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And during the dead man's recessional we were mustered, and we continued to draw nearer to the unknown. But everything seemed to recede as fast as we advanced, even events. We wandered five days, six days, in the lines, almost without sleeping. We stood for hours, for half-nights and half-days, waiting for ways to be clear that we could not see.
Rusty gray-brown, patched, and with ill-mended tears, which no amount of painstaking effort could ever convert again into more than dimly respectable uniforms, a sprinkling of civilian broadcloth and feminine bonnets. And across the church a smaller block of once hostile blue.... As the recessional formed, prayer books were closed to be slipped into pockets or reticules.
Lucas was an over-well nourished individual, some nine years Basset's senior, with a colouring that would have been accepted as a sign of intensive culture in an asparagus, but probably meant in this case mere abstention from exercise. His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive.
And touching the pure idea of the individual being free to speak and act within limits, the assertion of this idea, we may fairly say, has been the peculiar honour of our own country. For my part I greatly prefer the Jingoism of Rule Britannia to the Imperialism of The Recessional. I have no objection to Britannia ruling the waves.
Three times before recess did he, boldly ignoring the preface of upraised hand, swagger up to Miss Clara's desk. And going and coming, the little boy's boots with copper toes and run-down heels marked with thumping emphasis upon the echoing boards his processional and recessional. And reaching his desk, the little boy slammed down his slate with clattering reverberations.
For a moment she stood, passing the golden links through her white fingers like a young novice with a rosary. Steps on the stairs disturbed them; the recessional had begun; four solemn persons filed out the area gate. At the same moment, suave and respectful, her butler pro tem. presented himself at the doorway: "Luncheon is served, madam." "Thank you."
After the last echo of the recessional had died away, and the bowed hush of the congregation had grown into a quiet, well-bred commotion of the putting on of wraps and the low Sabbath greetings, Elizabeth turned to her grandmother. "Grandmother, may I please go and ask that man some questions? He said just what I have been longing and longing to know, and I must ask him more.
Child voices joined in, and presently from a bend in the track, 'three ha'pence for tuppence, three ha'pence for tuppence, came a lumbering old horse, urged into an unwonted canter. Three kiddies bestrode the ancient, and as they swung along they sang snatches of Kipling's 'Recessional, to an old hymn-tune that lingers in the memory of us all.
And so it runs, from McAndrew's Law, Order, Duty, and Restraint, to his last least line, whether of The Vampire or The Recessional. And no prophet out of Israel has cried out more loudly the sins of the people, nor called them more awfully to repent. "But he is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life," object the fluttering, chirping gentlemen, the Tomlinsonian men. Well, and isn't life vulgar?
And suddenly it seemed to Miltoun that he could never free himself from the echoes of that voice it was not worth while to try. "We are repeating ourselves," he said, dryly. The river's black water was making stilly, slow recessional under a half-moon.
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