LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS
In 1873 my father was appointed Chancellor of Lincoln, and the move
there was made in the summer of that year, during July and August. We
four younger children, Nellie, Maggie, myself and Hugh went with Beth to
stay with my grandmother at Rugby while it was in progress. That visit
was memorable for several reasons: in the first place I celebrated a
birthday there, and great-Aunt Henrietta had no idea that I was long
past fairies, for on the morning of that day she met me in the hall, and
said she would go out to see if there were any fairies about, for she
fancied she had heard them singing. Accordingly she went out of the
front door, closing it after her, and leaving me in the hall. Sure
enough from the other side of the door there instantly came a crooning
kind of noise, which I knew was Aunt Henrietta singing, and there was a
rattle in the letter-box in the door of something dropped into it. Aunt
Henrietta then returned in considerable excitement, and asked me if I
hadn’t heard the fairies singing, and of course I said I had. One had
come right on to the doorstep, she continued, while she stood there, and
had dropped something for me into the letter-box. And there was a velvet
purse with a brass clasp, and inside five shillings. This was an
opulence hitherto undreamed of. Aunt Henrietta was remarkable in other
ways besides generosity: she wore a curious cap with pink blobs on it,
and when asked how they were made instantly replied that they were made
by coral insects underneath the sea. It was also said of her that she
went to church one Sunday with a friend, and found they had only one
prayer book, and that with small print, between them. They were both
short-sighted and they each pulled so lustily on the prayer book in
order to see better, that it came in half about the middle of the
Psalms.
One day there came a moment which still ranks in my mind as an
experience of transcendent happiness. It had been a delicious day
already, for not only had my mother arrived, but the ceiling of the
dining-room was being white-washed, and we had our meals in my
grandmother’s sitting-room, which gave something of the thrill of a
picnic. That evening we were playing in the garden when Beth came out to
tell us it was time to go to bed. She took me along the path, and there
close to an open window my mother and grandmother were having dinner. We
stopped a moment, and I asked if I might not have ten minutes more in
the garden. That was granted, and, as if that was not enough, my
grandmother gave me three grapes from a bunch on the table. As I ate
them a breeze brought across me the warm scent of a lilac bush, and the
combination of these things made me touch a new apex of happiness.
Something, the joy of the level sunlight, of the three grapes, of the
lilac scent, of having ten minutes more to play in, rushed
simultaneously over me, and at that moment some new consciousness of the
world and its exquisiteness was unsealed in me. And I doubt if I have
ever been so happy since, or if anything, owing to that moment, will
ever smell so sweet to me as lilac.
Whatever that unsealing was, the wax was broken for ever, and from then
a more vivid perception was mine. According to Wordsworth I ought, just
about then, to have ceased trailing my clouds of glory, instead of which
they trailed in far more radiant profusion. The arrival at Lincoln still
wonderfully etched in my memory was an adventure of the finest kind, and
the exploration of the new land teemed with unique discoveries. The fact
that the house dated from the fourteenth century naturally mattered not
at all: its joy lay in its present suitability to the diversions of
children. There was a winding stone staircase, opening from a
nail-studded door in the hall with pentagrams carved on the steps to
keep off evil spirits: there was a day nursery made of two bedrooms
thrown into one; there was a suite of amazing attics, steeped in
twilight, with rafters close above the head, and loose boards underfoot.
Here in dark corners lay water-cisterns which gurgled unexpectedly in
the dusk with mirthless goblin chuckles; cobwebs hung in corners and
mice scuttled. Here too was a bare tremendous apartment also under the
roof, spread with pears and apples. Up one side of it went a buttress,
which certainly contained the chimney from the kitchen, for it was warm
to the touch and altogether mysterious.
