When it was Dark

by Guy Thorne

  As he began to bring his arguments to a close, Basil was conscious that the people were with him. He could feel the minds around him thinking in unison. It was almost as if he heard the thoughts of the congregation. The striking woman stared straight up at him. Trouble was in her eyes, an awakened consciousness, and Basil knew that the truth was dropping steadily into her mind, and it seemed to be unwelcome and alarming to her.

  He felt also the bitter antagonism which was alive and working behind the impassive face and half-closed eyes of the millionaire below. It was a silent duel between them. He knew his words were full of meaning, even of conviction to Schuabe, and yet he was subjectively conscious of some reserve of force, some hidden sense of fearful power, a desperate resolve he could not overcome.

  Basil felt his soul wrestle in this dark, mysterious conflict as with a devil, but he could not prevail.

  He finished his arguments, the last of his proofs. There was a hushed silence in the church.

  Then swiftly, with a voice which trembled with the power that was given him, he called them to repentance and a new life. If, he said, his words had carried conviction of the truth of Christ's resurrection, of His divinity, then there was only one course open to them all: to come to Christ for forgiveness and salvation. To know the truth, to believe it, and continue in indifference, was to kill the soul.

  It was over. Father Ripon had pronounced the blessing, the great organ was thundering out the ending of another Sunday, and Sir Michael was shaking hands warmly with Basil in the vestry.

  Basil felt exhausted by the long, nervous strain, but the evident pleasure of Father Ripon and Sir Michael, the knowledge that he had acquitted himself well, was comforting and sustaining.

  He walked home, down quiet Holborn which was curiously dead without the traffic of a week day. Lincoln's Inn was wonderfully soothing and quiet as his footsteps echoed in the old quadrangle. After a lonely, tranquil supper -- Hands was at a dinner party somewhere in Mayfair, and Spence was at the office of The Daily Wire preparing for Monday's paper -- he pulled a small writing desk up to the fireside and began a long letter of news and thankfulness to Helena.

  He pictured the pleasant dining room at Walktown, the Sunday night's supper, -- an institution at the Vicarage after the labours of the busiest day in the week, -- with a guest or two perhaps.

  He knew they would be thinking of him, as he was now of them, and pictured the love-light in his fiancée's calm eyes.

  Chapter 10

  Autumn came to London, a warm, lingering season. Basil Gortre had settled down to steady, regular work. At no time before had a routine been so pleasant to him. His days were full of work, which, hard as it was, came to him with far more appeal than his previous duties at Walktown. Nothing ever stagnated here in London, at the very hub and centre of things.

  There was the splendid energy and force of Father Ripon, with his magnificent, unconventional methods as he animated his staff to constant and unflagging exertions. Basil felt he had suddenly "grown up," that his life before had been spent in futile playtime compared to the present.

  One central fact in St. Mary's parish held all the great organisation together -- the daily services in the great church. Priests, deacons, sisters of mercy, school teachers, and lay helpers all drew their strength and inspiration from this source. The daily Holy Communion, matins, evensong, were a stimulus and stimulant of enormous power.

  Church brought the mysteries in which they lived, moved, and had their being into intimate relation with every circumstance of daily life.

  The extraordinary thing, which many of Father Ripon's staff were almost unable to understand, was that more people did not avail themselves of such helpful opportunities.

  "They are always coming to me," the vicar had said on one occasion, "and complaining that they find such a tremendous difficulty in leading a holy life. They say the worldly surroundings and so forth kill their good impulses -- and yet they won't come to church. People are such fools! My young men imagine they can become good Christians by a sort of sudden magic -- misdemeanours on Saturday night, and after a visit to church and a few tears in the vestry, a saint for evermore! And then when they get drunk or do something awful the next week, they rail against the Christian Faith because it isn't a sort of spiritual handcuffs! Yet if you told them you could manage a bank after a short experience in a shipping office, they would see the absurdity of that at once. Donkeys!"

  This with a genial smile of tenderness and compassion, for this Whirlwind in a Cassock loved his flock.

  So from the very first Basil found his life pleasant. Privately he blessed his good fortune in living in Lincoln's Inn with Harold Spence.

  Basil admired Spence greatly for some of his qualities. His intellect was, of course, first class -- his high position on the great daily paper guaranteed that. His reading and sympathies were wide. Moreover, Basil found great refreshment in the fact that, in an age of indifference, at a time when the best intellects of younger London life were professedly agnostic, Harold Spence was a declared Christian.

  As Basil got to know Spence better, when the silence and detachment of midnight in the old Inn broke down reticence, Spence had hinted of days of sin and secret shame. And now, very soberly and without any emotion, he clung to Christ for help.

  And he had conquered.

  This was ever a glorious fact to Basil. Another miracle in those thousands of daily miracles which were happening all around him. But his anxiety for Harold Spence came from his realisation of his friend's exact spiritual grip. Spence's Christian faith was rather basic. Perhaps the deep inward conviction was weak. He often prayed long that nothing would ever occur to shake Spence's belief; for he felt, if that should happen, the disaster would prove irreparable.

