THE CHORISTER

1

On the Friday following the Mayor’s historic party, Oswald brought his weekly rounds and obligations to an end and returned to the gleaming kitchen with his plenished pork-basket a full hour in advance of custom.

Nor, with the vista of sixty golden minutes in front of him, could he be persuaded to sit or rest, or do more than loosen the knot in his muffler. Neither the Swiss timepiece on the kitchen mantelshelf nor the Parish Church clock had yet declared the half hour before he tugged the ends of his scarf again and protested that unless he set off instantly for the Choir Practice he must be late, albeit--according to all canons of gentility--it was yet a whole quarter of an hour too early for the son of the best of fathers to be abroad; home being the proper place for every true gentleman (as Oswald knew) which he would never consent to exchange for the promiscuous openness of streets without good cause. Streets, despite their superficial attractiveness, were tutors of wickedness; preceptors of ill habits. They spat; they swore; they fought; they whistled, smoke and drank. The life that flowed in them was no more fit to be imbibed unfiltered than the turbid rain water straight from heaven that ran down gutters. The spiritual function of streets was to make home more precious; its dear ones dearer. Let them be walked through, when alone, with an upright head and steadfast purpose. For streets, like passages in scripture, are dark and difficult for the lonely student to traverse, needing wise commentators to explain their meaning, or render them suitably obscure. All of which Oswald knew (of his own experience) as well as well. By their very fascination he was aware of the deadliness of streets, that pulled at his companionship with a score of intimate and too persuasive hands, begging him stay here and play there; look at this and listen to that; to do, in a word, the things that so many of his age and sex did systematically, and with such obvious delight. For the avoidance of which dangers when attending choir practice he was accustomed to leave home no earlier than was necessary to bring him with punctuality to the vestry door--truth compelling the melancholy admission that vocal service in the house of worship affords no proof of gentility, and that many of those who lend their lips for hire to the praise of holiness are not, as Mrs. Holmroyd was aware, fitting companions for sons of the best of fathers.

Indeed, the proposal that her son should be reduced from the dignity of worshipping his Maker from a cushioned pew to the status of a chorister, cut straight through the tissue of her devoutest prejudices as deep as her tears; and not the less so because the blow to her spiritual pride was struck by the senior curate of St. Saviour’s.

Such a thing, her troubled pride reflected, would never have been hinted in the best of fathers’ time. For at this period her pride had not yet descended to the baking of pork pies. It was still very homeless and susceptible, as the Curate must have perceived, for he made haste to repair his blunder by assuring Mrs. Holmroyd that he had not intended to suggest her son should sing in the choir for a consideration, but as an unpaid, voluntary member. Already (he was at pains to make clear) the choir of St. Saviour’s was happily strengthened by three or four sons enlisted from the families of parishioners of standing. A doctor’s son, and a lawyer’s son, he instanced--to adduce no more. In answer to her question he rather fancied there was no architect’s son--as yet. But the Organist (Mr. Rencil) was, he said, a gentleman, a charming fellow, and a musician of accomplishment in whose hands Mrs. Holmroyd might entrust her little boy without a moment’s hesitation. Indeed, to Mr. Rencil’s persuasive charm and the high esteem in which his character was held, the curate acknowledged the infusion of this better class of singer at St. Saviour’s to be largely due. It was having (said he) a marked effect upon the conduct of the choir and the devotional fervour of the congregation, and was contributing not a little towards the elevation of the worship of God.

The argument, planted in such unquestionable soil and nurtured with so much piety, bore fruit. That the senior curate of St. Saviour’s recognized how distasteful any consideration of money must be for gentlepeople reduced to feel the need of it, offered a great consolation to pride. Pride being so inconsistent as to reject the solid food essential to its support and resolutely subsisting on slops, Mrs. Holmroyd was more grateful for a few words meaning nothing than she would have been for a little money meaning a great deal. Perhaps, after all (she told herself) here was an opportunity. It might be providential. Oswald’s musical talents might be quickened.

And on the next Sunday but one, palpitating under the importance of his novel vestment, Oswald took his place as a chorister in the chancel of St. Saviour’s. It was noticed, when to the solemn reverberation of the organ, succeeding a remote Amen, the choir moved slowly into sight, that the lady in mourning with haste let down her veil, whilst the little girl by whom she was accompanied, drawing closer to her side and plucking her by the sleeve, exclaimed in a whisper of searching intensity: “He’s there!”

2

For all Oswald had so much time at his disposal he walked with the urgent air of one for whose business the moments are not too plentiful; pressing forward with his wonted staid and concentrated gait; his whole figure infused with the dutiful self-consciousness that obviously moves by lofty precept and to pious pattern.

The night was of November mildness, draped with a haze not dense enough to hide the stars, that hung enmeshed in it here and there like raindrops in a cobweb, grey and beamless. About this mist was nothing municipal; nothing mayoral. The mayor’s party, dead like the week before, and evaporated into the past with the fog that solemnized it, might be thought of on such a night without envy and without a tear. Two columns of descriptive letterpress, with a complete list of guests and several letters on mayoral invidiousness, addressed to the respective editors, beginning tartly: “Sir,” and signed “Disgusted,” or “Ratepayer” appearing in the contestant weekly papers, that issued damp and smoking from the press that very morning, marked all that was left of last week’s glory. A movement had been instigated (so the papers said) to present the Mayor’s daughter with an album containing the photographs of all her guests, which, suitably inscribed and bound in red morocco with gilt edges and a brass clasp, would supersede the family Bible as an object of parlour veneration in her after years. All during the week desultory cabs, rumbling without urgency, had conveyed the bodies of contributors to the local studios, where their altered features were composed into a seemly dissimilitude of life beneath the professional hands of gentlemen who called themselves artist photographers and who were, in point of fact, pictorial layers-out. But these relics of a defunct glory--like the virtues of the dead, that inspired small envy--were bearable. Diluted by time, and converging to no ecstatic beam of splendour on a selected portion of eternity, they roused not any longings. To-night nodded its head as complacently as a tired child in a chair, untroubled by desires. The thick coverlet of last week’s fog being lifted, distinguishable sounds even from afar rose up into the void above the sleepy town; the barking of distant dogs, the shouts of playing children, streets and streets away; the harsh thud of the steam hammer, falling with forty ton force on soft metal at the railway works; the clank and snort and reckless clash of colliding buffers from the shunting yard, where agile engines singled and assembled trucks with the vigilance of sheep dogs; the slow, stertorous breaths of some labouring locomotive, harnessed to half a mile of groaning mineral waggons that crept reluctantly behind it--always a feature of the night-time at Daneborough.

