III
When Father Jinks read himself into St Agatha's, the church seemed to him little better than a conventicle, a mere preaching-house, and it was his business to change it into a place fit for Catholic worship. His success in this direction was marvellous. Before his death there was a chancel with screen and choir stalls, a side pulpit of carved stone with scenes from the Gospels thereon, a reredos, and an altar with cross and candlesticks, besides other pieces of ecclesiastical furniture of lesser importance and beyond the lay intelligence. There was also an organ, for which so many pews were removed, and a font near the door, for which other pews were removed, and an east window, containing the life and death of our patron saint, about whom nobody knew anything before, and for which a magnificent geometrical design in red and blue, greatly admired by the parish, had to be removed. The very plaster, with ornate pattern of roses, he had stripped from the roof, and had the oak laid bare; and although the walls had been tastefully decorated by a local firm with a mixed border on a ground of green, so fierce and unrelenting was the Vicar's iconoclastic passion that this also was sacrificed, and nothing was to be seen in St Agatha's save stone and wood. “It was the 'omeliest church you ever see,” that excellent woman Mrs. Judkin remarked to me, “in the old Canon's time, with the bits of colour, and 'im a looking down at you in 'is black gown; and now it chills your 'art to sit there, let alone that you're hexpected to bow 'alf the time;” and so Mrs. Judkin, with many of like mind, went off to Ebenezer, where the firmament was represented on the roof and the service was decidedly warm. The structural reformation (or deformation, as it was generally considered) was a very achievement of persevering and ingenious begging, in which he taxed the patron and all the patron's friends, as well as every old lady or ecclesiastical layman with the reputation of highness, obtaining a pulpit from one and a font from another, picking up crosses, candlesticks, stools, altar-cloths in all quarters, and being mightily cheered by every addition to the full equipment of this neglected edifice. Nor did Father Jinks ask from other people what he would not give himself, for he dispensed with a curate that he might repair the chancel, and, as appeared afterwards, he expended all his little patrimony on the apocryphal life of St Agatha, whose doings and appearance as represented on that window were a subject of derision to the wits of the parish. When Jinks held his first festival in her honour, and preached a discourse eleven minutes in length on St Agatha's example and miracles, an interesting correspondence followed in the local paper, in which it was asserted that the church, then in the country and a chapel of ease to the famous church of St Paul's-in-the-Fields, was named in the evil Laudian times, and ought to have been rechristened by the name of Wycliffe or Latimer in the days of the late lamented Canon; that St. Agatha never existed; that if she did, she was a Papist; that if we knew enough, we should likely find that her antecedents were very doubtful.
This correspondence, in which my friend himself was freely handled, did not in the least disturb him, for the Festival of St Agatha was a height to which he had been working for the three years, and it was the last function of his public ministry. When the procession came out of the vestry, with a cross-bearer—Jack Storgiss, the grocer, to whose deformed little boy Jinks had been very kind—the banners of the Guild of St Agatha, a choir of six men and twelve boys in varied garments, Father Jinks himself with everything on he knew, attended by acolytes—two little monkeys on whose ingenuous countenances self-importance struggled with mischief—and, having marched round the church singing “Onward, Christian soldiers,” re-entered the chancel, so far as outward things went, the Father's heart was almost satisfied; and as, in his stall, he thought of the desolation of the past he was as one that dreamed.
If Jinks allowed himself to be proud of anything, it was of his choir; and when people spoke of my friend as a weakling because he was insignificant in appearance and a feeble preacher—he himself thanked God daily that he was a priest, to whom Pastor Jumps' oratorical gifts were unnecessary—one could always point to the choir, for the qualities which created and held together that remarkable body were peculiar to Jinks and were quite wanting in the Pastor. Three years before this advertisement had appeared in the Anglo-Catholic:—
“Wanted, an organist and choirmaster, who will be prepared, for the glory of God and the love of sacred music, to assist a priest in affording Catholic worship to a neglected parish.”
