THE ALDERMAN
1
Coming or sedately going on his various errands about the town, the
little Oswald had occasion frequently to pass a large buff-painted
building in the High Gate that stood out with imposing dignity from the
adjoining red brick shops and business premises; touching shoulders with
them, and yet for all its contiguity aloof and consciously detached,
like a constable in a crowd; its spacious breast confronting the ancient
Pict Gate, down which it gazed towards the Market Place out of bland and
lofty windows with a look at once self satisfied and serene. This was
the Mansion House.
Above the curtain of faded red moreen that lent municipal discretion to
the lower panes of one of the windows flanking the square, flagged
vestibule, the little Oswald had glimpsed in passing, with awe for a
spectacle not commonly revealed to youth, the tops of human heads.
Venerable, bald and grey-haired heads, for the most part, of an
amplitude larger than normal. These were the heads of the City Fathers
in council assembled. The City Fathers, too, in their complete
embodiment Oswald had occasionally seen, mounting the broad steps to the
Mansion House, or descending gravely to the street. As befitted the
standard set up by their heads and the spacious edifice in which they
met, they seemed to be a bigger breed of men, as if municipality
required a larger race of representatives to serve her. Some of them
wore suits of substantial broadcloth and shining chimney-pot hats, and
boots wonderfully broad. Their movements were deliberate to the point of
being august. They walked in knots of twos and threes, their hands
behind their backs, their heads inclined to a common centre, conversing
earnestly in undertones and throwing out before each other’s eyes from
time to time their open palms and outspread fingers. Upon their broad
shoulders the whole burden of a borough seemed imposed. It was plain to
every onlooker that some vital interest to Daneborough hung in the
balance--such as a pump or lamp-post, or the mayor’s Port wine.
Among these gravely ponderating groups in earlier days, and even in the
days of Oswald’s wonderment--though more rarely, by reason of his
growing infirmity--the late lamented alderman had formed a frequent
figure, beneath the historic silk hat that had dispensed its lustre
during three terms of mayoral office, and been doffed as many times to
royalty. His massive shoulders sloped grandiosely under the frock-coat
of imperishable broadcloth that survived him after more than thirty
years of civic sun and rain. His dictatorial cough betokened him a
street away, as if a loosened tile had crashed to earth. It made the
ceiling of the Council chamber ring, and left noises as of church bells
in the heads of listeners unprepared, and formed the alderman’s curt
substitute for “No” to every applicant, and sole answer to every
question where the spoken negative, implying courtesy, might savour of
weakness. This was the same cough that killed him, which lends force to
the adage that a good servant makes a bad master. In the Council chamber
and in his business it did the work of a more fluent advocate. It
crushed opposition; it discouraged hope. But it presumed at length upon
the confidence reposed in it. It grew from humble beginnings, like its
one-time master, to aldermanic proportions. It disputed his authority.
It contradicted him flatly at street corners and in public places, and
coughed him down, so that breathless and impotent he must lean upon his
stick, or prop himself with a hand against a wall. How or where he had
made acquaintance with this despotic partner, nobody rightly knows. But
it seems first to have come into public prominence in the very Market of
whose committee he was uncompromising chairman when he died. There were
burgesses who remembered it in the struggling days of both of them,
attendant on an open stall in the Market Place, of such unprepossessing
and promiscuous nature as to bid defiance both to hope and definition.
This stall, scowling beneath a home-made canopy for protection from the
elements, exposed such disconnected goods as smoked and flattened
herrings; socks and calico; cabbages and onions; bottles of ink; pens
and potatoes; eggs and sometimes chickens. Whether, therefore, the
deceased alderman was at this time a greengrocer, fishmonger, hosier or
stationer, must be left for later biographers to decide. In all
likelihood the stall marked already a stage in the Bankettian evolution,
being the apotheosis of a pedlar’s basket. But it is from this period
that dates his association with history, and that his cough began to
make itself felt in the municipal life of the town. As the obituarist of
the Daneborough _Mercury_ said in a memoir which, even at the present
day, can still claim to be the most important contribution to posterity
on the subject of Alderman Bankett:
“ ... It was doubtless here (i.e. at his stall in the Market Place) that
the deceased gentleman first acquired his profound and intricate
knowledge of public life and character which stood the Council chamber
in such stead in later years, and was given so ungrudgingly to the
service of the Borough.”
As senior alderman, the death of Isaac Bankett was municipally held to
be an event of deepest significance to the town, calling for public
commemoration--not alone out of respect to the dead, concerning whom in
his private capacity members of the council preserved their own
opinions, but out of respect to the living. That is to say, out of
respect to the bleeding body corporate from which this limb had been so
tragically torn. Theoretically, the town was thrown into mourning. On
Sunday the bells of St. Gyles’s rang a muffled peal. Hymns and anthems
were selected with appropriate regard to the memory of the dead
alderman. All the spiritual leaders of the town, pressing gregariously
on each other’s heels, filled their respective pulpits with mortuary
bleatings, stimulated by the fear of rival oratory, and striving in
their rhetoric to outdo rather than be outdone. Morning and evening the
organs of most of the churches emitted the solemn march, the
congregations standing, and on the Tuesday that was to see the mortal
remains of Isaac Bankett committed to the vault prepared for them in the
big cemetery, the town awoke with a thrill of expectancy as for a circus
or a Race Day. All through the morning wreaths and crosses in brown
cardboard boxes threaded the streets of Daneborough from every florist
in the town, and handed themselves in at the late alderman’s side door.