That Mrs. Holmroyd drew comfort from the clearer night and lack of cabs only showed how feminine and limited was her understanding of the nature of the outer world her son walked in. With the removal of the dense and pall-like fog a protection not less than a menace was, for Oswald, withdrawn. If the fog had brought nearer the terrors of the unseen and the unknown, the absence of it left him at the mercy of the known and seen. The very outlets of the street he lived in held terrors of their own. There was the street made formidable with a public house called the “Breadloaf,” largely frequented by wives of the district, that to unobservant eyes differed little from the dwelling houses it adjoined, save that it thrust out a lantern at the end of an iron bracket above an open door from which the coarse breath of laughter blew in gusts at times, redolent of beer. Out of this same door Oswald had with his own eyes seen reeling men emerge who staggered blindly as they walked, and sometimes fell, and rose again with horrible alacrity, drawing blood away from crimson mouths on the back of their hands. How can the full horror of such a spectacle be communicated to adults? Gentleman or no gentleman, such a moment is not one to stand on ceremony or reflect at length upon the best of fathers. Away! Away at once on feet of desperation, flogged forward by the awful menace of that bleeding mouth and crimson knuckles, to where, breathless and palpitating, the fugitive can halt to gather up his disassembled self and collect the remnants of gentility out of the seething turmoil of impressions. Every figure met thereafter bears resemblance to the drunken man. Even the lamp-posts rock and sway. The whole world is rendered unstable. The stars, dislodged by the turbid beating of the runner’s heart stagger about the sky. And what a fearful colour is red. It is a terror of itself. No logic can stanch the bleeding of that mouth.

And but a street or so beyond there lies another zone of awful possibilities. It is of stone. A gloomy building, many-windowed, railed off from the roadway by iron railings, whose entrance two great iron lamp-posts guard. Even the lamps exert an awful influence of their own, for they are round. Round, in this conjunction, is horrible. It means inexpressible things. It means, for one thing, that this is an Infirmary. Precisely what Infirmary means is yet (for Oswald) unsure. But people are taken in and out on stretchers, and crowds follow them, and sometimes women wring their hands, and children gaze with their mouths open, and dogs get trodden on, and the spirit of calamity seems to be let loose, and dire fears fasten on the heart, and life grows dim and dreadful. Oswald has been sucked into the vortex of the crowd that swept gentility along with it to the iron railings; and he has gazed enthralled at the globular lamps and at the plate-glass windows beyond, reflecting blank horror from their blanched panes; and he has been whelmed in the comments of the crowd--every mouth a running source of terror. The victim is dead; the victim is not dead; his neck is broken; his neck is not broken, it is his leg. It is not his leg, it is his arm. He has been run over; he has fallen from a scaffold; he has been drowned; his head has been taken off at the railway station; he has committed suicide. A woman, informed by neighbours on insufficient evidence that the victim is her husband, transfixes the crowd with a scream. The scream goes through Oswald and curdles his blood. He awakes to a consciousness of no stomach and a trembling at the knees. He is hemmed in by mouths and pulled at by strange hands. Filled suddenly with awful fear of the hydra-headed danger called a crowd, he remembers the best of fathers and fights his desperate way out from this contestant mass of curiosities.

How can the terror of the tramp of awed and urgent feet attendant on a moving stretcher be conveyed to complaisant, upgrown understandings? How can one tithe of these living terrors be expressed? They cannot be conveyed; they cannot be expressed. Dreadfullest of all, they must not be expressed. Why! To the sons of gentlemen even words can be more terrible than mortals are, and silences more shudderful than sound. Sheets thrown sportively above the head, or lying limp upon the mattress, or a coat suspended, motionless, on a peg behind a door, or folded garments laid upon a chair in some room where the stealthy fingers of dusk begin to grope and stray,--these are no insentient harmless things as adults suppose, but plenipotentiaries from the kingdom of the terrors. They feel, they think, they live, endowed with a monstrous mobility that can make itself dead men, hanged men, drowned men, murdered men, or any sort of men to be afraid of, in a moment.

Aye! In a moment can they. And the sons of gentlemen, bound by the solemn covenant of their calling, must be secret as the grave, affecting to see the features of this altered world still tranquil and serene, as their mothers see them. Evening falls, and the bedly hour draws near. The good night kiss can be no longer delayed. The stairs, assuming eyes and a physiognomy, lurk maliciously in wait for sons of gentlemen. Would to God they had never passed the Infirmary, or seen blood wiped from a red mouth with the back of a hand, or brought themselves within the clutches of the Law.

For the very policemen whose leisured tread brings comfort to adults, and whom the upgrowns pass with an indifference bordering on contempt, lend dread gravity to street corners. They stand like carved monuments beneath a gas-lamp. A pang goes through the breast at sight of them. Conscience, startled by their immobility that is so sculptured and accusing, makes a hurried inventory of its crimes. How shall they be confronted? By what demeanour is their august indulgence to be won? By humility (it seems). By a self-effacement almost abject. By a stoppage of the breath, by a clenching of the palms, by a stepping on the toes, by a supplicative saddening of the mouth, by a supreme faith and trust in heaven.

His course beset and modified by such considerations, the little Oswald pursued his way to church. He boldly crossed the Horse Green (made complex with many cries) to its darker and deserted side, and pressed forward to where through a narrow neck or stricture it led him into upper Hill Street. To the right of him--already visited this evening--lay St. Lawrence Square. Doctors lived in Hill Street too, as brass plates of the most noble proportions testified. Here was St. Saviour’s Vicarage, for whose due acknowledgment (being a chorister) Oswald always composed his lips, in passing, to a processional solemnity, in case the Canon might by any chance be at the window. Over the road, obliquely facing it, stood Mr. Rencil’s house, through the Venetian blinds of whose upper windows golden bars of light shone forth like glorified staves of musical notation. Perhaps Mr. Rencil’s self was there behind this gilded latticework of lines and spaces.

Something like a thrill passed through Oswald’s bosom at the sight of this emblem of high musicianship, to which he elevated an allegiant and venerating gaze.

3

“Hey!”

Oswald was passing the historic livery stables, between the reverberating archway and the pump. Stripped of mist and imagination they showed less than half the size of the week before. The pump, as if conscious of being but a hack plaything for local infancy, hung its ball head and drooped its wooden handle like a seaside donkey during those sad spare moments when it has leisure to reflect upon its lot. Trivial little lights, peeping out of doors and windows of no importance (that had been too cowed to dare the darkness and show their craven faces the week before) now made friends with the evening and held companionable colloquies one with another, as neighbours do.

“Hey!”

The interjection, that had been successively a whistle, catcry, cockcrow and dogbark (all which, the hurrying Oswald had an uncomfortable feeling signified himself, and being so obviously pitfalls for gentility had resolutely ignored) came abreast with much breathing and a palpable hotness of cheeks, and fell into step with the object of its pursuit in such an ostensible manner as to make further preoccupation on Oswald’s part impossible.

“Didn’t you hear me call of you?” the newcomer enquired. “I’ve been calling of you all the way from Hill Street corner.”

There was a friendliness in this accost so oblivious of social disparities that Oswald, shrinking from falsehood, acknowledged it with an interrogative “Have you?” into which he infused as much surprise as conscience would allow.

For this, that fell into step with him, was one of the dangerous influences feared by motherhood. This with the plaid kerchief round its neck, breeched in hybrid corduroy continuations that were too short for trousers and too long for knickerbockers, was a fellow chorister. Not a gentleman chorister. Not a volunteer, like Oswald and the doctor and lawyer’s sons. A paid chorister, who wore a white apron and oversleeves and lurched round Daneborough each Saturday with a big meat basket on his arm and hip, and nodded to Oswald with intimacy even when Oswald was accompanied by his mother; never raising his hat, but singling Oswald out for invidious salutation as if mothers and sisters were irrelevant; pitching an amicable “hello!” in a voice that had no more respect for gentility than a flung stone has for a front window, and even whistling after Oswald with intent to ratify a treacherous compact of their choral brotherhood behind his mother’s back. Whether this boy constituted a friend or foe Oswald could never quite decide. Equally he seemed at home in Oswald’s company, or the company of Oswald’s fellow-foes, adapting his conduct to which ever society he chanced to move in at the moment; at times deriding gloves and a clean collar, and mimicking the hateful accents of gentility; at other times accosting gentility like an old and favoured friend.

