Chapter 17

“Tell her I am often thinking of her, and if she has anything to say--anything to send--any word--any message ... it can't be displeasing to the Almighty.... But no matter! Go, go!”

The key had grated in the lock again, the lay brother was gone, and John was left alone.

“God 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 passage, “Helloa, 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 ladyships 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 nobody 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-massey! 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--flashing 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 shingle, 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 class 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 fashionable 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 _urromassy_ [* 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 glass. 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 cocked 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 wishing 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! Fashion, 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 Devonshire junket] alone won't do. Give her a slush of _pissaves_ [* 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 butter. 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 pushing 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 astonishing 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 shining 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. If she “caught on,” there was no knowing what he might not get for her--ten pounds a week--fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, even fifty perhaps.

Glory's palpitation was becoming painful, and at the bottom of her heart there was a certain fear of this sudden tide of fortune, as if Providence had somehow made a mistake and would as suddenly find it out. To appease her conscience she began to think of home and how happy she might make everybody there if God was really going to be so good to her. They should want for nothing; they should never know a poor day again.

Meantime the stage manager was painting another picture. A girl didn't go a-begging if he once took her up. There was S----. She was only an “auricomous” damsel, serving in a tobacconist's shop in the Haymarket when he first found her, and now where was she?

“Of course, I've no interest of my own to serve, my dear--none whatever. And there'll be lots of people to tempt you away from me when your name is made.”

Glory uttered some vehement protest, and then was lost in her dreams again.

“Well, well, we'll see,” said the stage manager. He was looking at her with glittering eyes.

“Do you know, my dear, you are a very fine-looking young woman?”

Glory's head was down, her face was flushed, and she was turning her mother's pearl ring around her finger. He thought she was overwhelmed by his praises, and coming closer, he said:

“Dare say you've got a good stage figure too, eh? Pooh! Only business, you know! But you mustn't be shy with me, my dear. And besides, if I am to do all this for you, you must do something for me sometimes.”

She hardly heard him. Her eyes were still glistening with the far-off look of one who gazes on a beautiful vision.

“You are so good,” she said. “I don't know what to say, or how to thank you.”

“This way,” he whispered, and leaning over to her he lifted her face and kissed her.

Then her poor dream of glory and grandeur and happiness was dispelled in a moment, and she awoke with a sense of outrage and shame. The man's praises were flattery; his predictions were a pretence; he had not really meant it at all, and she had been so simple as to believe everything.

“Oh!” she said, with the feeble, childish cry of one who has received a pistol wound in battle. And then she rose and turned to go. But the stage manager, who was laughing noisily out of his hot red face, stepped between her and the door.

“My dear child, you can't mean--a trifle like that--!”

“Open the door, please,” she said in her husky voice.

“But surely you don't intend--In this profession we think nothing, you know----”

“Open the door, sir!”

“Really--upon my word----”

When she came to herself again she was out in the dark back street, and the snow was hard and dirty under foot, and the wind was high and cold, and she was running along and crying like a disappointed child.

The bitterest part of it all was the crushing certainty that she had no talents and no chances of success, and that the man had only painted up his fancy picture as a means of deceiving her. Oh, the misery of being a woman! Oh, the cruelty of this great, glorious, devilish London, where a girl, if she was poor and alone, could live only by her looks!

With God knows what lingering remnant of expectation, but feeling broken and beaten after her brave fight for life, and with the weak woman uppermost at last, she had turned toward the hospital. It was nearly half-past eleven when she got there, and Big Ben was chiming the half hour as she ascended the steps. Bracing herself up, she looked in at the porter's door with a face that was doing its best to smile.

“Any letters to-night, porter?”

“Not to-night, miss.”

“No? Well--none to get, none to answer, you know. Happy New Year to you!”

But there was a sob in her laughter, and the man said: “I'd be sorry to miss your face, nurse, but if you'll leave your address I'll send your letters on and save you the journey so late at night.”

“Oh, no-no, there'll be no more letters now, porter, and--I'll not come again. Here!”

“No, no, miss.”

