I wonder how old he is, and what he does!

CHAPTER XIII

WHITSUNTIDE EXPERIENCES

New sensations have elbowed and jostled each other to secure my special attention this Whitsuntide, until I have been positively alarmed for my mental equilibrium. The good people here seem so sedate on ordinary occasions that one fails to realise that after all there is a good deal of the peac.o.c.k and the kitten in the make-up of many of them; but Whitsuntide reveals this.

The peac.o.c.k in them manifests itself as they strut up and down in new clothing of brilliant dye, affecting an unconsciousness and unconcern which deceives n.o.body. The shocks I received during that memorable Sunday, when the village turned out in its new finery, I still experience, like the after-tremors of an earthquake.

Pray do not imagine that Windyridge knows nothing of the rule of fashion. Every mother's daughter, though not every daughter's mother, owns her sway and is her devoted subject. If the imperious Dame bids her votaries hobble, the Windyridge belle limps awkwardly to and fro--on Sundays and feast days--in proud and painful obedience, heedless of the unconcealed sneers and contempt of her elders. If headgear after the form of the beehive or the castle of the termite ant is decreed, she counts it a joy, like any fashionable lady of fortune, to suffer the eclipse of her good looks under the vilest monstrosity the milliner's ingenuity can devise. Ah, me! How fine a line, after all, divides Windyridge from Mayfair!

The kitten in them gambols and makes fun whole-heartedly for several hours at a stretch on the afternoon of Whit Monday, and with such kindliness and good humour that one cannot help feeling that the world is very young and one's self not so very old either.

I thought the rain was going to spoil everything. Day by day for a week it had come down with a steady determination that seemed to mean the ruin of holiday prospects. The foliage certainly looked all the fresher for it, and the ash took heart to burst its black buds and help to swell the harmony of the woods. But these are aesthetic considerations which do not appeal to people who are looking forward to a good time--a time of fun and frolic for some, and harvesting of shekels for others.

When I woke on the Sunday, however, old Father Sol had shaken off his lethargy, bundled the surly clouds into the store-room, locked the door and put the key into his pocket, and strolled forth to enjoy the sight of his welcome. Meadow, pasture and moor, green hedgerow and brown road were silvered over with sunshine, and the flowers looked up and laughed the tears away from their faces, and told themselves that everything had been for the best; and the c.o.c.ks crowed l.u.s.tily from the walls where they had flown to greet the sun, and all the birds came out from eave and tree and lowly nest, and sang their doxology in happy and tuneful notes which told how brimful they were of joy.

Long before church-time it was so hot that the fields were steaming like drying clothes before the fire, and as I walked back from Fawkshill after the morning service I felt sure that there need be no misgiving about the dryness of the gra.s.s for the children's treat on the morrow. Everybody was concerned for the children! Young women of eighteen and young men of the same age had no real concern or interest in the weather except in so far as it involved disappointment to the children! Well, well! How easily we deceive ourselves, and how unwilling we are to acknowledge the child within the man!

In the afternoon I went to chapel with Mother Hubbard, and saw and heard that which made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, and I really do not know why I should have done either. My emotions seem to take holiday sometimes and enjoy themselves in their own peculiar way without restraint. Let me set down my experiences.

Do you know what a "sitting-up" is? If you live in Yorkshire or Lancashire no doubt you do, but if you are a southerner or a more northern northerner the probability is that you do not. When Mother Hubbard told me that the children were to "sit up" at the chapel on Whit Sunday I stared at her without understanding. "Do they usually stand up or lie down?" I inquired.

Then it occurred to me that this was, perhaps, a metaphorical way of speaking, and that there was, so to speak, a "rod in pickle" for the bairns on this special occasion, but why I could not imagine. Yet I knew that when an irate Windyridge father undertook to make his lad "sit up," it usually betokened some little difficulty in sitting at all until the soreness wore off.

This, however, foreboded nothing of so unpleasant a nature. When I entered the light and airy little sanctuary I found thirty or forty children ranged in rows one above the other, in front of the little pulpit. Not many boys were there, and there was nothing specially attractive about those who were, beyond the attractiveness that lurks within the face of every cleanly-washed child. But the girls were a picture; they were all in white, but most of them had coloured sashes round their waists, and coloured ribbons in their hair, and one or two were distinguished by black adornments, betokening the recent visit of that guest who is so seldom regarded as a friend.

