CHATSEA
When Mark had been exactly a week at Chatsea he celebrated his eighteenth birthday by writing a long letter to the Rector of Wych:
St. Agnes' House,
Keppel Street,
Chatsea.
St. Mark's Day.
My dear Rector,
Thank you very much for sending me the money. I've handed it over to a splendid fellow called Gurney who keeps all the accounts (private or otherwise) in the Mission House. Poor chap, he's desperately ill with asthma, and nobody thinks he can live much longer. He suffers tortures, particularly at night, and as I sleep in the next room I can hear him.
You mustn't think me inconsiderate because I haven't written sooner, but I wanted to wait until I had seen a bit of this place before I wrote to you so that you might have some idea what I was doing and be able to realize that it is the one and only place where I ought to be at the moment.
But first of all before I say anything about Chatsea I want to try to express a little of what your kindness has meant to me during the last two years. I look back at myself just before my sixteenth birthday when I was feeling that I should have to run away to sea or do something mad in order to escape that solicitor's office, and I simply gasp! What and where should I be now if it hadn't been for you? You have always made light of the burden I must have been, and though I have tried to show you my gratitude I'm afraid it hasn't been very successful. I'm not being very successful now in putting it into words. I know my failure to gain a scholarship at Oxford has been a great disappointment to you, especially after you had worked so hard yourself to coach me. Please don't be anxious about my letting my books go to the wall here. I had a talk about this with Father Rowley, who insisted that anything I am allowed to do in the district must only be done when I have a good morning's work with my books behind me. I quite realize the importance of a priest's education. One of the assistant priests here, a man called Snaith, took a good degree at Cambridge both in classics and theology, so I shall have somebody to keep me on the lines. If I stay here three years and then have two years at Glastonbury I don't honestly think that I shall start off much handicapped by having missed both public school and university. I expect you're smiling to read after one week of my staying here three years! But I assure you that the moment I sat down to supper on the evening of my arrival I felt at home. I think at first they all thought I was an eager young Ritualist, but when they found that they didn't get any rises out of ragging me, they shut up.
This house is a most extraordinary place. It is an old Congregational chapel with a gallery all round which has been made into cubicles, scarcely one of which is ever empty or ever likely to be empty so far as I can see! I should think it must be rather like what the guest house of a monastery used to be like in the old days before the Reformation. The ground floor of the chapel has been turned into a gymnasium, and twice a week the apparatus is cleared away and we have a dance. Every other evening it's used furiously by Father Rowley's "boys." They're such a jolly lot, and most of them splendid gymnasts. Quite a few have become professional acrobats since they opened the gymnasium. The first morning after my arrival I asked Father Rowley if he'd got anything special for me to do and he told me to catalogue the books in his library. Everybody laughed at this, and I thought at first that some joke was intended, but when I got to his room I found it really was in utter confusion with masses of books lying about everywhere. So I set to work pretty hard and after about three days I got them catalogued and in good order. When I told him I had finished he looked very surprised, and a solemn visit of inspection was ordered. As the room was looking quite tidy at last, I didn't mind. I've realized since that Father Rowley always sets people the task of cataloguing and arranging his books when he doubts if they are really worth their salt, and now he complains that I have spoilt one of his best ordeals for slackers. I said to him that he needn't be afraid because from what I could see of the way he treated books they would be just as untidy as ever in another week. Everybody laughed, though I was afraid at first they might consider it rather cheek my talking like this, but you've got to stand up for yourself here because there never was such a place for turning a man inside out. It's a real discipline, and I think if I manage to deserve to stay here three years I shall have the right to feel I've had the finest training for Holy Orders anybody could possibly have.
