Still, he had no misgivings. It was June; and in June nine o'clock was still daytime. And when he went to the Service he hadn't any idea what it would do to him.
No more, of course, had poor old Wauchope. Wauchope was grateful and apologetic; before they got there he said he didn't know what he might be letting Ransome in for. The curate johnnie was bossing the Service, but he understood they'd engaged another joker for the Address. What he, Wauchope, funked, personally, more than anything was the Address. And Ransome, generously, declared that whatever it was like, he'd stick it. He'd stand by Wauchope to the finish, like a man.
They left their bicycles in Wauchope's rooms, and walked the few hundred yards to St. Matthias's Mission Church.
St. Matthias's Mission Church was a brand-new yellow-brick building in the latest Gothic, with a red-tiled roof, where a shrill little bell swung tinkling under the arch in the high west gable.
Inside, cream distempered walls with brown stencilings; in the roof, bare beams of pitch pine, stained and varnished; north and south, clear glass windows shedding a greenish light; one brilliant stained-glass window above the altar at the east end.
Up and down the aisles between the open pews of pitch pine went the workers of the Mission, marshaling the men into their seats. By the west door, Wauchope's friend, the cumbrous curate, who fancied himself as a featherweight, stood smiling and shaking hands with each man as he came, and thanking him for coming, thus carrying out the idea that it was an entertainment. He had his largest smile, his closest grip for Wauchope and for Ransome, for they were men after his own heart. Ransome observed the curate critically, and without committing himself irretrievably to an opinion, he owned that he looked fit enough. There was not about him any sign that you could see of flabbiness or weediness. He was evidently a decent johnnie, and for all that happened afterward Ransome forbore to hold him personally responsible.
The service, conducted by the curate, was extremely brief. Everything was left out that could be left, to make room for hymns wherever it was possible to place a hymn. The Psalms were chanted, and the curate intoned the Prayers in a voice that was not his natural voice, but something far more poignant and impressive.
There were no boys in the choir, and the singing, that lacked their purifying and clarifying treble, had a strange effect, somber yet disturbing. It acted on Ranny like an incantation.
Of course, if he had known what it was going to do to him, he would have kept away.