The Christian Part 63

"Behind my church, in a dark, unwholesome alley called. Crook Lane, we have a clergy house, at present let out in tenements, the cellar being occupied as a gin shop. As soon as these premises can be cleared of their enc.u.mbrances I shall turn them into a club for working girls. Why not? In the old days the Church came to the people: let it come to the people now. Here we are in the midst of this mighty stronghold of the devil's kingdom of sin and crime. Foreign clubs, casinos, dancing academies, and gambling houses are round about us. What are we to do? Put up a forest of props (as at the Abbey) and keep off touch and contamination? G.o.d forbid! Let us go down into these dens of moral disease and disinfect them. The poor working girls, of Soho want their Sunday: give it them. They want music and singing: give it them. They want dancing: give them that also, for G.o.d's sake, give it them in your churches, or the devil will give it them in his h.e.l.ls!

"Expect to be howled at of course. Some good people will think I am either a fanatic or an artful schemer, while the clerical place-seekers, who love the flesh-pots of Egypt and have their eyes on the thrones of the Church and the world, will denounce my 'secularity' and tell me I am feeding the 'miry troughs' of the publican and sinner. No matter, if only G.o.d is pleased to vouchsafe 'signs following.' And one weary-faced lonely girl, grown fresh of countenance and happy of mien, or one bright little woman, s.n.a.t.c.hed from the brink of perdition, will be a better fruit, of religion than some of them have seen for many a year.

"As soon as the workmen have cleared out I am going to establish a daily service and keep the church open always. Still at Mrs. Callender's, you see; but I am refusing all invitations, except as a priest, and already I don't seem to, have time to draw my breath. No income connected with St. Mary Magdalene's, or next to none, just enough to pay the caretaker; but I must not complain of that, for it is the accident to which I owe my church, n.o.body else wanting it under the circ.u.mstances. I had begun to think my time in the monastery wasted, but G.o.d knew better. It will help me to live the life of poverty, of purity, of freedom from the world.

"Love to the grandfather and the ladies. How I wish you were with me in the thick of the fight! Sometimes I dream you are, too, and I fancy I see you in the midst of these bright young things with their flowers and feathers--they will make beautiful Christians yet! Oddly enough, on the day you travelled to the island, every hour that took you farther away seemed to bring you nearer. Greetings!"

VII.

"Glenfaba,'the Oilan.'

"Oh, gracious and grateful friend, at length you have remembered the existence of the 'poor lone crittur' living in dead-alive land! Only that I lack gall to make oppression bitter, I should of course return your belated epistle by the Dead Letter Office, marked 'Unknown' across your 'Dear Glory,' there being no longer anybody in these regions who has a plausible claim to that dubious t.i.tle. But, alas! I am not my own woman now, and with tears of shame I acknowledge that _any_ letter from London comes like an angel's whisper breathed to me through the air.

"I dare say you have been unreasonable enough to think that I ought to have written to tell you of my arrival; and knowing that man is born to vanity as the sparks fly upward, I have more than once intended to take pen in hand and write; but there is something so sleepy in this island atmosphere that my good resolution has. .h.i.therto been a stillborn babe that has breathed but never cried!

"Know then that my journey hither was performed with due celerity and no further disaster than befalls me when, as usual, I have _done_ those things which I ought not to have done, and left _undone_ those things which I ought to have done--the former in this instance having reference to various bouts of crying--which drew forth the sympathy of a compa.s.sionate female sharper in the train--and the latter to the catch of my sachel, which enabled that obliging person to draw forth my embroidered pocket-handkerchief in exchange.

"I was in good time for the steamboat at Liverpool, and it was crowded, according to its wont, with the Lancashire lads and la.s.ses, in whom affection is as contagious as the mumps. Being in the dumps myself on sailing out of the river, and thinking of the wild excitement with which I had sailed into it, I think I should have found that I had not _done_ crying in both senses but for the interest of watching an amiable Bob Brierley who, with his arm about the waist of the person sitting next to him, kept looking round at the rest of the world from time to time with the innocence of one whose left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing.

"But we had hardly crossed the bar when the prince of the powers of the air began to envy the happiness of these dear young goodies, and if you had seen the weather for the next four hours you would have agreed that the devil must have had a hand in it! Up came a wave over the after quarter and down went the pa.s.sengers below decks, staggering and screaming like brewery rats, and then on we came like the Israelites out of Egypt on eagles' wings! Having lost my own sea legs a little I thought it prudent to go down too, with my doggie tucked under my arm, and finding a berth in the ladies' cabin, I fell asleep and didn't awake until we were in the cross-current just off the island, when, amid moans and groans and other noises, I heard the tearful voice of a sick pa.s.senger asking, 'Is there any hope, stewardess?'

