Part 3

Then came the always exciting task of moving the immense Bible from the reading desk to the pulpit. He regarded it, I think, almost in the light of a fetish, and certainly, so long as I knew him, would never have attempted a sermon with any smaller and less trustworthy guide. He balanced the enormous volume in his right hand, and, with his left hand on the rails, steadied himself as he made the painful and perilous ascent. The hope, I fear, of us boys was that the book would one day slip from his hand and imperil the head of the clerk beneath, who was now no longer choirmaster, but, like a Roman flute player, had crossed over to his proper seat and resumed his duties beneath the pulpit. But the hope was never realised, and I have felt ever since that my life has lacked something in consequence.

The choice of his text was the longest part of his sermon. The Bible was opened haphazard, as though he intended to execute a sort of _sors Vergiliana_. But so casual a method was quite unsuited to the dignity of our Rector. The pages were turned and re-turned; whole chapters were read and carefully studied, and, after a quarter of an hour of this preliminary investigation, a text was given out, that for glaring irrelevance and disconnection with everything else could never have been surpassed if he had taken it at sight. A name out of a genealogy—the Christian name Mary—Tophet—the daubed wall—pillows for all armholes—are among the subjects that I distinctly remember were selected for our edification. But of the treatment alas! I remember nothing—nothing then, and certainly nothing now, when I would give £50 to trace the exact process of his reasoning.

The last sermon I ever heard him deliver was on the text, “And there shall be no more sea”—an unwise and disquieting subject for a congregation, most of whom came of a race of fishermen, and gained their living from the element which he so confidently annihilated.

“If there baint no sea, then ’tis no place for I,” I heard a man say to his neighbour as he passed out of church; “and sakes alive, where be ’en going to get their fish from?”

Such was our Rector. Not reverent or discreet, you will say, in his capacity of priest. No, but a kindly, genial old man; devoted to his parishioners, if not to his duties; clever too, and companionable in society, and inexhaustible to the boys of the parish in the matter of marbles and gingerbread.

It is with affection that I recall him, for, in spite of his eccentricities, and perhaps because of them, I loved him well.—_R.I.P._

Echoes from an Organ Loft

“Pale fingers moved upon the keys, The ghost hands of past centuries.”

From Joseph’s flageolet to one of the finest organs in England—from the scene of “our Rector’s” ministrations to a building that could have swallowed up his church and his school room and all the house property in his parish—was a startling transition for a boy of fourteen.

I wonder how often, during my first experience of a cathedral service, my thoughts travelled back to the tiny hamlet in the west, with its ruined chancel on which the Atlantic had spent its rage, and its few cottages straggling on and up behind an avenue of elms, to where the new church, safe in a sheltered paradise of its own, looks down compassionately upon the wreckage of the past.

In times to come I got to know every nook and corner of the great organ loft at K. It was built in those large minded days before architects had conceived the fatal idea of economising space. Ascending by a broad staircase that rose with the dignity of an inclined plane, you came out upon a plateau, roomier and more comfortable than many a London flat. The sanctum of the organist—indeed, the huge instrument itself—were little more than incidents of the loft. There was a chamber for the wife of the dean, and another chamber for the wife of the organist, together with a library for the Church music; and still there was room in it for blind man’s buff—when the choristers could get the chance.

The organ itself might have been a mile away—so little did you hear of it. In this respect the loft resembled the deck of a battleship, where the men who work the guns hear least of the explosion. Only a few muttered growls from the big pipes that lined the walls on either side, or burrowed in the caverns underneath, suggested the proximity of sound. The crash of the full organ was delivered at a point far above your head, somewhere among the shadowy outlines of the roof.

The space allotted to the dean’s wife on the other side of the organ was less comfortable than ours, but far more interesting. The floor outside her enclosure was broken by yawning chasms to give the great pipes breathing room; and though they were of wood, and spoke, as wooden pipes should speak, in hollow muffled tones, they must, I fancy, have confused her devotions and raised a small hurricane about the nape of her neck.