And yet to-night, despite all complications of companionship this presence brought a certain comfort with it, assuring Oswald that the hour was not so utterly fantastic as he feared, and that he would not find the church foundered in darkness, all its gates shut and padlocked, the practice over, the choristers departed. Indeed the new arrival chided Oswald for his haste, enquiring: “What’s your hurry?” and being met with a tepid reference to time, flouted this ancient proprietor of scythe and hourglass as one unworthy the fear of any but aged people and the very young. By the side of his undaunted comrade Oswald felt a pleasant sense of security. He walked, as one might say, in the shadow of a mighty hunter, armed at all points against Time’s surprises and alarms; and this lion of life’s jungle grew harmless as a lamb. The satisfaction Oswald derived from this aspect of their companionship caused him to sadden at the thought that the chorister in the corduroy extremities was no gentleman, and that any lasting friendship between them was impossible. A melancholy reflection that took on a deeper significance when the boy by his side, plunging his right hand for a space into the depths of his pockets, brought forth a palmful of coppers for Oswald’s wonder, with the remark:

“See them? Do you know how much there is there?”

He clapped the second hand over the first and shook the coins vigorously, ostensibly as an aid to Oswald’s judgment, but not less (if the truth be told) for the pleasure of appraising the weight and volume of his own property.

Oswald shook his head.

There was (it seemed) over a shilling’s worth of coppers. All of it made by wassailing. Since Tea. He had only just left his sister in order to come to the choir practice. He went wassailing (so he told Oswald) every evening now. Except Saturdays--when he didn’t get finished while eleven. Last year he and his sister had made over ten shillings apiece by wassailing. As soon as the wassailing season closed he followed Christmas boxing. By the tone of his enthusiasm it appeared that the prospects of the present season were excellent. The market feeling was optimistic. He hoped, in fact, to exceed all previous records. Anticipations of success so kindled magnanimity within him that he asked why Oswald did not go wassailing too. For the moment it almost seemed that the proffer of a partnership was pending and Oswald dropped his eyes.

For in that moment--and it was no more--a veritable progeny of suppliant thoughts, the lawless children of his fantasy, trooped around reason; importunate, persuasive. After all ... was wassailing forbidden to a gentleman? Was there no means by which wassailing might be constituted licit--like singing in the choir, or canvassing for orders for pork pies?

To test the case, Imagination transformed itself into a wassailer. A gentlemanly wassailer with a white collar and spotless pocket handkerchief, who showed so clean a face and rapped with such refinement that not a house but welcomed him within its doors to sing. Coppers, yes, and silver bits should line his pockets, and his mother’s eyes should gleam with pride when he drew home from his wassailing each night and she saw the riches his lips had won. Tears almost started to his own eyes for very pride of this imaginative second self. The vision, bursting on him with a splendour wellnigh unbearable, was shaken to its foundations in the same instant by a startling disruption of externals. In place of the composed features of his companion that seemed to wait on his response, he beheld a countenance ecstaticized with the revelation of a new and preponderant interest. It was the sound of noisy youth, prosecuting its reckless pastimes in the near neighbourhood of St. Saviour’s and it acted on the corduroy trousers like a trumpet call from heaven. Casting Oswald’s companionship to the winds he brandished both arms as an aid to motion and uttering the cry:

“Hey up! It’s them. Come on! Hello! Ooli-ooli-ooli-ooli!...” dashed off in the direction of the sounds that had so stirred him.

Chagrined and solitary, the little Oswald withdrew into his empty mansion of gentility, that echoing habitation of many windows looking wanly out on the life by which it sees itself assailed; at once a prison and a home. There were times, and this was one of them, when the melancholy truth that gentility spells sacrifice oppressed him. Wassailing, Christmas boxing and errand running on Saturdays were roads to riches. In those detested corduroy breeches was deposed more wealth than gentility stood possessed of after months of pride and self-denial. Lovely as it seemed at home, beneath the glamour of a mother’s influence and eyes, gentility was no attribute to take abroad. It stood at every possible disadvantage before the world. To the pushful it must cede; before the clamorous it must be silent; generosity must it show to the selfish; to the unscrupulous, honesty; justice to the unjust; compassion to the hard; pardon to those that wronged it. It must assist the poor and be too proud to take a penny from the rich. O, what a noble thing it was! How beautiful the world, if everybody in it might be gentlemen.

4

By this time his reflection had brought him beneath the consolidated darkness that was St. Saviour’s, obtruding its vague bulk into the sky and displacing some of the higher stars with its steeple. The church stood within its own acre at the junction of the Hunmouth and London Roads, occupying a space of ground whose shape approximated to the superficies of a flat-iron, being bounded at the broad western base by iron railings and on its two converging sides by a low stone wall topped with a triangular coping, apex uppermost, of small service to sitters. By a sunken wicket in the southern wall, opening on a path that led to the side porch and thence, past a stone trough and a mouldering scent of dead flowers, to the vestry, Oswald dutifully took his stand.

Save for the internal glimmer of the church and one cadaverous lamp, half sunk into the stone above the vestry door, whose pallid flame lit nothing but itself, intensifying darkness and casting deceptive shadows on the steps it was intended to define, the churchyard lay in unalleviated gloom, resort chiefly of the dead and sundry amorous couples, the latter silent as gargoyles and motionless as monuments, that haunted the shadow of the churchyard trees, beneath which (upon the southern side, where Oswald stood) they propped its leaning wall at intervals with the regularity of buttresses. He wondered where they came from, these mystic forms at once nebulous and solid, and where eventually they went to, and was as reverent in heart towards them as to the sacred edifice itself and the serried stones of which he stood in such venerating awe. Among these latter the more venturesome of the paid and early choristers were busy. The church reverberated with cries immoderate and profane, that rebounded from its stony buttresses as if they had been balls in a fives court, and the scurry of footsteps over the gravel as their owners rioted in the obscurity of consecrated ground, using ledgers like vaulting horses and so corrupting the decorum of this venerable company with their evil communications that the whole churchyard was shortly in commotion; headstones leaping like humans, and marble crosses starting up with both arms menacefully extended to cry “Hey!” with the abruptness of choristers. Now and again some particularly audacious assault upon the vestry door brought forth the verger, irate and imprecatory, to pit his power against the ribald darkness that mocked him; declaring to the void--

“Now, I’m not going to waste my vocabulary on you. I know who it is. And Canon shall be cognizant an’ all before the night’s out. Don’t think I can’t certify you. I can. I can certify you all. I want no colloquy with any of you, and if I’ve got to come off this step you won’t forget it.”

Whereat the gravestones masquerading as choristers vomited derisive laughter, and a Gothic pinnacle consecrated to all the virtues disgorged an obscene word.