Instantly, so it seems to me now, we began playing the most
blood-curdling games in that floor of attics; people hid there and
groaned and jumped out on you with maniacal screams. A short steep
flight of steps led down from it to the nursery floor, and how often,
giddy with pleasing terror, have I tumbled down those steps, because
somebody (who ought to have been a sister, but might easily have become
a goblin) was yelling behind me. One’s mind, the sensible part of it
much in abeyance, knew quite well that it was Nellie or Maggie, but
supposing one’s sensible mind was wrong for once? It was wiser to run,
just in case.... From which vivid memory I perceive that though I knew
about Abracadabra I was not so firmly rationalistic about the rooms with
gurgling cisterns in them. In the dark, strange metamorphoses might have
occurred, and when one day I found in the darkest corner of one of these
attics, a figure apparently human, and certainly resembling Nellie,
lying flat down and not moving (though it was for the hider to catch the
seeker) the light of my sensible mind was snuffed out like a candlewick,
and I shrieked out, “Oh, Nellie, don’t!” Observe the confusion of an
infant mind! I knew the corpse to be Nellie, for I addressed it as
Nellie, and told it not to; on the other hand, by an involuntary
exercise of the imagination I conceived that this still twilight object
might be something quite different.
My sisters were now of an age to sleep together in a large apartment
somewhere at the top of the stone stairs, while I still slept in the
night nursery, in a bed near the window. Beth occupied another bed, and
in a corner was Hugh’s crib with high sides, where he--being now about
two years old--was stowed away before the day was over for me. Next door
to the nursery was a room smaller than any room I have ever seen, and
this was officially known as “My Room.” It had a tiny window, was quite
uninhabitable, for it was always shrouded in a deadly gloom and piled up
with boxes, but the fact that it was my room, though I lived in the day
nursery by day, and slept in the night nursery by night, gave me a sense
of pomp and dignity, and I resented the fact that presently my father
had the wing of the house which lay above the stone staircase connected
with the night nursery by a wooden passage across the roof. This turned
my room into part of the passage, and though he called this ten yards of
passage “the Rialto,” I felt that I had been robbed of some ancestral
domain. After all it was My Room....
The rest of the house was not particularly interesting; it consisted of
sitting-rooms and dining-room, and schoolroom and lobbies, the sort of
thing that you naturally supposed would be there. But one day my father
presented my sisters and me with a room at the top of the stone stairs,
with which we were allowed to deal precisely as we wished. We instantly
called it “The Museum,” and put in it any unusual objects that we
obtained. One day Maggie found a piece of sheep’s wool stuck in a hedge,
so that of course was brought home, washed white and carefully combed
and put in a cardboard box with a glass lid. Then (to anticipate as
regards the Museum) we spent a summer holiday at Torquay, and collected
various attractive pebbles, and madrepores, and shells. These were
dedicated to the Museum, and a large earthenware bread-bowl was lined
with them, and filled up with water to the top, so that they gleamed
deliciously through the liquid. Then there came a memorable day when my
mother killed a hornet on her window; she gave us the squalid corpse,
and after consultation we put it in the water of the bowl, lined with
spa and madrepore, in order to preserve it. It floated about there and
was supposed to be in process of preservation. An addled swan’s egg
joined the collection, which, very prudently, we decided not to blow.
But it began to smell so terribly even through the shell that with great
reluctance we scrapped it. My father gave us a case of butterflies,
collected by his father, in which, without doubt were two “large
coppers.” “As rare things will” that case vanished, and I wonder what
fortunate dealer eventually got the “large coppers.”... Then on a
bookshelf was the great stamp-collection, and I wish I knew what had
happened to that. There was all South Australia complete, and complete
too was Tasmania, and complete the Cape of Good Hope, the stamps of
which for the sake of variety were triangular. Heligoland was there and
the Ionian Islands and New Caledonia (black and only one of it). But the
stamp-collection was considered rather dull: the hornet disintegrating
in the bread-bowl, and the piece of sheep’s wool were far more
interesting. They had the timbre of personal acquisition, and rang with
first-hand emotion. Personal and precious too were the bits of oxydised
glass smouldering into rainbows which we dug up in the garden and
displayed here; there too we found bowls and broken stems of
tobacco-pipes which I think were Cromwellian. But Cromwell was no good
to us, so we said that they were Roman tobacco-pipes. Then there was a
collection of fossils, which, with the aid of geological hammers that my
father gave us, we rapped out of stones in lime quarries, or from the
heaps that lay by the roadside for mendings. Amateur stone-breakers
indeed we were, and often bruised fingers were of the party, but they
added preciousness to the trophies that we brought back to the Museum.