“Yes, yes, you must.”

She forced a shilling into the porter's hand in spite of his protests, and then fled from the look in his face which seemed to her to say that he would like to return her sixpence.

John Storm was lost to her. It was foolishness to go on expecting to hear from him. Had he not told her that the rule under which the brothers lived in community forbade them to write and receive letters except by special permission? But she had expected that something would happen--some accident, some miracle, she hardly knew what. That dream was over now; she was alone; it was no use deceiving herself any longer.

She went home by the back streets, for people were peering into her face, and she thought perhaps she had been crying. Late as it was, being New Year's Eve, there were groups about every corner, and in some of the flagged courts and alleys little girls were dancing to the music of the Italian organ man or turning catherine-wheels. As she was going down Long Acre a creachy voice saluted her.

“Evening, miss! Going home early, ain't ye?”

It was a miserable-looking woman in clothes that might have been stolen from a scarecrow.

“Market full to-night, my dear? Look as if the dodgers had been at ye. Live? I live off of the lane. But lor' bless ye, I've lived in a-many places! Seen the day I lived in Soho Square. I was on the 'alls then. Got a bit quisby on my top notes, you know, and took the scarlet fever--soldier, I mean, my dear. But what's the use of frettin'?

“I likes to be jolly, and I allwiz is. Doing now? Selling flowers outside the theatres--police is nasty if you've got nothink. Ain't I going home? Soon as I get a drain of white satin. Wish you luck, my dear!”

As she came up to the shop in the Turnstile she could hear that it was noisy with the voices of men and girls, so she turned back through Lincoln's-Inn Fields and passed down to Fleet Street. It was approaching twelve o'clock by this time, and streams of people were flowing in the direction of St. Paul's Cathedral. Glory turned eastward also and allowed herself to be carried along with the current which babbled and talked like a river in the night.

Immediately in front of her there was a line of girls walking arm-in-arm across the width of the pavement. They were factory girls in big hats with ostrich feathers, and as they skipped along with their free step they sang snatches of Salvation hymns and music-hall songs. All at once they gave a shrill peal of laughter, and one of them cried, “Tell me what it is and I'll give it a nyme.” At the next moment a strange figure was forging past their line, going westward with long strides. It was a man in the habit of a monk, with long black cassock and broad-brimmed hat. Glory caught a glimpse of his face as he passed her. It was a hungry, eager face, with big, melancholy eyes, and it seemed to her that she must have seen it before somewhere. The wind was very cold, and the great cross on the dome of the cathedral stood out like a beacon against flying clouds.

St. Paul's churchyard was thronged with noisy, happy people, and down to the last minute before the hour they shouted and joked and laughed. Then there was a hush, the great crowds seemed to hold their breath as if they had been a single living creature, and every face was turned upward to the clock. The clock struck, the bells of the cathedral began to ring, the people cheered and saluted each other and shook hands on every side, and then the dense mass broke up.

Glory could have cried for joy of it all--it was so simple, so human, so childlike. But she listened to the laughter and salutations of the people about her and felt more lonely than the Bedouin in the desert; she remembered the bubbling hopes that had carried her through the day, and her heart fell low; she thought of the letter which she had posted home on her way to the theatre, and two great tears came rolling from her eyes.

The face of the monk tormented her, and suddenly she bethought herself whose face it must have been. It must have been the face of Polly Love's brother. He belonged to the Bishopsgate Fathers, and had once been a patient in the hospital, and perhaps he was going there now on some errand or urgent message--to the doctors or to----

“It was foolish not to leave my address when the porter asked me,” she thought. She would go back and do so. There could be no harm in that; and if anything had really happened, if John----

“Happy New Year to you, my dear!”

Somebody in the drifting crowd was standing before her and blocking the way. It was Agatha Jones in a mock seal-skin coat and big black hat surmounted by black feathers, and with Charlie Wilkes (with his diminutive cap pushed back from his oily fringe and pimpled forehead) leaning heavily on her arm.

“Well, I never! Who'd have thought of meeting you in St. Paul's churchyawd!”