The Christian Part 18

There was a hurried footstep approaching, and Polly came in, with her eyes on the ground as if looking for something she had dropped. At the next moment she had s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter out of Glory's hand, and was saying:

"What are you doing in my room? Has your friend the chaplain told you to spy upon me?"

The expression on her face was appalling, and Glory, who had flushed up with shame, turned away without a word.

When John Storm got back to his room he found the following letter from the canon on his table:

"Since our interview of this morning (so strangely abridged) I have had the honour to visit your dear uncle, the Prime Minister, and he agrees with me that the strain of your recent examinations and the anxieties of a new occupation have probably disturbed your health, and that it will be prudent of you to take a short vacation. I have therefore the greatest pleasure in a.s.suring you that you are free from duty for a week, a fortnight, or a month, as your convenience may determine; and during your much-regretted absence I will do my best to sustain the great loss of your invaluable help."

On reading the message, John Storm flung himself into a chair and burst into a long peal of bitter laughter. But when the laughter was spent there came a sense of great loneliness. Then he remembered Mrs.

Callender, and went across to her little house in Victoria Square, and showed her the canon's letter and told her everything.

"Lies, lies, lies!" she said. "Ah, laddie, laddie! to lie, to know you lie, to be known to lie, and yet to go on lying--that is the whole art of life with these fashionable shepherds and their fashionable flock.

As for that woman--ugh! She was separated from her husband for two years before his death; and he died in a hotel abroad without kith or kin to comfort him: and now she wears his hair in a gold locket on her bosom--that's what she is! But all's well that ends well, laddie. The _holly_ will do ye good, for you were killing yerself with work. You'll no be spending it in your little island, now, eh?"

John Storm was sitting with one leg across the other, and his head on his hand and his elbow on his knee.

"I shall spend it," he said, "in Retreat at the Brotherhood in Bishopsgate."

"G.o.d bless me, man! is that the change of air ye'll be going to gie yoursel'? It may be well enough for men with water in their veins; but you have blood, laddie--blood! Tak' care, tak' care!"

XVI.

"Still at Martha's.

"Quite right, dear Aunt Anna, the terms 'authority' and 'obedience' must be known and honoured. Only, when it is a case of put a penny in the slot and out comes the word of command, you can't exactly feel that way.

The board of directors put the penny into the slot of this inst.i.tution, and the word of command, so far as I am concerned, comes out of the mouth of Ward Sister Allworthy. I call her the White Owl. She is five feet ten, and has big round cheeks which sometimes I should dearly love to slap--as mothers slap their 'childers' when they administer a humiliating punishment.

"So you think you notice 'a certain want of apt.i.tude'? Well, I don't think I am naturally a bad nurse, Aunt Anna. The patients like me, and they don't die of the dumps when I am about. Only I can't practise nursing by the rule of three, and as a consequence I get myself reported. Sister Allworthy has reported me three times, bless her!

Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, and now she threatens to have me up before the matron. That dear soul has difficulties of locomotion, being buried under the Pelion on Ossa of a mountain of fat. She inhabits a cave of Adullam on the edge of the Inferno--i. e., the 'theatre'--below stairs, and has a small dog with a bad heart and broken wind always nagging on her knee. I call her the Chief Broker in Breakages and Head Dealer in Diseases, and she is only seen once a day when she comes round to take stock. You have to be nice with her Majesty,' for she can haul you up at the weekly board, and put a score against you in the black book, and send you away without a certificate. If that happens, a girl who expects to earn her living as a nurse has never any particular need to pray, 'In all time of our wealth, good Lord deliver us.'

"But, oh, my dear grandfather, what do you think of our John Storm now? After uttering the lamentations of Jeremiah and predicting all the plagues of Egypt, he has gone off to hold his peace--that is to say, he has gone to make his 'Retreat,' which, being interpreted, means praying without ceasing, and also without speaking, eighteen hours a day, six days at a spell, and sometimes sixty. When he comes back reeking with all that holiness I shall feel myself such a miserable sinner----

"Soberly, I could cry to think of it, though, and when I remember that perhaps I was partly to blame----

"It was this way: In that 'ter'ble discoorse' I told you he had scotched the snake, not killed it, and his vicar (I call him Mr.

Worldly Wiseman), finding that his ladies and n.o.bility went out like the Pharisees, one by one, told our poor John he was ill and stood in need of instant rest. It looked like it certainly, and the trouble must have been a sort of human rabies in which the poor victim bites at his best friends first. He came here with his lower lip hanging like an old dog's, and I was so stupid as not to see that he was being hunted like a dog too, and only told myself how ugly and untidy he had grown of late.

But the Sister had just before been showing me her tusks again, and being possessed with a fury, I gave it him world without end. He was very unreasonable though, and seemed to say that I must have no friends and no amus.e.m.e.nts that were not of his choosing, and that after spending my days walking through the inside of this precious hospital I must spend my nights walking round the outside of it. Being a woman of like pa.s.sions with himself, I had a 'ter'ble dust' with him on the subject, and the next I heard was that he was going to make Retreat in a kind of English-church monastery somewhere in the city, where he would 'try to disentangle' himself 'from the world' and see what he 'ought to do next.' He sent me his blessing with this message, and I sent him back mine--a less holy one, but he'll make it do.

"I thought you would remember Mr. Drake's mother, dear Auntie Rachel.

Yes, he is fair also, and wears his hair brushed across his forehead, much as you see in the portraits of Napoleon. In fact, he is a sort of fair-haired Napoleon in nature as well.

