The Combined Maze Part 14

If he had been madder, if he'd been more set on it, he would have gone off with her that minute; he would have persuaded her to give up church; he himself would have broken his promise to old Wauchope. But he did none of these things, and his abstention was the sign and measure of his coolness, of his sanity. He only said, as any cool and sane young man might say: How about after church? And if he called when he got back from Clapham? He wouldn't be a minute later than half past nine.

And Violet had said: Oh, well--she didn't know about calling. You see, she only had one room. And he had reckoned with that difficulty; for Winny Dymond only had one room which she shared with Maudie. By calling, he'd meant, of course, on the doorstep, to take her for a walk.

But Violet, for some reason, didn't care about the doorstep. She'd rather, if he didn't mind, that he met her somewhere out of doors.

And so they had been drawn into an a.s.signation at the old elm tree by the Causeway on Wandsworth Plain.

Thus, if it had done nothing else to him, the Service for Men could be held responsible for throwing that meeting with Violet much too late.

Still, he had no misgivings. It was June; and in June nine o'clock was still daytime. And when he went to the Service he hadn't any idea what it would do to him.

No more, of course, had poor old Wauchope. Wauchope was grateful and apologetic; before they got there he said he didn't know what he might be letting Ransome in for. The curate johnnie was bossing the Service, but he understood they'd engaged another joker for the Address. What he, Wauchope, funked, personally, more than anything was the Address. And Ransome, generously, declared that whatever it was like, he'd stick it.

He'd stand by Wauchope to the finish, like a man.

They left their bicycles in Wauchope's rooms, and walked the few hundred yards to St. Matthias's Mission Church.

St. Matthias's Mission Church was a brand-new yellow-brick building in the latest Gothic, with a red-tiled roof, where a shrill little bell swung tinkling under the arch in the high west gable.

Inside, cream distempered walls with brown stencilings; in the roof, bare beams of pitch pine, stained and varnished; north and south, clear gla.s.s windows shedding a greenish light; one brilliant stained-gla.s.s window above the altar at the east end.

Up and down the aisles between the open pews of pitch pine went the workers of the Mission, marshaling the men into their seats. By the west door, Wauchope's friend, the c.u.mbrous curate, who fancied himself as a featherweight, stood smiling and shaking hands with each man as he came, and thanking him for coming, thus carrying out the idea that it was an entertainment. He had his largest smile, his closest grip for Wauchope and for Ransome, for they were men after his own heart. Ransome observed the curate critically, and without committing himself irretrievably to an opinion, he owned that he looked fit enough. There was not about him any sign that you could see of flabbiness or weediness. He was evidently a decent johnnie, and for all that happened afterward Ransome forbore to hold him personally responsible.

The service, conducted by the curate, was extremely brief. Everything was left out that could be left, to make room for hymns wherever it was possible to place a hymn. The Psalms were chanted, and the curate intoned the Prayers in a voice that was not his natural voice, but something far more poignant and impressive.

There were no boys in the choir, and the singing, that lacked their purifying and clarifying treble, had a strange effect, somber yet disturbing. It acted on Ranny like an incantation.

Of course, if he had known what it was going to do to him, he would have kept away.

For though there was nothing in his flesh and blood and muscle that suggested an inebriate father, yet in his profounder and obscurer being he was Fulleymore Ransome's son. The secret instability that made Fulleymore Ransome drink had had its effect on Ranny's nervous system.

His nerves, though he was not aware of it, were finely woven and highly strung. He had a tendency to be carried away and to be excited, exalted, and upset. Since Sat.u.r.day afternoon Ranny had remained more or less in a state of tension induced by the hurdle race, by the shock of seeing Violet Usher, and by the dinner at the "Golden Eagle." And, coming straight from Violet, he had entered St. Matthias's Mission Church keyed up to his highest pitch. So that the Service for Men which subdued Wauchope and made him humble and ashamed and sent him away trying to be a better man, that very same Service worked Ranny up to a point when anything became possible to him.

First of all, then, the intoning and the chanting acted on him exactly like an incantation. Ranny's will, the spiritual part of him, was lulled to sleep by the rhythmic voices, and as his sense of decency had no reason whatever to expect an outrage, it was also off its guard, quiescent, pa.s.sive to the charm. The rest of Ranny was exposed, piteously, to the rhythm that swelled, that accentuated, accelerated the vibration of his inner tumult.

Then the obvious safety-valve was closed to him. A sense of strangeness and of sudden shyness prevented him from joining as he should have joined in the Service. Ranny could not take it out all at once in singing. That silence and pa.s.sivity of his left him open at every pore to the invasion of the powers of sound. These young, intensely vibrant ba.s.s and tenor voices sang all round him, they sang at him and into him and through him. There was a young man close behind him with a tenor voice that pierced him like a pain. There was Wauchope at his right ear thundering in a tremendous barytone.

First of all it was a trumpet call that shook him.