  But he kept all these thoughts locked in his heart, and never spoke of them to his friend.

  Since the evening of his first sermon in St. Mary's, Basil had never seen Constantine Schuabe again. Now and then the thought of the millionaire passed through his mind, and his mental sight seemed obscured for a moment, as though great wings hid the sun from him. But since the silent duel in the church, the curious and malign influence of the militant atheist was without force. Fine health, the tonic of constant work, the armour of continual prayer, were able to banish much of what he now looked back on as his sickness, sinister though it had been.

  Nevertheless, one thing often reminded him of that night. The young lady he had seen sitting in the same pew with Schuabe often came to church on Sunday nights when he was preaching. The bold and beautiful face looked up at him with steady interest. The fierce regard had something passionate and yet wistful in it.

  Sometimes Basil found himself preaching almost directly to the face and soul of the unknown woman. There was an understanding between them. He knew it; he felt it most certainly.

  Sometimes she would remain in her seat after the throng had shuffled away into the night. She did not pray, but sat still, with her musing eyes fixed on the huge ten foot cross that swung down from the chancel arch.

  Once, as he passed the pew on the way to baptise the child of a poor woman of the streets -- brought in furtively after the Sunday evensong -- she made a movement as if to speak to him. He had waited in expectation for a moment, but she remained still, and he passed on to the font with its sad cluster of outcasts, its dim gas jets, and the tiny child of shame with its thin cry of distress.

  He was asking the mother the tremendous question: "Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by them?" when he saw the unknown woman standing close by, within the shadow of a pillar. A gleam of yellow light fell on her rich dress, and her eye glittered behind her white veil. He thought there was a teardrop in it. But when he finished saying the exhortation he realised the tall, silent figure had departed.

  He often won
dered who the woman was, if he would ever know her.

  Something told him she wanted help. Something assured him he would some day give that help to her.

  And beyond this, there was an unexplained conviction within him that the stranger was in some way concerned and bound up in the part he was to play in life.

  The episode of the cigarettes happened in this way.

  Stokes, one of Basil Gortre's fellow-curates, came to supper one night in Lincoln's Inn. Harold Spence was there also, as it was one of his free nights.

  About ten o'clock supper was over and they proposed to have a little music. Stokes was a fine pianist, and he had brought some of the nocturnes and ballads of Chopin with him, to try on the small black-cased piano which stood at the end of the large sitting room.

  "Will you smoke, Stokes?" Spence said.

  "Thank you, I'll have a cigarette," the young man replied. "I can't stand cigars, and I have left my pipe at the Clergy House."

  They looked for cigarettes in the silver box lined with cedar which stood on the mantelshelf, but the box was empty.

  "Never mind," Spence said. "I have been meaning to run out and get a late copy of The Westminster and I'll buy some cigarettes, too. There's a shop at the Holborn end of the Lane, next to the shop where the oysters come from, and it won't be shut yet."

  In a few minutes he came back. "I have brought Virginian," he said. "I know you can't stand Egyptian."

  Till eleven o'clock Stokes played to them -- Chopin's wild music of melancholy and fire -- and as the hour struck he went home.

  Gortre and Spence sat and talked casually after he had gone, about the music they had heard, the cartoon in the evening paper, anything that came.

  Basil had not been smoking during the evening. He had been too intent on the nocturnes, and now he felt a want of tobacco. One of the packets of cigarettes lay by him on the table. He pulled up the flaps and took one. Without thinking what he was doing he drew a small photograph from the cardboard case.

  He glanced at it casually.

  It was one of those pictures of burlesque actresses given away with this kind of tobacco. A tall girl with short skirts and a large picture hat was shown in a seductive attitude that was meant to be full of invitation.

  Basil looked at it steadily with a curious expression on his face. Then he took a large reading glass from the table and examined it again. It was the portrait of the strange girl who came to St. Mary's.

  Basil had already told Spence of this woman, and now he passed the photograph on to him.

  "Harold, that's the girl who comes to church and looks so unhappy. She's an actress, of course. The name is underneath -- Miss Gertrude Hunt. Who's Gertrude Hunt?"

  Spence took the card. "How very strange," he said, "to find your unknown like this. Gertrude Hunt? Why, she's a well-known musical comedy girl. Sings and dances at the Regent. There are all the usual stories about the lady, but possibly they're all lies. I'm sure I don't know. I have chucked that sort of society long ago. Are you sure it is the same person?"

  "Absolutely sure! Of course, this shows the girl in a different dress and so on, but it is her without a doubt. I'm glad she comes to church."

  He sighed, thinking of the many chilling experiences of the last few months in the vice-haunted streets and squares of Bloomsbury.

  "Well," said Spence, "I hope you'll be able to do some good. Personally, anything of the sort would be impossible to me. Goodnight, old man. I'm going to turn in. I have a hard day's work tomorrow. Sleep well."

  He went out of the room with a yawn.

  When he was left alone, with his little mystery solved in so strange a fashion, Basil was conscious of a curious disappointment. It was an anti-climax.

