Lark Rise to Candleford (32 page)

Another favourite subject was the supreme rightness of the
social order as it then existed. God, in His infinite wisdom, had appointed a
place for every man, woman, and child on this earth and it was their bounden duty
to remain contentedly in their niches. A gentleman might seem to some of his
listeners to have a pleasant, easy life, compared to theirs at field labour;
but he had his duties and responsibilities, which would be far beyond their
capabilities. He had to pay taxes, sit on the Bench of Magistrates, oversee his
estate, and keep up his position by entertaining. Could they do these things?
No. Of course they could not; and he did not suppose that a gentleman could cut
as straight a furrow or mow or thatch a rick as expertly as they could. So let
them be thankful and rejoice in their physical strength and the bounty of the farmer,
who found them work on his land and paid them wages with his money.

Less frequently, he would preach eternal punishment for sin,
and touch, more lightly, upon the bliss reserved for those who worked hard,
were contented with their lot and showed proper respect to their superiors. The
Holy Name was seldom mentioned, nor were human griefs or joys, or the kindly
human feelings which bind man to man. It was not religion he preached, but a
narrow code of ethics, imposed from above upon the lower orders, which, even in
those days, was out of date.

Once and once only did inspiration move him. It was the
Sunday after the polling for the General Election of 1886, and he had begun
preaching one of his usual sermons on the duty to social superiors, when,
suddenly something, perhaps the memory of the events of the past week, seemed
to boil up within him. Flushed with anger—'righteous anger', he would have called
it—and his frosty blue eyes flashing like swords, he cast himself forward
across the ledge of his pulpit and roared: 'There are some among you who have
lately forgotten that duty, and we know the cause, the bloody cause!'

Laura shivered. Bad language in church! and from the Rector!
But, later in life, she liked to think that she had lived early enough to have heard
a mild and orthodox Liberalism denounced from the pulpit as 'a bloody cause'.
It lent her the dignity of an historical survival.

The sermon over, the people sprang to their feet like
Jacks-in-a-box. With what gusto they sang the evening hymn, and how their lungs
expanded and their tongues wagged as they poured out of the churchyard! Not
that they resented anything that was said in the Rector's sermons. They did not
listen to them. After the Bloody Cause sermon Laura tried to find out how her
elders had reacted to it; but all she could learn was: 'I seems to have lost
the thread just then,' or, more frankly, 'I must've been nodding'; the most she
could get was one woman's, 'My! didn't th' old parson get worked up today!'

Some of them went to church to show off their best clothes
and to see and criticize those of their neighbours; some because they loved to
hear their own voices raised in the hymns, or because churchgoing qualified them
for the Christmas blankets and coals; and a few to worship. There was at least
one saint and mystic in that parish and there were several good Christian men
and women, but the majority regarded religion as something proper to extreme
old age, for which they themselves had as yet no use.

'About time he wer' thinkin' about his latter end,' they
would say of one who showed levity when his head and beard were white, or of
anybody who was ill or afflicted. Once a hunchback from another village came to
a pig feast and distinguished himself by getting drunk and using bad language,
and, because he was a cripple, his conduct was looked upon with horror. Laura's
mother was distressed when she heard about it. 'To think of a poor afflicted
creature like that cursing and swearing,' she sighed. 'Terrible! Terrible!' and
when Edmund, then about ten, looked up from his book and said calmly, 'I should
think if anybody's got a right to swear it's a man with a back like that,' she
told him he was nearly as bad to say such a thing.

The Catholic minority at the inn was treated with respect,
for a landlord could do no wrong, especially the landlord of a free house where
such excellent beer was on tap. On Catholicism at large, the Lark Rise people
looked with contemptuous intolerance, for they regarded it as a kind of
heathenism, and what excuse could there be for that in a Christian country?
When, early in life, the end house children asked what Roman Catholics were,
they were told they were 'folks as prays to images', and further inquiries
elicited the information that they also worshipped the Pope, a bad old man,
some said in league with the Devil. Their genuflexions in church and their
'playin' wi' beads' were described as 'monkey tricks'. People who openly said
they had no use for religion themselves became quite heated when the Catholics
were mentioned. Yet the children's grandfather, when the sound of the Angelus bell
was borne on the wind from the chapel in the next village, would take off his
hat and, after a moment's silence, murmur, 'In my Father's house are many
mansions.' It was all very puzzling.

