the hamlet; now, suddenly, nearly every one had

something the matter with them. ‘My pink pills’, ‘my little tablets’,

‘my mixture’, and ‘my lotion’ became as common in conversation as

potatoes or pig’s food. People asked each other how their So-and-So was

when they met, and, barely waiting for an answer, plunged into a

description of their own symptoms.

 

Mr. Alport complained to the children’s father that the hamlet people

were ignorant, and some of them certainly were, on the subjects in which

he was enlightened. One woman particularly. On a visit to her house he

noticed that one of her children, a tall, thin, girl of eleven or twelve

was looking rather pale. ‘She is growing too fast, I expect,’ he

remarked. ‘I must give her a tonic’; which he did. But she was not

allowed to take it. ‘No, she ain’t a goin’ to take that stuff,’ her

mother told the neighbours. ‘He said she was growin’ too tall, an’ it’s

summat to stunt her. I shan’t let a child o’ mine be stunted. Oh, no!’

 

When he left the place and the supply of physic failed, all the invalids

forgot their ailments. But he left one lasting memorial. Before his

coming, the road round the Rise in winter had been a quagmire. ‘Mud up

to the hocks, and splashes up to the neck,’ as they said. Mr. Alport,

after a few weeks’ experience of mud-caked boots and mud-stained

trouser-ends, decided to do something. So, perhaps in imitation of

Ruskin’s road-making at Oxford, he begged cartloads of stones from the

farmer and, assisted by the hamlet youths and boys, began, on light

evenings, to work with his own hands building a raised footpath. Laura

always remembered him best breaking stones and shovelling mud in his

beautifully white shirt-sleeves and red braces, his clerical coat and

collar hung on a bush, his big, smooth face damp with perspiration and

his spectacles gleaming, as he urged on his fellow workers.

 

Neither of the curates mentioned ever spoke of religion out of church.

Mr. Dallas was far too shy, and Mr. Alport was too busy ministering to

peoples’ bodies to have time to spare for their souls. Mr. Marley, who

came next, considered their souls his special care.

 

He was surely as strange a curate as ever came to a remote agricultural

parish. An old man with a long, grey beard which he buttoned inside his

long, close-fitting, black overcoat. Fervour and many fast days had worn

away his flesh, and he had hollow cheeks and deep-set, dark eyes which

glowed with the flame of fanaticism. He was a fanatic where his Church

and his creed were concerned; otherwise he was the kindest and most

gentle of men. Too good for this world, some of the women said when they

came to know him.

 

He was what is now known as an Anglo-Catholic. Sunday after Sunday he

preached ‘One Catholic Apostolic Church’ and ‘our Holy Religion’ to his

congregation of rustics. But he did not stop at that: he dealt often

with the underlying truths of religion, preaching the gospel of love and

forgiveness of sins and the brotherhood of man. He was a wonderful

preacher. No listener nodded or ‘lost the thread’ when he was in the

pulpit, and though most of his congregation might not be able to grasp

or agree with his doctrine, all responded to the love, sympathy, and

sincerity of the preacher and every eye was upon him from his first word

to his last. How such a preacher came to be in old age but a curate in a

remote country parish is a mystery. His eloquence and fervour would have

filled a city church.

 

The Rector by that time was bedridden, and a scholarly, easy-going,

middle-aged son was deputizing for him; otherwise Mr. Marley would have

had less freedom in the church and parish. When officiating, he openly

genuflected to the altar, made the sign of the cross before and after

his own silent devotions, made known his willingness to hear

confessions, and instituted daily services and weekly instead of monthly

Communion.

 

This in many parishes would have caused scandal; I but the Fordlow

people rather enjoyed the change, excepting the Methodists, who, quite

rightly according to their tenets, left off going to church, and a few

other extremists who said he was ‘a Pope’s man’. He even made a few

converts. Miss Ellison was one, and two others, oddly enough, were a

navvy and his wife who had recently settled near the hamlet. The latter

had formerly been a rowdy couple and it was strange to see them, all

cleaned up and dressed in their best on a weekday evening, quietly

crossing the allotments on their way to confession.

