Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
room and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were
tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
agreeable exhalations, traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in a
vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia, one could
almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given
forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the
bee and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a trifle
gross and material. Certainly, as she sat there in her grace and
slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early morning
about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to
present her in. With suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the
traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she
appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty
elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it
was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of
her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness
of movement which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a
personal world of many effects. Into her making of tea, for example, she
put nothing more sophisticated than sugar, and she ordered more bread
and butter in the worst possible Hindustani without a thought except
that the bread and butter should be brought. Lindsay liked to think that
with him she was particularly simple and direct, that he was of those
who freed her from the pretty consciousness, the elegant restraint that
other people fixed upon her. It must be admitted that this conviction
had reason in establishing itself, and it is perhaps not surprising
that, in the security of it, he failed to notice occasions when it would
not have held, of which this was plainly one. Alicia reflected, with her
cheek against the Afghan wolf-skins on the back of the chair. It was
characteristic of her eyes that one could usually see things being
turned over in them. She would sometimes keep people waiting while she
thought. She thought perceptibly about Hilda Howe, slanting her absent
gaze between sheltering eyelids to the floor. Presently she re-arranged
the rose in its green glass vase and said: "Then it's impossible not to
be interested."

"I thought you would find it so."

Alicia was further occupied in bestowing small fragments of cress
sandwich upon a terrier. "Fancy your being so sure," she said, "that you
could present her entertainingly!" She looked past him toward the soft
light that came in at the draped window, and he was not aware that her
regard held him fast by the way.

"Anyone could," he said cheerfully; "she presents herself. One is only
the humblest possible medium. And the most passive."

Alicia's eyes still rested upon the light from the window. It
silhouetted a rare fern from Assam, it certainly rewarded them.

"I like to hear you talk about her. Tell me some more."

"Haven't I exhausted metaphor in describing her?"

"Yes," said Miss Livingstone, with conviction; "but I'm not a bit
satisfied. A few simple facts sometimes--sometimes are better. Wasn't it
a little difficult to make her acquaintance?"

"Not in the very least. I saw her in _A Woman of Honour_ and was
charmed. Charmed in a new way. Next day I discovered her address--it's
obscure--and sent up my card for permission to tell her so. I explained
to her that one would have hesitated at home, but here one was protected
by _dustur_.[1] And she received me warmly. She gave me to understand
that she was not overwhelmed with tribute of that kind from Calcutta.
The truthful ring of it was pathetic, poor dear."

[Footnote 1: Custom.]

"That was in--"

"In February."

"In February we were at Nice," Alicia said, musingly. Then she took up
her divining-rod again. "One can imagine that she was grateful. People
of that kind--how snobbish I sound, but you know what I mean--are rather
stranded in Calcutta, aren't they? They haven't any world here;" and
with the quick glance which deprecated her timid clevernesses, she
added, "The arts conspire to be absent."

"Ah, don't misunderstand. If there was any gratitude it was all mine.
But we met as kindred, if I may vaunt myself so much. A mere theory of
life will go a long way, you know, toward establishing a claim of that
sort. And, at all events, she is good enough to treat me as if she
admitted it."

"What is her theory of life?" Alicia demanded, quickly. "I should be
glad of a new one."

Lindsay's communicativeness seemed to contract a little, as at the touch
of a finger light but cold.

"I don't think she has ever told me," he said. "No, I am sure she has
not." His reflection was, "It is her garment--and how could it fit
another woman?"

"But you have divined it--she has let you do that! You can give me your
impression."

He recognised her bright courage in venturing upon impalpabilities, but
not without a shade of embarrassment.

"Perhaps. But having perceived to pass on--it doesn't follow that one
can. I don't seem able to lay my hand upon the signs and symbols."

The faintest look of disappointment, the slightest cloud of submission,
appeared upon Miss Livingstone's face.

"Oh, I know!" she said. "You are making me feel dreadfully out of it,
but I know. It surrounds her like a kind of atmosphere, an intellectual
atmosphere. Though I confess that is the part I don't understand in
connection with an actress."

