Can you recall the most curious and most unlikely sight you have ever witnessed? Most of us, even in the course of a few years of a very ordinary existence, witness many strange things, but of all the strange things I have stumbled across nothing has been so wayward, so outré, so fundamentally silly, as the forty organists I saw sitting in one room at Worcester. One can imagine two, or even three, organists sitting talking together, but forty, and fifteen of the forty Cathedral organists, seems incredible.
Now, you have only to be fond of modern music to feel instinctively that a man who is an organist and nothing else is sitting on the wrong side of the fence. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he is helping to hold things back; he hates the rapid progress which music is making, and he has as much imagination as the vox humana stop.
Well, the forty organists were sitting and talking and smoking, and as I looked at them and at their mild, but worried, faces, it seemed to me and my companion that, in the interests of art, morality and ordinary decency, some protest should be made. And we decided that we were just the people to make it. We could have forgiven them if they had met together to discuss some professional question—e.g. how to get their salaries raised, how to get the better of their respective vicars, or how they could expand their minds so as to be able to appreciate Debussy or Ravel or even Max Reger. But they were gathered together merely because they liked it, just for the sake of enjoying each other’s society. Monstrous absurdity! Could they not see how ridiculous they were? Forty [198] ]organists in one room!—why, there ought not to be forty organists in the whole world.
Fortunately the room was on the ground floor and the hour late. My companion and I stepped outside the hotel, waited till the street was quiet, and then rapped a series of three tattoos upon the window-pane to secure silence within. We then sang in two parts, I in a high falsetto and my friend in a lugubrious bass, the “Baal” Chorus from Elijah. “Baal, we cry to thee! Baal, we cry to thee!”
We had not proceeded very far in this beautiful music—intended by the dear, delicious Mendelssohn for a shout of savagery, but really a quite charming cradle song—when a cry of delighted laughter came from the room, and two or three of the organists, hatless and earnest, rushed out into the street.
“Come inside!” they said; “come and join us. You belong to us!”
Too utterly flabbergasted at this invitation to make any reply, we turned and fled, rushed back to our hotel, and ordered whisky-and-sodas.
The great musician to whom we told the story next day said:
“Well, once more, you see, the biters were bit.”
But my friend and I did not think so.