Round the Corner

with the heat of the sun and with long travel, among others, wh

PETTY THEF

g an amethyst cross, a clerical frock-coat, and a round white-linen collar were the daily attire of the new Rector of St. Paul's, Bide Street. On great occasions the black-silk waistcoat was renounced in favour of one of violet silk. All day on Sundays he wore his cassock with a

bright and blue and merry, and when he laughed they used to close up into little slits and all his bulk would shake until tears were squeezed out of them. He had a great capacity for laugh

g

e or the people or the town, and she demanded to be taken away-to Potsham, to Plymouth, anywhere out of the smoke and the rain and the filth and the noise and away from the common, common people. She vowed that she would never attend service in the hideous, squalid little church, and

ns (he had amassed a collection of one hundred and fifty, which he delivered in rotation). By sheer amiabi

was quickly noised abroad that the new rector had private means. Further, it soon became clear that a new church was to be added to the little ring of churches which upheld the High Church cause in our town. After much cogitation Francis decided to abolish the pew-rents and to open his church f

e study were on the ground floor, the drawing-room on the first. They were fine rooms, and the Folyats' old furniture made a brave show in it. The house was lit by gas, and the drawing-room window looked across the square upon the deliberate ugliness of a Wesleyan

ay which his daughters were always performing in the cause of charity. Mrs. Folyat flourished the Folyats and the Bampfields at Mrs. Clibran-Bell, who countered with the Staffordshire Bentleys, her cousins. The Clibran-Bells all talked mincingly, as though they had eaten olives and could find no polite method of getting rid of the s

op's wif

eally tried to make his church a centre for them and a source of help in their all-too-frequent times [Pg 32]of trouble. Mrs. Folyat, by dint of custom, overcame her dislike of the common people with their coarse accent and rather uncouth manners, and went so far in her compromise with native custom

y were forced to cook the supper and to wash up the dinner afterwards. They were very disagreeable about it until they found that most of the young women they knew, including the Clibran-Bells, did far more housework and did it as a matter of cour

or's wife, and Mrs. Tuke, the widow of the man who built the Albert Bridge and was killed on the day it opened, all ready and pleased to listen to her tattle of her husband's ancestry and her own property and her hopes for her children. She had taken to lace caps and had settled down to a style in dress and a general appearance which should last to the Judgment Day. She read The Family Herald every week, and every [Pg 33]month purchased the threepenny novel published by the same firm. She had and was allowed a

her godmother had stepped in and sent her to a school in Edinburgh. Minna, who all her life had done exactly what she wanted, refused to be educated any

joined forces with young George, and together they indulged in all those follies with which young men fortify their uneasy sense of manhood. He had pale straw-coloured hair and a very pale complexion. He had a ready wit and a quick tongue, and soon won a reputation for cleverness. His brother Leedham hated him but always shrank away from Frederic's irony. Leedham had a great respect and admiration for his father, while Frederic regarded him with a contempt which or

r. If the atmosphere was not altogether pious, they were none the worse for that. They attended church regularly, worked in the Sunday-school, and in many other directions for the parish, and their happiness won the confidence of the poor, who made

himself with fierce zeal into the task of castigating their immorality and whipping them up into a state of religious fervour. He had pictured their lives-ugly and stunted as they were in fact-as a gay rout of sin, and he strove to counteract this peculiar fiction of his own mind by a religion of appalling dulness. [Pg 35]He had a commanding spirit and found many disciples. He substituted the intoxication of conversion for that of alcohol, and drew hundreds to the corrugated-iron church he had built on a piece of waste land opposite a public-house and a theatre. His sermons were printed week by week in The Pendle News-half a page of fierce exhortation, while the other half was filled with racing results and advertisements of rat

mmery and medi?val witchcraft. The wildest stories flew, and very soon Francis was credited with worshipping the Virgin Mary and maintaining a secret shrine in his vestry. Flynn wro

men and women enter, cross themselves, and curtsey and bow to the East in the central aisle, and his gorge rose at it all. When the organ began to boom and send music whirring up to the roof and flooding the nave and the chancel, and a young man in a purple cassock and a lace surplice appeared bearing the Cross, and behind him two censer-bearers, and behind them again the choir, the curate, the special preacher, and Francis Folyat, in robe, cope and stole, carrying his biretta, he was fain to scream out upon

taring eyes he sat unheedingly through the sombre evening service in the Humphrey Clay Memorial. He saw the whole town, the whole world, imperilled. He saw in Franci

rs a music-hall, with this difference, that for Flynn the abhorred thing had no charm nor

t sin at the door of the new source of corruption he had discovered, called for strong tea, wrapped [Pg 37]a wet towel ro

Angli s

emy within

l mine, could describe the impiousness of the processions, the bowings, the scrapings, the befouling and vulgarisation of things sacred that happen in this church, this so-called church, which is in reality a booth, a theatre. Why, the very costumes are indecent. The choir-boys do not wear surplices, but little laced shirts or shifts which do not even cover their spinal bulbs. Their behaviour, their demeanour, is an affront to all truly religious-minded persons. Had I not remembered that I was in the House of God I should have spat in the face of the arch-mummer as he passed me and bade him begone to Babylon whence he came. Who is this man? Why should he be suffered to defile the religion which he is supposed to practise? Why should this play-actor be permitted to strut and mow and paw the air in the Holy of Holies? Three times at

il something is done. If those in authority will not

oughts he could only discover that he wished his church to be free. All sorts and conditions of men were free to come and free to stay away. He had once found one of his sidesmen turning a ragged old beggar-woman out, and had reproved him and led the old woman to a pew. She spat on the floor and sat fingering an old clay-pipe, but, to Francis's way of thinking, these things might not be unacceptable to the God he honoured, however distasteful they might be to human

's-eye and filled his pipe. The parrot scrambled out of its cage, shuffled along the floor and climbed up th