Pelly reached the ground and stayed there in an unconscious state for some while; and the other boys determined that it would be as well to leave Meyrick to himself. He might be cracked but he was undoubtedly a hard hitter. As for Pelly, like the sensible fellow that he was, he simply concluded that Meyrick was too good for him. He did not quite understand it; he dimly suspected the intrusion of some strange forces, but with such things he had nothing to do. It was a fair knockout, and there was an end of it.
Bates had glanced up as Ambrose came into the dining-room on the Sunday morning. He saw the shining face, the rapturous eyes, and had silently wondered, recognising the presence of elements which transcended all his calculations.
Meanwhile the Lupton Sunday went on after its customary fashion. At eleven o’clock the Chapel was full of boys. There were nearly six hundred of them there, the big ones in frock-coats, with high, pointed collars, which made them look like youthful Gladstones. The younger boys wore broad, turndown collars and had short, square jackets made somewhat in the Basque fashion. Young and old had their hair cut close to the scalp, and this gave them all a brisk but bullety appearance. The masters, in cassock, gown and hood, occupied the choir stalls. Mr. Horbury, the High Usher, clothed in a flowing surplice, was taking Morning Prayer, and the Head occupied a kind of throne by the altar.
The Chapel was not an inspiring building. It was the fourteenth century, certainly, but the fourteenth century translated by 1840, and, it is to be feared, sadly betrayed by the translators. The tracery of the windows was poor and shallow; the mouldings of the piers and arches faulty to a degree; the chancel was absurdly out of proportion, and the pitch-pine benches and stalls had a sticky look. There was a stained-glass window in memory of the Old Luptonians who fell in the Crimea. One wondered what the Woman of Samaria by the Well had to do either with Lupton or the Crimea. And the colouring was like that used in very common, cheap sweets.
The service went with a rush. The prayers, versicles and responses, and psalms were said, the officiant and the congregation rather pressing than pausing—often, indeed, coming so swiftly to cues that two or three words at the end of one verse or two or three at the beginning of the next would be lost in a confused noise of contending voices. But Venite and Te Deum and Benedictus were rattled off to frisky Anglicans with great spirit; sometimes the organ tooted, sometimes it bleated gently, like a flock of sheep; now one might have sworn that the music of penny whistles stole on the ear, and again, as the organist coupled up the full organ, using suddenly all the battery of his stops, a gas explosion and a Salvation Army band seemed to strive against one another. A well-known nobleman who had been to Chapel at Lupton was heard to say, with reference to this experience: “I am no Ritualist, heaven knows—but I confess I like a hearty service.”
But it was, above all, the sermon that has made the Chapel a place of many memories. The Old Boys say—and one supposes that they are in earnest—that the tall, dignified figure of the Doctor, standing high above them all, his scarlet hood making a brilliant splash of colour against the dingy, bilious paint of the pale green walls, has been an inspiration to them in all quarters of the globe, in all manner of difficulties and temptations.
One man writes that in the midst of a complicated and dangerous deal on the Stock Exchange he remembered a sermon of Dr. Chesson’s called in the printed volume, “Fighting the Good Fight.”
“You have a phrase amongst you which I often hear,” said the Head. “That phrase is ‘Play the game,’ and I wish to say that, though you know it not; though, it may be, the words are often spoken half in jest; still, they are but your modern, boyish rendering of the old, stirring message which I have just read to you.
“Fight the Good Fight.’ ‘Play the Game.’ Remember the words in the storm and struggle, the anxiety and stress that may be—nay, must be—before you—etc., etc., etc.”
“After the crisis was over,” wrote the Stock Exchange man, “I was thankful that I had remembered those words.”
“That voice sounding like a trumpet on the battlefield, bidding us all remember that Success was the prize of Effort and Endurance—” So writes a well-known journalist.
“I remembered what the Doctor said to us once about ‘running the race,’ ” says a young soldier, recounting a narrow escape from a fierce enemy, “so I stuck to my orders.”
Ambrose, on that Sunday morning, sat in his place, relishing acutely all the savours of the scene, consumed with inward mirth at the thought that this also professed to be a rite of religion. There was an aimless and flighty merriment about the chant to the Te Deum that made it difficult for him to control his laughter; and when he joined in the hymn “Pleasant are Thy courts above,” there was an odd choke in his voice that made the boy next to him shuffle uneasily.
But the sermon!
It will be found on page 125 of the Lupton Sermons. It dealt with
