When It Was Dark Part 20

"What is the sign?"

"A drawing of a broken cross."

"Before the day dawns we will send the broken cross to Jerusalem."

END OF BOOK I

BOOK II

"A horror of great darkness."

CHAPTER I

WHILE LONDON WAS SLEEPING

In the winter, two or three weeks before Christmas, Gortre asked Father Ripon for a ten days' holiday, and went to Walktown to spend the time with Mr. Byars and Helena. Christmas itself could be no time of vacation for him,--the duties of St. Mary's were very heavy,--so he s.n.a.t.c.hed a respite from work before the actual time of festival.

Harold Spence was left alone in the chambers at Lincoln's Inn. The journalist found himself discontented, lonely, and bored. He had not realised before how much Basil's society had contributed to his happiness during the past few months. It had grown to be a necessity to him gradually, and, as is the case with all gradual processes, the lack of it surprised him with its sense of incompleteness and loss.

He had spent a hard summer and autumn over very uncongenial work. For months there had been a curious lull and calm in the news-world. Yet day by day the _Daily Wire_ had to be filled. Not that there was any lack of material,--even in the dullest season the expert journalist will tell one that his difficulty is what to _leave out_ of his paper, not what to _put in_,--but that the material was uninteresting and dull.

He felt himself that his leaders were growing rather stale, lacking in spontaneity. His style did not glitter and ring quite as usual. And Basil had helped him through this time wonderfully.

One Wednesday--he remembered the day afterwards--Spence awoke about mid-day. He had been late at the office the night before and afterwards had gone to a club, not going to bed till after four.

He heard the laundress moving about the chambers preparing his breakfast. He shouted to her, and in a minute or two she came in with his letters and a cup of tea. She went to the window and pulled up the blind, letting a dreary grey-yellow December light into the room.

"Nasty day, Mrs. Buscall," he said, sipping his tea.

"It is so, sir," the woman said, a lean, kindly-faced London drudge from a court in Drury Lane. "Gives me a frog in my throat all the time, this fog does. You'd better let me pour a drop of hot water in your bath, sir. I've got the kettle on the gas stove."

The laundress had an objection to baths, deep-rooted and a matter of principle. The daily cold tub she regarded as suicidal, and when Gortre had arrived, her pained surprise at finding him also--a clergyman too!--addicted to such adventurous and injudicious habits had been as extreme as her disappointment.

Spence agreed to humour her, and she began to prepare the bath.

"Letter from Mr. Cyril, I see, sir," she remarked. Mrs. Buscall loved the archaeologist with more strenuousness than her other two charges. The unusual and mysterious has a real fascination for a certain type of uneducated c.o.c.kney brain. Hands's rare sojourns at the chambers, the Eastern dresses and pictures in his room, his strange and perilous life--as she considered it--in the veritable Bible land, where Satan actually roamed the desert in the form of a lion seeking whom he might devour, all these stimulated her crude imagination and brought colour into the dreary purlieus of Drury Lane.

Most of the women around Mrs. Buscall drank gin. The doings of Cyril Hands were sufficient tonic for her.

Spence glanced at the bulky packet with its Turkish stamps and peculiar aroma--which the London fog had not yet killed--of s.h.i.+ps and alien suns.

Hands was a good correspondent. Sometimes he sent general articles on the work he was doing, not too technical, and Ommaney, the editor of Spence's paper, used and paid well for them.

But on this morning Spence did not feel inclined to open the packet. It could wait. He was not in the humour for it now. It would be too tantalising to read of those deep skies like a hard, hollow turquoise, of the flaming white sun, the white mosques and minarets throwing purple shadows round the cypress and olive.

"_Neque enim ignari sumus_," he muttered to himself, recalling the swing and freedom of his own travels, the vivid, picturesque life where, at great moments, he had been one of the eyes of England, flas.h.i.+ng electric words to tell his countrymen of what lay before him.

And now, after the chill of his bath and the rasping torture of shaving in winter, he must light all the gas-jets as he sat down to breakfast in his sitting-room!

He opened the _Wire_ and glanced at his own work of the night before.

How lifeless it seemed to him!

"Many years ago Bagehot wrote that 'Parliament expresses the nation's opinions in words well, when it happens that words, not laws, are wanted. On foreign matters, where we cannot legislate, whatever the English nation thinks, or thinks it thinks, as to the critical events of the world, whether in Denmark, in Italy or America, and no matter whether it thinks wisely or unwisely, that same something, wise or unwise, will be thoroughly well said in Parliament.'