"He took me to the theatre the other evening, and that was the great event I intended to tell you about. It was quite a proper sort of place, and n.o.body behaved badly except Glory, who kept talking and preaching and going silly with excitement all the evening through, with the result that everybody was staring mewards and wanting to turn me out.

"Since then Mr. Drake's friend, Lord Bob, who knows all the actors on earth seemingly, has taken us 'behind,' and we have seen a rehearsal.

Things don't look quite the same behind as before, but nothing in the world does that, and I wasn't a bit disenchanted. In fact, I found everything delightfully romantic and amusing, and really I do not think it _can_ be so very wicked to be an actress. Do you?

"My friend Polly Love was with us. Polly is a probationer also, and sleeps in the cubicle next to mine, and after the rehearsal we went to the gentlemen's chambers to tea. I can hear what Aunt Anna is saying: 'Goodness gracious! you didn't do that, girl?' Well, yes, I did though.

In the interest of my s.e.x I wanted to see how two boys could live in rooms all by themselves, and it's perfectly shocking how well they get on without a woman. Of course I wasn't such a silly as to let wit about that, but after I had examined their sitting-room and cross-examined its owners on its numerous photographs (chiefly feminine) and tried how it feels to hold their big pipes between one's teeth, I whipped off my hat at once and began to put things straight for them, and then I made the tea.

"By this time the gentlemen had changed into their jackets, and I sent them flying around for cups and saucers and sugar basins. It turned out that they had only one teaspoon in the place, and when anybody wanted to stir her tea she said, 'Will you oblige me with _spoon_ please?'

What fun it was! We laughed until we cried--at least one of us did--and eventually we managed to break the teapot and a slop basin and to overturn a standing lamp. It was perfectly delightful!

"But the best sport was after tea was over, and Glory was called on for imitations of the people we had seen at the theatre. Of course she couldn't imitate a man when she was in a woman's frock, so being as bright as diamonds that night and twice 'as impudent as a white stone,'

[* A Manx proverb] she actually conceived the idea of dressing up in man's clothes. Naturally the gentlemen were enchanted, so I hope Auntie Rachel isn't terribly shocked. Mr. Drake lent me his knickerbockers and a velvet jacket, and Polly and I went into the bedroom, where she helped me to find the way to put them on. With my own blouse and my own hat (I am wearing a felt one now with a broad brim and a feather), and _of course_ my own slippers and stockings, I made a bogh of a boy, I can tell you. I thought Polly would have died of delight in the bedroom, but when we came out she kept covering her face and crying, 'Glory, how _can_ you!'

"I'm afraid I sang and talked more than was good for the soul, but it was all Mr. Drake's doing. He declared I was such a marvellous mimic that it was simply a waste of time and the good gifts of G.o.d to go on hospital nursing any longer. And I do believe that if anything happened, and the need arose, he would----

"Only fancy Glory a public person, and all the world and his wife going down on their knees to her! But then it's fearful to think of being an actress, isn't it?

"After all such glorious 'outs' I have to go 'in' to the hospital, and then comes my fit again. Do you remember my little boy who said he was going to the angels, and he would get lots of gristly pork up there? He has gone, and I don't think I like nursing children now. Oh, how I long to go out into the world! I want to shine in it. I want to become great and glorious. I could do it too, I know I could. I have got it in me, I am sure I have. Yet here I am in a little dark corner crying for the sunshine!

"How silly this is, isn't it? It sounds like madness. My dears, allow me to introduce you to some one--

"Glory Quayle, 'March Hare and Madwoman.'"

XVII.

The board room of the hospital of Martha's Vineyard was a large and luxurious chamber, with an oval window at its farther end, and its two side walls panelled with portraits of former chairmen and physicians. In great oaken armchairs, behind ponderous oaken tables, covered with green cloth and furnished with writing pads, the Board of Governors sat in three sides of a square, leaving an open s.p.a.ce in the middle. This open s.p.a.ce was reserved for patients seeking admission or receiving discharge, and for officers of the hospital presenting their weekly reports.

On a morning in August the matron's report had closed with a startling item. It recommended the immediate suspension of a nurse on the ground of gross impropriety of conduct. The usual course in such a case was for the board of the hospital to depute the matron to act for them in private, but the chairman in this instance was a peppery person, with a stern mouth and a solid under-jaw.

"This is a most serious matter," he said. "I think--this being a public inst.i.tution--I really think the board should investigate the case for itself. We ought to a.s.sure ourselves that--that, in fact, no other irregularity is going on in the hospital."

"May it please your lordship," said a rotund voice from, one of the side tables, "I would suggest that a case like this of grievous moral delinquency comes directly within the dispensation of the chaplain, and if he has done his duty by the unhappy girl (as no doubt he has) he must have a statement to make to the board with regard to her."

It was Canon Wealthy.

"I may mention," he added, "that Mr. Storm has now returned to his duties, and is at present in the hospital."

"Send for him," said the chairman.

When John Storm entered the board room it was remarked that he looked no better for his holiday. His cheeks were thinner, his eyes more hollow, and there was a strange pallor under his swarthy skin.

The business was explained to him, and he was asked if he had any statement to make with regard to the nurse whom the matron had reported for suspension.

"No," he said, "I have no statement."

"Do you mean to tell the board," said the chairman, "that you know nothing of this matter--that the case is too trivial for your attention--or perhaps that you have never even spoken to the girl on the subject?"

"That is so--I never have," said John.