Linking the present to the past were the names of by-gone choristers, carved in schoolboy fashion upon the old oak panels, who had sung their last note a hundred years ago—it might be in this very gallery. It was easy to picture them passing and re-passing still through the trap door which opened at our feet—a white robed procession of the voiceless dead.

An organ loft is a delightfully irresponsible place from which to take part in a service, especially when the instrument is a large one, well removed from the congregation on the top of a screen—above all, when you do not happen to be the organist.

I would not for an instant be understood to imply that the sense of aloofness necessarily engenders irreverence. On the contrary, many of the most solemn hours of my life were passed within the recesses of the great organ at K., and my friend the organist might have been a pattern to the congregation in true devotional spirit. But the necessities imposed by a choral service afforded him little opportunity for a devotional attitude, while he would have been more, or less, than human if he had not utilised our isolation to impart to me pleasant little details regarding the progress of the service. These would be interrupted at intervals by parenthetical instructions whenever he wanted help in the management of his stops.

A reminiscence of an organ-loft monologue would read something as follows: “_Draw the Gamba_, _please_. How flat that boy Robinson’s singing; and oh! those _h_’s of his! _Principal_, _please_, _and now the mixtures_. Green’s getting shaky in his top notes; he only looked at that upper G. _Take care_; _you put in that coupler before I had finished the bar_. What a nuisance it is! I shall never get a boy like him . . . The finest hymn written, don’t you think? (They were singing Stainer’s ‘Saints of God’) . . . and ‘Aurelia’ is the second best. (Well done! Joseph, I thought; you’re in it after all.) Get me Wely’s Offertoire in G, will you? It’s poor stuff, but the people will have it. _The Oboe_, _please_, _for the air_ . . . And now for the scramble . . . _Turn over in good time_; _I can see ahead of me_, _but I can’t see through the page_.” And he dashed into the finale at the hurricane pace that alone makes the thing endurable. Even he couldn’t talk till it was done.

Sometimes we were interested in events that were proceeding in the world beneath us. “What on earth’s the man reading the fifteenth for? it’s the sixteenth that’s the lesson for the day.” “Oh, it’s Henderson,” would be my reply. “He always chooses a fine chapter to show off his voice and elocution. If he’s hauled up for it, he’ll say he did it by mistake.”

On one occasion we were favoured by a reader, fresh from the study of Aristophanes, with the startling announcement that the First Lesson for the day was taken from the Book of _Ecclesiazusae_.

One day I heard voices in the choir beneath. I knew, before I saw the speakers reflected from the mirror in front of me, that they were two limp figures in blue serge and coal-scuttle bonnets. The strident tones were unmistakeable, the product, in so far as the human throat can compass it, of a long and careful assimilation of the clash of the cymbals.

“A rare fine buildin’, this,” said one, “and what a hinstrument! I only wish we ’ad it in our place; draw a sight better than drums and cymbals, wouldn’t it? And a deal noisier.”

“You’re right,” answered the other, “but, for all that, I wouldn’t exchange with that lot to get it. They deans and chapters and canons, and heaven knows what they calls theirselves, aye, and the bisshup hisself, is that sunk in ignorance and self-conceit that they can’t see the right way; no, nor never will.”

Occasionally, but very rarely, matters went wrong in our own department. The water that fed the hydraulic gear failed, or was cut off at the main, and the organ “went out” in the middle of an anthem. One afternoon in November it clouded over so suddenly that we could hardly see our faces in the organ loft. Worse luck still, the matches were damp, and till I could be back with some more, Dr. H. had to guess at the anthem as best he could. I am not musician enough to know how he surmounted the difficulty, but I suspect that the choir that day must have been treated to an amount of improvisation to which they were wholly unaccustomed from an organist who, as a rule, played what he had to play, and rarely indulged in vagaries.

