It was from the next day, Sunday, that he dated it--what happened. It
followed as a sequel to the events of Sunday.
For Ransome was convinced that it never could have happened if he had
not gone with Wauchope on Sunday evening to that Service for Men. He
used to say that if you traced it back far enough, poor old Wauchope was
at the bottom of it. It was poor old Wauchope who had "rushed" him for
the Service (in calling him poor old Wauchope, he recognized him as the
unknowing and unwilling thing of Destiny). Thus it had its root and rise
in the extraordinary state of Wauchope's soul.
Wauchope had realized that he _had_ a soul, and was beginning to take an
interest in it. That, of course, was not the way he put it when he
approached Ransome on Saturday night after the Sports Dinner at the
"Golden Eagle." All he said was that he was "in for it." Been let in by
a curate johnnie who'd rushed him for a Service for Men to-morrow night
at Clapham. Wauchope wasn't going because he wanted to, but because the
curate was such a decent chap he didn't like to disappoint him. He ran a
Young Men's Club in St. Matthias's, Clapham, and Wauchope helped him by
looking in now and then for a knock-up with the gloves. The curate was
handy with the gloves himself. A bit cumbrous, but fancied himself as a
featherweight, in a skipping, dodging, dance-all-round-you,
land-you-one-presently sort of style. Well, the curate johnnie had been
handing round printed invitations for this Service. "All Welcome," don't
you know? "Come, and bring a Friend." Wauchope had promised, Honor
Bright, he'd come and bring a friend. And Ransome, in a weak moment, had
consented to be brought.
The Service would be at eight, and would last, say, till nine. Half past
nine was the very earliest hour he could fix for his appointment with
Miss Usher.
For he had seen her. She had risen up before him, to his amazement, on
that Sunday evening, as he turned out of his own door on his way to
supper with Wauchope at Clapham. He had walked with her for five
minutes, wheeling his bicycle in the gutter, while they settled how and
where they were to meet.
She was living in Wandsworth, lodging in St. Ann's Terrace, near to
Winny Dymond, so that Winny could take care of her. She had got another
situation at Starker's, in the millinery department.
He proposed that he should meet her at closing-time to-morrow, and she
smiled at him and said she didn't mind; but Winny would be there (he had
forgotten Winny). Then he suggested next Saturday afternoon or Sunday
about three; and she said she really couldn't say. Saturday and Sunday
were such a long way off, and things might be different now that she was
in the millinery. And she smiled again, and in such a manner that he had
a vision, a horrible vision, of other fellows crowding round her on
Saturdays and Sundays. He more than suspected that this was
"cock-a-tree"; but it made him desperate, so that he said, "Well--how
about to-night?"
Well--_to-night_ she'd promised Winny she'd be good and go to church.
If he had been madder, if he'd been more set on it, he would have gone
off with her that minute; he would have persuaded her to give up church;
he himself would have broken his promise to old Wauchope. But he did
none of these things, and his abstention was the sign and measure of his
coolness, of his sanity. He only said, as any cool and sane young man
might say: How about after church? And if he called when he got back
from Clapham? He wouldn't be a minute later than half past nine.
And Violet had said: Oh, well--she didn't know about calling. You see,
she only had one room. And he had reckoned with that difficulty; for
Winny Dymond only had one room which she shared with Maudie. By calling,
he'd meant, of course, on the doorstep, to take her for a walk.
But Violet, for some reason, didn't care about the doorstep. She'd
rather, if he didn't mind, that he met her somewhere out of doors.
And so they had been drawn into an assignation at the old elm tree by
the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain.
Thus, if it had done nothing else to him, the Service for Men could be
held responsible for throwing that meeting with Violet much too late.
Still, he had no misgivings. It was June; and in June nine o'clock was
still daytime. And when he went to the Service he hadn't any idea what
it would do to him.
No more, of course, had poor old Wauchope. Wauchope was grateful and
apologetic; before they got there he said he didn't know what he might
be letting Ransome in for. The curate johnnie was bossing the Service,
but he understood they'd engaged another joker for the Address. What he,
Wauchope, funked, personally, more than anything was the Address. And
Ransome, generously, declared that whatever it was like, he'd stick it.
He'd stand by Wauchope to the finish, like a man.
* * * * *
They left their bicycles in Wauchope's rooms, and walked the few hundred
yards to St. Matthias's Mission Church.