Later on, when they came to associate more with the other
children, on the way to Sunday school they would see horses and traps loaded
with families from many miles around on their way to the Catholic church in the
next village. 'There go the old Catholics!' the children would cry, and run
after the vehicles shouting: 'Old Catholics! Old lick the cats!' until they had
to fall behind for want of breath. Sometimes a lady in one of the high dogcarts
would smile at them forbearingly, otherwise no notice was taken.

The horses and traps were followed at a distance by the young
men and big boys of the families on foot. Always late in starting, yet always
in time for the service, how they legged it! The children took good care not to
call out after them, for they knew, whatever their haste, the boy Catholics
would have time to turn back and cuff them. It had happened before. So they let
them get on for quite a distance before they started to mock their gait and
recite in a snuffling sing-song:

'O dear Father, I've come to confess.'

'Well, my child, and what have you done?'

'O dear Father. I've killed the cat.'

'Well, my child, and what about that?'

'O dear Father, what shall I do?'

'You kiss me and I'll kiss you.'

— a gem which had probably a political origin, for the seeds
of their ignorant bigotry must have been sown at some time. Yet, strange to
say, some of those very children still said by way of a prayer when they went to
bed:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

Bless the bed where I lie on.

Four corners have I to my bed;

At them four angels nightly spread.

One to watch and one to pray

And one to take my soul away.

At that time many words, phrases, and shreds of customs
persisted which faded out before the end of the century. When Laura was a child,
some of the older mothers and the grandmothers still threatened naughty
children with the name of Cromwell. 'If you ain't a good gal, old Oliver Crummell'll
have 'ee!' they would say, or 'Here comes old Crummell!' just as the mothers of
southern England threatened their children with Napoleon. Napoleon was
forgotten there; being far from the sea-coast, such places had never known the
fear of invasion. But the armies of the Civil War had fought ten miles to the
eastward, and the name still lingered.

The Methodists were a class apart. Provided they did not
attempt to convert others, religion in them was tolerated. Every Sunday evening
they held a service in one of their cottages, and, whenever she could obtain
permission at home, it was Laura's delight to attend. This was not because the
service appealed to her; she really preferred the church service; but because
Sunday evening at home was a trying time, with the whole family huddled round
the fire and Father reading and no one allowed to speak and barely to move.

Permission was hard to get, for her father did not approve of
'the ranters'; nor did he like Laura to be out after dark. But one time out of
four or five when she asked, he would grunt and nod, and she would dash off
before her mother could raise any objection. Sometimes Edmund would follow her,
and they would seat themselves on one of the hard, white-scrubbed benches in
the meeting house, prepared to hear all that was to be heard and see all that
was to be seen.

The first thing that would have struck any one less
accustomed to the place was its marvellous cleanliness. The cottage walls were
whitewashed and always fresh and clean. The everyday furniture had been carried
out to the barn to make way for the long white wooden benches, and before the
window with its drawn white blind stood a table covered with a linen cloth, on
which were the lamp, a large Bible, and a glass of water for the visiting
preacher, whose seat was behind it. Only the clock and a pair of red china dogs
on the mantelpiece remained to show that on other days people lived and cooked
and ate in the room. A bright fire always glowed in the grate and there was a
smell compounded of lavender, lamp-oil, and packed humanity.

The man of the house stood in the doorway to welcome each
arrival with a handshake and a whispered 'God bless you!' His wife, a small
woman with a slight spinal curvature which thrust her head forward and gave her
a resemblance to an amiable-looking frog, smiled her welcome from her seat near
the fire-place. In twos and threes, the brethren filed in and took their
accustomed places on the hard, backless benches. With them came a few
neighbours, not of their community, but glad to have somewhere to go,
especially on wet or cold Sundays.

