Suddenly there sprang out to Glory the charm and fascination of the life
she was putting away. Trying to be true to her altered relations with
John Storm, she did not go to rehearsal the next morning--, but not yet
having the courage of her new position, she did not tell Rosa her true
reason for staying away. The part was exhausting--it tried her very
much; a little break would do no harm. Rosa wrote to apologize for her
on the score of health, and thus the first cloud of dissimulation rose
up between them.
Two days passed, and then a letter came from the manager: “Trust you
are rested and will soon be back. The prompter read your lines, but
everything has gone to pieces. Slack, slovenly, spiritless, stupid,
nobody acting, and nobody awake, it seems to me. 'All right at night,
governor,' and the usual nonsense. Shows how much we want you. But
envious people are whispering that you are afraid of the part. The
blockheads! If you succeed this time you'll be made for life, my dear.
And you _will_ succeed! Yours merrily,” etc.
With this were three letters addressed to the theatre. One of them was
from a press-cutting agency asking to be allowed to supply all newspaper
articles relating to herself, and inclosing a paragraph as a specimen:
“A little bird whispers that 'Gloria,' as 'Gloria,' is to be a startling
surprise. Those who have seen her rehearse----But mum's the word--an' we
could an' we would,” etc. Another of the letters was from the art editor
of an illustrated weekly asking for a sitting to their photographer for
a full-page picture; and the third inclosed the card of an interviewer
on an evening paper. Only three days ago Glory would have counted all
this as nothing, yet now she could not help but feel a thrilling, joyous
excitement.
Drake called after the absence of a fortnight. He had come to speak of
his last visit. His face was pale and serious, not fresh and radiant
as usual, his voice was shaking and his manner nervous. Glory had
never seen him exhibit so much emotion, and Rosa looked on in dumb
astonishment.
“I was to blame,” he said, “and I have come to say so. It was a cowardly
thing to turn the man out of his church, and it was worse than cowardly
to use you in doing it. Everything is fair, they say, in----” But he
flushed up like a girl and stopped, and then faltered: “Anyhow, I'm
sorry--very sorry; and if there is anything I can do----”
Glory tried to answer him, but her heart was beating violently, and she
could not speak.
“In fact, I've tried to make amends already. Lord Robert has a living
vacant in Westminster, and I've asked him to hand it over to the Bishop,
with the request that Father Storm----”
“But will he?”
“I've told him he must. It's the least we can do if we are to have any
respect for ourselves. And anyhow, I'm about tired of this anti-Storm
uproar. It may be all very well far men like me to object to the
man--I deny his authorities, and think him a man out of his century and
country--but for these people with initials, who write in the religious
papers, to rail at him, these shepherds who live on five thousand a year
and pretend to follow One who hadn't a home or a second coat, and whose
friends were harlots and sinners, though he was no sinner himself--it's
infamous, it's atrocious, it raises my gorge against their dead creeds
and paralytic churches. Whatever his faults, he is built on a large
plan, he has the Christ idea, and he is a man and a gentleman, and I'm
ashamed that I took advantage of him. That's all over now, and
there's no help for it; but if I might hope that you will forgive--and
forget----”
“Yes,” said Glory in a low voice, and then there was silence, and when
she lifted her head Drake was gone and Rosa was wiping her eyes.
“It was all for love of you, Glory. A woman can't hate a man when he
does wrong for love of herself.”
John Storm came in later the same day, when Rosa had gone out and Glory
was alone. He was a different man entirely. His face looked round and
his dark eyes sparkled. The clouds of his soul seemed to have drifted
away, and he was boiling over with enthusiasm. He laughed constantly,
and there was something almost depressing in the lumbering attempts at
humour of the serious man.
