Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters on
her knees on the floor. As she moved she bent upon the audience a
preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers, chances, from
a point remote and emotionally involved. Lindsay's impression was that
she looked at him as from behind a glass door. Then her eyes closed as
the other woman began, and through their lids, as it were, he could see
that she was again caught up, though her body remained abased, her hands
interlocked between her knees, swaying in unison with the petition. The
Ensign was a little, meagre, freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless
hair and tight drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she
would have been bedraggled and a nagger. She gained an elevation, it was
plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation of
cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a
complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her
fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her
influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior
commission. She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained minor key
that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened, her key to
hearts. She told the Lord in confidence that however appearances might
be against it, every soul before him was really longing to be gathered
within His Almighty arms, and when she said this, Laura Filbert, on the
floor, threw back her head and cried "Hallelujah!" and Duff started. The
others broke in upon the Ensign with like exclamations. They had a
recurrent, perfunctory sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again
cried "Praise the Lord!" Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty
impulse to leave the premises. Then she rose, and he watched with the
Duke's Own, to see what she would do next. The others looked at her too,
as she stood surprisingly fair and insistant among them, Ensign Sand
with humble eyes and disapproving lips. As she began to speak the
silence widened for her words, the ship's cook stopped shuffling his
feet. "Oh come," she said, "Come and be saved." Her voice seemed to
travel from her without effort, and to penetrate every corner and every
consciousness. There was a sudden dip in it like the fall of water, that
thrilled along the nerves. "Who am I that ask you? A poor weak woman,
ignorant, unknown. Never mind. It is not my voice, but the voice in your
heart that entreats you, 'Come and be saved!' You know that voice, it
speaks in the watches of the night; it began to speak when you were a
little, little child, with little joys and sorrows, and little prayers
that you have forgotten now. Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender
voice"--her own had dropped to the cooing of doves--"It is hard to know
why all the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper it!
Strange, strange! But the world is full of the clamour of its own
foolishness, and the Voice is lost in it, except in places where people
come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches. You hear it
now in the echo from my lips, 'Come and be saved.' Why must I beg of
you? Why do you not come hastening, running? Are you too wise? But when
did the wisdom of this world satisfy you about the next? Are you too
much occupied? But in the day of judgment what will you do?"--

"When you come to Jordan's flood,
How will you do? How will you do?"

It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her
opportunity. Laura gave her no glance of surprise--perhaps she was
disciplined to interruptions--but caught up her own tambourine, singing,
and instantly the chorus was general, the big drum thumping out the
measure, all the tambourines shaking together.

"You who now contemn your God,
How will you do? How will you do?"

The Duke's Own sang lustily, with a dogged enjoyment that made little of
the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment,
but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the
thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with
their feet. Through the medley of voices--everybody sang except Arnold
and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's seemed to flow, separate and
clear, threading the jangle upon melody, and turning the doggerel into
an appeal, direct, intense. When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to
him, in the unmistakable intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.

"Death will be a solemn day
When the soul is forced away,
It will be too late to pray;
How will you do?"

It was simple enough. All her supreme desire, to convince, to turn, to
make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the room with
whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could
seek with a kind of right to response. But the sensation Duff Lindsay
tried to sit still under was not simple. It had the novelty, the shock,
of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped and
blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears. His soul seemed
shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet the buffets themselves were
enthralling. In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to
depart, picked up his stick, but Arnold was sitting holding his chin,
wrapped in quiet interest, and took no notice. The hymn stopped, and he
found a few minutes' respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the
meeting, unveiling each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over
the leaves of the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware, for
airs and verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his
untaken, sinful citadel. There was time to bring him calmness enough to
wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the sort
of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch his state
with interest. Then, before he knew it, they were all down on their
knees' again, and Laura was praying; and he was not aware of the meaning
of a single word that she said, only that her voice was threading itself
in and out of his consciousness burdened with a passion that made it
exquisite to him. Her appeal lifted itself in the end into song, low and
sweet.

"Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
There to my heart was the blood applied,
Glory to His name!"

