The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

It was the Sunday before Christmas of the year 1894. No coach had come to Bridnorth for three weeks. The snow which had fallen there was still lying six inches deep all over the countryside and on the roads where it had been beaten down at all, was as hard as ice. Footmarks had mottled it. It shone in the sun like the skin of a snow leopard.

The hills around Bridnorth and all the fields as far as eye could see were washed the purest white. Every hedge had its mantle, every tree and every branch its sleeves of snow. The whole world seemed buried. Scarce one dark object was to be seen. Only the sea stretched dark and gray like ice water, the little waves in that still air there was, falling on the beach with the brittle noises of breaking glass.

Only for this, a silence had fallen everywhere. Footsteps made no sound. The birds were hidden in the hearts of the hedges and even when hunger drew them forth in search of berries, it was without noise they went, in swift, dipping flights--a dark thing flashing by, no more.

Every one put on goloshes to climb or descend the hill to church. The Vicar and his wife came stepping over from the Vicarage close by like a pair of storks and when the bell stopped ringing it was as though another cloak of silence had been flung over Bridnorth village. The Vicar felt that additional silence as acutely as any one. It seemed to him it fell to prepare the way for worship in the house of God and the sermon he was about to preach.

The attendance that morning was no different from what it would have been had the roads been clear. Going to church in the country is a comfortable habit. At their midday meal afterwards the subject of the attendance would crop up at the Vicar's table as it always did, ever full of interest as is the subject of the booking-office returns to a theatrical manager. He would congratulate himself upon the numbers he had seen below him from that eminence of the pulpit and would have been hurt beyond degree had any one suggested it was largely habit that brought them there.

The Throgmorton family would no more have thought of staying away because of the weather than they would have thought of turning the two portraits in the dining-room with their faces to the wall.

They collected in the square hall of the square, white house. They put on their gloves and their goloshes; they held their prayer books in their hands; they each looked for the last time to see that their threepenny bits were safe in the palms of their gloves. Then they set off.

The church in the country is a meeting place in a sense other than that of worship. You may desire at most times the quietness of your own home, but you like to see the world about you in a public place.

They worshipped God, those people in Bridnorth. Who could hope to maintain that they did not? They were close enough to Him in all conscience and fact on those Devon hills. But that worship was more in the silence of their own hearts, more on the floor at their own bedside than ever it was at the service conducted by the Vicar as so many services are conducted by so many Vicars in so many parishes throughout the length and breadth of the whole country.

The interest of seeing a fresh face, of even seeing an old face if it be under a new hat; the mere interest of human contact, of exchanging a word as they went in or mildly criticizing as they came out; the mild necessity of listening to what the Vicar said from the pulpit, the sterner necessity of trying to understand what he meant; the excitement of wearing a new frock, the speculations upon the new frock worn by another, these were more the causes of a good attendance in the worst of weather, these and that same consciousness of being overlooked, of having one's conduct under the gaze of all who chose to satisfy themselves about it.