But our worst disaster was of earlier date. Bildad the Shuhite blew the organ. He had received that name because he cleaned shoes in a corner of the Close. It was in prehistoric days before hydraulic gear was dreamed of in connexion with the organ. As luck would have it, Bildad fell sick, and had to supply a deputy at the last moment. Dr. H. studied the man carefully, mistrusting, I think, his intelligence. But his answers were satisfactory, though I thought with the Doctor that he protested too much. Anyhow, the service was due, and we had no time to waste on our fears. The singing began, but the organ was irresponsive, and, hurrying to the back of the loft, I found our deputy-blower contemplating with blank stolidity the mechanism at his command, and pleading with an injured air, “Sir, I am a’ waitin’ for you to begin!”

One day I was laboriously extracting discords from the great instrument with Dr. H. at my elbow, when a gentle voice at our side asked for permission to try the instrument. What a delight it was, after the horrors I had been perpetrating, to see the long fingers charm out the melody, till they drifted at last into the chords of Chopin’s great march. Surely, I thought, the composer must hear and welcome such a perfect realisation of his wondrous dream.

“Charrlie, me boy, thry the pey-dals,” came a voice from below, with the raciest and most captivating of brogues. It was my first introduction to Ireland’s great musician—Sir Robert Stewart—and his still greater pupil, composer in prospective of the _Requiem_ and _Revenge_.

At our next interview the Professor of the future gave me a friendly lecture on Wagner, emphasising his teaching the while by illustrative passages, which he played, I remember, in thick woollen gloves, of which he hadn’t troubled to divest himself, being pressed for time and the organ loft none too warm. The mechanism of the organ, I am bound to add, was old and antiquated—not as it is in these days, when the notes speak if a fly sits upon them, or you venture to sneeze in their neighbourhood.

I have made acquaintance with strange scenes in an organ loft—an organist of surpassing ability playing through a service when he was drunk, but certainly not incapable. Yet a deputy sat by him, ready to take his place in case he should prove unequal to retaining his seat at the instrument. I have seen a fight between two choristers who had been sent to fetch music for the choir. It began on this wise. “I can lick you ’ead over ’eels in ’oly ’oly ’oly,” said one. The taunt was not to be endured by a chorister of spirit, so “Come on!” said the other; and they had fought it out to the bitter end at the back of the organ before ever Dr. H. was aware that the battle was in progress. I have seen courtship too—ending, as all courtship should do, in matrimony—while the organist played unsuspiciously a soft and dreamy accompaniment. And I have seen heroism too—grand as any displayed upon a field of battle—when my friend came from his sick bed and played through a service magnificently while the death dew gathered on his face. And I coveted, as I never coveted before or since, the divine gift of music, which would have enabled me to spare him his long and patient hour of martyrdom.

And, at the end, he played the Dead March, never knowing that it was for himself he played it, while a furious thunder-storm raged over head, and the roll of the thirty-two-foot pipes was drowned by reverberating peals. As the final chords came crashing from his hands, he said to me, “Handel must have written it, I think, to an accompaniment like this. And yet the modern school of organists would have us leave out the drums! I shall never care to play it again.”

And three weeks afterwards he was dead.

Fighting the Cholera

WAS it an escapade, I wonder? or was it something greater and grander? There are, I suppose, escapades good and bad; heroic and unheroic.

One evening I was tidying up Ronald’s room at Cambridge. We were both of us in residence now: I as an M.A., while he had just entered as an undergraduate. He was as studiously untidy as I was the reverse, and, but for me, his room, artistic as it was, would always have looked like a boudoir that had been used over-night for a tap-room. Pipes, tobacco, and matches met the eye everywhere, scattered among vases of flowers and ferns; no two sheets of the _Times_ were together in one place; “Esmond” lay cheek by jowl with “Tom Jones” (the former, I was glad to see, the better worn), while there was more than a suspicion that his surplice was in use as a bed for a litter of kittens.

