The notes lie anyhow under the hand, but Mr. Corby cleverly simplified it still further. By turning most of the crotchets into minims, he could reduce to seven the number of notes in each half of the tune. This was his version:
When Mr. Corby played over his interpretation of the tune, it carried with it a kind of shorthand or telegraphic suggestion of the words, thus:
Glor be Jee
Who bitter pains
Pour me life
From sacred veins.
He pressed his hands on the keys and blew vigorously while the boys sang lustily, for he had practised them well in advance. The tune too is quite easy to sing when accompanied in this manner.
An unbroken feud existed between Mr. Corby and his neighbour Miss Sargent, the Head of the Girls’ School. Their two doors were barely six inches apart, and at the same hour on each day, these doors opened simultaneously for the two teachers to pass to their respective schools. Later on they returned simultaneously to their houses. Yet they hated each other so much that for fifteen years they never spoke except on ceremonial public occasions. Hers was a very different character to his. She had the grace in living which he lacked. As a girl, she must have been very pretty, and she and her sisters (who often visited her) retained to middle life considerable personal charm. Miss Sargent was immensely interested in human nature. The study of character absorbed her, and also the daily events of other people’s lives. She loved people, whether they were her pupils, her assistant teachers, her neighbours, or the friends and relations of any of these. She knew all about the Queen and the Royal Family, as well as the public men and women of the day. She enjoyed gossip and always had plenty to tell. She loved her garden, and even more she loved wild flowers. On Shrove Tuesday, when the schools had a half-holiday, Miss Sargent always took us as children for a walk to a far-off spur of Grovely Wood. There she knew she would always find the first primroses. Never was winter so long or spring so lagging that she failed to find at least some tiny buds hardly showing above the ground. These we carried home with her, to open in a dish of moss in the warmth of her sitting-room. And on Ascension Day, which then always began at Wilton with a Communion Service at five in the morning, Miss Sargent was in Grovely soon after six, picking great bundles of bluebells and bracken. She had too that gift of arranging flowers in the peculiarly intimate way which is only possessed by those who love them very much. Miss Sargent was enthusiastic in all things. She was keenly interested in needlework, embroidery and knitting, and was for ever trying some fresh pattern or design. She loved music, books, life—everything—except Mr. Corby. His wife had a long distressing illness, and then Miss Sargent was the best of neighbours, waiting on the invalid, cooking for her, running in to visit her, cheering her with her stores of gossip; but only when the master of the house was out of it. She would not meet him.
Mrs. Corby died during the school holidays, and that week Miss Sargent wrote resigning her post as schoolmistress. She did not even come back to pack her things, but sent a sister to do this for her. A year later, she returned as Mrs. Corby.
This was the explanation. When Miss Sargent first came to Wilton, she had found her neighbour a widower, for Mr. Corby’s odd difficult personality secured for him in all three charming wives. He soon asked Miss Sargent to marry him, and was accepted. Before the engagement was announced, the lovers quarrelled bitterly, and then parted for the holidays. Before the next term began, Mr. Corby avenged himself by marrying someone else. So these two lovers became enemies, and lived worlds apart, though side by side. He was a reserved man. She appeared to be a completely open-hearted woman. No one can guess at their inner feelings during those years, but they proved themselves to be people of a fine sense of honour, and of great self-control. They might have made a mess of things, but they accepted the consequences without involving other people. During those years they ceased to know each other socially. Mr. Corby made a success of his marriage, and Miss Sargent of her school.
Sinca, ‘the Russian Sailor’, was a great person in the old Wilton days. Lord Pembroke found him somewhere on his travels, and brought him to Wilton as house-carpenter. He was obviously a Slav, with his short square figure, and his flat face marked with smallpox. He spoke very quickly, in a deep hollow voice, which sounded as if he had his head in a bucket. He never walked, but he ran everywhere, on the level, or up and down the ladders which seemed to be his native place. The Wilton Mummers had a phrase, ‘a foreign-off man’, and this describes Sinca, who was always ‘off’ somewhere with his foreignness. Making and letting off fireworks were among his far-fetched tricks, and when we had a display, he was in his element. Then the amazing little figure could be seen, darting in and out of the darkness, now bending behind some curious contraption on a frame, which then fizzled and sparkled, and turned into a whirring Catherine Wheel; now appearing in a completely different part of the scene from which would soon rise the long swoop and the soft explosion of a rocket in the air, its stars falling quietly above a crowd
