Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




The grass was crisp and pleasant. Hilda deliberately sought its solace
for her feet, letting their pressure linger. All day long the sun had
been drawing the sweetness and the life out of it, and now the air had a
sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of harvests. The crickets had
been at it since five o'clock, and though the city rose not half a mile
across the grass, it was the crickets she heard and listened to. In
making private statements of things, the crickets offered a chorus of
agreement and they never interrupted. Not that she had much to consider,
poor girl, which lent itself to a difference of opinion. One might have
thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own, not badly
equipped. She had all the arguments--which is like saying all the
arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical
outcome of these things had been an intimate object-lesson in the small
value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and
made it more piquant. She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence
at the result, because it had always admitted the existence of
dominating facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only
the absurd unexpectedness of coming across one herself. One might think
round such a fact and talk round it--there were less exquisite
satisfactions--but it was not to be cowed or abated, and in the end the
things one said were only words.

Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through her
veins, with her blood, warm and free. The primitive things she saw
helped her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her profound
sweet presciences. A coolie woman, carrying a basket on her head,
stopped and looked at her with full, glistening eyes; they smiled at
each other and passed on. She found herself upon a narrow path, worn
smooth by other barefooted coolie-folk; it made in its devious way
toward the rich mists where the sun had gone down and Hilda followed it,
breasting the glow and the colour and wide, flat expanse, as if in the
India of it there breathed something exquisitely sensuous and
satisfying. It struck sharp on her senses; she almost consciously
thanked heaven for such a responsive set of nerves. Always and
everywhere she was intensely conscious of what she saw, and of how she
saw it; and it was characteristic of her that she found in that saffron
February evening, spreading to a purple rim with wandering points of
colour in a soldier's coat or a coachman's turban, an atmosphere and a
_mise en scene_ for her own complication. She could take a tenderly
artistic view of that, more soothing a good deal than any result that
came of examining it in other lights. And she did, aware, with smiling
eyes, of how colourable, how dramatic it was.

Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome seemed
a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time for that.
For the present, there on the Maidan with the south wind, she took it
with her head thrown up, in her glad, free fashion, as something that
came in the way of life--the delightful way of life--with which it was
absurd to quarrel because of a slight inconvenience or incongruity,
things which helped, after all, to make existence fascinating.

A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem,
dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up and drew in the
crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes and drifted on
the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet. All India and
all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought
her, as she gave her senses up to it, a kind of dual perception of being
near the core, the throbbing centre of the world's meaning.

Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay. He hastened to meet her, in
his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that lay between
them, and gave transit to her senses from that other plane. They
encountered each other in full recognition of the happiness of the
accident, and he turned back with her as a matter of course. It was a
kind of fruition of all that light and colour and passive delight that
they should meet and take a path together, he at least was aware. Hilda
asked him if he was quite all right now, and he said "Absolutely" with a
shade of emphasis. She charged him with having been a remarkable case,
and he piled up illustrations of what he felt able to do in his
convalescence. There was something in the way he insisted upon his
restoration which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.

"And I hear I may congratulate you," she said. "You have got what you
wanted."

"Someone has told you," he retorted, "who is not friendly to it."

"On the contrary, someone who has given it the most cordial
support--Alicia Livingstone."

He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for the
first time under such an aspect.

"She has been immensely kind," he asserted, "but she wasn't at first. At
first she was hostile, like you, only that her hostility was different,
just as she is different. She had to be converted," he went on
hopefully, "but it was less difficult than I imagined. I think she takes
a kind of pride in conquering her prejudices, and being true to the real
breadth of her nature."

"I am sure she would like her nature to be broad. She might very well be
content that it is charming. And what is the difference between her
hostility and mine?"

"The main difference," Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon her, "is
that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours"--he made a dramatic
gesture--"walks between us."

"I know. I tried to stiffen her. I appealed to the worst in her on your
behalf. But it wasn't any use. She succumbed, as you say, to her nobler
instincts."

Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and spent
the grimness of this in twirling it.

"One can so easily get an affair of one's own out of all
proportion--" Duff said. "And I should be sorry--do you really want me
to talk about this?"

"Don't be stupid. Of course."

He took her permission with plain avidity.

"Well, it grew plain to Miss Livingstone, as it will to everybody else
who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's tremendous
desirability. Her beauty would go for something anywhere, but I don't
want to insist on that. What marks her even more is the wonderful purity
and transparency of her mind; one doesn't find it often now, women's
souls are so clouded with knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals
especially to me because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm
only a man. Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. A creature
like that should be surrounded by the softest refinement in her daily
life. That was my chance. I could offer her her place. It's not much to
counterbalance what she is, but it helps, roughly speaking, to equalise
matters."