As the hour advanced the public ways and thoroughfares began to darken
with silk hats and other sombre habiliments of woe, all making for the
Mansion House.
Here every blind was drawn. The great door, thrown open, its ancient
brass knocker bound lugubriously in a crape bow, yawned like a
sepulchre. Two constables, with the solemnity of monumental effigies,
kept guard on each side of the broad stone steps, bringing up their arms
in a grave salute as members of the corporation passed between them.
Within the sepulchre, wearing his gold chain of office that encircled
his broad neck and swung against his massive dewlap like the label on a
prize bull, the Mayor received the aldermen and councillors, and the
delegates from neighbouring boroughs and public bodies, with many more
of Daneborough’s elect who, on one ground or another, associated
themselves with the corporate state on such ceremonial occasions as saw
refreshment laid out on the Mayor’s sideboard. Behind the lowered blind
of the Mayor’s parlour, in the gloom made more gloomy by three dim oil
paintings of departed worthies, that loomed obscurely out of their
gilded frames upon its walls, blinking in the premature and pallid
illumination dispensed by the gaslit chandelier, all the assembled faces
wore an unliving look, as if the sickly light were itself defunct
daylight awaiting burial. But the atmosphere, albeit subdued, displayed
an almost cheerful melancholy betokening a sorrow reconciled. Mourning,
recovered from its first stupour, had reached the pleasant reminiscent
stage in which the departed alderman, sustained with sandwiches and
warmed with wine, was made one of the assembled company. Being yet
unburied, decorum imposed complete suspension of the critical faculties.
All his rigid acts and sayings were sanctified with the company’s
content, and dressed in tones of meditative sorrow. The Mayor’s
attendant, in his rusty black, blended the hush of mourning with the
assiduousness of service, suggesting refreshment so furtively to
sorrowers that it looked, and sounded, rather as if he were soliciting a
loan than proffering hospitality. The aldermen and councillors, freemen
of the Sideboard, whose right to refreshment was inalienable, turned up
tumblers and tilted decanters with the assurance of campanologists,
helping themselves with a fine magnanimity to Port and Sherry, and
pushing the salient angles of sandwiches into their municipal mouths,
which they masticated along with memories of the dead.
Whilst this official company discriminated in sandwiches and accepted
liquid sustenance at one another’s instigation, as if conforming to a
pious rite, a growing crowd collected before the Mansion House. The
advent of the local fire brigade in full regalia, armed with brass
helmets and battle axes, and tramping two and two, sent a thrill through
the expectant throng, which was agreeably intensified by the tolling of
the minute bells from St. Gyles’s and St. Saviour’s. A sense of urgency
crept into the air that permeated even the seclusion of the Mayor’s
parlour and made the company round the sideboard restless. Watches were
produced and compared; glasses depleted. A low rumble, like faint and
distant thunder, announced that the retinue of corporation pair-horse
mourning coaches, chartered from the local livery stables to await the
Mayor and civic dignitaries at St. Saviour’s, was on its way. The crowd,
with that not always reliable instinct that comes of numbers, caught
knowledge of the restlessness within, and constricted its cordon round
the Mansion House. The cry escaped from extended throats:
“They’re coming.”
And in effect they came. Two by two--led by the mace-bearer in his
funebrial robes and black cocked hat, with the gilded emblem of
corporate pride upon his shoulder, swathed in crape, the civic fathers
slowly showed themselves to sight; pausing for one impressive moment on
the topmost step as if to fix the solemn significance of what they stood
for on the intent vision of the gaping crowd, before reducing their
statures by descent and conceding place of prominence to those behind.
First came the Mayor, with whom walked the ex-Mayor whose support was
deemed necessary to enable him to bear the burden of such public sorrow
and so many eyes. Behind them, in descending scale of dignity came the
aldermen and councillors, on whose heels in turn the salaried officials
trod, with a tail of delegates (some of whom bore wreaths) and those
burgesses previously mentioned, possessed of a prescriptive title to
refreshment at the Mansion House on all occasions of public sorrow.