They let her sing it alone, even the tempting chorus, and when it was
over Lindsay was almost certain that his were not the preliminary pangs
of conversion by the methods of the Salvation Army. Deliberately,
however, he postponed further analysis of them until after the meeting
was over. He would be compelled then to go away, back to the club to
dinner, or something; they would put out the lights and lock the place
up; he thought of that. He glanced at the lamps with a perception of the
finality that would come when they were extinguished--she would troop
away with the others into the darkness--and then at his watch to see how
much time there was left. More exhortation followed and more prayer; he
was only aware that she did not speak. She sat with her hand over her
eyes, and Lindsay had an excited conviction that she was still occupying
herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect whether any
one else was aware of it, this connection that she was blazoning between
them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into a sense of
ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of stuffy smells.
When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a rapt effort to tell
her that he perceived her intention. That he should be grateful, that he
should approve, was neither here nor there; the indispensable thing was
that she should know him conscious, receptive. She read three or four
sacred verses, a throb of tender longing from the very Christ-heart,
"Come unto me ..." The words stole about the room like tears. Then she
would ask "all present," she said, to engage for a moment in silent
prayer. There was a wordless interval, only the vague street noises
surging past the door. A thrill ran along the benches as Laura brought
it to an end with sudden singing. She was on her feet as the others
raised their heads, breaking forth clear and jubilant.

"I am so wondrously saved from sin,
Jesus so sweetly abides within;
There at the Cross where he took me in,
Glory to His Name."

She smiled as she sang. It was a happy, confident smile, and it was
plain that she longed to believe it the glad reflection of spiritual
experience of many who heard her. Lindsay's perception of this was
immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested for an instant of glad
inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy of her calling, he felt a
pang of compunction. It was a formless reproach, too vague for anything
like a charge, but it came nearest to defining itself in the idea that
he had gone too far--he who had not left his seat. When the hymn was
finished, and Ensign Sand said, "The meeting is now open for
testimonies," he knew that all her hope was upon him, though she looked
at the screen above his head, and he sat abashed, with a prodigal sense
surging through him of what he would rejoice to do for her in
compensation. In the little chilly silence that followed he surprised
his own eyes moist with disappointment--it had all been so anxious and
so vain--and he felt relief and gratitude when the man who beat the drum
stood up and announced that he had been saved for eleven years, with
details about how badly he stood in need of it when it happened.

"Hallelujah!" said Ensign Sand cheerfully, with a meretricious air of
hearing it for the first time. "Any more?" And a Norwegian sailor
lurched shamefacedly upon his feet. He had a couple of inches of
straggling yellow beard all round his face, and twirled a battered straw
hat.

"I haf to say only dis word. I goin' sdop by Jesus. Long time I subbose
I sdop by Jesus. I subbose----"

"Glory be to God!" remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of the
Duke's Own, who were inclined to be amused. "That will do, thank you.
Now, is there nobody else? Speak up, friends. It'll do you no harm, none
whatever; it'll do you that much good you'll be surprised. Now, who'll
be the next to say a word for Jesus?" She was nodding encouragement at
the negro cook as if she knew him for a wavering soul, and he, sunk in
his gleaming white collar, was aware, in silent, smiling misery, that
the expectations of the meeting were toward him. Laura had again hidden
her eyes in her hand. The negro fingered his watch-chain foolishly, and
the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her
perception that an African, in his best clothes, under conviction of
sin, was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus
itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his
voice. It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up
his hat, got upon his feet instead.

"I also," he said, "would offer my humble testimony to the grace of
God--with all my heart."

It was as if he had repeated part of the creed in the performance of his
office. Then he turned and bent gravely to Lindsay. "Shall we go now?"
he whispered, and the two made their way to the door, leaving a silence
behind them which Lindsay imagined, on the part of Ensign Sand at least,
to be somewhat resentful. As they passed out, a voice recovered itself
and cried, "Hallelujah!" It was Laura's. And all the way to the
club--Arnold was dining with him there--Lindsay listened to his friend's
analysis of religious appeal to the emotions, but chiefly heard that
clear music above a sordid din, "Hallelujah!" "Hallelujah!"




CHAPTER IV.


