WE had two, if not three, celebrities in our village. The Rector is
dead; the Clerk is dead; the Professor still lives. But, independently
of this claim to our respect, let us give precedence to the Church.
Less than fifty years ago the services in a parish not ten miles from one
of our well-known watering places were done—or left undone—by surely the
queerest cleric of his time.
A grand old man he was in person—tall, and venerable as Bede himself,
with the most benevolent of faces and the most silver of silver hair.
Fit to be an archbishop, so far as appearances went, but most unfit to
have the charge of the hundred souls—there were no more of them—committed
to his trust.
To these he ministered, or (as I have said) failed to minister, on Sunday
mornings; for often as not the services, stipulated for at the price of
£75 per annum, were left unperformed on the shallowest of pretexts. It
might be the weather; it might be that he was indisposed; often, I fear,
it was from sheer disinclination.
To the hamlet that clustered close round the church it was a matter of
comparative indifference. They never believed by anticipation in the
service till the bell was actually sounding; and his henchman (clerk,
sexton, choirmaster and gravedigger in one) had strict orders to withhold
this summons till the Rector himself was actually in view. But to our
party, who lived two miles away, the question of service or no service
was a serious one. It meant hesitation in starting, and reluctance to
risk the chance—provocation, too, even to my long-suffering father, when
he found the church door barred, and a south-wester brewing, in the teeth
of which we had to struggle home over a barren down, unsupported by the
nutriment, mental and moral, on which we had calculated. But the
service, when it did take place, was a queerer experience by far than the
service foregone. The orchestra would have been the despair of
Nebuchadnezzar. It consisted of a single flageolet, blown by the wheezy
old sexton—one Joseph Edwards by name. We did not even boast of a
serpent—instrument immortalised by Mr. Hardy for its volume of tone in
supplementing deficiencies. Now the flageolet is a pet aversion of mine,
and I can forgive Nebuchadnezzar many of his iniquities for having (so
far as we know) excluded it from his band. Indeed, musicians themselves
would seem to be ashamed of it, for they have re-christened it, I am
told, by a humbler name. But I was careful not to betray my feelings to
my friend Joseph, and listened patiently while he enlarged on the
capabilities and melodiousness of his pet instrument. “Not but what I’m
getting a bit wheezy (he’d often say to me), and can’t make the
flourishes as onst I could. But ’tis may be better as it is. They
quieter tunes are belike more godly. Anyhow the choir—poor souls—got
right puzzled among my turns and quavers, coming in here, there and no
how at the finish.”
But, praise it as he might, the flageolet is the worst instrument
possible to constitute an orchestra; especially when played as Joseph
played it. It gave out a series of squeaks and
counter-squeaks—punctuated and accentuated by his wheezes rather than by
the requirements of the tune. Indeed, a boy learning the bugle, or a
Punch and Judy panpipe, would have discoursed more decorous music. To me
the panpipe and the flageolet seem nearly akin; only the flageolet is the
more powerful instrument of the two, and Punch is more exacting than we
were in the choice of an executant.
Once, as a special favour, I was invited by Joseph to attend a choir
practice. It was before his hand or, I should say, his breath had lost
its cunning; and it took place on this wise. An hour before service
(which on this occasion was actually realised) Joseph took his stand in
the reading desk, flageolet in hand, while a group of apple-cheeked
cottagers—fishermen mainly, and plough-boys—grouped themselves in my
father’s pew below. In one point at any rate Joseph had anticipated the
ritual of later days; he repudiated all women from his choir. “’Taint no
place for ’em,” he’d say; “I wonder what ’postle Paul ’d think, if he
could ha’ heard they two women at S. Matthew’s screechin’ out ‘O ’twas a
joyful sound to hear’—and none of us, let alone the choir, privileged to
put in a joyful sound along wi ’em. If women baint allowed to preach in
Church, stands to reason that they baint allowed to sing.”
“Now boys, turn to ‘Aurelia,’ and go for to remember that we sing the
whole on’t right through this time. Last time as ever we did it some on
you took to skipping and one sang one verse and t’other the next, whereby
I had to blow myself nigh faint to hide your discordance. And mind ye
too, sing ’en slow, not as if you wanted to get shot on’t.”
All went well at the first rehearsal, for Joseph played the air
distinctly and without disturbing flourishes—only with an intolerable
drawl, mindful in all probability of “passon’s” injunctions; of which
more anon.
