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.”