There was a sudden indifference in this last sentence. Alicia lay back
upon her wolf-skins like a long-stemmed flower cast down among them, and
looked away from the subject at the teacups. Duff picked up his hat. He
had the subtlest intimations with women.

"It's an intoxicating atmosphere," he said. "My continual wonder is that
I'm not in love with her. A fellow in a novel, now, in my situation,
would be embroiled with half his female relations by this time, and
taking his third refusal with a haggard eye."

Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness. She lifted
her head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty suddenly
revealed.

"Why aren't you?" she said. "I wonder, too."

"I should like it enormously," he laughed. "I've lain awake at nights
trying to find out why it isn't so. Perhaps you'll be able to tell me. I
think it must be because she's such a confoundedly good fellow."

Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur made a
shadow on the whiteness of her throat. Her buffeting was over; she was
full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.

"Oh, you mustn't depend on me," she said. "But why are you going? Don't
go. Stay and have another cup of tea."




CHAPTER III.


The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same terms
at New College, and now found themselves again together in the social
poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their
walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in
Bentinck street. It seems desirable to supply a reason why any one
should be walking there, to begin with, any one, at all events, not a
Chinaman or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture or an
able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets,
and describing an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest
glass of country spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled
person with a Bulgarian, a Levantine or a Japanese smile, who no longer
possessed a carriage, to whom the able-bodied seamen represented the
whole port. The cramped, twisting thoroughfare was full of people like
this; they overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the
left and walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings
and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past with
prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as possible
aside, for three parts of the tide of them were neither white nor black,
but many shades of brown, written down in the census as "of mixed blood"
and wearing still, through the degenerating centuries, an eyebrow, a
nostril of the first Englishmen who came to conjugal ties of Hindustan.
The place sent up to the stars a vast noise of argument and anger and
laughter, of the rattling of hoofs and wheels; but the babel was ordered
in its exaggeration, the red turban of a policeman here and there
denoted little more than a unit in the crowd. There were gas-lamps, and
they sent a ripple of light like a sword-thrust along the gutter beside
the banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted.
They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built
into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for
Bentinck street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour
of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together
into the fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and
yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue capital, that fancy dictated.
There, where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and
the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads
passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial,
remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human,
practical. A torch flamed this way and that stuck in the wall over the
head of a squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels
of betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little
flame, blue and yellow, beside a sweetmeat seller's basket, and showed
his heap of cakes that they were well-browned and full of butter. From
the "Cape of Good Cheer," where many bottles glistened in rows inside,
came a braying upon the conch, and a flame of burnt brandy danced along
the bar to the honour and propitiation of Lakshmi, that the able-bodied
seaman might be thirsty when he came, for the "Cape of Good Cheer" did
not owe its prosperity, as its name might suggest, to any Providence of
Christian theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's
shoe-shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the stitching.
There were endless shoe-shops, and they all belonged to Powson or
Singson or Samson, while one signboard bore the broad impertinence,
"Macpherson." The proprietors stood in the door, the smell came out in
the street--that smell of Chinese personality steeped in fried oil and
fresh leather that out-fans even the south wind in Bentinck street. They
were responsible but not anxious, the proprietors; they buried their fat
hands in their wide sleeves and looked up and down, stolid and smiling.
They stood in their alien petticoat trousers for the commercial
stability of the locality, and the rows of patent-leather slippers that
glistened behind them testified to it further. Everything else shifted
and drifted, with a perpetual change of complexion, a perpetual
worsening of clothes. Only Powson bore a permanent yoke of prosperity.
It lay round his thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue
cotton smock, and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking
up and down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise
of the opaque, inscrutable philosophy tied up in his queue.