These were augmented in the High Gate by a respectful contingent of
petty tradesmen (municipal contractors in esse and posse) among whom the
silk hat of solemn circumstances saw itself gradually superseded by the
less pretentious covering of felt; and by the lesser corporation
functionaries, such as gas inspectors, clerks, carters, road-men, the
market keeper on a wooden leg, sundry caretakers, and the Town Crier in
a tail coat with electro-plated buttons, a red and white striped
waistcoat and a top hat bound with silver braid. The procession, briefly
halted on the pavement and marshalled into order by the manipulation of
beckoning hands, put forth its feet at last. They were in motion. The
long anticipated funeral had begun. History, so recently suspended and
inanimate, awoke once more to consciousness and did her part. There were
children dragged by the hand or galloped on a jolting arm who would in
later days recall participation in this striking scene with pride. The
solemn body, elongated incredibly by the process of locomotion, crept
sinuously over the pavement. The muffled mace, swaying with portentous
rhythm above the sable hats and gleaming helmets as the procession took
the hill, was already half way up Hill Street before the Town Crier in
his tail coat and striped vest had settled on his length of stride, and
the proper leg to go with it. From the flagstones, trodden by so many
solemn feet, a slow and measured tramp resounded. To see all these
public dignitaries reduced to one common measure of mourning, adopting
the same pace, the same step, consciously or unconsciously borrowing the
same bodily movements from one another; looking up and looking down, was
a spectacle symbolic and profound. Here, animating one coherent whole,
of a shape so undulatory and elastic as to be almost reptilian, was the
very root and fruit and flower of Daneborough’s municipality. The sum
total of importance comprised in this creeping monster that fed on
paving-stones at the rate of two feet in every second, was incomputable.
Every department of the borough, every feature of the town’s vitality
had its representative here, in one or other of the oscillating segments
of which the procession was composed. Gas, water, drains, macadam,
markets and abattoirs--all marched imposingly incarnate to pay respect
to Alderman Bankett’s clay. So embodied and substantialized the elusive
spirit of bereavement was presented in a shape emphatic, and rendered
palpable to the meanest intelligence. Those among the thoughtless who
had never reflected rightly on the nobleness of an alderman, or
understood the magnitude of his functions, had small excuse for any
failure to realize these now.
Already a thick scum of the populace simmered round the railings of St.
Saviour’s, whose western gateway--thrown widely open--was strewn with
the rice that had been showered about the shoulders of an early morning
bride. Within the sepulchral twilight of the Church a preternatural
stillness reigned. Sunk in the pews, or kneeling on submerged hassocks,
were many figures--feminine for the most part--who seemed by their
attitudes of immobility to have been there for centuries. At intervals
the form of Prestwich floated up and down the aisles behind his extended
wand, engaged in the divided duty of allocating seats to stray
worshippers, and maintaining contact with the Canon--already robed and
waiting in the clerical vestry along with the Canon Vicar of St.
Gyles’s--and the outer world. Eight choristers (of whom Oswald formed
one), spaced out over the choir stalls to suggest sixteen, sat
motionless in their bleached surplices with their faces fixed upon the
Western Doors; already unbolted and in readiness to be flung open at the
first sign. Behind the depleted rows of choristers, displaying a maturer
and more spacious interest, sat as many men. The Rate Collector, kindled
already with anticipations of the seraphic fare to come, turned the look
of a connoisseur upon the organ each time it creaked under the strain of
its distended bellows. Already he had exhorted Mr. Rencil to surpass
himself and give the congregation something they could take away with
them; something they could look back upon and remember; something they
couldn’t get at home or hear in any other church throughout the kingdom.
“Something worthy of yourself, Sir. Something Sublime. Don’t be afraid
to let the Corporation have it.” Seated out of sight upon his oaken
bench, silently composing and recomposing his stops, the Organist’s
thoughtful glasses seemed imbued already with something of the solemnity
of the music he was about to play. Behind him the Deputy, following his
every movement with the veneration of the neophyte, pushed a frequent
head into the chancel and kept watch upon the Western Doors. In his
place of dark and solitary confinement the Blower, with forehead pressed
against the wooden casement of the organ, followed the fluctuations of
the plummet, and kept the organ’s lungs inflated. It breathed, this
stertorous beast of bronchial pipes and wooden articulations; breathed
hugely, like a great leviathan, ready to expel its breath through
sonorous diapason and wailing reed at the first behest of its master’s
fingers. They sank into the keys at last, on a hurried intimation from
the Deputy. The air, so long imprisoned in the heaving confines of its
leathern bellows, rolled out in solemn sound. The Alderman was coming.
He was here, this stern-faced preacher of the practical; this contemner
of the sentiments; this intolerator of all soft voices and sweet
sounds. He was here, enveloped in the music he had hated; transfigured
by it; received into the bosom of its vast and sheltering softness.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life.... No man cometh to the Father but
by Me.”
The phrases fell with dry cadence, trampled underfoot like dead leaves
by the heavy feet of the perspiring bearers, and lost in the surge of
other feet behind. At the steps of the main entrance, the great coffin
shewed itself to the crowd from its elevation like an ark of gleaming
gold. For a moment it shone forth with the uplifted splendour of
benediction beneath the slanting beams of the late November sun. Then it
passed into the inky shadow of the porch, that ate it foot by foot and
swallowed the final remnant of its lustre.