Some of the frocks were new, but most of them were old; and it is safe to a.s.sume that the younger children were wearing what had served the turn of a past generation of "sitters-up." In some cases they were so inadequate to the requirements of the long-limbed, growing maidens who wore them, that it cannot be denied that the dresses "sat up" even more than their owners, so that the white cotton stockings were taxed to the utmost to maintain conventional decency.

To listen to the children's performances, rather than to the address of the preacher, the chapel was uncomfortably crowded by what the handbills called "parents, relatives and friends."

The door was wide open, and my eyes often strayed to it before the service began, for it framed a picture of yellow meadows and waving trees, of brown moorland and ultramarine sky, with drowsy cattle in the pastures a hundred feet below, which seemed strangely unfamiliar, and rather reminiscent of something I had once seen or dreamed of, than of what I looked upon every day of my life. The explanation is simple enough, of course. I saw just a _panel_ of the landscape, and with limited vision the eye observed more clearly and found the beauty of the scene intensified.

But when the prayer was ended--a rather long and wearisome one, to my thinking, on such a fine day, when all nature was offering praise so cheerily--the children's part began.

They sang children's hymns, the simple hymns I had sung myself as a child, which I hope all English-speaking Christian children sing: the hymns which belong to the English language and to no one church, but are broad enough to embrace all creeds, and tender enough to move all hearts, and which must find an echo in the Higher Temple, where thousands of children stand around the throne of G.o.d.

A wee la.s.sie of five stood up to sing alone. As the thin, childish voice rose and fell my heart began to beat fast, and I looked at the fair little head through a veil of tears. They made an aureole which transformed Roger Treffit's firstborn into a heavenly cherub, and I was carried into that exalted state when imperfect speech and neglected aspirates are forgotten:

"Jesus, tender Shep'erd 'ear me: Bless Thy little lamb to-night; Through the darkness be Thou near me; Keep me safe till mornin' light."

Was there one present who did not at that moment feel very near to the sheep-fold of the Good Shepherd? I am a Churchwoman, and by training and a.s.sociation inclined to look distrustfully upon Dissent, but that child's lispingly tuneful prayer taught me that I was in the House of G.o.d; for surely I know at the heart of me that neither in the Catholic mountain nor the Anglican Jerusalem is G.o.d solely to be worshipped, but wherever men seek Him in spirit and in truth; and this afternoon a little child was leading us.

"All this day Thy 'and has led me.

And I thank Thee for Thy care; Thou 'ast clothed me, warmed an' fed me; Listen to my evenin' prayer."

It was not evening, for the sun was still high in the heavens and the shadows short upon the earth; but He with whom the night and the morning are one day heard and understood, I do not doubt.

Without a pause the sweet voice went on:

"Let my sins be all forgiven; Bless the friends I love so well; Take me, when I die, to 'eaven, 'Appy there with Thee to dwell."

Amen and amen, dear little Lucy! Surely no stain of sin as yet has darkened your soul, but the thought of the good Lord who "forgiveth iniquity, transgression and sin" cannot come to us too soon. Let it sink into the plastic wax of your memory and your heart, and harden into certainty, and then when the time comes for you to die--whether the day be near or distant--it will be well with you, "happy there with Thee to dwell!"

There were other solos, but none which moved me like this of little Lucy's, and there were recitations by two of the boys which affected an entirely different compartment of my emotions.

They were highly moral pieces, I know, and they exhorted us to a course of conduct which must have been beneficial if followed; the trouble was that the eye had so much employment that the ear was neglected and so missed its opportunities.

Each boy licked his lips vigorously to start with, and then glued his eyes upon one fixed spot, as if he saw the words in bold type there.

If he did, an invisible compositor had set them up in the west window for the one lad, and on a corner of the ceiling for the other. The swiftness with which the words came out reminded me of a brakeless gramophone running at top speed; and it made the performers gasp for breath, which they dared hardly stop to renew lest memory should take wings and fly away. I am sure I was relieved when the final bob to the congregation was reached and the contortions ended.

The address was tedious, like the prayer, but fortunately it was not long; then the preacher came in to tea, it being Mother Hubbard's turn to entertain him.

The chapel people take the preachers according to an arranged plan with which they are all familiar. My old lady regards the privilege as in the nature of a heavenly endowment, and she has more than once reminded me that those who show hospitality to G.o.d's ministers sometimes entertain angels unawares. No doubt that is so, but the wings were very, very inconspicuous in the one who ate our b.u.t.tered toast that Sunday.

