At eight o'clock that night John Storm was walking through the streets of Soho. The bell of a jam factory had just been rung, and a stream of young girls in big hats with gorgeous flowers and sweeping feathers were pouring out of an archway and going arm-in-arm down the pavement. Men standing in groups at street ends shouted to them as they passed, and they shouted back in shrill voices and laughed with wild joy. In an alley round one corner an organ man was playing “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” and some of the girls began to dance and sing around him. Coming to the main artery of traffic, they were almost run down by a splendid equipage which was cutting across two thoroughfares into a square, and they screamed with mock terror as the fat coachman in tippet and cockade bellowed to them to get out of the way.
The square was a centre of gaiety. Theatres and music halls lined two of its sides, and the gas on their facades and the beacons on their roofs were beginning to burn brightly in the fading daylight. With skips and leaps the girls passed over to the doors of these palaces, and peered with greedy eyes through lines of policemen and doorkeepers in livery at gentlemen, in shields of shirt-front and ladies in light cloaks and long white gloves stepping out of gorgeous carriages into gorgeous halls.
John Storm was looking on at this masquerade when suddenly he became aware that the flare of coarse lights on the front of the building before him formed the letters of a word. The word was “GLORIA.” Seeing it again as he had seen it in the morning, but now identified and explained, he grew hot and cold by turns, and his brain, which refused to think, felt like a sail that is flapping idly on the edge of the wind.
There was a garden in the middle of the square, and he walked round and round it. He gazed vacantly at a statue in the middle of the garden, and then walked round the rails again. The darkness was gathering fast, the gas was beginning to blaze, and he was like a creature in the coil of a horrible fascination. That word, that name over the music hall, fizzing and crackling in its hundred lights, seemed to hold him as by an eye of fire. And remembering what had happened since he left the monastery—the sandwich men, the boards on the omnibuses, the hoardings on the walls—it seemed like a fiery finger which had led him to that spot. Only one thing was clear—that a supernatural power had brought him there, and that it was intended he should come. Fearfully, shamefully, miserably, rebuking himself for his doubts, yet conquered and compelled by them, he crossed the street and entered the music hall.
He was in the pit and it was crowded; not a seat vacant anywhere, and many persons standing packed in the crush-room at the back. His first sensation was of being stared at. First the man at the pay-box and then the check-taker had looked at him, and now he was being looked at by the people about him. They were both men and girls. Some of the men wore light frock-coats and talked in the slang of the race-course, some of the girls wore noticeable hats and showy flowers in their bosoms and were laughing in loud voices. They made a way for him of themselves, and he passed through to a wooden barrier that ran round the last of the pit seats.
The music hall was large, and to John Storm's eyes, straight from the poverty of his cell, it seemed garish in the red and gold of its Eastern decorations. Men in the pit seats were smoking pipes and cigarettes, and waiters with trays were hurrying up and down the aisles serving ale and porter, which they set down on ledges like the book-rests in church. In the stalls in front, which were not so full, gentlemen in evening dress were smoking cigars, and there was an arc of the tier above, in which people in fashionable costumes were talking audibly. Higher yet, and unseen from that position, there was a larger audience still, whose voices rumbled like a distant sea. A cloud of smoke filled the atmosphere, and from time to time there was the sound of popping corks and breaking glasses and rolling bottles.
The curtain was down, but the orchestra was beginning to play. Two men in livery came from the sides of the curtain and fixed up large figures in picture frames that were attached to the wings of the proscenium. Then the curtain rose and the entertainment was resumed. It was in sections, and after each performance the curtain was dropped and the waiters went round with their trays again.
John Storm had seen it all before in the days when, under his father's guidance, he had seen everything—the juggler, the acrobat, the step-dancer, the comic singer, the tableaus, and the living picture. He felt tired and ashamed, yet, he could not bring himself to go away. As the evening advanced he thought: “How foolish! What madness it was to think of such a thing!” He was easier after that, and began to listen to the talk of the people about him. It was free, but not offensive. In the frequent intervals some of the men played with the girls, pushing and nudging and joking with them, and the girls laughed and answered back. Occasionally one of them would turn her head aside and look into John's face with a saucy smile. “God forbid that I should grudge them their pleasure!” he thought. “It's all they have, poor creatures!”