When Alicia Livingstone, almost believing she liked it, drove to Number
Three, Lal Behari's Lane and left cards upon Miss Hilda Howe, she was
only partially rewarded. Through the plaster gate-posts, badly in want
of repair and bearing, sunk in one of them, a marble slab announcing
"Residence with Board," she perceived the squalid attempt the place made
at respectability, the servants in dirty livery salaaming curiously, the
over-fed squirrel in a cage in the door, the pair of damaged wicker
chairs in the porch suggesting the easiest intercourse after dinner, the
general discoloration. She observed with irritation that it was a
down-at-heels shrine for such a divinity, in spite of its six dusty
crotons in crumbling plaster urns, but the irritation was rather at her
own repulsion to the place than at any inconsistency it presented. What
she demanded and expected of herself was that Number Three, Lal Behari's
Lane should be pleasing, interesting, acceptable on its merits as a
cheap Calcutta boarding-house. She found herself so unable to perceive
its merits that it was almost a relief to see nothing of Miss Howe
either; Hilda had gone to rehearsal, to the "dance-house," the servant
said, eyeing the unusual landau. Alicia rolled back into streets with
Christian names distressed by an uncertainty as to whether her visit had
been a disappointment or an escape. By the next day, however, she was
well pulled together in favour of the former conclusion--she could
nearly always persuade herself of such things in time--and wrote a
frank, sweet little note in her picturesque hand--she never joined more
than two syllables--to say how sorry she had been, and would Miss Howe
come to lunch on Friday. "I should love to make it dinner," she said to
herself, as she sealed the envelope, "but before one knows how she will
behave in connection with the men--I suppose one must think of the other
people."

It was Friday, and Hilda was lunching. The two had met among the
faint-tinted draperies of Alicia's drawing-room--there was something
auroral even about the mantlepiece--a little like diplomatists using a
common tongue native to neither of them. Perhaps Alicia drew the
conventions round her with the greater fluency; Hilda had more to cover,
but was less particular about it. The only thing she was bent upon
making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of Miss Livingstone's
effort to receive her as if she had been anybody else. Alicia was hardly
aware of what she wanted to conceal, unless it was her impression that
Miss Howe's dress was cut a trifle too low in the neck, that she was
almost too effective in that cream and yellow to be quite right. Alicia
remembered afterwards, to smile at it, that her first ten minutes of
intercourse with Hilda Howe were dominated by a lively desire to set
Celine at her--with such a foundation to work upon, what could Celine
not have done? She remembered her surprise, too, at the ordinary things
Hilda said in that rich voice, even in the tempered drawing-room tones
of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under the gallery,
and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with them, movements
which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women
and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them,
and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazaar rode on
long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the
encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they might
have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and
acknowledged no demand for more than the smile.

The cutlets had come before Hilda's impression was at the back of her
head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her elbow on
the table. They had found a portrait-painter.

"He has such an eye," said Alicia, "for the possibilities of character."

"Such an eye that he develops them. I know one man he painted. I
suppose when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the meantime
he and everybody else had forgotten about it. All but Salter. Salter
re-created it on the original lines, and brought it up, and gave it a
lodging behind the man's wrinkles. I saw the picture. It was
fantastic--psychologically."

"Psychology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know," Alicia said.
"Do let him give you a little more. It's only Moselle." She felt quite
direct, and simple, too, in uttering her postulate. Her eyes had a
friendly, unembarrassed look; there was nothing behind them but the joy
of talking intelligently about Salter.

Hilda did not even glance away. She looked at her hostess instead, with
an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have
mistaken it to be insincere. It was part of her that she could swim in
any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in
Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent
quality.

"It's everything to everything, don't you think? And especially, thank
Heaven, to my trade." Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the
way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms. That was the
case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.

"To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a
picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and
voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to
do it, or a pen or a chisel!"

"I know what you mean," said Alicia. She had a little flush, and an
excited hand among the wine-glasses. "No, I don't want any; please don't
bother me!" to the man at her elbow with something in aspic. "It's much
more direct--your way."

"And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned,
abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh, yes! if we are lightly
esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has dignity
enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to
appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare's--with being
unliterary. You might--good Heavens!--as well accuse a painter of not
being a musician? Our business lies behind the words--they are our mere
medium! Rosalind wasn't literary--why should I be? But don't indulge me
in my shop, if it bores you," Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that
Miss Livingstone was never further from being bored.

"Oh, please go on! If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows confessed the
tedium of Calcutta small-talk. "But why do you say you are lightly
esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone--and you hold the public in
the hollow of your hand!"

