THE PARSON'S PROGRESS

CHAPTER I

THE NEW CURATE

Ir was already thawing fast when Mark Lidderdale got into the train at Silchester station; and by the time he alighted at Galton, not much more than an hour afterward, the sweet and gentle westerly air that greeted him on the platform did not mitigate the disgusting orgy of slush to which the roads and pavements of the little country town had surrendered their placid dignity. Mr. Shuter, his Vicar, emerged from the waiting-room to offer Mark a limp blue hand and to mutter with the banality of a very shy man, "Ah, you have arrived," as if the success of catching the 11.15 at Silchester and travelling thence to arrive in Galton at 12.25, without even so much peril as a change of trains, was matter for wonderment and felicitation.

Mark had thought two or three times during the adventurous crawl through Hampshire of what he should say to his Vicar, or perhaps not so much of what he should say as the manner in which he should say, at any rate, something. In the end he achieved:

"How d'ye do, sir? A merry Christmas, if it's not too early in the week to wish that."

Mr. Shuter smiled nervously.

"Thank you, Lidderdale. The-er-same to you." "I'll go and see that they hoick out my luggage from the van," Mark went on. He had not had the least intention beforehand of assuming this breezy and muscular tone when he met his Vicar, and he laughed at himself

as he hurried along the train to the luggage van, for he realized that he was trying not to be too much like a curate, and for that very reason succeeding in being perfectly the curate.

"Jews, curates, mothers-in-law, British workmen, shopwalkers . . . all recognized as fair sport for the facetious," he laughed to himself. "But it's only the curate that bothers about trying not to be ridiculous. Who ever heard of a mother-in-law's being self-conscious quâ mother-in-law?

"Oh, is that my trunk? Thanks very much. Heave it out, will you. There I go again. Confound this dog

collar !

"The Reverend Mark Lidderdale," a porter read out slowly upon the label. Then he looked at Mark.

With

"You'll be the Reverend Shuter's new curate," he speculated. "The Reverend Shuter's over there. a beard. Any more luggage?"

"Only a couple of handbags. They're on the platform, just by where Mr. Shuter is now."

'My two nippers both goes to St. Luke's Sunday school," the porter volunteered as he loaded his trolley with Mark's trunk and wheeled it up the platform.

"Splendid!" the new curate exclaimed fervidly.

"I believe one on 'em brought home some kind of a prize to her Ma last week. But I never wouldn't take on much over Sunday school prizes. They get 'em too easy. That's what I said to my missus when our Reller brought home hers last week. Still, I don't say it wasn't a nice enough book, and it looks nice on our parlour table, what's more. I'll say that for it. You know it looks bright. And her Ma sees she don't muck it about by reading it."

By this time Mark and the porter had reached the Vicar of St. Luke's.

"Good morning, Willis," the Vicar said coldly, when the porter touched his cap.

"I didn't order a fly," he went on, turning to Mark. "I thought you'd probably prefer a little walk after your journey. The out-porter will bring your luggage down to the Vicarage.

Elbert, you're wanted.

"Elbert!" Willis shouted. This lot down to the Reverend Shuter's!"

Mark and the Vicar dabbled across the dreadful slush of the station yard and presently emerged in High Street. Galton had been, until twenty years ago, a typical English country town with wide High Street, narrow Market Street, picturesque Market Square, two ancient hostelries, fine old church, gabled almshouses, and all that was necessary to make it, what it had been for several centuries, the rallying point of a prosperous and beautiful countryside. And then it suddenly began to develop. The water of the insignificant river that flowed through the meadows below the town was found suitable for brewing and for paper-making, and for various other enterprises of a commercial nature that helped to increase the population. It was now a town of eight or nine thousand inhabitants and still growing. Twenty years ago it had not had more than half that number.