In the dim lamplight dark Sunday suits and sad-coloured
Sunday gowns massed together in a dark huddle against the speckless background,
and out of it here and there eyes and cheeks caught the light as the brethren
smiled their greetings to each other.

If the visiting preacher happened to be late, which he often
was with a long distance to cover on foot, the host would give out a hymn from Sankey
and Moody's Hymn-Book, which would be sung without musical accompaniment to one
of the droning, long-drawn-out tunes peculiar to the community. At other times
one of the brethren would break into extempore prayer, in the course of which
he would retail the week's news so far as it affected the gathering, prefacing
each statement with 'Thou knowest', or 'As thou knowest, Lord'. It amused Laura
and Edmund to hear old Mr. Barker telling God that it had not rained for a
fortnight and that his carrot bed was getting 'mortal dry'; or that swine fever
had broken out at a farm four miles away and that his own pig didn't seem 'no
great shakes'; or that somebody had mangled his wrist in a turnip cutter and
had come out of hospital, but found it still stiff; for, as they said to each
other afterwards, God must know already, as He knew everything. But these
one-sided conversations with the Deity were conducted in a spirit of simple
faith. 'Cast your care upon Him' was a text they loved and took literally. To
them God was a loving Father who loved to listen to His children's confidences.
No trouble was too small to bring to 'the Mercy Seat'.

Sometimes a brother or a sister would stand up to 'testify',
and then the children opened their eyes and ears, for a misspent youth was the conventional
prelude to conversion and who knew what exciting transgressions might not be
revealed. Most of them did not amount to much. One would say that before he
'found the Lord' he had been 'a regular beastly drunkard'; but it turned out
that he had only taken a pint too much once or twice at a village feast;
another claimed to have been a desperate poacher, 'a wild, lawless sort o' chap';
he had snared an occasional rabbit. A sister confessed that in her youth she
had not only taken a delight in decking out her vile body, forgetting that it was
only the worm that perishes; but, worse still, she had imperilled her immortal
soul by dancing on the green at feasts and club outings, keeping it up on one
occasion until midnight.

Such mild sins were not in themselves exciting, for plenty of
people were still doing such things and they could be observed at first hand; but
they were described with such a wealth of detail and with such self-condemnation
that the listener was for the moment persuaded that he or she was gazing on the
chief of sinners. One man, especially, claimed that pre-eminence. 'I wer' the
chief of sinners,' he would cry; 'a real bad lot, a Devil's disciple. Cursing
and swearing, drinking and drabbing, there were nothing bad as I didn't do.
Why, would you believe it, in my sinful pride, I sinned against the Holy Ghost.
Aye, that I did,' and the awed silence would be broken by the groans and 'God
have mercy's of his hearers while he looked round to observe the effect of his
confession before relating how he 'came to the Lord'.

No doubt the second part of his discourse was more edifying
than the first, but the children never listened to it; they were too engrossed
in speculations as to the exact nature of his sin against the Holy Ghost, and
wondering if he were really as thoroughly saved as he thought himself; for,
after all, was not that sin unpardonable? He might yet burn in hell. Terrible
yet fascinating thought!

But the chief interest centred in the travelling preacher,
especially if he were a stranger who had not been there before. Would he preach
the Word, or would he be one of those who rambled on for an hour or more, yet
said nothing? Most of these men, who gave up their Sunday rest and walked miles
to preach at the village meeting houses, were farm labourers or small
shopkeepers. With a very few exceptions they were poor, uneducated men. 'The
blind leading the blind,' Laura's father said of them. They may have been unenlightened
in some respects, but some of them had gifts no education could have given.
There was something fine about their discourses, as they raised their voices in
rustic eloquence and testified to the cleansing power of 'the Blood',
forgetting themselves and their own imperfections of speech in their ardour.