But the audience grew noisier as the evening went on. They called to the singers, made inarticulate squeals, and then laughed at their own humour. A lady sang a comic song. It described her attempt to climb to the top of an omnibus on a windy day. John turned to look at the faces behind him, and every face was red and hot, and grinning and grimacing. He was still half buried in the monastery he had left that morning, and he thought: “Such are the nightly pleasures of our people. To-night, to-morrow night, the night after! O my country, my country!”
He was awakened from these thoughts by an outburst of applause. The curtain was down and nothing was going on except the putting up of a new figure in the frames. The figure was 8. Some one behind him said, “That's her number!” “The new artiste?” said another voice. “Gloria,” said the first.
John Storm's head began to swim. He looked back—he was in a solid block of people. “After all, what reasons have I?” he thought, and he determined to stand his ground.
More applause. Another leader of the orchestra had appeared.Bâtonin hand, he was bowing from his place before the footlights. It was Koenig, the organist, and John Storm shuddered in the darkest corner of his soul.
The stalls had filled up unawares to him, and a party was now coming into a private box which had hitherto been empty. The late-comers were Drake and Lord Robert Ure, and a lady with short hair brushed back from her forehead.
John Storm felt the place going round him, yet he steadied and braced himself. “But this is the natural atmosphere of such people,” he thought. He tried to find satisfaction in the thought that Glory was not with them. Perhaps they had exaggerated their intimacy with her.
The band began to play. It was music for the entrance of a new performer. The audience became quiet; there was a keen, eager, expectant air; and then the curtain went up. John Storm felt dizzy. If he could have escaped he would have turned and fled. He gripped with both hands the rail in front of him.
Then a woman came gliding on to the stage. She was a tall girl in a dark dress and long black gloves, with red hair, and a head like a rose. It was Glory! A cloud came over John Storm's eyes, and for a few moments he saw no more.
There was some applause from the pit and the regions overhead. The people in the stalls were waving their handkerchiefs, and the lady in the box was kissing her hand. Glory was smiling, quite at her ease, apparently not at all nervous, only a little shy and with her hands interlaced in front of her. Then there was silence again and she began to sing.
It is the moment when prayers go up from the heart not used to pray. Strange contradiction! John Storm found himself praying that Glory might do well, that she might succeed and eclipse everything! But he had turned his eyes away, and the sound of her voice was even more afflicting than the sight of her face. It was nearly a year since he had heard it last, and now he was hearing it under these conditions, in a place like this! He must have been making noises by his breathing. “Hush! hush!” said the people about him, and somebody tapped him on the shoulder.
After a moment he regained control of himself, and he lifted his head and listened. Glory's voice, which had been quavering at first, gathered strength. She was singing Mylecharaine, and the wild, plaintive harmony of the old Manx ballad was floating in the air like the sound of the sea. After her first lines a murmur of approval went round, the people sat up and leaned forward, and then there was silence again—dead silence—and then loud applause.
But it was only with the second verse that the humour of her song began, and John Storm waited for it with a trembling heart. He had heard her sing it a hundred times in the old days, and she was singing it now as she had sung it before. There were the same tricks of voice, the same tricks of gesture, the same expressions, the same grimaces. Everything was the same, and yet everything was changed. He knew it. He was sure it must be so. So artless and innocent then, now so subtle and significant! Where was the difference? The difference was in the place, in the people. John Storm could have found it in his heart to turn on the audience and insult them. Foul-minded creatures, laughing, screaming, squealing, punctuating their own base interpretations and making evil of what was harmless! How he hated the grinning faces round about him!
When the song was finished Glory swept a gay courtesy, lifted her skirts, and tripped off the stage. Then there were shouting, whistling, stamping, and deafening applause. The whole house was unanimous for an encore, and she came back smiling and bowing with a certain look of elation and pride. John Storm was becoming terrified by his own anger. “Be quiet there!” said some one behind him. “Who's the josser?” said somebody else, and then he heard Glory's voice again.