All the same he is, I am sure, a very good man, and a man of large and cheerful self-sacrifice which calls for admiration and respect, and I do sincerely honour him; and it is no fault of his that his great big hands are deeply seamed over their entire surface, and that the crevices are filled with black. He works, I discovered, at an iron-foundry, and I believe his hands were really as clean as soap and water could make them. But when all has been said, he need not have spread them over all the plate whenever he helped himself to another slice of bread, and he might just as well have taken the first piece he touched. I suppose I am squeamish, but I cannot help it. I found some amus.e.m.e.nt in pressing him to eat all he had touched, however, and seeing that he did it.

His conversation was chiefly remarkable for the use he made of the phrase "as it were." Mother Hubbard regards him as a genius, but I doubt if he is anything more than an intelligent eccentric. It must have been his flow of language which got him "on the plan" that is to say, into the ranks of the local preachers of the Wesleyan Church--for, like the brook, he could "go on for ever."

He is a tall, heavy man, perhaps fifty years of age, with a ma.s.s of hair upon his head but none upon his face, except where thick eyebrows hang like brushwood over the twin caverns of his eyes. As he speaks he raises his right hand and holds the palm towards you, moving it slowly to and fro for emphasis, and he measures his words as he goes along.

He was describing his experiences in a new chapel where he had recently preached, a gothic building, "more like a church, as it were, than a chapel."

"Ah yes, Mrs. Hubbard," he said (he never addressed me direct, perhaps because he suspected that I was not one of the confraternity), "I always mistrust a chapel with a spire to it; and the spirit of Methodism, as it were, cannot dwell in transepts or chancels. There is not the heartiness, not the freedom, which we a.s.sociate with our chapels. The air is heavy, as it were, with the spirit of sacerdotalism. Why, ma'am, at this particular chapel--church, they call it--they had choir stalls, filled with men and boys, and a liturgical service, as it were. Ah yes! No sound of 'Hallelujah!' or 'Praise the Lord!' escaped the lips of the devout worshipper. They were stifled stillborn, as it were. It was cold, ma'am, cold and formal; John Wesley would never have found his heart strangely warmed in such an atmosphere. No!

"And yet, ma'am, there was something in the arrangements that stirred my feelings, as it were. Here, on my right hand, were grouped the scholars; children in the springtime of life, as it were. Yes! it was a moving sight, ma'am, to a man of feeling." (I wickedly thought of his hands.) "Life was before them--spread out like a map, as it were, with nothing but the outline; or like a copy-book which would be soiled and disfigured with many blots, as it were, before the end was reached.

Yes!

"And on my left were the elders of the flock, gathered there, I was told, because the acoustic properties, as it were, are excellent in the transepts: the grey-headed sires, who had almost fought through the battle and were now awaiting the recall, as it were. Men and women in the late evening of life, as it were, who would soon pa.s.s behind the sunset.

"And in front of me were the middle-aged, those who were bearing the burden and heat of the day, as it were. Yes! labourers in life's vineyard; earning their bread in the sweat of their brow, going forth to their work until the evening, as it were.

"Yes! And as I looked upon them, young and middle-aged and old, I said to myself in the language of the preacher: 'All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.'--Ecclesiastes iii. 20, ma'am."

I got up and went into the garden, and filled my nostrils with the fragrance which earth was sending to heaven--as it were--and felt better.

Whit Monday was a hard day for me. After dinner my Easter experiences were repeated, and sitters came thick and fast. I really believe my work is giving satisfaction, for some of my last holiday customers had sent their friends to be "taken"; and some called themselves to say "How d'ye do?"

Nothing eventful transpired, however, and no Cynic turned up to disturb the serenity of my temper with sarcastic observations upon women, so I climbed the hill at the back of the house and joined the merry throng of school-children who were having a jolly time with their elders in a field at the top. And there I forgot my tiredness, and romped for a couple of hours with the wildest of them, having as much of the kitten in me as most folk.

When the red had finally died out of the western sky the dustman came round, and the eyes of the little ones grew heavy. But the grown-ups were enjoying themselves far too much to think of leaving so soon, so I gathered the infants around me and told them all the wonderful stories which had been locked away in the dusty cabinets of my memory. Not the ordinary nursery tales, which are as well known in Windyridge as in Westminster, but some of the simpler records of Greek mythology, and extracts from the lives of the saints.