Sabine Baring-Gould - Arminell, Vol. 1

Sunday-school on the ground floor of the keeper’s cottage that stood against the church-yard, in a piece nibbled out of holy ground. Some old folks said this cottage had been the church-house where in ancient days the people who came to divine service stayed between morning prayer and evensong, ate their mid-day meal and gave out and received their hebdomadal quotient of gossip. But such days were long over, the house had been used as a keeper’s lodge for at least a hundred years. The basement consisted of one low hall exactly six feet one inch from floor to rafters. There was no ceiling between it and the upper house – only a flooring laid on the rafters. In pre-traditional days the men had sat and eaten and drunk in the room above, and the women in that below, between services, and their horses had been stabled where now the keeper had his kennel.

The basement chamber was paved with slabs of slate. Rats infested the lodge, they came after the bones and biscuits left by the dogs. The pheasants’ food was kept there, the keeper’s wife dropped her dripping, and the children were not scrupulous about finishing their crusts. The rats undermined the slates, making runs beneath the pavement to get at the box of dog biscuits, and the sacks of buckwheat, and the parcels of peppercorns; consequently the slates were not firm to walk on. Moreover, in the floor was a sunless secret cellar, of but eighteen inches in depth, for the reception of liquor, or laces or silks that had not paid the excise. The slates over this place, long disused, were infirm and inclined to let whoever stepped on them down.

During the week the keeper’s wife washed in the basement and slopped soapy water about, that ran between the slates and formed puddles, lurking under corners, and when, on Sunday, the incautious foot rested on an angle of slate, the slab tilted and squirted forth the stale unsavoury water.

The room, as already said, was unceiled. The rafters were of solid oak; the boards above were of deal, and had shrunk in places, and in places dropped out the core of their knots. The keeper’s children found a pleasure in poking sticks and fingers through, and in lying flat on the floor with an eye on the knot-hole, surveying through it the proceedings in the Sunday-school below.

About the floor in unsystematic arrangement spraddled forms of deal, rubbed by boys’ trousers to a polish. Some of these forms were high in the leg, others short. No two were on a level, and no two were of the same length. They were rudely set about the floor in rhomboidal shapes, or rather in trapeziums, which according to Euclid have no defined shapes at all.

There was a large open fireplace at one end of the room, in which in winter a fire of wood burned. When it burned the door had to be left wide open, because of the smoke, consequently Sunday-school was held in winter in a draught. At the extremity of the room, opposite the fireplace stood Moses and Aaron – not in the flesh, nor even in spirit, but in “counterfeit presentment” as large as life, rudely painted on board. They had originally adorned the east end of the chancel; when, however, the fashion of restoring churches set in, Orleigh Church had been done up, and Moses and Aaron had been supplanted to make room for a horrible reredos of glazed tiles. One of the Sunday-school scholars, a wag, had scribbled mottoes from their mouths, on scrolls, and had made Aaron observe to Moses, “Let us cut off our noses;” to which the meekest of men was made to re-join, “It is the fashion to wear ’em.” But through orthographical weakness, fashion had been spelled fashum , and wear ’em had been rendered warum .

But why was the Sunday-school held in the basement of the keeper’s cottage? For the best of good reasons. There was no other room conveniently near the church in which it could be held.

Lady Lamerton could not live in peace without a Sunday-school. To her, the obligation to keep the ten commandments was second to the obligation to keep Sunday-school. How could the ten commandments be taught, unless there were a Sunday-school in which to teach them? About a century ago Mr. Raikes invented and introduced this institution; it spread like measles, schools multiplied like maggots. It became an incumbus on consciences. It was supposed to be the panacea for all moral evil. There are still to be found persons with childlike faith in Sunday-schools, as there are to be found persons who believe in spontaneous combustion and calomel.

The national school was two miles distant, near the village. The church stood in the grounds of Orleigh Park, and its satellite, the Sunday-school, necessarily near it.

In Yorkshire it is customary among the lower classes at dinner, when there is meat, to introduce first a huge and heavy slab of pudding, and the young people are expected to devour a pound’s weight of this before meat is put on their plates. It is thought, and justly, that a grounding of leaden dough will make their appetites less keen for roast beef. On the same principle the disciples of Mr. Raikes serve out Sunday-school, slabby and heavy, to young church-folk, before Church worship, to abate in some degree their relish for it.

There had been some difficulty about a habitat for the Sunday-school. Lady Lamerton had tried to hold it in the laundry of the great house, but the children in muddy weather had brought in so much dirt that no laundry-work could be done in the room on Monday till it had been scoured out. Besides – a fearful discovery had been made, better left to the imagination than particularized. Suffice it to say that after this discovery the children were banished the laundry. It must have come from them. From whom else could it have been derived? The laundry-maids were Aphrodites, foam, or rather soapsud-born, and it could not proceed from such as they. Some said – but nonsense – there is no such a thing as spontaneous generation. Pasteur has exploded that. So all the pupils, with their prayer-books and Ancient-and-Moderns under their arms, made an exodus, and went for a while into an outhouse in the stable-yard. There they did not remain long, for the boys hid behind doors instead of coming in to lessons, and then dived into stables to see the horses. One of them nearly died from drinking embrocation for spavin, thinking it was cherry-brandy, and another scratched his ignoble name on the panel of one of my lord’s carriages, with a pin.

So, on the complaint of the coachman, my lord spoke out, and the Sunday scholars again tucked their prayer-books and hymnals under their arms, and, under the guidance of Lady Lamerton, migrated to a settled habitation in the basement of the keeper’s cottage. The place was hardly commodious, but it had its advantages-it was near the church.

Lady Lamerton, who presided over the Sunday-school and collected the Sunday scholars’ club-pence, and distributed that dreary brown-paper-covered literature that constituted the Sunday-school lending library, was a middle-aged lady with a thin face and very transparent skin, through which every vein showed. There was not much character in her face, but it possessed a certain delicacy and purity that redeemed it from being uninteresting. She was – it could be read in every feature – a scrupulously conscientious woman, a woman strong in doing her duty, and in that only; one whose head might be and generally was in a profound muddle as to what she believed, but who never for a moment doubted as to what she should do. She would be torn by wild horses rather than not keep Sunday-school, and yet did not know what to teach the children in the school she mustered.

Lady Lamerton, seated on a green garden chair from which the paint was much rubbed away, had about her on three sides of an irregular square the eldest girls of the school. The next class to hers was taken by the Honourable Arminell Inglett, her step-daughter, only child of Lord Lamerton by his first wife.