“After all, we sing ‘Praise to the Holiest’ in chapel,” remarked Alison. “I have known the Master join in it.”
Butler drew in his breath with a hissing inspiration as of pain at that recollection.
“Yes, yes, sufficient unto the day—usually Trinity Sunday—is the Master’s singing of that hymn,” he remarked. “If the Master proposed to sing the whole of the ‘Dream of Gerontius’ himself I would be steadfast in prayer that it should not be given at all. But he has not threatened that, I gather.”
Waters extracted a few crumbs of biscuit that had fallen in his silver-sabled beard.
“I think Jackson has hit the nail on the head,” he remarked. “The question is how far music purges the libretto. In my view it doesn’t: it merely emphasizes it. Another appeal, the musical, is added. I admit the inconsistency of singing a hymn that comes out of Gerontius, but you do not remedy that inconsistency by adding to it the far greater one of giving, as Alison neatly phrased it, a pugnaciously Roman Catholic work in a Church of England chapel.”
“And those who vote for the motion, that is the exclusion of Gerontius?” asked Alison.
He counted hands.
“The ayes have it,” he announced. “I think we may conclude that Gerontius will have to seek another dormitory.”
“To sleep, perchance to dream,” suggested Waters.
This point being settled, the unrest in Ireland and possible Labour troubles were lightly touched on, but such subjects had very little concern for these sheltered lives, and presently, even before Alison had drunk his tumbler of Alison’s Own, more exhilarating topics came under discussion. There was a proposal to be brought by some Junior Don at the next College meeting that the dinner hour should, during the summer months, be postponed, from 7.30 till 8; this aroused Butler’s gloomiest apprehensions.