he was of years calendared in unreflecting minds as tender years, and he was clothed in tough corduroy knickerbockers, once the habiliments of a huger being, reaching to the tops of some boots shod with tremendous nails and fastened by bits of fugitive string. his jacket was certainly the jacket of a child—possibly some dead one, for it was not his own—and in lieu of a collar behold a twist of uncoloured, unclean flannel. pink face, pink hands, yellow hair, a quite unredeemable dampness about his small nose—altogether he was a country boy.
“what are you doing there, tom prowse?” asked grainger, the sexton, entering to him suddenly one saturday afternoon. the boy was sitting on a bench in the empty nave, hands on knees, looking towards the altar. he rose to his feet and went timidly through the doorway under the stern glance of that tall tall man, whose height enabled him to look around out of a grave when it was completely dug. “you pop on out of ’ere,” said grainger, threateningly, but to himself, when the boy had gone.
walking into the vestry grainger emptied his pockets of a number of small discarded bottles and pots of various shapes and uses—ink bottles, bottles for gum[112] and meat extract, fish-paste pots, and tins which had contained candy. he left them there. the boy, after he had watched him go away, came back and resumed his seat behind one of the round piers.
a lady dressed in black entered and, walking to the front stall under the pulpit, knelt down. the boy stared at the motionless figure for a long time until his eyes ached and the intense silence made him cough a little. he was surprised at the booming hollow echo and coughed again. the lady continued bowed in her place; he could hear her lips whispering sibilantly: the wind came into the porch with sudden gust and lifted the arras at the door. turning he knocked his clumsy boots against the bench. after that the intense silence came back again, humming in his ears and almost stopping his breath, until he heard footsteps on the gravel path. the vicar’s maid entered and went towards the vestry. she wished to walk softly when she observed the kneeling lady but her left shoe squeaked stubbornly as she moved, and both heels and soles echoed in sharp tones along the tiles of the chancel. the boy heard the rattle of a bucket handle and saw the maid place the bucket beside the altar and fetch flowers and bottles and pots from the vestry. some she stood upon the table of the altar; others, tied by pieces of string, she hung in unique positions upon the front and sides, filling them with water from the pail as she did so; and because the string was white, and the altar was white, and the ugly bottles were hidden in nooks of moss, it looked as if the very cloth of the altar sprouted with casual bloom.
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not until the maid had departed did the lady who had been bowed so long lift up her head adoringly towards the brass cross; the boy overheard her deep sigh; then she, too, went away, and in a few moments more the boy followed and walked clumsily, thoughtfully, to his home.
his father was the village cobbler. he was a widower, and he was a freethinker too; no mere passive rejector of creeds, but an active opponent with a creed of his own, which if less violent was not less bigoted than those he so witheringly decried. the child tom had never been allowed to attend church; until today, thus furtively, he had never even entered one, and in the day school religious instruction had been forbidden by his atheistic father. but while faith goes on working its miracles the whirligigs of unfaith bring on revenges. the boy now began to pay many secret visits to the church. he would walk under the western tower and slip his enclosing palms up and down the woolly rope handles, listen to the slow beat of the clock, and rub with his wristband the mouldings of the brass lectern with the ugly bird on a ball and the three singular chubby animals at the foot, half ox, half dog, displaying monstrous teeth. he scrutinized the florid georgian memorial fixed up the wall, recording the virtues, which he could not read, of a departed rodney giles; made of marble, there were two naked fat little boys with wings; they pointed each with one hand towards the name, and with the other held a handkerchief each to one tearful eye. this was very agreeable to young prowse, but most he loved to[114] sit beside one of the pillars—the stone posties, he called them—and look at the window above the altar where for ever half a dozen angels postured rhythmically upon the ladder of jacob.
one midsummer evening, after evensong, he entered for his usual meditation. he had no liking for any service or ritual; he had no apprehension of the spiritual symbols embodied in the building; he only liked to sit there in the quiet, gazing at things in a dumb sort of way, taking, as it were, a bath of holiness. he sat a long time; indeed, so still was he, he might have been dozing as the legions of dead parishioners had dozed during interminable dead sermons. when he went to the door—the light having grown dim—he found it was locked. he was not at all alarmed at his situation: he went and sat down again. in ten minutes or so he again approached the door ... it was still locked. then he walked up the aisle to the chancel steps and crossed the choir for the first time. choristers’ robes were in the vestry, and soon, arrayed in cassock and surplice, he was walking with a singular little dignity to his old seat by one of the pillars. he sat there with folded hands, the church growing gloomier now; he climbed into the pulpit and turned over the leaves of the holy book; he sat in the choir stalls, pretended to play the organ, and at last went before the altar and, kneeling at the rails, clasped his orthodox hands and murmured, as he had heard others murmuring there, a rigmarole of his scholastic hours:
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thirty days hath september,
april, june and november.
all the rest have thirty-one,
excepting february alone,
and leap year coming once in four,
february then has one day more.
re-entering the vestry, he observed on a shelf in a niche a small loaf wrapped in a piece of linen. he felt hungry and commenced to devour the bread, and from a goblet there he drank a little sip of sweet tasting wine. he liked the wine very much, and drank more and more of it.
there was nothing else to be done now in the darkness, so he went on to the soft carpet within the altar rails, and, piling up a few of the praying mats from the choir—little red cushions they were, stamped with black fleur-de-lys, which he admired much in the daylight—he fell asleep.
and he slept long and deeply until out of some wonderful place he began to hear the word “ruffian, ruffian,” shouted with anger and harshness. he was pulled roughly to his feet, and apprehension was shaken into his abominable little head.
the morning sunlight was coming through the altar window, and the vicar’s appearance was many-coloured as a wheelwright’s door; he had a green face, and his surplice was scaled with pink and purple gouts like a rash from some dreadful rainbow. and dreadful indeed was the vicar as he thrust the boy down the altar[116] steps into the vestry, hissing as he did, “take off those things!” and darting back to throw the cushions into proper places to support the knees of the expected devotees.
“now, how did you get in here?” he demanded, angrily.
the boy hung up the cassock: “someone locked me in last night, sir.”
“who was it?”
“i dunno, sir, they locked me in all night.”
his interrogator glared at him for a moment in silence, and the boy could not forbear a yawn. thereat the vicar seized him by the ear and, pulling it with such animation as to contort his own features as well as the child’s, dragged him to the vestry door, gurgling with uncontrolled vexation, “get out of this. get out ... you ... you beast!”
as the boy went blinking down the nave the tenor bell began to ring; the stone posties looked serene and imperturbable in new clean sunlight, and that old blackbird was chirping sweetly in the lilac at the porch.
