“It ought not to be put with so many of the Committee away,” Lady Susan objected. “Not all the people likely to be in favour of the playing field are here yet.”
“They ought to be here,” Mr. Harold said. “We’re the Committee; we’re more than the necessary quorum; we have every right to decide. They’ve all been called to the meeting and haven’t come to it.”
“I quite agree,” several voices said. “We’re the Committee, as we are.”
“I move that we take the vote on it,” Mr. Ock said.
“I second Mr. Ock,” Mr. Edge said.
The Rector looked round the room, put it to the vote of the meeting, that the Memorial should take the form of a work of art, not a water-supply, nor a playing-field. The motion was carried.
“That clears the air a bit,” the builder said. “That’s the first practical thing that’s been done on this Committee since it first sat, along about 1919.”
Lady Susan said nothing, but sat with a hardened face, surveying, now one, now another of the company with dislike.
The door opened; two men came in together, a little, wizened, stooping figure, with keen, darting eyes and shaggy eyebrows, and an elderly man in clerical dress, whose face reminded Frampton of a grizzled lion. The old man flung off his overcoat; he was wearing a dinner-jacket.
“Sorry to be late, Rector,” he said. “Carry on; how far have you got?”
“We’ve just decided to have a work of art, not a water supply or playground.”
“I knew you’d get into trouble without me,” the old man said. “Now you’re for it. A work of art, eh? Poor old Stubbington, condemned to a work of art. Who is going to do the said work? Who’ve you got there? Tom, I suppose. Tom? Why the devil Tom? He knows nothing about it; do you, Tom? Tom’s wife and daughter do all Tom’s work, that’s well known.”
As Tom did not seem to mind, Frampton saw that the old man was a favoured being there. He put him down as a naval officer.
“Who are these newcomers?” he whispered to Harold.
“Admiral Sir Topsle Cringle,” the man whispered, “eighty-four. The other is Reverend Mr. Holyport, retired clergyman.”
“Well, come on, come on,” the Admiral said. “I’m not going to leave Tom in charge of the ship; not if I know it. Who else is here? Why isn’t Budd here? Where’s Bynd? Oh, his leg’s still game. Captain Tocque-Roger said he was coming. I don’t know half the people here and I know all the rest a lot too well.”
“I propose the Admiral should submit a design,” Miss Pauntley said.
“You propose to me?” the Admiral said. “By George, that’s something at my time of life.”
There was a general laugh. Frampton remembered now that he had heard of a very brave thing done by the Admiral as a young lieutenant, while at sea in a squadron in the North Atlantic. He had taken charge of a boat in very wild weather at nightfall, and gone off after a man who had fallen from aloft; had picked him up and had then, with great difficulty, contrived to save the boat. It had been long talked of in the Navy as one of the best bits of work ever done, in the kind of sea then running. The Admiral had sent for him next day and complimented him before the Flagship’s company.
“Now,” the Rector said, “we’ve decided that the Memorial is to be a work of art. Shall we now try to decide where it is to be? When we have decided that, it may be easier to decide what form the work of art should take.”
There was a lull, while people looked from face to face, or drew figures on the paper in front of them.
A man rose, and said that there were many in Stubbington who said that the Memorial ought to be in the parish church. He was sure that many there thought the same, but he hoped he would not be considered slighting to the Church, when he said that many of the men commemorated were not members of the Church. There were many dissenters of different congregations in Stubbington, as well as a good many Roman Catholics. He dared say that half the men serving from Stubbington had not been Churchmen, and that, therefore, a Memorial in the church would be resented by the non-Church members. He was not a Churchman himself, and hoped that the church would not be insisted on.
Mr. Harold said, that in a census of congregations undertaken by his newspaper the year before, it had been shown that rather more people attended the various chapels in the town than the parish church. This quite bore out the statement of the last speaker.
Lady Susan said that the Church was the centre of the community, however much some had strayed from it, and that a window in the church was certainly to most people the most fitting Memorial that could be devised. It might even lead back some of those that had strayed; but it would at least teach them that the Church is established by law and stands for England.