All Roads Lead to Calvary | Page 4

loved ones waiting for us. And above, the rock-strewn Calvary: and
crowning its summit, clear against the starlit sky, the cold, dark cross.
"Not perhaps to us the bleeding hands and feet, but to all the bitter tears.
Our Calvary may be a very little hill compared with the mountains
where Prometheus suffered, but to us it is steep and lonely."
There he should have stopped. It would have been a good note on
which to finish. But it seemed there was another point he wished to
make. Even to the sinner Calvary calls. To Judas--even to him the gates
of the life- giving Garden of Gethsemane had not been closed. "With
his thirty pieces of silver he could have stolen away. In some distant
crowded city of the Roman Empire have lived unknown, forgotten. Life
still had its pleasures, its rewards. To him also had been given the
choice. The thirty pieces of silver that had meant so much to him! He
flings them at the feet of his tempters. They would not take them back.
He rushes out and hangs himself. Shame and death. With his own
hands he will build his own cross, none to help him. He, too--even
Judas, climbs his Calvary. Enters into the fellowship of those who

through all ages have trod its stony pathway."
Joan waited till the last of the congregation had disappeared, and then
joined the little pew-opener who was waiting to close the doors. Joan
asked her what she had thought of the sermon, but Mary Stopperton,
being a little deaf, had not heard it.
"It was quite good--the matter of it," Joan told her. "All Roads lead to
Calvary. The idea is that there comes a time to all of us when we have
to choose. Whether, like your friend Carlyle, we will 'give up things'
for our faith's sake. Or go for the carriage and pair."
Mary Stopperton laughed. "He is quite right, dear," she said. "It does
seem to come, and it is so hard. You have to pray and pray and pray.
And even then we cannot always do it." She touched with her little
withered fingers Joan's fine white hand. "But you are so strong and
brave," she continued, with another little laugh. "It won't be so difficult
for you."
It was not until well on her way home that Joan, recalling the
conversation, found herself smiling at Mary Stopperton's literal
acceptation of the argument. At the time, she remembered, the shadow
of a fear had passed over her.
Mary Stopperton did not know the name of the preacher. It was quite
common for chance substitutes to officiate there, especially in the
evening. Joan had insisted on her acceptance of a shilling, and had
made a note of her address, feeling instinctively that the little old
woman would "come in useful" from a journalistic point of view.
Shaking hands with her, she had turned eastward, intending to walk to
Sloane Square and there take the bus. At the corner of Oakley Street
she overtook him. He was evidently a stranger to the neighbourhood,
and was peering up through his glasses to see the name of the street;
and Joan caught sight of his face beneath a gas lamp.
And suddenly it came to her that it was a face she knew. In the dim-lit
church she had not seen him clearly. He was still peering upward. Joan

stole another glance. Yes, she had met him somewhere. He was very
changed, quite different, but she was sure of it. It was a long time ago.
She must have been quite a child.

CHAPTER II
One of Joan's earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing
before the high cheval glass in her mother's dressing-room. Her clothes
lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a
shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very
small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her
head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame.
Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared
red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession
there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of
shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it
swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a
confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton
gloves and purple bonnet strings.
"You young imp of Satan!" demanded Mrs. Munday--her feelings of
outraged virtue exaggerating perhaps her real sentiments. "What are
you doing?"
"Go away. I'se looking at myself," had explained Joan, struggling
furiously to regain the glass.
"But where are your clothes?" was Mrs.