Lindsay liked Bentinck street as an occasional relapse from the scenic
standards of pillared and verandahed Calcutta, and made personal
business with his Chinaman for the sake of the racial impression thrown
into the transaction. Arnold, in his cassock, waited in the doorway with
his arms crossed behind him, and his thin face thrust as far as it would
go into the air outside. It is possible that some intelligence might
have seen in this priest a caricature of his profession, a figure to be
copied for the curate of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the
common signs of the ascetic school. His face would have been womanish in
its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only
occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness which
had the effect of being permitted, conceded. He had the long thin nose
which looked as if, for preference, it would be for ever thrust among
the pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe the width of his
mouth without perhaps detecting the patience and decision of the upper
lip. The indignity of spectacles he did not yet wear, but it hovered
over him; it was indispensable to his personality in the long run. In
figure he was indifferently tall and thin and stooping, made to pass
unobservedly along a pavement, or with the directness of humble but
important business among crowds. At Oxford he had interested some of his
friends and worried others by wistful inclinations toward the shelter of
that Mother Church which bids her children be at rest and leave to her
the responsibility. Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to exist
on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent animal,
under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was among those who
observed his waverings without prejudice, or anything but an
affectionate solicitude that whichever way Arnold went he should find
the satisfactions he sought. The conviction that settled the matter was
accidental, the work of a moment, a free instinct and a thing made with
hands--the dead Shelley where the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed
him, under his memorial dome in the gardens of University College. Here
one leafy afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head
in some confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which he
saw, deeply concealed in his bosom and disguised with a host of
spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic
bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that
he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the
effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of
spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept
upon his devotions. In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic
point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away
in another direction from which, if he turned his head, he could see the
Church of Rome sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in her
skirts, looking mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the Clarke
Mission to Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood in the
door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck street while Lindsay explained
to Ahsing his objection to patent-leather toe caps; six years which had
not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully admitted,
he had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of
achievement--lowered them with a heroism which took account of himself
as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and moving to the
great future, already shining behind coming aeons, of the universal
Kingdom. Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his deductions
from the granular nature of all change, moral and material. He never
talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar
oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather
the ego and the energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in
this world, thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy
to survive at all. It should be understood that Arnold did not hope to
attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple. He held vastly,
on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of
symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye of
faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be
hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and
intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it
about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys,
who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of
mangoes and nuts and oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round
boxes of white grapes in sawdust from Kabul. He seldom dwelt upon the
converts that already testified to the success of the mission; it might
be gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.

As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his hand
within Arnold's elbow. It was an impulse, and the analysis of it would
show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value continually
renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common ground. The physical
nearness, the touch, was something, and each felt it in the remoteness
of his other world with satisfaction. There was absurdly little in what
they had to say to each other; they talked of the Viceroy's attack of
measles and the sanitary improvements in the cloth-dealers' quarter.
Their bond was hardly more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness of
sentiment, clearness of eye. Such as it was, it was strong enough to
make both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague
impatience on Lindsay's part with a concentration of hostility to
Arnold's _soutane_. It made its universal way for them, however, this
garment. Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and pressed with
one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the padre-sahib. He, with
his eyes cast down, took the tribute with humility; as meet, in a way
that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at the persistence of
ecclesiastical tradition.

Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the
broken, half-comprehensible tumult, was smitten and divided by a wave of
rhythmic sound. It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat sellers, and
mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the continual auction of
Krist, Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-hand. In its vivid
familiarity it seemed to make straight for the two Englishmen, to
surround and take possession of them, and they paused. The source of it
was plain--an open door under a vast white signboard dingily lettered
"The Salvation Army." It loomed through the smoke and the street lights
like a discovery.

"Our peripatetic friends," said Arnold, with his rare smile; and, as if
the music seized and held them, they stood listening.

"I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
All day on Sunday, and six days a week!
I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
Fifty-two weeks in the year."

It was immensely vigourous; the men looked at each other with fresh
animation. Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they picked
their steps across the street to the door, and there hesitated, revolted
in different ways. Perhaps I have forgotten to say that Lindsay came to
Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse, and had a mother before whose
name people wrote "The Hon." Besides, the singing had stopped, and
casual observation from the street was checked by a screen.

