“This soured the organist, and he developed unsound opinions about the Close. His enemies even said that he voted for the Whig candidate at a Parliamentary election: but this was before the days of ballot voting, and the base slander was easily disproved. He was a freeholder under the old statutes of the cathedral, and neither dean nor bishop could touch him.”
“Quamdiu bene se gessisset,” I interposed, knowing the Rector’s affection for an easy bit of Latin.
“Just so,” he answered, rather uncertainly, and continued.
“Pedler’s special aversion was the Irish canon; partly because he had led the laughter that slew Sennacherib, and had even asked why Sims Reeves had not a Jews’ harp to accompany him: partly because it was known to Pedler that the Canon spoke of him as the ‘great and marvellous’ one, in allusion to the anthem above mentioned: but chiefly because by the statutes of the cathedral his enemy was precentor, and got £600 a year for his office.[31]
“‘Paddy Windbags,’ he would say—for by that opprobrious name he designated his enemy—‘doesn’t know the difference between the Cruiskeen Lawn and Winchester New; and with his canonry, and what he gets by letting furnished apartments here, when he is on the stump in Mudborough, he gets as much as all the men and boys on the Cantoris side put together.’
“‘And there’s that Cockney chap,’ he would go on, ‘got a living in London worth goodness knows what; population 15,000; takes a holiday in September, because he is so hard worked, and then comes down here for three solid months with thirteen old sermons in his pocket to fire at the cathedral congregation. Three months with two hours’ work a day! Yah!’
“All gone now,” Chaunters sighed; and there was a pause.
“Did I ever tell you about old Dick the blower?” he resumed: “Dick had been blowing the cathedral organ for thirty-five years; it was all done by hand then; and the story was that he knew the Services and anthems so well that he could tell exactly how many fillings of the big bellows went to each. He had a rough copy of the Service List hung up in the recess where he worked his lever, and a glance at that sufficed. One afternoon, when the First Lesson was running down, he looked at the list to see what ‘Magnificat’ was on; it was Rogers in D; and he muttered ‘sixty-four,’ or whatever the number of pumpings was, and in due course he blew sixty-four times. But by bad luck it happened that an eminent musician had turned up, and, to impress him, the precentor had taken off Rogers in D, which is a short affair, and put on Attwood in C, which, you may remember, has a long Gloria at the end. Having blown his sixty-four, Dick had emerged from his den to stretch his legs, and, long before the Gloria was finished, the organ was as dead as Sennacherib. Dick was puzzled, but conscious of right; and when, during the Second Lesson, Pedler came raging down-stairs to know what was wrong, Dick was ready: ‘What ’ave I bin a doin’ on? Why, what ’ave you bin a singin’ of? Hattwood in C? What does it say on that there list? Doctor Rogers in D, and I blowed Dr. Rogers in D. If you’d ’a said Hattwood in C, I’d ’a blowed accordin’.”
Pedler admitted contributory negligence.
Concerning vergers, Chaunters had countless tales; but he robbed all the cathedrals in England of their local vergers and domiciled them all in Sudchester. It was not his verger, but a St. Paul’s man who objected to private devotions on the ground that they had services at 10 and 3.30, and didn’t want no fancy work. It was a Canterbury verger who bade a private devotee rise from his knees, and apologetically remarked to a bystander that if he didn’t stop ’em he should ’ave ’em prayin’ hall hover the place. It was a Belgravian verger who warned the lady not to leave her parasol about while she looked at the painted windows, “because Private Devotions comes in at 11, and they halways steals.” It was in a northern cathedral that the vergers complained to the dean that the organist, by playing on the organ when there was no service going on, distracted the visitors so much that they wouldn’t go round the chapels and tombs.