“I likes to be jolly, and I allwiz is. Doing now? Selling flowers outside the theatres—police is nasty if you've got nothink. Ain't I going home? Soon as I get a drain of white satin. Wish you luck, my dear!”
As she came up to the shop in the Turnstile she could hear that it was noisy with the voices of men and girls, so she turned back through Lincoln's-Inn Fields and passed down to Fleet Street. It was approaching twelve o'clock by this time, and streams of people were flowing in the direction of St. Paul's Cathedral. Glory turned eastward also and allowed herself to be carried along with the current which babbled and talked like a river in the night.
Immediately in front of her there was a line of girls walking arm-in-arm across the width of the pavement. They were factory girls in big hats with ostrich feathers, and as they skipped along with their free step they sang snatches of Salvation hymns and music-hall songs. All at once they gave a shrill peal of laughter, and one of them cried, “Tell me what it is and I'll give it a nyme.” At the next moment a strange figure was forging past their line, going westward with long strides. It was a man in the habit of a monk, with long black cassock and broad-brimmed hat. Glory caught a glimpse of his face as he passed her. It was a hungry, eager face, with big, melancholy eyes, and it seemed to her that she must have seen it before somewhere. The wind was very cold, and the great cross on the dome of the cathedral stood out like a beacon against flying clouds.
St. Paul's churchyard was thronged with noisy, happy people, and down to the last minute before the hour they shouted and joked and laughed. Then there was a hush, the great crowds seemed to hold their breath as if they had been a single living creature, and every face was turned upward to the clock. The clock struck, the bells of the cathedral began to ring, the people cheered and saluted each other and shook hands on every side, and then the dense mass broke up.
Glory could have cried for joy of it all—it was so simple, so human, so childlike. But she listened to the laughter and salutations of the people about her and felt more lonely than the Bedouin in the desert; she remembered the bubbling hopes that had carried her through the day, and her heart fell low; she thought of the letter which she had posted home on her way to the theatre, and two great tears came rolling from her eyes.
The face of the monk tormented her, and suddenly she bethought herself whose face it must have been. It must have been the face of Polly Love's brother. He belonged to the Bishopsgate Fathers, and had once been a patient in the hospital, and perhaps he was going there now on some errand or urgent message—to the doctors or to——
“It was foolish not to leave my address when the porter asked me,” she thought. She would go back and do so. There could be no harm in that; and if anything had really happened, if John——
“Happy New Year to you, my dear!”
Somebody in the drifting crowd was standing before her and blocking the way. It was Agatha Jones in a mock seal-skin coat and big black hat surmounted by black feathers, and with Charlie Wilkes (with his diminutive cap pushed back from his oily fringe and pimpled forehead) leaning heavily on her arm.
“Well, I never! Who'd have thought of meeting you in St. Paul's churchyawd!”