Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt. "Don't go away,"
she said. Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was hardly a
foot between them. She went on with a curious excitement.

"My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure pulse, you
don't know. One only asks the things that minister--one goes and finds
and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's head under any roof. What
difference does it make? The only thing that counts, that rules, is the
chance of seeing something else, feeling something more, doing something
better."

Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on the
actress's skirt. Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary movement. It
comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action of flight. Then
she glanced about her again with a kind of appraisement, which ended
with Alicia and embraced her. What she realised seemed to push her, I
think, in some weak place of her sex, to go on intensely, almost
fiercely.

"Everything here is aftermath. You are a gleaner, Alicia Livingstone. We
leave it all over the world for people of taste, like you, in the glow
of their illusions. I couldn't make you understand our harvest; it is of
the broad sun and the sincerity of things."

"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said, wearing,
as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.

But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
impulse to the end. "Shall I be quite candid?" she said. "I find the
atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."

Alicia, with a face of astonishment, made a half-movement toward the
window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at
Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I see what you mean;
and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so little imagination."

"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you could add
up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly. "You have none!"

As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands. "At
least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried. "I felt you,
too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me to--to respond
properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be the one valuable thing
that I can have--the only permanent fact that is left."

Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort. "Who said anything about
giving up?" she interrupted.

"Why, you did! But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean it, if
you say so." She turned the appeal of her face and saw a sudden pitiful
consideration in Hilda's, and, as if it called them forth, two tears
sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her delicate head, upon her
lap.

"Dear thing! I didn't indeed. If I meant anything it was that I'm
overstrung. I've been horribly harried lately." She possessed herself of
one of Alicia's hands and stroked it. Alicia kept her head bent for a
moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment, upon the other
woman's shoulder. Her defences crumbled so utterly that Hilda felt
guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery. They sat together for a moment
or two in silence with only that supervening sense of successful
aggression between them, and the humiliation was Hilda's. Presently it
grew heavy, embarrassing. Alicia got up and began a slow, restless
pacing up and down before the alcove they sat in. Hilda watched her--it
was a rhythmic progress--and when she came near with a sound of brushing
silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a
long breath, as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a
manner, obtained, assimilated.

"Oh, yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile,
"I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself more--worth
while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take up modelling.
There's rather a good man here just now."

"Yes," Hilda assented. "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling. It is
most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like those things
sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far as I count--oh, my
dear, do nothing more. You are already an achieved effect--a
consummation of the exquisite in every way. Generations have been chosen
among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious
and tender and discriminating in a hundred years. You are as rare as I
am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more
than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you
have for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady,
my dear."

"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light of
satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the room
overhead, and the light died out. "And what good do they do me!" she
cried in soft misery. "What good do they do me!"

"Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now? What
more simple, honest opportunity do you want than a sick room in your own
house?"

Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side. "Oh,
hush!" she cried. "Go on!"

"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room should be
full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your profile should come
between him and the twilight with a scent of violets."

"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.

"It _is_ a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot.
If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you
perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent
ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're
naturally too scrupulous, but nobody asked us. 'Without our aid He did
us make,' you know."

"But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if I
could."

Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back
and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees
were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her
symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that
sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a
tragic symbol for the poet who sang in the King's garden of wine and
death and roses.

"I would go further," she said, and looked as if some other thing
charged with sweetness had come before her.

"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success," Alicia
faltered.

"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she smiled on
her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came
upon her lips. As if she knew her betrayal already complete, "I wish I
had such a chance," she said.

Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a
mirage of the Promised Land.

"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.

"Who?"

"Hamilton Bradley."

Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all
the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it
beautiful.

"How you will hold me to my _metier_," she said. "Hamilton Bradley has
given up trying."

"Then----"

"Then think! Be clever. Be very clever."

Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A turquoise
on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual. Presently
she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other
woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their
astonishment.

"Well?" said Hilda.

"I can think of no one--there _is_ no one--except--oh, it's too absurd!
Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"

The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an instant
she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came back, dashed
with a gravity, a gentleness.

"I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it seems,"
she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--like a thing
born. But it is that--a thing born."

"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.

"Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature with its
feet in a trap. The insane, _insane_ improbability of it!" She laughed
again. It was delicious to hear her.

"But--he is a priest!"

"Much more difficult. He is a saint."

Alicia glanced at the floor. The record of another lighter moment
twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.

"Are you quite certain?" she said. "You told me once that--that there
had been other times."

