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.