The close proximity of eight o’clock was marked by a multiplication of churchyard cries. Soon, in addition to the demoniac spirits that debauched the gravity of St. Saviour’s tombstones, there gathered an independent cluster round the little iron gate where Oswald stood. Some of the more impatient among the newcomers, made frantic by the clamour of their kindred beyond, as dogs are irresistibly drawn by barking, scrambled likewise over the wall. Others instigated independent games in the roadway, which they alternated fitfully with more audacious sallies upon the gate and summonses of the invisible verger by name:

“Mester Prestwich! Hey-up! Mester Prestwich!”

Ultimately a shout went up like a triumphant sky rocket, tailed with ribaldry. It notified the opening of the vestry door, distinguishable as a rectangular stain of yellow beneath the blue-lipped lamp. This gave birth to a shadow whose increasing definition revealed motion, and being too dignified for gravestones (which leaped and danced outrageously) identified itself at last with the verger’s impressive person. The keys of office jangled authoritatively in his hand and any lingering doubt about his identity was dispelled at close quarters by the fact of his drawing breath with audible difficulty through a snuff-clogged nostril.

His nose, although this hour of darkness did small justice to it, was by daylight a most episcopal and proper organ. One might say without irreverence, it was an archiepiscopal organ. When it led the timid to their pews or headed a processional, or beckoned hesitating strangers out of the porch into the sacred edifice, its dilating nostrils seemed to elevate themselves above the common odour of mortality and sniff the delectable odours of heaven. But for this nose, indeed,--which the common race of choristers lacked the vision to appreciate--it is said the verger would have forfeited his holy office long before the little Oswald came to know him, for he was (if truth spoke truly of him, which truth is not notoriously prone to do) an individual in his earthly parts most spiritual, in his spiritual portions most infirm. Certain it is, that the verger’s resignation was more than once accepted by the Canon before it had been tendered, with Christian finality: “I am very sorry, Prestwich. But this time I cannot overlook it. I have the welfare of this church and the feelings of this congregation to consider. If you are incapable of performing your duty it is all the more necessary that I must not fail to discharge mine. I have no alternative but to accept your resignation.”

Which Prestwich translated to parishioners in the following terms.

“I’ve done my best to temporize with him, but I can’t put up with the Canon any longer. He’s too heterodox. Too heterodox by half. There’s no reasoning with him. I’ve done my best to keep things together, for the sake of all parties concerned, but if church comes to the ground--as it’s sure to do--Canon has nobody but himself to blame. He can’t say I haven’t capitulated with him. I have.”

Whereat he would take the opportunity of bidding farewell to such parishioners as had any reputation for sensitive purses--either in the church or at their own homes, whither he betook himself for the purpose--saying it would be the last sad occasion on which he would be able to speak to them in an ecclesiastical capacity and it was not without deep deliberation that he had decided to sever his connection with a church and cause so dear to him. “I’ve given the Canon every chance. I’ve put up with more than most men in my position would have suffered, for the sake of worship and the congregation. I know the temper of the congregation better than he knows it. In my exceptional opportunities for intimate colloquy they repose confidences in me that they’d think twice before depositing in him. If I go, it won’t be long before they follow. Church will be empty before many weeks.”

And the next Sunday, that was to have marked his absence from St. Saviour’s, and the church’s first step upon the road to ruin, saw him floating through the aisles and transepts in his sable robes of office as before; balancing his wand and elevating his mahogany nostrils like the distended louvres of the swell organ at full. For that ceremonious member, more securely than the verger’s verbal applications, prevailed over the Canon in the end, as an irreplaceable asset to the church’s dignity. The Canon’s self admitted: “Prestwich may occasionally drink, but the fellow has a manner with him. If only he’d kept himself in hand he might have aspired to a cathedral.” The resignation was remitted. Prestwich was given one more chance. He sought the congregation’s private ear, and called upon it in its private home, to announce the Canon’s uncompromising surrender.

“He’s come to his senses, you’ll be thankful to hear,” the verger communicated. “I had a long Conclave with him on Saturday, and he earnestly begged me to reconsider my dictum for the sake of the church and the parishioners. I told him I was willing to make what sacrifices I could to augment congregational harmony and promote the unity of worship, but I could allow no interference with my office neither from him nor nobody. If that’s interfered with all Authority goes. There’s an end to cohesion. It’s the stultification of worship. We might as well be nonconformists at once, and done with it. I’ve told Canon so. He’s given his word, and so we shall see how he goes on.”

From which it will be remarked that the verger possessed a literary wardrobe of no ordinary capacity for the clothing of his ideas; years of association with dignitaries of every degree having in fact afforded him an opportunity to pick up a marvellous secondhand assortment of verbal boots and shoes, shirts, vests and oratorical garments in general (some of historical association, others nearly new and scarcely shop-soiled) with which to mantle the dignity of his calling and garb sentiments worthy of his nose. Whether he always wore the garments of this miscellaneous wardrobe wisely, or in the nicest taste, is another question, but such stress did he lay on the importance of possessing what he called “a Vocabulary” that his indictment of a fellow-creature could be formulated in no more scathing fashion than an accusation of the lack of it. Whether the accused chanced to be a rival verger at St. Gyles’s, or a disfavoured cleric, an officious churchwarden, or a male singer addicted to pomposity, the judicial question invariably resolved itself into; “What is he?”

“A man of no vocabulary!” said the Verdict. “A man you might listen to for a whole day and never hear a word come off his lips you didn’t understand. Without a vocabulary no man--I don’t care who he is--can call himself complete. As Archdeacon Oliver said to me one day in one of the frequent conversational colloquies me and him used to have together; ‘Words, not Raiment, make a man, Prestwich. Words are power. Words are character. Words are life. By a man’s Vocabulary may we know and judge him.’

“ ... But what,” the verger would enquire with indignation and despondency, “ ... what is the good of vocabularies in a place like this? They’re wasted. They’re thrown away. They’re not worth a ha’penny to anybody here. They lead to no preferment. There’s more than half of mine I can’t use. People wouldn’t comprehend me if I did. They’d stare. They’d beg my pardon. I’ve known them to do it. People that wears the cloth and nominates themselves Clerks in Holy Orders.”

By now as a result of crowding round the gate and consequent displacements, the little Oswald--although the first comer to await admission--stood on the outer fringe of the throng attendant on the verger’s dignified approach. The paid choristers, betraying an incomprehensible desire for entry, fought among themselves for precedence before the bars of the gate, as if they were caged animals and this were feeding time. Some of them even attempted to retain priority by laying hold of the wicket, whereat the verger (displaying wonderful accuracy and promptitude) rapped their knuckles loudly with his key, saying, in his nose-congested voice:

“Now then! Let’s have no colloquy. Don’t let me have to tell you twice!”

This done, he paused and fixed the impatient choristers with an eye which, even in the darkness--was felt to be terrible. An eye that seemed to deputize for his Vocabulary and produced a marked effect upon the crowd, converting the contestant choristers into statuary and freezing them to silence. On which, as if at last accepting these evidences as sufficient subscription to his office, the verger stooped and with a not too hasty hand undid the lock.