/P "Sold-ier-ers o-of Christ! a-arise, And put your armor on,"

P/

sang Wauchope. The sound of that singing made Ransome feel n.o.ble; and there is nothing more insidiously destructive than feeling n.o.ble.

And then, later on, it was a strange and a more poignant cry that melted him, so that his very soul dissolved in tenderness and yearning.

/P "Jesu, Lover o-of my soul,"

P/

sang the young man with the tenor.

/P "Let me to Thy bosom fly, While the gathering wa-ters roll.

While the tempest sti-ill is high."

P/

(Ranny felt them about him, the waters and the tempest.)

/P "Other refuge ha-ave I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee; Leave--ah! leave me no-ot alone, Still support and co-omfort me."

P/

And as the infinite pathos and pleading of the tenor voice played on him, Ranny sank, lost and shelterless and alone, till at the word "Life"

he rose again and exulted, he rose above himself, even to the point of singing.

/P "Thou of Life the fountain art, Freely let me take of Thee; Spring Thou up with-in my heart;"

P/

sang Ranny.

/P "Rise to all eternity."

P/

There was something about that hymn, and his own sudden crying out in it, that made him peculiarly susceptible to the influences of the Address. When the preacher rose in the pulpit, when he looked about him with ardent and earnest eyes in a face ravaged by emotion, when his wide and somewhat loose and mobile lips gave out the text, Ranny had an obscure foreknowledge of what would happen to him.

For he was not altogether virgin to the experience he was undergoing. It belonged to certain moods of his childhood and his adolescence when more than once, in Wandsworth Parish Church, he had been stirred mysteriously by the tender music of the Evening Service, and by the singing of certain hymns. There were layers upon layers of emotion sunk beyond memory in Ranny's soul. So that what happened to him now had the profound and vehement, though secret, force of a revival. The submerged feelings rose in him; they were swollen, intensified, dominated beyond recognition by the virile and unspiritual pa.s.sion that leaped up and ran together with them and made them one. It gave them an obscure but superb sanction and significance.

For that incantation not only called up the past; with a still greater magic and mystery it evoked the future. It was a prophecy, a premonition of the things to be. It cried upon the secret, unseen powers of life. It brought down destiny.

"'Know ye not that your bodies,'" said the preacher--and he leaned out and looked to the young men on the right--"'your bodies'"--and he looked to the young men on the left--"'are the temples, of the Holy Ghost'"--and he looked straightforward and paused as if he saw invisible things.

He may have drawn a bow at a venture, but he seemed to have singled out Ranny from among all those young men. He leaned over his pulpit, and fixed his kindled and penetrating eyes on Ranny. He adjured Ranny to remember that Sin which he had never committed; he implored him to recall the shame which he had never felt, and at the same time to purge himself of that unholy memory, and put away from him the sensual thoughts that had never occurred to him and the abominable intentions that he had never had.

Then, with a subtle and plastic inflection of his voice, like the poise of wings descending, he dropped from that almost inspired height of emotion, and became shrewd and practical, thoroughly informed and competent, a physician with a flair for the secret of disease, a surgeon of the Soul, relentless in his handling of the knife, a man of the world who spoke to them of what he knew, in all sincerity, as man to man. And then he soared again, flapping his great wings that fanned emotion to a flame.

And through it all the young curate who had brought them there sat folded more and more within his surplice, and became more and more red as to his face, more and more dubious as to his eyes. He was like some young captain, wise though intrepid, who sees his brave battalions routed through the false move of his general.

The magic worked. A man behind Ransome was heard breathing heavily. The gentle drowsiness habitually expressed by Wauchope's broad and somewhat flattened features was intensified to stupefaction. His head had sunk slightly forward, but he looked up, lowering at the preacher with his little innocent eyes, half sullen, half afraid.

Wauchope was merely uncomfortable. He suffered on the surface. But Ranny was disturbed profoundly, shaken, excited, and most curiously uplifted.

He and Wauchope compared notes afterward on the preacher, whom they called "that imported josser." They thought he rather fancied himself at that particular job, and supposed that he was some sort of a "pro" who had spoiled his "form" by overdoing it, and had lost the confidence of his backers. They agreed that if Wauchope's friend the curate had given them a straight talk it would have been much straighter. As it was, nothing could have been more devious, more mysterious and serpentine than the discourse that turned and wound and wormed its way into the last obscurities and secrecies of Ranny's being.

In the Mission Church of St. Matthias's Ranny underwent illumination. It was as if all that was dark and pa.s.sionate in him had been interpreted for him by the preacher. Interpreted, it became in some perverse way justified. Over and above that innermost sanction and recognition it had the seal outside it of men's acknowledgment, it took its place among the existent, the normal, the expected. Ranny was not alone in his pa.s.sion and confusion. He was companioned, here and now, in the great enlightenment.

But even Ranny could not have foretold the full extent of his reaction to that sinuous and evocative Address.

Meanwhile, so carried away was Ranny that he joined Wauchope in a furious singing of the final hymn, "Onward, Christian so-o-oldier-ers!"

He had felt n.o.ble; he had felt tender; now he was triumphant.