“What do you think has happened? The Bishop sent for me and offered me
a living in Westminster. It turns out to being the gift of Lord Robert
Ure; but no thanks to him for it. Lady Robert was at the bottom of
everything. She had called on the Bishop. He remembered me at the
Brotherhood, and told me all about it. St. Jude's, Brown's Square, on
the edge of the worst quarter in Christendom! It seems the Archdeacon
expected it for Golightly, his son-in-law. The Reverend Joshua called
on me this morning and tried to bully me, but I soon bundled him off to
Botany Bay. Said the living had been promised to him--a lie, of course.
I soon found that out. A lie is well named, you know--it hasn't a
leg--to stand upon. Ha, ha, ha!”
Nothing would serve but that they should go to look at the scene of
their future life, and with Don--he had brought his dog; it had to be
held back from the pug under the table--they set off immediately. It was
Saturday night, and as they dipped down into the slums that lie under
the shadow of the Abbey, Old Pye Street, Peter's Street, and Duck Lane
were aflare with the coarse lights of open naphtha lamps, and all but
impassable with costers' barrows. There were the husky voices of the
street hawkers, the hoarse laughter, the quarrelling, the oaths, the
rasping shouts of the butcher selling chunks of dark joints by auction,
the screeches of the roast-potato man, and the smell of stale vegetables
and fried fish. “Jow, 'ow much a pound for yer turmaters?” “Three pence;
I gave mor'n that for 'em myself.” “Garn!” “S'elp me, Gawd, I did, mum!”
“Isn't it a glorious scene?” said John; and Glory, who felt chilled
and sickened, recalled herself from some dream of different things
altogether and said, “Isn't it?”
“Sanctuary, too! What human cats we are! The poor sinners cling to the
place still!”
He took her into the alleys and courts that score and wrinkle the map
of Westminster like an old man's face, and showed her the “model”
lodging-houses and the gaudily decorated hells where young girls and
soldiers danced and drank.
“What's the use of saying to these people, 'Don't drink; don't steal'?
They'll answer, 'If you lived in these slums you would drink too.' But
we'll show them that we can live here and do neither--that will be the
true preaching.”
And then he pictured a life of absolute self-sacrifice, which she was to
share with him. “You'll manage all money matters, Glory. You can't
think how I'm swindled. And then I'm such a donkey as far as money
goes--that's not far with me, you know. Ha, ha, ha! Who's to find it?
Ah, God pays his own debts. He'll see to that.”
They were to live under the church itself; to give bread to the hungry
and clothes to the naked; to set up their Settlement in the gaming-house
of the Sharkeys, now deserted and shut up; to take in the _un_deserving
poor-the people who had nothing to say for themselves, precisely those;
and thus they were to show that they belonged neither to the publicans
and sinners nor to the Scribes and Pharisees.
“Only let us get rid of self. Only let us show that self-interest never
enters our head in one single thing we do----” and meantime Glory, who
had turned her head aside with a lump in her throat, heard some one
behind them saying:
“Lawd, Jow, that's the curick and his dorg--'im as got pore Sharkey
took! See--'im with the laidy?”
“S'elp me, so it is! Another good man gorn to 'is gruel, and all 'long
of a bloomin' dorg.”
They walked round by the church. John was talking--rapturously at every
step, and Glory was dragging after him like a criminal going to the
pillory. At last they came out by Great Smith Street, and he cried:
“See, there's the house of God under its spider's web of scaffolding,
and here's the Broad Sanctuary--broad enough in all conscience! Look!”
A crowd of girls and men were trooping out of a place of entertainment
opposite, and there were screams and curses. “Look at 'im!” cried a
woman's voice. “There 'e is, the swine! And 'e was the ruin of me; and
now 'e's 'listed for a soldier and going off with another woman!”
“You're bleedin' drunk, that's what you are!” said a man's voice, “and
if you down't take kear I'll send ye 'ome on a dawer!”
“Strike me, will ye, ye dog? Do it! I dare you!”
“She ain't worth it, soldier--come along,” said another female voice,
whereupon the first broke into a hurricane of oaths; and a little
clergyman going by at the moment--it was the Rev. J. Golightly--said:
“Dear, dear! Are there no policemen about?” and so passed on, with his
tall wife tucked under his arm.
