Part 74 (1/2)

XIV.

The rehearsals began early in the morning and usually lasted until late in the afternoon. Glory found them wearisome, depressing, and often humiliating. The body of the theatre was below the level of the street, and in the daytime was little better than a vast vault. If she entered by the front she stumbled against seats and saw the figures of men and women silhouetted in the distance, and heard the echo of cavernous voices. If by the back, she came upon the prompter's table set midway across the stage, with a twin gas-bracket shooting up behind it like a geyser, and an open s.p.a.ce of some twenty feet by twenty in front whereon the imaginary pa.s.sions were to disport themselves at play.

Glory found real ones among them, and they were sometimes in hideous earnest. Jealousy, envy, uncharitableness, and all the rancour of life where the struggle for it is bitterest, attempts to take advantage of her inexperience, to rob her of the best positions on the stage, to cut out her lines which ”scored”--these, with the weary waits, the half darkness, the chill atmosphere, the void in front, with its seats in linen covers, suggesting an audience of silent ghosts, and then the sense of the bright, busy, bustling, rattling, real world above, sent her home day after day with a headache, a heartache, and tears bubbling out of her eyes.

And when she had conquered these conditions, or settled down to them, and had made such progress with her part as to throw away her scrip, the old horror of the woman she was to make herself into, came back as a new terror. The visionary Gloria was very proud and vain and selfish, and trampled everything under foot that she might possess the world and the things of the world.

Meantime the real Gloria had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke because it is an insult.

Sometimes she took stolen glances at his work. On Sunday morning she walked through Soho, past the people sitting on their doorsteps reading the sporting intelligence in the Sunday papers, with their larks in cages hung on nails, overhead, until she came to the church, and heard the singing inside, and saw chalked up on the walls the legend, ”G.o.d bless the Farver!”

”Strange charge against a clergyman!” It was a low-cla.s.s paper, and the charge was a badge of honour. A young ruffian (it was Charles Wilkes) had been brought up on remand on a charge of a.s.saulting Father Storm, and being sentenced to a week's imprisonment, notwithstanding the Father's appeal and offer of bail, he had accused the clergyman of relations with his sweetheart (it was Agatha Jones).

Glory's anger at the world's treatment of John Storm deepened to a great love of the misunderstood and downtrodden man. She saw an announcement of his last service, and determined to go to it. The church was crowded, chiefly by the poor, and the air was heavy with the smell of oranges and beer. It was a week-day evening, and when the choir came in, followed by John Storm in his black ca.s.sock, Glory could not help a thrill of physical joy at being near him.

The text was, ”Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outside, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness!” The first half of the, sermon was a denunciation of the morality of men. We made clean the outside of the platter, but the so-called purity of England was a smug sham built upon rottenness and sin! There were men among us, d.a.m.ned sensualists, left untouched by the idleness of the public conscience, who did not even know where their children were to be found.

Let them go down into the gutters of life and look for their own faces, and--G.o.d forgive them!--their mothers' faces, among the outcast and the criminal. The second half was a defence of woman. The sins of the world against women were the most crying wrongs of the time. Had they ever reflected on the heroism of women, on their self-denying, unrewarded labour? Oh, why was woman held so cheap as in this immoral London of to-day? There had been scarcely a breach of the law of Nature by women, and not one that men were not chiefly to blame for. Men tempted them by love of dress, of ease, of money, and of fame, to forget their proper vocation; but every true woman came right in the end, and preferred to the false and fict.i.tious labour for worldly glory, a mother's silent and unseen devotion, counting it no virtue at all. ”Yes, women, mothers, girls, in your hands lies the salvation of England. May you live in this prospect, and may G.o.d and his ever-blessed Mother be your reward all through this weary life and in glory everlasting!”

There was a procession with banners, cross, stars, green and blue fleur-de-lis, but Glory saw none of it. She was kneeling with her head down and heart choked with emotion. The next she knew the service was over, the congregation was gone; only one old woman in widow's weeds was left, jingling a bunch of keys.

”Has the Father gone?”

”No, ma'am; he is still in the sacristy.”

”Show me to it.”

At the next moment, with fluttering throat and a look of mingled love and awe, she was standing eye to eye with John Storm in the little bare chamber off the church.

”Glory, why do you come here?”

”I can't help it.”

”But we said good-bye and parted.”

”You did. I didn't. It was not so easy----”

”Easy? I told you it wouldn't be easy, my child, and it hasn't been. I said I should suffer, and I have suffered. But I've borne it--you see I've borne it. Don't ask me at what cost.”

”Oh, oh, oh!” and she covered her face.

”Yes, the devil tortured me with love first. I was seeing you and hearing you everywhere and in everything, Glory. But I got over that, and then he tortured me with remorse. I had left you to the mercy of the world. It was my duty to watch over you. I did it, too.”

She glanced up quickly.

”Ah, you never knew that, but no matter! It's all over now, and I'm a different man entirely. But why do you come and torment me again? It's nothing to you, nothing at all. You can shake it off in a moment. That's your nature, Glory; you can't help it. But have you no pity? You find me here, trying to help the helpless--the brave girls who have the virtue to be poor, and the strength to be weak, and the courage to be friendless. Why can't you leave me alone? What am I to you? Nothing at all! You care nothing for me--nothing whatever.”

She glanced up again, and the look of love in her eyes was stronger now than the look of awe. He saw it and could not help knowing how strongly it worked upon his feelings.

”Go back to your own world, unhappy girl! You love it--you must; you have sacrificed the best impulses of your heart to it!”