It was another Manx ditty. A crew of young fishermen are going ashore on Saturday night after their week on the sea after the herring. They go up to the inn; their sweethearts meet them there; they drink and sing. At length they are so overcome by liquor and love that they have to be put to bed in their big sea boots. Then the girls kiss them and leave them. The singer imitated the kissing, and the delighted audience repeated the sound. Sounds of kissing came from all parts of the hall, mingled with loud acclamations of laughter. The singer smiled and kissed back. Somehow she conveyed the sense of a confidential feeling as if she were doing it for each separate person in the audience, and each person had an impulse to respond. It was irresistible, it was maddening, it swept over the whole house.
John Storm felt sick in his very soul. Glory knew well what she was doing. She knew what these people wanted. His Glory! Glory of the old, innocent happy days! O God! O God! If he could only get out! But that was impossible. Behind him the dense mass was denser than ever, and he was tightly wedged in by a wall of faces—hot, eager, with open mouths, teeth showing, and glittering and dancing eyes. He tried not to listen to what the people about were saying, yet he could not help but hear.
“Tasty, ain't she?” “Cerulean, eh?” “Bit 'ot, certinly!” “Well, if I was a Johnny, and had got the oof, she'd have a brougham and a sealskin to-morrow.” “To-night, you mean,” and then there were significant squeaks and trills of laughter.
They called her back again, and yet again, and she returned with unaffected cheerfulness and a certain look of triumph. At one moment she was doing the gaiety of youth, and at the next the crabbedness of age; now the undeveloped femininity of the young girl, then the volubility of the old woman. But John Storm was trying to hear none of it. With his head in his breast and his eyes down he was struggling to think of the monastery, and to imagine that he was still buried in his cell. It was only this morning that he left it, yet it seemed to be a hundred years ago. Last night the Brotherhood, the singing of Evensong, Compline, the pure air, silence, solitude, and the atmosphere of prayer; and to-night the crowds, the clouds of smoke, the odour of drink, the meaning laughter, and Glory as the centre of it all!
For a moment everything was blotted out, and then there was loud hand-clapping and cries of “Bravo!” He lifted his head. Glory had finished and was bowing herself off. The lady in the private box flung her a bouquet of damask roses. She picked it up and kissed it, and bowed to the box, and then the acclamations of applause were renewed.
The crush behind relaxed a little, and he began to elbow his way out. People were rising or stirring everywhere, and the house was emptying fast. As the audience surged down the corridors to the doors they talked and laughed and made inarticulate sounds. “A tricky bit o' muslin, eh?” “Yus, she's thick.” “She's my dart, anyhow.” Then the whistling of a tune. It was the chorus of Mylecharaine. John Storm felt the cool air of the street on his hot face at last. The policemen were keeping a way for the people coming from the stalls, the doorkeepers were whistling or shouting for cabs, and their cries were being caught up by the match boys, who were running in and out like dogs among the carriage wheels and the horses' feet. “En-sim!” “Four-wheel-er!”
In a narrow court at the back, dimly lit and not much frequented, there was a small open door under a lamp suspended from a high blank wall. This was the stage-door of the music hall, and a group of young men, looking like hairdressers' assistants, blocked the pavement at either side of it. “Wonder what she's like off?” “Like a laidy, you bet.” “Yus, but none o' yer bloomin' hamatoors.” “Gawd, here's the josser again!”
John Storm pushed his way through to where a commissionaire sat behind a glass partition in a little room walled with pigeon holes.
“Can I see Miss Quayle?” he asked.
The porter looked blank.
“Gloria, then,” said John Storm, with an effort.
The porter looked at him suspiciously. Had he an appointment? No; but could he send in his name? The porter looked doubtful. Would she come out soon? The porter did not know. Would she come this way? The porter could not tell. Could he have her address?
“If ye want to write to the laidy, write here,” said the porter, with a motion of his hands to the pigeon-holes.
John Storm felt humiliated and ashamed. The hairdressers' assistants were grinning at him. He went out, feeling that Glory was farther than ever from him now, and if he met her they might not speak. But he could not drag himself away. In the darkness under a lamp at the other side of the street he stood and waited. Shoddy broughams drove up, with drivers in shabby livery, bringing “turns” in wonderful hats and overcoats, over impossible wigs, whiskers, and noses—niggers, acrobats, clowns, and comic singers, who stepped out, shook the straw of their carriage carpets off their legs, and passed in at the stage entrance.
