THUS it came to pass that, for the sake of Stellamaris, Risca remained
in London and fought with beasts in Fenton Square. Sometimes he got the
better of the beasts, and sometimes the beasts got the better of him. On
the former occasions he celebrated the victory by doing an extra turn of
work; on the latter he sat idly growling at defeat.
At this period of his career he was assistant-editor of a weekly review,
in charge of the book-column of an evening newspaper, the contributor of
a signed weekly article on general subjects to the “Daily Herald,” and
of a weekly London letter to an American syndicate. From this it will
be seen that for a man not yet thirty he had achieved a position in
journalism envied by many who had grown gray-headed in the game. But as
Risca had written three or four novels which had all been rejected by
all the publishers in London, he chose to regard himself as a man foiled
in his ambitions. He saw himself doomed to failure. For him was the
eternal toil of ploughing the sand; the Garden of Delight cultivated by
the happy Blest--such as Fawcus of the club, who boasted of making over
a thousand pounds for every novel he wrote, and of being able to take
as much holiday as he chose--had its gilded gates closed against him
forever. That the man of nine-and-twenty should grow embittered because
he was not accepted by the world as a brilliant novelist is a matter for
the derision of the middle-aged and for the pitying smile of the hoary;
but it is a matter of woeful concern to twenty-nine, especially if
twenty-nine be a young man of a saturnine temperament whom fate has
driven to take himself seriously. In Risca's life there were misfortunes
the reality of the pain of which was independent of age; others which
were relative, as inseparable from youth as the tears for a bumped head
are inseparable from childhood. Yet to the man they were all equally
absolute. It is only in after-years, when one looks back down the vista,
that one can differentiate.
For all that he ought to have given himself another decade before crying
himself a failure, yet a brilliant young journalist who has not found
a publisher for one of four novels has reasonable excuse for serious
cogitation. There are scores of brilliant young journalists who have
published masterpieces of fiction before they are thirty, and at forty
have gone on their knees and thanked kind, gentle Time for his effacing
fingers; yet the novels have had some quality of the novel warranting
their publication. At any rate, the brilliant young journalists have
believed in them. They have looked upon their Creation and found that
it was good. But Risca, looking on his Creation, found that it was
wood. His people were as wooden as Mr. and Mrs. Ham in a Noah's Ark; his
scenery was as wooden as the trees and mountain in a toy Swiss
village; his dialogue as wooden as the conversation-blocks used by
the philosophers of Laputa. He had said, in an outburst of wrathful
resentment, that he found his one artistic outlet in aiding to create
Stella's Land of Illusion; and he was right. He was despairingly
aware of the lack of the quick fancy; the power of visualization; the
sublimated faculty of the child's make-believe, creating out of trumpery
bits and pieces a glowing world of romance; the keen, instinctive
knowledge of the general motives of human action; the uncanny insight
into the hearts and feelings of beings of a sex, class, or type
different from his own; the gift of evolving from a tiny broken bone of
fact a perfect creature indisputably real, colouring it with the hues of
actuality and breathing into it the breath of life--the lack, indeed, of
all the essential qualities, artistic and therefore usually instinctive,
that go to the making of a novelist. Yet Risca was doggedly determined
to be a novelist and a poet. It was pathetic. How can a man who cannot
distinguish between “God Save the King” and “Yankee Doodle” hope to
write a world-shaking sonata? Risca knew that he was crying for the
moon, and it is only because he cried so hard for it that he deserved
any serious commiseration.
When he did come to death-grapple with the absolute, the beasts above
mentioned, he stood out a tragic young figure, fiercely alone in the
arena, save for Herold.
His name, uncommon and arresting, had one connotation in London--the
Case, the appalling and abominable Case. Even Ferguson of the “Daily
Herald,” who had evinced such sympathy for him at first, shrank from the
name at the head of the weekly column and suggested the temporary use of
a pseudonym. Had it not been for Herold's intervention, Risca would have
told Ferguson to go to the devil and would have refused to work for his
Philistine paper. He swallowed the insult, which did him no good. He
refused to carry the accursed name into the haunts of men.
“Come to the club, at any rate,” Herold urged. “Every man there is loyal
to you.”
“And every man as he looks at me will have on his retina not a picture
of me, but a picture of what went on in that house in Smith Street.”
“Oh, go and buy a serviceable epidermis,” cried Herold. Argument was
useless.
