Arnold Bennett - Arnold Bennett - Buried Alive, The Old Wives' Tale & The Card (3 Books in One Edition)

Priam was glad of that.

"Well, I'm dashed!" he reflected, handling the ticket for the nave.

There it was, large, glossy, real as life.

In the vast nave there were relatively few people--that is to say, a few hundred, who had sufficient room to move easily to and fro under the eyes of officials. Priam Farll had been admitted through the cloisters, according to the direction printed on the ticket. In his nervous fancy, he imagined that everybody must be gazing at him suspiciously, but the fact was that he occupied the attention of no one at all. He was with the unprivileged, on the wrong side of the massive screen which separated the nave from the packed choir and transepts, and the unprivileged are never interested in themselves; it is the privileged who interest them. The organ was wafting a melody of Purcell to the furthest limits of the Abbey. Round a roped space a few ecclesiastical uniforms kept watch over the ground that would be the tomb. The sunlight of noon beat and quivered in long lances through crimson and blue windows. Then the functionaries began to form an aisle among the spectators, and emotion grew tenser. The organ was silent for a moment, and when it recommenced its song the song was the supreme expression of human grief, the dirge of Chopin, wrapping the whole cathedral in heavy folds of sorrow. And as that appeal expired in the pulsating air, the fresh voices of little boys, sweeter even than grief, rose in the distance.

It was at this point that Priam Farll descried Lady Sophia Entwistle, a tall, veiled figure, in full mourning. She had come among the comparatively unprivileged to his funeral. Doubtless influence such as hers could have obtained her a seat in the transept, but she had preferred the secluded humility of the nave. She had come from Paris for his funeral. She was weeping for her affianced. She stood there, actually within ten yards of him. She had not caught sight of him, but she might do so at any moment, and she was slowly approaching the spot where he trembled.

He fled, with nothing in his heart but resentment against her. She had not proposed to him; he had proposed to her. She had not thrown him aside; he had thrown her aside. He was not one of her mistakes; she was one of his mistakes. Not she, but he, had been capricious, impulsive, hasty. Yet he hated her. He genuinely thought she had sinned against him, and that she ought to be exterminated. He condemned her for all manner of things as to which she had had no choice: for instance, the irregularity of her teeth, and the hollow under her chin, and the little tricks of deportment which are always developed by a spinster as she reaches forty. He fled in terror of her. If she should have a glimpse of him, and should recognize him, the consequence would be absolutely disastrous--disastrous in every way; and a period of publicity would dawn for him such as he could not possibly contemplate either in cold blood or warm. He fled blindly, insinuating himself through the crowd, until he reached a grille in which was a gate, ajar. His strange stare must have affrighted the guardian of the gate, for the robed fellow stood away, and Priam passed within the grille, where were winding steps, which he mounted. Up the steps ran coils of fire-hose. He heard the click of the gate as the attendant shut it, and he was thankful for an escape. The steps led to the organ-loft, perched on the top of the massive screen. The organist was seated behind a half-drawn curtain, under shaded electric lights, and on the ample platform whose parapet overlooked the choir were two young men who whispered with the organist. None of the three even glanced at Priam. Priam sat down on a windsor chair fearfully, like an intruder, his face towards the choir.

The whispers ceased; the organist's fingers began to move over five rows of notes, and over scores of stops, while his feet groped beneath, and Priam heard music, afar off. And close behind him he heard rumblings, steamy vibrations, and, as it were, sudden escapes of gas; and comprehended that these were the hoarse responses of the 32 and 64 foot pipes, laid horizontally along the roof of the screen, to the summoning fingers of the organist. It was all uncanny, weird, supernatural, demoniacal if you will--it was part of the secret and unsuspected mechanism of a vast emotional pageant and spectacle. It unnerved Priam, especially when the organist, a handsome youngish man with lustrous eyes, half turned and winked at one of his companions.

The thrilling voices of the choristers grew louder, and as they grew louder Priam Farll was conscious of unaccustomed phenomena in his throat, which shut and opened of itself convulsively. To divert his attention from his throat, he partially rose from the windsor chair, and peeped over the parapet of the screen into the choir, whose depths were candlelit and whose altitudes were capriciously bathed by the intermittent splendours of the sun. High, high up, in front of him, at the summit of a precipice of stone, a little window, out of the sunshine, burned sullenly in a gloom of complicated perspectives. And far below, stretched round the pulpit and disappearing among the forest of statuary in the transept, was a floor consisting of the heads of the privileged--famous, renowned, notorious, by heredity, talent, enterprise, or hazard; he had read many of their names in the Daily Telegraph . The voices of the choristers had become piercing in their beauty. Priam frankly stood up, and leaned over the parapet. Every gaze was turned to a point under him which he could not see. And then something swayed from beneath into the field of his vision. It was a tall cross borne by a beadle. In the wake of the cross there came to view gorgeous ecclesiastics in pairs, and then a robed man walking backwards and gesticulating in the manner of some important, excited official of the Salvation Army; and after this violet robe arrived the scarlet choristers, singing to the beat of his gesture. And then swung into view the coffin, covered with a heavy purple pall, and on the pall a single white cross; and the pall-bearers--great European names that had hurried out of the corners of Europe as at a peremptory mandate--with Duncan Farll to complete the tale!

Was it the coffin, or the richness of its pall, or the solitary whiteness of its cross of flowers, or the august authority of the bearers, that affected Priam Farll like a blow on the heart? Who knows? But the fact was that he could look no more; the scene was too much for him. Had he continued to look he would have burst uncontrollably into tears. It mattered not that the corpse of a common rascally valet lay under that pall; it mattered not that a grotesque error was being enacted; it mattered not whether the actuating spring of the immense affair was the Dean's water-colouring niece or the solemn deliberations of the Chapter; it mattered not that newspapers had ignobly misused the name and honour of art for their own advancement--the instant effect was overwhelmingly impressive. All that had been honest and sincere in the heart of England for a thousand years leapt mystically up and made it impossible that the effect should be other than overwhelmingly impressive. It was an effect beyond argument and reason; it was the magic flowering of centuries in a single moment, the silent awful sigh of a nation's saecular soul. It took majesty and loveliness from the walls around it, and rendered them again tenfold. It left nothing common, neither the motives nor the littleness of men. In Priam's mind it gave dignity to Lady Sophia Entwistle, and profound tragedy to the death of Leek; it transformed even the gestures of the choir-leader into grave commands.

And all that was for him! He had brushed pigments on to cloth in a way of his own, nothing more, and the nation to which he had always denied artistic perceptions, the nation which he had always fiercely accused of sentimentality, was thus solemnizing his committal to the earth! Divine mystery of art! The large magnificence of England smote him! He had not suspected his own greatness, nor England's.