The Altar Steps | Page 7

much time with his son; and the teaching of Sunday morning, the clear-cut uncompromising statement of hard religious facts in which the Missioner delighted, was considerably toned down by his wife's gentle commentary.
Mark's mother taught him that the desire of a bad boy to be a good boy is a better thing than the goodness of a Jack Horner. She taught him that God was not merely a crotchety old gentleman reclining in a blue dressing-gown on a mattress of cumulus, but that He was an Eye, an all-seeing Eye, an Eye capable indeed of flashing with rage, yet so rarely that whenever her little boy should imagine that Eye he might behold it wet with tears.
"But can God cry?" asked Mark incredulously.
"Oh, darling. God can do everything."
"But fancy crying! If I could do everything I shouldn't cry."
Mrs. Lidderdale perceived that her picture of the wise and compassionate Eye would require elaboration.
"But do you only cry, Mark dear, when you can't do what you want? Those are not nice tears. Don't you ever cry because you're sorry you've been disobedient?"
"I don't think so, Mother," Mark decided after a pause. "No, I don't think I cry because I'm sorry except when you're sorry, and that sometimes makes me cry. Not always, though. Sometimes I'm glad you're sorry. I feel so angry that I like to see you sad."
"But you don't often feel like that?"
"No, not often," he admitted.
"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some poor dog or cat being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to cry?"
"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me, and I want to kick the people who is doing it."
"Well, now you can understand why God sometimes gets angry. But even if He gets angry," Mrs. Lidderdale went on, for she was rather afraid of her son's capacity for logic, "God never lets His anger get the better of Him. He is not only sorry for the poor dog, but He is also sorry for the poor person who is ill-treating the dog. He knows that the poor person has perhaps never been taught better, and then the Eye fills with tears again."
"I think I like Jesus better than God," said Mark, going off at a tangent. He felt that there were too many points of resemblance between his own father and God to make it prudent to persevere with the discussion. On the subject of his father he always found his mother strangely uncomprehending, and the only times she was really angry with him was when he refused out of his basic honesty to admit that he loved his father.
"But Our Lord is God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.
Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal puzzle.
"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?"
Mark sighed.
"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in Kensington Gardens?"
"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"
"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I want you to think about the Holy Trinity."
"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he protested.
"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great mystery."
"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant when she could not find her rolling-pin.
"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.
Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All about a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he had been corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery stood for all that history was not. There were no dates in "mystery:" Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity, had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense tale of humanity. He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius C?sar landed, but he could never remember exactly when. The last time he was asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had landed.
"The Holy Trinity is a mystery."
It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies huddled up in dustbins: it had no date.
But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not matter you were able to remember so much more easily. He could have listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their pods when the donkey was