So Risca worked like a mole at anonymous journalism in his shabby
lodgings where Lilias and Niphetos were suggested only by a mangy tabby
who occasionally prowled into his sitting-room, and Arachne presided,
indeed, but in the cobwebs about the ceiling in the guise which she had
been compelled to take by the angry god when the world was young. Only
when his attendance at the office of the weekly review was necessary,
such as on the day when it went to press, did he mingle with the busy
world.
“If you go on in this way,” said Herold, “you 'll soon have as much idea
of what's going on in London as a lonely dog tied up in a kennel.”
“What does it matter,” growled John, “to any of the besotted fools who
read newspapers, provided I bark loud enough?”
There was one thing going on in London, however, in which he took a grim
interest, and that was the convalescence of the little maid-of-all-work
who had been taken back, a maimed lamb, to the cheerless fold where
she had been reared. Thither he went to make inquiries as soon as he
returned from Southcliff-on-Sea. He found the Orphanage of St. Martha
at Willesden, a poverty-stricken building, a hopeless parallelogram of
dingy, yellow brick, standing within a walled inclosure. There were no
trees or flowers, for the yard was paved. His ring at the front door was
answered by an orphan in a light print dress, her meagre hair clutched
up tight in a knob at the back. He asked for the superintendent and
handed his card. The orphan conducted him to a depressing parlour, and
vanished. Presently appeared a thin, weary woman, dressed in the black
robes of a Sister of Mercy, who, holding the card tight in nervous
fingers, regarded him with an air of mingled fright and defiance.
“Your business?” she asked.
Despite the torture of it all, John could not help smiling. If he had
been armed with a knout, his reception could not have been more hostile.
“I must beg of you to believe,” said he, “that I come as a friend and
not as an enemy.”
She pointed to a straight-backed chair.
“Will you be seated?”
“It is only human,” said he, “to call and see you, and ask after that
unhappy child.”
“She is getting on,” said the Sister superintendent, frostily, “as well
as can be expected.”
“Which means? Please tell me. I am here to know.”
“She will take some time to recover from her injuries, and of course her
nerve is broken.”
“I'm afraid,” said John, “your institution can't afford many invalid's
luxuries.”
“None at all,” replied the weary-faced woman. “She gets proper care and
attention, however.”
John drew out a five-pound note. “Can you buy her any little things
with this? When you have spent it, if you will tell me, I 'll send you
another.”
“It's against our rules,” said the Sister, eying the money. “If you like
to give it as a subscription to the general funds, I will accept it.”
“Are you badly off?” asked John.
“We are very slenderly endowed.”
John pushed the note across the small table near which they were
sitting.
“In return,” said he, “I hope you will allow me to send in some jellies
and fruits, or appliances, or whatever may be of pleasure or comfort to
the child.”
“Whatever you send her that is practical shall be applied to her use,”
said the Sister superintendent.
She was cold, unemotional; no smile, no ghost even of departed smiles,
seemed ever to visit the tired, gray eyes or the corners of the rigid
mouth; coif and face and thin hands were spotless. She did not even
thank him for his forced gift to the orphanage.
“I should like to know,” said John, regarding her beneath frowning
brows, “whether any one here loves the unhappy little wretch.”
“These children,” replied the Sister superintendent, “have naturally a
hard battle to fight when they go from here into the world. They come
mostly from vicious classes. Their training is uniformly kind, but it
has to be austere.”
John rose. “I will bring what things I can think of to-morrow.”
The Sister superintendent rose, too, and bowed icily. “You are at
liberty to do so, Mr. Risca; but I assure you there is no reason for
your putting yourself to the trouble. In the circumstances I can readily
understand your solicitude; but again I say you have no cause for it.”
“Madam,” said he, “I see that I have more cause than ever.”
The next day he drove to the orphanage in a cab, with a hamper of
delicacies and a down pillow. The latter the Sister superintendent
rejected. Generally, it was against the regulations and, particularly,
it was injudicious. Down pillows would not be a factor in Unity Blake's
after-life.
“Besides,” she remarked, “she is not the only orphan in the infirmary.”
“Why not call it a sick-room or sick-ward instead of that prison term?”
asked John.
“It's the name given to it by the governing body,” she replied.
After this John became a regular visitor. Every time he kicked his heels
for ten minutes in the shabby and depressing parlour and every time he
was received with glacial politeness by the Sister superintendent.
By blunt questioning he learned the history of the institution. The
Sisterhood of Saint Martha was an Angelican body with headquarters in
Kent, which existed for meditation and not for philanthropic purposes.
