Miss Tarrant was the Choir's principal treble, and Stephen, bowing gallantly, escorted her with Miss Tiffany to the piano, a decayed and tinny instrument, with many photographs of children obliquely regarding each other on the top. Stephen sat at the piano, and the Reverend Peter stood stooping like a tired steeple beyond. He was, of course, the bass. The young man with the blue collar provided with John Egerton a throaty and wavering tenor. Egerton tried to stand next to Miss Tarrant, but was thwarted without intention by his companion tenor. Miss Tiffany grew slowly pinker and pinker. A solemn hush descended. The company held their breath.
At the beginning of the Great War Mr. Asquith made a speech. In it he formulated the principles for which this nation was fighting. The formula was perfect and worthy of a great master of formulæ, sonorous and dignified, yet not verbose. It said everything without saying a word too much. And Mr. Asquith was, justifiably, so pleased with it that for many years he lost no opportunity of publicly repeating it, or if he did not repeat it, of reminding people about it in speeches and pronouncements and letters to the Press. It began, "We shall not sheathe the sword," and for a long time it was blazoned on every hoarding. Few men can have had so striking a literary success with four sentences.
But over and above its conciseness and majesty and lucidity the formula had other qualities which may or may not have been consciously imparted to it by Mr. Asquith. Its component sentences had the literary form of Hebraic poetry, the structure and rhythm of the Psalms. They might, indeed, have come out of the Psalms.
But this was not all. One would understand the Prime Minister of England modelling some important literary composition on the style of the Psalms, which is a noble style. And that being so, one could understand the result being more or less easily adjustable to some one or other of those Church of England chants, which have done so much to popularize the Psalms of David. But the extraordinary thing about Mr. Asquith's formula was that it fitted exactly the Quadruple Chant, the unique and famous Quadruple Chant, designed by a benignant Church to make the longest Psalm that David composed less inexpressibly fatiguing than it would be to the music of a miserable single or double chant. There were four sentences in Mr. Asquith's formula. There were four musical sentences in the Quadruple Chant, each divided in twain. And they fitted each other like a glove, or, rather, like a well-fitting glove. It was marvellous. The only reasonable conclusion was that Mr. Asquith, in a moment of pious exaltation, had deliberately set his formula to the Quadruple Chant.
Alone of the English-speaking race Stephen Byrne had discovered these astounding truths. Having formed the conclusion that Mr. Asquith had written the words to that chant, he held that one ought to sing the words to that chant. This would be the highest compliment to the man and the best means of perpetuating his work. And so, with many others, he did. But there is a season for all things; and it cannot be pretended that Mrs. Whittaker's select and crowded At Home was the season for this particular thing.
Stephen struck a chord. The company wondered what masterpiece was to be given them—perhaps some Schubert, perhaps something from Gilbert and Sullivan.
Then the great anthem rolled out. The voices of the Hammerton Choir were not individually of high quality, but they blended well, and their volume was surprising. They sang in excellent time, all stopping at the asterisks absolutely together, all accomplishing with perfect unanimity those long polysyllabic passages on one note which make psalm-singing in our churches so fruitful a source of precipitancy and schism.
"We shall not sheathe the sword" (pause for breath), "which we hàve not/lightly/drawn,//until Belgium has recovered all and MORE than/all that/she has/sacrificed.
"Until France is adequàte/ly sec/urèd//against the/menace/of ag/gression."
(The accentuation of ate in "adequately" was the one blot on the pointing; it was unworthy of Mr. Asquith.)