2
Upon the little Oswald this funeral of Alderman Bankett produced a
powerful impression. It was his first confrontation with the real
solemnity of life. His father’s death had fallen on him at an age when
life’s realities are merely dreams. Miserableness filled him; he wept
inconsolably; he kissed a marble countenance ice-cold and dreadfully
reminiscent of someone previously known and loved. On a sudden life
became incomprehensible like a page of print, elementary at first and
simple to read, that later loses itself in long and unintelligible
words. But with this last reality he had been formally connected. He had
been a sentient part of it; his co-operation had been sought; he had
contributed aid to Splendour.
From the first dread tolling of the late Alderman’s knell, to that
terrific moment when his coffin floated up the aisle as if borne upon
the bosom of an inken flood and wafted slowly onward by waves invisible,
he had occupied a world of solemn wonder and expectancy. It was a
world, perhaps, too grave for one so young and so susceptible, enjoying
none of those rude reactions within the reach of his fellow choristers,
who liquidated all their emotional liabilities on the spot, and ran up
no long credits; cashing reverences into levity, and changing golden
silence into the noisy coppers of sound at the first chance. Once his
mother’s doubts upon the wisdom of his appearance at such a solemn
gathering were overcome, she prepared her son for the event with as much
diligence as if he had been a candidate for the Bishop’s hands. Whilst
other choristers and youth in general shouted and ran, as if no Alderman
lay dead, Oswald kept his soul aloof from every deed and sound that
desecrated sorrow and threatened its state of grace. He took to church a
mind so piously subdued and blanched, so resolutely divested of every
bright happiness and tinted hope, that it constituted a corpse in
itself. The deceased Alderman had not more completely purged himself of
earthly taint than Oswald, who lent almost bloodless lips to mourn him,
filled with the belief that as much was demanded of his sadness as of
his voice, and that grief, if it be sung at all, required the devoutest
sadness to sing it.
“Think of your father, Oswald!” his mother had enjoined him in her last
commendatory kiss, and he thought thereon till his lip trembled. The
word Alderman, so unfamiliar to his ears and lips before, and so
remotely apprehended, drew now into the foreground of his mind,
acquiring such awful stature and significance as it came that other
words made way for it.
For him, Alderman Bankett was an entity compounded of bells, churches,
organs, dead marches, choirs, coffins, bark upon the roadway, chains,
maces, brass helmets, policemen--everything, in a word, that had been so
poignantly introduced to his emotion during these recent days, and had
served to give his very life a fresh and solemn substance, dividing it
and disintegrating it from the life so unsuspectingly and brightly lived
before.
And all this power, acting undiminished over such a gigantic field of
operations, derived itself from a homemade hand cart and a market stall.
Nay, if Elizabeth were to be believed (whose acquaintance we have yet to
make--and in all things touching earlier Daneborough, her word seemed
final) it derived itself from less than this. It derived itself from a
basket that had tramped the country roads and exchanged buttons and tape
against eggs and chickens, which later it hawked about the purlieus of
the market place; paying no stallage, but perambulating through the
crowd and nudging the elbows of bargain hunters.
A basket! All this power out of a basket. Riches, greatness, office,
honour. A new feeling took hold of Oswald in regard to baskets; a
feeling akin to veneration. Hitherto he had viewed baskets as dubious
associates, like choristers; things to be patiently endured for his dead
father’s sake and discarded at the first opportunity; things whose
inherent dreadfulness was only condoned by the punctilious method of
their carriage. But now it was as if the scales had fallen from his
eyes. He visioned baskets as exalted possibilities. What virtue once had
done, virtue again might do. He would be virtuous and rich, like this
defunct prototype; he would enter the Council. He would be an alderman;
all his father’s enemies should be confounded; a superb monument in
marble should rise ere long above his father’s grave; his mother and his
sister should be proud of him.
No wonder that this funeral touched his emotions so deeply, for it was,
in part, his own. Not Alderman Bankett but rather Alderman Holmroyd, the
best of sons begotten of the best of fathers, filled this awesome
coffin whose shape and slow approach shook tears from the beholders. He
was both what they buried and the glory surmounting burial. In the vivid
alliance of his emotions with all that moved them he was every thing his
eyes saw or susceptibility apprehended. Time past and time future
clasped their tenses together like stricken hands and became
overwhelmingly one in time present. These bells, slow beating, were for
him. These tears; these whispers; these solemn silences; these stirring
feet; these helmets, hats, dead march and mace. When his own time came
to die nothing must be changed in all that had happened or was happening
now. From the first portentous tolling of St. Gyles’s bell upon the
silence of a suspended choir practice, to the last terrifying rite, no
deviation from approved pattern must take place. Not a single ingredient
of present glory must be lacking.
Led by desire to dedicate this solemn day to commemorative sadness, Mrs.