"They are useful, those foolish episodes. They explain to one the
difference." The tone of this was very even, very usual, but Alicia was
aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of aggression, that almost
ranged her hostile. She hurried out of that position.

"If it were possible," she said, frowning at her embarrassment. "I see
nothing--nothing _really_--against it."

"I should think not! Can't you conceive what I could do for him?"

"And what could he do for you?" Alicia asked, with a flash of curiosity.

"I don't think I can let you ask me that."

"There are such strange things to consider! Would he withdraw from the
Church? Would you retire from the stage? I don't know which seems the
more impossible!"

Hilda got up.

"It would be a criminal choice, wouldn't it?" she said. "I haven't made
it out. And he, you know, still dreams only of Bengali souls for
redemption, never of me at all."

A servant of the house, with the air of a messenger, brought Alicia a
scrap of paper. She glanced at it, and then, with hands that trembled,
began folding it together.

"He has been allowed to get up and sit in a chair," she murmured, "and
he wants me to come and talk to him."

"Well," said Hilda, "come."

She put her arm about Alicia and drew her out of the room to the foot of
the stairs. They went in silence, saying nothing even when they parted,
and Alicia, of her own accord, began to ascend. Half way up she paused
and looked down. Hilda turned to meet her glance, and something of
primitive puissance passed, conscious, comprehended, between the eyes of
the two women.




CHAPTER XVI.


For three days there had certainly been, with the invalid, no sign of
anything but convalescence. An appetite to cry out upon, a chartered
tendency to take small liberties, to make small demands; such
indications offered themselves to the eye that looked for other
betrayals. There had been opportunities--even the day nurse had gone and
Lindsay came to tea in the drawing-room--but he seemed to prefer to talk
about the pattern in the carpet, or the corpulence of the khansamah, or
things in the newspapers. Alicia once, at a suggestive point, put almost
a visible question into a silent glance, and Lindsay asked her for some
more sugar. Surgeon-Major Livingstone, coming into his office
unexpectedly one morning, found his sister in the act of replacing a
volume upon its professional shelf. It was somebody on the pathology of
Indian fevers. Hilda's theory lacked so little to approve it--only
technical corroboration. It might also be considered that, although
Laura had expressly received the freedom of the city for intercessional
or any other purpose, she did not come again. They may have heard in
Crooked lane that Duff was better. We may freely imagine that Mrs. Sand
was informed; it looked as if the respite to disinterested anxiety
afforded by his recovery had been taken advantage of. Lindsay was to be
given time for more dignified repentance; they might now very well hand
him over, Alicia thought, smiling, to the Archdeacon.

As a test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay, still
in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make was perhaps
lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it
might very probably work, out in shades. So much would infallibly have
to be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure,
without any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to
Hilda's theory might very well be lost in contingencies. Nevertheless,
Alicia postponed her story from day to day and from hour to hour. If her
ideas about it--she kept them carefully in solution--could have been
precipitated they might have appeared in a formula favourite with her
brother, the Surgeon-Major, who often talked of giving nature a chance.

She told him finally on the morning of his first drive. They went
together and alone, Alicia taking her brother's place in the carriage at
a demand for him from the hospital. It was seven o'clock, and the
morning wind swept soft and warm from over the river. There was a white
light on all the stucco parapets, and their shadows slanted clear and
delicately purple to the west. The dust slept on the broad roads of the
Maidan, only a curling trace lifted itself here and there at the heel of
a cart-bullock, and nothing had risen yet of the lazy tumult of the
streets that knotted themselves in the city. From the river, curving
past the statue of an Indian administrator, came a string of country
people with baskets on their heads. The sun struck a vivid note with the
red and the saffron they wore, turned them into an ornamentation, in the
profuse Oriental taste, of the empty expanse. There was the completest
freedom in the wide, tree-dotted spaces round which the city gathered
her shops and her palaces, the fullest invitation to disburden any
heaviness that might oppress, to give the wings of words to any joy that
might rebel in prison. The advantage of the intimacy of the landau for
purposes of observation was so obvious that one imagines Alicia must
have been aware of it, though, as a matter of fact, when she told
Lindsay she did not look at him at all, but beyond the trees of the Eden
Gardens, where the yellow dome of the Post Office swelled against the
morning sky, and so lost it.

He heard without exclamation, but stopped her now and then with a
question. On what day precisely? And how long? And afterward? The yellow
dome was her anchor; she turned her head a little, as the road trended
the other way, to keep her eyes upon it. There was an endless going
round of wheels, and trees passed them in mechanical succession; a tree,
and another tree; some of them had flowers on them. When he broke the
silence afterward, she started as if in apprehension, but it was only to
say something that anybody might have said, about the self-sacrificing
energy of the organisation to which Miss Filbert belonged. Her assent
was little and meagre; nothing would help her to expand it. The
Salvation Army rose before her as a mammoth skeleton, without a
suggestive bone.

