And yet within a couple of months the last rumble of the threatened
disturbance had passed away.
This is how the _status quo ante bellum_ was restored:
The offending Canon was in the habit of confiding in his supporters his
feeling of sorrow that none of his clerical brethren had the manliness
to follow his example and read the Lessons as they should be read:
he had quite believed, he said, that in a short time the slovenly,
monotonous reader would have ceased to appear at the lectern; he was
greatly disappointed.
But one Sunday an elderly Prebendary astonished every one by “putting
on” two separate and distinct voices in reading the First Lesson. It was
the chapter in which Moses pleads for the Children of Israel when their
destruction is threatened by the Almighty. Now it will be plain to any
one that to treat this duologue in an elocutionary style requires a
delicacy of touch of the rarest sort; but unhappily the reader seemed
to have the idea that all that was necessary to deal with the most
important passages effectively was to deliver them in two voices,
and this scheme he adopted. The one voice was that of a good-natured
gentleman taking the part of naughty schoolboys who had been caught
robbing the orchard of an irascible old farmer; the second voice was
that of the irascible old farmer who had cornered them and had sent one
of his staff for a dog whip.
The effect was startling at first. It seemed as if the clergyman had
seen Irving in _The Lyons Mail'_ and thought he could not improve
greatly upon the method of the actor in the dual rôle--speaking in the
mild accents of the amiable Lesurges on the one hand and in the gruff
staccato of Dubose on the other. At first this touch of realism was
startling, but as it went on it became queer, then funny, and at last it
had the element that made its emphatic appeal to most hearers, that of
burlesque. Some of the congregation were shocked: they had no idea that
“God spake these words and said” in the tone of a testy old gentleman.
Others were frankly amused and showed it without reticence; and the
entertainment closed with the giggling of choir-boys.
The Second Lesson was read by Canon Mowbray in a very subdued way.
Contrary to the expectation of a good many people, he made no attempt
to match himself in realistic effects against the Prebendary; and when
during the week remarks were made in his hearing respecting that member
of the Chapter and his elocution, he only shook his head sadly. The
other members of the Chapter could do no more. When an elderly clergyman
has made a fool of himself within the precincts of his church people can
only shake their heads.
But the next Sunday the congregation who crowded the Minster at the
afternoon service shook not only their heads but their bodies also in
their decorous but wholly ineffectual attempts to smother their
laughter while the Prebendary read a chapter in the Book of Ruth which
necessitated, he thought, full orchestral treatment. He clearly saw
the parts for a basso, a tenor, a soprano, and a contralto, and he set
himself about doing all four by subtle modulations of his voice. Now,
people do not as a rule mind a middle-aged parson's putting on a gruff
voice when reading what a man said, or going up an octave or so when
assuming the dialogue of a milder-mannered man; but when he puts on
a falsetto, and a very high falsetto, when he essays to reproduce the
words of a woman, and occasionally breaks in an attempt to lay the
emphasis on the right words, the most decorous of folk will either laugh
or weep--and the great majority of the worshippers in the old Minster
this day did the former. Quite a number hurried from the Sacred
Fane with their handkerchiefs held close to their mouths. But once
outside----
That was how the scandal which threatened to make Broadminster Chapter
a house divided against itself was dispersed. It was obvious that the
Minster was too antique a place to be made the scene of so great an
innovation as Canon Mowbray had attempted to introduce, and he at
once fell back into the recognised monotone, with a suspicion of the
sing-song rising and falling from sentence to sentence in his reading of
the Lessons, and the Prebendary once more followed his example; and so
the plague--or worse--was stayed.
But the general impression that prevailed throughout Broadminster
when the whole question of the innovation was discussed was that
that middle-aged Prebendary had not gone very far in making a fool of
himself. They had heard of a potent form of argument technically known
as _reductio ad absurdum_, but they had never before had so signal an
instance of its successful operation.