The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [152]
From outside the windows had a deep, submarine tinge, but from inside they were clear white, and the morning sun streamed in over the altar and the assembled school. The prefect in Charles’s row was Symonds, editor of the Magazine, president of the Debating Society, the leading intellectual. Symonds was in Head’s; he pursued a course of lonely study, seldom taking Evening School, never playing any game except, late in the evenings of the summer term, an occasional single of lawn tennis, appearing rarely even in the Sixth Form, but working in private under Mr. A. A. Carmichael for the Balliol scholarship. Symonds kept a leather-bound copy of the Greek Anthology in his place in chapel and read it throughout the services with a finely negligent air.
The masters sat in stalls orientated between the columns, the clergy in surplices, laymen in gowns. Some of the masters who taught the Modern Side wore hoods of the newer universities; Major Stebbing, the adjutant of the O.T.C., had no gown at all; Mr. A. A. Carmichael—awfully known at Spierpoint as “A. A.,” the splendid dandy and wit, fine flower of the Oxford Union and the New College Essay Society, the reviewer of works of classical scholarship for the New Statesman, to whom Charles had never yet spoken; whom Charles had never yet heard speak directly, but only at third hand as his mots, in their idiosyncratic modulations, passed from mouth to mouth from the Sixth in sanctuary to the catechumens in the porch; whom Charles worshipped from afar—Mr. Carmichael, from a variety of academic costume, was this morning robed as a baccalaureate of Salamanca. He looked, as he stooped over his desk, like the prosecuting counsel in a cartoon by Daumier.
Nearly opposite him across the chapel stood Frank Bates; an unbridged gulf of boys separated these rival and contrasted deities, that one the ineffable dweller on cloud-capped Olympus, this the homely clay image, the intimate of hearth and household, the patron of threshing-floor and olive-press. Frank wore only an ermine hood, a B.A.’s gown, and loose, unremarkable clothes, subfusc today, with the Corinthian tie which alternated with the Carthusian, week in, week out. He was a clean, curly, spare fellow; a little wan for he was in constant pain from an injury on the football field which had left him lame and kept him at Spierpoint throughout the war. This pain of his redeemed him from heartiness. In chapel his innocent, blue eyes assumed a puzzled, rather glum expression like those of an old-fashioned child in a room full of grown-ups. Frank was a bishop’s son.
Behind the masters, out of sight in the side aisles, was a dowdy huddle of matrons and wives.
The service began with a procession of the choir: “Hail Festal Day,” with Wykham-Blake as the treble cantor. At the rear of the procession came Mr. Peacock, the Chaplain and the Headmaster. A week ago Charles had gone to church in London with Aunt Philippa. He did not as a rule go to church in the holidays, but being in London for the last week Aunt Philippa had said, “There’s nothing much we can do today. Let’s see what entertainment the Church can offer. I’m told there is a very remarkable freak named Father Wimperis.” So, together, they had gone on the top of a bus to a northern suburb where Mr. Wimperis was at the time drawing great congregations. His preaching was not theatrical by Neapolitan standards, Aunt Philippa said afterwards; “However, I enjoyed him hugely. He is irresistibly common.” For twenty minutes Mr. Wimperis alternately fluted and boomed from the pulpit, wrestled with the reading-stand and summoned the country