III
So the old carriage mouldered on in the coach-house, and its net-work of cobwebs grew grimier each day.
How the spiders maintained themselves was a mystery, for no fly could have run the blockade of the window, even if the inducement had been greater. At last Ronald and I wove a legend around them in our turn, which terrified us more than did the carriage itself. We decided that, after long years of mutual slaughter, the victory had rested in the end with two or three hoary monsters, who had ensconced themselves within the framework of the ruined carriage, from which they looked out upon the solitude they were creating. Little by little the uncanny idea grew upon us till, regardless of all probability, we fancied we could see their eyes peering out of the darkness.
More than once we made illicit expeditions at midnight in the hope that we might find the ghostly coachman cleaning and repairing his equipage for another sortie. But we could see nothing. If either of us had gone alone, the result might have been different; we should have seen, or pretended to see, many matters of interest.
November was, as a rule, our month of storms at Broadwater, though February often ran it close; and, in the year that followed upon Frampton’s story, a gale broke upon us on the third of the month that beat the record of our times for violence. We had not been without warning of its coming. The sea had been “crying out” at intervals—sure token that the storm had paused to gather breath, bidding the sea take forward its message to the shore.
Not when the gale is at its height—at any rate along our coast—can you best realise the grandeur of the sea. Study it rather on one of these quiet days of warning, when you can trace a wave almost from its inception, till it curls over at your feet with a dull roar, regular as the boom of a minute gun, and audible for miles inland.
Lashed into foam, and its voice drowned by the wind, it parts with much of its majesty, and becomes merely a symbol of turmoil and unrest. What it gains in wildness, it loses in self-control, like the seething rapids of Niagara before they compose themselves into dignity prior to the final plunge.
Then came another and a final warning. It was one of those rare sunsets which leave an imprint on the memory for life. Not a sunset in which conflicting colours are fused into each other by soft and subtle gradations—these we see often and soon forget—but one of war and discord; when colours, the most antagonistic, meet without blending, and produce effects that would be called crude and coarse upon a painter’s canvas.
On a background of unvarying crimson, black and purple clouds were projected, clean cut in outline, and solid, to all appearance, as the hull of an Atlantic liner that was cleaving her way across the sea beneath them. The sea itself borrowed its colours from the sky, but jealously guarded them from encroaching on the beach beyond, which shone white as silver in the unnatural glow. Beyond it still, the valleys and hills that rose behind Broadwater were painted a dark and luminous green, on which a few scattered homesteads stood out in clear and startling relief. For the moment distance was annihilated, and a step or two, or so it seemed, might have compassed the mile of space that separated us from our own house door.
A sunset like this, following upon a “crying” sea, can never be misread by the dwellers on our coast. It warns every fisherman that he must haul his lerret to the very summit of the ridge, and every Coastguard station along the dreaded Bay that it behoves them to be awake and watching. But it was not till midnight that the storm broke upon us.
Our faith in the old house was strong. It had outlived so many storms, and the gale of ’24 must have been worse than this, or so we kept saying for mutual encouragement. But it was hard to believe it, and the comfort was quickly followed by a disquieting thought that each year, as it passed, left the chimneys older and less capable of resisting the pressure. We were disquieted, too, for others; we knew well by experience what a night like this might bring us from the sea. Times upon times, in similar gales, we had been hurried to the beach by signals of distress, and had helped the Coastguard, sometimes in saving life, oftener in furthering that painful recall to life which is more agonizing to witness than death itself.
Happily there came to-night no appealing cry. Even if it had pierced its way through wind and rain, those whom it summoned could only have watched and waited for one of those strange freaks by which the sea now and again elects to spare a human life. At the height of the gale, when gust upon gust followed each other with ever increasing fury, we were still seated in the drawing-room under various pretences. Ronald and I said openly that we were afraid of venturing our lives in the upper rooms, just under the chimneys. Our uncle jeered at our cowardice, but stayed where he was. “The noise would prevent my sleeping,” he said, “but, as for danger, I’d as lief sleep in the garrets as anywhere; only the servants’ beds ain’t as comfortable as my own. The old house’ll last our time yet.”
As if in answer to his boast, the gale made another defiant howl. It was answered by a dull crash, followed by a continuous roar of falling materials—followed again by a dead silence that was audible above the rush of wind and rain. It took us only a few minutes to satisfy ourselves that the fabric of the house was safe. It was a chimney stablewards that had gone, crashing through a hay loft and lumber room right down on the top of our ghostly carriage, and clearing Broadwater of spiders for the period of our lives. Even the uncle himself could find no plea for extending his protection to a mass of shivered fragments. If the powers of darkness had destroyed their own handiwork, or failed in ability to protect it, there was no reason to suppose that the hand of man would be more successful. So the fiat went forth—not, I believe, without great searching of heart on the part of our uncle—and carriage and cobwebs, and even the stable itself were swept away, and, as Bunyan says, I saw them no more.
“Well, I’m glad that it’s gone,” said a quiet, sweet voice at my elbow, as Ronald and I were watching the departure of the last load of materials. And, turning, I saw before me the woman who was to be the guiding star of Ronald’s life, yes, and my own life too. She was little more than a girl then—only a few years older than Ronald himself—with a great calm truthfulness in her eyes, and the air of one who had already known sorrow, and been refined, not hardened, by the experience.
