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The Christian, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Book 3. The Devil's Acre - Chapter 15 |
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_ THIRD BOOK. THE DEVIL'S ACRE CHAPTER XV 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;
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:
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. _ |
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