When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

He scrutinised it with great care. It was the portrait of the strange girl who came to St. Mary's.

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

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

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

"Oh, quite sure! Of course, this shows the girl in a different dress and so on, but it's she without a doubt. I am glad she comes to church. It is not what one expects from what one hears of that class of woman, and it's not what one generally finds in the parish."

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, "experiments with that type are generally failures, and sometimes dangerous to the experimenter. You remember Anatole France's Thais? But this damsel is no Thais certainly, and you aren't a bit like Paphuntius. I hope you will be able to do some good. Personally, anything of the sort would be quite impossible to me. Good-night, old man. I'm going to turn in. I've a hard day's work to-morrow. Sleep well."

He went out of the room with a yawn.

When he was left alone, with his little mystery solved in so commonplace 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, nevertheless he had always felt a slight instinctive dislike to the trade of a mime. All voluntary sacrifices of personal dignity affect the average English temperament in this way more or less. However much the apologists of the stage may cry "art" or "beneficial influence," your British thinker is not convinced that there is anything very worthy in painting the face and making the body a public show for a wage. And there is sometimes a kind of wonder in the heart of a sincere Christian who attends a theatre as he remembers that the 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 that 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 every-day 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 class 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 very chagrin made him bitter and contemptuous more than his wont.

Then his eye lit upon a photogravure hung upon 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 the old dim times to animate the picture and make it vivid.

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

And then, from the open courtyard, up the verandah step, perhaps through an antechamber, and by the open door, passed the figure of 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 One only.

The woman had brought with her an alabastron 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 Him at His feet, 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, "Go into peace" not go in peace, as the logical dogmatics would have had it.

And so she, the first 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 vulgar little photograph and forgot that aspect of the dancer. He remembered rather 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 XII

POWERS OF GOOD AND EVIL

Gortre felt certain that his vicar stood without. His knocking was full of militant Christianity. The tumultuous energy of the man without communicated its own stir and disturbance to Basil's brain by the most subtle of all forms of telepathy – that "telepathy" which, in a few more years, will have its definite recipes and formulæ.

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 had found it impossible to call on Gortre before this late hour, and he came regardless of it now. He wished to see Basil, and he came now with a supreme and simple carelessness of conventional time.

As usual, the worthy man was hungry, and the débris 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 famous opportunity," he said. "If you go to work in the right way you may win a soul. It's a poor demi-mondaine creature, a dancer at the theatres. She came to me in her brougham, her furs, and finery, and had a chat in my study. I gave her tea and a cigarette – you know I always keep some cigarettes for the choir-men or teachers when they call. All these women smoke. It's a great thing to treat these people with understanding and knowledge, Gortre. Don't 'come the priest' over them, as a coster said to me last week. When they realise that one is a man, then they are fifty times more willing to allow the other and more important thing.

"Well, this poor girl told me all about it, the same very sordid story one is always hearing. She is 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 little 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. 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 is dying from a slow complaint. She will live a year or two, the doctors think, and that is all. It does not prevent her from living her ordinary life, but it will strike her down suddenly some day.

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

He handed Gortre 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 to-morrow evening. She tells me she isn't 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 creature's heart, catching her in the middle of her champagne and frivolity, and just turning her, almost compelling her towards Christ! And men like John Morley or Constantine Schuabe say there is no truth in Christianity! – I'll take one of these apples – poor fools! Now I must go and write my sermon."

He was gone in a clattering rush.

For a long time Basil sat thinking. The mysterious links of some great chain were being revealed inch by inch. Wonderful as these circumstances already seemed to him, he felt sure there was far more behind them than he knew as yet. There was some unseen tie, some influence that drew his thoughts ever more and more towards the library in the palace at Manchester.

The next evening a maid showed Gortre into the hall of the flat of Bloomsbury Court Mansions, eyeing him curiously as she did so.

He passed down the richly carpeted passage with a quickening of all his pulses, noticing the Moorish lamps of copper studded with turquoise which threw a dim crimson light over everything, marking the ostentatious luxury of the place with wonder.

Gertrude Hunt lay back in a low arm-chair. She was dressed in a long, dull red teagown of cashmere, with a broad white band round the neck opening of white Indian needlework, embroidered with dark green leaves.

Her face was pale and tired.

Despite the general warmth of the time, a fire burnt steadily on the hearth.

Gortre sat down at her invitation, and they fell into a desultory conversation. He waited for her to open on the real subjects that had brought him there.

He watched the tired, handsome face. Coarse it certainly was, in expression rather than feature, but that very coarseness gave it power. This woman, who lived the life of a doll, had character. One saw that. Perhaps, he thought, as he looked at her, that the very eagerness and greed for pleasure marked in her face, the passionate determination to tear the heart and core out of life, might still be directed to purer and nobler ends.

Then she began to talk to him quite frankly, and with no disguise or slurring over the facts of her life.

"I'm sick and tired of it all, Mr. Gortre," she said bitterly. "You can't know what it means a bit – lucky for you. Imagine spending all your life in a room painted bright yellow, eating nothing but chocolate creams, with a band playing comic songs for ever and ever. And even then you won't get it."

Basil shuddered. There was something so poignant and forceful in her words that they hurt, stung like a whip-lash. He was being brought into terrible contact not only with sin and the satiety of sin, but with its results. The hideous staleness and torture of it all appalled him as he looked at this human personification of it in the crimson gown.

"That's how it was at first," she continued. "I knew there was something more than this in life, though. I could read it in people's faces. So I came to the service at your church one Sunday evening. I'd never made fun of religion and all that at any time. I simply couldn't believe it, that was all. Then I heard you preach on the Resurrection. I heard all the proofs for the first time. Of course, I could see there wasn't any doubt about the matter at all. Then, curiously, directly I began to believe in it I began to hate the way I was going on, so I went to Father Ripon, who was very nice, and he said you'd call."

"I quite understand you, Miss Hunt," said Gortre. "That's the beauty of faith. When once you believe, then you've got to change. It's a great pity, a very great pity, that clergymen don't attempt to explain things more than they do. If one isn't built in a certain way, I can quite understand and sympathise with any one who isn't able to take a parson's mere statement on trust, so to speak. But that's beside the way. You believe at any rate. And now what are you going to do? I'm here to help you in every possible way. I want to hear your views, just as you have thought them out."

"I like that," she said. "That's practical and sensible. I've never cared very much for sentimental ways of looking at things. You know I can't live very long. I've got enough to live quietly on for some years, put away in a bank, money I've made acting. I haven't spent a penny of my salary for years – I've made the men pay for everything. I shall go quietly away to the country and be alone with my thoughts, close to a little quiet church. You'll find a place for me, won't you? That's what I want to do. But there's something in the way, and a big something, too."