“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.