The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

"Brown! Brown!" he shouted down the church.

The stalwart schoolmaster arose from where he sat with his pupils under the tower, and advanced up the aisle with a pole in his hand. It may have been the punitive rod with which he could crack the pate of the farthest National School boy without leaving his own seat to do it, or it may have been the church broomstick; anyway, it was long enough to reach the top of the screen.

"Bong on to him, Brown!" commanded the rector in loud imperious tones—he meant "bang on to him," but his accents as well as his words ring down the grooves of time as distinctly as if heard but yesterday. "Bong on to him!"

Brown wielded the clumsy weapon as desired, and it fell with force upon the spot from which the raven deftly hopped at the last moment. The bird was quite self-possessed in the midst of the excitement; each time he measured the direction of the pole, watched its approach, and skipped over or under it in the nick of time, and he chuckled and jeered as if it were a game of play. His demeanour, and its contrast with the increasing wildness of the schoolmaster's blows and of the outraged rector's temper, made the scene so exquisitely funny that I can laugh now when I think of it. I suppose I laughed then, for the irrepressible hilarity of the congregation, confessing its sympathy with the rebel against high authority, was an aggravation of the bird's offence too serious for words. I am sorry I cannot recall how the episode ended, but, of course, the raven was defeated somehow; what I can never forget is the splendid time he gave us first. He was better than the donkey which made another red-letter Sunday for us. This animal, grazing in the churchyard, put his head through the open door in the middle of sermon time. Not content with a decorous survey of the congregation he suddenly uttered his raucous bray—hee-haw!—as if in sarcastic comment upon the preacher's words.

But many funny things happened in church which we did not understand to be funny, and therefore found no amusement in. The spectacle of the parson's hat and gloves, perhaps also his overcoat and umbrella, on the communion-table did not raise a smile, not to mention frowns. A companion picture of the old clerk holding up the lid of the same table while he dragged forth from its depths a black bottle and tilted it before one unclosed eye, to see if it contained sufficient sacramental wine for an impending celebration, passed almost unnoticed. Conversations in the vulgar tongue, audible to all, were of almost daily occurrence—or I should say weekly occurrence, for whoever heard of non-Sunday matins or evensong in those easy-going times? Oh yes, they were known of course in cathedrals and the more civilised centres of life—the "Tracts for the Times" had been stirring up what the writers called "our afflicted church" for many a year—but not in such out-of-the-world villages as those in and about which my early years were spent.

There was no rigid ecclesiastical etiquette, no rigid ecclesiastical discipline, observed in those days, and the dullness of a child's Sundays was sensibly mitigated thereby. I remember an occasion when the parson (not Canon W., of the raven episode) was reading the psalms verse and verse about with the clerk beneath him. Suddenly the latter, instead of reciting his verse, remarked aloud: "You've turned over two leaves, sir." "No, I haven't," was the equally loud and composed reply. "Yes, you have," rejoined the clerk. They had quite an altercation, carried on exactly as if they had been out on the road. The rector of the parish where my maternal grandparents lived was the same sort of free-and-easy person. I was told that once, with the benediction hardly out of his mouth, he leaned over the ledge of the pulpit to hail a gentleman of the congregation before he should get away. "Come home with me," the rector publicly invited his friend, "I've got a prime haunch of venison for dinner." I remember his way with candidates for confirmation: "Your mother can hear your catechism." And it is my belief that the bishops asked no questions of the men who royally entertained them on their visitations. You could not imagine a rector dining on venison and waited on by liveried servants being subjected to the indignity of an inquiry as to how he performed his duties.

Parsons and squires—Church and State—combined to keep the common lay person in his place. In league they governed the rural communities, by whom their authority was unquestioned. It was a benevolent despotism, as a rule, like that of the majority of the slave-owning aristocracy of America, who were also in the enjoyment (tempered by "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and other annoying portents) of their feudal powers at the time; but, as with the slave system, it took small account of the human rights of the lower "orders" and in the hands of the naturally arrogant was often grossly abused.

A squire's wife of our neighbourhood, when she went out of church—and no one presumed to go before her—used to mount a little rise of ground near the porch, and there stand to receive the obeisances of "the poor." One by one they filed before her, dropping the trembling curtsy with that deprecating, serf-like air which one is thankful to know will never be worn again by man or woman of British blood; and according as they performed their act of homage, or satisfied her mind when she chose to stop and question them, so would they be rewarded in the dispensation of her doles—doles that might well demoralise poor things whose lives were all toil from beginning to end, and who perhaps never enjoyed a full meal until they ate it on Christmas Day in the workhouse, which was the refuge of their declining years.

This squire's wife (I saw her home and the church in the park again, still the appanage of her family) was typical of her class. They all regarded their villages as a queen would regard her kingdom. The squire looked after the menfolk and saw that his tenants voted Whig or Tory, as the case might be. But the homes were the care of the lady of the great house—where there was one. Often she was a second mother to them, feeling a responsibility for their well-being almost as great as for that of her own establishment. A godmother to babies, a nurse to the sick, the kind patroness of girls going out to service, a succourer in crises of trouble, an indispensable adviser in all-important affairs—I have known such and heard of more; but whether of this sort or of that which took the line of the arbitrary schoolmistress, it was invariably her aim to lead her protégées in the way that they should go. The parson was her henchman, as she was his backer. He made his reports and she acted upon them. "You were not at church on Sunday, Jane. How was that?" The chapel—making its way into the most conservative villages (but I knew one where the rights of the lord of the manor enabled him to keep it uncontaminated by both chapels and public-houses—he bracketed them together—up to the end of the sixties)—was contemptuously ignored as long as it was possible to do so. Jane had to go to church regularly, or forfeit the favour of authority and the incalculable advantages that went with it.

Morning service was, so to speak, the state service of the day. The heads of families attended, and the families themselves in force. The afternoon service was for servants and such, and nursemaids and governesses could take their charges to keep them occupied and out of the way; Sunday-schools were not invented, apparently, though we all had to say our collect and catechism to somebody at home. There was no service in the evening. The churches had no apparatus for lighting except with daylight. Sunday evening, in summer, was the time for long family walks, aimless strolls about the lanes and fields. It was the great opportunity for love-making with the young couples "keeping company." There was no visiting from house to house, as might be supposed, with families so much at leisure and so bored for want of something to do; it would have verged upon desecration of the Sabbath to have paid a call for the mere pleasure of it. No toys or story-books, and, of course, no games, were allowed to relieve the monotony of indoor hours. "Memoirs" represented the only human element in our Sunday literature, otherwise composed of volumes of sermons; and as the memoir was always of a clergyman, or some other saintly person, there were but two scraps of interest to be found in it—his portrait at one end and the account of what he died of at the other. Later, we had a servant who took in a missionary magazine full of pictures of black men swinging on hooks thrust through their backs, widows burning alive on pyres, missionaries being horribly tortured, cooked and eaten—all sorts of interesting things. She used to smuggle them to my bed, and, when my governess had retired from the room, instead of sleeping I would sit up and read them in the lingering light of the long days until night made the page a blank. But just now I am speaking of the years before I had a governess. A missionary magazine was a Sunday book, and my early Sundays did not know the joy of them.