The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

Another of those villages or little country towns whose charms must inevitably be lost upon those who have always known them. There are houses in Malling (and I found them plentiful elsewhere) standing close upon the street—plain, flat-fronted, absolutely unpretentious, but genuine, dignified, high-bred, if one may use the term, in every inch of them—before which I stood in admiration that I am sure no home-staying English person could understand. Are they the real Queen Anne? Whatever they are they are good taste materialised. And if I could choose a home——

But no; on second thoughts, no—not in an English village or little town, all its loveliness notwithstanding. It is strange that for thirty-eight years the daydream of my partner and myself—an English-bred colonial clergyman's idea of mundane bliss—was just that life; to be "settled" in one of those peaceful and comfortable country rectories such as that in which we began our joint career. It seems to be his dream still, but it is no longer mine. When, on the third Sunday, after our return we walked through the fields and lanes to morning service at W——, and entered the village church (to be stared at by the rustic congregation with as much curiosity as when I wore my wedding bonnet and G. his first canonicals); and when after service we were invited, although we did not stay, to luncheon at the rectory, and saw the house which was our first home, and walked upon the lawn where we played croquet with the young friends who came to see us in our bridal retirement, now all old like us, or dead and gone—it came over me to wonder how it would have been if we had had our hearts' desire and stayed there or in a like place always. I thought of the living life that had been mine, and shuddered inwardly. So I did whenever I looked upon a pretty parsonage house distant from railways and centres of intellectual activity—and I saw so many of them; my first thought was: "Oh, what a sweet home I could have made of this!" My swiftly following second: "What appalling loneliness!" Somehow a bush hut in the Back Blocks does not suggest such isolation for a cultivated mind and a spirit awake to the movements of the world as these stately rectories and vicarages in the small villages of England. One suspects it is not easy to keep awake in them. But I may be wrong.

At Malling Abbey it was still more forcibly borne in upon me how I had grown away from the attitudes of my youth.

The glorious old place—the eleventh-century tower has for its base the foundations of a Saxon church, that is nothing for England—now belongs to, or is occupied by, a community of nuns and their priest-chaplain; English Benedictines is the correct label for them, I believe. The only members of the household not too sacred for the common use of visitors were the lay-women, and even they could not take us across the line separating the earth and floors allowed to unconsecrated feet from the precincts trodden by the Mother Superior and her nuns. The rooms they occupied we could not see—not for love or money (and we dropped no mean donation into the box displayed in the neutral vestibule); nor their chapel, although the priest's chapel was shown to us. A late Mother Superior had been more indulgent to the respectful curiosity of the wayfarer, but the present Mother was "very strict," we were told. So we did not so much as catch a glimpse of sacerdotal raiment, except that of the priest taking the place of the absent chaplain—austere in his caped cassock and biretta—and the Sister who had once been the sweet-maker, and who dropped in to see her successor, who was her own sister, while we were with the latter—a pleasant girl, with whom C. had an acquaintance, and who was a charming hostess to us.

She worked very hard—for love, plus board and lodging—at the making of the sweets (in Australian parlance, lollies) which were an important source of revenue to the community. She made them in large quantities and of high quality, and they had a steady sale amongst those who knew of them, the high church aristocracy being the "connection" chiefly. C. and I, both interested in fine cookery, had a great time in her workroom, filled and lined with the materials, appliances and finished products of her vicarious trade. She showed us everything without any professional reserve or personal pride, explaining over and over again that she had not the genius of the sister she had superseded. The sister had been the famous sweet-maker; her humble self had taken, but could not fill, that expert's place. But the expert had put on the habit of the Order, and "When you have to go to church seven times a day, you have no time for sweet-making," said our lay friend, unconscious of the meanings borne by her words to a life-taught, world-taught listener. When the sweet-maker who had entered the Sisterhood, which, so far as I could learn, had no definite occupation except to pray and meditate, lingered for a minute at her old cooking-table, looking on at the really arduous labours of her successor, there was no evidence in her demeanour of any doubt as to which of the two stood on the higher plane.

Well, I was even as these dear, dense women when I was young. I wanted (at about the age of seventeen) to go into a sisterhood and say prayers all day instead of living my life. And I was so morally undeveloped, so intellectually juvenile, as to believe that I would thereby be performing a noble, if not even the noblest, deed. Supposing I had not been shaken out of my groove—the old hereditary groove, so deeply worn that one does not see over the edges unless one is pushed up—where should I have been now? I asked myself the question at Malling Abbey, standing between the Mary in the black gown and white wimple and the Martha making fondu with all her might, and the answers of a startled imagination sent cold chills adown my spine.

Our unemancipated, unappreciated Martha was quite delightful to us. The proud Marys would not let us near them, but she did all she could to serve and oblige us—she and the dear old housekeeper of the chaplain, who, in her reverend lord's absence and out of the human kindness of her heart, stretched a point to please a stranger from so far, and allowed me to peep into the home he had made in the ancient gatehouse; an austerely and appropriately appointed one as ever I saw, but suggesting, oh, what a life for a man with his manhood in him! The sweet-maker not only gave us sweets and the secrets of their manufacture, she took chairs for us into the abbey grounds, that we might take our picnic luncheon in comfort; not, of course, in the garden, for the nuns walked there, but beside a pond with willow-trees—a typical bit of convent ground which I seemed to have visited in a previous existence. As we ate our sandwiches, and viewed through sylvan veils the grey jumble of the ancient buildings and the new but not discordant Guest House incorporated with them, the Twentieth Century and its works seemed very far away.

I think it was the chaplain's housekeeper who showed us the Pilgrims' Bath—a place of weird suggestions. It is a stone outhouse hidden in trees, and containing a sunk stone tank, with stone steps going down into it. Here, in the bygone ages, the pilgrims washed themselves, or were washed, before entering the sacred precincts. The cistern was empty now, and there was no apparatus for taking water out of it. In those pre-hygienic days ... However, it was interesting to know that washing was done at all.

The Guest House looked the abode of peace. It takes in lady boarders, for the pecuniary benefit of the community—which, if it does not work for its living, must still be supported somehow—and how I would have loved to be one, if I had stayed in my groove! Even as it was, the sweet seclusion and simplicity and refinement of the life fascinated me intensely. But the Guest House is presided over by a "Guest Mistress," and liberty is the basis of peace, as of all forms of happiness—to me. She may be a darling, but I could not stand her now. The guests will all have to be women of the Church and not of the world, souls in steady grooves of tradition from which they have never been shaken out. To them, if they are tired, it should be an ideal place of rest. One thing I wish I had asked the sweet-maker: Are they allowed to worship in the nuns' chapel? Surely not, if we were not permitted even to look at it. In the priest's chapel, then? That seems too small, and I think I saw no seat for a congregation of more than two—his housekeeper and under maid. Perhaps the paying guests are sent to the parish church. But suppose the rector of Malling (I know nothing of him) should be an Evangelical? One thing is certain. They will have to go to church somewhere, and to go often.

For nearly a thousand years the tower of this old abbey has stood where it now stands, and who knows for how many years the Saxon church which laid its foundations stood there before it? As I looked up at its lofty broken crown, and down and around upon the structures beneath it, I thought how many things beside stone walls outlive their time and use and meaning.