 

Of course, Laura’s father said they were ‘after what they could get out

of the poor old fool’. That couple almost certainly were not; but others

may have been, for he was a most generous man, who gave with both hands,

‘and running over’, as the hamlet people said. Not only to the sick

and needy, although those were his first care, but to anybody he thought

wanted or wished for a thing or who would be pleased with it. He gave

the schoolboys two handsome footballs and the girls a skipping-rope

each—fine affairs with painted handles and little bells, such as they

had never seen in their lives before. When winter came he bought three

of the poorest girls warm, grey ulsters, such as were then fashionable,

to go to church in. When he found Edmund loved Scott’s poems, but only

knew extracts from them, he bought him the Complete Poetical Works,

and, that Laura might not feel neglected, presented her at the same time

with The Imitation of Christ, daintily bound in blue and silver. These

were only a few of his known kindnesses; there were signs and rumours of

dozens of others, and no doubt many more were quite unknown except to

himself and the recipient.

 

He once gave the very shoes off his feet to a woman who had pleaded that

she could not go to church for want of a pair, and had added, meaningly,

that she took a large size and that a man’s pair of light shoes would do

very well. He gave her the better of the two pairs he possessed, which

he happened to be wearing, stipulating that he should be allowed to walk

home in them. The wearing of them home was a concession to convention,

for he would have enjoyed walking barefoot over the flints as a follower

of his beloved St. Francis of Assisi, towards whom he had a special

devotion twenty years before the cult of the Little Poor Man became

popular. He gave away so much that he could only have kept just enough

to keep himself in bare necessaries. His black overcoat, which he wore

in all weathers, was threadbare, and the old cassock he wore indoors was

green and falling to pieces.

 

Laura’s mother, whose religion was as plain and wholesome as the food

she cooked, had little sympathy with his ‘bowings and crossings’; but

she was genuinely fond of the old man and persuaded him to look in for a

cup of tea whenever he visited the hamlet. Over this simple meal he

would tell the children about his own childhood. He had been the bad boy

of the nursery, he said, selfish and self-willed and given to fits of

passionate anger. Once he had hurled a plate at his sister (here the

children’s mother frowned and shook her head at him and that story

trailed off lamely); but on another day he told them of his famous ride,

which ever after ranked with them beside Dick Turpin’s.

 

The children of his family had a pony which they were supposed to ride

in turn; but, in time, he so monopolized it that it was known as his

Moppet, and once, when his elders had insisted that another brother

should ride that day, he had waited until the party had gone, then taken

his mother’s riding horse out of the stable, mounted it with the help of

a stable boy who had believed him when he said he had permission to do

so, and gone careering across country, giving the horse its head, for he

had no control over it. They went like the wind, over rough grass and

under trees, where any low-hanging bough might have killed him, and, at

that point in the story, the teller leaned forward with such a flush on

his cheek and such a light in his eye that, for one moment, Laura could

almost see in the ageing man the boy he had once been. The ride ended in

broken knees for the horse and a broken crown for the rider. ‘And a

mercy ‘twas nothing worse,’ the children’s mother commented.

 

The moral of this story was the danger of selfish recklessness; but he

told it with such relish and so much fascinating detail that had the end

house children had access to anybody’s stable they would have tried to

imitate him. Edmund suggested they should try to mount Polly, the

innkeeper’s old pony, and they even went to the place where she was

pegged out to reconnoitre; but Polly had only to rattle her tethering

chain to convince them they were not cut out for Dick Turpins.

 

All was going well and Mr. Marley was talking of teaching Edmund Latin,

when, in an unfortunate moment, finding the children’s father at home,

he taxed him with neglect of his religious duties. The father, who never

went to church at all and spoke of himself as an agnostic, resented this

and a quarrel arose, which ended in Mr. Marley being told never to

darken that door again. So there were no more of those pleasant teas and

talks, although he still remained a kind friend and would sometimes come

to the cottage door to speak to the mother, scrupulously remaining

outside on the doorstep. Then, in a few months, the Rector died, there

were changes, and Mr. Marley left the parish.

 

Five or six years afterwards, when Edmund and Laura were both out in the

world, their mother, sitting by her fire one gloomy winter afternoon,

heard a knock at her door and opened it to find Mr. Marley on her

doorstep. Ignoring