Brother Copas Part 17

"Well--it isn't _pay_ exactly. There was an understanding that if I blew for him this afternoon--old Brewer being laid up with the s.h.i.+ngles--he would take me through that tenor part in the new _Venite Exultemus_. It's tricky, and yesterday morning I slurred it horribly."

"Tc'ht! A man of your education blowing an organ, and for nothing!

If there was any money in it one wouldn't mind so much. . . . But you let yourself be put upon by anybody."

Mr. Simeon was silent. He knew that to defend himself would be to court a wrangle, reproaches, tears perhaps, all unseemly before the children; and, moreover, what his wife said was more than half deserved.

"Daddy, why _don't_ you write a play?" demanded the five-year-old Agatha. "And then mammy would have a carriage, and I'd go to a real boarding-school with canaries in the window like they have at Miss d.i.c.kinson's."

The meal over, Mr. Simeon stole away to the Cathedral. He was unhappy; and as he pa.s.sed through Friars' Gateway into the Close, the sight of the minster, majestical above its green garth, for once gave no lift to his spirit. The great central tower rose against a sky of clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or perched on niche and corbel. But fort.i.tude and aspiration alike had deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life--hard life and poverty--had subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?" A thousand thousand such as Mr. Simeon had listened or lifted their voice to its anthems--had aspired for the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at rest. Where now were all their emotions? He entered by a side-door of the western porch. The immense, solemn nave, if it did not catch his thoughts aloft, at least hushed them in awe. To Mr. Simeon Merchester Cathedral was a pa.s.sion, nearer, if not dearer, than wife or children.

He had arrived ten minutes ahead of the appointed time. As he walked towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen. He supposed it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at the coffins above the canopy.

"And is King Alfred really up there?--the one that burnt the cakes?-- and if so, which?" Corona was asking, too eager to think of grammar.

Brother Copas shrugged his shoulders.

"What's left of him is up there somewhere."

'Here are sands, ign.o.ble things Dropped from the ruined sides of kings.'

"--But the Parliament troopers broke open the coffins and mixed the dust sadly. The Latin says so. '_In this and the neighbouring chests_' (or caskets, as you say in America), '_confounded in a time of Civil Fury, reposes what dust is left of_--' Ah, good afternoon, Mr. Simeon! This young lady has laid forcible hands on me to give her an object-lesson in English history. Do you, who know ten times more of the Cathedral than I, come to my aid."

"If you are looking for King Alfred," answered Mr. Simeon, beaming on Corona through his gla.s.ses, "there's a tradition that his dust lies in the second chest to the right . . . a tradition only.

No one really knows."

Corona s.h.i.+fted her position some six paces to the right, and tilted her gaze up at the coffer as though she would crick her neck.

"Aye, missie"--Mr. Simeon still beamed--"they're up there, the royal ones--Dane and Norman and Angevin; and not one to match the great Anglo-Saxon that was father of us all."

Brother Copas grunted impatiently.

"My good Simeon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! G.o.d forbid that one should decry such a man as Alfred was. But the pedantry of Freeman and his sect, who tried to make 'English' a conterminous name and subst.i.tute for 'Anglo-Saxon,' was only by one degree less offensive than the ignorance of your modern journalist who degrades Englishmen by writing them down (or up, the poor fool imagines) as Anglo-Saxons. In truth, King Alfred was a n.o.ble fellow. No one in history has struggled more pluckily to rekindle fire in an effete race or to put spirit into an effete literature by pretending that both were of the prime."

"Come, come," murmured Mr. Simeon, smiling. "I see you are off upon one of your hobbies. . . . But you will not tell me that the fine rugged epic of _Beowulf_, to which the historians trace back all that is n.o.blest in our poetry, had lost its generative impulse even so early as Alfred's time. That were too extravagant!"

"_Brekekekex, ten brink, ten brink!_" snapped Brother Copas.

"All the frogs in chorus around Charon's boat! Fine rugged fiddlestick--have you ever read _Beowulf_?"

"In translation only."

"You need not be ashamed of labour saved. I once spent a month or two in mastering Anglo-Saxon, having a suspicion of Germans when they talk about English literature, and a deeper suspicion of English critics who ape them. Then I tackled _Beowulf_, and found it to be what I guessed--no rugged national epic at all, but a blown-out bag of bookishness. Impulse? Generative impulse?--the thing is wind, I tell you, without sap or sinew, the production of some conscientious Anglo-Saxon whose blue eyes, no doubt, watered with the effort of inflating it. I'll swear it never drew a human tear otherwise. . . .