5

Only the lights above the choir-stalls were burning. The great nave, yawning inimitably beyond, seemed as if cut off from the chancel ogive by a velvet pall. Pulpit and brass lectern were wrapped in calico, that imparted to the familiar contours swelling beneath these pallid coverlets the vague immensity of the unseen. The church was a vast repository of whispers. The dropping of a hymnbook multiplied itself startlingly throughout the interminable building like the clapping of dead and apathetic hands. Coughs prolonged themselves into a chain of dismal groans as if the spirits were in pain. Not a sound within the chancel but was challenged by a dozen sounds beyond. It seemed the dread occupants of the outer tombs and mouldy crypts below were gathered all together to attend the practice. Oswald, feeling how inadequate were the powers of one gentleman to cope with such forces as these, shivered in his heart to think the verger had occupied this church alone, before yet Light was.

Now, in quick succession, the heavy echoes of the vestry latch resounded through the church as belated choristers trooped in, hot and breathy. The verger, immobile against the sanctuary, propped up from the altar-rail with an arm, turned his austere profile towards the vestry and fixed each newcomer with a look of interdiction that would have deterred any but a chorister, and checked even those. The harmonium, dislodged from its lair behind the organ by two of the senior boys, was borne into the chancel and deposited before the shrouded lectern under its layer of weekly dust. The psalter and hymnbooks, stacked chin-high like a pile of plates in a waiter’s arms, were distributed throughout the choir, violently snatched at and fought for in transit, and much used about the head and person; old copies being repudiated and forcibly exchanged for new; new copies being rapidly converted into old through the heat with which their ownership was contested.

“That’ll do now!” the verger’s voice declared. “I’ve told you once. Next time I’ve got to address any of you it’ll be digital.” The organist’s factotum, or right-hand man, appearing in the chancel during this sally, tendered to the indignant Prestwich a mild and ingratiatory “good evening.”

“I won’t have it,” the verger said, ignoring the salutation as below the level of his outraged dignity, and an infringement on authority during the active discharge of itself. “And so you know. If there’s any recurrence of it, out you go. That’s my Dictum. It’s quite immaculate to me Who you are. I’m not going to waste my time with you.”

The folds of this ample indignation being momentarily relaxed as if Prestwich were on the point of disrobing injured dignity, the factotum found encouragement to renew his greeting: “Good evening, Mr. Prestwich,” to which the verger recognizing the voice and deeming it of insufficient consequence to justify the least modification of his demeanour, contributed an abbreviated “evening,” that sounded more like a reproof to interruption than an acknowledgment of courtesy.

“And so I’ve told you,” he repeated. “I’ve told you all. I’m responsible for the preservation of this fabric and the behaviour of everybody in it and I won’t stand the least dereliction of my office--not from the Archbishop himself.” Saying which and decided more by the impediment of his refractory organ than by any satisfaction of an authority vindicated, he returned to the sanctuary, where he took up a position commanding the choirstalls in readiness to reassert himself again if necessary.

Meanwhile the organist’s factotum laid on the harmonium the heavy parcel of church music wrapped up in brown paper, with which he had arrived encumbered, and taking ingenious advantage of the verger’s authority, grafted his own upon it (though in a voice carefully modulated so as not to compete with what the irate verger said) telling the boys; “Order, now!” and “Silence!” in a sort of apologetic undertone, obviously fearful lest Prestwich might resent anything suggestive of an infringement of his rights.

He was a lean and awkward youth, in an overcoat too small for him. By occupation he was a clerk in the Railway Mineral Office but by predilection he was an organist, and in a tentative and surreptitious sort of way his hair struggled to express this aspiring part in him by a redundancy about the neck, albeit the chief effect produced on the unmusical who viewed him from behind consisted in a certain greasiness of collar. Towards the end of every six weeks or so this opulence of lock became most noticeable; but provincial barbers unacquainted with the lives and habits of the Great Masters, are an unimaginative race, and at the end of this period he would appear one night at the practice with his hat sunk down to his accentuated ears; a neck so shorn and meagre as to suggest decline, and, thus transmogrified would begin his painful progress to musicianship from the bottom of the ladder once again. In return for musical instruction of a loose and interrupted sort he served as Mr. Rencil’s vade-mecum and handy-man; mended the church music; wrote some of the more formal of the organist’s letters; kept the choir books and did those semi-menial services which are prone to tumble to the lot of enthusiasm--enthusiasm being frequently no more than Folly, bound in calf and glorified with gilt edges. At times, sustained by the illusion of having an organ lesson, he would blow for the organist during a whole evening, and copy out tattered voluntaries into the late night hours as an aid to the understanding of musical composition. To his friends, or rather to such of them as had no contact with the choir, he spoke of himself occasionally as Choir Master and Deputy Organist. But he was in reality neither of these, although he fulfilled the servile offices of both, carrying all the heavier music to and from the organist’s house, bearing urgent messages to the Vicarage, running errands and supplementing the blower’s services when required.

At unimportant week-night services he did, indeed, deputize on the organ bench occasionally, perspiring minims out of his forehead, and touching sundry pedals with a tentative and cautious toe as if they were explosives. But he was seen to greatest advantage when unlocking the panels of the console with the key his master had entrusted to him for the purpose; or when, with profound understanding, he pushed all the stops home after the concluding voluntary.

Having this evening unlocked the organ and made impressive and judicial selection of stops for the Master’s use, he put up the humble harmonium lid and drew forth the white wood baton from its place of repose on the black keys in readiness for Mr. Rencil’s use, and first tapping the music desk for the surreptitious indulgence of his own authority, besought the choristers to find the psalms for Sunday.

“The Psalms for Sunday!” he proclaimed in a voice so startlingly imitative of the absent organist as to bring the blushes up to his very hair. Anxious to expunge this flagrant act of plagiarism he added in tones by contrast supplicative and contrite: “Come along now. Don’t let’s waste any more time. Mr. Rencil will be here in a minute!”

6

Amid the ruffling of psalter leaves and the clapping of heads with them, and facetious appeals to the Deputy:

“Please Mester Wembling, what day’ll next Sunday be?” succeeded by such stereotyped replies as “Good Friday,” “Bank Holiday,” “the forty-fifth of last January,” with their consequent retaliations and the dexterous doubling up of psalters too confidingly held open in unwary hands--all of which, under cover of disposing his own pages the deputy tactfully ignored; taking pencil notes of the chants and hymn tunes from the rough copy drawn from his breast pocket in the organist’s handwriting--the Organist himself arrived.

His approach, between the clicking of the great latch and his appearance in the chancel, was sufficiently notified to the observant by the transformation in the verger’s demeanour, who, having first fastened on the vestry door a gaze of renewed and concentrated displeasure in preparation for some flushed and guilty head, exchanged this and his stony attitude for an alert and welcoming posture as if at last he found himself confronted with a presence worthy of his recognition.