Presently he said in a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded
thought, "I had so little to make me think she cared." There was in it
that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under
pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his
invalid's privileges as if he valued them. He lay extended beside her
among his cushions and wraps; she tried to look at him, and got as far
as the hand nearest her, ungloved and sinewy, on the plaid of the rug.

"She told me it was not for your life she had been praying--only that if
you died you might be saved first." Her eyes were still on his hand, and
she saw the fingers close into the palm as if by an impulse to some kind
of action. Then they relaxed again, and he said, "Oh, well," and smiled
at the balancings of a crow drinking at a city conduit.

That was all. Alicia made an effort, odd and impossible enough, to
postpone her impressions, even her emotions. In the meantime it was
something to have got it over, and she was able at a bound to talk about
the commonplaces of the roadside. In her escape from this oppression,
she too gathered a freshness, a convalescent pleasure in what they saw;
everything had in some way the likeness of the leafing teak trees,
tender and curative. In the broad early light that lay over the tanks
there was a vague allurement, almost a presage, and the wide spaces of
the Maidan made room for hope. She asked Lindsay presently if he would
mind driving to the market; she wanted some flowers for that night. I
think she wanted some flowers for that hour. Her thought broke so easily
into the symbol of a rose.

They turned into Chowringhee, where the hibiscus bushes showed pink and
crimson over the stucco walls, and at the gates of the pillared houses
servants with brown and shining backs sat on their haunches in the sun
and were shaved. Where the street ran into shops there was still a
shuttered blankness, but here and there a _durwan_[8] yawned and
stretched himself before an open door, and a sweeper made a cloud of
dust beneath a commercial verandah. The first boarding in a side street
announced the appearance of Miss Hilda Howe for one night only as Lady
Macbeth, under the kind patronage of His Excellency the Viceroy, with
Jimmy Finnigan in the close proximity of professional jealousy,
advertising five complete novelties for the same evening. It made a
cheerful note which appealed to them both; it was a pictorial
combination, Hilda and Jimmy Finnigan and the Viceroy; there was
something of gay burlesque in the metropolitan poster against the
crumbling plaster of the outer mosque wall where Mussulmans left their
shoes. Talking of Hilda, they smiled; it was a way her friends had, a
testimony to the difference of her. In Alicia's smile there was a
satisfaction rather subtle and in a manner superior; she knew of things.

[Footnote 8: Doorkeeper.]

The life of the market, the bazaar, was all awake and moving. They
rolled up though a crowd of inferior vehicles, empty for the moment and
abandoned, where the leisurely crowd, with calculation under its
turbans, swayed about the market-house, and the pots of a palm-dealer
ran out of bounds and made a little grove before the stall of the man
who sold pith helmets. The warm air held the smell of all sorts of
commodities; there was a great hum of small transactions, clink of small
profits. "It makes one feel immensely practical and acquisitive," Duff
said, looking at the loaded baskets on the coolies' heads; and he
insisted on getting out. "I am dying to buy an enormous number of
desirable things very cheap. But not combs or shirt-buttons, thank you,
nor any ribbons or lace--is that good lace, Miss Livingstone? Nor even a
live duck--really I am difficult. We might inquire the price of the
duck, though."

The sense of being contributory to his holiday satisfaction reigned in
her. She abandoned herself to it with a little smile that played
steadily about her lips, as if it would tell him, without her sanction,
how continually she rejoiced in his regained well-being. They made their
way slowly toward the flower-corner; there were so many things he wanted
to stop before as they went, leaning on his stick to examine them and
delighting in opportunities for making himself quite ridiculous. The
country tobacco-dealer laughed too, squatting behind his basket; it was
a mad sahib, but not madder than the rest, and there was no hurry.
Alicia saw the pink glow of the roses beyond, where the sun struck
across them over the shoulders of the crowd, and was content to reach
them by degrees. They would be in their achieved sweetness a kind of
climax to the hour's experience, and after that she was not entirely
sure that the day would be as grey as other days.