Hilda looked at him with sudden critical interest, missing an emanation
from him. It was his enthusiasm. A cheerfulness had come upon him
instead. Also what he said had something categorical in it, something
crisp and arranged. He himself received benefit from the consideration
of it, and she was aware that if this result followed, her own
"conversion" was of very secondary importance.

"So!" she said meditatively, as they walked.

"After it happens, when it is an accomplished fact, it will be so
plainly right that nobody will think twice about it," Duff went on in an
encouraged voice. "It's odd how one's ideas materialise. I want her
drawing-room to be white and gold, with big yellow silk cushions."

"When its it to happen?"

"Beginning of next cold weather--in not quite a year."

"Ah! then there will be time. Time to get the white and gold furniture.
It wouldn't be my taste quite. Is it Alicia's?"

"It's our own at present, Laura's and mine. We have talked it over
together. And I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone. In matters
of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"

"Oh, Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. "Where is Miss Filbert
now?"

"At No. 10, Middleton street."

"With the Livingstones?"

"Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in her
kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and
Laura is to stay with them until she sails."

"She sails?"

"In the _Sutlej_, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She
really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating
old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old
friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got
a notion of taking lessons of some kind--perfectly unnecessary, but if
it amuses her--during the summer. And of course she will have to get her
outfit together."

"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you."

"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."

"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"

"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I
would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why should one
offer her up at their dinner-tables?"

"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.

The coolie-track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where
it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing
about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf under-foot. The
cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man little way off was a man and
not a horse but did hardly more. "I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let
us sit down," and sank comfortably on the fragrant grass. Lindsay
dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket
chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that
direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling
city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out,
topaz points in the level glow.

"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to see
its proportions more clearly now."

Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully good
sort, Duff," she said, "I wish you were out of Asia."

"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he examined
himself to see.

"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacrifice will not endure,
you know."

"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a maxim,
and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they sat without
speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across the river and
left something chill and empty in the spaces about them. Things grew
hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited expanse of commonplace,
grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps on the roads came very near.
"What a difference it makes!" Lindsay exclaimed, looking after the
vanished light, "and how suddenly it goes!"

Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen sadness
far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said with
apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She
made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if
the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined, he
kept her hand while he said, "You will always represent something in
mine. I can depend upon you--I shall know that you are there."

"Yes," she said, sincerely, "Yes, indeed;" and it seemed to her that he
looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was only
another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they turned to
walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever has taken a good
deal out of you."




CHAPTER XVIII.


Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof
followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia at
one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared
entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a
rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust.
It gave a soothing wistulness to discontent to think this, which a
discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as
she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the south
wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly,
however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things
require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command
over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There
was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or
one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the
days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of
worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from the
rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with dilemmas
and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget. As a matter of
fact, there were not very many days, and they were largely filled with
millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses, when they asserted
themselves, were more or less overswept, as if for the sake of decency,
by billows of spotted muslin, with which Celine, who felt the romance of
the situation, made herself marvellously clever. Celine, indeed, was
worth in this exigency many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend"
her to the fullest extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert
contriving and arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's
beneficence. It became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the
source, and they stitched together while she, with careful reserves,
watched for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from
the lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her
Bible--she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of Mrs.
Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations. She had
several times felt, seated beside Celine, how grateful she ought to be
that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths of such
pleasantness, though Celine herself seemed to stand rather far from
their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs. Sand came
occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had always a fresh
remembrance of how much she had done in giving so generous a friend as
Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was reasonable enough that
there should be a falling off in Mr. Lindsay's attendance just now in
Laura's absence, but when they were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would
be very few evening services when she, the Ensign, would miss their
bright faces. Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made his
tea for him with precision, and pressed upon him, solicitously,
everything there was to eat. He found her submissive and wishful to be
pleasant. She sat up straight and said it was much hotter than they had
it this time of year up-country but nothing at all to complain of yet.
He also discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the
muslins, and explained one or two bargains. She seemed to wish to make
it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very expensive to
take a wife. In the course of a few days one of the costumes was
completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing before him for the
first time in secular dress. The stays insisted a little cruelly on the
lines of her figure, and the tight bodice betrayed her narrow-chested.
Above its frills her throat protruded unusually, with a curve outward
like that of some wading birds, and her arms, in their unaccustomed
sleeves, hung straight at her sides. She had put on a hat that matched:
it was the kind of pretty, disorderly hat with waving flowers that
demands the shadow of short hair along the forehead, and she had not
thought of that way of making it becoming. Among these accessories the
significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant; its
lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased. She made no demand upon him
for admiration on this occasion, she seemed sufficiently satisfied with
herself; but after a time, when they were sitting together on the sofa,
and he still pursued the lines of her garment with questioning eyes, she
recalled him to the conventionalities of the situation.