“Yes,” she repeated, “I am glad it’s gone. And now we can be friends. It has been so lonely for me at Thorpe ever since my father died, and I have so wanted to make friends with you; only that old carriage stood in the way. It was silly, no doubt, to be so much afraid, but then I am Scotch—and the Scotch you know are very superstitious,” she added with a smile. “Besides, ever since I can remember anything, I’ve been told that the old carriage meant mischief and trouble between Thorpe and Broadwater. It is true, no doubt, that an ancestor of mine did die in it, and that all sorts of ghastly rumours were current as to how he met his death. But nothing ever came of them, and it was commonly assumed that he died of heart disease; he had certainly been ailing for years before. Thank heaven! the very scene of the crime—if such it were—has been swept away at last. And it is pleasant, isn’t it? to recommence our life’s friendship here where it was wrecked. Though I fear we shan’t meet often as yet, for my husband that is to be lives abroad, till I can persuade him to give up his post and settle down with me for good in the dear old home. But you will be my friends, won’t you, for always?”
She held out her hand in pledge of her friendship. And we shall be friends, I think, “for always.” I like the old-fashioned phrase.
Besides, it was her own.
On the Racecourse at Bayview
It was Ronald’s birthday, and the day fixed for the Races at Bayview—an unlucky coincidence, for he always showed a keen spirit of enterprise on that particular morning. He was now fourteen, and looked a trifle older owing to his splendid physique. Even in the nursery visitors had christened him the “Infant Hercules.” A Viking he was in miniature, with clear blue eyes and short, crisp hair, carrying with him an atmosphere of suppressed fun that, dangerous as it might prove, was a certain guarantee against dulness or want of spirit. He had behaved himself beautifully for an entire month. But I distrusted him to-day. He had never seen the races, and had constantly signified his intention of doing so. So when his uncle said to him at breakfast, “You are not to go to the races; they are destructive of morality, especially to a boy of your age,” and Ronald winked at me across the table, I felt sure he intended to go.
“No sir,” he said respectfully—“and I suppose you won’t go either. Of course they can’t do you any harm at your age; but they can’t do you any good.”
“As it happens, Ronald, I shall go—just to make sure that you don’t. Besides, I think it a good principle that elderly people should be seen doing things which they forbid to their youngsters. Unquestioning obedience is a fine thing. It doesn’t follow that because I allow myself a cigar to quiet my nerves, therefore you should smoke who don’t know what a nerve means.”
“No sir: of course it doesn’t”—and he winked again.
For myself, I distinctly intended to go to the races, seeing that I was past the age at which my uncle feared their contagion; though neither was I old enough to plead the principle which he had so astutely paraded on his own account. And so I went.
Ronald had left the house soon after breakfast—for a ride (he said)—and, as I saw nothing of him on the racecourse, I was comfortable in the belief that for once he had obeyed orders. When the races were nearly over, a little stable boy came up to me and touched his cap:
“Hold your horse, sir?”
By Jove, it was Ronald. He had borrowed Dick the groom’s livery, and had had a fine time of it, he told me, in that unconventional attire.
Just then our uncle rode up. “Now stand away, Fred, and don’t be seen talking to me, and I’ll show you some rare sport.”
“Hold your horse, sir?”—this to our uncle.
“Well, I don’t mind if you do, and I’ll have a stroll with Fred here till it’s time to go home.”
After a lounge along the course, chatting with friends and criticising the horses, we came back to where we left Ronald. “Thanks,” said the uncle, as he re-mounted, “here’s a shilling for you. A lucky dog you are, too, for it’s got a hole in it, I see. Good-day.”
When dinner was over that evening, the uncle waxed genial over a bottle of ’75 Margaux. “We’d a capital day’s racing, Ronald. I’m almost sorry you weren’t with us. Next year, all well, my boy, I’ll take you myself.”
“Thanks, sir”—and he winked the third time. “By the way, you haven’t lost a shilling, sir, have you? I picked up this one while you were at the races. You’re a lucky dog, sir, if it does belong to you, for it’s got a hole in it?”
Verdict: Acquitted, but don’t do it again.
On the Sands
Broadwater was fearfully dull on a Sunday, so I came over from Bayview where I was staying, that Ronald and I might help each other in getting through the day.
It was a blazing afternoon in August, and the park, shut in by hills, shimmered in a haze of heat. “I can’t stand this,” said Ronald. “Air I must get somehow, and, as it’s not to be got nearer than the sea, we’ll walk to the shore in search of it. It’s rather hard on you, to be sure, who’ve done the walk once already. But it’s better than lounging about here, where it’s too hot to speak or think; and, at any rate, we shall see the trippers.”
It happened, most unluckily, that just as we reached the pier, an open air service had begun. Of course they had chosen the hottest corner possible for it; a nook sheltered by the masonry of the pier, which carefully excluded every breath of wind that might be travelling to us from the sea. But, despite the heat, it was a temptation to mild excitement that Ronald found it impossible to resist.
“Not so good as the nigger minstrels, but better than nothing,” he said. So we joined the throng of listeners. It was the usual audience, the devotees (mainly women) forming the inner circle, in close proximity to the preacher and the harmonium. Next came the half-hearted, weaker vessels, who separated the former as by a wall from the irreverent throng of idlers who laughed and talked and smoked on the outside fringe. The preacher was a man of the ordinary type, only a little stouter, a little more flaccid and even more illiterate than usual. Where do they come from, these preachers? Are they men who think they have a call or a gift? and are they accepted for the office on their own valuation? Certainly they are not chosen for any capability that can approve itself to the impartial hearer.
