Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




"No," she went on, "I am not shy on this occasion; indeed, I feel that I
should like to keep your eyes upon me for a long time to-night, and go
on talking far past your patience or my wit. For I cannot think it
likely that our ways will cross again." Here her words grew suddenly low
and hurried. "If I may tresspass upon your interest so much further, I
have to tell you that my connection with the stage closes with this
evening's performance. To-morrow I join the Anglican Order of the
Sisters of St. Paul--the Baker Institution--in Calcutta, as a novice.
They have taken me without much question because--because the plague
hospitals of this cheerful country"--she contrived a smile--"have made a
great demand upon their body. That is all. I have nothing more to say."

It was, after all, ineffective, the denouement, or perhaps it was too
effective. In any case it was received in silence, the applause that was
ready falling back on itself, inconsistent and absurd. The incredulity
of Llewellyn Stanhope might have been electric had it found words, but
that gentleman's protests were made in violent whispers, to which Hilda,
who sat playing with a faded rose, seemed to pay no attention whatever.
One might have thought her more overcome than anyone, she seemed to make
one or two unsuccessful efforts to raise her head. There was a moment of
waiting for someone to reply: eyes were turned toward Mr. Bradley, and
when it became plain that no one would, broken murmurs of talk began
with a note of deprecation and many shakes of the head. The women
especially looked tragically at their neighbours with very wide-open
eyes. Presently a chair was drawn back, then another, and people began
to filter, in slow embarrassment, toward the door. Lindsay came up with
Hilda's cloak. "You won't mind my coming with you," he said; "I should
like to hear the details." Beryl Stace made as if to embrace her,
pouring out abusive disbelief, but Hilda waved her away with a gesture
almost of irritation. Some of the others said a perfunctory word or two
and went away with lingering backward looks. In a quarter of an hour Mr.
Lindsay's brougham had followed the other vehicle into the lamp-lit ways
of Calcutta and only the native table servants remained in somewhat
resentful possession of what was left.




CHAPTER XXIV.


If Duff Lindsay had apprehended that the reception of Miss Filbert by
the Simpsons would involve any strain upon the affection his friends
bore him, the event must have relieved him in no small degree. He was
soon made aware of its happy character and constantly kept assured.
Indeed, it seemed that whenever Mrs. Simpson had nothing else to do she
laid her pen to the task of telling him once again how cherished a
satisfaction they found in Laura and how reluctant they would be to lose
it. She wrote in that strain of facile sympathy which seems part of an
Englishwoman's education, and often begged him to believe that the more
she knew of their sweet and heavenly-minded guest the more keenly she
realised how dreary for him must have been the pang of parting and how
arid the months of separation. Mrs. Simpson herself was well acquainted
with these trials of the spirit. She and her husband had been divided by
those wretched thousands of miles of ocean for three years, one week,
and five days, all told, during their married life; she knew what it
meant. But if Duff could only see how well and blooming his beloved one
was--she had gained twelve pounds already--Mrs. Simpson was sure the
time of waiting would pass less heavily. For herself, it was cruel, but
she smiled upon the deferred reunion of hearts: she would keep Laura
till the very last day, and hoped to establish a permanent claim on her.
She was just the daughter Mrs. Simpson would have liked, so unspotted,
so pure, so wrapped in high ideals, and then the page would reflect
something of the adoring awe in which Mrs. Simpson would have held such
a daughter. It will be seen that Mrs. Simpson knew how to express
herself, but there was a fine sincerity behind the mask of words; Miss
Filbert had entered very completely into possession.

It had its abnormal side, the way she entered into possession.
Everything about Laura Filbert had its abnormal side, none the less
obvious because it was inward and invisible. Nature, of course, worked
with her--one might say that nature really did it, since in the end she
was practically unconscious, except for the hope that certain souls had
been saved, that anything of the sort had happened. She conquered the
Simpsons and their friends chiefly by the simple impossibility that they
should conquer her, walking immobile among them even while she admired
Mr. Simpson's cauliflowers and approved the quality of Mrs. Simpson's
house linen. It must be confessed that nothing in her surroundings spoke
to her more loudly or more subtly than these things. In view of what
happened, poor dear Alicia Livingstone's anticipation that the Simpsons
and their circle would have a radical personal effect upon Laura
Filbert, became ludicrous. They had no effect at all. She took no tint,
no curve. She appeared not to see that these precious things were to be
had for the assimilation. Her grace remained exclusively that of
holiness and continued to fail to have any relation to the common little
things she did and said.