St. Matthias's Mission Church was a brand-new yellow-brick building in
the latest Gothic, with a red-tiled roof, where a shrill little bell
swung tinkling under the arch in the high west gable.
Inside, cream distempered walls with brown stencilings; in the roof,
bare beams of pitch pine, stained and varnished; north and south, clear
glass windows shedding a greenish light; one brilliant stained-glass
window above the altar at the east end.
Up and down the aisles between the open pews of pitch pine went the
workers of the Mission, marshaling the men into their seats. By the west
door, Wauchope's friend, the cumbrous curate, who fancied himself as a
featherweight, stood smiling and shaking hands with each man as he came,
and thanking him for coming, thus carrying out the idea that it was an
entertainment. He had his largest smile, his closest grip for Wauchope
and for Ransome, for they were men after his own heart. Ransome observed
the curate critically, and without committing himself irretrievably to
an opinion, he owned that he looked fit enough. There was not about him
any sign that you could see of flabbiness or weediness. He was evidently
a decent johnnie, and for all that happened afterward Ransome forbore to
hold him personally responsible.
The service, conducted by the curate, was extremely brief. Everything
was left out that could be left, to make room for hymns wherever it was
possible to place a hymn. The Psalms were chanted, and the curate
intoned the Prayers in a voice that was not his natural voice, but
something far more poignant and impressive.
There were no boys in the choir, and the singing, that lacked their
purifying and clarifying treble, had a strange effect, somber yet
disturbing. It acted on Ranny like an incantation.
Of course, if he had known what it was going to do to him, he would have
kept away.
For though there was nothing in his flesh and blood and muscle that
suggested an inebriate father, yet in his profounder and obscurer being
he was Fulleymore Ransome's son. The secret instability that made
Fulleymore Ransome drink had had its effect on Ranny's nervous system.
His nerves, though he was not aware of it, were finely woven and highly
strung. He had a tendency to be carried away and to be excited, exalted,
and upset. Since Saturday afternoon Ranny had remained more or less in a
state of tension induced by the hurdle race, by the shock of seeing
Violet Usher, and by the dinner at the "Golden Eagle." And, coming
straight from Violet, he had entered St. Matthias's Mission Church keyed
up to his highest pitch. So that the Service for Men which subdued
Wauchope and made him humble and ashamed and sent him away trying to be
a better man, that very same Service worked Ranny up to a point when
anything became possible to him.
First of all, then, the intoning and the chanting acted on him exactly
like an incantation. Ranny's will, the spiritual part of him, was lulled
to sleep by the rhythmic voices, and as his sense of decency had no
reason whatever to expect an outrage, it was also off its guard,
quiescent, passive to the charm. The rest of Ranny was exposed,
piteously, to the rhythm that swelled, that accentuated, accelerated the
vibration of his inner tumult.
Then the obvious safety-valve was closed to him. A sense of strangeness
and of sudden shyness prevented him from joining as he should have
joined in the Service. Ranny could not take it out all at once in
singing. That silence and passivity of his left him open at every pore
to the invasion of the powers of sound. These young, intensely vibrant
bass and tenor voices sang all round him, they sang at him and into him
and through him. There was a young man close behind him with a tenor
voice that pierced him like a pain. There was Wauchope at his right ear
thundering in a tremendous barytone.
First of all it was a trumpet call that shook him.
/P
"Sold-ier-ers o-of Christ! a-arise,
And put your armor on,"
P/
sang Wauchope. The sound of that singing made Ransome feel noble; and
there is nothing more insidiously destructive than feeling noble.
And then, later on, it was a strange and a more poignant cry that melted
him, so that his very soul dissolved in tenderness and yearning.
/P
"Jesu, Lover o-of my soul,"
P/
sang the young man with the tenor.
/P
"Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the gathering wa-ters roll.
While the tempest sti-ill is high."
P/
(Ranny felt them about him, the waters and the tempest.)
/P
"Other refuge ha-ave I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave--ah! leave me no-ot alone,
Still support and co-omfort me."
P/
And as the infinite pathos and pleading of the tenor voice played on
him, Ranny sank, lost and shelterless and alone, till at the word "Life"
he rose again and exulted, he rose above himself, even to the point of
singing.