John Storm pressed through the crowd and came between the two who were
quarrelling. By the light of the lamp he could see them. The man was
Charlie Wilkes, in the uniform of a soldier; the woman, with the paint
running on her face, her fringe disordered, and her back hair torn down,
was Aggie Jones.
“We down't want no religion 'ere,” said Charlie, sneering.
“You'll get some, though, if you're not off quick!” said John. The man
looked round for the dog and a moment afterward he had disappeared.
Glory came up behind. “O Aggie, woman, is it you?” she said, and then
the girl began to cry in a drunken sob.
“Girls is cruel put upon, mum,” said one of the women; and another
cried, “Nix, the slops!” and a policeman came pushing his way and
saying: “Now, then, move on! We ain't going to stand 'ere all night.”
“Call a cab, officer,” said John.
“Yes sir--certainly, Father. Four-wheel-er!”
“Where do you live, Aggie?” said Glory; but the girl, now sobbing drunk,
was too far gone to follow her.
“She lives in Brown's Square, sir,” said the woman who had spoken
before, and when the cab came up she was asked to get in with the other
three.
It was a tenement house, fronting to one facade of St. Jude's, and
Aggie's room was on the second story. She was helpless, and John carried
her up the stairs. The place was in hideous disorder, with clothing
lying about on chairs, underclothing scattered on the floor, the fire
out, many cigarette ends in the fender, a candle stuck in a beer bottle,
and a bunch of withered roses on the table.
As John laid the girl on the bed she muttered, “Lemme alone!” and when
he asked what was to happen to her when she grew old if she behaved like
this when young, she mumbled: “Don't want to be old. Who's goin' to like
me then, d'ye think?”
Half an hour afterward Glory and John were passing through the gates
into Clement's Inn, with its moonlight and silence, its odour of
moistened grass, its glimpse of the stars, and the red and white blinds
of its windows lit up round about. John was still talking rapturously.
He was now picturing the part which Glory was to play in the life
they were to live together. She was to help and protect their younger
sisters, the child-women, the girls in peril, to enlist their loyalty
and filial tenderness for the hour of temptation.
“Won't it be glorious? To live the life, the real life of warfare with
the world's wickedness and woe! Won't it be magnificent? You'll do it
too! You'll go down into those slums and sloughs which I've shown you
to-night--they are the cradle of shame and sin, Glory, and this wicked
London rocks it!--you'll go down into them like a ministering angel to
raise the fallen and heal the wounded! You'll live in them, revel in
them, rejoice in them, they'll be your battlefield. Isn't that better,
far better, a thousand times better, than _playing_ at life, and all its
fashions and follies and frivolities?”
Glory struggled to acquiesce, and from time to time in a trembling
voice she said “Yes,” and “Oh, yes,” until they came to the door of the
Garden House, and then a strange thing happened. Somebody was singing in
the drawing-room to the music of the piano. It was Drake. The window was
open and his voice floated over the moonlit gardens;
Du liebes Kind, komm' geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir.
Suddenly it seemed to Glory that two women sprang into life in her--one
who loved John Storm and wished to live and work beside him, the other
who loved the world and felt that she could never give it up. And these
two women were fighting for her heart, which should have it and hold it
and possess it forever.
She looked up at John, and he was smiling triumphantly, “Are you happy?”
she asked.
“Happy! I know a hundred men who are a hundred times as rich as I, but
not one who is a hundredth part as happy!”
“Darling!” she whispered, holding back her tears. Then looking away from
him she said, “And do you really think I'm good enough for a life of
such devotion and self-sacrifice?”
“Good enough!” he cried, and for a moment his merry laughter drowned the
singing overhead.
“But will the world think so?”
“Assuredly. But who cares what the world thinks?”
“We do, dear--we must!”
And then, while the song went on, she began to depreciate herself in a
low voice and with a creeping sense of hypocrisy--to talk of her former
life in London as a danger, of the tobacco-shop, the foreign clubs,
the music hall, and all the mire and slime with which she had been
besmirched. “Everything is known now, dear. Have you never thought of
this? It is your duty to think of it.”