The present representative of the school was enlarging, when we came up, upon the demerits of the publican. Ronald, after a few minutes, began to fume and fret. But he behaved for a while excellently well, though I could hear him muttering words in an undertone distinctly uncomplimentary to the preacher.
“And it is publicans like these—the scum and refuse of Jerusalem—that are represented in this town to-day by the inn-keepers, barmen, and pot-boys, who an hour or two hence will be serving many of their fellow creatures—many, I fear, of this audience—with drink, to the ruin of their lives here and of their hopes of salvation hereafter.”
“Nothing of the sort,” shouted Ronald, “he wasn’t an innkeeper at all; he was a tax-gatherer. Every schoolboy knows that.”
The silence that followed was awful; every eye was turned upon the boy, and it was a strain upon my loyalty to remain at his side, and not then and there renounce his acquaintance.
“Oh, he wasn’t, wasn’t he, young man?” said the preacher. “Well, as you seems to know more about the Bible than I do, perhaps you’ll step up here and take my place. Kindly tell us, if you please, out of your superior knowledge, what he was, and why he was called a publican if he was a tax-collector; and why a poor collector of rates, who only did his duty, is held up to our scorn and reprobation; yes, our reprobation.” (This word he regarded as a crushing climax.)
To my complete and indescribable confusion, Ronald, nothing loth, accepted the challenge with delight, and the next moment was standing on the platform addressing an appreciative audience. What a sermon he gave them!—lasting without a pause or break for exactly half-an-hour; every thought reasoned out, and closing with a peroration of consummate eloquence. By a clever feint he had diverted the text of the preacher to one on the Pharisee and the Publican, making a scathing attack on the Pharisaism of the day, which went to church, and gave its alms openly and never in secret; which paid its way and kept the conventional commandments, and neglected (as of little count) the weightier things of unselfishness and love. “A day is coming when it will matter nothing where we lived, nor in what occupations, nor amidst what circumstances, but only how we wrought, and in what spirit we suffered. Be the thing you say; be unselfish, in your own poor way, to your friends and to your home, and to the world about you; that is worth ten thousand sermons and a hundred thousand Articles of Religion.” A dead silence followed as he stepped down from the platform; he had left a charm upon us that it seemed sacrilege to break. Then came a word or two. “What a wonderful boy!—a second Spurgeon; with all his eloquence and none of his irreverence.”
“Summat worth hearin’, I calls it; how he did pitch into they bloomin’ aristocrats. I’ll come and hear ye, young master, whensomdever you holds forth agin.”
“Well—I never!” It was with this ungrammatical aposiopesis that I started, so soon as I could find breath to start at all. “Where on earth, Ronald, did you get it all from?” The boy had come back to me looking as cool as a cucumber, and highly delighted with the sensation he had created.
“Don’t tell, Fred,” he answered, “but it was a sermon of Vaughan’s. We are made to analyse his sermons at school, and say them afterwards for repetition lessons. So when that old donkey fell foul of the publican, I had one handy you see, on that very subject, and I thought it a pity not to fire it off.”
Surely, I thought, he’ll be satisfied now, and I tried to draw him away from the crowd, who were becoming a trifle too much interested in our name and identity. But no; not a bit of it. The excitement was full upon him still. So up he went to the harmonium (they had now started a hymn), and looking over the shoulder of the performer (she was a pretty girl of eighteen) he began to sing as lustily as the best of them. By degrees his arm, I saw, began to steal about her waist, and, fuss and fidget as she might, she was powerless to help herself. Her hands were occupied with the keyboard, and her feet with the blower, and with her voice she had to lead the singing. So he had her at his mercy, and hugged her disgracefully, while she, poor girl, was powerless to resist. The audience all thought she was his sister, and highly commended him, it was clear, for the countenance and support he was giving her.
While the last line of the last verse was being sung, the temptation became too strong for resistance, and Ronald stooped down and kissed her—an action which touched still further the sympathetic heart of the audience.
“A dear, good young feller that, as ever I see’d”—said an old lady in my immediate neighbourhood. “I only wish as how he were a son of mine; a preachin’ that fine, for all the world like the Bishop, and a’ lookin’ arter his sister so prettily—and a nice young girl she is too.”
After this exploit he slipped across the circle and joined me, and a minute later—with hot and blazing cheeks—I was thankful to find myself round the corner, and well on the way home before the throng of listeners had begun to disperse. I felt, indeed, as must that Bishop, who, to oblige a small girl younger in years than in experience, condescended to ring at a street door, and was rewarded with the advice, “Run! run for yer life! they’ll knock the ’ead off yer shoulders if they catches ye.” I wonder what he elected to do? pocket his dignity and run? or rely upon his clerical attire to see him through? In any case our anxiety would be more protracted. What if the escapade should reach our uncle’s ears? However I was spared this climax. The story of it got wind in the servants’ hall, as all stories do; but the servants were far too loyal to Master Ronald to betray him, and so it never made its way up stairs to the drawing room.
But the career of that preacher was ended—in Bayview.
Our Rector
We had two, if not three, celebrities in our village. The Rector is dead; the Clerk is dead; the Professor still lives. But, independently of this claim to our respect, let us give precedence to the Church.