Holmroyd had at noon dismissed her school until the morrow, several of
her scholars, indeed, having discoursed enthusiastically on the subject
of the “fune-ral,” and stating their intention to be present along with
parents and friends. The service at St. Saviour’s was timed for two
o’clock, and the hour had barely struck when Mrs. Holmroyd (filled with
a laudable anxiety not to disappoint her son, who had begged them to
await him outside the church) set forth upon her sacred errand
accompanied by her little daughter.
The great _cortège_ had already been absorbed into St. Saviour’s when
she and Beryl arrived. The string of empty mourning coaches solemnized
the roadway round two of the churchyard walls; a great crowd clung to
the railings, and scattered spectators traced desultory patterns about
the tombs. Among these Mrs. Holmroyd’s feelings could not suffer to
mingle, but on the southern side of the church, across the road (and
nearly opposite to the iron wicket where Oswald took his pensive stand
on practice nights) the pathway bounding the high wall and garden-doors
of the houses in St. Lawrence Square rose and dropped over a little
hill. This hill, scarped perpendicularly to the road on the Church side,
and faced with a stone wall whose parapet followed its abrupt contour,
though it afforded no great temptation to hardened sightseers who love
treading on each other’s toes, and breathing down each other’s necks,
and for whom a contested proximity furnishes half their joy, provided an
ideal place for a remote sorrow shunning earthly contact. Here on this
summit Mrs. Holmroyd and her daughter kept their vigil; not stationary,
(an attitude suggestive of mere sightseeing) but expressing justified
attendance by a slow pacing to and fro. The deep reverberations of the
organ reached them; they were stirred by the sound of sublimated
singings; the impressive emblem of mortality emerged at last, weaving
its slow way down the gravel paths in the soft sunlight behind the
intersecting branches of the stripped November trees. Mrs. Holmroyd
clasped her little daughter with an instinctive gesture of sorrow and
protection. The great procession drained itself away; the churchyard lay
at length behind the moving _cortège_, empty and desolate.
Beryl said, “Let us go ... into it,” and Mrs. Holmroyd’s own desires
subscribed, and they descended the little hill and passed through the
wicket and mingled with the placid, undemonstrative tombs. In the
sunlight these seemed to meditate, like blind men that see nothing but
their own introspections, on which they smile. But their rapt
contentment brought trouble to Mrs. Holmroyd too, as well as peace. She
thought of that other grave in distant Clothton, its very shape by this
time subsiding into the clay as if discouraged with its long and
fruitless effort of expectancy, in the way that sick hope--too
frequently bestirred in vain--sinks back on a despondent pillow. Every
time she dwelt among these memorials of the dead her heart upbraided
her. All the dead were mourned but hers. Cross and ledger, kerb and
headstone, marble and granite, offered themselves for her selection.
Always she was making choice; always resolving. And still despairing
love remained inactive. O! some memorial he must surely have....
Mr. Rencil, walking with a stranger and followed by the Deputy who bore
beneath one arm a load of bound organ music of the size and substance of
a paving stone, passed down the gravel drive to the main gate. He turned
on Mrs. Holmroyd his customary softened gaze through the blandness of
his broad glasses; raised his hat and (divining her errand) greeted her
by name.
“Oswald is coming, Mrs. Holmroyd,” he told her in the soft voice that
was the counterpart of his look. “He is only just helping to put some
books away for me. It will not take him a minute.” Here was no remark to
cause tears, and yet ... something in the organist’s recognition and the
gentle look and kindly voice made Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyelids burn. They
recalled other eyes, another voice; sweeter and happier days. And also,
perhaps, a little foolish pride was gratified in her. For Mr. Rencil,
albeit they had no formal acquaintance, and had exchanged no real words,
invited always her acknowledgment when they met, saluting her with a
courtesy that assured her she was still a lady. Again, strengthened with
emotive power, her thought for Oswald’s future was revived. Without
delay his musical education must begin in earnest. Every time she
encountered the gentle meditative gaze of the Organist of St. Saviour’s
the resolution struggled to be realized. The eyes of the organist, soft
though they were, seemed on occasions veiled with the enquiring mildness
of reproach; as if this hope of hers, escaping with her looks, were
known to both, and he asked her how long she meant her son should lack
this teaching so essential to his welfare. Not long, not long ... (she
told herself). For this dread burden, borne with so much circumstance
through the town to-day, had caused the very air to droop as though it
bore some solemn part of it. Death is a great instructor, that recalls
careless life to its forgotten duties. She would take profit from the
lesson taught, with God’s good help.
