wisdom he needed to live by. She had told him what he was, and what he should try to be, and how to be it. And crying, still crying, he had promised that he would try.
âAnd the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes,â said Mr Pelvey, âfor our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.â
And had he kept his promise, Gumbril wondered, had he preserved himself alive?
âHere endeth the First Lesson.â Mr Pelvey retreated from the eagle and the organ presaged the coming
Te Deum
.
Gumbril hoisted himself to his feet; the folds of his B.A. gown billowed nobly about himself as he rose. He sighed and shook his head with the gesture of one who tries to shake off a fly or an importunate thought. When the time came for singing, he sang. On the opposite side of the chapel two boys were grinning and whispering to one another behind their lifted Prayer Books. Gumbril frowned at them ferociously. The two boys caught his eye and their faces at once took on an expression of sickly piety; they began to sing with unction. They were two ugly, stupid-looking louts, who ought to have been apprenticed years ago to some useful trade. Instead of which they were wasting their own and their teacherâs and their more intelligent comradesâ time in trying, quite vainly, to acquire an elegant literary education. The minds of dogs, Gumbril reflected, do not benefit by being treated as though they were the minds of men.
âO Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us.â
Gumbril shrugged his shoulders and looked round the chapel at the faces of the boys. Lord, indeed, have mercy upon us! He was disturbed to find the sentiment echoed on a somewhat different note in the Second Lesson, which was drawn from the twenty-third chapter of St Luke. âFather, forgive them,â said Mr Pelvey in his unvaryingly juicy voice; âfor they know not what they do.â Ah, but suppose one did know what one was doing? suppose one knew only too well? And of course one always did know. One was not a fool.
But this was all nonsense, all nonsense. One must think of something better than this. What a comfort it would be, for example, if one could bring air cushions into chapel! These polished oaken stalls were devilishly hard; they were meant for stout and lusty pedagogues, not for bony starvelings like himself. An air cushion, a delicious pneu.
âHere endeth,â boomed Mr Pelvey, closing his book on the back of the German eagle.
As if by magic, Dr Jolly was ready at the organ with the
Benedictus.
It was positively a relief to stand again; this oak was adamantine. But air cushions, alas, would be too bad an example for the boys. Hardy young Spartans! it was an essential part of their education that they should listen to the word of revelation without pneumatic easement. No, air cushions wouldnât do. The real remedy, it suddenly flashed across his mind, would be trousers with pneumatic seats. For all occasions; not merely for church-going.
The organ blew a thin Puritan-preacherâs note through one of its hundred nostrils. âI believe . . .â With a noise like the breaking of a wave, five hundred turned towards the East. The view of David and Goliath was exchanged for a Crucifixion in the grand manner of eighteen hundred and sixty. âFather, forgive them; for they know not what they do.â No, no Gumbril preferred to look at the grooved stonework rushing smoothly up on either side of the great east window towards the vaulted roof; preferred to reflect, like the dutiful son of an architect he was, that Perpendicular at its best â and its best is its largest â is the finest sort of English Gothic. At its worst and smallest, as in most of the colleges of Oxford, it is mean, petty, and, but for a certain picturesqueness, almost wholly disgusting. He felt like a lecturer: next slide, please. âAnd the life everlasting. Amen.â Like an oboe,