Ronald himself lay at his ease upon the sofa, watching—I cannot say with interest, but at any rate without prejudice—my improvements for the worse. But I roused him at last. In replacing a small box of Italian olive wood I knocked off the lid, and an aggregation of articles unimaginable were scattered on the floor.

“Hullo! stop that, old man,” he said. “You’ll be losing or breaking some of my most cherished possessions.”

“What on earth are they, Ronald? Here’s a small crucifix and a missal (you haven’t turned Roman Catholic, have you?) and any amount of rings—most of them brass—and, by Jove, a lock of hair! Is the last a love token? It looks uncommonly like the relic of another escapade. Did it belong to the girl who played the harmonium on the beach at Bayview? I didn’t know you’d got so far as that. Besides, her hair was light, if I remember. Out with it, old man, and clear your conscience by confession.”

“Have done with your jokes, Fred; you’re the last fellow to chaff like that if you knew the rights of it. And, if I must tell you, I must. But I didn’t want you to know of the matter; it looks too much like boasting. However, you find out everything I do; so I may as well tell you all about this, before you hunt it up for yourself in some underhand way, or make a tale out of it that isn’t the true one. You know Richards, Fred; the man my uncle made me travel with last autumn—to see the world, as he called it. I never liked the fellow, and always thought him a cad; but I didn’t know till then that he was a coward as well as a cad.”

“I always thought him both,” was my reply.

“Taormina in Sicily was one of the places we stopped at: the loveliest spot that you could dream of, if you dreamed your hardest. You’ve never been there, have you? Well: the town itself is a fair day’s walk up hill from the sea, and Mola’s another day’s walk above that; by which time you’ve nearly reached the clouds—only, as it happens, Sicily doesn’t boast of any. But you needn’t go higher than Taormina for the loveliest view on earth. They may talk of seeing Madrid, Seville, Naples, and a hundred other places, and then dying contented—why, there’s none of them that’s a patch on Taormina. Sit down in the proscenium of the old theatre, facing Etna, with the Straits of Messina and the foot of Italy laid out like a map on your left: and you can do without another view for the rest of your natural life. The only objection we found to it was that in September of last year it was most awfully hot, and Taormina is pestiferous enough to be a Turkish settlement. It is worse, I think, than the old town of Granada, which is perhaps the filthiest place that I know in Europe. The cholera, too, was about last year, especially in Italy; and, if it _did_ cross the Straits, Taormina was ripe and handy for it.

“After we’d been there for a week or so it _did_ come with a vengeance. First a suspicious case or two, then a case that was not suspicious at all, and then it fell like a thunderbolt on the town. Richards was off directly, and with him everyone in the place who could afford to go; so the poorer people, with their old priest, who stuck to his work like a man, had it all to themselves.

“Now it looks like boasting, but I didn’t like to run. Besides, I had come there for a fortnight, and I was fond of the place and the view and the old theatre—so why go? Anyhow I didn’t budge, and did what I could to help the old man in his difficulty—it was little enough. However, I had heaps of money, and they wanted that more than anything. And he taught me something about medicine—what little he knew of it; though, after all, nothing but stimulants at one stage and opium at another seemed to do them the slightest good.

“What a time it was! I pray that I may never stand face to face with cholera again. Overhead, a sky like brass, and, veiling the town, a dusky, steel-blue haze, almost as palpable as gauze: the distinctive colour (I’ve been told) of a cholera atmosphere. They died like flies, crowded in their close, evil-smelling dwellings, though we lighted fires in the streets to clear the air; an idea I borrowed, I believe, from ‘Old St. Paul’s.’

“Late one evening I hurried from a sick room to get a breath of air in the theatre below. My friend, the old priest, was there before me. This was an unusual coincidence, as he scarcely ever gave himself a moment’s rest. Yet he might have done so now, for in ten days’ time the disease abated as rapidly as it had begun. And besides, he had organised a band of fairly efficient helpers.