You know enough about Father Rowley yourself to understand how impossible it would be for me to give any impression of his personality in a letter. I have never felt so strongly the absolute goodness of anybody. I suppose that some of the great mediæval saints like St. Francis and St. Anthony of Padua must have been like that. One reads about them and what they did, but the facts one reads don't really tell anything. I always feel that what we really depend on is a kind of tradition of their absolute saintliness handed on from the people who experienced it. I suppose in a way the same applies to Our Lord. I always feel it wouldn't matter a bit to me if the four Gospels were proved to be forgeries to-morrow, because I should still be convinced that Our Lord was God. I know this is a platitude, but I don't think until I met Father Rowley that I ever realized the force and power that goes with exceptional goodness. There are so many people who are good because they were born good. Richard Ford, for example, he couldn't have ever been anything else but good, but I always feel that people like him remain practically out of reach of the ordinary person and that the goodness is all their own and dies with them just as it was born with them. What I feel about a man like Father Rowley is that he probably had a tremendous fight to be good. Of course, I may be perfectly wrong and he may have had no fight at all. I know one of the people at the Mission House told me that, though there is nobody who likes smoking better than he or more enjoys a pint of beer with his dinner, he has given up both at St. Agnes merely to set an example to weak people. I feel that his goodness was with such energy fought for that it now exists as a kind of complete thing and will go on existing when Father Rowley himself is dead. I begin to understand the doctrine of the treasury of merit. I remember you once told me how grateful I ought to be to God because I had apparently escaped the temptations that attack most boys. I am grateful; but at the same time I can't claim any merit for it! The only time in my life when I might have acquired any merit was when I was at Haverton House. Instead of doing that, I just dried up, and if I hadn't had that wonderful experience at Whitsuntide in Meade Cantorum church nearly three years ago I should be spiritually dead by now.
This is a very long letter, and I don't seem to have left myself any time to tell you about St. Agnes' Church. It reminds me of my father's mission church in Lima Street, and oddly enough a new church is being built almost next door just as one was being built in Lima Street. I went to the children's Mass last Sunday, and I seemed to see him walking up and down the aisle in his alb, and I thought to myself that I had never once asked you to say Mass for his soul. Will you do so now next time you say a black Mass? This is a wretched letter, and it doesn't succeed in the least in expressing what I owe to you and what I already owe to Father Rowley. I used to think that the Sacred Heart was a rather material device for attracting the multitude, but I'm beginning to realize in the atmosphere of St. Agnes' that it is a gloriously simple devotion and that it is human nature's attempt to express the inexpressible. I'll write to you again next week. Please give my love to everybody at the Rectory.
Always your most affectionate
Mark.
Father Rowley had been at St. Agnes' seven or eight years when Mark found himself attached to the Mission, in which time he had transformed the district completely. It was a small parish (actually of course it was not a parish at all, although it was fast qualifying to become one) of something over a thousand small houses, few of which were less than a century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of its overcrowded and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always in view, and the windows of the pawnbrokers were filled with the relics of long voyages, with idols and large shells, with savage weapons and the handiwork of remote islands.
When Mark came to live in Keppel Street, most of the brothels and many of the public houses had been eliminated from the district, and in their place flourished various clubs and guilds. The services in the church were crowded: there was a long roll of communicants; the civilization of the city of God was visible in this Chatsea slum. One or two of the lay helpers used to horrify Mark with stories of early days there, and when he seemed inclined to regret that he had arrived so late upon the scene, they used to tease him about his missionary spirit.
"If he can't reform the people," said Cartwright, one of the lay helpers, a tall thin young man with a long nose and a pleasant smile, "he still has us to reform."
"Come along, Mark Anthony," said Warrender, another lay helper, who after working for seven years among the poor had at last been charily accepted by the Bishop for ordination. "Come along. Why don't you try your hand on us?"
"You people seem to think," said Mark, "that I've got a mania for reforming. I don't mean that I should like to see St. Agnes' where it was merely for my own personal amusement. The only thing I'm sorry about is that I didn't actually see the work being done."
Father Rowley came in at this moment, and everybody shouted that Mark was going to preach a sermon.
"Splendid," said the Missioner whose voice when not moved by emotion was rich in a natural unction that encouraged everyone round to suppose he was being successfully humorous, such a savour did it add to the most innutritious chaff. Those who were privileged to share his ordinary life never ceased to wonder how in the pulpit or in the confessional or at prayer this unction was replaced by a remote beauty of tone, a plangent and thrilling compassion that played upon the hearts of all who heard him.
"Now really, Father Rowley," Mark protested. "Do I preach a great deal? I'm always being chaffed by Cartwright and Warrender about an alleged mania for reforming people, which only exists in their imagination."
