The Altar Steps, page 269 by Compton MacKenzie
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igious atmosphere of Malta combined with the romantic associations of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated by his son's ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much church-going argued an unhealthy preoccupation, and as for Edward's rhapsodies about the Auberge of Castile, which sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, they made him sick, to use his own expression.
"You make me sick, Ted," he used to declare. "The sooner I get quit of Malta and quartered at Woolwich again, the better I shall be pleased."
When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he hoped that the effect of such prosaic surroundings would put an end to Ted's mooning, and that he would settle down to a career more likely to reward him in this world rather than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his dreams aspired. Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who had so far submitted to his father's wishes as to be working in a solicitor's office, found that the effect of being banished from Malta was to stimulate him into a practical attempt to express his dreams of religious devotion. He hired a small room over a stable in a back street and started a club for the sons of soldiers. The band-master would not have minded this so much, especially when he was congratulated on his son's enterprise by the wife of the Colonel. Unfortunately this was not enough for Edward, who having got the right side of an unscrupulously romantic curate persuaded him to receive his vows of a Benedictine oblate. The band-master, proud and fond though he might be of his own uniform, objected to his son's arriving home from business and walking about the house in a cassock. He objected equally to finding that his own musical gifts had with his son degenerated into a passion for playing Gregorian chants on a vile harmonium. It was only consideration for his delicate wife that kept the band-master from pitching both cassock and harmonium into the s