“Well sung,” says he; “you be a good choir when you be so minded; and
well instructed, too, though I says it as didn’t ought to. Now then,
we’ll see what ye can do when I puts in the flourishes.”
This was a change for the worse, and what had been a melancholy dirge
became a haphazard scramble for notes, each boy seizing on the one that
he could detect among the enveloping flourishes, regardless whether it
was the same note that had found favour with his neighbour. In the end
the hymn became a sacrilegious fugue, devoid of time, harmony or
sequence. Yet Joseph was never disquieted at the result. On the
contrary, he regarded it as a tribute to his skill, addressing his choir
at the finish as a general might address his discomfited troops: “You’ve
done your best, and none of us can’t do no more. Better luck at
church-time, and this I do say, that ’tis few players can overlay a
melody as I can wi’ flourishes and expect them as sings it to pick out
the tune.”
But to return to our Rector. The fun began (I write, remember, as a boy
of ten) with the First Lesson. When the time for it approached, great
preparations were seen to be in progress. Our benevolent Archbishop
retired into the recesses of the reading desk (a high, square pew,
scarcely to be differentiated from our own) and disposed his lunch in
orderly array upon the sill overhanging my father’s head. And, to give
time for its consumption, a boy was summoned from the
congregation—usually it was his own son, a curly-pated lad of thirteen—to
discourse the Lesson. Manfully he grappled with the difficulties and
hard names of the Old Testament—sticking and halting at nothing, and
making a record of false quantities and mispronunciations that I have
never heard beaten during a twenty years’ experience of the average
undergraduate. Meanwhile his father lunched peacefully, careless what
havoc he made with the Kings of Israel and Judah. But woe betide the boy
if ever he tried to skip a name. A guttural rebuke issued from the
depths of the reading desk: “None of that, Jack; go back, my lad, and try
it again.”
But his greatest delight of all was to hear Jack struggling with the
genealogy in St. Luke. A series of chuckles issued from the corner where
the old man lay ensconced, that gathered in volume with every fresh fall;
and when the boy, hot and discomfited, retired from the fray, there was a
pause in the proceedings till the old man had recovered himself
sufficiently to resume his functions. His luncheon meanwhile had been
progressing steadily, not without the gurgling sound of something
comforting to facilitate digestion. It puzzled me for years to discover
the _raison d’ être_ of this extraordinary meal, knowing as I did that an
hour later he would be dining with one of his cottagers, after careful
preliminary enquiry as to which house could offer the most attractive
fare. Only quite lately, long after the idea of luncheon had been
stereotyped upon my brain, I found out that the so-called luncheon was,
after all, no luncheon at all, but only a retarded breakfast. Our Rector
being a late riser, and having a five-mile walk before him, could find no
opportunity of taking it in comfort till he had reached the haven of the
parish reading desk.
A cigar was the indispensable accompaniment of the second Lesson, during
which period its fumes could be seen ascending like “curling incense” to
the blackened rafters of the roof. Indeed, the only thing that ever
really shattered my father’s equanimity was the sight of its reeking end,
projected over his head from the sill of the reading desk, where the
Rector had reluctantly placed it while he applied himself to the
requirements of the “Benedictus.”
When the flageolet sounded the key note of the first hymn, the Rector
regarded it as the signal of a temporary relaxation. He was for a time
off duty, and the cigar was again in requisition. But in fine and balmy
weather, he found the atmosphere of the church too close for its
enjoyment. It “gathered sweetness from the open air.” So, attired in
surplice, stole and bands, our Rector strolled out into the
churchyard—giving us pleasant little vista-views of his enjoyment as he
passed and re-passed the windows of the aisles. That it might be enjoyed
in perfection and unto the end, the hymns selected were inordinately
long. But, if fate was against him, and the wind light, and the cigar
drew slowly, he had no false shame in appearing on the chancel steps to
announce with all the dignity of a formal notice that the last two verses
of the hymn would be repeated. After which he disappeared into the
churchyard again.
The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest. It
had an infinity of anticipation. No one knew what was coming—least of
all the Rector himself. We felt stimulated by the chance of any and
every possibility. A clergyman of the strictest sect of the
Evangelicals, he always preached in a surplice. (It was in the days,
remember, when the Geneva gown was the badge of that school, and the sign
of a high church cleric was barely appearing above the horizon).
But I sadly fear that our Rector was influenced by no question of
principle or non-principle; I cannot, I think, be wronging him if I infer
that his preference for the surplice was due to sheer indifference or
indolence.
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._