The Simpsons were more plastic. Laura had been with them hardly a week
before Mrs. Simpson, with touching humility, was trying to remodel her
spiritual nature upon the form so fortuitously, if the word is
admissible, presented. The dear lady had never before realised, by her
own statement, how terribly her religious feelings were mingled with
domestic and social considerations, how firmly her spiritual edifice was
based upon the things of this world. She felt that her soul was
honeycombed--that was her word--with conventionality and false
standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the
girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these
confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged
hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the
responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal
her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace: she
made short work of special services and ladies' Bible classes. The world
was white with harvest, and Mrs. Simpson's chief activity was a
recreation society for shop-girls. But it was something, it was
everything, to be uneasy, to be unsatisfied, and they would uplift
themselves in prayer, and Laura would find words of such touching
supplication in which to represent the matter that the burden of her
friend and hostess would at once be lessened by the weight of tears.
Mrs. Simpson had never wept so much without perceived cause for grief as
since Laura arrived, and this alone would testify, such was the gentle
paradox of her temperament, how much she enjoyed Miss Filbert's
presence.

Laura's room was a temple, for which the gardener daily gave up his
choicest blooms, the tenderest interest watched upon her comings and
goings, and it was the joy of both the Simpsons to make little
sacrifices for her, to desert their beloved vicar on a Sunday evening,
for instance, and accompany her to the firemen's halls and skating rinks
lent to the publishing of the Word in the only manner from which their
guest seemed to derive benefit.

With all this, the Simpsons were sometimes troubled by the impression
that they could not claim to be making their angel in the house
completely happy. The air, the garden, the victoria, the turbot and the
whitebait, these were all that had been vaunted, and even to the modesty
of the Simpsons it was evident that the intimacy they offered their
guest should count for something. There were other friends, too, young
friends who tried to teach her to play tennis, robust and silent young
persons who threw shy, flushed glances at her in the pauses of the
games, and wished supremely, without daring to hint it, that she would
let fall some word about her wonderful romance--a hope ever renewed,
ever to be disappointed. And physically Laura expanded before their
eyes. The colour that came into her cheek gave her the look of a person
painted by Bouguereau. That artist would have found in her a model whom
he could have represented with sincerity. Yet something was missing to
her, her friends were dimly aware. Her desirable surroundings kindled
her to but a perfunctory interest in life: the electric spark was
absent. Mrs. Simpson relied strategically upon the wedding preparations
and hurried them on, announcing in May that it was quite time to think
about various garments of which the fashion is permanent, but the issue
was blank. No ripple stirred the placid waters, unless, indeed, we take
that way of describing Laura's calm demand, when the decision lay
between Valenciennes and Torchon for under-bodies, to hear whether Mrs.
Simpson had ever known Duff Lindsay to be anxious about his eternal
future. The girl continued to give forth a mere pale reflection of her
circumstances, and Mrs. Simpson was forced into the deprecation that
perhaps one would hardly call her a joyous Christian.

But for the Zenana Mission Society this impression of Miss Filbert might
have deepened. The committee of that body was almost entirely composed
of Mrs. Simpson's friends, and naturally came to learn much about her
guest. The matter was vastly considered, but finally Miss Filbert was
asked to speak at one of the monthly meetings the ladies held among
themselves to keep the society "in touch" with the cause. Laura brought
them, as one would imagine, surprisingly in touch. She made pictures for
them, letting her own eyelashes close deliberately while they stared.
She moved these ladies, inspired them, carried them away, and the fact
that none of them found themselves able afterward to quote the most
pathetic passages seemed rather to add to the enthusiasm with which they
described the address. The first result was a shower of invitations to
tea, occasions when Laura was easily led into monologue. Miss Filbert
became a cult of the evangelistic drawing-rooms, and the same kind of
forbearance was extended to her little traces of earlier social
experiences as is offered, in salons of another sort, to the
eccentricities of persons of genius. Very soon other applications had to
be met and considered, and Mrs. Simpson freely admitted that Laura would
not be justified in refusing to the Methodists and Baptists what she had
given elsewhere. She reasserted her platform influence over audiences
that grew constantly larger, and her world began to revolve again in
that great relation to the infinities which it was her life to perceive
and point out. Mrs. Simpson charged her genially with having been
miserable in Plymouth until she was allowed to do good in her own way,
and saw that she had beef-tea after every occasion of doing it. She
became, in a way, of public character, and a lady journalist sent an
account of her, with a photograph, to a well-known London fashion-paper.
Perhaps the strongest effect she made was as the voice of the Purity
Association, when she delivered an address, in the picturesque costume
she had abandoned, attacking measures contemplated by Government for the
protection of the health of the army in India. This was reported in full
in the local paper, and Mr. Simpson sent a copy to Duff Lindsay, who
received it, I regret to say, with an unmistakable imprecation. But
Laura rejoiced. Deprived of her tambourine she nevertheless rejoiced
exceedingly.




