It was touch and go. For a few bars they hung back: then a couple of voices started, tentatively. By the end of the first chorus, half of them were in. Ellis took it again, singing fat harmonies, and with a rising roar they all came in. From that moment he gave them no rest, whirling them from chorus to chorus till at last he banged a final terrific chord and lunged round on the chair, shouting with laughter in which they joined. Then, with a rush, came orders for a fresh round of drinks, and everyone was laughing and talking at once. Three or four pressed forward, grinning all across their faces, in their anxiety to assure him.
“We reckoned you was comin’ in to try and find summat out.”
“Snoopin’ round, like.”
“Lord love you,” Ellis cried. “Aren’t you going to give me any time off? Can’t I even have my evenings free?”
A man with a moustache edged closer.
“D’you really reckon, mister——”
Ellis held up his hand.
“No. No shop, please. Not a word. I’m off duty now.”
The rest laughed, and the would-be questioner grinned sheepishly, and shrank back discomfited.
“Don’t you ever have sing-songs here?” Ellis asked them. “No? Why not?”
“Nobody to play.”
“Rubbish. Must be somebody. You don’t mean to tell me that, in this whole village, there’s nobody who can play the piano!”
There were two or three, it appeared, but they were females or didn’t patronise the bar.
“You ought to have all sorts of songs. Who sings solo? Who’s in the choir?”
One or two bashful individuals were gleefully pointed out by their friends.
“Well—damn it—what’s the good of being in the choir, if you never sing a solo? Why don’t you rope in that schoolmaster bloke? He’s got a good voice. I heard him, in his garden.”
They looked at each other. “Can’t often get he. He’s busy most evenin’s.” They detailed Rattray’s activities in the village and at the camp.
“ ’E don’t finish up there, not till nine o’clock,” one man volunteered.
“Oh well—we’ll have to do without him. I’ll start you off. Who’s going to be here to-morrow night? Sunday’s a bad night, is it? All right: what about Monday?”
On Monday, it seemed, several were going to one of Rattray’s affairs at the Institute.
“Very well. Tuesday then. That is, if it’s too late for you after nine?”
Yes. They thought it was. After nine, they liked to go home.
“Us got to be up early in the mornin’, master.”
“Not like me, eh? Hogging it in bed. All right. Tuesday it is, then. Mind you come, every man jack of you, and we’ll have the roof off.”
He waited a little longer, then withdrew, to a cordial chorus of good-nights, and returned to Gilkison, well pleased with himself.
“You’ve been kicking up a filthy row out there,” Gilkison told him.
A look of intolerable complacency came over Ellis’s face.
“I got ’em,” he said. “I made ’em eat out of my hand. And I got something valuable as well.”
“What was that?”
“Remember Mrs. Rattray telling us that darling hubby didn’t get back till ten on the nights he does his good works? Well—the good works finish at nine, leaving an hour off, for fun and games.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Next morning Ellis announced his intention of going to church. Gilkison, sensitive to a notoriety in which he could not help sharing, refused to accompany him, and called him an exhibitionist.
Ellis rebutted the charge with characteristic offensiveness, and went off in high spirits to sit at the feet of Mr. Rawlings.
If the churchgoers did not react to his arrival as markedly as the Plume of Feathers’ customers the night before, it was only because their surroundings forbade it. The sensation caused was, if anything, greater. Between those who frankly stared, and those who resolutely looked in front of them, Ellis achieved as much attention from pew and choir-stall as if he were a gorilla.
Several of Ellis’s new friends of the pub were there, making violents efforts not to seem aware of him. One, the verger who handed him a prayer-book, was scarlet with embarrassment. Martha Attwill was in the front of the choir, looking happy and unconcerned. Rattray wheeled his wife in at the side door just before the service began. Stiff and resolute, he took care not to look in Ellis’s direction.
The constraint lasted even after the service had begun, since Ellis joined heartily in the opening hymn, his confident tenor being heard all over the little church. The congregation and choir rallied and sang their loudest, stimulated perhaps, or else determined to put the intruder in his place. To do Ellis justice, he did not sing in order to draw attention to himself, but unself-consciously and from good will. One of the puzzles of Gilkison’s life was to know when Ellis was showing off and when he was naively unaware of the effect he was producing. Even Kathleen, Ellis’s wife, did not always know.
The West Nattering choir sang simply and pleasantly, and the organist, Ellis decided, was really good. He found himself enjoying the service. A village church or a school chapel—those were the places where he liked best to attend service. His ideal, for communal worship, was to make a cheerful noise unto the God of Jacob, and the genuinely devout strain in his nature found its most natural expression in a straightforward and simple ritual.
Happy, the worries of the case forgotten, he sat upright, twiddling his thumbs, and noted with approval the advent of an elderly and most respectable looking man to read the first lesson. The elderly man did not hurry himself. He took out a spectacle case, opened it, put the spectacles carefully on his nose, announced the lesson, and then looked over the top of his spectacles until the congregation had found the place in their Bibles or settled themselves into an attitude of attention. He then repeated the chapter and verse, and delivered, in tones of respectful fervour, a passage from one of the lesser prophets, which, to Ellis, meant nothing at all, and could hardly have meant more to the congregation.
It sounded well, though, Ellis decided: and none of the congregation would like it any the less for not knowing what it was about. The woes prophesied to some city long since dust had for them the one great quality of bearing no possible relationship to their own fives. They could listen disinterestedly, and, when a year had passed, they could hear the same words again, part of the seasons’ rhythm, a brief, recurrent experience in the cycle of the turning globe.
The vicar read the second lesson, a miracle and a parable from St. Matthew, and its immediate simplicity was in perfect contrast to the remoter resonance that had come first. He read it with a note of childlike wonder, as if he had never seen it before, and Ellis wished that he had gone to see the vicar himself, instead of handing that duty over to Bradstreet.
When, presently, Mr. Rawlings made allusion to the recent fatality, and solicited the congregation’s prayers for the bereaved, Ellis’s mood of admiration received a jolt. The immediate reaction of the hearers was patent too. A soundless stiffening, a withdrawal of the mind. No one there but knew that Matt Baildon’s death was a mercy and a relief to the wife and daughter he left behind him.
Then, within three or four seconds, they yielded themselves once more to the exhortation of the single voice. The vicar was neither cynical nor foolish. He was doing the conventional thing, the thing he would always do, because the Church prescribed it: and, even if the sense of it went a little awry, was it not fitting to pray for those two souls, who had suffered a great deal, and were by no means clear of their troubles yet, and needed all the goodwill that might come to them from earth or from heaven? So the congregation acquiesced, and Ellis found himself relaxing with them into the warmth of a better wisdom and a higher common sense.