Meanwhile, awaiting Oswald, they had wandered to the south porch. Whilst
they looked the dull door opened, and who should emerge--pitting his
small body against its heavy hinges--but Oswald’s self, his face still
pale from its recent part in such solemnities. Above his slight and
fragile figure the deep profundity of the church, filled with a dusky,
oceanic green like deep sea-water, loomed for a moment beyond the opened
door, showing how vain and weak a thing is man. They exchanged greetings
of restrained joy, and Beryl’s eyes, fixed still upon the space occupied
so recently by the solemn vision of the nave, besought her mother that
they should enter. She did but lend a voice to the yearnings in her
mother’s heart, and subduing their looks and movements to the place they
entered, they passed into the twilight of the church, whose grave
features still retained like Oswald’s face traces of the recent ordeal
undergone. No other living figures tenanted the dim box pews, but from
afar--as if remotely reaching them from the invisible next world--a
sustained cantilation rose and fell, draped in its own echoes like robed
and floating angels, that was the voice of Prestwich in the clergy
vestry, descanting to the blower and the man-of-all-work on the subject
of vocabularies viewed in their regard to funeral orations. He deplored
that Canon Quexley was so ill-equipped in this department of his office,
and (expressing keen disappointment with his oratory on Sunday) wished
the congregation might have benefited by the discourse of such a divine
as Archdeacon Benefit, whose vocabulary (it transpired) accorded death
the support that such a theme demanded, and that critical listeners had
a right to expect. From a picture of Archdeacon Benefit, “who was a
Christian and a Gentleman as you don’t often meet in collusion with such
scholarship,” he turned contemptuously on Canon Quexley with the
scathing question: “What is he?”--the answer falling true to formula: “A
man of no vocabulary. You can cover all the words he uses with your
hand. And when I say Words, mark you, I mean Words. Words suited to a
man’s intellect and status; words that can be looked up to and respected
even by those that doesn’t understand them. Canon relies too much on
rank and personal appearance. Not but what I’m willing to concede he
looks transpontine in the pulpit, and he can give out hymns and parish
notices in a manner calculated to impress parties that haven’t heard him
preach, and doesn’t know what preaching should be if they have. If I had
to sum up Canon Quexley in a word I should.... What’s that? Is it
somebody in church?”
3
It was only the heavy latch of the south door that, escaping Oswald’s
fingers, too conscientious in their efforts to preserve solemnity, fell
resoundingly on the hasp as Mrs. Holmroyd and her children left the
church. In one of the endmost pews--not the pew in which she held her
sittings and took her place on Sunday--Mrs. Holmroyd had immersed
herself for prayer, whilst Oswald and his sister, abashed and silent,
turned sidelong eyes upon the bowed head, curious to know what form of
invocation issued from the hidden lips. Her prayer was brief, but
earnest; for she made the most of moments threatened with intrusion. As
hurriedly as she had knelt she rose at last and showed a face refreshed
and tranquil to her children; a face that sought to share with them the
spiritual sustenance just received. The verger, gownless and
de-glorified, interrupting for a space his peroration on the subject of
vocabularies, quitted the vestry and showed a scrutinizing nostril in
the chancel, that pierced the dimness of the nave as if it had been a
dilated eye. But the authors of the disturbance were already gone--as
was also when he returned: (after a rapid interchange of courtesies
between fluttering thumb and forefinger and receptive nose) his late
audience, which had decamped by way of the vestry door; a fact bearing
witness to the melancholy truth so constantly deplored by Prestwich that
vocabularies were no longer respected of the vulgar.
This day, with all its strange and powerful emotions, Oswald never
forgot. It seemed as if the whole wide world he walked in had been
transformed and sabbatized. Even the ordinary facts and things of life
wore unfamiliar Sunday clothes. A new air, that might have been imported
straight from Heaven for all it breathed of earth, replaced the old.
Yesterday it had smelled of warm humidity and dead leaves; to-day it
exhaled the beatific odour of faint spices; clinging with the soft
insistency of a shroud, that draped the whole world with sanctity,
veiling its earthliness from view and simplifying its contours. Sorrow,
sweetened and purified, seemed consecrate to high ends. The barriers of
mortality were broken; life and death seemed curiously and inseparably
one. This was no longer Daneborough they walked in, but some heavenly
city of the hereafter where anger had no place, and from all evil
thoughts they lived remote.
They passed into the broad Town Acres. A soft St. Martin’s breeze
upraised itself from time to time, like hands in benediction,
commending loves and blessing hopes. The burnless late November sun
gathered already the folds of the hazy mantle that shortly he would wrap
about his declining head, and, gilding the stubble, tinged with pale
gold the narrow path they trod. Three plough teams, biblical in their
solemnity, moved slowly over the surface of the brown soil, followed by
a cortege of restless crows, like this afternoon’s mourners, and flights
of distracted pewits that seemed to wring their very wings with woe as
they uttered their despairing plaint. In the distant furrows a blue mist
lay already: in attentuated wisps it floated immobile and nebulous above
the hollows of the soil, like disembodied thoughts. Drawn each to each
by the reflected loss of somebody their lives had never known, their
looks and voices vied in softness and compassion. Not once did Oswald
contradict his sister; not once did Beryl snatch the wilful final word.
