"NEITHER DO I CONDEMN THEE"
Autumn came to London, a warm, lingering season. There was a hint of the
South in the atmosphere of town. All business moved with languor; there
was more enjoyment in life as people went and came through the streets
under so ripe and genial a sun.
Gortre had settled down to steady, regular work. At no time before had a
routine been so pleasant to him. His days were full of work, which, hard
as it was, came to him with far more appeal than his duties at Walktown.
Nothing ever stagnated here, at the very hub and centre of things.
The splendid energy and force of Father Ripon, the magnificent
unconvention of his methods, animated his staff to constant and
unflagging exertions.
Gortre felt that he was suddenly "grown up," that his life before had
been spent in futile playtime compared to the present.
One central fact in St. Mary's parish held all the great organisation
together. This was the daily services in the great church. Priests,
deacons, sisters of mercy, school teachers, and lay helpers all drew
their strength and inspiration from this source. The daily Eucharist,
matins, evensong, were both a stimulus and stimulant of enormous power.
Church brought the mysteries in which they lived, moved, and had their
being into intimate relation with every circumstance of daily life.
The extraordinary thing, which many of Father Ripon's staff were almost
unable to understand, was that more people did not avail themselves of
what they regarded--viewing the thing from a standpoint of personal
experience--such helpful opportunities.
"They are always coming to me," Father Ripon had said on one occasion,
"and complaining that they find such a tremendous difficulty in leading
a holy life--say that the worldly surroundings and so forth kill their
good impulses--and yet they _won't_ come to church. People are such
fools! My young men imagine that they can become good Christians by a
sort of sudden magic--a low beast on Saturday night, the twentieth of
August, and, after a nerve storm in church and a few tears in the
vestry, a saint for evermore! And then when they get drunk or do
something beastly the next week, they rail against the Christian Faith
because it isn't a sort of spiritual hand cuffs! And yet if you told
them you could manage a bank after merely experience in a shipping
office, they would see the absurdity of that at once. Donkeys!"
This with a genial smile of tenderness and compassion, for this
Whirlwind in a Cassock loved his flock.
So from the very first Basil had found his life congenial. Privately he
blessed his good fortune in living in Lincoln's Inn with Spence. On the
nights when the journalist was free from the office, and not otherwise
engaged, the two men sat late with pipes and coffee, enjoying that
vigorous communion of two keen, young, and virile brains which is one of
the truly stimulating pleasures of life.
Gortre admired Spence greatly for some of his qualities. His intellect
was, of course, first class--his high position on the great daily paper
guaranteed that. His reading and sympathies were wide. Moreover, the
clergyman found a great refreshment in the fact that, in an age of
indifference, at a time when the best intellects of younger London life
were professedly agnostic, Harold Spence was an avowed Christian and
Churchman. As Gortre got to know him better, when the silence and
detachment of midnight in the old Inn broke down reticence, he realised
with a sense of thankfulness, and sometimes of fear also, how a thorough
belief in religion kept the writer straight and captain of his own soul.
For the man was a creature of strong passions and wayward desires. He
had not always been the clean gentleman of the present. As is so often
the case with a refined and cultured temperament, he had a dark and ugly
side to his nature. The coarse vices of the blood called to him long and
often with their hollow siren voices. Evil came to him with swift
invitation and cunning allurement. He had hinted to Basil of days of sin
and secret shame. And now, very soberly and without any emotion, he
clung to Christ for help.
And he had conquered.
This was ever a glorious fact to Basil, another miracle in those
thousands of daily miracles which were happening all around him. But his
fear for Harold came from his realisation of his friend's exact
spiritual grip. Spence's Christianity was rather too _utilitarian_ for
safety. Perhaps the deep inward conviction was weak. It seemed sometimes
as if it were a barren, thorny thing--too much fetish, too much a return
for benefits received, a sort of half-conscious bargain. He often prayed
long that nothing should ever occur to shake Spence's belief; for he
felt, if that should happen, the disaster would prove irreparable. A
dammed river is a dangerous thing.
But he kept all these thoughts locked in his heart, and never spoke of
them to Harold.
Since the evening of his first sermon he had never seen Schuabe again.
