Occasionally, but very rarely, matters went wrong in our own department. The water that fed the hydraulic gear failed, or was cut off at the main, and the organ “went out” in the middle of an anthem. One afternoon in November it clouded over so suddenly that we could hardly see our faces in the organ loft. Worse luck still, the matches were damp, and till I could be back with some more, Dr. H. had to guess at the anthem as best he could. I am not musician enough to know how he surmounted the difficulty, but I suspect that the choir that day must have been treated to an amount of improvisation to which they were wholly unaccustomed from an organist who, as a rule, played what he had to play, and rarely indulged in vagaries.
But our worst disaster was of earlier date. Bildad the Shuhite blew the organ. He had received that name because he cleaned shoes in a corner of the Close. It was in prehistoric days before hydraulic gear was dreamed of in connexion with the organ. As luck would have it, Bildad fell sick, and had to supply a deputy at the last moment. Dr. H. studied the man carefully, mistrusting, I think, his intelligence. But his answers were satisfactory, though I thought with the Doctor that he protested too much. Anyhow, the service was due, and we had no time to waste on our fears. The singing began, but the organ was irresponsive, and, hurrying to the back of the loft, I found our deputy-blower contemplating with blank stolidity the mechanism at his command, and pleading with an injured air, “Sir, I am a’ waitin’ for you to begin!”
One day I was laboriously extracting discords from the great instrument with Dr. H. at my elbow, when a gentle voice at our side asked for permission to try the instrument. What a delight it was, after the horrors I had been perpetrating, to see the long fingers charm out the melody, till they drifted at last into the chords of Chopin’s great march. Surely, I thought, the composer must hear and welcome such a perfect realisation of his wondrous dream.
“Charrlie, me boy, thry the pey-dals,” came a voice from below, with the raciest and most captivating of brogues. It was my first introduction to Ireland’s great musician—Sir Robert Stewart—and his still greater pupil, composer in prospective of the Requiem and Revenge.
At our next interview the Professor of the future gave me a friendly lecture on Wagner, emphasising his teaching the while by illustrative passages, which he played, I remember, in thick woollen gloves, of which he hadn’t troubled to divest himself, being pressed for time and the organ loft none too warm. The mechanism of the organ, I am bound to add, was old and antiquated—not as it is in these days, when the notes speak if a fly sits upon them, or you venture to sneeze in their neighbourhood.
I have made acquaintance with strange scenes in an organ loft—an organist of surpassing ability playing through a service when he was drunk, but certainly not incapable. Yet a deputy sat by him, ready to take his place in case he should prove unequal to retaining his seat at the instrument. I have seen a fight between two choristers who had been sent to fetch music for the choir. It began on this wise. “I can lick you ’ead over ’eels in ’oly ’oly ’oly,” said one. The taunt was not to be endured by a chorister of spirit, so “Come on!” said the other; and they had fought it out to the bitter end at the back of the organ before ever Dr. H. was aware that the battle was in progress. I have seen courtship too—ending, as all courtship should do, in matrimony—while the organist played unsuspiciously a soft and dreamy accompaniment. And I have seen heroism too—grand as any displayed upon a field of battle—when my friend came from his sick bed and played through a service magnificently while the death dew gathered on his face. And I coveted, as I never coveted before or since, the divine gift of music, which would have enabled me to spare him his long and patient hour of martyrdom.
And, at the end, he played the Dead March, never knowing that it was for himself he played it, while a furious thunder-storm raged over head, and the roll of the thirty-two-foot pipes was drowned by reverberating peals. As the final chords came crashing from his hands, he said to me, “Handel must have written it, I think, to an accompaniment like this. And yet the modern school of organists would have us leave out the drums! I shall never care to play it again.”
And three weeks afterwards he was dead.
Fighting the Cholera
Was it an escapade, I wonder? or was it something greater and grander? There are, I suppose, escapades good and bad; heroic and unheroic.