"The train got to Peel as the sun was setting behind the grim old castle walls, and when I saw the dear little town again I dropped half a tear, and even felt an insane desire to run out to meet it. Grandfather was at the station with old 'Caesar' and the pony carriage, and when I had done kissing him and he had done panting and puffing and talking nonsense, as if I had been Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French rolled into one, I could have cried to see how small and feeble he had become since I went away. We could not get off immediately, for in his simple joy at my return he was hailing everybody and everybody was hailing him, and the dear old Pharisee was sounding his trumpet so often in the market-place, that he might have glory of men, that I thought we should never get up to Glenfaba that night. When we did so at length the old aunties were waiting at the gate, and then he broke into exclamations again. 'Hasn't she grown tall? Look at her! Hasn't she, now?' Whereupon the aunties took up their parable with, 'Well, well! Aw, well! Aw, well now! Well, ye navar!' So that by the time I got through I had kissed everybody a dozen times, and was as red over the eyes as a grouse.

"Then we went into the house, and for the first five minutes I couldn't tell what had come over the old place to make it look so small and mean. It was just as if the walls of the rooms had been the bellows of a concertina and somebody had suddenly shut them. But there was the long clock clucking away on the landing, and there was Sir Thomas Traddles purring on the hearth-rug, and there were the same plates on the dresser, and the same map of Africa over the fireplace, with a spot of red ink where my father died.

"The moon was glistening on the sea when I went to bed that night, and when I got up in the morning the sun was shining on it, and a crow cut across my window cawing, and I heard grandfather humming to himself on the path below. And after my long spell in London, and my railway journey of the day before, it was the same as if I had fallen asleep in a gale on the high seas and awakened in a quiet harbour somewhere.

"So here I am, back at Glenfaba, in my old little room with my old little bed, and everything exactly as it used to be; and I begin to believe that when you went into that monastery you only just got the start of me in being dead. There used to be a few people in this place, but now there doesn't seem to be a dog left. All the youngsters have 'gone foreign,' and all the oldsters have gone to--'goodness knows which.' Sometimes we hear the bleat of sheep on the mountains, and sometimes the scream of seagulls overhead, and sometimes we hold a convocation of all living rooks in the elms on the lawn. We take no thought for the morrow, what we shall eat or what we shall put on, and on Sundays when the church bell rings we go out, like the Israelites in the wilderness, in clothes which wax not old after forty years. During the rest of the week we watch the blue-bottles knocking their stupid heads against the ceiling, and listen to the gra.s.shoppers whispering in the gra.s.s, and fall asleep to the hum of the bees, and awake to the _hee-haw_ of old Neilus's 'canary.' [* Donkey] Such is the dead-alive life we live at Glenfaba, and the days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if.... Ohoy! (A yawn.)

"I suppose it is basely ungrateful of me to talk like this, for the dear place itself is lovely enough to disturb one's hope of paradise, and this very morning is as fresh as the dew on the gra.s.s, with the larks singing above, and the river singing below, and clouds like little curls of foam hovering over the sea. And as for my three dear old dunces, who love me so much more than I deserve, I am ashamed in my soul when I overhear them planning good things for me to eat, and wild excitements for me to revel in, that I may not be dull or miss the luxuries I am accustomed to. 'Do you know I'm afraid Glory doesn't care so much for pinjane after all,' I heard grandfather whispering to Aunt Anna one morning, and half an hour afterward he was reproving Aunt Rachel for pressing me too hard to serve at the soup kitchen.

"They govern me like a child in pinafores, and of course like a child I revenge myself by governing all the house. But, oh, dear! oh, dear! gone are the days when I could live on water-gruel and be happy in a go-cart.

Yes, the change is in me, not in them or the old home, and what's the good of putting back the clock when the sun is so stubbornly keeping pace? I might be happy enough at Glenfaba still, if I could only bring back the days when the garden trees were my gymnasium and I used to rock myself and sing like a bird on a bough in the wind, or when I led a band of boys to rob our own orchard--a bold deed, for which Bishop Anna ofttimes launched at me and! all her suffragans her severest censure--it was her slipper, I remember. But I can't run barefoot all day long on the wet sand now, with the salt spray blowing in my face, and a young lady of one-and-twenty seldom or never rushes out to play dumps and baggy-mug in public with little girls of ten.