Mr. Rencil came accompanied by two boys, sons of the doctor and of the lawyer respectively, each of whom bore a Grammar School cap in his hand; a dog-eared much dismembered mortarboard that Oswald’s eyes instinctively looked for and rested on with a gratification almost possessive. To the paid and corduroyed choristers this mortarboard constituted an object of envy and traditional hate. To Oswald it was an object of soulful emulation; a bond of learning and gentility. Some day--that dim, delectable some day awaiting wistfully its turn behind the throng and pressure of these more competitive, immediate days, like Oswald’s self behind the crush of ruder selves that dispossessed him--he was to wear such a cap, and go to such a school, and acquire great wisdom, and make himself worthy of the best of fathers. Some day, too, he was to have music lessons from the organist of St. Saviour’s, whom both as chorister and prospective pupil his loyalty proclaimed a musician without parallel, whilst his love, shyly disguised beneath its very yearning for expression, vested him with every virtue. The kindliness of the organist’s eyes, the gentle droop of his brown moustache, the attractive softness of his voice, the sympathetic friendliness of his hand--all stirred Oswald’s affections to a degree of unspeakable devotion. For this worshipped hand, so smooth, so white, so marvellously certain of its way and whereabouts upon the keys, had rested more than once on Oswald’s shoulder, as it rested now on the shoulder of the doctor’s son--who lived (this latter) at the double brass plate in Hill Street where the empty medicine bottles went up the long passage to the red lamp overhanging a door at the end of it, coughing dreadfully, some of them, when Oswald was on his rounds at night; and came down filled, withdrawing their corks and exchanging sniffs and trial drinks with one another, as Oswald had himself observed and greatly wondered at. And the organist’s eyes, through the large lenses that seemed to liquefy and soften them, had rested on Oswald’s own with a tenderness not often to be met with in the eyes of men. One night, never to be forgotten, he had actually overtaken Oswald beneath the lamp-post that spread its parsimonious light on Canon Quexley’s steps, and had (to the confusion of Oswald’s wildest hopes) not only recognized but walked with him as far as the vestry door. Inspired by which stimulating memory Oswald ever took the same way, and gazed at the organist’s window with an intensity that was already half a prayer.

Mr. Rencil called him “Oswald” too, as he called by their christian names the doctor and lawyer’s sons. It was a tribute to gentility, and the proud distinction of volunteers. The paid choristers who thrust forth their predatory hands each quarter’s end for the jangling hire that the deputy dropped into them, were unmitigated “Smiths” and “Higginsons,” and “Browns” and “Butlers,” and so on uniformly through the mercenary list of surnames. But, this distinction apart, no differentiation marked the organist’s treatment of his choir. To all alike he showed the same kind smile, the same enlarged and lenient eye, the same soft voice. Even to the shoulders of the surnames his hand was not a stranger; and yet--with, peradventure, the sole exception of the Canon’s self--there was no presence whose mere approach drew the choir to a prompter recollection of decorum. As he came down the chancel with a comprehensive smile of greeting, he stopped before the little Oswald, dutifully erect with his psalter held before him and his lips pursed to attention, and took him playfully by the ear.

“Oswald, you rogue, you weren’t at the practice last Friday. In the end we had to begin without you. Why was that?”

A voice suggested: “It was Mayor’s Party.” Another voice contemptuously said: “Think _he_ was at Mayor’s Party?” Neither of these two voices was Oswald’s. Realizing his embarrassment Mr. Rencil released the boy’s ear with the gentlest shake of reassurance, and turned to Oswald’s neighbour, distinguished by a crimson flannel wrapping round his neck.

“Now Hopwood, how’s the throat going on? Ought you to be singing? I see you have it bandaged still.” So, with a word to one or other he approached the deputy and addressed himself to the work in hand.

The practice began. The deputy seated himself upon the blower’s rush-bottomed chair, brought from the blower’s gloomy purlieus behind the organ, whose depressed seat had been raised to harmonium height by the expedient of old church books and tattered voluntaries. Mr. Rencil tapped the instrument lightly with his tapered baton. It breathed a bronchial response beneath the pressure of the deputy’s feet. They soared into the psalms for Sunday. From time to time the organist accentuated the pointing with his baton on the choir ledges or rapped the music into silence at some blunder too palpable for pardon, such as an aitchless “Holy” or a mispronounced word. At other moments he strayed towards the altar, and even wandered down into the darkling nave--far beyond the range of Oswald’s fearful eyes--sublimely unconscious of the unseen terrors lurking in it, from whose profundity his corrective voice emerged, trailing a train of stupefying echoes as if a cab were lumbering up the aisle. Meanwhile, sundry of the senior singers also sauntered in by ones and twos, with the leisureliness befitting honorary members. Their attendance--save on those special occasions when Mr. Rencil requested it--was subject to no such invidious rule of punctuality as brought so many of the choristers to practice in a perspiration, whilst their conduct at rehearsal was exempt from the harassing restrictions laid upon the juniors in front. During the psalms and canticles it was their privilege to remain seated, alternately singing and reverently discussing the latest news among themselves, such as murders, elections and starting prices, and occasionally dropping an admonitory hymnbook on the head of some chorister so unmindful of the respect due to Mr. Rencil and his Maker as to cease singing and lend his ears and open mouth to a conversation not concerning him. Most of these newcomers were obviously arrived at an age when their voices, in the lyric sense, could be of small service to God, but they helped to fill the surplices on Sunday, even if they added nothing substantial to the singing. They still retained, however, the impressive habit of clearing their throats as though the whole responsibility of choral service hung upon them, and speaking in the historic present of a vocal organ nobody ever heard. Still, as church was the only place where their singing would have been tolerated, they clung to it with the persistence of a worthless husband to a good wife, and were more regular attendants than the better singers to whom the world at large offered a wider sphere of temptations. These arrived later, usually towards anthem time, with the dissimulated consequence of Festival soloists, smoothing their hair and pulling down their waistcoats as if in preparation for the platform. All of them were united in their esteem of Mr. Rencil, for whose personal attentions they vied, and in a general way the choir practice was more regarded as an opportunity for social intercourse and the interchange of words and smiles with the organist of St. Saviour’s than as a means of perfecting praise for the worship of heaven--in which department not a few considered themselves proficient enough already. To-night the chief topic of conversation appeared to centre in the health of Alderman Bankett--not the husband, but the father-in-law, of the Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew--who occupied a detached house along the Hunmouth Road, and had been dangerously ill for some days. Taking advantage of a lull in the singing Mr. Rencil turned to ask the men if there were any further tidings of the alderman’s condition. One had heard nothing since midday; another understood the alderman was sinking; a third shook his head. “There’s bark in front of the house,” interpolated one of the choirboys (not Oswald) suddenly. All eyes turned upon the speaker.

“When was that?” asked one of the seniors, judicially.

“To-night,” answered the boy. “Ever so deep.... You could kick it.”

“There’s been bark there this two days,” said another of the men, indifferently. “That’s nothing to go by.”

“It’s a bad sign, is bark,” commented the judicial member. “A very bad sign. When it comes to bark for anybody.... I’m very sorry. It’s generally fatal.”

They were on the point of resuming the interrupted singing when the vestry latch snapped heavily again and a heated chorister, holding his cap screwed tightly in both hands as if he were wringing water out of it, came swiftly into view. For his composure’s sake this entry coincided with an inauspicious moment. Mr. Rencil, glancing at his watch and then turning his thoughtful eyes through their gold-rimmed lenses upon the delinquent, said in a voice whose unaltered softness lacked nothing of reproachful severity:

“You are late to-night, Anderson. How is that?”

Without directly answering this question, but wringing his cap the harder and sliding into place amidst his fellows, the chorister was heard to say:

“Alderman Bankett’s dead.”