But he only laughed again with a joyous voice. “What's the odds?” he
said. “The world is made up for the most part of low, selfish, sensual
beings, incapable of belief in noble aims. Every innovator in such a
world exposes himself to the risk of being slandered or ridiculed, or
even shut up in a lunatic asylum. But who wouldn't rather be St. Theresa
in her cell than Catharine of Russia on her throne? And in your case,
what does it come to anyway? Only that you've gone through the fiery
furnace and come out unscathed. All the better--you'll be a living
witness, a proof that it is possible to pass through this wicked Babylon
unharmed and untouched.”
“Yes, if I were a man--but with a woman it is so different! It is an
honour to a man to have conquered the world, but a disgrace to a woman
to have fought with it. Yes, believe me, I know what I'm saying. That's
the cruel tragedy in a woman's life, do what you will to hide it. And
then you are so much in the eye of the world; and besides your own
position there is your family's, your uncle's. Think what it would be if
the world pointed the finger of scorn at your--at your mission--at your
high and noble aims--and all on account of me! You would cease to love
me-and I--I----”
“Listen!” He had been shuffling restlessly on the pavement before
her. “Here I stand! Here are you! Let the waves of public opinion dash
themselves against us--we stand or fall together!” “Oh, oh, oh!”
She was crying on his breast, but with what mixed and conflicting
feelings! Joy, pain, delight, dread, hope, disappointment. She had tried
to dishonour herself in his eyes, and it would have broken her heart if
she had succeeded. But she had failed and he had triumphed, and that was
harder still to bear.
From overhead they heard the last lines of the song:
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh und Noth
In seinen Armen das Kind war todt.
“Good-night,” she whispered, and fled into the house. The lights in the
dining-room were lowered, but she found a telegram that was waiting on
the mantelpiece. It was from Sefton, the manager: “Author arrived in
London today. Hopes to be at rehearsal Monday. Please be there certain.”
The world was seizing her again, the imaginary Gloria was dragging her
back with visions of splendour and success. But she crept upstairs and
went by the drawing-room on tip-toe. “Not to-night,” she thought. “My
face is not fit to be seen to-night.”
There was a dying fire in her bedroom, and her evening gown had been
laid out on a chair in front of it. She put the gown away in a drawer,
and out of a box which she drew from beneath the bed she took a far
different costume. It was the nurse's outdoor cloak, which she had
bought for use at the hospital. She held it a moment by the tips of her
fingers and looked at it, and then put it back with a sigh.
“Gloria! is that you?” Rosa called up the stairs; and Drake's cheery
voice cried, “Won't our nightingale come down and give us a stave before
I go?”
“Too late! Just going to bed. Good-night,” she answered. Then she lit a
candle and sat down to write a letter.
“It's no use, dear John, I can not! It would be like putting bad money
into the offertory to put me into that holy work. Not that I don't
admire it, and love it, and worship it. It is the greatest work in the
world, and last week I thought I could count everything else as dross,
only remembering that I loved you and that nothing else mattered. But
now I know that this was a vain and fleeting sentiment, and that the
sights and scenes of your work repel me on a nearer view, just as the
hospital repelled me in the early mornings when the wards were being
cleaned and the wounds dressed, and before the flowers were laid about.
“Oh, forgive me, forgive me! But if I am fit to join your life at all
it can not be in London. That 'old serpent called the devil and Satan'
would be certain to torment me here. I could not live within sight and
sound of London and go on with the life you live. London would drag me
back. I feel as if it were an earlier lover, and I must fly away from
it. Is that possible? Can we go elsewhere? It is a monstrous demand,
I know. Say you can not agree to it. Say so at once--it will serve me
right.”
The stout watchman of the New Inn was calling midnight when Glory stole
out to post her letter. It fell into the letter-box with a thud, and she
crept back like a guilty thing.