"As a result, my former adventures are now limited to careering on the back of little 'Caesar,' who has grown so ancient and fat that he waddles like an old duck, and riding him is like working your pa.s.sage.

So I confine myself to sitting on committees, and being sometimes sat upon, and rubbing the runes for grandfather, and cleaning the milkpails for Aunt Anna, and even such holy kill-times as going to church regularly and watching Neilus when he is pa.s.sing round the plate after 'Let your light so shine before men'--light to his practical intellect being clearly a synonym for silver in the shape of threepenny bits!

"But, oh my! oh my! I am a dark character in this place for all that The dear old goodies have never yet said a syllable about my letter announcing that I had gone over to the enemy (i. e., Satan and the music hall), and there is a dead hush in the house as often as the wind of conversation veers in that direction. This is nothing, though, to the white awe in the air when visitors call and I am questioned how I earn my living in London. I hardly know whether to laugh or cry at the long-drawn breath of relief when I wriggle out of a tight place without telling a lie. But you can't hide an eel in a sack, and I know the truth will pop out one of these days. Only yesterday I went district-visiting with Aunt Rachel, and one of the Balaams of life, who keeps a tavern for fishermen, lured us into his bar parlour to look at a portrait of 'Gloria' which he had cut out of an ill.u.s.trated paper and pinned up on the wall 'because it resembled me so much!' Oh, dear! oh, dear! I could have found it in my heart to brazen it out on the spot at this sight of my evil fame; but when I saw poor little auntie watching me with fearful eyes I talked away like a mill-wheel and went out thanking G.o.d that the rest of the people of Peel were not as other men are, or even as this publican.

"I have been getting newspapers myself, though, sent by my friend Rosa; and as long as the mis-reporters concerned themselves with my own doings and failures to do, and lied as tenderly as an epitaph about my disappearance from London, I cut them up and burned them. But when they forgot me, and began to treat of other people's triumphs, I made Neilus my waste-paper basket, on the understanding that the papers were to go to the fishermen just home from Kinsale. Then from time to time he told me they were 'goin' round, miss, goin' round,' and gave me other a.s.surances of 'the greatest circulation in the world,' which was true enough certainly, though the old thief omitted to say it was at the paper-mill, where they were being turned into pulp.

"But, heigho! I don't need newspapers to remind me of London. Like St.

Paul, I have a devil that beats me with fists, and as often as a clear day comes, and one can see things a long way off, he makes me climb to the top of Slieu Whallin [* A mountain in Man.] that I may sit on the beacon by the hour and strain my eyes for a glimpse of England, feeling like Lot's wife when she looked back on her old home, and then coming down with a heavy heart and a taste of tears in my mouth as if I had been turned into a pillar of salt. Dear old London! But I suppose it is going on its way just as it used to do, with its tides of traffic and its crowds and carriages, and wandering merchants and hawkers crying their wares, and everything the same as ever, just the same, although Glory isn't there!"

"10.30 P. M.--I had to interrupt the writing of my letter this morning owing to an alarm of illness seizing grandfather. He had been taken with a sudden faintness. Of course we sent for the doctor, but before he arrived the faintness had pa.s.sed, so he looked wise at us, like a prize riddle which had to be guessed before his next visit, left us his autograph (a wonderful hieroglyphic), and went away. Since then grandfather has been in the hands of a less taciturn pract.i.tioner, whom he calls the 'flower of Glenfaba' (that's me), and after talking nonsense to him all day and playing chess with him all the evening I have to put him to bed laughing, and come back to my own room to finish my letter with an easier mind. For the last half-hour the aurora has been pulsing in the northern sky, and I have been thinking that the glorious phantasmagoria must be the sign of a gale in heaven, just as sleet and mist and black wind are the signs of a gale on earth. But it has tripped off into nothingness and only the dark night is left, through which the dogs at Knockaloe are keeping up their private correspondence with the dogs at Ballamoar by the medium of their nightly howls.

"Oh, dear! Only 10.30! And to know that while we are going to bed by country hours, with nearly everything still and dead around us, London is just beginning to bestir itself! When I lie down and try to sleep I shall see the wide squares, with their statues of somebody inside, and the blaze of lights over the doors of the theatres, and all the tingling life of the great and wonderful city. Ugh! It makes one feel like one's own ghost wandering through the upper rooms and across the dark landings, and hearing the strains of the music and the sounds of the dancing from the ballroom below stairs!