On the door of the Museum was a paper label, on which was emblazoned in
large letters tinted with water-colour, “Museum. Private.” The privacy
was part of the joy of it. Occasionally we asked my mother to have tea
with us there, and she came in her hat formally. This very proper
behaviour was duly appreciated.
Indeed that was a good house for children with its attics and its
winding-stairs, and its multitude of passages. Judging the virtue of a
house by the standards of hide-and-seek, than which there is no more
authentic rule, I never saw so laudable a habitation. Endless were the
dark places for the concealment of hiders, endless also the various
routes by which the seekers might get back uncaught to the sanctuary
where Beth sat with her sewing over the fire and said, “Eh now, you’ll
be falling down and hurting yourselves.” There was the route up the
kitchen stairs, the route through my father’s dressing-room and study,
only practicable (as on the days when the Khyber Pass is open to
caravans) when he was away: there were the stairs up from the hall into
the lobby; there were the winding-stairs communicating through the
Rialto with the nursery passage, at the other end of which were the
nursery stairs. How rare again was the cul-de-sac, that infernal
invention of degraded architects and the ruin of all good hide-and-seek,
which makes capture inevitable, when once you are in the trap. For
magnificence of design, judging by these standards, I unhesitatingly
allot the palm to the Chancery house in the Close at Lincoln.
Gardens, in like manner, must be judged by their serviceableness in the
pursuit of games, and here again we were fortunate. Adjacent to the
house itself was a big lawn, levelled and sown afresh, which was the
arena of cricket and rounders. Behind that was an asphalted yard with a
stable, a coach-house and a woodshed, erected no doubt in order that we
might play fives against them: a covered passage led to the kitchen
garden. There was sufficient space here for a lawn-tennis court, the
lines of which were laid down with tape secured by hairpins.
Occasionally the foot caught in the tape; “zp, zp, zp,” went most of the
hairpins and the shape of the court changed for the moment from an
oblong to a trapezium with no right-angles. By one side of this was a
steep grassy bank with elder bushes growing on the top. Here you laid
yourself stiffly out on the ground, and like that rolled bodily down the
bank, sitting up again at the bottom to find the world reeling and
spinning round you. When you felt a little less sick, you refreshed
yourself with elderberries, and rolled down again. Beyond this was a
pear tree large enough to climb, and high enough not to fall out of, and
an asparagus bed. The edible properties of that vegetable were of no
interest, but when it went to seed and grew up in tall fern-like stems
with orange berries it was valuable as a hiding-place. Narrow grass
paths led this way and that between the garden beds, and they had been
well constructed, for they were of such a width that it was possible,
though difficult, to bowl a hoop down them without invading the
cabbages. A fool would have made them either wider or narrower, and then
they would have been useless. In a corner of the garden were our own
particular plots, and against the red brick wall grew a fig tree, which
I thought had some connection with the biblical tree that withered away,
because it never yielded its fruit. All round the garden ran a high
wall, now brick, now ancient limestone, and at the bottom was a mediæval
tower partly in ruins, where we habitually played the most dangerous
game that has ever been invented since the world began. Why no one was
killed I cannot understand to this day. The game was called “Sieges,”
and the manner of it was as follows:
A flight of some twenty high stone steps led up to a chamber in the
tower, which was roofless and ivy-clad. They lay against the wall with a
turn half-way up, and up to that point had no protection whatever on one
side, so that nothing could have been simpler than to have fallen off
them to the ground. From the chamber a further short flight led up on to
an open turret defended at the top by a low iron railing of doubtful
solidity. One child was constituted King of the Castle, the others were
the besiegers. The besiegers stormed the castle and the besieger and
besieged tried to hurl each other downstairs. The besieged had the
advantage of superior height, for he stood usually at the top of the
stairs by the chamber; the besiegers the advantage of weight and
numbers. You were allowed to resort to any form of violence in order to
win your object, except kicking; blows and pushings and wrestlings and
trippings-up formed legitimate warfare. Even the rule about kicking must
have been rather slack, for I remember once seeking my mother with a
bleeding nose, and saying that Nellie had kicked me in the face at
“Sieges.” Her defence, a singularly weak one as it still appears to me,
was that she hadn’t kicked me in the face at all: she had only put her
foot against my face and then pushed. Whereon the judge went into such
fits of laughter that the trial was adjourned.
