“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.