The Bluecaster Choral Society, numbering over sixty, was packed tightly into the choir-stalls, with a surplus of men on forms. Late comers were greeted with despairing shakes of the head, and stood about in the aisle, looking lost, but in a minute or two they had always miraculously disappeared, stowed away somewhere in the serried ranks. The chancel had been partially decorated in honour of the occasion, and through the fronds of palm and fern could be traced exotic blooms of mystifying shape and colour, appearing presently as ladies’ hats. There was a good deal of whispered conversation in progress—the sort that misses your neighbour’s ear but can be heard well across the aisle—and a fluttering of leaves like a fretted wind up an autumn glade. Hymn-books and direction-papers were being handed about, and anxious-looking tenors stood up and signalled to worried-looking basses. The male portion of a choir is always economical of concentration. No matter how its part in the programme has been explained, it will generally wait to wonder about things until the stick is well up on the opening beat.
A twin fluttering was going on in the congregational forest, and feathers and fur bent towards each other in the throes of lowered comment. So Nancy Leyburne was going to be the soprano—the Widow—after all! A little pointed, surely—curious, anyhow—so soon after her broken engagement! And really it was a shocking pity that Graham-Langwathby insisted upon considering himself a tenor, when it was perfectly plain to anybody—anybody musical—that he was simply a pushed-up baritone. They might have been sure he would be the Obadiah. You met him at every old thing—like other people’s clothes.
“The Angel—oh, my dear, do remember you’re in church!—the Angel, ‘Fidge’ Morseby! Let me see—was it last night I saw her on the luggage-carrier of Captain Gaythorne’s motor-cycle? And at the Gaythornes’ theatricals—well, perhaps I had better wait till we get home.”
“Who’s the Elijah?—something Wigmore—C. or G.? Oh, I believe he’s a friend of the new Watters people. I seem to have heard of him—the only one of their old set that they weren’t able to choke off. Colossal cheek to tackle a big thing like ‘Elijah,’ but perhaps he thinks it doesn’t matter here. It’s really very distressing how little outsiders realise our extremely high standard of culture!”
Hamer and his wife were in a convenient position for admiring both their own chairs and their daughter’s head through the palms. Helwise was at the extreme end of a stall under the reading-desk, just where her wandering soprano would sail straight into Wiggie’s sensitive ear. There was a pretty colour in her delicate cheeks. She had just been having words with the Vicar about the necessity of providing his best silk drawing-room cushions for the unyielding oak seats of Hamer’s property. Harriet was in the altos. If you are not quite sure whether you possess a voice or not, they always shove you into the altos, or else into that last refuge of the destitute—the second trebles.
Bluecaster was talking to Lanty in the porch when a long gray car, covered with mud, slid up to the gate, setting down a young man, thin and eager-looking, and an older one, broad-shouldered and dark, with sad eyes. They were evidently strangers, from the way they looked about them, and in the porch the thin man appealed for information.
“I understand there is to be a performance of the ‘Elijah,’ this afternoon. Shall we find seats, do you think? We’ve come some distance to hear a friend sing.”
Bluecaster took them in tow and persuaded the verger to put them in the Vicar’s pew in front, the Vicar’s wife being securely jammed in the chancel sardine-box. The strangers looked tired, as if they had come far, and they talked to each other in little, snapped-off, troubled sentences. Once, the hatchet-faced man rose as if set on an errand, but the big man dragged him down again. His voice was low, but singularly penetrating, on account of its curious inflections.
“It’s no good. You can’t make a fuss, with this crowd. He would never forgive us. Sit still, man, and trust to Heaven. You’ll have the congregation thinking we’re the bailiffs!”
In the vestry, the Bluecaster schoolmaster, an excitable little man with a beat like an aeroplane propeller, was giving the last instructions to his soloists. The Obadiah was making quite sure of his moustache in the clerical looking-glass, while the Angel, in the very latest of earthly fashions, followed Wiggie round the room, declaiming: “Elijah! Get thee hence, Elijah!” with playful fervour. The Widow looked out of the window, rather sad and pale, and to her Wiggie drifted by degrees. She was young and evidently very nervous, and because she had blue eyes rather like Dandy’s, he wanted to speak to her; so he opened his neat, leather-bound copy, asking how she meant to take a certain phrase.