"But, my goodness! (I can still swear on that, you see, and not be forsworn!) 'What's the odds if you're jolly?--and I allus is!' How's your dog? Mine would write you a letter, only her heart is moribund, and if things go on as they are going she must set about making her will. In fact, she is now lying at the foot of my bed thinking matters out, and bids me tell you that after various attempts to escape Home Rule, not being (like her mistress) one of those natures made perfect through suffering, she is only 'kept alive by the force of her own volition,' in this house that is full of old maids and has nothing better in it than one old cat, and he isn't worth hunting, being dest.i.tute of a tail.

Naturally she is doing her best (like somebody else) to keep herself unspotted from that world which is a source of so much temptation, but she's bound to confess that a little 'divilment' now and then would help her to take a more holy and religious view of life.

"I 'wish you happy' in your new enterprise; but if you are going in for being the champion of woman in this world--of her wrongs--I warn you not to be too pointed in your moral, for there is a story here of a handsome young curate who was so particular in the pulpit with 'Lovest thou me'

that a lady followed him into the vestry and admitted that she did.

Soberly, it is a great and n.o.ble effort, and I've half a mind to love you for it. If men want women to be good they _will_ be good, for women dance to the tune that men like best, and always have done so since the days of Adam--not forgetting that gentleman's temptation, nor yet his excuse about 'the woman _Thou gavest_ me,' which shows he wasn't much of a husband anyway, though certainly he hadn't much choice of a wife.

"My love to dear old London! Sometimes I have half a mind to skip off and do my wooing myself. Perhaps I should do so, only that Rosa writes that she would like to come and spend her summer holiday in Peel.

Haven't I told you about Rosa? She's the lady journalist that Mr. Drake introduced me to.

"But let's to bed, Said Sleepyhead.

"Glory.

"P.S.--IMPORTANT. Ever since I left London I have been tormented with the recollection of poor Polly's baby. She put him out to nurse with the Mrs. Jupe you heard of, and that person put him out to somebody else.

While the mother lived I had no business to interfere, but I can't help thinking of the motherless mite now and wondering what has become of him. I suppose that like Jeshurun he waxeth fat and kicketh by this time, yet it would be the act of a man and a clergyman if anybody would take up my neglected duty and make it his business to see that there is somebody to love the poor child. Mrs. Jupe's address is 5a, The Little Turnstile, going from Holborn into Lincoln's Inn Fields."

VIII.

It was on a Sat.u.r.day morning that John Storm received Glory's letter, and on the evening of the same day he set out in search of Mrs. Jupe's.

The place was not easy to find, and when he discovered it at length he felt a pang at the thought that Glory herself had lived in this dingy burrowing. As he was going up to the door of the little tobacco shop a raucous voice within was saying, "That's what's doo on the byeby, and till you can py up you needn't be a-kemmin' 'ere no more." At the next moment a young woman crossed him on the threshold. She was a little slender thing, looking like a flower that has been broken by the wet. He recognised her as the girl who had nursed the baby in Cook Lane on the day of his first visit to Soho. She was crying, and to hide her swollen eyes she dropped her head at pa.s.sing, and he saw her faded ribbons and soiled straw hat.

A woman of middle age behind the counter was curtsying to his clerical attire, and a little girl at the door of an inner room was looking at him out of the corner of her eyes, with head aslant.

"Father Storm, I think, sir. Come in and set you down, sir.--Mind the shop, b.o.o.boo.--My 'usband 'as told me about ye, sir. 'You'll know 'im at onct, Lidjer,' 'e sez, siz 'e.--No, 'e ain't 'ome from the club yet, but 'e might be a-kemmin' in any time now, sir."

John Storm had seated himself in the little dark parlour, and was looking round and thinking of Glory. "No matter; my business is with you, Mrs. Jupe," he answered, and at that the twinkling eyes and fat cheeks, which had been doing their best to smile, took on a look of fear.

"Wot's the metter?" she asked, and she closed the door to the shop.

"Nothing, I trust, my good woman," and then he explained his errand.

Mrs. Jupe listened attentively and seemed to be asking herself who had sent him.

"The poor young mother is dead now, as you may know, and----"

"But the father ain't," said the woman sharply, "and, begging your parding, sir, if 'e wants ter know where the byeby is 'e can come 'isself and not send sembody else!"

"If the child is well, my good woman, and well cared for----"

"It _is_ well keered for, and it's gorn to a pusson I can trust."