Part 56 (1/2)
At the next moment he was gone from the room. The two men stood where he had left them until his footsteps had ceased on the stairs and the door had closed behind him. Then Drake cried, ”Benson--a telegraph form! I must telegraph to Koenig at once.”
”Yes, he'll follow her up on the double quick,” said Lord Robert. ”But what matter? His face will be enough to frighten the girl. Ugh! It was the face of a death's head!”
At dinner that night John Storm was more than usually silent. To break in upon his gravity, Mrs. Callender asked him what he intended to do next.
”To take priest's orders without delay,” he said.
”And what then?”
”Then,” he said, lifting a twitching and suffering face ”to make an attack on the one mighty stronghold of the devil's kingdom whereof woman is the direct and immediate victim; to tell Society over again it is an organized hypocrisy for the pursuit and demoralization of woman, and the Church that bachelorhood is not celibacy, and polygamy is against the laws of G.o.d; to look and search for the beaten and broken who lie scattered and astray in our bewildered cities, and to protect them and shelter them whatever they are, however low they have fallen, because they are my sisters and I love them.”
”G.o.d bless ye, laddie! That's spoken like a man,” said the old woman, rising from her seat.
But John Storm's pale face had already flushed up to the eyes, and he dropped his head as one who was ashamed.
II.
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 pa.s.sed, 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 c.o.c.kade 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 pa.s.sed over to the doors of these palaces, and peered with greedy eyes through lines of policemen and doorkeepers in livery at gentlemen, in s.h.i.+elds of s.h.i.+rt-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 coa.r.s.e 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 h.o.a.rdings 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 pa.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 gla.s.ses 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 foolis.h.!.+ 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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. ”G.o.d 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. _Baton_ in 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.