“Because of a natural association of ideas. Staithley Eisteddfod, however, is a Lancashire occasion with a Welsh label that hasn’t much to do with it. You may recall the Hand Bell Ringers who were on the halls some years ago. I picked them up at Staithley Eisteddfod. It’s a sort of competitive festival of song, and if I were not dressed, I should not be admitted to the stalls.”
Staithley was, so to speak, on Montagu’s beat, and it was not on, obviously, Chown’s. Yet here was Chown telling Montagu something about Staithley quite material to his business, which he did not know. Staithley Eisteddfod did not advertise: the largest hall in the town was too small to hold the friends of the competitors, let alone the hardly more dispassionate public, and Chown had his ticket for the stalls because he was a subscriber to the funds. Short of theft, it was the only way by which one could become possessed of a ticket.
He did not add, though he knew, that Montagu’s second-rate company with their third-rate play was at the Staithley Theater Royal that week because more alert managers, with better attractions, steered clear of the place in that week of musical ferment, and the resident theater manager had to take what he could, by diplomatic silence, get. One lives and learns and Mr. Montagu would learn that week without a living wage; his moderate houses belonged with the early, pre-Eisteddfod nights of the week and though only the favored few would crowd into the Eisteddfod Hall, the rest of Staithley, hot partisans of the performers, watched and waited.
Music is music in Lancashire.
“Ah.” said the innocent Mr. Montagu, “if it’s music, and dressed at that, it’ll not affect me at the theater.”
“Let me fill your glass.” said Mr. Chown. “What’s your opinion of the cinemas?”
Mr. Montagu was of the opinion, current, in 1912. that, the cinemas were of no account. Revolutions in the making are apt to go unperceived by their contemporaries. Chown was less insular, but “Imagine.” he said, “the strangled emotions of the young man in the stalls who desires a woman he sees on the cinema and then realizes she is a shadow on a screen.” They finished dinner on a genially Rabelaisian note.
Chown chose this, the first evening of the Eisteddfod, because there were to be no Hand Bell Ringers and no instrumentalists: there was choral singing and there were soloists. He was going to hear Choral Societies from all over Lancashire sing, one after the other, the same chorus from “King Olaf,” and he was going to hear soloists, one after the other, sing the same song. It was, on the face of it, the dullest possible way of spending an evening, yet the packed audience in Staithley Drill Hall considered themselves privileged to be there. The official judges who were Walter Pate and two others (which meant, for practical purposes. Walter Pate alone) sat screened oft from view of the performers, lest prejudice should mar the fairness of their decisions. They heard but did not see.
The audience heard and saw, and the singers were not numbers to them but “our Annie”’ or “our Sam”’ or “our lot fra? Blackburn”’ and so on. Local feeling ran high under an affectation of cool discrimination and broke out in wild applause, intended to influence the judges’ verdict, coming, curiously localized, from parts of the hall where adherents had gathered together in the belief that union is strength. But they were, one and all, susceptible to fine shades of singing; they didn’t withhold applause from a fine rendering because the singers were of some other district than their own. Local patriotism was disciplined to their musical appreciations.
Mr. Chown, of London, had ceased, as an annual visitor, to be surprised by this musical cockpit, where not money but taintless glory was the prize. They competed for the honor of their birthplaces, and for the privilege of holding a “challenge shield,” inscribed with the winners’ names, until the nest contest. He had ceased even to wonder at that drastic rule of an autocratic committee imposing evening dress upon the occupants of the front seats and at its phenomenal results. He was a worker in research, he was scientifically unemotional about the motive of his research, but he was on fertile ground here, and if he drew blank at Staithley Eisteddfod, then Lancashire was not the county he took it for.