/P
"Thou of Life the fountain art,
Freely let me take of Thee;
Spring Thou up with-in my heart;"
P/
sang Ranny.
/P
"Rise to all eternity."
P/
There was something about that hymn, and his own sudden crying out in
it, that made him peculiarly susceptible to the influences of the
Address. When the preacher rose in the pulpit, when he looked about him
with ardent and earnest eyes in a face ravaged by emotion, when his wide
and somewhat loose and mobile lips gave out the text, Ranny had an
obscure foreknowledge of what would happen to him.
For he was not altogether virgin to the experience he was undergoing. It
belonged to certain moods of his childhood and his adolescence when more
than once, in Wandsworth Parish Church, he had been stirred mysteriously
by the tender music of the Evening Service, and by the singing of
certain hymns. There were layers upon layers of emotion sunk beyond
memory in Ranny's soul. So that what happened to him now had the
profound and vehement, though secret, force of a revival. The submerged
feelings rose in him; they were swollen, intensified, dominated beyond
recognition by the virile and unspiritual passion that leaped up and ran
together with them and made them one. It gave them an obscure but superb
sanction and significance.
For that incantation not only called up the past; with a still greater
magic and mystery it evoked the future. It was a prophecy, a premonition
of the things to be. It cried upon the secret, unseen powers of life. It
brought down destiny.
"'Know ye not that your bodies,'" said the preacher--and he leaned out
and looked to the young men on the right--"'your bodies'"--and he looked
to the young men on the left--"'are the temples, of the Holy
Ghost'"--and he looked straightforward and paused as if he saw invisible
things.
He may have drawn a bow at a venture, but he seemed to have singled out
Ranny from among all those young men. He leaned over his pulpit, and
fixed his kindled and penetrating eyes on Ranny. He adjured Ranny to
remember that Sin which he had never committed; he implored him to
recall the shame which he had never felt, and at the same time to purge
himself of that unholy memory, and put away from him the sensual
thoughts that had never occurred to him and the abominable intentions
that he had never had.
Then, with a subtle and plastic inflection of his voice, like the poise
of wings descending, he dropped from that almost inspired height of
emotion, and became shrewd and practical, thoroughly informed and
competent, a physician with a flair for the secret of disease, a surgeon
of the Soul, relentless in his handling of the knife, a man of the world
who spoke to them of what he knew, in all sincerity, as man to man. And
then he soared again, flapping his great wings that fanned emotion to a
flame.
And through it all the young curate who had brought them there sat
folded more and more within his surplice, and became more and more red
as to his face, more and more dubious as to his eyes. He was like some
young captain, wise though intrepid, who sees his brave battalions
routed through the false move of his general.
The magic worked. A man behind Ransome was heard breathing heavily. The
gentle drowsiness habitually expressed by Wauchope's broad and somewhat
flattened features was intensified to stupefaction. His head had sunk
slightly forward, but he looked up, lowering at the preacher with his
little innocent eyes, half sullen, half afraid.
Wauchope was merely uncomfortable. He suffered on the surface. But Ranny
was disturbed profoundly, shaken, excited, and most curiously uplifted.
He and Wauchope compared notes afterward on the preacher, whom they
called "that imported josser." They thought he rather fancied himself at
that particular job, and supposed that he was some sort of a "pro" who
had spoiled his "form" by overdoing it, and had lost the confidence of
his backers. They agreed that if Wauchope's friend the curate had given
them a straight talk it would have been much straighter. As it was,
nothing could have been more devious, more mysterious and serpentine
than the discourse that turned and wound and wormed its way into the
last obscurities and secrecies of Ranny's being.
In the Mission Church of St. Matthias's Ranny underwent illumination. It
was as if all that was dark and passionate in him had been interpreted
for him by the preacher. Interpreted, it became in some perverse way
justified. Over and above that innermost sanction and recognition it had
the seal outside it of men's acknowledgment, it took its place among the
existent, the normal, the expected. Ranny was not alone in his passion
and confusion. He was companioned, here and now, in the great
enlightenment.
But even Ranny could not have foretold the full extent of his reaction
to that sinuous and evocative Address.
Meanwhile, so carried away was Ranny that he joined Wauchope in a
furious singing of the final hymn, "Onward, Christian so-o-oldier-ers!"
He had felt noble; he had felt tender; now he was triumphant.