"We have never read a finer defence of such Parliamentary discussion as the recent events in certain Continental bureaucracies have given rise to, etc., etc."

Words! words! words! that seemed to him to mean little and matter nothing. Yet as he chipped his egg he remembered that the writing of this leader had meant considerable mental strain. Oh, for a big happening abroad, when he would be sent and another would take up this routine work! He knew he was a far better correspondent than leader writer. His heart was in that work.

There were one or two invitations among his letters, two books were sent by a young publisher, a friend of his, asking if he could get them "noticed" in the _Wire_, and a syllabus of some winter lectures to be given at Oxford House. His name was there. He was to lecture in January on "The Sodality of the Knights of St. John".

After breakfast, the lunch time of most of the world, he found it impossible to settle down to anything. He was not due at the office that night, and the long hours, without the excitement of his work, stretched rather hopelessly before him. He thought of paying calls in the various parts of the West End, where he had friends whom he had rather neglected of late. But he dismissed that idea when it came, for he did not feel as if he could make himself very agreeable to any one.

He wanted a complete change of some sort. He half thought of running down to Brighton, fighting the cold, bracing sea winds on the lawns at Hove, and returning the next day.

He was certainly out of sorts, liverish no doubt, and the solution to his difficulties presented itself to him in the project of a Turkish bath.

He put his correspondence into the pocket of his overcoat, to be read at leisure, and drove to a hammam in Jermyn Street.

The physical warmth, the silence, the dim lights, and Oriental decorations induced a supreme sense of comfort and _bien-etre_. It brought Constantinople back to him in vague reverie.

Perhaps, he thought, the Turkish bath in London is the only easy way to obtain a sudden and absolute change of environment. Nothing else brings detachment so readily, is so instinct with change and the unusual.

In delightful langour he pa.s.sed from one dim chamber to another, lying p.r.o.ne in the great heat which surrounded him like a cloak. Then the vigorous kneading and ma.s.sage, the gradual toning and renovating of each joint and muscle, till he stood drenched in aromatic foam, a new, fresh physical personality. The swift dive under the india-rubber curtain left behind the domed, dim places of heat and silence. He plunged through the bottle-green water of the marble pool into the hall, where lounges stood about by small inlaid octagonal tables, and a thin whip of a fountain tinkled among green palms. Wrapped from head to foot in soft white towels, he lay in a dream of contentment, watching the delicate spirals from his Cairene cigarette, and sipping the brown froth of a tiny cup of thick coffee.

At four a slippered attendant brought him a sole and a bottle of yellow wine, and after the light meal he fell once more into a placid, restorative sleep.

And all the while the letter from Jerusalem was in his overcoat pocket, forgotten, hung in the entrance-hall. The thing which was to alter the lives of thousands and ten thousands, that was to bring a cloud over England more dark and menacing than it had ever known, lay there with its stupendous message, its relentless influence, while outside the church bells all over London were tolling for Evensong.

At length, as night was falling, Spence went out into the lighted streets with their sudden roar of welcome. He was immensely refreshed in brain and body. His thoughts moved quickly and well, depression had left him, the activity of his brain was unceasing.

As a rule, especially for the last year or two, Spence was by no means a man given to casual amus.e.m.e.nts. His work was too absorbing for him to have time or inclination to follow pleasure. But to-night he felt in the humour for relaxation.

He turned into St. James Street, where his club was, intending to find some one who would go to a music-hall with him. There was no one he knew intimately in the smoking-room, but soon after he arrived Lambert, one of the deputy curators from the British Museum, came in. Spence and Lambert had been at Marlborough together.

Spence asked Lambert, who was in evening dress, to be his companion.

"Sorry I can't, old man," he answered; "I've got to dine with my uncle, Sir Michael. It's a bore, of course, but it's policy. The place will be full of High Church bishops, minor Cabinet Ministers, and people of that sort. I only hope old Ripon will be there--he's my uncle's tame vicar, you know; uncle runs an expensive church, like some men run a theatre--for he's always bright and amusing. You're not working to-night, then?"

"No, not to-night. I've been and had a Turkish bath, and I thought I'd wind up a day of mild dissipation by going to the Alhambra."

"Sorry I can't go too--awful bore. I've had a tiring day, too, and a ballet would be refres.h.i.+ng. The governor's been in a state of filthy irritation and nerves for the last fortnight."