He covered his ears with his hands and his head fell into his breast.
X.
“The Little Turnstile,
“New Year's Eve.
“Hooraa! hooraa!
“Feeling like bottled yeast this evening and liable to go off, I thank my stars I have three old babies at home to whom I am bound to tell everything. So lizzen, lizzen for all! Know ye then, all men (and women) by these presents that there is a gentleman in London who predicts wonderful things for Glory. His name is Sefton, and I came to know him through three ladies—I call them the Three Graces—whose acquaintance I have made by coming to live here. He is only an old mushroom with a bald, white head; and if I believed everything their ladyships say I should conclude that he is one of those who never sin except twice a year, and that is all the time before Christmas and all the time after it. But their Graces belong to that saintly sisterhood who would take away the devil's character if they needed it (they don't), and though the mushroom's honour were as scarce as the middle cut in salmon, yet in common loyalty Glory would have to believe in it.
“It is all about my voice. Hearing it by accident when I was humming about the house like a blue-bottle, he asked me to let him hear it again in a place where he could judge of it to more advantage. That turned out to be a theatre—yes, indeed, a theatre—but it was the middle of the morning, and nobody was there except ourselves and a couple of cleaners, so Aunt Anna needn't be afraid. Yes, the chief of the orchestra was present, and he sat before a piano on the edge of the maelstrom, in what we should call the High Bailiff's pews—but they call them the stalls—while the mushroom himself went back to the cavernous depths of the body, which in a theatre they have properly christened the pit, and this morning it looked like the bottomless one.
“Lor'-a-massey! Ever see the inside of a theatre in the daytime? Of course you've not, my dears. It is what the world itself was the day before the first day—without form and void, and darkness is on the face of the deep. Not a ray of daylight anywhere, except the adulterated kind that comes mooching round corridors and prowling in at half-open doors, and floating through the sepulchral gloom like the sleepy eyes of the monsters that terrified me in the caves at Gob-ny-Deigan when I used to play pirate, you remember.