Читать книгу Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896 - E F Benson - Страница 7

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

to

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:

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.