The creation and conduct of the orphanage had been thrust upon the
sisterhood by the will of a member long since deceased. It was unpopular
with the sisterhood, who resented it as an excrescence, but bore it as
an affliction decreed by divine Providence. Among the cloistered inmates
of the Kentish manor-house there was no fanatical impulse towards
Willesden.
They were good, religious women; but they craved retirement, and not
action, for the satisfying of their spiritual needs. Otherwise they
would have joined some other sisterhood in which noble lives are spent
in deeds of charity and love. But there are angels of wrath, angels of
mercy, and mere angels. These were mere angels. The possibility of being
chosen by the Mother Superior to go out into the world again and take
charge of the education, health, and morals of twenty sturdy and squalid
little female orphans lived an abiding terror in their gentle breasts. A
shipwrecked crew casting lots for the next occupant of the kettle could
suffer no greater pangs of apprehension than did the Sisters of Saint
Martha on the imminence of an appointment to the orphanage. They had
taken vows of obedience. The Mother Superior's selection was final.
The unfortunate nominee had to pack up her slender belongings and go
to Willesden. Being a faulty human being (and none but a faulty,
unpractical, unsympathetic human being can want, in these days of
enlightenment, to shut herself up in a nunnery for the rest of her life,
with the avowed intention of never doing a hand's turn for any one of
God's creatures until the day of her death), she invariably regarded
herself as a holy martyr and ruled the poor little devils of orphans for
the greater glory of God (magnified entirely, be it understood, by her
own martyrdom) than for the greater happiness of the poor little devils.
Sister Theophila--in entering into religion the Protestant Sisters
changed the names by which they were known in the world, according to
the time-honoured tradition of an alien church--Sister Theophila, with
the temperament of the recluse, had been thrust into this position
of responsibility against her will. She performed her duties with
scrupulous exactitude and pious resignation. Her ideal of life was the
ascetic, and to this ideal the twenty orphans had to conform. She did
not love the orphans.
Her staff consisted of one matron, a married woman of a much humbler
class than her own. Possibly she might have loved the orphans had
she not seen such a succession of them, and her own work been less
harassing. Twenty female London orphans from disreputable homes are
a tough handful. When you insist on their conformity with the ascetic
ideal, they become tougher. They will not allow themselves to be loved.
“And ungrateful!” exclaimed the matron, one day when she was taking
Risca round the institution. He had expressed to Sister Theophila his
desire to visit it, and she, finding him entirely unsympathetic, had
handed him over to her subordinate. “None of them know what gratitude
is. As soon as they get out of here, they forget everything that has
been done for them; and as for coming back to pay their respects, or
writing a letter even, they never think of it.”
Kitchen, utensils, floors, walls, dormitory, orphans--all were
spotlessly clean, the orphans sluiced and scrubbed from morning to
night; but of things that might give a little hint of the joy of life
there was no sign.
“This is the infirmary,” said the matron, with her hand on the
door-knob.
“I should like to see it,” said John.
They entered. An almost full-grown orphan, doing duty as nurse, rose
from her task of plain sewing and bobbed a curtsy. The room was clean,
comfortless, dark, and cold. Two pictures, prints of the Crucifixion
and the Martyrdom of St. Stephen, hung on the walls. There were three
narrow, hard beds, two of which were occupied. Some grapes on a chair
beside one of them marked the patient in whom he was interested. John
noticed angrily that some flowers which he had sent the day before had
been confiscated.
“This is the gentleman who has been so kind to you,” said the matron.
Unity Blake looked wonderingly into the dark, rugged face of the man who
stood over her and regarded her with mingled pain and pity. They had not
told her his name. This, then, was the unknown benefactor whose image,
like that of some elusive Apollo, Giver of Things Beautiful, had haunted
her poor dreams.
“Can't you say, 'Thank you?' “ said the matron.
“Thank you, sir,” said Unity Blake.
Even in those three words her accent was unmistakably cockney--as
unmistakably cockney as the coarse-featured, snub-nosed, common little
face. In happier, freer conditions she would have done her skimpy hair
up in patent curlers and worn a hat with a purple feather, and joined
heartily in the raucous merriment of her comrades at the pickle-factory.
Here, however, she was lying, poor little devil, thought Risca, warped
from childhood by the ascetic ideal, and wrecked body and spirit by
unutterable cruelty. In her eyes flickered the patient apprehension of
the ill-treated dog.
“I hope you will soon get better,” he said, with sickening knowledge of
that which lay hidden beneath the rough bedclothes.
“Yes, sir,” said Unity.
“It 's chiefly her nerves now,” said the matron. “She hollers out of
nights, so she can't be put into the dormitory.”
“Do you like the things I send you?” asked John.
