Then Jeannie started a musical society, at the meetings of which the Miss Cliffords quavered an uncertain alto, and Colonel Raymond thundered an approximate bass. They met originally once a week at Bolton Street, to sing glees for an hour, under the severe guidance of Miss Fortescue, who taught them by degrees not so much what good part singing was, as what it was not. Then they won their way to the passable. Her teaching seemed almost hair-splitting at first, especially when she insisted on the middle of a note being sung, and allowed nothing which to the ordinary mind was allowable enough, and insisted on the existence of notes intermediate between semitones.
“Because a piano has black notes and white notes,” she observed once, “you think that there is no interval between. If you think you are lower than A flat, and higher than G sharp, you must be singing A. The chances are strongly against it. The basses again, please.”
But in spite of, or perhaps because of, this severity the club prospered. The instinct for perfection is commoner than one thinks, even among those who never attain more than mediocrity, and those new facts about intervals were as fascinating as X-rays. Mrs. Collingwood even joined, for she valued music among the higher relaxations. The apostles of this art she held were Mendelssohn and Handel--these were the moons. And the greater stars were Barnby, Stainer, and the Rev. P. Henley, whose chant in E flat she ranked among the noblest productions of the world of art. A memorable evening indeed came, when Mrs. Collingwood sang also in a drinking-song, without turning a hair. She professed her willingness in a spuriously fugal passage “to drink a bowl wi’ thee” fortissimo, though there was no foot-note stating specifically that the bowl contained a non-alcoholic beverage. A charity performance was to be given at Christmas, in which the drinking-song would be performed, and Mrs. Collingwood knew it. But she made no protest, and practised “drinking her bowl” every Tuesday evening with gusto.
And Jeannie had classes of all sorts. She interested herself in the girls of the soap manufactory at Wroxton, and taught them that there were more things in the world than factory and followers. Some showed botanical tendencies, and she would bury herself in Sowerby’s Plants in order to be able to take them further in their hobby. Two others had violins, and Jeannie made night hideous by bringing them to Bolton Street two evenings in the week and accompanying their vagrant strains. There was another who sang, and a fifth who had a mania for wood-carving. Jeannie weaned her from the reproduction of imagining ferns tied together by amorphous ribbons, and persuaded her to copy the lines of real leaves and flowers. All these various elements were amalgamated on Sunday afternoon, when a large room over the stables, which she had appropriated for her purposes, was thronged with the wood-carvers, the musicians, and the botanists. On these occasions she read to them and gave them tea. The readings were not strictly Sabbatical, and Arthur, spying out the land one Sunday after they had gone, found a large number of perfectly secular books with markers in them. Jeannie, when confronted with them, only laughed.