The parish of St. Luke's included all the developments. St. Luke's had no High Street, or at any rate only an extension of it that consisted of terraces of small houses, each of which was stamped with a date in florid numerals to mark the development of Galton during the last decade of the nineteenth century. St. Luke's had neither narrow Market Street nor picturesque Market Square nor ancient hostelry nor fine old church nor gabled almshouse, although in the course of the development it had acquired the workhouse, which in the first decade of the nineteenth century had been built at a certain distance from Galton itself, that the old-world charm and comeliness and decency of the little town might not be affronted by any memento of poverty. And now that very workhouse, by the ironical process of time, was the only bit of old-world charm and comeliness and decency in the whole of St. Luke's parish.

"Willis, the porter who got your trunk out of the van, is a parishioner," Mr. Shuter explained after he had paused for a moment at the top of the steep, short hill that marked the beginning of High Street and indicated with a feeble wave of the arm the glories of Galton below. Forthwith he turned to the right with his curate and

led him away from the land flowing with milk and honey into the desert of St. Luke's.

"He was telling me that his children go to our Sunday school," Mark said.

"Yes," Mr. Shuter sniffed, "for what they can get out of it. Willis hasn't been inside the church since I've been here."

Mark told himself that it should not be beyond the province of a youthful deacon to go and give Willis a prod on the subject of church attendance. He marked down Willis in his mind's eye as one of the first victims of his visiting. It would be something of a triumph to secure Willis.

"I'll look him up," he announced.

The Vicar turned round and stared at his curate with watery pale blue eyes.

"I don't think I should waste very much time on him," he sniffed.

"I had an amusing encounter this morning at Silchester railway station, sir," Mark began, to divert the conversation. "As I was taking my ticket, a Salvation Army lassie came up to me and said: 'Young man, what class are you travelling?' 'Third class,' I told her. 'You'll never get to the end of your journey that class,' she said. 'Won't I?' said I. 'I've never travelled anything but third so far, and I've always managed to get to my destination safely.' Whereupon she shook her head at me and said with a sigh, 'Ah, young man, the journey you mean is an earthly one, but the journey I mean is a heavenly one.' And then she caught sight of my collar. 'Oh, I beg pardon,' she said. 'I didn't notice you were a minister.'"

The Vicar shook his head gloomily.

"These misguided creatures do more harm than they wot of to religion," he sighed. "One always hopes that they are sincere, but their lack of education is so dangerous-so very dangerous.'

Mark did not feel that his story had had a success, and he was silent for the length of a terrace, at the end of which he could produce nothing better than a remark upon the rapidity of the thaw.

"It was really wonderful in Silchester yesterday, sir. I don't think that during the whole of my time there I was ever so much moved by the outward scene. The quietness of the snow, and the cathedral carrying such a weight of it. Really awe-inspiring, sir."

"Yes, snow is very pretty while it lasts," the Vicar agreed. "While it lasts. Yes. Oh-and-er-by the way-er-Lidderdale, I'd rather you didn't call me

I don't mean anything unpleasant. But it might give rise to the idea that I had asked you to call me 'sir,' which I shouldn't like. It might appear rather pretentious. Yes, I think I should prefer to be addressed as Vicar.'"

The expression of all this caused Mr. Shuter considerable embarrassment and such fidgeting from one foot to the other that he ended by fidgeting himself off the pavement into a quagmire of slush.

"This is Jubilee Terrace," he said, pointing out to Mark a dozen cream-coloured houses, the pediment of which was stamped like an iced cake Jubilee Terrace, 1897.

Mark looked at the houses as he might have looked at a dull group of statuary in a museum, and then, feeling guilty of displaying a lack of interest, he hurriedly exclaimed with a kind of patriotic assertiveness:

"Part of our parish!"

"Oh, yes," the Vicar said. "We have been in my -in the-in our parish practically since we turned to the right up the main road. I thought you'd understood that. Why I pointed out Jubilee Terrace was because the next turning on the left, the turning down which we are-er-turning at this moment is the turning-the street, St. Luke's Street, in which the church is situated."

Mark did not remind the Vicar that he had already been shown the church when he came down here last autumn to obtain a title. He tried to regard St. Luke's, Galton, as if Ely or Wells or Canterbury were being offered for the first time to his astonished gaze.

St. Luke's was an edifice built of stone and red brick in the Early English style. It lacked any kind of distinguishing feature. It was stock size, stock shape, the