Before the chancel could recover from the effect produced by this portentous tidings, the verger--reappearing dramatically before the altar rails--gave out in an impressive voice:

“It is my painful obligation to announce that Alderman Bankett passed away at 7.45. His death removes one of the oldest members of the Corporation from our midst, and his demise will be a conspicuous deprivation to the Council.”

This tribute to the defunct Alderman was ceremonial solely--Prestwich’s private estimation of the late Alderman Bankett (whom he stigmatized as an upstart of no Vocabulary) being well known.

The late delinquent, regaining assurance in the sudden alternation of a demeanour occasioned by his news, and seeking to wrest back some of the popularity unscrupulously appropriated by the verger, took advantage of a nasal stoppage on the latter’s part to exclaim:

“Bell’s ringing for him now. You can hear it.”

7

Almost to a man the choir drew its breath and listened. After a while there dropped into the breath-held stillness of the church a dull and leaden sound; the portentous slow pulse of St. Gyles’s passing bell. All were visibly impressed, but none so profoundly as the little Oswald, who clasped his book as if it had been a mother’s hand and listened, open-mouthed and silenced, to the solemn knell that went through his small frame like a throb from eternity’s heart, accompanied with vague shapes of policemen and blood-smeared men and infirmaries and dark ways home. His own heart reciprocated the throb, and his lips shaped themselves to the unspoken word “Dead!” The word had a deep significance for him. Alderman Bankett, whom he did not know, was Dead. The news was terrible. What tidings for his mother. Instantly he wished the practice over that he might hasten the proud moment of breaking it to her.

The punctuation of the bell, like a full stop awaited, released all these captive breaths which, growing more audible and more difficult of repression, broke out in coughs and converse. Alderman Bankett, though of late an infrequent worshipper by reason of infirmity, had in earlier days paid pew-rent at St. Saviour’s. His son--the husband of that Mrs. Bankett in St. Lawrence Square whom Oswald and everybody knew--was one of the present churchwardens, and formed a familiar feature of the service, walking on Sunday behind a stiff outstretched arm holding an offertory plate. The Alderman’s death involved considerations for St. Saviour’s.

“I suppose, Sir,” said Mr. Blenkinsop the Rate Collector, half rising from his seat and addressing the Organist, “I suppose, Sir, we shall have the privilege of the Dead March on Sunday?”

For nearly forty years Mr. Blenkinsop had monopolized a place in St. Saviour’s choir on the strength of an apocryphal voice, to which he administered the pitch by means of a pipe kept in his waistcoat pocket for the purpose, as if he fed it from a bottle, and sustained on lozenges that disseminated a melancholy odour of paregoric through the chancel when he sucked them. By virtue of this pitch pipe, and these lozenges, Mr. Blenkinsop (with due respect to the organist of St. Saviour’s, whose word he held sacred, and whose utterances, humbly assimilated to-day, were re-issued as expressions of his own authority to-morrow) Mr. Blenkinsop based his claim to musical consideration. Mr. Rencil, turning his thoughtful glasses upon the Rate Collector said he assumed that the Dead March would enter into the service on Sunday.

“Morning and evening, Sir?” enquired the Rate Collector eagerly.

“We can spare an alderman or two,” he declared, “for the Dead March.” He wished to make clear that it was the March in Saul he meant. “None of your Mendelssohns or Beethovens!” he exclaimed emphatically. “They aren’t in it, Sir. They haven’t the grandeur. They don’t go through you. But Handel’s different. That’s what I call Sublime Music. We can’t have too much of it. It’s an education. It’s a Sermon. It lays hold of a man. After he’s heard that he can go back to his Sunday dinner with something to think about.”

Questions were raised, too, concerning anthems; and the spirits of the choir rose visibly to discussion of services in This and That. Somebody in F, and Somebody in D, and Somebody (jocosely) in L--which drew the accustomed draft of small-beer laughter from the stalls. In the midst of these deliberations the figure of Prestwich suddenly appeared, dusting both palms together as if applauding his own entry, who, drawing confidentially near enough to Mr. Rencil in order that a whisper, guided adroitly by a hand, might reach the organist’s ear, announced in a voice partaking of the quality of a whisper only in the outward manner of its delivery:

“The Canon’s coming, Sir.”

He added, in tones of as much injury as the need for haste allowed, “He says the main gates is to be opened of a Friday, now. Just in case he wants to use ’em. He can’t fiddle about with side walks, he says. First it’s Lock this one; then it’s Lock that one; then it’s Lock ’em all. Now it’s Leave ’em all open. There’s no materia medica about his goings on. He’s too ultramontane to be argued with. That’s what’s the matter with him. I’m about.... Here he comes!”

The apparition of the Vicar of St. Saviour’s at a choir practice, albeit a contingency to be reckoned with, was rare. Accepting his ignorance of music as sufficient proof of the art’s inferiority, Canon Quexley concerned himself little with the choral disposition of St. Saviour’s worship but left this matter largely in the hands of Mr. Rencil. From time to time, as an act of policy, he showed himself within the church on Friday, to encourage effort and stimulate attendance, but such musical questions as were referred to him on these occasions were briefly dealt with, the Canon betraying no great desire to dwell on matters so far below his comprehension. But that his presence imposed a fresh criterion of conduct was evident by the behaviour of the choir. The choristers assumed an upright posture, taking their books in both hands. The smiles still lingering on the men’s faces were extinguished like surreptitious candles in a school dormitory. The Deputy dropped his under lip and expressed respect by a lowering of facial intelligence. The Rate Collector, after a moment’s hesitation, rose to his feet; the others limply following.

8

The Canon came into view from behind the choir vestry, still wearing his hat, which as he passed before the altar rails he solemnly removed. He advanced with a careful and calculated tread; a tread deliberately posited like the premise of a syllogism, for use in consecrated places and on ceremonious occasions. Within the fabric, indeed, he walked as he spoke; weighing each step as if it were a word, and lifting up his eyes from alternate feet to heaven and down again, as though in conversation with higher powers. An Inverness cape amplified his portly person with its voluminous folds, one wing of which (exposing its silken lining) lay negligently retroverted on a shoulder. In the matter of profiles he showed inferior to Prestwich, who in this respect at least might have changed places with his vicar not at all to the church’s disadvantage. He lacked Prestwich’s classic nose and chiselled nostrils; his own organ being blunted by a certain flaccidity. The bile-tinted cheeks, somewhat pouched and baglike, shook as he walked, and the folds of his neck overhung his Roman collar. But his forehead, most cathedrally domed, reflected the choirlights from its gleaming surface, with the intensity of a halo. He coughed, on coming between the choir stalls, with a resonant cough suggesting crypt-like depths of dignity and understanding; a cough of purpose rather than necessity; the very verger of a cough, imbued with the importance of what it portended, and the function it served. And it served, too, in some sort as an indirect acknowledgment of the choir, which--save for this and a grave inclination of the head, as if some stranger had saluted him--he did not explicitly notice. His countenance relaxed as little to the expression of social amenity as his cape; both, indeed, being rather utilized to eliminate the human element from his person as a thing calculated to compromise dignity and prejudice rank. In his official dealings with the world he bestowed smiles sparingly, and certainly discouraged any interchange of them with the choir, which he condescended to acknowledge purely as an abstraction, like sin, in which convenient form it might be apprehended by the intellect without any derogatory passage through the organs of sight,--these approaches to his private person, indeed, being kept discreetly curtained against intrusion, like the vicarage windows looking on the street, behind whose panes it was but rarely pedestrians might catch a glimpse of his canonical head. They were cold eyes, of a steely colour and a metallic hardness, that seemed as if capable of calculating the small currency of life to a ha’penny; being by nature more adapted to compute figures than subserve rapture. In unguarded moments, as he spoke or listened, it was noticeable that they strayed from his control like children from the vigilance of a governess, to busy themselves with increasing interest in external trifles--such as boots and shoes and ties and watch-chains and partings in the hair--until, coming at length into direct collision with other eyes not less active and enquiring than themselves, they were peremptorily recalled and withdrawn from intercourse behind their fleshy lids as if these had been the governess’s flounces.