Indeed Mark had long ago grown out of the desire to reform or to convert anybody, although had he wished to keep his hand in, he could have had plenty of practice among the guests of the Mission House. Nobody had ever succeeded in laying down the exact number of casual visitors that could be accommodated therein. However full it appeared, there was always room for one more. Taking an average, day in, day out through the year, one might fairly say that there were always eight or nine casual guests in addition to the eight or nine permanent residents, of whom Mark was soon glad to be able to count himself one. The company was sufficiently mixed to have been offered as a proof to the sceptical that there was something after all in simple Christianity. There would usually be a couple of prefects from Silchester, one or two 'Varsity men, two or three bluejackets or marines, an odd soldier or so, a naval officer perhaps, a stray priest sometimes, an earnest seeker after Christian example often, and often a drunkard who had been dumped down at the door of St. Agnes' Mission House in the hope that where everybody else had failed Father Rowley might succeed. Then there were the tramps, some who had heard of a comfortable night's lodging, some who came whining and cringing with a pretence of religion. This last class was discouraged as much as possible, for one of the first rules of the Mission House was to show no favour to any man who claimed to be religious, it being Father Rowley's chief dread to make anybody's religion a paying concern. Sometimes a jailbird just released from prison would find in the Mission House an opportunity to recover his self-respect. But whoever the guest was, soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, apothecary, ploughboy, or thief, he was judged at the Mission House as a man. Some of the visitors repaid their host by theft or fraud; but when they did, nobody uttered proverbs or platitudes about mistaken kindness. If one lame dog bit the hand that was helping him over the stile, the next dog that came limping along was helped over just as freely.
"What right has one miserable mortal to be disillusioned by another miserable mortal?" Father Rowley demanded. "Our dear Lord when he was nailed to the cross said 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' He did not say, 'I am fed up with these people I have come down from Heaven to save. I've had enough of it. Send an angel with a pair of pincers to pull out these nails.'"
If the Missioner's patience ever failed, it was when he had to deal with High Church young men who made pilgrimages to St. Agnes' because they had heard that this or that service was conducted there with a finer relish of Romanism than anywhere else at the moment in England. On one occasion a pietistic young creature, who brought with him his own lace cotta but forgot to bring his nightshirt, begged to be allowed the joy of serving Father Rowley at early Mass next morning. When they came back and were sitting round the breakfast table, this young man simpered in a ladylike voice:
"Oh, Father, couldn't you keep your fingers closed when you give the Dominus vobiscum?"
"Et cum spiritu tuo," shouted Father Rowley. "I can keep my fingers closed when I box your ears."
And he proved it.
It was a real box on the ears, so hard a blow that the ladylike young man burst into tears to the great indignation of a Chief Petty Officer staying in the Mission House, who declared that he was half in a mind to catch the young swab such a snitch on the conk as really would give him something to blubber about. Father Rowley evidently had no remorse for his violence, and the young man went away that afternoon saying how sorry he was that the legend of the good work being done at St. Agnes' had been so much exaggerated.
Mark wrote an account of this incident, which had given him intense pleasure, to Mr. Ogilvie. Perhaps the Rector was afraid that Mark in his ambition to avoid "churchiness" was inclining toward the opposite extreme; or perhaps, charitable and saintly man though he was, he felt a pang of jealousy at Mark's unbounded admiration of his new friend; or perhaps it was merely that the east wind was blowing more sharply than usual that morning over the wold into the Rectory garden. Whatever the cause, his answering letter made Mark feel that the Rector did not appreciate Father Rowley as thoroughly as he ought.
The Rectory,
Wych-on-the-Wold.
Oxon.
Dec. 1.
My dear Mark,
I was glad to get your long and amusing letter of last week. I am delighted to think that as the months go by you are finding work among the poor more and more congenial. I would not for the world suggest your coming back here for Christmas after what you tell me of the amount of extra work it will entail for everybody in the Mission House; at the same time it would be useless to pretend that we shan't all be disappointed not to see you until the New Year.