Each feared to break that incredible perfection of behaviour which,
thanks to the propitious death of Alderman Bankett seemed now
unquestionably theirs. In this new and glorious perfection they lavished
on their mother a quiet but insistent love that made her feel how
blessed above all women she was in them. When, their saintly wanderings
over, they came back to their home in Spring Bank Gardens, Oswald and
Beryl strove to retain hold on the comfortable but evasive perfection by
every service proffered and relinquished. From its allotted drawer in
the kitchen dresser Oswald drew forth the white cloth with the devotion
of an acolyte and spread it reverently on the table in the front room as
if he draped an altar. The cups and saucers, piously deposited, seemed
metamorphosed into sacred vessels, that tinkled when the spoons touched
them, like sanctus bells. He stole on tip-toe with his chancel tread,
apprehensive lest by any lapse into the secular employment of his feet
he might break the protecting spell of sanctity encircling him. No one
could have divined with what uplifting goodness he was filled. It
surprised himself; abashed him, even. Never more, from this memorable
day, should he give way to sin. Upon this broad and level path of
goodness would he henceforth walk, as Alderman Bankett and his father
had walked before him. The whole secret of virtuous living was revealed.
How easy and how blessed was it to be good. Filled with this spirit he
folded his hands and closed his eyes, and had got as far as “For what we
are going ...” when Beryl, consumed with equal fervour to be good,
pulled his hands apart and intercepted the supplication with her eager
voice: “No, no. Let _me_, Oswald!--‘For what we are going to ’ceive may
the Law make us truly thankful....” The grace got no further on her lips
than that. The hands darkening her eyes and hiding from expectant piety
the sweet things on the table, came asunder on a sudden to allow a
glance of fearful apprehension to emerge.
“My purse!” she cried, looking wildly from Oswald to her mother, “Who
has it?”
4
Who had it?
Nobody had it, in effect. Nobody but herself to-day had seen it. This
precious receptacle of all her recent savings, including a farthing
dressed in tissue-paper and some coloured beads, must now be resting on
the pew-edge at St. Saviour’s, where she remembered to have confided it
to the admiration of the Almighty during her mother’s prayer. The loss,
reproaching an overtrustful piety, plunged her into tears. Her mother’s
tender “Never mind, darling!” pricked contrition deeper than the
sharpest of words. She thrust bereaved knuckles into either eye and
made patent preparations to be inconsolable.
Oswald, a grave spectator of this disturbing grief, felt his security on
a sudden threatened.
“ ... Oswald will run and fetch it for you, Beryl,” he heard the voice
of Fate, making usage of his mother’s lips, declare. He shot a hasty
look at his mother’s imperturbable sweet face, that not all the funerals
of the world could awe, and with a pendant head rose blindly from his
seat.
“ ... Not now, dear. After tea.”
After tea! Was his mother mad? Had the sorrow of this afternoon so
weighed upon her that she was grown oblivious of approaching nighttime
and the dark? Already the little tea-table drew more light from its own
white cloth than from the window, whose upper panes seemed to have
turned ashen with the reciprocation of his own fears. Even at this
moment the dying day offered but a dubious light for purse-hunters in a
dim church that had contained a coffin, twelve firemen, a mace with its
jaw tied up, and heaven knows how many sepulchral forms in crape. Now!
Now! He must go now this very minute. A hundred reasons urged it. It was
a race with the expiring lights of day. Fear, disguised as goodness,
professed for its weeping sister’s sake there was no moment to be lost.
If only his cowardice had had the courage of its convictions, to
proclaim itself always what it was, how easy life might be; divested of
every pretention that made it terrible. He said with a carelessness
almost jaunty, “I will not be long, mother.” His mother answered, “we
will wait for you, Oswald.” Beryl, suffused with sudden gratitude at the
thought of her recovered purse, flung impulsive arms around his neck.
She ran to fetch his cap, his gloves. Love dressed him like a warrior
for the fray; love opened the door for him; love--cruel that love ever
is--made his going easy; sped him on his deadly errand. He set off at a
step quicker than consideration for such a solemn day approved, with an
anxious reference to the light allotted from above.
Out of the pores of the autumnal earth a twilight haze began to creep;
the sky in the West was streaked with the last pink parallels of the
setting sun; the lamp-lighter hurried on his zig-zag course, bearing his
ghostly glimmer at the end of his long pole, and touching one by one the
municipal gas-jets into life. The day-light was ebbing fast. It was the
solemn hour when things put off their daytime dress and draw the dusk
about them; peeping abroad with sinister nocturnal eyes, in which all
gleam of friendliness is quenched; when thoughts creep out of their
subliminal hiding places, like the mist, and fold the soberest fancy in
a grey and ghostly garb. The ghost of Alderman Bankett, ridiculing
coffins and the masonry of cemented vaults, arose--no longer vested with
inestimable virtues, but making preliminary trial of the shape that all
dead people, be they good or bad, seem to turn to indifferently in the
dark. Even the cries of the Friday night choristers came back to earth,
with a vitality increased: hooting owl-like in Oswald’s ear, and
producing dreadful death-rattles by means of forefingers agitated
violently in open mouths: “Ooooooo! Hey-up! Yon’s alderman, sither.