As he drew near to Mr. Rencil (whom alone he recognized or greeted) it was observable that he held the pince-nez in his ungloved right hand; a white and flabby hand whose etiolated flesh suggested too much seclusion from sun and air, reminding Oswald irresistibly of the waxen pork exposed to view in Waxford’s shop. Mr. Rencil, receiving the august visitor with a look of pleasant, mild enquiry, adverted to the recent tidings, saying he was sorry to hear.... The Canon, with a remote crimping of his eyes and a slight action of the hand and pince-nez, indicative not precisely of impatience, but of an understanding of all the considerations involved in this topic, too complete for words, assented.

“ ... To-night. At 7-45. Yes, yes. It was to be expected.... And now, with regard to Sunday....”

No words were expended in reference to the late Alderman’s virtues. It might have been, for any allusion made to the subject, that he had not any. The Canon dropped his voice to an introspective murmur that taxed (as it was designed to do) the ears of the listening choir, who, though obviously not included in the conversation assumed an intelligent part in it for their credit’s sake. Stray words of confabulation escaped.

“The interment.... Most probably the Corporation.... With regard to Sunday....”

Here the Rate Collector, whose mouth opened each time the conversation blew his way, in a desire to vindicate his forty years’ membership, believed he had entrapped the Canon’s elusive eye at last. He seized the moment to clap a retentive supposition on it, saying:

“I suppose, Sir....”

The supposition fell with strange abruptness as if a hymnbook had fallen on the chancel tiles. The Canon, seemingly aware of some intrusive sound, but blank as to the source of it, turned pained enquiring eyebrows on the organist as though seeking confirmation and enlightenment. Mr. Rencil interpreted the Rate Collector’s petition, whereupon, deigning to acknowledge it from this official source, the Canon answered:

“To be sure. To be sure.”

“To be sure ... the dead march on Sunday, Mr. Blenkinsop,” the organist transmitted. “So that will set your mind at rest,” he added with a smile.

“Morning and evening, Sir?” the Collector summoned confidence to ask, in a voice of larger assurance by virtue of what had been conceded to it. Once more, the question was referred to the Canon’s ear and the canonical murmur vouchsafed acquiescence, saying: “Certainly.... Certainly.” Then, as though feeling that some small comment might at this juncture without impropriety be committed to the choir, he said in a voice addressed to nobody in particular, but dedicated to the service of all: “The late Alderman was for some years associated with this church.”

A vague murmur, apparently appreciative, rose up like incense from the choir stalls at this communication. Many of the members were obviously engaged in thinking what remark they might contribute with prestige to themselves. One said: “Ah! It’s a sad affair to be sure. A very sad affair!” with his face saddened to the expression he judged most creditable to his own sentiments and most appropriate to the Vicar. Other members, not to be outdone, threw in touching contributions to the sadness of Alderman Bankett’s death, like coins to the collecting plate, feeling the eye of the church upon them. The Tax Collector, thinking it his turn once more, assumed a deeply moralizing attitude and voice, and depositing his hand upon the book he sang from, as though to attest religious truth, declared:

“It’s what we must all be prepared for when it pleases the Almighty to call us.”

If this show of devout submission were intended to recommend the speaker on the grounds of piety to the canonical ear, it only showed that Mr. Blenkinsop’s forty years’ experience of pitch-pipes and paregoric lozenges within this sacred edifice had been in vain. The name of the Deity, coming from secular lips, brought to Canon Quexley not comfort but a manifest uneasiness verging on apprehension. Already the extending area of the conversation had imparted a restless movement to his glasses and a certain instability to his feet. Wincing under the name of the Lord--as a doctor might do under receipt of a prescription for his cough, tendered by some misguided patient--he raised his canonical hat with an impulse almost suggesting for one moment that he meant to put it on; regarded its outer and inner surfaces, and moved in an atmosphere of exclusive meditation towards the altar. This fit of deep abstraction having brought him safely out of range of the Tax Collector and any indiscreet deities he stopped, gazed fixedly at his feet and at his pince-nez, still out-held, and said over his shoulder:

“Of course ... Mr. Rencil....”

The sentence was not completed. In its unterminated state it furnished an implicate request for the Organist’s ear.

“Of course, Mr. Rencil ...” the Canon said again, and balancing his pince-nez began to move once more towards the altar. Canon and organist, engaging in a conversation of greater freedom as they left the choir, passed out of sight towards the vestry door, followed by Prestwich--who, all this while, had not been idle, but associating himself with the canonical person by a studious propinquity, as if the canon’s rank were incomplete without him, had addressed various menacing, intense and expostulatory gestures towards the junior choristers, commanding them in irate whispers to “stand up”, “turn your head round,” “cease talking there,” and “be still.”

With the conclusive snapping of the vestry latch and Mr. Rencil’s return, it was as if a great blanket had been lifted from the spirits of the choir. All were sensible of the honour conferred by the Canon’s visit--which they might now enjoy at leisure, freed from the constraints and responsibilities his presence imposed. Mr. Rencil announced that the first part of the funeral service for the deceased Alderman would probably take place at St. Saviour’s--though the alderman was to be interred at the Cemetery--and in this case he might have to ask for the assistance of the choir. The interment was provisionally arranged for Tuesday. Would those who thought they could conveniently be present put up their hands?

Various hands, of various sizes and complexions, were lifted into the prominence of the choirlights, some tentatively, others--perhaps ashamed of the spectacle they presented, or repenting a too rapid decision--were, after hesitation, withdrawn. Oswald, not too certain in his mind what it was that was being demanded of these hands, and a prey to the politeness that shrinks from the least assertion of self, did not raise his own hand with the rest, albeit offering the organist a timid and beseeching eye. But Mr. Rencil, counting up the erect palms and finding their number few, appealed to him by name, asking if he did not think his mother would spare him on Tuesday. Thrilled with this direct appeal, and burning with the loyal desire to concede any service that Mr. Rencil might require of him, Oswald answered in an undertone “he thought she would.” The organist turned his smile upon the Rate Collector. “I’m afraid it’s no use my asking _you_, Mr. Blenkinsop!”

“If it’s to be the Dead March in Saul, Sir,” said the Rate Collector--first to the organist, and then to every face in turn of which the choir was composed,--“there’s nothing will keep me away.”