Hilda smiled. "Dear old public! It does its best for us, doesn't it? One
loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never believing in its
treachery in the end. But I don't know why I say we are lightly
esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all. I've done nothing--I've no
right. In ten years perhaps--no, five--I'll write signed articles for
the _New Review_ about modern dramatic tendencies. Meanwhile you'll have
to consider that the value of my opinions is prospective."

"But already you have succeeded--you have made a place."

"In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg. I think they remember me in
Trichinopoly too, and--yes, it may be so--in Manila. But that wasn't
legitimate drama," and Hilda smiled again in a way that coloured her
unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia's eyes, in rose and gold. She waited an
instant for these tints to materialise, but Miss Howe's smile slid
discreetly into her wine-glass instead.

"There's immense picturesqueness in the Philippines," she went on, her
look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way with her
hat. "Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions. One wonders what
America will do with those friars, when she does take hold there."

"Do you think she is going to?" asked Alicia, vaguely. It was the merest
politeness--she did not wait for a reply. With a courageous air which
became her charmingly she went on, "Don't you long to submit yourself to
London? I should."

"Oh, I must. I know I must. It's in the path of duty and
conscience--it's not to be put off forever. But one dreads the chained
slavery of London"--she hesitated before the audacity of adding, "the
sordid hundred nights," but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as
if she watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.

"You are magnificently sure," she said. Alicia herself felt curiously
buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate
achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had
become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together,
and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In Hilda's there was an
instant of consideration before she said:

"I might as well tell you--you won't misunderstand--that I am sure. I
expect things of myself. I hold a kind of mortgage on my success; when I
foreclose it will come, bringing the long, steady, grasping chase of
money and fame, eyes fixed, never a day to live in, only to accomplish,
every moment straddled with calculation, an end to all the byeways where
one finds the colour of the sun. The successful London actress, my
dear--what excursion has she? A straight flight across the Atlantic in a
record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many
in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper--an existence of
pure artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell
of your personality. It's the house forever on your back; at the last
you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on
the floral offerings. There never was reward so qualified by its
conditions."

"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"

"Oh, yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But
then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but
the eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could
begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much
understood in the proscenium--but there are so many, honestly, that
London being at the top of the hill, I'm not panting up. My way of going
has twice wound round the world already. But I'm talking like an
illustrated interview. You will grant the impertinence of all I've been
saying when I tell you that I've never yet had an illustrated
interview."

"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked. "Don't they make you
sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"

Hilda threw her head back and laughed almost, Alicia noted, like a man.
She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief,
as woman often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much
as she wanted to, and it was as clear as possible that tights presented
themselves quite preposterously to any discussion of her profession.
They were things to be taken for granted, like the curtain and the
wings; they had no relation to clothing in the world.

Alicia laughed too. After all, they were absurd--her outsider's
prejudices. She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar again
for her point of view about the illustrated interviews. "They _are_
atrocities," she said. "On their merits they ought to be cast out of
even the suburbs of art and literature. But they help to make the
atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do that, of
course"----the pursed seriousness of her lips gave Alicia the impression
that, though the whole world took offence, the expediency of the
illustrated interview was beyond discussion.

The servant brought them coffee. "Shall we smoke here," said Miss
Livingstone, "or in the drawing-room?"

"Oh, do you want to? Are you quite sure you like it? Please don't on my
account--you really mustn't. Suppose it should make you ill?" If Hilda
felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her face. Nothing was
there but cheerful concern.

"It won't make me ill." Alicia lifted her chin with delicate
assertiveness. "I suppose you do smoke, don't you?"

"Occasionally--with some people. Honestly, have you ever done it
before?"

"Four times," said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the
apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them. "I thought
it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you--"

"Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some Serene
Highness's neck. I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer to dispense
with it. In my bath, for instance, and almost always in omnibuses."

"How absurd you are! Then we'll stay here."

Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia sacrifice
two matches.

"There's Rosa Norton of our company," she went on. "Poor dear old Rosy.
She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look
of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear;
but blow her if she won't be as Bohemian as anybody. I've seen her smoke
in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin. I got up and went away."

"But I can't possibly affect you in that way," said Alicia, putting her
cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glacee. "I'm not
old and I'm not grotesque."

"No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."

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