At first my mother taught us entirely, and the sight of the schoolroom
when lessons were going on would certainly have conveyed a very false
impression to a stranger, for close to my mother’s hand lay a
silver-mounted riding-whip of plaited horsehair. But it was not for
purposes of correction: its use was that if as we were writing our
exercises and copies she saw we were not sitting upright, her hand would
stealthily take up the whip and bring it down with a sounding thwack on
to the table, startling us into erect attitudes again. To these
instructions there was soon added Latin, and I remember the charm of new
words just because they were new. It was also interesting to grasp the
fact that there really had been people once who, when they wanted to say
“table” preferred to say “mensa,” and found that their friends
understood them perfectly. I suppose that soon my mother became too busy
to continue the instruction of my sisters and me, for a day-governess
appeared, a quiet melancholy German lady with brown eyes, and a manner
that commanded respect. She was not with us very long, and on her
departure we three went to a day-school kept by a widow. She had a Roman
nose, and though rather terrible was kind. She lived in a house just
outside the close which smelt of mackintosh: the schoolroom was a larger
wooden apartment built out over the garden.
In between these curricula we had a temporary governess who seemed to us
all the most admirable and enviable person who ever lived. This was Miss
Bramston, a great personal friend of my mother’s, whose brother, beloved
subsequently by generation after generation of Wykehamists, had been a
master at Wellington under my father. Never was there so delightful an
instructress; by dint of her being so pleasant when we disobeyed her, we
soon got to obey her not out of discipline, of which she had not the
faintest notion, but out of affection, of which she had a great deal.
She wrote us a play in rhymed verse, all out of her own head, which we
acted one Christmas, rather like _Hamlet_, with rhymes thrown in, and
ending much more comfortably than that tragedy. There was a king on a
throne, only he wasn’t the right king and when alone he soliloquized,
saying:
I’m a usurper, though I seem a swell;
The true King lies within a dungeon cell,
and I wish I could remember more of it. She painted not in water-colour
only but in oils, and could make any canvas of hers recognizable. For
instance, you knew at once that this was the Cathedral. But not only to
us was she not a usurper but a swell; she was a Public Authoress, and
wrote stories, printed and published, which she gave us to read. The
S.P.C.K. published them, and the whole world could buy them, and she got
paid for writing them. One of her early works was _Elly’s Choice_; there
was a poor good girl called Elly, and a rather nasty rich cousin called
Cordelia, a boy called Alick, and everybody who mattered was about nine
years old. A piece of stained glass was broken in the “Octagon Room,”
and Cordelia let Elly be punished for it though Cordelia had broken it,
and then Elly received apologies from Grandmamma Farmer, and Cordelia
learned a lesson, and all got wonderfully happy again. The extreme
vividness with which I remember it, surely shows that the book fulfilled
its purpose, that is, of interesting children. Later Miss Bramston
spread larger pinions, and I do not think she did so well. To our
intense joy she came back to us at Truro a year or two later, and was as
lovable as ever.