Now and then the thought of him passed through his brain, and his mental
sight seemed obscured for a moment, as though great wings hid the sun
from him. But since the silent duel in the church, the curious and
malign influence of the millionaire had waned. It was prominent no
longer, and when it troubled him it did so without power and force. Fine
health, the tonic of constant work, the armour of continual prayer, had
their way and were able to banish much of what he now looked back on as
morbidity, sinister though it had been.
Nevertheless, one thing often reminded him of that night. The dark,
Jewish-looking lady he had seen sitting in the same pew with Schuabe
often came to church on Sunday nights when he was preaching. The bold
and insolently beautiful face looked up at him with steady interest. The
fierce regard had something passionate and yet wistful in it.
Sometimes Basil found himself preaching almost directly to the face and
soul of the unknown woman. There was an understanding between them. He
knew it; he felt it most certainly.
Sometimes she would remain in her seat after the mass of the
congregation had shuffled away into the night. She did not pray, but sat
still, with her musing eyes fixed on the huge ten-foot crucifix that
swung down from the chancel arch.
Once, as he passed the pew on the way to baptise the child of a poor
woman of the streets--brought in furtively after the Sunday
evensong--she made a movement as if to speak to him. He had waited in
expectation for a moment, but she remained still, and he passed on to
the font, with its sad cluster of outcasts, its dim gas-jets, and the
tiny child of shame with its thin cry of distress.
He was asking the tremendous question--
"_Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all
his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous
desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that
thou wilt not follow nor be led by them?_"
when he saw that the unknown woman was standing by within the shadow of
a pillar. A gleam of yellow light fell through the dark on her rich
dress, her eye glittered behind her white veil. He thought there was a
tear in it. But when he was saying the exhortation he saw that the tall,
silent figure had departed.
He often wondered who the woman was,--if he should ever know her.
Something told him that she wanted help. Something assured him that he
should some day give it to her.
And beyond this there was an unexplained conviction within him that the
stranger was in some way concerned and bound up in the part he was to
play in life.
Long ago he had realised that it was idle to deny the interference of
supernatural personalities in human life. Accepting the Incarnation, he
accepted the Communion of Saints. And he was always conscious of hidden
powers moulding, directing him.
The episode of the cigarettes happened in this way.
Stokes, one of Gortre's fellow-curates, came to supper one night in
Lincoln's Inn.
Spence was there also, as it was one of his free nights.
About ten o'clock supper was over and they proposed to have a little
music. Stokes was a fine pianist, and he had brought some of the
nocturnes and ballads of Chopin with him, to try on the little
black-cased piano which stood at an obtuse angle with the end of the
large sitting-room.
"Will you smoke, Stokes?" Spence said.
"Thank you, I'll have a cigarette," the young man replied. "I can't
stand cigars, and I've left my pipe at the Clergy House."
They looked for cigarettes in the silver box lined with cedar which
stood on the mantel-shelf, but some one had smoked them all and the box
was empty.
"Never mind," Spence said; "I've been meaning to run out and get a late
_Westminster_ and I'll buy some cigarettes, too. There's a shop at the
Holborn end of the Lane, next to the shop where the oysters come from,
and it won't be shut yet."
In a few minutes he came back with several packets of cigarettes in his
hand. "I've brought Virginian," he said; "I know you can't stand
Egyptian, none of us can, and if these are cheap, they're good, too."
Till eleven o'clock Stokes played to them--Chopin's wild music of
melancholy and fire--and as the hour struck he went home.
Gortre and Spence sat and talked casually after he had gone, about the
music they had heard, the cartoon in the evening paper, anything that
came.
Basil had not been smoking during the evening. He had been too intent
upon the nocturnes, and now he felt a want of tobacco. One of the
packets of cigarettes lay by him on the table. He pulled up the flaps
and took one. Without thinking what he was doing he drew a little
photograph, highly finished and very clear, from the tiny cardboard
case.
He glanced at it casually.
The thing was one of those pictures of burlesque actresses which are
given away with this kind of tobacco. A tall girl with short skirts and
a large picture hat was shown in a coquettish attitude that was meant to
be full of invitation.
Basil looked at it steadily with a curious expression on his face. Then
he took a large reading-glass from the table and examined it again,
magnifying it to many times its original size.
He scrutinised it with great care. It was the portrait of the strange
girl who came to St. Mary's.
Basil had told Spence of this woman, and now he passed the photograph on
to him.
"Harold, that is the girl who comes to church and looks so unhappy. She
is an actress, of course. The name is underneath--Miss Gertrude Hunt.