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there anything special you'd like to have?”
“No, sir.”
But he caught a certain wistfulness in her glance.
“She does n't want anything at all,” said the matron, and the girl's
eyelids fluttered. “She's being spoiled too much as it is already.”
John bent his heavy brows on the woman. She spoke not shrewishly, not
unkindly, merely with lack of love and understanding. He repressed the
bitter retort that rose to his lips. But at the same time a picture rose
before him of another sick-room, a dainty sea-chamber open to sun
and sky, where pillows of down were not forbidden, where flowers and
exquisite colours and shapes gladdened the eye, where Love, great and
warm and fulfilling, hovered over the bed. No gulls with round, yellow
eyes came to the windows of this whitewashed prison with messages
from the world of air and sea; no Exquisite Auntship, no Great High
Favourite, no Lord High Constable, executed their high appointed
functions; no clock with chimes like a bell swung in a sea-cave told
the hours to this orphan child of misery. He realized in an odd way
that Stellamaris, too, was an orphan. And he remembered, from the awful
evidence, that this child was just over fifteen--Stella's age.
Again rose the picture of the cherished one in her daintily ribboned
dressing-jacket, as filmy and unsubstantial as if made of sea-foam,
with her pure, happy face, her mysterious, brown pools of eyes, her
hair lovingly brushed to caressing softness; and he looked down on Unity
Blake. Man though he was, the bit of clean sail-cloth that did duty as a
nightgown moved his compassion.
He did his best to talk with her awhile; but it was a one-sided
conversation, as the child could reply only in monosyllables. The matron
fidgeted impatiently, and he said good-bye. Her wistful glance followed
him to the door. Outside he turned.
“There is just one thing I want to say to her.”
He left the matron and darted back into the room.
“I'm sure there must be something you would like me to bring you,” he
whispered. “Don't be afraid. Any mortal thing.”
The child's lips twitched and she looked nervously from side to side.
“What is it? Tell me.”
“Oh, sir,” she pleaded breathlessly, “might I have some peppermint
bull's-eyes.”
When Herold returned to his dressing-room after the first act,--the
piece for which he had been rehearsing had started a successful
career,--he found Risca sitting in a straight-backed chair and smoking a
pipe.
“Hallo, John! I did n't know you were in front. Why did n't you tell me?
It's going splendidly, is n't it?”
He glowed with the actor's excited delight in an audience's enthusiastic
reception of a new play. His glow sat rather oddly upon him, for he was
made up as a decrepit old man, with bald wig, and heavy, blue patches
beneath his eyes.
“No, I'm not in front,” said John.
“I see now,” smiled Herold, glancing at his friend's loose tweed suit.
No clothes morning or evening ever fitted Risca. Herold called him “The
Tailors' Terror.”
“I want to talk to you, Wallie,” said he.
“Have a drink? No? I sha' n't want anything, Perkins,” said he to
the waiting dresser. “Call me when I 'm on in the second act. I don't
change,” he explained.
“I know,” said John. “That 's why I 've come now.”
“What's the matter?” Herold asked, sitting in the chair before the
dressing-table, bright with mirrors and electric lights and sticks of
grease paint and silver-topped pots and other paraphernalia.
“Nothing particular. Only hell, just as usual. I saw that child to-day.”
Herold lit a cigarette.
“Have you ever speculated on what becomes of the victims in cases of
this kind?” asked John.
“Not particularly,” said Herold, seeing that John wanted to talk.
“What do you think can become of a human creature in the circumstances
of this poor little wretch? Her childhood is one vista of bleak
ugliness. Never a toy, never a kiss, not even the freedom of the gutter.
Unless you 've been there, you can't conceive the soul-crushing despair
of that infernal orphanage. She leaves it and goes into the world.
She goes out of a kind of dreary Greek hades into a Christian hell. It
lasted for months. She was too ignorant and spiritless to complain, and
to whom was she to complain? Now she's sent back again, just like a sick
animal, to hades. Fancy, they would n't let her have a few flowers in'
the room! It makes me mad to think of it. And when she gets well again,
she 'll have to earn her living as a little slave in some squalid
Household. But what's going to become of that human creature morally and
spiritually? That's what I want to know.”
“It's an interesting problem,” said Herold. “She may be either a
benumbed half-idiot or a vicious, vindictive she-brute.”
“Just so,” said John. “That is, if she goes to slave in some squalid
household. But suppose she were transferred to different surroundings
altogether? Suppose she had ease of life, loving care, and all the rest
of it?”
The senile travesty of Herold laughed.