Less than fifty years ago the services in a parish not ten miles from one of our well-known watering places were done—or left undone—by surely the queerest cleric of his time.
A grand old man he was in person—tall, and venerable as Bede himself, with the most benevolent of faces and the most silver of silver hair. Fit to be an archbishop, so far as appearances went, but most unfit to have the charge of the hundred souls—there were no more of them—committed to his trust.
To these he ministered, or (as I have said) failed to minister, on Sunday mornings; for often as not the services, stipulated for at the price of £75 per annum, were left unperformed on the shallowest of pretexts. It might be the weather; it might be that he was indisposed; often, I fear, it was from sheer disinclination.
To the hamlet that clustered close round the church it was a matter of comparative indifference. They never believed by anticipation in the service till the bell was actually sounding; and his henchman (clerk, sexton, choirmaster and gravedigger in one) had strict orders to withhold this summons till the Rector himself was actually in view. But to our party, who lived two miles away, the question of service or no service was a serious one. It meant hesitation in starting, and reluctance to risk the chance—provocation, too, even to my long-suffering father, when he found the church door barred, and a south-wester brewing, in the teeth of which we had to struggle home over a barren down, unsupported by the nutriment, mental and moral, on which we had calculated. But the service, when it did take place, was a queerer experience by far than the service foregone. The orchestra would have been the despair of Nebuchadnezzar. It consisted of a single flageolet, blown by the wheezy old sexton—one Joseph Edwards by name. We did not even boast of a serpent—instrument immortalised by Mr. Hardy for its volume of tone in supplementing deficiencies. Now the flageolet is a pet aversion of mine, and I can forgive Nebuchadnezzar many of his iniquities for having (so far as we know) excluded it from his band. Indeed, musicians themselves would seem to be ashamed of it, for they have re-christened it, I am told, by a humbler name. But I was careful not to betray my feelings to my friend Joseph, and listened patiently while he enlarged on the capabilities and melodiousness of his pet instrument. “Not but what I’m getting a bit wheezy (he’d often say to me), and can’t make the flourishes as onst I could. But ’tis may be better as it is. They quieter tunes are belike more godly. Anyhow the choir—poor souls—got right puzzled among my turns and quavers, coming in here, there and no how at the finish.”
But, praise it as he might, the flageolet is the worst instrument possible to constitute an orchestra; especially when played as Joseph played it. It gave out a series of squeaks and counter-squeaks—punctuated and accentuated by his wheezes rather than by the requirements of the tune. Indeed, a boy learning the bugle, or a Punch and Judy panpipe, would have discoursed more decorous music. To me the panpipe and the flageolet seem nearly akin; only the flageolet is the more powerful instrument of the two, and Punch is more exacting than we were in the choice of an executant.
Once, as a special favour, I was invited by Joseph to attend a choir practice. It was before his hand or, I should say, his breath had lost its cunning; and it took place on this wise. An hour before service (which on this occasion was actually realised) Joseph took his stand in the reading desk, flageolet in hand, while a group of apple-cheeked cottagers—fishermen mainly, and plough-boys—grouped themselves in my father’s pew below. In one point at any rate Joseph had anticipated the ritual of later days; he repudiated all women from his choir. “’Taint no place for ’em,” he’d say; “I wonder what ’postle Paul ’d think, if he could ha’ heard they two women at S. Matthew’s screechin’ out ‘O ’twas a joyful sound to hear’—and none of us, let alone the choir, privileged to put in a joyful sound along wi ’em. If women baint allowed to preach in Church, stands to reason that they baint allowed to sing.”
“Now boys, turn to ‘Aurelia,’ and go for to remember that we sing the whole on’t right through this time. Last time as ever we did it some on you took to skipping and one sang one verse and t’other the next, whereby I had to blow myself nigh faint to hide your discordance. And mind ye too, sing ’en slow, not as if you wanted to get shot on’t.”
All went well at the first rehearsal, for Joseph played the air distinctly and without disturbing flourishes—only with an intolerable drawl, mindful in all probability of “passon’s” injunctions; of which more anon.
“Well sung,” says he; “you be a good choir when you be so minded; and well instructed, too, though I says it as didn’t ought to. Now then, we’ll see what ye can do when I puts in the flourishes.”
This was a change for the worse, and what had been a melancholy dirge became a haphazard scramble for notes, each boy seizing on the one that he could detect among the enveloping flourishes, regardless whether it was the same note that had found favour with his neighbour. In the end the hymn became a sacrilegious fugue, devoid of time, harmony or sequence. Yet Joseph was never disquieted at the result. On the contrary, he regarded it as a tribute to his skill, addressing his choir at the finish as a general might address his discomfited troops: “You’ve done your best, and none of us can’t do no more. Better luck at church-time, and this I do say, that ’tis few players can overlay a melody as I can wi’ flourishes and expect them as sings it to pick out the tune.”
But to return to our Rector. The fun began (I write, remember, as a boy of ten) with the First Lesson. When the time for it approached, great preparations were seen to be in progress. Our benevolent Archbishop retired into the recesses of the reading desk (a high, square pew, scarcely to be differentiated from our own) and disposed his lunch in orderly array upon the sill overhanging my father’s head. And, to give time for its consumption, a boy was summoned from the congregation—usually it was his own son, a curly-pated lad of thirteen—to discourse the Lesson. Manfully he grappled with the difficulties and hard names of the Old Testament—sticking and halting at nothing, and making a record of false quantities and mispronunciations that I have never heard beaten during a twenty years’ experience of the average undergraduate. Meanwhile his father lunched peacefully, careless what havoc he made with the Kings of Israel and Judah. But woe betide the boy if ever he tried to skip a name. A guttural rebuke issued from the depths of the reading desk: “None of that, Jack; go back, my lad, and try it again.”