At length the commissionaire appeared at the door and whistled, and a hansom cab rattled up to the end of the court. Then a lady muffled in a cape, with the hood drawn over her head, and carrying a bouquet of roses, came out leaning on the arm of a gentleman. She stood a moment by his side and spoke to him and laughed. John heard her laughter. At the next moment she had stepped into the hansom, the door had fallen to, the driver had turned, the gentleman had raised his hat, the light had fallen on the lady's face, and she was leaning forward and smiling. John saw her smiles.
At the next moment the hansom had passed into the illuminated thoroughfares and the group of people had dispersed. John Storm was alone under the lamp in the little dark street, and somewhere in the dark alleys behind him the organ man was still grinding out “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.”
“Weel, what luck on your first night out?” said Mrs. Callender at breakfast in the morning. “Found any of the poor lost things yet?”
“One,” said John, with a rueful face. “Lost enough, though she doesn't know it yet, God help her!”
“They never do at first, laddie. Write to her friends, if she has any.”
“Her friends?”
“Nothing like home influences, ye ken.”
“I will—I must! It's all I can do now.”
“The Priory, Friday Morning.
“Oh, my dear aunties, don't be terrified, but Glory has had a kind of a wee big triumph! Nothing very awful, you know, but on Monday night, before a rather larger company than usual, she sang and recited and play-acted a little, and as a result all the earth—the London earth—is talking about her, and nobody is taking any notice of the rest of the world. Every post is bringing me flowers with ribbons and cards attached, or illustrated weeklies with my picture and my life in little, and I find it's wonderful what a lot of things you may learn about yourself if you'll only read the papers. My room at this moment is like a florist's window at nine o'clock on Saturday morning, and I have reason to suspect that mine host and teacher, Carl Koenig, F. E. C. O., exhibits them to admiring neighbours when I am out. The voice of that dear old turtle has ever since Monday been heard in the land, and besides telling me about Poland day and night from all the subterranean passages of the house, he has taken to waiting on me like a nigger, and ordering soups and jellies for me as if I had suddenly become an invalid. Of course, I am an able-bodied woman just the same as ever, but my nerves have been on the rack all the week, and I feel exactly as I did long ago at Peel when I was a little naughty minx and got up into the tower of the old church and began pulling at the bell rope, you remember. Oh, dear! oh, dear! My frantic terror at the noise of the big bells and the vibration of the shaky old walls! Once I had begun I couldn't leave off for my life, but went on tugging and tugging and quaking and quaking until—have you forgotten it?—all the people came running helter-skelter under the impression that the town was afire. And then, behold, it was only little me, trembling like a leaf and crying like a ninny! I remember I was scolded and smacked and dismissed into outer darkness (it was the chip vault, I think), for that first outbreak of fame, and now, lest you should want to mete out the same punishment to me again—
“Aunt Anna, I'm knitting the sweetest little shawl for you, dear—blue and white, to suit your complexion—being engaged in the evening only, and most of the day sole mistress of my own will and pleasure. How charming of me, isn't it? But I'm afraid it isn't, because you'll see through me like a colander, for I want to tell you something which I have kept back too long, and when I think of it I grow old and wrinkled like a Christmas apple. So you must be a pair of absolute old angels, aunties, and break the news to grandfather.
“You know I told you, Aunt Rachel, to say something for me at nine o'clock on the Queen's birthday. And you remember that Mr. Drake used to think pearls and diamonds of Glory, and predict wonderful things for her. Then you don't forget that Mr. Drake had a friend named Lord Robert Ure, commonly called Lord Bob. Well, you see, by Mr. Drake's advice, and Lord Bobbie's influence and agency, and I don't know what, I have made one more change—it's to be the last, dears, the very last—in my Wandering-Jew existence, and now I am no longer a society entertainer, because I am a music-hall art——”
Glory had written so far when she dropped the pen and rose from the table, wiping her eyes.