"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.

The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at
six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been
completed over night; indeed, she slept on board, and Duff had only the
duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her in
a sequestered corner of the fresh-swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her
Army clothes--she had come on board in one of the muslins--and she was
softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid
tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane,
the overruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come
apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no
more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.

"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu
To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you.
We've laboured together, united in heart,
But now we must close, and soon we must part."

They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they
evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside
the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a
consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to a
ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between
the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless, as she presently turned a
calmed face to him with her pale apology, he had the sensation of a
rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted
muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of
smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he remembered
that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.

The _Sutlej_ had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a
dinner in Middleton street, at which the guests, it was understood, were
to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency
the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an
assurance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose
almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make, if you like, with the
geographical mile. She could hardly have left him out in any case--he
could almost have demanded an explanation--since it was one of those
parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus
of Hilda Howe. It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society
was so little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses--there
were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would
"mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss
Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so
fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced. She
took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite
comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner party; and it was
seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking, to carry away a bone
from the feast. If you found this reprehensible, she would have told you
she had observed that they do it in Japan, where manners are the best in
the world.

Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party than I,
with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself inclined to do.
To me it is depressing, and a little cruel, to be compelled to betray
the inadequacy of the personal element at Alicia's banquets, especially
in connection with the conspicuous excellence of the cooking. A poverty
of cuisine would have provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would
have been offered up to the gods that season. The limitations of her
resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact that she
asked such a person as the Head of the Department of Education, with no
better reason than that he had laid almost the whole of Shelley under
critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta University, and the necessary
item, his wife, who did even less harm by making exquisite lampshades.
There was a civilian who had written a few years before an article in
the _Nineteenth Century_ about the aboriginal tribes of Madras, and the
lady attached to him, who had been at one time the daughter of a
Lieutenant-Governor. The Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry
loved meeting anybody that was clever, admired brains beyond anything;
and an Aide-de-Camp who had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was, and
Captain Salter Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays
when they were produced in Simla, and was invariably considered up there
to have done them better than any professional they have at home, though
he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment
happened to be a burlesque. Taking Hilda and Lindsay and Stephen Arnold
as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with the contortionist, as it
were, at the apex, on his head. The Livingstones had family connection
with a leading London publishing firm, and Alicia may possibly have
reflected, as she surveyed her completed work, how much better than
capering captains she could have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be
admitted likely that she would harbour, at that particular instant, so
ungracious a thought. And indeed it was a creditable party; it would
almost unanimously call itself, next day, a delightful one. Miss Howe
made the most agreeable excitement--you might almost have heard the
heart-beats of the wife of the literary and on one occasion current
civilian, as she just escaped being introduced, and so availed herself
of the dinner's opportunity for intimate observation without letting
herself in a particle--most clever. Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed
upon the spear, as she always did, and made a gushing little speech,
with every eye upon her, in the middle of the room, without a thought of
consequences. The Aide-de-Camp was also _empresse_, one would have
thought that he was acting himself, the way he bowed and picked up
Hilda's fan--a grace lingered in it from the minuet he had danced the
week before, in ruffles and patches, with the daughter of the
Commander-in-Chief. Duff got out of the way to enable the
newly-introduced Head of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe
that he never went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too
badly ventilated; and Stephen Arnold, arriving late, shot like an
embarrassed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was still
engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was announced.

There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace--those were the
pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he
began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous, half-checked smile.
Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then she
stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands, like a
reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew
a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The
civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was
absurdly affected; and, indeed, to an acuter intelligence it might have
looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not
offered.

That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife,
observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she
complained afterward that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly
went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to
personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that
night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was
a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the
Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about
punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but
after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have
represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms
instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance;
she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the
jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little
dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's
wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter of
the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying
qualities, which were only very slightly dashed when she glanced over
the brim of her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval,
giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry and
drinking water. The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower,
living, pulsating, and in the heart of its light and colour the petals
closed over her secret, over him, the unconscious priest with the
sloping shoulders, thinking of abstinence and listening to Mrs.
Barberry.

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