Mrs Gray had taken advantage of this opportunity to mop her forehead
with her blue and white pocket handkerchief, and wrestle with her
bonnet's unconquerable tendency to slip off behind, and the clergyman
passed the question on to her husband, who fixed his eye on a
bluebottle buzzing in one of the windows, and jerked out what sounded
like 'Joe.'
'I thought it was a girl,' whispered the clergyman. 'Joe, did you say?'
'No, it ain't that 'zactly. Here, 'Liza, can't you tell the gentleman?
You knows best what it be.'
The next attempt sounded like 'Sue,' and the clergyman suggested Susan
as the name, but that would not do.
'Zola' seemed to him, though not a reader of French novels, unsuitable,
and 'Zero,' too, he could not quite appreciate.
'I can't make it out, an outlandish sorter name!' said Gray, with a
terrible inclination to put on his hat in the excitement of the moment,
only checked by a timely nudge from his wife's elbow; 'here, ain't you
got it wrote down somewheres? Can't you show it up?'
And after a lengthened rummage in a voluminous pocket, and the
production of several articles irrelevant to the occasion--a thimble, a
bit of ginger, and part of a tract--Mrs Gray brought to light a piece
of paper, on which was written the name 'Zoe.'
'Zoe, I baptise thee'----
A sudden crash on the organ-pedals followed these words. Mr Robins,
the organist, had, perhaps, been asleep and let his foot slip on to the
pedals, or, perhaps, he had thought there was no wind in the instrument
and that he could put his foot down with impunity. He was plainly very
much ashamed of himself for what had happened, and it was only right
that he should be, for, of course, it made all the school children
giggle, and a good many of their elders too, who should have known
better.
The boy who blew the organ declared that he turned quite red and bent
his head over the keys as if he were examining something on them, and
he was evidently nervous and upset, for he made ever so many mistakes
in the concluding parts of the service, and, to the great surprise and
to the satisfaction of the blower, cut the voluntary at the end
unusually short, ending it in an abrupt and discordant way, which, I am
sorry to say, the blower described as 'a 'owl,' though any shock that
the boy's musical taste sustained was compensated for by the feeling
that he would be at home at least ten minutes earlier than usual to tea.
Now it so happened that Mr Robins was in the vestry when the
christening party came in to give the particulars about the babies to
be entered in the register. He had come to fetch a music-book, which,
however, it appeared after all had been left at home; but the clergyman
was glad of his help in making out the story of the little Zoe who had
just been baptised.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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