Tom Barter, who was the leading emotionalist in the parish, was visibly affected, his bosom heaving in a manner which the poet himself could not have excelled; while his poor anæmic wife, who had hesitated about coming to the feast because her eye was still discoloured from the blow Tom had given her last week, feebly expressed the hope "that it would do him good."
So it went on. Whatever jocund rebecks may have sounded in the England of long ago, their strains found no echo in the funeral ditties of the Perrymans' feast.
Snarley Bob, in whom the drink had kindled some hankering for eternal splendours, was well content with the singing of "The Farmer's Boy," and joined in the chorus with the remnants of a once mighty voice. After that he became restless and increasingly snappish; his face darkened at "Fallen Leaves," and he began to look positively dangerous when a young man who was a railway porter in town, now home for a holiday, made a ghastly attempt at merriment by singing a low-class music-hall catch. What he would have done or said I do not know, for at that moment the announcement was made which the reader has been expecting—that Mrs. Abel would give a recitation.
"Now," said Snarley to his neighbour, "we shall have summat like." His whole being sprang to attention. He rapidly knocked out the ashes of his pipe, refilled, and lit; and, folding his arms before him on the table, leant forward to listen. For my part, I took a convenient station where I could watch Snarley, as Hamlet watched the king in the play. He was far too intent on Mrs. Abel to notice me.
The barn was dimly lighted, and the speaker, standing far back from the end of the table, was in deep shadow and almost invisible. Has the reader ever heard a voice which trembles with emotions gathered up from countless generations of human experience—a voice in which the memories of ages, the designs of Nature, the woes and triumphs of evolving worlds become articulate; a voice that speaks a language not of words, but of things, transmuting the eternal laws to tones, and pouring into the soul by their means a stream of solicitations to the secret springs of the buried life? Such voices there are: Wordsworth heard one of them in the song of "The Solitary Reaper." In such a voice, rolling forth from the shadows, and in exquisite articulation, there came to us these words:
"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness steals my sense,
As though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains,
One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk."
The noisy crew were hushed: silence fell like a palpable thing. Snarley Bob shifted his position: he raised his arms from the table, grasped his chin with his right hand; with his left he took the pipe from his mouth, and pointed its stem at the speaker; his features relaxed, and then fixed into the immobility of the worshipping saint.
Observation was difficult; for I, too, was half hypnotised by the voice from the shadows; but what I remember I will tell.
The voice has now finished the second verse, and is entering the third, the note slightly raised, and with a tone like that of a wailing wind:
"That I might drink and leave the world unseen,
And, with thee, fade away into the forest dim.