It was a sight worth seeing to watch these Breezys ambling up Queen’s
Road, proudly, with their little girl. And it was because Lola knew that
she was conferring a great treat upon her parents that she submitted
herself to an hour and a half of something worse to her than boredom.
Only a little while ago she had looked forward to the evening service on
Sundays and had been gently moved by the hymns, by the reading from the
Scripture and even by the illiterate impromptus of the minister; and she
had found, in moments that were dull, the usual feminine pleasure in
casting surreptitious glances about the small, plain unbeautiful
building to see what Mrs. This wore or Mrs. That. But now she found
herself going through it all like a fish out of water. As Ellingham had
outgrown Lady Feo, so had she outgrown that flat, uninspired, and rather
cruel service, in which the name of God was always mentioned as a
monster of vengeance, without love and without forgiveness, and with a
suspicious eye to the keyhole of every house. With a sort of shame she
found herself finding fault with the rhymes of the hymns, which every
now and then were dreadful, and were, oh, so badly sung; and when a
smug-faced, uneducated man came forward, shut his eyes, placed himself
in an attitude of elaborate piety and let himself go with terrible
unction, treating God and death and life and joy and humanity as though
they were butter, or worse still, margarine, goose flesh broke out upon
her and a curious self-consciousness as though she were intruding upon a
scene at which she had no right to be present. Away and away back,
church had not been like this to her. Out of a dream she seemed to hear
the deep reverberation of a great organ, the high sweet voices of unseen
boys and the soft murmur of an old scholar retelling the simple story of
Christ’s pathetic struggle, and of God’s mercy.—Oh, the commonplace, the
misinterpretation, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. No wonder the busses
were filled, she thought, the commons crowded on the outskirts of the
city. To her there was more religion in one shaft of evening sun than in
all those chapels put together.
It was with thankfulness and relief that Lola went back with her parents
to the street and turned into Queen’s Road again, which wore a Sunday
expression. Gone for a brief time were the itinerant musicians, the
innumerable perambulators, the ogling flappers with their cheap silk
stockings and misshapen legs, the retired colonels eking out a grumbling
living on infinitesimal pensions.
“Let’s take a little walk,” said Mrs. Breezy. “It’s nice now. The
Gardens look more like the country in the twilight.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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