Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/16

8 people had to conceal their faces while they prayed Gilbert did not know, but it gave him a very solemn feeling to keep his eyes closed, and an even more solemn one to open them surreptitiously and look over the wilderness of bent backs.

The ceiling was very far away, and very blue, with queer indented squares that shot out reddish lines. Out of it came two enormous chandeliers of brass, with a ring of lights around, which were sometimes lighted on a dark day and made a chain of dancing lamplight. There were galleries running down each side of the church, held up by slender white pillars. Outside, just at the top of the pillars, ran a narrow ledge. Gilbert's imagination would perform perilous adventures along that ledge. You would walk along, along, and around the back and up the other side, dizzily perched above the congregation, clinging to the brass rail, and you would come to the choir behind the minister's desk. From the ledge to the choir was a gap of a few feet, but Gilbert saw himself jumping it, and his heart would beat faster. And then he would return painfully, exhilaratedly, around that ledge, holding on so tightly.

When Gilbert got tired of this play he would look up at the strange figures that were fastened to the under side of the ledge. They looked like playing-cards, little square raised blocks marked with black points, at regular intervals down the gallery. Gilbert sometimes imagined that they were really cards, and that a hooded figure moving down the aisles would touch them with a wand, and they would lose their frozen state and fall to the floor. From where Gilbert sat, lines went out from him in all directions: lines of the pews, lines of the aisle ahead which went along under the gallery, angles of the walls, lines of the windows. Sometimes, as his gaze wandered around the church, the line of a pillar would coincide with the line of a window, and Gilbert would hold them there together, getting a sudden satisfaction out of holding them in coincidence, and letting them go reluctantly, only when his eye would mount to the queer people in the gallery, whose bonnets and eyes and noses you could just see over the brass railing.

Sometimes in the summer when Uncle Marcus's family was away, Garna and Gilbert sat in their pew at the back of the gallery, a pew that was as big as a house, with great arm-chairs and cushions for your feet. In front of you was the clock, the face of which you not see, for it looked out straight towards the minister, but