  He had no narrow objection to the theatre. Now and then he had been to see famous actors in great plays. His occasional visits to the theatres of Irving or Wyndham had given him pleasure. However much the apologists of the stage may cry "art" or "beneficial influence," Basil knew there was sometimes a kind of wonder in the heart of a sincere Christian who attends a theatre as he remembers his body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

  Still Basil was tolerant enough. But this case which had thrust itself before him was quite different. He knew the burlesque, the modern music play, made, first and foremost, a frank appeal to the senses. Its hopeless vulgarity and coarseness of sentiment, its entire lack of appeal to anything that was not debased and materialistic, were ordinary indisputable facts of everyday life.

  And so his lady of evensong was a high priestess of nothing better than this cult of froth and gaudy sensuality. More than all others, his experiences of late had taught him that women of this type seemed to be very nearly soulless. Their souls had dissolved in champagne; their consciences were burnt up by the feverish excitement and pleasure of their lives. They sold themselves for luxury and the adulation of coarse men.

  His disappointment made him bitter and contemptuous more than usual.

  Then his eye lit on a photogravure hung on the opposite wall. It was the reproduction of a quaint, decorative, stilted picture by an artist of the early Umbrian school, and represented St. Mary Magdalene.

  The coincidence checked his contemptuous thoughts.

  He began to reconstruct the scene in his brain, a favourite and profitable exercise of his, using his knowledge and study of New Testament times to animate the picture and make it vivid.

  They were all resting, or rather lying, around the table, their bodies resting on the couch, their feet turned away from the table in the direction of the wall, while their left elbows rested on the table.

  And then, from the open courtyard, up the veranda step, perhaps through an antechamber. and by the open door passed a woman into the festive reception room and dining hall. How had she gained access? How incongruous her figure must have been there. In those days the Jewish prejudice against any conversation with women -- even those of the most lofty character -- was extreme.

  The shadow of her form must have fallen on all who sat at meat. But no one spoke, nor did she heed any but Jesus only.

  The woman had brought with her an alabaster box of perfume. It was a flask of precious foliatum, probably, which women wore round the neck, and which hung over the breast. The woman stood behind Jesus, and as she bowed reverently a shower of tears, like sudden summer rain, bedewed His feet.

  Basil went through the whole scene until the final words of Jesus: "Go into peace" not go in peace, as some would have it.

  And so she, who had come to Him for spiritual healing, went out into the better light, and into the eternal peace of the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Basil tore up the little photograph and forgot that aspect of the dancer. He remembered instead the dim figure by the font.

  There was a sudden furious knocking on the outer door of the chambers, and he went to open it.

  Chapter 11

  Basil knew for certain that his vicar stood outside. The knocking was full of militant Christianity. Father Ripon refused to live by any standard of measured time. He refused -- so he said -- to believe that a wretched little clock really knew what the great golden sun was doing. He explained he had found it impossible to call before this late hour, and he came regardless of it now. He wished to see Basil.

  As usual, the worthy man was hungry, and the remains of supper on the table reminded him of that. He sat down at once and began to eat rapidly, telling his story between mouthfuls.

  "I bring you news of a wonderful opportunity," he said. "If you go to work in the right way you may win a soul. It is a poor dancer at the theatres. She came to me in her carriage, her furs, and finery, and had a serious talk in my study. I gave her tea and a cigarette -- you know I always keep some cigarettes. All these women smoke. It is a great thing to treat these people with understanding and knowledge, Gortre. Don't 'come the priest' over them, as a seller with a handcart said to me last week. When they realise that you are a nonjudgmental man, then they are fifty times more willing to allow the o
ther and more important thing.

  "Well, this poor girl told me the same sordid story one's always hearing. She's a favourite burlesque actress, and she lives very expensively in those gorgeous new flats -- Bloomsbury Court. Some wealthy scoundrel pays for it all. A man 'in a very high position,' as she said with a pathetic touch of pride which made me want to weep. Oh, my dear fellow, if the world only knew what I know! Great and honoured names in the senate, the forum, the Court, unsullied before the eyes of men. And then these hideous establishments and secret ties. This is a wicked city, Gortre. The deadly lusts which war against the soul are great, powerful, and militant all around us.

  "This poor woman has been coming regularly to church on Sundays. The first time was when you preached your capital sermon on the Resurrection. Now she's dying from a slow complaint. She will live a year or two, the doctors think, and that's all. It doesn't prevent her from living her ordinary life, but it will strike her down suddenly some day.

  "She's expressed a wish to see you to talk things over. She thinks you can help her. Go to her and save her. We must."

  He handed Basil a visiting card, on which he saw the name of Gertrude Hunt, with a curious lack of surprise.

  "Well, I must be off," said Father Ripon, rising from the table with a large hunk of bread and cheese in one hand. "Go and see this poor woman tomorrow evening. She tells me she's not acting for a week or two. Rehearsing some new play. Isn't it wonderful to think of the things that are going on every day? Just think of the Holy Spirit pouring into this sinning woman's heart, catching her in the middle of her champagne and frivolity, and turning her, almost compelling her towards Christ! And men like Constantine Schuabe say there's no truth in Christianity -- I'll take one of these apples -- poor fools! Now I must go and write my sermon."