But his greatest delight of all was to hear Jack struggling with the genealogy in St. Luke. A series of chuckles issued from the corner where the old man lay ensconced, that gathered in volume with every fresh fall; and when the boy, hot and discomfited, retired from the fray, there was a pause in the proceedings till the old man had recovered himself sufficiently to resume his functions. His luncheon meanwhile had been progressing steadily, not without the gurgling sound of something comforting to facilitate digestion. It puzzled me for years to discover the raison d’ être of this extraordinary meal, knowing as I did that an hour later he would be dining with one of his cottagers, after careful preliminary enquiry as to which house could offer the most attractive fare. Only quite lately, long after the idea of luncheon had been stereotyped upon my brain, I found out that the so-called luncheon was, after all, no luncheon at all, but only a retarded breakfast. Our Rector being a late riser, and having a five-mile walk before him, could find no opportunity of taking it in comfort till he had reached the haven of the parish reading desk.
A cigar was the indispensable accompaniment of the second Lesson, during which period its fumes could be seen ascending like “curling incense” to the blackened rafters of the roof. Indeed, the only thing that ever really shattered my father’s equanimity was the sight of its reeking end, projected over his head from the sill of the reading desk, where the Rector had reluctantly placed it while he applied himself to the requirements of the “Benedictus.”
When the flageolet sounded the key note of the first hymn, the Rector regarded it as the signal of a temporary relaxation. He was for a time off duty, and the cigar was again in requisition. But in fine and balmy weather, he found the atmosphere of the church too close for its enjoyment. It “gathered sweetness from the open air.” So, attired in surplice, stole and bands, our Rector strolled out into the churchyard—giving us pleasant little vista-views of his enjoyment as he passed and re-passed the windows of the aisles. That it might be enjoyed in perfection and unto the end, the hymns selected were inordinately long. But, if fate was against him, and the wind light, and the cigar drew slowly, he had no false shame in appearing on the chancel steps to announce with all the dignity of a formal notice that the last two verses of the hymn would be repeated. After which he disappeared into the churchyard again.
The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest. It had an infinity of anticipation. No one knew what was coming—least of all the Rector himself. We felt stimulated by the chance of any and every possibility. A clergyman of the strictest sect of the Evangelicals, he always preached in a surplice. (It was in the days, remember, when the Geneva gown was the badge of that school, and the sign of a high church cleric was barely appearing above the horizon).
But I sadly fear that our Rector was influenced by no question of principle or non-principle; I cannot, I think, be wronging him if I infer that his preference for the surplice was due to sheer indifference or indolence.
Then came the always exciting task of moving the immense Bible from the reading desk to the pulpit. He regarded it, I think, almost in the light of a fetish, and certainly, so long as I knew him, would never have attempted a sermon with any smaller and less trustworthy guide. He balanced the enormous volume in his right hand, and, with his left hand on the rails, steadied himself as he made the painful and perilous ascent. The hope, I fear, of us boys was that the book would one day slip from his hand and imperil the head of the clerk beneath, who was now no longer choirmaster, but, like a Roman flute player, had crossed over to his proper seat and resumed his duties beneath the pulpit. But the hope was never realised, and I have felt ever since that my life has lacked something in consequence.
The choice of his text was the longest part of his sermon. The Bible was opened haphazard, as though he intended to execute a sort of sors Vergiliana. But so casual a method was quite unsuited to the dignity of our Rector. The pages were turned and re-turned; whole chapters were read and carefully studied, and, after a quarter of an hour of this preliminary investigation, a text was given out, that for glaring irrelevance and disconnection with everything else could never have been surpassed if he had taken it at sight. A name out of a genealogy—the Christian name Mary—Tophet—the daubed wall—pillows for all armholes—are among the subjects that I distinctly remember were selected for our edification. But of the treatment alas! I remember nothing—nothing then, and certainly nothing now, when I would give £50 to trace the exact process of his reasoning.
The last sermon I ever heard him deliver was on the text, “And there shall be no more sea”—an unwise and disquieting subject for a congregation, most of whom came of a race of fishermen, and gained their living from the element which he so confidently annihilated.
“If there baint no sea, then ’tis no place for I,” I heard a man say to his neighbour as he passed out of church; “and sakes alive, where be ’en going to get their fish from?”
Such was our Rector. Not reverent or discreet, you will say, in his capacity of priest. No, but a kindly, genial old man; devoted to his parishioners, if not to his duties; clever too, and companionable in society, and inexhaustible to the boys of the parish in the matter of marbles and gingerbread.
It is with affection that I recall him, for, in spite of his eccentricities, and perhaps because of them, I loved him well.—R.I.P.
Echoes from an Organ Loft
“Pale fingers moved upon the keys,
The ghost hands of past centuries.”
From Joseph’s flageolet to one of the finest organs in England—from the scene of “our Rector’s” ministrations to a building that could have swallowed up his church and his school room and all the house property in his parish—was a startling transition for a boy of fourteen.
I wonder how often, during my first experience of a cathedral service, my thoughts travelled back to the tiny hamlet in the west, with its ruined chancel on which the Atlantic had spent its rage, and its few cottages straggling on and up behind an avenue of elms, to where the new church, safe in a sheltered paradise of its own, looks down compassionately upon the wreckage of the past.
In times to come I got to know every nook and corner of the great organ loft at K. It was built in those large minded days before architects had conceived the fatal idea of economising space. Ascending by a broad staircase that rose with the dignity of an inclined plane, you came out upon a plateau, roomier and more comfortable than many a London flat. The sanctum of the organist—indeed, the huge instrument itself—were little more than incidents of the loft. There was a chamber for the wife of the dean, and another chamber for the wife of the organist, together with a library for the Church music; and still there was room in it for blind man’s buff—when the choristers could get the chance.
The organ itself might have been a mile away—so little did you hear of it. In this respect the loft resembled the deck of a battleship, where the men who work the guns hear least of the explosion. Only a few muttered growls from the big pipes that lined the walls on either side, or burrowed in the caverns underneath, suggested the proximity of sound. The crash of the full organ was delivered at a point far above your head, somewhere among the shadowy outlines of the roof.
The space allotted to the dean’s wife on the other side of the organ was less comfortable than ours, but far more interesting. The floor outside her enclosure was broken by yawning chasms to give the great pipes breathing room; and though they were of wood, and spoke, as wooden pipes should speak, in hollow muffled tones, they must, I fancy, have confused her devotions and raised a small hurricane about the nape of her neck.
Linking the present to the past were the names of by-gone choristers, carved in schoolboy fashion upon the old oak panels, who had sung their last note a hundred years ago—it might be in this very gallery. It was easy to picture them passing and re-passing still through the trap door which opened at our feet—a white robed procession of the voiceless dead.
An organ loft is a delightfully irresponsible place from which to take part in a service, especially when the instrument is a large one, well removed from the congregation on the top of a screen—above all, when you do not happen to be the organist.
I would not for an instant be understood to imply that the sense of aloofness necessarily engenders irreverence. On the contrary, many of the most solemn hours of my life were passed within the recesses of the great organ at K., and my friend the organist might have been a pattern to the congregation in true devotional spirit. But the necessities imposed by a choral service afforded him little opportunity for a devotional attitude, while he would have been more, or less, than human if he had not utilised our isolation to impart to me pleasant little details regarding the progress of the service. These would be interrupted at intervals by parenthetical instructions whenever he wanted help in the management of his stops.
A reminiscence of an organ-loft monologue would read something as follows: “Draw the Gamba, please. How flat that boy Robinson’s singing; and oh! those h’s of his! Principal, please, and now the mixtures. Green’s getting shaky in his top notes; he only looked at that upper G. Take care; you put in that coupler before I had finished the bar. What a nuisance it is! I shall never get a boy like him . . . The finest hymn written, don’t you think? (They were singing Stainer’s ‘Saints of God’) . . . and ‘Aurelia’ is the second best. (Well done! Joseph, I thought; you’re in it after all.) Get me Wely’s Offertoire in G, will you? It’s poor stuff, but the people will have it. The Oboe, please, for the air . . . And now for the scramble . . . Turn over in good time; I can see ahead of me, but I can’t see through the page.” And he dashed into the finale at the hurricane pace that alone makes the thing endurable. Even he couldn’t talk till it was done.
Sometimes we were interested in events that were proceeding in the world beneath us. “What on earth’s the man reading the fifteenth for? it’s the sixteenth that’s the lesson for the day.” “Oh, it’s Henderson,” would be my reply. “He always chooses a fine chapter to show off his voice and elocution. If he’s hauled up for it, he’ll say he did it by mistake.”
On one occasion we were favoured by a reader, fresh from the study of Aristophanes, with the startling announcement that the First Lesson for the day was taken from the Book of Ecclesiazusae.
One day I heard voices in the choir beneath. I knew, before I saw the speakers reflected from the mirror in front of me, that they were two limp figures in blue serge and coal-scuttle bonnets. The strident tones were unmistakeable, the product, in so far as the human throat can compass it, of a long and careful assimilation of the clash of the cymbals.
“A rare fine buildin’, this,” said one, “and what a hinstrument! I only wish we ’ad it in our place; draw a sight better than drums and cymbals, wouldn’t it? And a deal noisier.”
“You’re right,” answered the other, “but, for all that, I wouldn’t exchange with that lot to get it. They deans and chapters and canons, and heaven knows what they calls theirselves, aye, and the bisshup hisself, is that sunk in ignorance and self-conceit that they can’t see the right way; no, nor never will.”
Occasionally, but very rarely, matters went wrong in our own department. The water that fed the hydraulic gear failed, or was cut off at the main, and the organ “went out” in the middle of an anthem. One afternoon in November it clouded over so suddenly that we could hardly see our faces in the organ loft. Worse luck still, the matches were damp, and till I could be back with some more, Dr. H. had to guess at the anthem as best he could. I am not musician enough to know how he surmounted the difficulty, but I suspect that the choir that day must have been treated to an amount of improvisation to which they were wholly unaccustomed from an organist who, as a rule, played what he had to play, and rarely indulged in vagaries.
But our worst disaster was of earlier date. Bildad the Shuhite blew the organ. He had received that name because he cleaned shoes in a corner of the Close. It was in prehistoric days before hydraulic gear was dreamed of in connexion with the organ. As luck would have it, Bildad fell sick, and had to supply a deputy at the last moment. Dr. H. studied the man carefully, mistrusting, I think, his intelligence. But his answers were satisfactory, though I thought with the Doctor that he protested too much. Anyhow, the service was due, and we had no time to waste on our fears. The singing began, but the organ was irresponsive, and, hurrying to the back of the loft, I found our deputy-blower contemplating with blank stolidity the mechanism at his command, and pleading with an injured air, “Sir, I am a’ waitin’ for you to begin!”
One day I was laboriously extracting discords from the great instrument with Dr. H. at my elbow, when a gentle voice at our side asked for permission to try the instrument. What a delight it was, after the horrors I had been perpetrating, to see the long fingers charm out the melody, till they drifted at last into the chords of Chopin’s great march. Surely, I thought, the composer must hear and welcome such a perfect realisation of his wondrous dream.
“Charrlie, me boy, thry the pey-dals,” came a voice from below, with the raciest and most captivating of brogues. It was my first introduction to Ireland’s great musician—Sir Robert Stewart—and his still greater pupil, composer in prospective of the Requiem and Revenge.
At our next interview the Professor of the future gave me a friendly lecture on Wagner, emphasising his teaching the while by illustrative passages, which he played, I remember, in thick woollen gloves, of which he hadn’t troubled to divest himself, being pressed for time and the organ loft none too warm. The mechanism of the organ, I am bound to add, was old and antiquated—not as it is in these days, when the notes speak if a fly sits upon them, or you venture to sneeze in their neighbourhood.
I have made acquaintance with strange scenes in an organ loft—an organist of surpassing ability playing through a service when he was drunk, but certainly not incapable. Yet a deputy sat by him, ready to take his place in case he should prove unequal to retaining his seat at the instrument. I have seen a fight between two choristers who had been sent to fetch music for the choir. It began on this wise. “I can lick you ’ead over ’eels in ’oly ’oly ’oly,” said one. The taunt was not to be endured by a chorister of spirit, so “Come on!” said the other; and they had fought it out to the bitter end at the back of the organ before ever Dr. H. was aware that the battle was in progress. I have seen courtship too—ending, as all courtship should do, in matrimony—while the organist played unsuspiciously a soft and dreamy accompaniment. And I have seen heroism too—grand as any displayed upon a field of battle—when my friend came from his sick bed and played through a service magnificently while the death dew gathered on his face. And I coveted, as I never coveted before or since, the divine gift of music, which would have enabled me to spare him his long and patient hour of martyrdom.
And, at the end, he played the Dead March, never knowing that it was for himself he played it, while a furious thunder-storm raged over head, and the roll of the thirty-two-foot pipes was drowned by reverberating peals. As the final chords came crashing from his hands, he said to me, “Handel must have written it, I think, to an accompaniment like this. And yet the modern school of organists would have us leave out the drums! I shall never care to play it again.”
And three weeks afterwards he was dead.
Fighting the Cholera
Was it an escapade, I wonder? or was it something greater and grander? There are, I suppose, escapades good and bad; heroic and unheroic.
One evening I was tidying up Ronald’s room at Cambridge. We were both of us in residence now: I as an M.A., while he had just entered as an undergraduate. He was as studiously untidy as I was the reverse, and, but for me, his room, artistic as it was, would always have looked like a boudoir that had been used over-night for a tap-room. Pipes, tobacco, and matches met the eye everywhere, scattered among vases of flowers and ferns; no two sheets of the Times were together in one place; “Esmond” lay cheek by jowl with “Tom Jones” (the former, I was glad to see, the better worn), while there was more than a suspicion that his surplice was in use as a bed for a litter of kittens.
Ronald himself lay at his ease upon the sofa, watching—I cannot say with interest, but at any rate without prejudice—my improvements for the worse. But I roused him at last. In replacing a small box of Italian olive wood I knocked off the lid, and an aggregation of articles unimaginable were scattered on the floor.
“Hullo! stop that, old man,” he said. “You’ll be losing or breaking some of my most cherished possessions.”
“What on earth are they, Ronald? Here’s a small crucifix and a missal (you haven’t turned Roman Catholic, have you?) and any amount of rings—most of them brass—and, by Jove, a lock of hair! Is the last a love token? It looks uncommonly like the relic of another escapade. Did it belong to the girl who played the harmonium on the beach at Bayview? I didn’t know you’d got so far as that. Besides, her hair was light, if I remember. Out with it, old man, and clear your conscience by confession.”
“Have done with your jokes, Fred; you’re the last fellow to chaff like that if you knew the rights of it. And, if I must tell you, I must. But I didn’t want you to know of the matter; it looks too much like boasting. However, you find out everything I do; so I may as well tell you all about this, before you hunt it up for yourself in some underhand way, or make a tale out of it that isn’t the true one. You know Richards, Fred; the man my uncle made me travel with last autumn—to see the world, as he called it. I never liked the fellow, and always thought him a cad; but I didn’t know till then that he was a coward as well as a cad.”
“I always thought him both,” was my reply.
