The Christian Part 39

"G.o.d pity and forgive me!" he muttered, and then he turned away.

The traffic in the streets was increasing every moment, and as he stumbled across the courtyard a drunken man going by the gate stopped and cried into the pa.s.sage, "h.e.l.loa, there! I'm a-watchin' of ye!" The bloodhound leaped up and barked, but John hurried into the house and clashed the door.

He sat on the form and tried to compose himself. He thought of Paul as he had seen him at the last moment--the captured eagle with the broken wing scudding into the night, the night of London, but free, free!

In his mind's eye he followed him through the streets--down Bishopsgate Street into Threadneedle Street and along Cheapside to St. Paul's churchyard. Crowds of people would be there to-night waiting for the striking of the clock at midnight that they might raise a shout and wish each other a happy New Year.

That made him think of Glory. She would be there too, for she loved a rich and abounding life. He could see her quite plainly in the midst of the throng with her sparkling eyes and bounding step. It would be so new to her, so human and so beautiful! Glory! Always Glory!

He thought he must have been dreaming, for suddenly the clocks were all striking, first the clock in the hall, then the clocks of the churches round about, and finally the great clock of the cathedral. Almost at the same moment there was a distant sound like the rattle of musketry, and then the church bells began to ring.

The noises in the street were now tumultuous. People were shouting and laughing. Some of them were singing. At one moment it was the Salvation chorus, at the next a music-hall ditty. First "At the Cross, at the Cross," then "Mr. 'enry 'awkins," and then an unfamiliar ditty. With measured steps over the hardened snow of the pavement there came tramping along a line of boys and girls, crying:

D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?

D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?

D'ye ken John P-e-e-l----

Their shrill trebles broke like a rocket on the topmost note, and there was loud laughter.

Glory again! Always, always Glory!

Then the scales fell from his eyes and he saw himself as he was, a self-deluded man and a cheat. The impulses that had prompted him to this night's work had really centred in Glory. It had been Glory first and Glory last, and his pity for Brother Paul and his fear for the fate of Polly had been only a falsehood and pretence.

The night wind was still howling about the house. Its noise mingled with the peal of the church bells, and together they seemed to utter the voices of mocking fiends: Judas! Traitor! Fool! Fool! Traitor! Judas!

He covered his ears with his hands and his head fell into his breast.

X.

"The Little Turnstile,

"New Year's Eve.

"Hooraa! hooraa!

"Feeling like bottled yeast this evening and liable to go off, I thank my stars I have three old babies at home to whom I am bound to tell everything. So lizzen, lizzen for all! Know ye then, all men (and women) by these presents that there is a gentleman in London who predicts wonderful things for Glory. His name is Sefton, and I came to know him through three ladies--I call them the Three Graces--whose acquaintance I have made by coming to live here. He is only an old mushroom with a bald, white head; and if I believed everything their ladys.h.i.+ps say I should conclude that he is one of those who never sin except twice a year, and that is all the time before Christmas and all the time after it. But their Graces belong to that saintly sisterhood who would take away the devil's character if they needed it (they don't), and though the mushroom's honour were as scarce as the middle cut in salmon, yet in common loyalty Glory would have to believe in it.

"It is all about my voice. Hearing it by accident when I was humming about the house like a blue-bottle, he asked me to let him hear it again in a place where he could judge of it to more advantage. That turned out to be a theatre--yes, indeed, a theatre--but it was the middle of the morning, and n.o.body was there except ourselves and a couple of cleaners, so Aunt Anna needn't be afraid. Yes, the chief of the orchestra was present, and he sat before a piano on the edge of the maelstrom, in what we should call the High Bailiff's pews--but they call them the stalls--while the mushroom himself went back to the cavernous depths of the body, which in a theatre they have properly christened the pit, and this morning it looked like the bottomless one.

"Lor'-a-ma.s.sey! Ever see the inside of a theatre in the daytime? Of course you've not, my dears. It is what the world itself was the day before the first day--without form and void, and darkness is on the face of the deep. Not a ray of daylight anywhere, except the adulterated kind that comes mooching round corridors and prowling in at half-open doors, and floating through the sepulchral gloom like the sleepy eyes of the monsters that terrified me in the caves at Gob-ny-Deigan when I used to play pirate, you remember.

