Mrs. Marlow threw a swift glance over her shoulder, fearing her other guests, who were following, might have heard. "Hush, Jimmy," she said. "It sounds so bad. Never say that again, especially before the servants. The rector's housemaid is sister to my parlour-maid, and it would be sure to get round to him. Of course, I know you have been in wild places where there were no churches, and we understand, but others might not. And all our friends are Church-people."
Jimmy dropped the subject, and a few minutes later he was following her rustling skirts up the broad centre aisle to the pew four rows back from the pulpit. He wished it had not been so far forward, because the worshippers interested him, if only by reason of their sameness of type. You could see they were all people of position, with regular incomes and hereditary political convictions, solid people of that slow-moving, tenacious class which is the real backbone of the country, holding, as it does, the greater part of the wealth, and producing, often by a kind of apparent accident, the greater part of the intellect.
Jimmy belonged to them by birth, and yet, as he sat amongst them, listening to the lisping voice of the senior curate, he found it hard to realise the fact. He tried his best to follow the service, to keep his mind on it, but, somehow, the whole atmosphere seemed wrong. The church was a modern one, the work of a famous architect, and, therefore, grossly inartistic, lacking every feature which makes for solemnity and beauty. The detail was coarse and roughly finished, the red-brick walls, as always, an offence to the eye; big texts seemed to squirm, like semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window. The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker who had left nearly a million. They no more dreamed of doubting its artistic merits than they did of questioning the religion it was supposed in some vague way to typify.
The singing was good, the sermon grammatical and well delivered, and yet Jimmy left the church with a feeling of dissatisfaction. He had expected that this, his first service in England after ten years, would have carried him back to the days when he knew nothing of the Tree of Knowledge; but, instead of that, it had made no appeal to him. Its poetry was destroyed by the hideousness of the surroundings; whilst even the glorious words of the Benediction seemed but a perfunctory dismissal, giving the congregation leave to hasten away to the heavy dinners which were awaiting it at home.
He was very silent on his way back, thinking of the past, and he was only recalled to the present when May, seeing him producing his cigarette case, thought it time to speak.
"Jimmy," she said, rather severely, "it is hardly correct to smoke on your way home from church. People notice that sort of thing so much."
Her brother coloured, and thrust the case back into his pocket. A minute later, he heard his sister's name spoken, and a tall, well-dressed woman hurried up from behind.
"I have been trying to overtake you for the last five minutes, May," she said. "Only you have been walking as if you were very, very hungry," then, disregarding Mrs. Marlow's little snort of annoyance, she turned to Jimmy, "Don't you remember me, Jimmy—Mr. Grierson I suppose I ought to say—I'm Ethel Grimmer, Ethel Jardine that was."
Jimmy laughed and took the outstretched hand.
"Of course I remember you now; but when I saw you in church where I could only catch your profile obliquely, I was not quite sure who you were. I didn't know you lived down here."