CHAPTER XXV.


The Sister Superior had a long upper lip, which she was in the habit of
drawing still further down; it gave her an air of great diplomatic
caution, almost of casuistry. Her face was pale and narrow. She had eyes
that desired to be very penetrating, and a flat little stooping figure
with a suggestion of extreme neutrality within her voluminous draperies.
She carried about with her all the virtues of a monastic order, patience
was written upon her, and repression, discipline and the love of
administration, written and underlined, so that the Anglican Sister whom
no Pope blessed was more priestly in her personal effect than any
Jesuit. It was difficult to remember that she had begun as a woman; she
was now a somewhat anaemic formula making for righteousness. Sister Ann
Frances, who in her turn suggested the fat capons of an age of friars
more indulgent to the flesh, and whose speech was of the crispest in
this world, where there was so much to do, thought poorly of the
executive ability of the Sister Superior, and resented the imposition,
as it were, of the long upper lip. Out of this arose the only
irritations that vexed the energetic flow of duty at the Baker
Institution, slight official raspings which the Sister Superior
immediately laid before Heaven at great length. She did it with
publicity, too, kneeling on the chunam floor of the chapel for an hour
at a time explaining matters. The bureaucracy of the country was
reflected in the Baker Institution: it seemed to Sister Ann Frances that
her superior officer took undue advantage of her privilege of direct
communication with the Supreme Authority, giving any colour she liked to
the incident. And when the Sister Superior's lumbago came on in direct
consequence of the cold chunam, the annoyance of Sister Ann Frances was
naturally not lessened.

There were twenty or thirty of them, with their little white caps tied
close under their chins, their long veils and their girdled black robes.
They were the most self-sacrificing women in Asia, the most devout, the
most useful. Government gave hospitals and doctors into their hands;
they took the whole charge of certain schools. They differed in
complexion, some of the newly arrived being delightfully fresh and pink
under their starched bandeaux. But they were all official, they all
walked discreetly and directly about their business, with a jangle of
keys in the folds of their robes, immensely organised, immensely under
orders. Hilda, when she had time, had the keenest satisfaction in
contemplating them. She took the edge off the fact that she was not
quite one, in aim and method, with these dear women, as they supposed
her to be, with the reflection that, after all, it might be worth while
to work out a solution of life in those terms, standing aside from the
world--the world was troublesome--and keeping an unfaltering eye upon
the pity of things, an unfaltering hand at its assuagement. It was
simple and fine and indisputable, this work of throwing the clear shadow
of the Cross upon the muddy sunlight of the world. It carried the boon
of finality in itself. One might be stopped and put away at any moment,
and nothing would be spoiled, broken, unfinished; and it absolutely
barred out such considerations as were presented by Hamilton Bradley.
There was a time early in her probation when she thought seriously that
if it were not Stephen Arnold it should be this.

She begged to be put on hospital work and was sent for her indiscretion
to teach in the Orphanage for Female Children of British Troops. The
first duty of a novice was to be free of preference, to obey without a
sigh of choice. On the third day, however, Sister Ann Frances,
supervising, stopped at the open schoolroom door to hear the junior
female orphans repeating in happy chorus after their instructress the
statement that seven times nine were fifty-six. I think Hilda saw Sister
Ann Frances in the door. That couldn't go on, even in the name of
discipline, and Miss Howe was placed at the disposal of the chief
nursing Sister at the General Hospital next day. Sister Ann Frances was
inclined to defend Hilda's imperfect acquaintance with primary
arithmetic.

