III.—THE PEACEMAKERS

And yet within a couple of months the last rumble of the threatened disturbance had passed away.

This is how the status quo ante bellum was restored:

The offending Canon was in the habit of confiding in his supporters his feeling of sorrow that none of his clerical brethren had the manliness to follow his example and read the Lessons as they should be read: he had quite believed, he said, that in a short time the slovenly, monotonous reader would have ceased to appear at the lectern; he was greatly disappointed.

But one Sunday an elderly Prebendary astonished every one by “putting on” two separate and distinct voices in reading the First Lesson. It was the chapter in which Moses pleads for the Children of Israel when their destruction is threatened by the Almighty. Now it will be plain to any one that to treat this duologue in an elocutionary style requires a delicacy of touch of the rarest sort; but unhappily the reader seemed to have the idea that all that was necessary to deal with the most important passages effectively was to deliver them in two voices, and this scheme he adopted. The one voice was that of a good-natured gentleman taking the part of naughty schoolboys who had been caught robbing the orchard of an irascible old farmer; the second voice was that of the irascible old farmer who had cornered them and had sent one of his staff for a dog whip.

The effect was startling at first. It seemed as if the clergyman had seen Irving in The Lyons Mail'' and thought he could not improve greatly upon the method of the actor in the dual rôle—speaking in the mild accents of the amiable Lesurges on the one hand and in the gruff staccato of Dubose on the other. At first this touch of realism was startling, but as it went on it became queer, then funny, and at last it had the element that made its emphatic appeal to most hearers, that of burlesque. Some of the congregation were shocked: they had no idea that “God spake these words and said” in the tone of a testy old gentleman. Others were frankly amused and showed it without reticence; and the entertainment closed with the giggling of choir-boys.

The Second Lesson was read by Canon Mowbray in a very subdued way. Contrary to the expectation of a good many people, he made no attempt to match himself in realistic effects against the Prebendary; and when during the week remarks were made in his hearing respecting that member of the Chapter and his elocution, he only shook his head sadly. The other members of the Chapter could do no more. When an elderly clergyman has made a fool of himself within the precincts of his church people can only shake their heads.

But the next Sunday the congregation who crowded the Minster at the afternoon service shook not only their heads but their bodies also in their decorous but wholly ineffectual attempts to smother their laughter while the Prebendary read a chapter in the Book of Ruth which necessitated, he thought, full orchestral treatment. He clearly saw the parts for a basso, a tenor, a soprano, and a contralto, and he set himself about doing all four by subtle modulations of his voice. Now, people do not as a rule mind a middle-aged parson's putting on a gruff voice when reading what a man said, or going up an octave or so when assuming the dialogue of a milder-mannered man; but when he puts on a falsetto, and a very high falsetto, when he essays to reproduce the words of a woman, and occasionally breaks in an attempt to lay the emphasis on the right words, the most decorous of folk will either laugh or weep—and the great majority of the worshippers in the old Minster this day did the former. Quite a number hurried from the Sacred Fane with their handkerchiefs held close to their mouths. But once outside——

That was how the scandal which threatened to make Broadminster Chapter a house divided against itself was dispersed. It was obvious that the Minster was too antique a place to be made the scene of so great an innovation as Canon Mowbray had attempted to introduce, and he at once fell back into the recognised monotone, with a suspicion of the sing-song rising and falling from sentence to sentence in his reading of the Lessons, and the Prebendary once more followed his example; and so the plague—or worse—was stayed.

But the general impression that prevailed throughout Broadminster when the whole question of the innovation was discussed was that that middle-aged Prebendary had not gone very far in making a fool of himself. They had heard of a potent form of argument technically known as reductio ad absurdum, but they had never before had so signal an instance of its successful operation.