"The gentlemen had left me alone on the stage with five or six footlights--which they ought to call face-lights--flas.h.i.+ng in my eyes, and when the pianist began to vamp and I to sing it was like pitching my voice into a tunnel, and I became so dreadfully nervous that I was forced to laugh. That seemed to vex my unseen audience, who thought me 'rot'; so I said, 'Let there be more light then.' and there was more light, 'and let the piano cease from troubling,' and it was so. Then I just stiffened my back and gave them one of mother's French songs, and after the first verse I called out to the manager at the back," Can you hear me?' and he called back, 'Go on; it's splendid!' So I did 'Mylecharaine' in the Manx, and I suppose I acted both of my songs; but I was only beginning to be aware that my voice in that great place was a little less like a barrel-organ than usual when suddenly there came a terrific clatter, such as comes with the seventh wave on the s.h.i.+ngle, and my two dear men in the dark were clapping the skin of their hands off!

"Oh, my dears! my dears! If you only knew how for weeks and weeks I had been moaning and lamenting that it was because I wasn't clever that people took no notice of me, you would forgive a vain creature when she said to herself, 'My daughter, you are really somebody, after all--you, you, you!' It was a beautiful moment, though, and when the old mushroom came back to the stage saying: 'What a voice! What expression! What nature!' I felt like falling on his bald head and kissing it, not being able to speak for lumps in the throat and feeling like the Methodist lady who poured out whisky for the cla.s.s leaders after they had presented her with a watch, and then told the reporters to say she had suitably responded.

"Heigho! I have talked about the fas.h.i.+onable people I meet in London, but I don't want to be one of them. They do nothing but rush about, dress, gossip, laugh, love, and plunge into all the delights of life. That is not my idea of existence. I am ambitious. I want to do something. I am tired in my soul of doing nothing. Yes, it _has_ been that all along, though I didn't like to tell you so before. There are people who are born in the midst of greatness and they don't know how to use it. But to be one of the world's celebrities, that is so different!

To have won the heart of the world, so that the world knows you and thinks of you and loves you! Say it is by your voice you do it and that your world is the concert hall, or even the music hall--what matter? You needn't _live_ music hall, whatever the life inside of it. And then that great dark void peopled with faces; that laugh or cry just as you please to make them--confess; that it would be magnificent, my dear ones!

"I am to go again to-night to hear what Mr. Sefton has to propose, but already this dingy little bedroom smiles upon me, and even the broken tiles in the backyard might be the pavement of paradise! If it is true what he tells me---Well, he that hath the bride is the bridegroom, and if my doings hereafter don't make your hair curl I will try to show the inhabitants of this stupid old earth what a woman can do in spite of every disadvantage. I shall not be sorry to leave this place either. The rats in these old London houses (judging by their cries of woe) hold a nightly carnival for the eating up of the younger members of the family.

And then Mrs. Jupe and Mr. Jupe--Mr. Dupe I call him--she deceives him so dreadfully with her gadding about----But anon, anon, good people!

"It is New Year's Eve to-day, and nearly nine months since I came up to London. _Tempus fugit!_ In fact _tempus_ is _fugit_-ing most fearfully, considering that I am twenty-one on Sunday next, you know, and that I haven't begun to do anything really. The snowdrops must be making a peep at Glenfaba by this time, and Aunt Rachel will be cutting slips of the rose trees and putting them in pots. Yandher place must he _urroma.s.sy_ [* Out of mercy.] nice though, with snow on the roof and the sloping lawn, and the windows glistening with frost--just like a girl in her confirmation veil as she stands hack to look at herself in the gla.s.s.

I intend to see the New Year in this time on the outside of St. Paul's Cathedral, where people congregate in thousands as twelve o'clock approaches to carry on the beautiful fiction that there is still only one clock in London, and they have to hold their noses in the air to watch for the moment when it is going to strike. But in the midst of the light and life of this splendid city I know my heart will go back with a tender twinge to the little dark streets on the edge of the sea, where the Methodist choirs will be singing, 'Hail, smiling morn,' preparatory to coffee and currant cake.