Alderman Bankett’s after ye.”
By this time his urgent footsteps brought him to the gate through which
so many gruesome forms had come and gone this afternoon. The sky was
closing down upon him; the church itself, enfolded gloomily in its own
buttresses, showed as remote and unencouraging as Prestwich. What a
church! Why were churches built so big? Why did they set them so far
from human companionship and aid? He touched the gate with a trepid
hand, and a surge of thankfulness arose in him. Providence had harkened
to his prayer. Jubilate deo, the gate was locked.
In the revulsion of delivery, fear grew reckless. What better
justification indeed, did the most self-respecting fear require than
this? Ex uno disce omnes should have been its maxim. But filled with
faith in Providence and meretricious longing to prove its mettle in a
campaign where glory could be had so cheap, fear must needs run round to
the side wicket, sunk in the southern wall, beneath the darkling shadow
of the tree, and touch that too. Whereat the wicket moved on its hinges
and made way for him like a trustful child.
To say that he was startled would be, in the verger’s parlance, a
degradation of vocabulary. As well might the Corporation have gone in
state to Alderman Bankett’s funeral preceded by a brass meat-jack tied
up in a pudding cloth as attempt to publish Oswald’s feelings by so
inadequate a word. Before the dread discovery he stood transfixed and
appalled. What signified this open gate, on whose integrity his
confidence had so relied? No sign of Prestwich and his flickering taper
lent assurance to any window. What further act did conscience now demand
of him? In silence he stood and wrestled with this awful problem.
The sky above soaked up darkness as if it were ink in blotting paper.
Not a soul passed by. The church emitted no human sound.
He looked intently through the narrow avenue of tombs through which the
pathway struck, knowing all his future hung upon what happened now. And
suddenly, gathering the very panic of his fears about him for
protection, he burst through the gate and sped through the astonished
tombs. With an eye that knew nor right nor left he flung himself against
the latch of the south door, that yielded as the treacherous wicket had
done. In turn the red baize door ceded to his fury. Fear, like a drift
of storm-blown sky-wrack, blew into the darkness of the church.
Expostulatory groans burst out on all sides of him. Disturbed corpses,
as if the church had been some wrecked hull sunk fathoms deep below the
surface of the sea, rose up out of every pew and floated in a ghastly
company to the roof. Fear could afford to shew no piety in such a place.
It pounced into the darkening pew that prayer and love had occupied this
afternoon. Something softer than a prayerbook was dislodged, that fell
as with a startled gasp upon the floor. It was the purse. But terror had
no time for exultation. His groping fingers closed on it; an unseen,
bony hand, hard as the pew ledge itself, rapped a painful blow upon his
head in rising. The baize door tried to bar his passage; he struck it
with both fists. He spurned the southern door, leaving it to shut itself
as best it could. The tombstones, gathered ready for his egress like
assassins, closed their ranks upon him as he ran, with determination to
hem him in. But he outstripped the last of them by a hair’s breadth, and
dashed into safety through the wicket (that he had the presence of mind
to close against them) panting like a spent hare.
He had done what never in his sober mind he thought it possible himself
could do. It was a deed incredible, heroic. Through the breathless
subsidence of his terrors rose a mighty exultation. The best of fathers
would be proud of him, above.
As he turned from the gates his foot struck an object on the ground that
intuition told him was no pebble. Although he lacked sight of it, some
subtle sense--doubtless heightened by the recent enterprise in which all
his senses had been developed to such a transcendent pitch of
susceptibility--divined that something rolled away upon its edge, and
subsided with the minute ring of metal. What if it should chance to be
a coin! A penny; a sixpenny piece; a shilling. He stooped, tracing with
sharpened eye the path his intuition said the moving object had taken,
and his fingers--making eager furrows in the gravel, discovered it at
length. Circular it was, as intuition had suspected; of about the
circumference of a florin. Metallic was it too, for it reflected the
last beams of daylight like an oblique bull’s eye. He picked it up for
scrutiny, stirred by strange feelings of elation and hope. This was no
common coin. He saw now precisely what it was. It was the substantial
headpiece of a solitaire--just such a solitaire, in fact, as clipped his
own small cuff; but more than twice the size, and richly chased. An
article, perhaps, of priceless value. He could not estimate its worth.
Pounds, possibly. All the same he wished it had been a shilling. There
was something definite about a shilling; something final and conclusive,
on which one’s judgment could repose. Besides, such treasure-trove as
this pertained to somebody, whereas coins seemed universal. He looked
about him carefully on every hand to make sure his conduct had attracted
the attention of no spectator. There was none in sight. For all he had
been brought up to the pious maxim that finding is not keeping, he
experienced the proud thrill of satisfaction that accompanies a
discovery unshared, and thrust the solitaire into the deepest corner of
the purse. Now, indeed, his wondrous work was done, and with this
two-fold triumph could he hasten home.