If flighty young girls, with hearts sound at bottom, would come here and unfold the error of their independent ways, the practice of confession might be justified, and chapel-service become both useful and exciting. But these faded people, these ungainly men and fubsy females! Who on earth cared for their drab histories? Ah, there was Mother Gander, not so podgy as most—in the blue silk of auld lang syne—if only she would get up—or even Charley Mott—there would be some spark of interest. But no, the horn-spectacled bore held the floor pitilessly, and the phrases beat on.
“Be-yu-tiful, be-yu-tiful words—I thought I should die!—Poor me! What a comfort in them words!”
And the nasal voice, its fervour unallayed by its own outpouring, still punctuated the other speeches with jerky interpolations. “Praise the Lord!” or “Glory!” came with fiery iteration, and sometimes this saint with the mutton-chop whiskers said “Lord bless me!” or “Lord bless my soul!” and these frayed and almost meaningless ejaculations seemed full of a startling significance in his mouth and nose.
“Brother Bridges, they said to me, how’s your soul? I couldn’t give ’em a straightforward answer.”
Will woke up again. It was not now the horn-spectacled speaker—he had apparently been wiped off the floor at last, and was not even visible—it was a man with a humorous twinkle and a red beard.
“But if they had asked me, how’s your body——?”
There was a faint snigger from a thick-set girl, instantly repressed by her shocked mother; but after Will had extracted what relief he could from this incident, he tried vainly to extract from the anecdote the exciting edification it held for the others. “How can I go to Romford and tell people I haven’t got salvation?” A dramatic crisis indeed for all save Will, who did not even stifle his yawn. The man’s journey to Romford seemed infinitely unimportant compared with journeys going on every Tuesday and Friday, and despitefully checked on Sunday.
Once the door opened, but it was only for a shambling youth in his teens, and Will did not share the satisfaction of the congregation at this new, if belated, proof of their vitality.
“We’re not afeared, no, not the humblest of us,” pursued the red-bearded man, catching fresh inspiration from this continuous rise in their numbers. “And why? Because we don’t go to work without a Partner.”
Here at last was a definite image through the blur, and if Will in a vivid flash saw a working-partner for himself in a less sublime incarnation than the speaker had in mind, he was for once as a-quiver as his father, who now, albeit with the stock exclamation of “Be-yu-tiful!” proceeded to add real tears to the contents of his capacious handkerchief.