"I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are," said Arnold.

Their methods were just on the other side of the screen. A bullet-headed
youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulder, fingering a
forage-cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment, passing the two
men beside the door, and a light, clear voice seemed to call after him--

"Ah! don't go away!"

Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical speculation
whether now, at the week's end, the soul of Hilda Howe was still
pursuing the broad road to perdition. The desire to enter sprang up in
him; he was reminded of a vista of some interest which had recently
revealed itself by an accident, and which he had not explored. It had
almost passed out of his memory; he grasped at it again with something
like excitement, and fell adroitly upon the half-inclination in Arnold's
voice.

"I suppose I can't expect you to go in?" he said.

"Precisely why not?" Stephen retorted. "My dear fellow, we make broad
our sympathies, not our phylacteries."

At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic was
the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with amusement the
pulpit tone of the little epigram. But this moment found him only aware
of the consent in it. His hand on Arnold's elbow clinched the agreement;
he half pushed the priest into the room, where they dropped into seats.
Stephen's hand went to his breast instinctively--for the words in the
air were holy by association--and stopped there, since even the breadth
of his sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General
Booth. Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General Booth;
he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline and bushy,
from a frame on the wall at the end of it. The texts on the other walls
seemed emanations from him; and the man in the short, loose, collarless
red coat, with "Salvation Army" in crooked black letters on it, who
stood talking in high, rapid tones with his hands folded, had the look
of a puppet whose strings were pulled by the personality in the frame
above him. It was only by degrees that they observed the other objects
in the room--the big drum on the floor in the empty space where the
exhorters stood, the dozen wooden benches and the possible score of
people sitting on them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting
up the curtness of the texts. There were half-a-dozen men of the Duke's
Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and three
or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the Hooghly, who
leaned well forward, their elbows on their knees, twirling battered
straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the instant off the
defensive. One was a Scandinavian, another a Greek, with earrings. There
was a ship's cook, too, a full-blooded negro, very respectable with a
plaid tie and a silk hat; and beside, two East Indian girls of different
shades, tittering at the Duke's Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali
boy, who spelled out the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very
clean Chinaman, who greatly appreciated his privilege, since it included
a seat, a lamp, and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went
no further. The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood,
like the girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest,
lying along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.

Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end of the
room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung visibly in
mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking. Laura
Filbert was one of the women. She might have been flung upon her chair;
her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm. A
tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay,
palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs.
The folds hung from her waist, and the short close bodice that she wore
above them, like a Bengali woman, left visible the narrow gap of flesh
which nobody notices when it is brown. Her head covering had slipped and
clung only to the knot of hair at the nape of her neck; she lacked,
pathetically, the conscious hand to draw it forward. She was unaware
even of the gaze of the Duke's Own, though it had fixity and absorption.

The man with folded hands went on talking. He seemed to have caught as a
text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung. "Yes indeed," he said,
"I can tell every one 'ere this night, h'every one, that the Saviour is
mighty to keep. I've got it out of my own personal experience, I 'ave.
Jesus don't only look after you on a Sunday but six days a week, my
friends, six days a week. Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on
you--that's all your part of it. I don't mean to say I don't stumble an'
fall into sin. There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but
oh, my friends, I ask you each an' every one of you, is that the fault
of Jesus? No, it is not 'is fault, it is the fault of the person. The
person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' his prayers;
what can you expect? And now I ask you, my friends, is Jesus a-keeping
you? And if he is not, oh, my friends, ain't it foolish to put off any
longer? 'Ere we are met together to-night; we may never all meet
together again. You and I may never 'ear each other speaking again or
see each other sitting there. Thank God," the speaker continued, as his
eye rested on Arnold and Lindsay, "the vilest sinner may be saved, the
respectable sinner may be saved. We've got God's word for that. Now just
a little word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got God's ear, the
Ensign 'as, and she'll plead with 'im for all unconverted souls inside
these four walls to-night."

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