“My poor child, you can't tell them, it's impossible; they would never forgive you!”
Then a carriage stopped before the house, the garden bell was rung, and the maid came into the room with a lady's card. It was inscribed “Miss Polly Love,” with many splashes and flourishes.
“Ask her up,” said Glory. And then Polly came rustling up the stairs in a silver-gray silk dress and a noticeable hat, and with a pug-dog tucked under her arm. She looked older and less beautiful. The pink and ivory of her cheeks was coated with powder, and her light gray eyes were pencilled. There was the same blemished appearance as before, and the crack in the vase was now plainly visible.
Glory had met the girl only once since they parted after the hospital, but Polly kissed her effusively. Then she sat down and began to cry.
“Perhaps you wouldn't think it, my dear, but I'm the most miserable girl in London. Haven't you heard about it? I thought everybody knew. Robert is going to be married. Yes, indeed, to-morrow morning to that American heiress, and I hadn't an idea of it until Monday afternoon. That was the day of your luncheon, dear, and I felt sure something was going to happen, because I broke my looking-glass dressing to go out. Robert took me home, and he began to play the piano, and I could see he was going to say something. 'Do you know, little woman, I'm to be married on Saturday?' I wonder I didn't drop, but I didn't, and he went on playing. But it was no use trying, and I burst out and ran into my room. After a minute I heard him coming in, but he didn't lift me up as he used to do. Only talked to me over my back, telling me to control myself, and what he was going to do for me, and so on. He used to say a few tears made me nicer looking, but it was no good crying—and then he went away.”
She began to cry again, and the dog in her lap began to howl.
“O God! I don't know what I've done to be so unfortunate. I've not been flash at all, and I never went tocafésat night, or to Sally's or Kate's, as so many girls do, and he can't say I ever took notice of anybody else. When I love anybody I think of him last thing at night and first thing in the morning, and now to be left alone—I'm sure I shall never live through it!”
Glory tried to comfort the poor broken creature. It was her duty to live. There was her child—had she never even seen it since she parted with it to Mrs. Jupe? It must be such a darling by this time, creeping about and talking a little, wherever it was. She ought to have the child to live with her, it would be such company.
Polly kissed the pug to stop its whining, and said: “I don't want company. Life isn't the same thing to me now. He thinks because he is marrying that woman—What better is she than me, I would like to know? She's only snapping at him for what he is, and he is only taking her for what she's got, and I've a great mind to go to All Saints' and shame them. You wouldn't? Well, it's hard to hide one's feelings, but it would serve them right if—if I did it.”
Polly had risen with a wild look, and was pressing the pug so hard that it was howling again.
“Did what?” said Glory.
“Nothing—that is to say——”
“You mustn't dream of going to the church. The police——”
“Oh, it isn't the police I'm afraid of,” said Polly, tossing her head.
“What then?”
“Never mind, my dear,” said Polly.
On the way downstairs she reproached herself for not seeing what was coming. “But girls like us never do, now do we?”
Glory coloured up to her hair, but made no protest. At the gate Polly wiped her eyes and drew down her veil, and said: “I'm sorry to say it to your face, my dear, but it's all been that Mr. Drake's doings, and a girl ought to know he'd do as much himself, and worse. But you're a great woman now, and in everybody's mouth, so you needn't care. Only——”
Glory's face was scarlet and her under lip was bleeding. Yet she kissed the poor shallow thing at parting, because she was down, and did not understand, and lived in another world entirely. But going back to where her letter lay unfinished she thought: “Impossible! If this girl, living in an atmosphere so different, thinks that——” Then she sat at the table and forced herself to tell all.
She had got through the red riot of her confession and was writing: “I don't know what he would think of it, but do you know I thought I saw his face on Wednesday night. It was in the dark, and I was in a cab driving away from the stage door. But so changed! oh, so changed! It must have been a dream, and it was the same as if his ghost had passed me.”