It was in those few years at Lincoln that my father began to be
individual, instead of being part of the landscape, and as I got to know
him, I, like the rest of us, also got to fear him. For many years we
were none of us at our ease with him, as we always were with my mother,
and it is tragic that it was so, for I know that he regarded us all with
the tenderest love. Often and often his glorious vitality, keener and
more splendid than any I have ever come across, enchanted us, and the
sunlight of him was of a midsummer radiance. But he had no idea how
blighting his displeasure was to small children, and for fear of
incurring it we went delicately like Agag, attending so strictly to our
behaviour that all spontaneity withered. Nothing would have pleased him
more, had we taken him into our confidence, but we feared his
disapproval more than we were drawn to intimacy with him. It was always
uncertain whether he would not pull us up with stinging rebukes for
offences that were certainly venial, and in his watchfulness over our
mental and moral education, he came down upon faults of laziness and
carelessness as if to explode such tendencies out of our nature. Earnest
and eager all through, and gloriously and tumultuously alive, he brought
too heavy guns to bear on positions so lightly fortified as children’s
hearts, and from fear of the bombardment we did not dare to make a
sortie and go to him. Too much noise, an ordinary childish carelessness
might, so we believed, bring down on us a schoolmaster’s reproof instead
of such remonstrances as we got from my mother, which were completely
successful, and with him we were careful to be decorous to the verge of
woodenness. We had washed hands and neat hair and low voices, because
thus we minimized the risks of his society. We were never frank with
him, we did not talk about the things that interested us, but those
which interested him and which we thought he would wish us to be
interested in. We sat on the edge of our chairs, and were glad to be
gone. If we had been natural with him, I know that his appreciation of
that would somehow have made cement between us, but how are you to be
natural when, rightly or wrongly, you are being careful? Tearing spirits
moderated themselves on his approach, we became as mild as children on
chocolate boxes. If he was pleased with us, we breathed sighs of relief:
if he was displeased we waited for the clouds to pass. With him I, at
least, was a prig and a hypocrite, assuming a demure demeanour, and
pretending to be interested in the journal of Bishop Heber of Bombay,
which I still maintain is a dreary work, and not suited to young
gentlemen of between six and nine years old. But the journal of Bishop
Heber was given me as a book to read on Sunday and helped to add to the
wearisomeness of that rather appalling day.
Below our lovely Museum, and opening out of the winding stone stairs,
there was a room fitted up as a chapel. There was stained glass in the
windows, Arundel prints on the walls, and a quite unique harmonium that
cost five pounds. The keyboard was only of three octaves, extending from
[Illustration: musical notation] to [Illustration: musical notation]
which, as it was used if not designed to be as an instrument to
accompany hymns, seems to me to be a truly remarkable compass, since in
order to accompany hymns on it at all, you had to leave out the bass, or
transfer the whole tune to the higher octave. When fully extended for
purposes of melody, it stood about two and a half feet high, but on its
black japanned front were two steel catches which, if pressed, caused it
to subside into itself, the foot-bellows becoming flat, and the
harmonium itself so small that a man could put it under his arm.
Sometimes when playing it (as I was presently to do) a too vigorous
knee, in the movement of blowing, would touch these catches, and it
collapsed in the middle of the hymn on to the feet of the organist,
dealing them a severe blow, and necessitating its readjustment before
the hymn proceeded. It had two stops, one of which allowed the air to
get to its pipes, the other was a tremolo which caused its voice to be
transformed into a series of swift little bleats with pauses in between
like a soprano lamb much out of breath. Perhaps it was designed to take
the solo part of a flute in one of those curious bastard orchestras on
which Mr. Oscar Browning, with the help of three undergraduates, used to
render quartettes in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, but here it
was as an accompanying instrument at prayers in the chapel of the
Chancery, and took its part in the religious exercises of the morning.
Sunday, in fact, began in the chapel for us children after the early
service for our elders in the Cathedral. There was a hymn, my father
read certain Sunday prayers, and then came breakfast. The collection of
hymns which we used in chapel was Bishop Wordsworth’s “Holy Year.” There
are many admirable hymns in it, others not so good. For instance, the
one for the feast of St. Philip and St. James began:
Let us emulate the names
Of St. Philip and St. James.