“You want me to say that she may develop into some sort of flower of
womanhood.”
“Do you think she might?” John asked seriously. “My dear fellow,” said
Herold, “there are Heaven knows how many hundred million human beings
on the face of the earth, and every one of them is different from the
others. How can one tell what any particular young woman whom one does
n't know might or might not do in given circumstances? But if you want
me to say whether I think it right for you to step in and look after the
poor little devil's future, then I do say it's right. It 's stunning of
you. It's the very best thing you can do. It will give the poor little
wretch a chance, at any rate, and will give you something outside
yourself to think of.”
“I was going to do it whether you thought it right or not,” said Risca.
Herold laughed again. “For a great, hulking bull of a man you 're
sometimes very feminine, John.”
“I wanted to tell you about it, that 's all,” said Risca. “I made up my
mind this afternoon. The only thing is what the deuce am I to do with a
child of fifteen in Fenton Square?”
“Is she pretty?”
“Lord, no. Coarse, undersized little cockney, ugly as sin.”
“Anyhow,” said Herold, extinguishing his cigarette in the ash-tray,
“it's out of the question.” He rose from his chair. “Look here,” he
cried with an air of inspiration, “why not send her down to The Channel
House?”
“I'm not going to shift responsibilities on to other people's
shoulders,” John growled in his obstinate way. “This child 's my
responsibility. I 'm going to see her through somehow. As to Southcliff,
you must be crazy to suggest it. What's to prevent her, one fine
day, from getting into Stella's room and talking? My God! it would be
appalling!”
Herold agreed. He had spoken thoughtlessly.
“I should just think so,” said Risca. “The idea of such a tale of horror
being told in that room--”
The dresser entered. “Miss Mercier has just gone on, sir.”
“Well, just think out something else till I come back,” said Herold. “At
any rate, Fenton Square won't do.”
He left John to smoke and meditate among the clothes hanging up on pegs
and the framed photographs on the walls and the array of grease paints
on the dressing-table. John walked up and down the narrow space in great
perplexity of mind. Herold was right. He could not introduce Unity Blake
into lodgings, saying that he had adopted her. Landladies would not
stand it. Even if they would, what in the world could he do with her?
Could he move into a house or a flat and persuade a registry-office
to provide him with a paragon of a housekeeper? That would be more
practicable. But, even then, what did he know of the training, moral and
spiritual, necessary for a girl of fifteen? He was not going to employ
her as a servant. On that he was decided. What sort of a position she
should have he did not know; but her floor-scrubbing, dish-scraping days
were over. She should have ease of life and loving care--his own phrase
stuck in his head--especially loving care; and he was the only person in
the world who could see that she got it. She must live under his roof.
That was indisputable. But how? In lodgings or a flat? He went angrily
round and round the vicious circle.
When Herold returned, he dragged him round and round, too, until Perkins
appeared to help him to change for the third act. Then John had to stop.
He clapped on his hat. He must go and work.
“And you have n't a single suggestion to make?” he asked.
“I have one,” said Herold, fastening his shirt-studs while Perkins was
buttoning his boots. “But it's so commonplace and unromantic that you 'd
wreck the dressing-room if I made it.”
“Well, what is it?” He stood, his hand on the door-knob.
“You 've got a maiden aunt somewhere, have n't you?”
“Oh, don't talk rot!” said John. “I'm dead serious.”
And he went out and banged the door behind him. He walked the streets
furiously angry with Herold. He had gone to consult him on a baffling
problem. Herold had suggested a maiden aunt as a solution. He had but
one, his mother's sister. Her name was Gladys. What was a woman of over
fifty doing with such an idiot name? His Aunt Gladys lived at Croydon
and spent her time solving puzzles and following the newspaper accounts
of the doings of the royal family. She knew nothing. He remembered when
he was a boy at school coming home for the holidays cock-a-whoop at
having won the high jump in the school athletics sports. His Aunt
Gladys, while professing great interest, had said, “But what I don't
understand, dear, is--what do you get on to jump down from?” He had
smiled and explained, but he had felt cold in the pit of his stomach. A
futile lady. His opinion of her had not changed. In these days John was
rather an intolerant fellow.
Chance willed it, however, that when he reached Fenton Square he found
a letter which began “My dearest John” and ended “Your loving Aunt
Gladys.” And it was the letter of a very sweet-natured gentlewoman.
John sat down at his desk to work, but ideas would not come. At last
he lit his pipe, threw himself into a chair in front of the fire, and
smoked till past midnight, with his heavy brows knitted in a tremendous
frown.