“Because a piano has black notes and white notes,” she observed once, “you think that there is no interval between. If you think you are lower than A flat, and higher than G sharp, you must be singing A. The chances are strongly against it. The basses again, please.”
But in spite of, or perhaps because of, this severity the club prospered. The instinct for perfection is commoner than one thinks, even among those who never attain more than mediocrity, and those new facts about intervals were as fascinating as X-rays. Mrs. Collingwood even joined, for she valued music among the higher relaxations. The apostles of this art she held were Mendelssohn and Handel—these were the moons. And the greater stars were Barnby, Stainer, and the Rev. P. Henley, whose chant in E flat she ranked among the noblest productions of the world of art. A memorable evening indeed came, when Mrs. Collingwood sang also in a drinking-song, without turning a hair. She professed her willingness in a spuriously fugal passage “to drink a bowl wi’ thee” fortissimo, though there was no foot-note stating specifically that the bowl contained a non-alcoholic beverage. A charity performance was to be given at Christmas, in which the drinking-song would be performed, and Mrs. Collingwood knew it. But she made no protest, and practised “drinking her bowl” every Tuesday evening with gusto.
And Jeannie had classes of all sorts. She interested herself in the girls of the soap manufactory at Wroxton, and taught them that there were more things in the world than factory and followers. Some showed botanical tendencies, and she would bury herself in Sowerby’s Plants in order to be able to take them further in their hobby. Two others had violins, and Jeannie made night hideous by bringing them to Bolton Street two evenings in the week and accompanying their vagrant strains. There was another who sang, and a fifth who had a mania for wood-carving. Jeannie weaned her from the reproduction of imagining ferns tied together by amorphous ribbons, and persuaded her to copy the lines of real leaves and flowers. All these various elements were amalgamated on Sunday afternoon, when a large room over the stables, which she had appropriated for her purposes, was thronged with the wood-carvers, the musicians, and the botanists. On these occasions she read to them and gave them tea. The readings were not strictly Sabbatical, and Arthur, spying out the land one Sunday after they had gone, found a large number of perfectly secular books with markers in them. Jeannie, when confronted with them, only laughed.
“The point is to interest them in something,” she said. “Look what lives they live. But the dreadful difficulty is that two of Mrs. Collingwood’s Sunday afternoon class seceded to me. I didn’t know what to do.”
Arthur laughed.
“You should have tried to interest them in Mrs. Collingwood,” he said.
“I know. But it is so difficult,” she said. “I read them a story out of Plain Tales from the Hills instead.”
The girls’ class led on to a boys’ class, and Wroxton was again convulsed. For it was known that Jeannie allowed her boys, if they were allowed to smoke at home, to smoke when they came to her class, and her rule that not more than four might smoke simultaneously, for the sake of the atmosphere, was clearly not directed against smoking in general. This class was held on Saturday evening, in order to keep them out of the public-houses, for “the boys” were for the most part grown men, and several fathers of families had tried to steal surreptitiously into it. This Jeannie had stopped with good-humoured firmness.
“Go and sit with your wives,” she said, “and help to amuse the children.”