Then she became aware of voices in dispute downstairs. First a man's voice, then the voices of two men—one of them Koenig's, the other with a haunting ring in it. She got up from the table and went to the door of her room, going on tip-toe, yet hardly knowing why. Koenig was saying: “No, sair, de lady does not lif here.” Then a deep, strong chest-voice answered, “Mr. Koenig, surely you remember me?” and Glory's heart seemed to beat like a watch. “No-o, sair. Are you—Oh, yes; what am I thinking of?—But de lady——”
“Mr. Koenig,” Glory called, cried, gasped over the stair-rail, “ask the gentleman to come up, please.”
She hardly knew what happened next, only that Koenig seemed to be muttering confused explanations below, and that she was back in her sitting-room giving a glance into the looking-glass and doing something with her hair. Then there was a step on the stairs, on the landing, at the threshold, and she fell back a few paces from the door, that she might see him as he came in. He knocked. Her heart was beating so violently that she had to keep her hand over it. “Who's there?”
“It is I.”
“Who's I?”
Then she saw him coming down on her, and the very sunlight seemed to wave like the shadows on a ship. He was paler and thinner, his great eyes looked weary though they smiled, his hand felt bony though firm, and his head was closely cropped.
She looked at him for a moment without speaking and with a sensation of fulness at her heart that was almost choking her.
“Is it you? I didn't know it was you—I was just thinking——” She was talking at random, and was out of breath as if she had been running.
“Glory, I have frightened you!”
“Frightened? Oh, no! Why should you think so? Perhaps I am crying, but then I'm always doing that nowadays. And, besides, you are so——”
“Yes, I am altered,” he said in the pause that followed.
“And I?”
“You are altered too.” He was looking at her with an earnest and passionate gaze. It was she—herself—Glory—not merely a vision or a dream. Again he recognised the glorious eyes with their brilliant lashes and the flashing spot in one of them that had so often set his heart beating. She looked back at him and thought, “How ill he must have been!” and then a lump came into her throat and she began to laugh that she might not have to cry, and broke out into broad Manx lest he should hear the tremor in her voice:
“But you're coming too, aren't ye? And you've left that theer—Aw, it's glad ter'ble I am, as our people say, and it's longin' mortal you'd be for all, boy.”
Another trill of nervous laughter, and then a burst of earnest English: “But tell me, you've come for good—you are not going back to——”
“No, I am not going back to the Brotherhood, Glory.” How friendly his low voice sounded!
“And you?”
“Well, I've left the hospital, you see.”
“Yes, I see,” he said. His weary eyes were wandering about the room, and for the first time she felt ashamed of its luxuries and its flowers.
“But how did you find me?”
“I went to the hospital first——”
“So you hadn't forgotten me? Do you know I thought you had quite—But tell me at once, where did you go then?”
He was silent for a moment, and she said, “Well?”
“Then I went to Mr. Drake's chambers.”
“I don't know why everybody should think that Mr. Drake——”
His great eyes were fixed on her face and his mouth was quivering, and, to prevent him from speaking, she put on a look of forced gaiety and said, “But how did you light on me at last?”
“I meant to find you, Glory, if I tramped all London over and everybody denied you to me”—the lump in her throat was hurting her dreadfully—“but I chanced to see the name over the music hall.”
She saw it coming, and broke into laughter. “The music hall! Only think! You looking at music halls!”
“I was there on Monday night.”
“You? Monday? Then perhaps it was not my fancy that I saw you by the stage do—.” Her nerves were getting more and more excited, and to calm them she crossed her arms above her head. “So they gave you my address at the stage door, did they?”
“No, I wrote for it to Peel.”
“Peel?” She caught her breath, and her arms came down. “Then perhaps you told them where——” “I told them nothing, Glory.” She looked at him through her eyelashes, her head held down.
“Not that it matters, you know.”
“I've just been writing to them, and they'll soon—But, oh, I've so much to say, and I can't say it here. Couldn't we go somewhere? Into the park or on to the heath, or farther—much farther—the room is so small, and I feel as if I've been suffocating for want of air.”
“I've something to say too, and if——”
“Then let it be to-morrow morning, and we'll start early, and you'll bring me back in time for the theatre. Say Paddington Station, at eleven—will that do?”
“Yes.”
