The Prelude to Adventure | Page 8

now could speak, because God knew.
Might not this idiot of a Bunning have been shown the way to the mystery?
"Yes," said Olva, smiling. "I'll come, if you won't mind sitting down and smoking for a quarter of an hour, while I finish this--have a drink, will you?"
Bunning's consternation at Olva's acceptance was amusing. He dropped his cap, stopped to pick it up, gasped. That Dune should really come!
"You'll come?" he spluttered out. Never in his wildest imaginings had he fancied such a thing. Dune, the most secret, reserved, mysterious man in the college--Dune, whose sarcastic smile was considered more terrifying than Lawrence's mailed fist--Dune, towards whom in the back of his mind there had been paid that reverence that belongs only to those who are of another world.
Never, in anything that had happened to him, had Bunning been so terrified as he had been by this visit to Dune. Watson Morley, the Christian Union man, had insisted that it was his duty and therefore he had come, but it had taken him ten minutes of agony to climb those stairs. And now Dune had accepted. . . .
The colour flooded his cheeks and faded again. He sat down clumsily in a chair, felt for a pipe that he smoked unwillingly because it was the manly thing to do, spurted some Apollinaris into a glass and over the tablecloth, struck many matches vainly, dropped tobacco on to the carpet. His heart was beating like a hammer!
How men would stare when they saw him with Dune. In his heart was the uneasy knowledge that had Dune proposed staying there in his rooms and talking instead of going to Little St. Agnes and listening to the Reverend Med. Tetloe, he would have stayed. This was not right, it was not Christian. The world gaped below Bunning's heavy feet.
At last Dune said: "I'm ready, let's go." They went out.
2
Little St. Agnes was apparently so named because it was the largest church in Cambridge. It was of no ancient date, but it was grim, grey, dark--admirably suited to an occasion like the present. Under the high roof, lost in a grey cloud, resolving themselves into rows of white, intense faces, sat hundreds of undergraduates.
They were seated on uncomfortable, unstable chairs, and the noise of their uneasy movements sent squeaks up and down the building as though it had been a barn filled with terrified rats.
Far in the distance, perched on a high pulpit, was a little white figure--an old gaunt man with a bony hand and a grey beard. Behind him again there was darkness. Only, in all the vast place, the white body and rows of white faces raised to it.
Olva and Bunning found seats in a corner. A slight soft voice said, with the mysterious importance of one about to deliver an immense secret, "You will look in the Mission Books, Hymn 330. 'Oh! for the arms of Jesus.' I want you to think for a moment of the meaning of the words before you sing."
There followed the rustling of many pages and then a heavy, emotional silence. Olva read the words and found them very sentimental, very bad verse and rather unpleasantly fall of blood and pain. Every one stood; the chairs creaked from one end of the building to the other, an immense volume of sound rose to the roof.
Olva felt that the entire church was seized with emotion. He saw that Bunning's hand was trembling, he knew that many eyes were filled with tears. For himself, he understood at once that that distant figure in white was here to make a dramatic appeal--dramatic as certainly as the appeal that a famous actor might make in London. That was his job-- he was out for it---and anything in the way of silence or noise, of darkness or light, that could add to the effect would be utilized. Olva knew also that nine-tenths of the undergraduates were present there for the same purpose. They wished to have their emotions played upon; they wished also to be reassured about life; they wished to confuse this dramatic emotion with a sincere desire for salvation. They wished, it is true, to be good, but they wished, a great deal more, to be dramatically stirred.
Olva was reminded of the tensity of the atmosphere at a bull-fight that he had once seen in Madrid. Here again was the same intensity. . . .
He saw, therefore, in this first singing of the hymn, that this place, this appeal, would be of no use in his own particular need. This deliberate evoking of dramatic effect had nothing to do with that silent consciousness of God. This place, this appeal, was fantastic, childish, beside that event that had that afternoon sent Carfax into space. Let these men hurry to the