Part 39 (1/2)
”G.o.d pity and forgive me!” he muttered, and then he turned away.
The traffic in the streets was increasing every moment, and as he stumbled across the courtyard a drunken man going by the gate stopped and cried into the pa.s.sage, ”h.e.l.loa, there! I'm a-watchin' of ye!” The bloodhound leaped up and barked, but John hurried into the house and clashed the door.
He sat on the form and tried to compose himself. He thought of Paul as he had seen him at the last moment--the captured eagle with the broken wing scudding into the night, the night of London, but free, free!
In his mind's eye he followed him through the streets--down Bishopsgate Street into Threadneedle Street and along Cheapside to St. Paul's churchyard. Crowds of people would be there to-night waiting for the striking of the clock at midnight that they might raise a shout and wish each other a happy New Year.
That made him think of Glory. She would be there too, for she loved a rich and abounding life. He could see her quite plainly in the midst of the throng with her sparkling eyes and bounding step. It would be so new to her, so human and so beautiful! Glory! Always Glory!
He thought he must have been dreaming, for suddenly the clocks were all striking, first the clock in the hall, then the clocks of the churches round about, and finally the great clock of the cathedral. Almost at the same moment there was a distant sound like the rattle of musketry, and then the church bells began to ring.
The noises in the street were now tumultuous. People were shouting and laughing. Some of them were singing. At one moment it was the Salvation chorus, at the next a music-hall ditty. First ”At the Cross, at the Cross,” then ”Mr. 'enry 'awkins,” and then an unfamiliar ditty. With measured steps over the hardened snow of the pavement there came tramping along a line of boys and girls, crying:
D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D'ye ken John P-e-e-l----
Their shrill trebles broke like a rocket on the topmost note, and there was loud laughter.
Glory again! Always, always Glory!
Then the scales fell from his eyes and he saw himself as he was, a self-deluded man and a cheat. The impulses that had prompted him to this night's work had really centred in Glory. It had been Glory first and Glory last, and his pity for Brother Paul and his fear for the fate of Polly had been only a falsehood and pretence.
The night wind was still howling about the house. Its noise mingled with the peal of the church bells, and together they seemed to utter the voices of mocking fiends: Judas! Traitor! Fool! Fool! Traitor! Judas!
He covered his ears with his hands and his head fell into his breast.
X.
”The Little Turnstile,
”New Year's Eve.
”Hooraa! hooraa!
”Feeling like bottled yeast this evening and liable to go off, I thank my stars I have three old babies at home to whom I am bound to tell everything. So lizzen, lizzen for all! Know ye then, all men (and women) by these presents that there is a gentleman in London who predicts wonderful things for Glory. His name is Sefton, and I came to know him through three ladies--I call them the Three Graces--whose acquaintance I have made by coming to live here. He is only an old mushroom with a bald, white head; and if I believed everything their ladys.h.i.+ps say I should conclude that he is one of those who never sin except twice a year, and that is all the time before Christmas and all the time after it. But their Graces belong to that saintly sisterhood who would take away the devil's character if they needed it (they don't), and though the mushroom's honour were as scarce as the middle cut in salmon, yet in common loyalty Glory would have to believe in it.
”It is all about my voice. Hearing it by accident when I was humming about the house like a blue-bottle, he asked me to let him hear it again in a place where he could judge of it to more advantage. That turned out to be a theatre--yes, indeed, a theatre--but it was the middle of the morning, and n.o.body was there except ourselves and a couple of cleaners, so Aunt Anna needn't be afraid. Yes, the chief of the orchestra was present, and he sat before a piano on the edge of the maelstrom, in what we should call the High Bailiff's pews--but they call them the stalls--while the mushroom himself went back to the cavernous depths of the body, which in a theatre they have properly christened the pit, and this morning it looked like the bottomless one.
”Lor'-a-ma.s.sey! Ever see the inside of a theatre in the daytime? Of course you've not, my dears. It is what the world itself was the day before the first day--without form and void, and darkness is on the face of the deep. Not a ray of daylight anywhere, except the adulterated kind that comes mooching round corridors and prowling in at half-open doors, and floating through the sepulchral gloom like the sleepy eyes of the monsters that terrified me in the caves at Gob-ny-Deigan when I used to play pirate, you remember.
”The gentlemen had left me alone on the stage with five or six footlights--which they ought to call face-lights--flas.h.i.+ng in my eyes, and when the pianist began to vamp and I to sing it was like pitching my voice into a tunnel, and I became so dreadfully nervous that I was forced to laugh. That seemed to vex my unseen audience, who thought me 'rot'; so I said, 'Let there be more light then.' and there was more light, 'and let the piano cease from troubling,' and it was so. Then I just stiffened my back and gave them one of mother's French songs, and after the first verse I called out to the manager at the back,” Can you hear me?' and he called back, 'Go on; it's splendid!' So I did 'Mylecharaine' in the Manx, and I suppose I acted both of my songs; but I was only beginning to be aware that my voice in that great place was a little less like a barrel-organ than usual when suddenly there came a terrific clatter, such as comes with the seventh wave on the s.h.i.+ngle, and my two dear men in the dark were clapping the skin of their hands off!
”Oh, my dears! my dears! If you only knew how for weeks and weeks I had been moaning and lamenting that it was because I wasn't clever that people took no notice of me, you would forgive a vain creature when she said to herself, 'My daughter, you are really somebody, after all--you, you, you!' It was a beautiful moment, though, and when the old mushroom came back to the stage saying: 'What a voice! What expression! What nature!' I felt like falling on his bald head and kissing it, not being able to speak for lumps in the throat and feeling like the Methodist lady who poured out whisky for the cla.s.s leaders after they had presented her with a watch, and then told the reporters to say she had suitably responded.
”Heigho! I have talked about the fas.h.i.+onable people I meet in London, but I don't want to be one of them. They do nothing but rush about, dress, gossip, laugh, love, and plunge into all the delights of life. That is not my idea of existence. I am ambitious. I want to do something. I am tired in my soul of doing nothing. Yes, it _has_ been that all along, though I didn't like to tell you so before. There are people who are born in the midst of greatness and they don't know how to use it. But to be one of the world's celebrities, that is so different!
To have won the heart of the world, so that the world knows you and thinks of you and loves you! Say it is by your voice you do it and that your world is the concert hall, or even the music hall--what matter? You needn't _live_ music hall, whatever the life inside of it. And then that great dark void peopled with faces; that laugh or cry just as you please to make them--confess; that it would be magnificent, my dear ones!