This was the flood-time of roses and it was exquisite in the
flower-corner with the soft wind picking up their fragrance and squares
of limpid sunlight standing on the wet flagstones. Some of the
stall-keepers had little glass cases, and in these there was room only
for the Gloire de Dijons and the La Frances and the velvety Jacks, the
rest over-ran the tables and the floor in anything that would hold them.
The place rioted with the joy and the passion of roses, for buying and
selling. There were other flowers, nasturtiums, cornbottles, mignonette,
but they had a diminished, insignificant look in their tied-up bunches
beside the triumph of the roses. Further on, beyond the cage of the
money-changer, the country people were hoarse with crying their
vegetables, in two green rows, and beyond that, where the jostling crowd
divided, shone a glimpse of oranges and pomegranates. In this part there
were many comers and goers, lean Mussulman table servants and fat
Eurasian ladies who kept boarding-houses, Armenian women with
embroidered shawls drawn over their heads, sailors of the port. They
came to pass that way, through the sweetness of it, and this made a
coign of vantage for the men with trays, who were very persecuting
there. Lindsay and Alicia stood together beside the roses, her hands
were deep in them; he perceived with pleasure that their glow was
reflected in her face. "No," she exclaimed with dainty aplomb to the man
who sat cross-legged in muslin draperies on the table. "These are
certainly of yesterday. There is no scent left in them--and look!" she
held up the bunch and shook it. A shower of pink petals and drops of
water fell upon the round of her arm above the wrist, where the laces of
her sleeve slipped back. Lindsay had something like a poetic
appreciation of her, observing her put the bunch down tenderly, as if
she would not, if she could help it, find fault with any rose. The
dealer drew put another and handed it to her; a long-stemmed, wide-open,
perfect thing, and it was then that her glance of delight, wandering,
fell upon Laura Filbert. Lindsay looked instantly, curiously, in the
same direction, and Alicia was aware that he also saw. There ensued a
terse moment with a burden of silence and the strangest misgivings, in
which he may have imagined that he had his part alone, but which was the
heavier for her because of him. These two had seen the girl before only
under circumstances that suggested projection, that made excuse, on a
platform receiving the respect of attention, marching with her fellows
under common conventions, common orders. Here, alone, slipping in and
out among the crowd, she looked abandoned; the sight of her in her bare
white feet and the travesty of her dress was a wound. Her humility
screamed its violation, its debasement of her race; she woke the impulse
to screen her and hurry her away as if she were a woman walking in her
sleep. She had on her arm a sheaf of the _War Cry_. This was another
indignity; she offered them right and left, and no one had a pice for
her except one man, a sailor who refused the paper. When he rejoined his
companions there was a hoarse laugh, and the others turned their heads
to look after her.

The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation,
seeing what had claimed their eyes. There was nothing new, the "mem"
passed every day at this hour. She did no harm and no good. He, too,
looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to Alladiah Khan, a
man impatient in his religion, who refused it, mumbling in his beard.
With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something. Then
Alladiah's green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled; he
raised his arm, and Laura, in white astonishment, darted from under it.
They seldom did that.

Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it as Lindsay made his
stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of Mecca and
fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague thankfulness that
it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed. More plainly she saw the
manner of Duff's coming back to the girl, and the way in which, with a
look of half-frightened satisfaction, Laura gave herself up to him. He
was hurrying her away without a word. Her surrender was as absolute and
final as if she had been one of those desirable things he said he wanted
to buy. Alicia intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being
forgotten, stepping up to them. "Take her home in the carriage," she
said to Duff, "and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time
still--quite a long time." She stared at Captain-Filbert as she spoke,
but made no answer to the "Good-morning! God bless you!" with which the
girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked down at
the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn of it deep
into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt themselves more to
suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic of her, for she was not
aware that she still held it, but that was the only rose she brought
away.




CHAPTER XVII.


Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her
skirt, and struck out into the Maidan. It spread before her green where
the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and yellow in
the distance, where the light lay on the top of the withered grass. It
was like a great English park, with something of the village common,
only the trees, for the most part, made avenues over it, running an
arbitrary half-mile this way or that, with here and there a group dotted
about in the open; and the brimming tank-ponds were of India and of
nowhere else in the world. The sun was dipping behind the masts that
showed where the straight border of the river ran, and the shadows of
the pipals and the banyans were richly purple over the roads. The light
struck on the stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee
which made behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push
them back, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the
Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether. Calcutta, the
teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that chaste
frontage and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here cattle
grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles of the
trees. Calcutta, the capital, indeed, was superimposed; one felt that
always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the air among the
tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space and
indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What
persisted, then, under the span of the sky was the old India of rich
traditions, and a thinking bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the
evening to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the
rim of the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction and
fabrication.

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