We children, therefore, could hardly help making up another hymn for the
feast of St. Simon and St. Jude beginning (and then stopping):
Let us try to be as good
As St. Simon and St. Jude.
Matins at the Cathedral was at half-past ten, so we often bore a crude
sausage there, as Juvenal would have said. The service was fully choral,
and the _pièce de résistance_, as far as I was concerned, was the
Litany, chanted by two lay-clerks at a desk in the middle of the
gangway between the seats. Together I think (or perhaps separately,
while the other was in reserve) they chanted the first sentences as
follows:
[Illustration: musical notation: Oh, God, the Father of Heaven, Have
mercy upon us miser-a-ble sinners.]
The choir then repeated it in harmony, and the same simple musical
material furnished the whole of the subsequent responses.
Sung thus very slowly the Litany took a full quarter of an hour, but
when that was over, I was at liberty to find my hat and steal out. I
used to put my hat, a round soft felt hat with elastic under the chin,
in an aperture at the corner of our seat below the stalls, which had in
it an opening for ventilation. Sometimes my hat slipped down this, and
after an excited groping for it, it came up covered with the dust of
ages. The service had already lasted an hour or more, and I made my
jaded way back to the Chancery, while my mother and sisters, and in the
holidays, my two elder brothers, remained for the rest of the service.
Martin and Arthur occupied stalls near my father and were still dim
figures to me, at home only for a comparatively few weeks in the year,
and having a sitting-room of their own. I used to be rather glad when
they went to school, because my mother invented for me the title of “The
Eldest Son at Home,” which could only be used in their absence.
In the afternoon there was a family walk, and then Cathedral service
again. Then came a reading of Sunday books, or a reading of the Bible
with my father, and we went utterly fatigued to bed. It was not so much
the plethora of religious exercises that caused this lassitude, but the
entire absence of any recreation. Spare time (and there was not much of
it) was supposed to be taken up with Bishop Heber’s Journal, _Agathos_
and _The Rocky Island_. Once a certain brightness came into these Sunday
readings, because we were allowed a book called _Sunday Echoes in
Week-day Hours_. There was a widowed mother in it, and her boy called
Cecil, and their conversation about collects was so excruciatingly pious
that it became merely humorous, and we invented fresh Cecil-talk among
ourselves. We once indulged in this before my mother, who with a
controlled countenance withdrew the delightful volume. I remember waking
up after falling asleep one Sunday night, and hearing Compline going on
in the chapel with another hymn, and thinking with amazement that they
were still at it. In the way of a child, I think I was, from certain
evidence that will appear, religious, but to put it quite frankly, I was
sick of the whole affair by Sunday evening.
I cannot chronologize the events in our life at Lincoln, which only
lasted for three and a half years, and I do not quite know when the
Cathedral services began to wear a perfectly new complexion for me. The
reason of this was that I was violently attracted by a choir-boy, or
rather a chorister, one of four, who instead of wearing a surplice like
the common choir-boy, wore a long dark blue coat down to the knees faced
with white. A similar experience, I fancy, is almost universal: the
first romantic affection a girl is conscious of is nearly always towards
a girl, and in the same way, a small boy, when first his physical nature
begins to grope, still quite blindly and innocently, in the misty
country of emotion, is pretty certain to take as his idol for secret
romantic worship, one of his own sex. It was so at any rate with me,
and instead of the Cathedral services being of incomparable tedium, they
became exciting and exalting. He, the nameless he, came in procession at
the end of the choir-boys just before the lay-clerks, and besides having
this soul-stirring effect on me, he woke in me, by means of his singing,
my first love of music. He sat at the end of the choir nearest our seat,
and luckily on the other side, so that I could see him without the
intervention of dull people’s heads. I could hear his voice, sexless and
unemotional, above the rest of the trebles, but with what emotion did
that voice inspire me! He used to sing solos as well, and I am sure that
the sneaking love that I have still for Mendelssohn, was due to the fact
that (unaccompanied) he sang “The night is departing, depa-a-art (A in
alt) ing.” I would have welcomed the interminable Litany becoming