That's what the whole Anglo-Saxon race had become when Alfred arose to galvanise 'em for a while--a herd of tall, flabby, pale-eyed men, who could neither fight, build, sing, nor enforce laws. And so our England--wise as Austria in mating--turned to other nuptials and married William the Norman. Behold then a new breed; the country covered with st.u.r.dy, bullet-headed, energetic fellows, who are no sooner born than they fly to work--hammers going, scaffolds climbing; cities, cathedrals springing up by magic; and all to a new song that came with some imported workmen from the Provence--"

'Quan la douss' aura venta Deves vostre pays'--

"And so--pop!--down the wind goes your p.r.i.c.ked bladder of a _Beowulf_: down the wind that blows from the Mediterranean, whence the arts and the best religions come."

Mr. Simeon rubbed the side of his jaw thoughtfully.

"Ah," said he, "I remember Master Blanchminster saying something of the sort the other day. He was talking of wine."

"Yes--the best religions and the best wine: they go together.

Could ever an Anglo-Saxon have built _that_, think you?" demanded Brother Copas with a backward jerk of the head and glance up at the vaulted roof. "But to my moral.--All this talk of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and the rest is rubbish. We are English by chemical action of a score of interfused bloods. That man is a fool who speaks as though, at this point of time, they could be separated: had he the power to put his nonsense into practice he would be a wicked fool.

And so I say, Mr. Simeon, that the Roundheads--no pure Anglo-Saxon, by the way, ever had a round head--who mixed up the dead dust in the caskets aloft there, were really leaving us a sound historical lesson--"

But here Mr. Simeon turned at the sound of a brisk footstep.

Dr. Windeatt had just entered by the western door.

"You'll excuse me? I promised the Doctor to blow the organ for him."

"Do people blow upon organs?" asked Corona, suddenly interested.

"I thought they played upon them the same as pianos, only with little things that pulled out at the sides."

"Come and see," Mr. Simeon invited her, smiling.

The three went around to the back of the organ loft. By and by when Mr. Simeon began to pump, and after a minute, a quiet _adagio_, rising upon a throb of air, stole along the aisles as though an angel spoke in it, or the very spirit of the building, tears sprang into the child's eyes and overflowed. She supposed that Mr. Simeon alone was working this miracle. . . . Blinking more tears away, she stared at him, meeting his mild, half-quizzical gaze as he stooped and rose and stooped again over the bellows.

Brother Copas, touching her elbow, signed to her to come away.

She obeyed, very reluctantly. By a small doorway in the southern aisle she followed him out into the suns.h.i.+ne of the Cathedral Close.

"But how does he do it?" she demanded. "He doesn't look a bit as if he could do anything like that--not in repose."

Brother Copas eyed her and took snuff. "He and the like of him don't touch the stops, my dear. He and the like of him do better; they supply the afflatus."

O ye holy and humble Men of heart, bless ye the Lord: praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!

Mr. Simeon worked mechanically, heaving and pressing upon the bellows of the great organ. His mind ran upon Master Copas's disparagement of _Beowulf_ and the Anglo-Saxons. It was ever the trouble that he remembered an answer for Brother Copas after Brother Copas had gone.

. . . Why had he not bethought him to cite Caedmon, at any rate, against that sweeping disparagement? How went the story?--

Caedmon was a lay brother, a tender of cattle at the Abbey of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda who founded it. Until somewhat spent in years he had never learnt any poems. Therefore at a feast, when all sang in turn, so soon as he saw the harp coming near him, he would rise and leave the table and go home.

Once when he had gone thus from the feast to the stables, where he had night-charge of the beasts, as he yielded himself to sleep One stood over him and said, greeting him by name, "Caedmon, sing some song to me." "I cannot sing," he said, "and for this cause left I the feast." "But you shall sing to me,"

said the Vision. "Lord, what shall I sing?" "Sing the Creation," said the Vision. Caedmon sang, and in the morning remembered what he had sung . . .

"If this indeed happened to Caedmon, and late in life" (mused Mr.

Simeon, heaving on the bellows of the great organ), "might not even some such miracle befall me?"

Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place where Thine honour dwelleth.

"I might even write a play," thought Mr. Simeon.

CHAPTER XII.

MR. ISIDORE TAKES CHARGE.

"Uncle Copas," said Corona, as the two pa.s.sed out through the small doorway in the southern aisle and stood blinking in the suns.h.i.+ne, "I want you next to show me what's left of the old Castle where the kings lived: that is, if you're not tired."