She saw him to the gate, and when he was going she wanted him to kiss her hand, so she pretended to do the high handshake, but he only held it for a moment and looked steadily into her eyes. The sunshine was pouring into the garden, and she was bareheaded. Her hair was coiled up, and she was wearing a light morning blouse. He thought she had never looked so beautiful. On getting into the omnibus at the end of the street he took a letter out of his vest pocket, and, being alone, he first carried it to his lips, then reopened and read it:
“See her at once, dear John, and keep in touch with her, and I shall be happy and relieved. As for your father, that old Chaise is going crazy and is sending Lord Storm crazy too. He has actually discovered that the dust the witch walks on who has cast the evil eye on you lies in front of Glenfaba gate, and he has been sweeping it up o' nights and scattering it in front of Knockaloe! What simplicity! There are only two women here. Does the silly old gawk mean Rachel? or is it, perhaps, Aunt Anna?”
And while the omnibus joggled down the street, and the pale young clergyman with the great weary eyes was poring over his letter, Glory was sitting at her table and writing with flying fingers and a look of enthusiastic ecstasy:
“I've had three bites at this cherry. But who do you think has just been here? John!—John Storm! But then you know that he is back, and it wasn't merely my fancy that I saw him by the stage door. It seems as if people have been denying me to him, and he has been waiting for me and watching over me.” (Blot.) “His voice is so low, but I suppose that comes to people who are much alone, and he is so thin and so pale, and his eyes are so large, and they have that deep look that cuts into the heart. He knew he was changed, and I think he was ashamed” (blot), “but of course I didn't let whit that I was taking notice, and I'm so happy for his sake, poor fellow! that he has escaped from his cage in that Salvation zoo that I know I shall make them split their sides in the theatre to-night.” (Blot, blot.) “How tiresome! This ink must have got water in it somehow, and then my handwriting is such a hop-skip-and-a-jump anyway. But hoots!
“Why shouldn't I love Johnny,“And why shouldn't Johnny love me?
“Glory.”
It was a beautiful May morning, and standing by the Paddington Station with the dog at his feet, he felt her approach instinctively as she came toward him with her free step in her white cambric dress under the light parasol fringed with lace. Her face was glowing with the fresh air, and she looked happy and bright. As they walked into the station she poured out a stream of questions about the dog, took possession of him straightway, and concluded to call him Don.
They agreed to spend the day at Burnham Beeches, and while he went for the tickets she stepped on to the platform. It was Saturday, the bookstall was ablaze with the picture papers, and one of them was prominently displayed at a page containing her own portrait. She wanted John to see this, so she invented an excuse for bringing him face to face with it, and then she laughed and he bought the paper.
The clerk recognised her—they could see that by the smile he kept in reserve—and a group of officers in the Guards, in flannels and straw hats, going down to their club at Maidenhead, looked at her and nudged each other as if they knew who she was. Her eyes danced, her lips smiled, and she was proud that John should see the first fruits of her fame. She was proud of him, too, with his bold walk and strong carriage, as they passed the officers in their negligent dress, with their red and blue neckties. But John's heart was aching, and he was wondering how he was to begin on the duty he had to do.
From the moment they started she gave herself up to the delights of their holiday, and even the groaning and cranking and joggling of the train amused her. When the Guards had got into their first-class carriage they had glanced at the open window where her brilliant eyes and rosy lips were gleaming behind a veil. John gazed at her with his slow and tender looks, and felt guilty and ashamed.
They left the train at Slough, and a wave of freshness, with an odour of verdure and sap, blew into their faces. The dog leaped and barked, and Glory skipped along with it, breaking every moment into enthusiastic exclamations. There was hardly any wind, and the clouds, which were very high overhead, were scarcely moving. It was a glorious day, and Glory's face wore an expression of perfect happiness.
They lunched at the old hotel in the town, with the window open, and the swallows darting in the air outside, and Glory, who took milk “for remembrance,” rose and said, “I looks toward Mr. Storm,” and then drank his health and swept him the prettiest courtesy. All through lunch she kept feeding the dog from her own fingers, and at the end rebuked him for spreading his bones in a half circle across the carpet, a thing which was never done, she said, in the best society, this side the Cannibal Islands.
“By-and-bye,” he thought, “time enough by-and-bye,” for the charm of her joy was infectious.