“Taormina in Sicily was one of the places we stopped at: the loveliest spot that you could dream of, if you dreamed your hardest. You’ve never been there, have you? Well: the town itself is a fair day’s walk up hill from the sea, and Mola’s another day’s walk above that; by which time you’ve nearly reached the clouds—only, as it happens, Sicily doesn’t boast of any. But you needn’t go higher than Taormina for the loveliest view on earth. They may talk of seeing Madrid, Seville, Naples, and a hundred other places, and then dying contented—why, there’s none of them that’s a patch on Taormina. Sit down in the proscenium of the old theatre, facing Etna, with the Straits of Messina and the foot of Italy laid out like a map on your left: and you can do without another view for the rest of your natural life. The only objection we found to it was that in September of last year it was most awfully hot, and Taormina is pestiferous enough to be a Turkish settlement. It is worse, I think, than the old town of Granada, which is perhaps the filthiest place that I know in Europe. The cholera, too, was about last year, especially in Italy; and, if it did cross the Straits, Taormina was ripe and handy for it.
“After we’d been there for a week or so it did come with a vengeance. First a suspicious case or two, then a case that was not suspicious at all, and then it fell like a thunderbolt on the town. Richards was off directly, and with him everyone in the place who could afford to go; so the poorer people, with their old priest, who stuck to his work like a man, had it all to themselves.
“Now it looks like boasting, but I didn’t like to run. Besides, I had come there for a fortnight, and I was fond of the place and the view and the old theatre—so why go? Anyhow I didn’t budge, and did what I could to help the old man in his difficulty—it was little enough. However, I had heaps of money, and they wanted that more than anything. And he taught me something about medicine—what little he knew of it; though, after all, nothing but stimulants at one stage and opium at another seemed to do them the slightest good.
“What a time it was! I pray that I may never stand face to face with cholera again. Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere. They died like flies, crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old St. Paul’s.’
“Late one evening I hurried from a sick room to get a breath of air in the theatre below. My friend, the old priest, was there before me. This was an unusual coincidence, as he scarcely ever gave himself a moment’s rest. Yet he might have done so now, for in ten days’ time the disease abated as rapidly as it had begun. And besides, he had organised a band of fairly efficient helpers.
“‘Good evening, signor,’ he said. ‘You see me in my church; for I find in it the same relief that my brethren in the cities find within the walls of a cathedral. To me it would seem a poor exchange—for what cathedral built by man could match this view?’ As he spoke he pointed through the ruined arches to where Etna towered in the distance. Surely the noblest drop-scene ever fashioned by the hand of nature, and not unworthily framed by the artist who had designed the theatre. Between the ruined columns on the left a steamer, environed by a little group of feluccas, made a series of dissolving views as it overtook and passed them on the sea below. But I saw he had some trouble on his mind over and above his care for his patients.
“‘Take courage, padre mio. The worst is over. That shroud of steel-blue mist is lifting day by day. I should like to know what causes it. I believe if we had had the power of gauging it, its changes would have made no bad register of the death-rate in the town.’
“‘You are right, my son; the worst is past; and, thanks mainly to you, I have been enabled to do my duty while it lasted. Without you I could have done little. Take an old man’s thanks, signor, on behalf of those who are left and those who are gone. Neither the one nor the other will ever forget you, here or in the world that holds them now. Yet I could almost wish that you had never come.’
“‘Why so?’ I asked.
“‘I wish, at any rate’ (speaking with more vehemence than his wont), ‘that you had not brought with you that false-hearted friend of yours.’
“‘You mean Richards. Yes, he is a coward to run away like that.’
“‘Worse, far worse. You know little Ninetta well, who lives at your lodgings up the hill—the prettiest girl in Taormina they call her, and I fancy they are right. She is down with the cholera—didn’t you know it? Taken this morning, and, unless I am wrong in my judgment, it is one of the worst cases we have had—hopeless, I should say, from the very first.’
“‘Poor little Ninetta! It does seem hard; taken, too, just when the disease was dying out. But what has Richards to do with it?’
“‘The confessional is sacred, my friend. But it may be that, in this one case, the cholera has struck in kindliness. Though I am sorry he should be away when he might have made her end more peaceful. Even when I left her to come and find you, she was perpetually calling for him. Put her off with excuses; it won’t be for long. Don’t let her think him a coward as well as a villain. If you weren’t a heretic, I would absolve you beforehand for any necessary evasion.’
“‘You may be sure I’ll do my best. The evasions won’t lie heavy upon my conscience. Goodnight.’
“There was no hope for her, as he had said. During the early stage of her illness she was always asking for him—wondering why he stayed away—for I obeyed the priest’s injunctions, and never told her he’d been coward enough to run. As she got worse, she began to wander, and, from having seen us so often together, she would confuse him with me; and, at the last, was perfectly happy so long as I was with her; calling me by his name, and thanking him, as she imagined, for all his care and kindness to her. The lock of hair that puzzled you is hers. She gave it to me just before she died (she had nothing else to give, poor girl) in the belief she was giving it to Richards. And then, quite quietly, still in the belief that he was with her, and that it was his hand and not mine that she was holding, she died.
“There you have the story, Fred, such as it is. All the other things were given me by the villagers—the few of them, that is, who lived—all except the missal, which came from my old friend the priest. It was his most cherished possession; given, I believe, in the hope of converting me. Well, if conversion would make me another such as he was, I wouldn’t say no to it.
“Shall I ever see him again, I wonder? Some day, Fred, you and I will go and hunt him up.”