"Who will be your 'first foot' this year, I wonder? It was John Storm last year, you remember, and being as dark as a gipsy, he made a perfect _qualtagh_. [* Manx for "first foot."] And how we laughed when, disguised in the snow that was falling at the time, he pretended to be a beggar and came in just as grandfather was reading the bit about the Good Shepherd, and how he loved his lambs--and then I found him out! Ah me!

"I am looking perfectly dazzling in a new hat to-day, having been going about hitherto in one of those little frights that used to be c.o.c.ked up on the top of your hair like a hen on a cornstack. But now I am carrying about the Prince of Wales's feathers, and if he could only see me himself in them!----

"You see what a scatter-brained creature I am! Leaving the hospital has made me grow so much younger every day that I am almost afraid I may come to contemplate short frocks. But really it's the first time I've looked nice for an eternity, and now I entirely retract and repent me of all I said about wis.h.i.+ng to be a man. Being a girl, I'll put up with it, and if all the old mushroom says on that head also is true---- But then men are such funny things, bless them! Glory.

"P.S.--No word from John Storm yet. Apparently he never thinks of us now--of me at all events--and I suppose he has resigned himself and taken the vows. That's one kind of religion, I dare say, but I can't understand it; and I don't know how a dog, even, can be nailed up to a wall and not go mad. In the night lying in bed I sometimes think of him. A dark cell, a bench for a bed, a crucifix, and no other furniture, praying with trembling limbs and chattering teeth--No; such things are too high for me; I can not reach to them.

"It seems impossible that _he_ can be in London too. What a place this London is! Such a mixture! Fas.h.i.+on, religion, gaiety, devotion, pride, depravity, wealth, poverty! I find that for a girl to succeed in London her moral colour must be heightened a little. _Pinjane_ [* Manx dish, like Devons.h.i.+re junket] alone won't do. Give her a slush of _p.i.s.saves_ [* Preserves] and she'll go down sweeter. Angels are not wanted here at all. The only angels there are in London are kept framed in the church windows, and I half suspect that even they were women once, and liked bread and b.u.t.ter. And then Nell Gwynne's flag floats from the steeple of St. Martin's in the Fields, and now and again they ring the bells for her!"

XI.

At eleven o'clock that night Glory was putting on her hat and cloak to return home when the call-boy came to the dressing-room door to say that the stage manager was waiting to see her. With a little catch, in her breath, and then with a tightening of the heart-strings, she followed him to the stage manager's office. It was a stuffy place over the porter's lodge, approached by a flight of circular iron stairs and lumbered with many kinds of theatrical property.

"Come in, my dear," said the stage manager, and pus.h.i.+ng away some models of scenery he made room for her on a sofa which stood by a fast-dying fire. Then shutting the door, he bobbed his head at her and winked with both eyes, and said in a familiar whisper:

"It's all right, my dear. I've settled that little matter for you."

"Do you mean----" began Glory, and then she waited with parted lips.

"It's as good as done, my dear. Sit down." Glory had risen in her excitement. "Sit down and I'll tell you everything."

He had spoken to his management. "Gentlemen," he had said, "unless I'm mistaken I've found a prize." They had laughed. He was always finding prizes. But he knew what he was talking about, and they had given him _carte blanche_.

"You think there is really some likelihood, then----" began Glory, with the catch in her breath again, for her throat was thick and her breast was heaving.

"Sit down, now do sit down, my dear, and listen."

He was suave, he was flattering, he was intimate, he was, coaxing. She was to leave everything to him. Of course, there was much to be done yet. She had a wonderful voice; it was finer than music. She had style as well; it was astonis.h.i.+ng how she had come by it. Only a dresser, too--not even in the chorus. But stars were never turned out by Nature.

She had many things to learn, and would have to be coached up carefully before she could be brought out. He had done it for others, though, and he could do it for her; and if----

Glory's eyes were s.h.i.+ning and her heart was beating like a drum.

"Then you think that eventually--if I work hard--after years perhaps----"

"You can't do it on your own, my dear, so leave yourself in my hands entirely, and don't whisper a word about it yet."

"Ah!" It was like a dream coming true; she could scarcely believe in it.

The stage manager became still more suave and flattering and familiar.