The sun was high when they started on their walk, and her face looked flushed and warm. But through the park-like district to the wood she raced with Don, and made him leap over her sunshade and roll over and over on the bright green grass. The larks were trilling overhead, everything was humming and singing.
“Let her have one happy day,” he thought, and they began to call and shout to each other.
Then they came to the beeches, and, being sheltered from the fiery rays of the sun, she put down her sunshade and John took off his hat. The silence and gloom, the great gnarled trees, with their thews and sinews, their arms and thighs and loins, the gentle rustle of the breeze in the branches overhead, the deep accumulation of dead leaves underfoot, the fluttering of wings, the low cooing of pigeons, and all the mystery and wonder of the wood, brought a sense of awe, as on entering a mighty minster in the dusk. But this wore away presently, and Glory began to sing. Her pure voice echoed in the fragrant air, and the happiness so long pent up and starved seemed to bubble in every word and note.
“Isn't this better than singing in music halls?” he thought, and then he began to sing too, just like any happy boy, without thinking of yesterday or to-morrow, of before or after. She smiled at him. He smiled back. It was like a dream. After his long seclusion it was difficult to believe it could be true. The open air, the perfume of the leaves they were wading through, the silver bark of the birches and the blue peeps of the sky between, and then Glory walking with her graceful motion, and laughing and singing by his side! “I shall wake up in a minute,” he thought, “I'm sure I shall!”
They sang one song together. It was Lasses and Lads, and to make themselves think it was the old time back again they took each other's hands and swung them to the tune. He felt her clasp like milk coursing through his body, and a great wave of tenderness swept up his hard resolve as sea-wrack is thrown up after a storm. “She is here; we are together; why trouble about anything more?” and the time flew by.
But their voices went wrong immediately, and they were soon in difficulties. Then she laughed, and they began again; but they could not keep together, and as often as they tried they failed. “Ah, it's not like the old days!” he thought, and a mood of sadness came over him. He had begun to observe in Glory the trace of the life she had passed through—words, phrases, ideas, snatches of slang, touches of moods which had the note of a slight vulgarity. When the dog took a bone uninvited she cried: “It's a click; you've sneaked it”; when John broke down in the singing she told him to “chuck it off the chest”; and when he stopped altogether she called him glum, and said she would “do it on her own.”
“Why does he look so sorrowful?” she thought, and telling herself that this came to people who were much alone, she rattled on more recklessly than before.
She talked of the life of the music hall, the life at “the back,” glorifying it by a tone of apology. It was all hurry-scurry, slap, dash, and drive; no time to consider effects; a succession of last acts and first nights; so it was really harder to be a music-hall woman than a regular actress. And the music-hall woman was no worse than other women—considering. Had he seen their ballet? It was fetching. Such pages! Simply darlings!Theywere the proud young birds of paradise whom toffs like those Guards came to see, and it was fun to see them pluming and preening themselves at the back, each for the eyes of her own particular lord in the stalls. Thus she flung out unfamiliar notes, hardly knowing their purport, but to John they were as slimy creatures out of the social mire she had struggled through. O London! London! Its shadow was over them even there, and go where they would, they could never escape from it.
His former thought began to hang about him again, and he asked her to tell him what had happened to her during his absence.
“Shall I?” she said. “Well, I brought three golden sovereigns out of the hospital to distribute among the people of London, but, bless you, they went nowhere.”
“And what then?”
“Then—then Hope was a good breakfast but a bad supper, you know. But shall I tell you all? Yes, yes, I will.”
She told him of Mrs. Jupe, and of the deception she had practised upon her people, and he turned his head that he might not see her tears. She told him of the “Three Graces,” and of the stage manager—she called him the “stage damager”—and thensheturned her head that she might hide her shame. She told him of Josephs, the bogus agent, and his face grew hard and his brown eyes looked black.
“And where did you say his place was?” he asked in a voice that vibrated and broke.
“I didn't say,” she answered with a laugh and a tear.
She told him of Aggie, and of the foreign clubs, and of Koenig, and of the dinner party at the Home Secretary's, and then she skipped a step and cried: