Church Circle

They walked down School Street at twenty to eleven in the order the programme gave, which was the order of precedence, which nobody in Annapolis but Bramwell knew.

The Governor-General went first, alone, in a dark morning coat and a grey waistcoat and a black silk hat, with a prayer book in his left hand that had belonged to his mother and had been rebound twice. The Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland walked one pace behind him and one pace to his left, in his grey suit and his grey Homburg, with his Bible under his arm, beaming, and Mrs Tull walked beside her husband in grey silk with a grey parasol, and behind them came the Governor-General’s son, with a white silk scarf round his neck, and the Governor-General’s private secretary, with nothing in his hands at all.

It was a hundred and fifty yards. It took four minutes. Pershing had walked to church in procession in a great many towns and he had never walked to one with so many people watching who had no reason to.

They were on the pavements of School Street on both sides, under the trees, in their Sunday clothes, families in white and midshipmen in white and old men in black, and they did not cheer and they did not wave, they stood and watched the Governor-General walk past them to church as if they had all been told something was going to happen and none of them knew what. They were on Church Circle, round the church, three deep on the pavement on every side. They were at the windows of the houses on the circle. They were on the steps of the church, on either side of the west door, making a lane up the middle. And the west door was open, wide, and propped with a brick.

Tull saw the brick.

He stopped on the pavement at the bottom of the church steps and looked at it, and Pershing, one pace ahead of him, stopped too, because the Lieutenant-Governor had, and turned his head.

“They’ve propped the door,” said Tull.

“It is June,” said Mrs Tull. “The church is an oven by half past eleven. The Rector always props it in June.”

“Does he?” Tull looked at the brick a moment longer, with the faintest puzzled crease between his eyebrows, like a man who has heard a note in a hymn that he cannot quite place. Then he looked up, past the door, past the steps and the people on them, back up School Street the way they had come, to the circle at the top of it, and the green rise, and the white porch of his own house with the flag above it hanging limp in the sun.

“You can see the house,” he said. “From here.”

“You can see the house from a great many places, Wesley,” said Mrs Tull. “The Governor-General ruled on most of them on Friday night in his dressing gown. You were asleep.” She took his arm. “Come. You have the lesson. Mr Asbury Cooper will be waiting at the chapel and he will have chosen the wrong hymn again.”

Tull looked at the brick once more. Then the crease went away, and he smiled, and turned to Pershing, and took off his Homburg.

“Your Excellency,” he said. “We’ll leave you here. A blessed Sunday to you.”

“And to you, Your Honour.”

“The last day,” said Tull, happily. “Maryland keeps the law,” and put his Homburg back on, and gave his wife his arm, and they turned and went back round Church Circle toward School Street and the chapel, slowly, the round grey man and the tall grey woman under her parasol, and the people on the pavement made way for them; and Pershing stood at the foot of the steps of St Anne’s and watched them go, and Mrs Tull, at the corner, without turning round, lifted her parasol very slightly, once, as a woman does who knows she is being watched.

Then he went up the steps and into the church.

---

He did not see La Guardia. He did not look for him. He knew where he would be.

He walked up the aisle of St Anne’s in the order of precedence, with his son behind him and Bramwell behind his son, between the box pews with their doors shut and their occupants standing, every one, to watch him go by: up the long aisle under the gallery, which was full, and out from under it into the nave, which was full, to the front, where the verger, an old thin man with a wand, opened the door of the front pew on the left and stood aside. The Governor-General went in and knelt. His son went in and knelt beside him, carefully, because of his neck. His private secretary went in and knelt at the end.

The church was very hot already. The tall clear windows were open at the top, but there was no wind, and the sun came in through them in long white slants full of dust, and the whole of Annapolis seemed to be in the pews, fanning, with the paper fans the church gave out at the door, which had a picture of the Good Shepherd on one side and an advertisement for a funeral parlour on Main Street on the other.

Pershing knelt with his face in his hands, in the way he had been taught at seven in the Methodist church at Laclede, long before he came to the Church of America, and said his prayers, which were short. Then he sat back in the pew and opened his mother’s prayer book at the order for the Holy Communion, and looked at the altar.

He did not turn round to look at the door.

It was behind him, at the far end of the aisle, sixty feet away, beyond the gallery, open, propped with a brick. He did not need to turn round to see it. He could feel it, the way he had once been able to feel, on the ridge at Mindanao, without looking, where every man of his company was standing. He could feel the open door at his back with the street beyond it going up between the two old roofs to the circle, and the porch at the top of the circle, white, with the flag over it; and he could feel, sitting on the step outside that door, or standing on the pavement below it, or leaning on the iron railing of the churchyard in his black suit with his hat on, a short wide man who had not been to the rail in four years, waiting for the last hymn.

He turned the page of his prayer book, and looked at the altar, and did not turn round.

The organ began.

---

The service went as services do, and Pershing followed it in his mother’s prayer book, standing and kneeling and sitting with the congregation, and said the responses in his clear flat voice, and sang the hymns, which he did badly and knew it, and listened to the Rector read the Epistle, which was from the First Epistle of Saint John and said that God was love, and the Gospel, which was the parable of the great supper, at which all the invited guests made excuse, and the master of the house sent his servant out into the streets and lanes of the city to bring in the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind, and when there was still room, out into the highways and hedges, to compel them to come in.

He listened to the sermon. It was short. It was about the parable, and about June Week, and about the young men of the class of 1926 who would go out from the Academy into the highways and hedges of the world, and the Rector said, near the end, in his old gentle voice, looking out over the congregation, not at anybody: “There is always room at the table. There is always more room than we think. And it is never we who decide who comes in.”

Warren, beside his father, made a very small sound in his throat and stared at his knees.

The Rector came down from the pulpit.

The offertory was taken. The organ played. The sidesmen came up the aisle with the alms basins, and the congregation put in its coins and its envelopes, and Pershing put in a pound note, and the sidesmen went back down the aisle toward the door, and as they did there was a sound from the door.

It was not loud. It was a voice, outside, on the steps, raised, and then another voice, and then a third, a great deal louder than either, which Pershing would have known anywhere in the world.

“Get your hand off me. I’m a communicant.”

---

Every head in St Anne’s turned.

Pershing did not turn. He sat in the front pew on the left with his mother’s prayer book open on his knee at the prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church, and looked at the altar, where the Rector, at the north end, had paused with the alms basins in his hands and lifted his head, very slightly, like an old horse hearing a gate.

Behind him the voices went on.

“Mr La Guardia, I am placing you under arrest.” That was Voss. It was very clear. It carried up the aisle of the church as if it had been spoken from the pulpit. “For conspiracy to transport intoxicating liquor to Government House, Annapolis, in contravention of section three.”

“I’m not transporting anything. I’m going to church.”

“You are proceeding to a place where intoxicating liquor is to be supplied to you within sight of Government House, in furtherance of a design of which the Bureau has been seized since a quarter to ten on Friday night. The design is the conspiracy. The vessel is the chalice.”

There was a silence in the church that Pershing would remember for the rest of his life.

Then a fourth voice spoke, flat and careful and slightly nasal.

“Mr Voss. Take your hand off that man’s shoulder. You are under arrest.”

“On what charge, Agent Spratt?”

“Section forty. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit or interfere with the use of wine for sacramental purposes by any church or minister of religion. Interfere, Mr Voss. You are interfering. And he’s a sitting member of Parliament on his way to worship on a Sunday, which is privilege, which I looked up at four o’clock this morning, and you’d have looked it up too if you’d read the whole Act instead of the bits with arrest in them.”

“Agent Spratt, I have read the whole Act.”

“Including the schedules?”

There was a pause.

“Not the schedules,” said Voss.

In the front pew on the left, Warren put his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking. Bramwell, at the end, was reading the prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church with an expression of total absorption. And at the north end of the altar the Rector of St Anne’s, eighty years old, with the alms basins in his hands, looked down the length of his church to the open west door, where everybody else was looking, and then, slowly, back again, to the front pew on the left, to the Governor-General, who was the only person in the church not looking at the door; and something happened in his long creased face that was not quite a smile; and he turned, and laid the alms basins on the altar, and went on.

“Let us pray,” said the Rector, “for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth.”

The congregation, slowly, turned back round, and knelt.

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Bramwell did not kneel. He slipped out of the end of the pew while the congregation was kneeling, quietly, on the side away from the aisle, and went down the side of the church under the windows and along under the gallery to the door, and out, and Pershing heard nothing more from the steps for some time except, once, very faintly, La Guardia saying, “Fine. Fine. Then arrest me in the churchyard, at least the dead don’t vote,” and a woman in the pew behind him saying “Oh!” in a shocked whisper, and then laughing into her fan.

The Rector prayed for the King, and for the Governor-General, and for all who were put in authority under him, that they might truly and indifferently minister justice; and Pershing, kneeling, with his face in his hands, heard the words truly and indifferently go past him like a shot past a man in a trench, close, and said Amen.

The Rector said the invitation. Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life. The congregation said the general confession. The Rector said the absolution, and the comfortable words, and the Sursum corda, and the sanctus, which the choir sang, very sweetly, in the gallery; and then the prayer of humble access, We do not presume to come to this thy Table; and then he turned to the altar and took the bread into his hands, and the cup.

Bramwell came back up the side of the church and slipped into the end of the pew and knelt, and after a moment passed something along to Warren, who passed it along to his father.

It was a page from Bramwell’s notebook, folded in four. Pershing unfolded it on his mother’s prayer book under the ledge of the pew.

Sir, it said, in Bramwell’s copperplate, written in pencil, very fast, on his knee, on the church steps. Mr Voss has arrested Mr La Guardia on the top step, his hand on his shoulder. Mr Spratt has arrested Mr Voss, his hand on his. Neither will let go. They are standing in a line in the doorway, all three, and cannot come in without letting go and will not let go without a ruling. The sidesmen cannot get past them to close the door. The congregation outside is on the pavement and in the churchyard and on the railings, about two hundred, and the class of 1926 is in the street. Mr La Guardia asks me to tell you that he is still confirmed, that he has the right to be admitted to the Sacrament, that he is in love and charity with all his neighbours except Mr Voss, and that the referee has said that if there is a question, the referee answers it. He asks whether there is a question. Mr Voss asks the same. So does Mr Spratt. H.B.

And beneath it, in a different hand, a large round hand in pencil, sloping hard to the right, unmistakable:

General. Is it a drink? F. LaG.

Pershing read it twice.

Then he folded it in four again and put it in his breast pocket, behind the programme and the place card and the prescription for his son’s neck, and closed his mother’s prayer book on his finger, and looked at the altar, where the Rector of St Anne’s, his back to the congregation, his old hands raised, was consecrating the wine.

He had said, at the Lieutenant-Governor’s table on Friday night, in front of everybody, that he would not rule on lawfulness. He had said, at the back of this church on Saturday morning, to this Rector, with a cup of very bad coffee in his hand, that he would not rule on sacraments.

He did not rule.

He sent nothing back. He sat in the front pew on the left with his son on one side of him and his secretary on the other and his mother’s prayer book closed on his finger and the folded note in his pocket, and he did not turn round, and he did not answer, and behind him, sixty feet down the aisle, in the open door of St Anne’s, with the white porch of Government House framed beyond them at the top of School Street, three men stood in a line on the top step with their hands on one another’s shoulders, in the June sun, waiting for a referee who said nothing.

The Rector turned round with the paten in one hand and the cup in the other, and looked out over his church.

“Draw near with faith,” he said.

And the Governor-General of the Realm, who went first, because it was in the programme and it was the order of precedence and it was what his office required of him in that place, rose from his knees, and opened the door of the front pew, and went up the three steps to the rail.