All the delinquencies and hiatuses of the plucky little chorus smote his trained ear in a succession of torturing shocks. He knew when the infant basses asked for bread exactly half a bar too late, and heard Helwise calling upon Baal to listen at a moment when she had no business to be singing at all. Through all the shades of alto he could detect a queer grumbling like that of a home-sick cow, and traced it correctly to Harriet. Yet you could not have told from his face that the Second Tenor Angel had dashed his foot against several stones in the way of accidentals, though the conductor moaned and wept, and knocked a mauve hat eastwards in one of his volplaning movements. The professional knew so much better than anybody else just what was the real standard of the big work, and the long rehearsal of the night before had set him marvelling at the perseverance which had brought it into presentable form. He had been told the miles the choir came through wild weather, opening his eyes at the record of attendance; and when he had grasped their deeds achieved, in face of the average of knowledge among them, he saw each member a Hercules striving to seventy times seven, and the little aeroplaning schoolmaster a hero storming Valhalla.
The Widow trembled to her feet, and Wiggie guessed that there were real tears behind the first words of pleading for the sick child. He got up presently, long before his time, and stood beside her to give her courage; and when he broke at last into the thrice-repeated, conquering prayer, with eyes fixed on a far window, unheeding the woman’s interjected lament, it seemed to the girl, bitterly conscious of her personal trouble, that it was her own spirit, her own future, that he gave back alive again into her hands.
But, curiously enough, it was not the praying but the fighting Elijah that Wiggie loved best. The pale, diffident young man saw himself as the fierce, tanned herald of woe, and made others see him as such, too. It was glorious to curse kings, run before chariots and slay false prophets by the hundred! He felt the inspired words hot on his lips, the racing blood in his veins, the warm dust spurned by his swift feet. In the great “hammer” solo he worked to such a pitch of intensity, beating out the last iron strokes of the più lento so strongly that the audience almost winced beneath his power, and the hatchet-faced man shook like a whippet on leash, uttering sharp little sounds remarkably like oaths. But after that—after the Reproach to Ahab—Elijah sank back into Wigmore, quivering under the virulent words of the venomous Queen as if they had been live blades. The Queen was a strenuous member of the Society, with a bludgeon air that reminded him of Harriet, and he shrank before her condemnation as he had shrunk many a time under Harriet’s scorn. The tired protest under the juniper-tree, in face of the fresh task—“Oh, Lord, I have laboured in vain! Yea, I have spent my strength, have spent my strength for naught. O that I now might die!” brought the tears chasing down Hamer’s cheeks, but it was Wiggie, not Elijah, who brought them there, though he did not know it. It was Wiggie’s own cry from a desolate heart and an almost finished body, looking into a future void of the one hope that had kept him alive for long—the terrible cry of the human, seeing the strength of the flesh break, taking the strength of the soul with it. He was in the wilderness, and no God could set his feet for Horeb.
But the pitiful personal note was felt, if not recognised, bringing the Angel to “O Rest in the Lord” with a style very different from her famous “Sing me to Sleep” imitation, and aweing the basses to an unwonted mellowness of mumbling in the tender balm of “He that shall Endure to the End.” And at the close of it, the quiet figure on Hamer’s chair lifted his eyes and smiled the same whimsical smile at the strangers in the front pew. The man with the sad eyes smiled also. The leashed whippet sank back and was still.
It was over at last, the last brave spurt of confidence and hope, the swirl of the final choruses, followed by the stillness of a prayer; and then the organ burst out again, the doors flew open, the sardine-box unpacked itself and stretched. A hum of wonder was running through the congregation. Who was the collapsed young man with the perfect voice at least six sizes too big for him? Quite extraordinarily good, and with a great look of—something like “Quagga”—the man who was commanded to Windsor last month—but of course they all knew that he was nothing more exciting than the Shaws’ last, unthrottled-off pal.
Wiggie saw the watchdogs spring up and leave the pew, to be checked at their first step by the Vicar’s wife, strongly suspicious that they had been sitting on her best Prayer-book; and as the stream from the chancel joined the human sea below, he seized the opportunity to escape from the adoring conductor, and steer his swimming head towards the vestry door. Here the Vicar had his word, but at last he was out on the step and in the air; and there he found Harriet.
“Saw you bolt for the vestry,” she began, “so I came round outside, as I wanted to speak to you. I say, you did do us all proud! Hefty sort of song, that hammer-yell—what? You must be stronger than you look, to put all that weft into it. By the way, there’s a couple of outsiders waiting at the lych-gate, asking for you. I suppose they didn’t see you bunk for the short cut. Look here! Will you play hockey for me, to-morrow?”
He gazed at her with the patient surprise of one, half-crossed to the other world, surveying the caperings of those still firmly anchored to this. At that moment he could not have run from one tombstone to the next, and a hockey-ball, bounding down the path, would have taken to itself a dozen nebulous brethren under his reeling sight. Except in the case of her own employees, who were rigidly well looked after, Harriet, with her superb health, rarely troubled about other people’s, unless they were yellow with jaundice or pink with scarlet fever. And she had already decided what was the right treatment for Wiggie.
“I haven’t played for years,” he hedged, “so I should be worse than useless. And I’m afraid I’ve—a—a very bad headache!” he added apologetically.
“No wonder! The atmosphere in there was enough to lift the roof clean off its hinges. But your head will have gone by to-morrow, won’t it? As for being out of training, it doesn’t matter; at least, it does matter, but it can’t be helped. You can always get in the way and let the ball hit you. Every little helps. It’s Dandy’s fault. She was one of the team, and now she and her folks are scuttling off to that Motor and Aero Show to-morrow. Don’t say you’re going with them, because you can’t. They’ll let you stop on by yourself, won’t they? You might help me out of a hole—especially as it’s Dandy’s hole. We’re up against a classy team, so I don’t want to be short. I ought to have a girl, of course, but I don’t suppose Witham will mind our playing a man extra, as it’s only you.”