‘It’s about that praying chap.’

‘What, old Greenpants?’

‘Yes. They’ve gone to watch him at it.’

‘Where?’

‘In the tower gallery. Fred Buckland pinched the key when the old man wasn’t looking.’

‘Coo, they’ll cop it if they’re caught.’

‘Why, they aren’t doing no harm. You can’t trespass in a church.’

‘That’s all you know. They haven’t gone there just to watch, neither.’

‘Why, what are they going to do?’

‘Well,’ said Tom Wignall importantly, ‘they’re going to give him a fright. Do you know what he does?’

‘He prays, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes, but he don’t pray to himself. He prays out loud, and he shouts sometimes, and rocks himself about. And he doesn’t pray for his father and mother——’

‘He hasn’t got any, so I’ve heard,’ said an older boy, who, to judge from his caustic tone, seemed to be listening with some impatience to Tom Wignall’s revelations. ‘He’s an orphan.’

‘Anyhow,’ the speaker resumed unabashed, ‘he doesn’t pray for his king or his country, or to be made good or anything like that. He confesses his sins.’

‘Do you mean he’s done a murder?’

‘Fred Buckland couldn’t hear what it was, but it must have been something bad or he wouldn’t have come all this way to confess it.’

This reasoning impressed the audience.

‘Must have been murder,’ they assured each other, ‘or forgery anyhow.’

‘But that isn’t all,’ continued the speaker, intoxicated by the attention he was receiving. ‘He prays for what he didn’t ought.’

‘Why, you can pray for anything you like,’ opined one of the listeners.

‘That you can’t. There’s heaps of things you mustn’t pray for. You mustn’t pray to get rich, for one thing, and (he lowered his voice) you mustn’t pray for anyone to die.’

‘Did he do that?’

‘Fred Buckland said that’s what it sounded like.’

There was a pause.

‘I think the poor chap’s balmy if you ask me,’ said the older boy. ‘I bet his prayers don’t do no one any harm nor him any good either.’

‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ said the spokesman of the party. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Fred Buckland says he’s got much, much richer these last six months. Why, he’s got a car and a chauffeur and all. Fred Buckland says he wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a millionaire.’

‘You bet he is,’ scoffed the older boy. ‘You bet that when he prayed somebody dropped down dead and left him a million. Sounds likely, doesn’t it?’

The circle of listeners stirred. All the faces broadened with scepticism and one boy took up his bat and played an imaginary forward stroke. Tom Wignall felt that he was losing ground. He was like a bridge-player who has held up his ace too long.

‘Anyhow,’ he said defiantly, ‘Fred Buckland says that church is no place for the likes of him who’ve got rich by praying in a way they ought to be ashamed of. And I tell you, he’s going to give old Greenpants a fright. He’s going to holler down at him from the tower in a terrible deep voice, and Greenpants’ll think it’s God answering him from Heaven, or perhaps the Devil, and he’ll get such a fright he’ll never set foot in Aston again. And good riddance, I say.’

Tom’s own voice rose as he forced into it all the dramatic intensity he could muster. But he had missed his moment. One or two of his companions looked serious and nodded, but the rest, with the unerring instinct of boys for a change of leadership, a shifting of moral ascendancy, threw doubtful glances towards their senior. They were wavering. They would take their cue from him.

‘Lousy young bastards,’ he said, ‘leaving us all standing about like fools on a fine evening like this. I should like to tan their hides.’

There was a murmur of sympathetic indignation, and he added, ‘What makes them think the chap’s coming to-day to pray, anyhow?’

Tom Wignall answered sullenly: ‘He comes most days now. . . . And if you want to know, Jim Chantry passed him on his motor-bike the other side of Friar’s Bridge. He didn’t half jump when Jim honked in his ear,’ Tom concluded with unrepentant relish. ‘He’ll be here any time now.’

‘Well,’ said the older boy stretching himself luxuriously, ‘you chaps can go and blank yourselves. There’s nothing else for you to do. I’m off.’ He sauntered away, grandly, alone, towards the main road. Those silly mutts need a lesson. I’ll spoil their little game for them, he thought.

The tower gallery at St. Cuthbert’s, Aston Highchurch, was a feature most unusual in parish churches. But the tower was rather unusual too. Its lower storey, which rose fifty or more feet to the belfry floor, was open to the main body of the building; only an arch divided it from the nave. The gallery, a stone passage running along the tower wall just above the west window, was considerably higher than the apex of the arch. It was only visible from the western end of the church, and itself commanded a correspondingly restricted view—a view that was further impeded by the lightly swaying bell-ropes. But Fred Buckland and his four conspirators could see, through the flattened arc of the arch, a portion of the last six rows of chairs. The sunlight coming through the window below them fell on the chairs, picking them out in gold and making a bright patch like the stage of a theatre.

‘He ought to be here by now, didn’t he?’ one urchin whispered.

‘Shut up!’ hissed the ringleader. ‘It’ll spoil everything if he hears us.’

They waited, three of them with their backs pressed against the wall, their faces turned this way and that as in a frieze, looking very innocent and naughty. Fred, who had more than once sung carols from this lofty perch, embraced a baluster and let his feet dangle over the edge.

Five minutes passed, ten, a quarter of an hour. The sinking sun no longer lay so brightly on the foreground; shadows began to creep in from the sides. The boys even began to see each other less plainly.

‘I’m frightened,’ whispered a voice. ‘I wish we hadn’t come. I want to go home.’

‘Shut up, can’t you?’

More minutes passed and the church grew darker.

‘I say, Fred,’ a second voice whispered, ‘what time does your old man come to shut the church up?’

‘Seven o’clock these evenings. It still wants a quarter to.’

They waited; then one whispered in a tense voice, ‘I believe that’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘Old Greenpants, of course.’

‘Did you hear anything?’

‘No, but I thought I saw something move.’

‘You’re balmy. That’s the shadow of the bell-rope.’

They strained their eyes.

‘I don’t think it was, Fred. It moves when the bell-rope doesn’t.’

‘Funny if somebody else should be spying on old Greenpants.’

‘Maybe it’s him who’s spying on us.’

‘What, old Greenpants?’

‘Of course. Who else could it be?’

‘I wish I could see what that was moving,’ the boy said again. ‘There, close by the stove.’

‘I suppose it couldn’t get up to us?’

‘Not unless it came by the bell-rope,’ said Fred decisively. ‘I’ve locked the door of the stairs and the only other key my dad has. You’re in a funk, that’s your trouble. Only the Devil could shin up one of them ropes.’

‘They wouldn’t let him come into church, would they?’

‘He might slip in if the north door was open.’

Almost as he spoke a puff of wind blew up in their faces and the six bell-ropes swayed in all directions lashing each other and casting fantastic shadows.

‘That’s him,’ Fred hissed. ‘Don’t you hear his footsteps? I bet that’s him. Just wait till he gets settled down. Now, all together: “God is going to punish thee, Henry Greenstream, thou wicked man”.’

In creditable unison, their voices quavered through the church. What result they expected they hardly knew themselves, nor did they have time to find out; for the sacristan, appearing with a clatter of boots at the gallery door, had them all like rats in a trap. Fear of committing sacrilege by blasphemy for a moment took away his powers of speech; then he burst out, ‘Come on, you little blackguards! Get down out of here! Oh, you’ll be sore before I’ve finished with you!’