This unworldly invitation caught the eye (and fancy) of Harold de Petre—his original name was Henry Peter—about whom his friends were much concerned because he had a small competency and would do nothing except work at music; because he wore a brown velvet coat and a loose red bow, and three ancient gems on his left hand, and his hair falling over his ears; and because he practised a certain luxurious softness of life which might pass any day into positive vice. Two more different men could not have been found in a day's journey, but they became friends at once. The priestly instinct detected at-once in Petre a gift whose consecration would be the salvation of a soul and an assistance to the Church of God; and the humility and sincerity of the little priest were very attractive to the aesthete. From that time the curiously assorted pair worked together in perfect harmony and ever-growing affection, with one common desire to beautify the worship and edifice of St Agatha's.
In order to secure an organ Petre sacrificed one-third of his means, and was daily designing some improvement in his loved instrument; for her help he had even learned some organ handicraft, and could be seen almost any day toiling in his shirt-sleeves. As he watched the life of the Vicar, Petre began also to make many personal sacrifices, giving up his wine—used to spend a good deal on Chateau Lafitte—to defray choir expenses; teaching the piano in the more ambitious homes of the parish, and with the proceeds providing two tenors and two basses of distinction for the choir. One year he took no holiday that the altar might be becomingly dressed according to the season of the Church year, whether of joy or sorrow. Working with Jinks, a certain change even came over Petre's outer man; with every year he shed a gem; black velvet replaced the brown, and his hair became almost decorous; and one evening, when the two were having a lemon squash after hard work at the Easter decorations, Petre made a confession to his friend.
“There is something I wanted to tell you Jinks,” lighting his pipe slowly. “My name is not really Harold de Petre: it's... just Henry Peter. Didn't sound very artistic, you know, and I just... improved it in fact. Rather think that I should go back to old signature.”
“My own name,” said the Vicar with much simplicity, “isn't a high-class name, and I was once tempted to change it—it lends itself too easily to abbreviations—but it seemed unreal to do that kind of thing.”
“Do you know, Father, I expect that anthem to go well to-morrow; that little rascal Bags took the high notes magnificently to-night I told him so, and he was awfully pleased: he's as keen as mustard at practice.”
Nothing further was said about fancy pseudonyms, but next time the Father saw the organist's signature it was Henry Peter.
The boys in St. Agatha's choir were not angels, but they were Jinks' particular friends, and would do more for him than for their own parents. He had picked them up one by one in the parish as he visited—for he had no school—upon the two qualifications that each one had an ear, and each was an out-and-out boy. Because he was so good himself Jinks would have nothing to do with prigs and smugs; and because he did nothing wrong himself he delighted in the scrapes of his boys. It was to him they went in trouble, and he somehow found a way of escape. Every one knew who paid for the broken glass in the snowball fight between Thackeray and Dickens Streets, in which Bags and another chorister, much admired for his angelic appearance, led their neighbourhood; and it was asserted by the Protestant party that the Papist Vicar was seen watching the fray from the corner. When an assistant School Board master bullied his boys beyond endurance and they brought him to his senses with pain of body, it was the Vicar of St Agatha's who pled the case of the rebels before the Board, and saved them from public disgrace and the Police Court The Vicarage and all its premises were at the disposal of the boys, and they availed themselves freely of their privileges. Bags kept his rabbits in the yard—his parents allowed no such tenants at home—and his fellow-warrior of the snowball fight had a promising family of white mice in one of the empty rooms, where another chorister had a squirrel, and his friend housed four dormice. There was a fairly complete collection of pigeons—tumblers, pouters, fantails; you could usually have your choice in pigeons at the Vicarage of St Agatha's. The choir did elementary gymnastics in what was the Canoness's drawing-room, and learned their lessons, if they were moved that way, in the dining-room. Every Friday evening, after practice, there was a toothsome supper of sausages and mashed potatoes, with stone ginger. Ye gods, could any boy or man feed higher than that? On Saturdays in summer the Vicar took the whole gang to the nearest Park, where, with some invited friends, they made two elevens and played matches, with Jinks, who was too short-sighted to play himself, but was the keenest of sportsmen, as consulting umpire; and on chief holidays they all made excursions into the country, when Harold de Petre became Henry Peter with a vengeance. And this was how there was no difficulty in getting boys for the choir, and people began to come to hear the music at St Agatha's.