"We all have our gifts," she said. "Miss Howe's is not the
multiplication table, but neither is mine stage-acting." At which the
upper lip lengthened further into an upward-curving smile, and the
Sister Superior remarked cautiously that she hoped Miss Howe would
develop one for making bandages, otherwise----

The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite the
ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the two
women. The full understanding of it was an abyss between them, across
which they joined hands, looking elsewhere. Even in the surprise of
Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance away, lest her
eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the situation. It had
never been discussed, but it had to be accepted and occasionally
referred to; and the terms of acceptance and reference made no
implication of Stephen Arnold. In her inmost privacy Alicia gazed
breathless at the conception as a whole; she leaped at it, and caught
it, and held it to look, with a feverish comparison of possibilities. It
was not strange, perhaps, that she took a vivid personal interest in the
essentials that enabled one to execute a flank movement like Hilda's nor
that she should conceive the first of them to be that one must come out
of a cab. She dismissed that impression with indignation as ungenerously
cynical, but it always came back for redismissal. It did not interfere
in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to Stephen to
come to 10, Middleton street on afternoons or evenings when Hilda was
there. She was like one standing denied in the Street of Abundance; she
had an avidity of the eye for even love's reflection.

That was a little later. At first there was the transformation to
lament, the loss, the break.

"You look," cried Miss Livingstone, the first time Hilda arrived in the
dress of the novice, a kind of understudy of the Sisters' black and
white, "you look like a person in a book, full of salient points, and
yet made so simple to the reader. If you go on wearing those things I
shall end by understanding you perfectly."

"If you don't understand me," Hilda said, dropping into the corner of a
sofa, "_Cela que je m'en doute_, it's because you look for too much
elaboration. I am a simple creature, done with rather a broad
brush--_voila tout!_"

Nevertheless, Miss Livingstone's was a happy impression. The neutrality
of her hospital dress left Hilda in a manner exposed: one saw in a
special way the significance of lines and curves; it was an
astonishingly vigourous human expression.

Alicia leaned forward, her elbow on the arm of her chair, her chin
tucked into her palm, and looked at it. The elbow bent itself in a light
blue muslin sleeve of extreme elegance, trimmed with lace. The colour
found a wistful echo in the eyes that regarded Miss Howe, who was
accustomed to the look and met it with impenetrable commonplace, being
made impatient by nothing in this world so much as by futility, however
charming.

"Just now," Alicia said, "the shadows under your eyes are brushed too
deep."

"I don't believe I sleep well in a dormitory."

"Horrible! All the little privacies of life--don't you miss them?"

"I never had them, my dear--I never had them. Life has never given me
the luxury of curtains--I don't miss them. An occasional blind--a closed
door--and those we got even at the Institution. The decencies are
strictly conserved, believe me."

"One imagines that kind of place is always clean."

"When I have time I think of Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and
believe myself in Paradise. The repose is there, the angels also--dear
commanding things--and a perpetual incense of cheap soap. And there is
some good in sleeping in a row. It reminds one that after all one is
very like other women."

"It wouldn't convince me if I were you. And how did the Sisters receive
you--with the harp and the psaltery?"

"That was rather," said Hilda gravely, "what I expected. On the
contrary, they snubbed me--they really did. There were two of them. I
said, 'Reverend ladies, please be a little kind. Convents are strange to
me; I shall probably commit horrible sins without knowing it. Give me
your absolution in advance--at least your blessing."

"Hilda, you didn't!"

"It is delightful to observe the Mother Abbess, or whatever she is,
disguising the fact that she takes any interest in me. Such
diplomacy--funny old thing."

"They must be _devoured_ with curiosity!"

"Well, they ask no questions. One sees an everlasting finger on the lip.
It's a little boring. One feels inclined to speak up and say, 'Mesdames,
_entendez_--it isn't so bad as you think.' But then their fingers would
go into their ears."

"And the rules, Hilda? I can't imagine you, somehow, under rules."

"I am attached to the rules; I think about them all day long. They make
the thing simple and--possible. It is a little like living for the first
time in a house all right angles after--after a life-long voyage in a
small boat."

"Isn't the house rather empty?"

"Oh, well!"

Alicia put out her hand and tucked an irrelevant bit of lace into
Hilda's bosom. "I can tell you who is interested," she cried. "The
Archdeacon--the Archdeacon and Mrs. Barberry. They both dined here last
night; and you lasted from the fish to the pudding. I got so bored with
you, my dear, in your new capacity."

A new ray of happiness came into the smile of the novice. "What did they
say? Do tell me what they said."

"There was a difference of opinion. The Archdeacon held that with God
all things were possible. He used an expression more suitable to a
dinner-party, but I think that is what he meant. Mrs. Barberry thought
it wouldn't last. Mrs. Barberry was very cynical. She said anyone could
see that you were as emotional as ever you could be."