literally interminable, so long as he continued singing, “We beseech
thee to hear us, Good Lord,” with his chin a little stuck out, and his
eyes roving about the pews. Sometimes I thought he saw me and noticed
me, and then my imagination took wings to itself, and I saw myself
meeting him somewhere alone, him in his chorister’s cope. What we should
have to say to each other, I had not the smallest idea, but we should be
together, and there lay completion. It was due to his unconscious
influence that I began to sing loudly in the chapel at the Chancery, and
never shall I forget my father once saying to me, “Perhaps some day you
will sing an anthem in the Cathedral.” That supplied a fresh imaginative
chapter to my secret book; I should be a chorister too, and sit next the
idol, and we would sing together. I was not egoistic in this vision: I
had no thought of ravishing the world by the beauty of my voice: it
merely became a sunlit possibility (after all my father had said as
much) that I should sing in the Cathedral. But I knew, though he did
not, that I should be singing with the chorister. Thanks to my idol,
Sunday became, as long as this passion lasted, a day in which joy
watered the arid sands of Bishop Heber’s Journal, and made it,
literally, “break forth into singing.” That emotion, the fulfilment of
which was brought into the realms of possibility by my father’s remark,
touched such religion as I had with ecstasy, and I added to my prayers
the following petition, which I said night and morning.
“O God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, and abide there in
happiness evermore with Thee!”
Who “Thee” was I cannot determine: I believe it to have been a mixture
of God and the chorister, and, I think, chiefly the chorister.
This quickening of emotion gave rise to a sort of waking vision in which
I used then consciously to indulge, promising myself as I undressed for
bed a night of Holy Convocation. Two minutes of Holy Convocation were
about the duration of it, and then I went to sleep. There was a hymn in
the “Holy Year” in which there were lines
To Holy Convocations
The silver trumpets call,
and with that and the chorister as yeast, there used to bubble out, when
I had gone to bed, this curious waking vision. I would not be asleep at
all, but with open eyes I distinctly saw against the blackness of the
night nursery a line of golden rails, very ornamental, before which I
knelt. There was the sound of silver trumpets in my ears, there was the
sound of the chorister, anthems in the Cathedral, and the presence of
God. But all these things were secret and apart, never told of to this
day, and they did not in the least interfere with wrestlings in the
tower, and violent games of rounders and the pleasing terrors of
hide-and-seek. The shrine usually stood shut, but when it opened it
disclosed blinding splendours.
The Cathedral had, apart from the chorister and the services, certain
pains and pleasures of its own. Occasionally assizes were held in
Lincoln, and then on Sunday the judges would attend in robes of majesty
with full wigs falling on to their shoulders. They walked in procession
up the choir, and, reaching their seats, turned round awful pink
clean-shaven faces of eternal calm, awful mouths that pronounced
death-sentences. Once to my knowledge there was a murder-trial at
Lincoln and a man condemned to death and the judge on that occasion
became more terrible than death itself, and I slunk out after the Litany
with apprehension that I should be called back, and hear some appalling
sentence pronounced on me. Again, one day, a canon of the Cathedral
stepped backwards through a skylight and was killed and Great Tom, the
big bell in the central tower, tolled for the funeral. But the whole
circumstances of that were so interesting that, though terror was
mingled with them, they were more exciting than terrible. Wholly
delightful on the other hand was a scientific demonstration that took
place in the nave. A long cord was hung from one of the arches, to the
end of which depended a heavy lead weight. On the pavement beneath it
there was marked out a circle in white chalk, and this pendulum was then
set swinging. As the hours passed, it swung in a different direction
from that in which it was started, and instead of oscillating up and
down the nave it moved along the transepts, thus demonstrating the
motion of the earth. Why that delightful piece of science was shown in
the Cathedral I have no idea; certain it is, however, that my mother
took me to see the pendulum after breakfast one morning and again before
tea when it was swinging in quite another direction. I never had any
doubts about the rotary movement of the earth after that, nor, as far as
I can remember, before.