“‘Good evening, signor,’ he said. ‘You see me in my church; for I find in it the same relief that my brethren in the cities find within the walls of a cathedral. To me it would seem a poor exchange—for what cathedral built by man could match this view?’ As he spoke he pointed through the ruined arches to where Etna towered in the distance. Surely the noblest drop-scene ever fashioned by the hand of nature, and not unworthily framed by the artist who had designed the theatre. Between the ruined columns on the left a steamer, environed by a little group of feluccas, made a series of dissolving views as it overtook and passed them on the sea below. But I saw he had some trouble on his mind over and above his care for his patients.

“‘Take courage, padre mio. The worst is over. That shroud of steel-blue mist is lifting day by day. I should like to know what causes it. I believe if we had had the power of gauging it, its changes would have made no bad register of the death-rate in the town.’

“‘You are right, my son; the worst _is_ past; and, thanks mainly to you, I have been enabled to do my duty while it lasted. Without you I could have done little. Take an old man’s thanks, signor, on behalf of those who are left and those who are gone. Neither the one nor the other will ever forget you, here or in the world that holds them now. Yet I could almost wish that you had never come.’

“‘Why so?’ I asked.

“‘I wish, at any rate’ (speaking with more vehemence than his wont), ‘that you had not brought with you that false-hearted friend of yours.’

“‘You mean Richards. Yes, he is a coward to run away like that.’

“‘Worse, far worse. You know little Ninetta well, who lives at your lodgings up the hill—the prettiest girl in Taormina they call her, and I fancy they are right. She is down with the cholera—didn’t you know it? Taken this morning, and, unless I am wrong in my judgment, it is one of the worst cases we have had—hopeless, I should say, from the very first.’

“‘Poor little Ninetta! It does seem hard; taken, too, just when the disease was dying out. But what has Richards to do with it?’

“‘The confessional is sacred, my friend. But it may be that, in this one case, the cholera has struck in kindliness. Though I am sorry he should be away when he might have made her end more peaceful. Even when I left her to come and find you, she was perpetually calling for him. Put her off with excuses; it won’t be for long. Don’t let her think him a coward as well as a villain. If you weren’t a heretic, I would absolve you beforehand for any necessary evasion.’

“‘You may be sure I’ll do my best. The evasions won’t lie heavy upon my conscience. Goodnight.’

“There was no hope for her, as he had said. During the early stage of her illness she was always asking for him—wondering why he stayed away—for I obeyed the priest’s injunctions, and never told her he’d been coward enough to run. As she got worse, she began to wander, and, from having seen us so often together, she would confuse him with me; and, at the last, was perfectly happy so long as I was with her; calling me by his name, and thanking him, as she imagined, for all his care and kindness to her. The lock of hair that puzzled you is hers. She gave it to me just before she died (she had nothing else to give, poor girl) in the belief she was giving it to Richards. And then, quite quietly, still in the belief that he was with her, and that it was his hand and not mine that she was holding, she died.

“There you have the story, Fred, such as it is. All the other things were given me by the villagers—the few of them, that is, who lived—all except the missal, which came from my old friend the priest. It was his most cherished possession; given, I believe, in the hope of converting me. Well, if conversion would make me another such as he was, I wouldn’t say no to it.

“Shall I ever see him again, I wonder? Some day, Fred, you and I will go and hunt him up.”

Ronald’s Courtship

I

I HAVE been looking through all my old letters to-night. It is a strange sensation in these days, when the shuttle spins so fast, to re-read the letters between childhood and manhood. All details seem softened, viewed through the haze of time. Human nature was (or so it seems to one) so much kindlier then than now. What pleasant ghosts are raised by these old letters; what touches that one missed in them in the hurried, feverish days when they were written! In so very many cases, too, the hands that penned them are still. I have come upon one from Ronald, written when he was just twenty-five. It is singularly devoid of romance, compared with many of the others, and has “brisked me up” considerably, when I was verging on melancholia.

“DEAR FRED (it runs),

“I shall want you for a wedding a month hence. Guess the name of the happy lady. No more escapades from—Yours respectably,

“RONALD.”