THE MORNING WATCH
143
hesitated, subdued by the stagnant darkness and its smell of waxed
pine and spent incense. Across the unlighted nave the open door
of the Lady Chapel brimmed with shaken light; but just at their left,
through the door to the vestry, came a friendlier and more mundane
light, a delicious smell, and the tired grinding of the voice they most
admired in the world. When he became aware of their hesitation
beside this partly closed door, George Fitzgerald spoke to them with
a formality as unaccustomed and gentle as
if
a dead body lay in
the room behind him and they came in, silent and shy. By the
loud hurrying little clock it was still only four minutes to four. They
squatted on their bare heels against the wall and looked on, their
six eyes emphatic in the sleepless light.
The inward wall of this long corridor was hung solid with cas–
socks, and they were all lengths from a size almost big enough for
the giant sad boy they all called Undertaker, to the all but baby
size of Dillon Prince. At first Richard wondered where all the cottas
were; in the laundry for Easter, he realized. The room was so
weakly lighted by candlestubs that at the far end
it
was hardly
possible to distinguish the red cassocks from the black. Just within
the surer light, his jaw and his shoulders sloping more heavily even
than usual with fatigue and with his low posture, Willard Rivenburg
sat on a folding-chair which gave out dangerous splintering noises
whenever he stirred. It was he who was talking, aimlessly, quietly,
almost in
his
sleep; and Richard could see that George and Lee Allen
answered him only so often as courtesy required, never turning their
attention from their work. Not only were they Prefects; it was also be–
lieved by some of the older people that they alone among the boys
now at the School, might have a Vocation. They were in their last
year now and it was generally understood that they were both praying
hard for this to be made clear to them before they graduated.
It
was
their privilege, tonight,
to
trim and change the candles and to remove
and replace the withering flowers, and now white-girdled, incon–
gruous in red cassocks, they stood wearily beside a soup plate, reply–
ing gravely in short words while, their eyes bright with the lateness
of the hour and fixed in the profound attentiveness of great scien–
tists, they revolved candlestubs between thumb and forefinger, just
above a flame, and watched the meltings add themselves to the al–
ready considerable cone of wax and tallow which they had developed