On reading through your last letter again I feel just a little worried lest, in the pleasure you derive from Father Rowley's treatment of what was no doubt a very irritating young man, you may be inclined to go to the opposite extreme and be too ready to laugh at real piety when it is not accompanied by geniality and good fellowship, or by an obvious zeal for good works. I know you will acquit me of any desire to defend extreme "churchiness," and I have no doubt you will remember one or two occasions in the past when I was rather afraid that you were tending that way yourself. I am not in the least criticizing Father Rowley's method of dealing with it, but I am a trifle uneasy at the inordinate delight it seems to have afforded you. Of course, it is intolerable for any young man serving a priest at Mass to watch his fingers all the time, but I don't think you have any right to assume because on this occasion the young man showed himself so sensitive to mere externals that he is always aware only of externals. Unfortunately a very great deal of true and fervid piety exists under this apparent passion for externals. Remember that the ordinary criticism by the man in the street of Catholic ceremonies and of Catholic methods of worship involves us all in this condemnation. I suppose that you would consider yourself justified, should the circumstances permit (which in this case of course they do not), in protesting against a priest's not taking the Eastward Position when he said Mass. I was talking to Colonel Fraser the other day, and he was telling me how much he had enjoyed the ministrations of the Reverend Archibald Tait, the Leicestershire cricketer, who throughout the "second service" never once turned his back on the congregation, and, so far as I could gather from the Colonel's description, conducted this "second service" very much as a conjuror performs his tricks. When I ventured to argue with the Colonel, he said to me: "That is the worst of you High Churchmen, you make the ritual more important than the Communion itself." All human judgments, my dear Mark, are relative, and I have no doubt that this unpleasant young man (who, as I have already said, was no doubt justly punished by Father Rowley) may have felt the same kind of feeling in a different degree that I should feel if I assisted at the jugglery of the Reverend Archibald Tait. At any rate you, my dear boy, are bound to credit this young man with as much sincerity as yourself, otherwise you commit a sin against charity. You must acquire at least as much toleration for the Ritualist as I am glad to notice you are acquiring for the thief. When you are a priest yourself, and in a comparatively short time you will be a priest, I do hope you won't, without his experience, try to imitate Father Rowley too closely in his summary treatment of what I have already I hope made myself quite clear in believing to be in this case a most insufferable young man. Don't misunderstand this letter. I have such great hopes of you in the stormy days to come, and the stormy days are coming, that I should feel I was wrong if I didn't warn you of your attitude towards the merest trifles, for I shall always judge you and your conduct by standards that I should be very cautious of setting for most of my penitents.
Your ever affectionate,
Stephen Ogilvie.
My mother and Miriam send you much love. We miss you greatly at Wych. Esther seems happy in her convent and will soon be clothed as a novice.
When Mark read this letter, he was prompt to admit himself in the wrong; but he could not bear the least implied criticism of Father Rowley.
St. Agnes' House,
Keppel Street,
Chatsea.
Dec. 3.
My dear Mr. Ogilvie,
I'm afraid I must have expressed myself very badly in my last letter if I gave you the least idea that Father Rowley was not always charity personified. He had probably come to the conclusion that the young man was not much good and no doubt he deliberately made it impossible for him to stay on at the Mission House. We do get an awful lot of mere loafers here; I don't suppose that anybody who keeps open house can avoid getting them. After all, if the young man had been worth anything he would have realized that he had made a fool of himself and by the way he took his snubbing have re-established himself. What he actually did was to sulk and clear out with a sneer at the work done here. I'm sorry I gave you the impression that I was triumphing so tremendously over his discomfiture. By writing about it I probably made the incident appear much more important than it really was. I've no doubt I did triumph a little, and I'm afraid I shall never be able not to feel rather glad when a fellow like that is put in his place. I am not for a moment going to try to argue that you can carry Christian charity too far. The more one meditates on the words, and actions of Our Lord, the more one grasps how impossible it is to carry charity too far. All the same, one owes as much charity to Father Rowley as to the young man. This sounds now I have written it down as if I were getting in a hit at you, and that is the worst of writing letters to justify oneself. What I am trying to say is that if I were to have taken up arms for the young man and supposed him to be ill-used or misjudged I should be criticizing Father Rowley. I think that perhaps you don't quite realize what a saint he is in every way. This is my fault, no doubt, because in my letters to you I have always emphasized anything that would bring into relief his personality. I expect that I've been too much concerned to draw a picture of him as a man, in doing which I've perhaps been unsuccessful in giving you a picture of him as a priest. It's always difficult to talk or write about one's intimate religious feelings, and you've been the only person to whom I ever have been able to talk about them. However much I admire and revere Father Rowley I doubt if I could talk or write to him about myself as I do to you.
