Pat McIntosh: The Nicholas Feast

Whatever setting they were using, it was being dominated by the first alto line, sung in a confident, rich head-voice slightly ahead of the other singers, and Gil was not surprised to find as his eyes adjusted to the dimness that the singer was the same red-haired William.

‘Listen to the little toad,’ muttered Maister Kennedy at his shoulder. ‘What did I say? He sings like an angel. That cousin of his would be quite good if William wasny there.’

‘Hush,’ said the Second Regent. ‘Later.’

Maister Kennedy snorted, but held his peace. The Mass wore on, and the light at the chapel’s tiny round-headed windows faded, brightened, faded again. When the door was finally dragged open and the Faculty stood back for the senior members to leave, the same group of students was revealed waiting to hand out dripping branches of hawthorn improbably decked with bunches of daisies.

‘Christ aid!’ said Maister Kennedy. ‘We’ll be soaked. The University will be wiped out, for we’ll all be dead of lung-rot.’

Gil, looking over the heads of the congregation, was watching William. The boy seemed exalted, his bony face flushed, his eyes glittering as if he had stepped into a new life. He handed a branch of wet leaves to the Principal, with a murmured comment which brought Maister Doby’s head round sharply. William smiled broadly, and moved on to present another bough to John Shaw the Steward. Maister Shaw, attempting to oversee the green boughs as well as the horse-holders, waved him aside impatiently, and got another murmured remark. He shook his head angrily, and William moved away, looking down his nose. The Steward paused almost fearfully to look at his retreating back.

‘The more people are present,’ said Patrick Coventry behind him, ‘the longer it takes, in a kind of geometric progression.’

‘You mean two people take more than twice as long?’ Gil prompted absently. William had moved out of sight now.

‘Two people take four times as long, and three people take nine times.’

‘This means there must be a limit to the numbers for an event like this,’ said Gil, thinking about it, ‘or we would reach a point where it took so long to get everyone mounted that the older members would have succumbed to their years before the procession moved off.’

‘We may have reached that already,’ Maister Coventry observed.

‘What are you two talking about?’ asked Maister Kennedy. ‘Are we to be here all day?’

Achieving the door, Gil stepped out into the sunshine, received a dripping branch from the very young treble, and got back on his horse, remarking to the Second Regent, ‘I feel we will get wet if we are here much longer.’

Patrick Coventry, eyeing the black clouds piling up above the houses of the Chanonry, nodded agreement.

‘It looks like thunder, indeed. I think we will move off soon. And when we get back we make one more procession on foot, right round the outer court and into the Lang Schule — ’

One of the students attending the Beadle worked his way through the throng under the hawthorn branches, looking harassed and saying, in alternate Latin and Scots, ‘Places, please, maisters! Order of precedence, maisters! Places, please!’

‘- for the Faculty meeting, to ensure that we are at peace with one another and with the other faculties,’ quoted Patrick Coventry resolutely. ‘And then we have the feast and then, Heaven help us, we have the entertainment. I still think it should have been before the meeting.’

‘What, now?’ said Gil, startled. ‘I thought it was in the statutes — it’s supposed to be after the feast.’

‘Well,’ said Maister Coventry, ‘there was the year two of the Muses were sick, whether from excitement or over-eating, and ruined their costumes. There was the year the bejants got hold of a skin of wine by mistake, and the audience was full of drunken fourteen-year-olds. But I think what settled the matter in my mind was the year everyone who ate the aigre-douce of pork was out the back lined up for the privy and the play had to be abandoned. I’ve been arguing in favour of the Lang Schule before the feast for a year or two now. Perhaps we should take our places.’

The other graduates did likewise, the elderly members were helped back into the saddle, and straggling somewhat, the Faculty made its way down the length of the High Street to the Mercat Cross, rounded it, accompanied by occasional comments, ironic cheers and whistles from the burgesses of Glasgow whose Sunday business was being interrupted, and returned, past the Tolbooth, past the mason’s house, past Black-friars, to the college gateway.

Here they dismounted, and after some more milling about the procession formed up again on foot. Led by the Beadle, the Faculty made its stately way through the arched tunnel into the outer court of the college, once round the courtyard to the accompaniment of singing, and into the largest of the three lecture-rooms, where academic order of precedence broke into some rather unseemly jostling for seats on the long benches. Gil, finding himself an unobtrusive corner, was surprised to be joined by both Maister Kennedy and Maister Coventry.

‘Should you not be near the front?’ he asked. ‘Do you not intend to speak?’

‘I intend to sleep,’ said Maister Kennedy, ‘and anyway once the Dean gets going nobody else can get a word in.’

‘I remember,’ said Gil. ‘Full of fruyte and rethorikly pykit.’

‘You and your quotations,’ grumbled his friend. ‘Move up, will you, and let me in against the wall.’

When the Dean began to speak, Gil perceived the wisdom of this. It was a long speech, expounding the duties of a scholar, ornamented with illustrations, parables and epigrams. The masters listened with polite attention, except for Maister Kennedy. The students developed the glazed look of young men listening to speeches. Finally the Dean sat down, to polite applause, and Maister Forsyth spoke at rather less length, dwelling on only two of the scholarly duties which the Dean had enumerated. He should, he declared in elegant concise periods, treat all fellow scholars as his brothers, and love them accordingly; and he should regard the college where he was educated as his mother, and treat it with the respect due from a loving son.

‘He’s never met my minnie,’ said someone quietly near Gil, and someone else sniggered.

Maister Forsyth achieved his peroration and seated himself, to more enthusiastic applause. The Principal, in the lecturer’s pulpit, invited the rest of the Faculty to join in the discussion.

‘Not that you can call it a discussion,’ commented Maister Coventry, ‘since all the speakers are on the same side.’

In descending order of rank, Masters of Arts rose and delivered laboriously constructed speeches agreeing with the propositions already put forward. The youngest students, the bejants, became restless. Gil was aware of his stomach rumbling. Two rows in front of him, the red-haired alto appeared to be writing in his wax tablets, to judge by the cupped left hand just visible round his faded blue shoulder. Taking notes? Gil wondered.

‘I want my dinner,’ said Nick Kennedy, waking. ‘Where have we got to? Oh, it’s the magistrand. Not long now.’ He paused to listen to the raw-boned fourth-year student who was drawing a somewhat repetitious parallel between the care of a mother for her sons and that of the Faculty for its students, and turned to Gil. ‘Is that what it’s been about?’ he asked in sudden dismay. ‘The college as mother?’ Gil nodded. ‘Oh, fient hae it!’

‘What ails you, Nick?’ asked Maister Coventry across Gil.

‘The Dean has probably stolen all our best lines,’ said Maister Kennedy gloomily. ‘You’ll see. It’s too close by far to the theme of our play.’