The eyes of the two women met and they laughed frankly. A sense of
expansion came between them, in which for an instant they were silent.

"Tell me about the hospital," Alicia said presently.

"Ah, the hospital!" Hilda's face changed. There came into her eyes the
moved look that always waked a thrill in Alicia Livingstone, as if she
were suddenly aware that she had stepped upon ground where feet like
hers passed seldom.

"There is nothing to tell you that is not--sad. Such odds and ends of
life, thrown together!"

"Have you had any experiences yet?"

Hilda stared for a moment absently in front of her, and then turned her
head aside to answer as if she closed her eyes on something.

"Experiences? Delightful Alicia, speaking your language, no. You are
thinking of the resident surgeon, the medical student, the interesting
patient. My resident surgeon is fifty years old; the medical student is
a Bengali in white cotton and patent-leather shoes. I am occupied in a
ward full of deck hands. For these I hold the bandage and the basin;
they are hardly aware of me."

"You are sure to have them," Alicia said. "They crop up wherever you go
in this world, either before you or behind you."

Hilda fixed her eyes attentively upon her companion. "Sometimes," she
said, "you say things that are extremely true in their general bearing.
A fortune-teller with cards gives one the same shock of surprise. Well,
let me tell you, I have been promoted to temperatures. I took
thirty-five to-day. Next week I am to make poultices; the week after
baths and fomentations."

"What are the others like--the other novices?"

"Nearly all Eurasians, one native, a Hindu widow--the Sisters are almost
demonstrative to her--and one or two local European girls; the
Commissariat-Sergeant class, I should think."

"They don't sound attractive and I am glad. You will depend the more
upon me."

Hilda looked thoughtfully at Miss Livingstone. "I will depend," she
said, "a good deal upon you."

It was Alicia's fate to meet the Archdeacon again that evening at
dinner. "And is she really throwing her heart into the work?" asked that
dignitary, referring to Miss Howe.

"Oh, I think so," Alicia said; "Yes."




CHAPTER XXVI.


The labours of the Baker Institution and of the Clarke Mission were very
different in scope, so much so that if they had been secular bodies
working for profit there would have been hardly a point of contact
between them. As it was, they made one, drawing together in affiliation
for the comfort of mutual support in a heathen country where all the
other Englishmen wrote reports, drilled troops, or played polo, with all
the other Englishwomen in the corresponding female parts. Doubtless the
little communities prayed for each other. One may imagine, not
profanely, their petitions rising on either side of the heedless,
multitudinous, idolatrous city, and meeting at some point in the purer
air above the yellow dust-haze. I am not aware that they held any other
mutual duty or privilege, but this bond was known and enabled people
whose conscience pricked them in that direction to give little garden
teas to which they invited Clarke Brothers and Baker Sisters, secure in
doing a benevolent thing and at the same time embarrassing nobody,
except, possibly, the Archdeacon, who was officially exposed to being
asked as well and had no right to complain. The affiliation was thus a
social convenience, since it is unlikely that without it anybody would
have hit upon so ingenious a way of killing, as it were, a Baker Sister
and a Clarke Brother with one stone. It is not surprising that this
degree of intelligence should fail to see the profound official
difference between Baker Sisters and Baker Novices. As the Sister
Superior said, it did not seem to occur to people that there could be,
in connection with a religious body, such words as discipline and
subordination, which were certainly made ridiculous for the time being,
where she and Sister Ann Frances were asked to eat ices on the same
terms with Miss Hilda Howe. It must have been more than ever painful to
these ladies, regarded from the official point of view, when it became
plain, as it usually did, that the interest of the afternoon centred in
Miss Howe, whether or not the Archdeacon happened to be present. Their
displeasure was so clear, after the first occasion, that Hilda felt
obliged, when the next one came, to fall back on her original talent,
and ate her ice abashed and silent, speaking only when she was spoken
to, and then in short words and long hesitations. Thereupon the Sisters
were of opinion that, after all, poor Miss Howe could not help her
unenviable note--she was perhaps more to be pitied on account of it than
anything else. It came to this, that Sister Ann Frances even had an
exhibitor's pride in her, and Hilda knew the sensations of a barbarian
female captive in the bonds of the Christians. But she could not afford
to risk being cut off from those little garden teas. All told, they were
few; ladies disturbed by ideas of social duties toward missionaries
being so uncommon.

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