Until I came here I don't think I ever quite realized all that the Blessed Sacrament means. I had accepted the Sacrifice of the Mass as one accepts so much in our creed, without grasping its full implication. If anybody were to have put me through a catechism about the dogma I should have answered with theological exactitude, without any appearance of misapprehending the meaning of it; but it was not until I came here that its practical reality—I don't know if I'm expressing myself properly or not, I'm pretty sure I'm not; I don't mean practical application and I don't mean any kind of addition to my faith; perhaps what I mean is that I've learnt to grasp the mystery of the Mass outside myself, outside that is to say my own devotion, my own awe, as a practical fact alive to these people here. Sometimes when I go to Mass I feel as people who watched Our Lord with His disciples and followers must have felt. I feel like one of those people who ran after Him and asked Him what they could do to be saved. I feel when I look at what has been done here as if I must go to each of these poor people in turn and beg them to bring me to the feet of Christ, just as I suppose on the shores of the sea of Galilee people must have begged St. Peter or St. Andrew or St. James or St. John to introduce them, if one can use such a word for such an occasion. This seems to me the great work that Father Rowley has effected in this parish. I have only had one rather shy talk with him about religion, and in the course of it I said something in praise of what his personality had effected.
"My personality has effected nothing," he answered. "Everything here is effected by the Blessed Sacrament."
That is why he surely has the right without any consideration for the dignity of churchy young men to box their ears if they question his outward respect for the Blessed Sacrament. Even Our Lord found it necessary at least on one occasion to chase the buyers and sellers out of the Temple, and though it is not recorded that He boxed the ears of any Pharisee, it seems to me quite permissible to believe that He did! He lashed them with scorn anyway.
To come back to Father Rowley, you know the great cry of the so-called Evangelical party "Jesus only"? Well, Father Rowley has really managed to make out of what was becoming a sort of ecclesiastical party cry something that really is evangelical and at the same time Catholic. These people are taught to make the Blessed Sacrament the central fact of their lives in a way that I venture to say no Welsh revivalist or Salvation Army captain has ever made Our Lord the central fact in the lives of his converts, because with the Blessed Sacrament continually before them, Which is Our Lord Jesus Christ, their conversion endures. I could fill a book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls. The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his flock. Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not believe, and I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any use without Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural service. Father Rowley makes of the Blessed Sacrament Christ Himself, so that the poor people may flock round Him. He does not go round arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers them the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a great use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions revolve round that one great fact. "Jesus Christ is what you need," he says, "and Jesus Christ is here in your church, here upon your altar."
You can't go into the little church without finding fifty people praying before the Blessed Sacrament. The other day when the "King Harry" was sunk by the "Trafalgar," the people here subscribed I forget how many pounds for the widows and children of the bluejackets and marines of the Mission who were drowned, and when it was finished and the subscription list was closed, they subscribed all over again to erect an altar at which to say Masses for the dead. And the old women living in Father Rowley's free houses that were once brothels gave up their summer outing so that the money spent on them might be added to the fund. When the Bishop of Silchester came here last week for Confirmation he asked Father Rowley what that altar was.
"That is the ugliest thing I've ever seen," he said. But when Father Rowley told him about the poor people and the old women who had no money of their own, he said: "That is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."
I am beginning to write as if it was necessary to convince you of the necessity of making the Blessed Sacrament the central feature of the religious life to-day and for ever until the end of the world. But, I know you won't think I'm doing anything of the kind, for really I am only trying to show you how much my faith has been strengthened and how much my outlook has deepened and how much more than ever I long to be a priest to be able to give poor people Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
Your ever affectionate
Mark.