Who is Miss Gertrude Hunt?"
Spence took the thing. "How very queer!" he said, "to find your unknown
like this. Gertrude Hunt? Why, she is a well-known musical comedy girl,
sings and dances at the Regent, you know. There are all the usual
stories about the lady, but possibly they are all lies. I'm sure I don't
know. I've chucked that sort of society long ago. Are you sure it's the
same person?"
"Oh, quite sure! Of course, this shows the girl in a different dress and
so on, but it's she without a doubt. I am glad she comes to church. It
is not what one expects from what one hears of that class of woman, and
it's not what one generally finds in the parish."
He sighed, thinking of the many chilling experiences of the last few
months in the vice-haunted streets and squares of Bloomsbury.
"Well," said Spence, "experiments with that type are generally failures,
and sometimes dangerous to the experimenter. You remember Anatole
France's _Thais_? But this damsel is no Thais certainly, and you aren't
a bit like Paphuntius. I hope you will be able to do some good.
Personally, anything of the sort would be quite impossible to me.
Good-night, old man. I'm going to turn in. I've a hard day's work
to-morrow. Sleep well."
He went out of the room with a yawn.
When he was left alone, with his little mystery solved in so commonplace
a fashion, Basil was conscious of a curious disappointment. It was an
anti-climax.
He had no narrow objection to the theatre. Now and then he had been to
see famous actors in great plays. His occasional visits to the theatres
of Irving or Wyndham had given him pleasure, nevertheless he had always
felt a slight instinctive dislike to the trade of a mime. All voluntary
sacrifices of personal dignity affect the average English temperament in
this way more or less. However much the apologists of the stage may cry
"art" or "beneficial influence," your British thinker is not convinced
that there is anything very worthy in painting the face and making the
body a public show for a wage. And there is sometimes a kind of wonder
in the heart of a sincere Christian who attends a theatre as he
remembers that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit.
Still Basil was tolerant enough. But this case which had thrust itself
before him was quite different. He knew that the burlesque, the modern
music play, made, first and foremost, a frank appeal to the senses. Its
hopeless vulgarity and coarseness of sentiment, its entire lack of
appeal to anything that was not debased and materialistic, were ordinary
indisputable facts of every-day life. And so his lady of evensong was a
high-priestess of nothing better than this cult of froth and gaudy
sensuality. More than all others, his experiences of late had taught him
that women of this class seemed to be very nearly soulless. Their souls
had dissolved in champagne, their consciences were burnt up by the
feverish excitement and pleasure of their lives. They sold themselves
for luxury and the adulation of coarse men.
His very chagrin made him bitter and contemptuous more than his wont.
Then his eye lit upon a photogravure hung upon the opposite wall. It
was the reproduction of a quaint, decorative, stilted picture by an
artist of the early Umbrian school, and represented St. Mary Magdalene.
The coincidence checked his contemptuous thoughts.
He began to reconstruct the scene in his brain, a favourite and
profitable exercise of his, using his knowledge and study of the old dim
times to animate the picture and make it vivid.
They were all resting, or rather lying, around the table, the body
resting on the couch, the feet turned away from the table in the
direction of the wall, while the left elbow rested on the table.
And then, from the open courtyard, up the verandah step, perhaps through
an antechamber, and by the open door, passed the figure of a woman into
the festive reception-room and dining-hall. How had she gained access?
How incongruous her figure must have been there! In those days the
Jewish prejudice against any conversation with women--even those of the
most lofty character--was extreme.
The shadow of her form must have fallen on all who sat at meat. But no
one spoke, nor did she heed any but One only.
The woman had brought with her an _alabastron_ of perfume. It was a
flask of precious _foliatum_, probably, which women wore round the neck,
and which hung over the breast. The woman stood behind Him at His feet,
and as she bowed reverently a shower of tears, like sudden summer rain,
"bedewed" His feet.
Basil went through the whole scene until the final, "Go _into_ peace"
not go _in_ peace, as the logical dogmatics would have had it.
And so she, the first who had come to Him for spiritual healing, went
out into the better light, and into the eternal peace of the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Basil tore up the vulgar little photograph and forgot that aspect of the
dancer. He remembered rather the dim figure by the font.
There was a sudden furious knocking on the outer door of the chambers,
and he went to open it.