Book: Hilda

S >> Sarah Jeanette Duncan >> Hilda




Alicia was in front with the Yardleys, dropping her unfailing plummet
into the evening's experience. Arnold, hesitating over the rudeness of
departure, thought she was sufficiently absorbed; she would hardly mind.
The centurion slapped his tin armour, and made a jest about the King of
the Jews which reached Stephen over his hostess's shoulder and seemed to
brand him where he sat. He looked about for his hat and some excuse that
would serve, and while he looked the sound of applause rose from the
house. It was a demonstration without great energy, hardly more than a
flutter from stall to stall, with a vague, fundamental noise from the
gallery; but it had the quality which acclaimed something new. Arnold
glanced at the stage and saw that while Pilate and the hollow-chested
slaves and the tin centurion were still on they had somehow lost
significance and colour, had faded into the impotent figures of a
tapestry, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation
had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced. She was
almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and the
_kol_ smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of her
fallen hair, and her unfettered body. Beside her the slave-girls,
crouching, looked liked painted shells. She danced before Pilate in
strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and gesturings that seemed to
be the telling of a tale; and from the orchestra only one unknown
instrument sobbed out to help her. The women of the people have ever
bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick
grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in
the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and
twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened
lips had the immobility of the bazaar. People looked at their playbills
to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed
from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his
foot upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house. Under the
unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there was a
keenness of desire to see what would happen next which plainly curtailed
the applause, as it does with the children at a pantomime.

"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not nearly
so well done. Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene had begun to
use her arts upon Pilate in the well-known scene about which the
newspapers reported long afterwards how the Pope had declared that if
Miss Howe had not been a Protestant and so impervious he would have
excommunicated her--and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed
to afford him a better place. He put an undecided hand upon a prop of
the box that rose behind Alicia's shoulder, and so stood leaning and
looking, more conspicuous in the straight lines and short shoulder-cape
of the frock of his Order than he knew. Hilda, in one of those
impenetrable regards which she threw straight in front of her while
Pilate yawned and posed nearer and nearer the desire of the Magdalene to
be admitted to his household, was at once aware of him. Presently he sat
down again--it was still the profane, the fabulous, the horrible
Patullo, but a strain of pure gold had come into the fabric worth
holding in view, impossible, indeed, to close the eyes upon. Far enough
it was from any semblance to historical fact, but almost possible,
almost admissible, in the form of the woman, as historical fiction. She
dared to sit upon the floor now, in the ungraceful, huddled Eastern
fashion, clasping her knees to her breast, with her back half turned to
her lord the friend of Caesar, so that he could not see the design that
sat behind the mask of her sharp indifference. She rested her chin upon
her knees, and let the blankness of her beauty exclaim upon the subtlety
of her replies, plainly measuring the power of her provocation against
the impoverished quality that camp and grove, court and schools, might
leave upon august Roman sensibilities. It was the old, old
sophistication, so perfect in its concentration behind the _kol_-brushed
eyes and the brown breasts, the igniting, flickering, raging of an
instinct upon the stage. Alicia, when it was over, said to Mrs. Yardley,
"How the modern woman goes off upon side issues?" to which that lady
nodded a rather suspicious assent.

Long before Hilda had begun to act for Arnold, to play to his special
consciousness, he was fastened to his chair, held down, so to speak, by
a whirlpool of conflicting impulses. She did so much more than "lift"
the inventive vulgarisation of the Bible story in the common sense; she
inspired and transfused it so that wherever she appeared people
irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made private acknowledgments
to the effect that something was to be said even for an impious fantasy
which gave her so unique an opportunity. To Arnold her vivid embodiment
of an incident in that which was his morning and evening meditation made
special appeal, and though it was in a way as if she had thrust her
heathen torch into his Holy of Holies, he saw it lighted with
fascination, and could not close the door upon her. The moment of her
discovery of this came early, and it is only she, perhaps, who could
tell how the strange bond wove itself that drew her being--the
Magdalene's--to the priest who sat behind a lady in swansdown and
chiffon in the upper box nearest to the stage on the right. The
beginnings of such things are untraceable, but the fact may be
considered in connection with this one that Hamilton Bradley, who
represented, as we have been told he would, the Chief Character, did it
upon lines very recognisably those of the illustrations of sacred books,
very correct as to the hair and beard and pictured garment of the
Galilean; with every accent of hollow-eyed pallor and inscrutable
remoteness, with all the thin vagueness, too, of a popular engraving,
the limitations and the depression. Under it one saw the painful
inconsistency of the familiar Hamilton Bradley of other presentations,
and realised with irritation, which must have been tenfold in Hilda, how
he hated the part. Perhaps this was enough in itself to send her
dramatic impulse to another focus, and the strangeness of the adventure
was a very thing she would delight in. Whatever may be said about it,
while yet the hideousness of the conception and display of a woman's
natural passion for the man Christ Jesus was receding from Arnold's mind
before the exquisite charm and faithfulness of the worshipping
Magdalene, he became aware that in some special way he sat judging and
pitying her. She had hardly lifted her eyes to him twice, yet it was he,
intimately he, who responded, as if from afar off, to the touch of her
infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love. As
he watched and knew his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb
of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his
brotherhood and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how
the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and
transported thus. The poverty of the play faded out; he became almost
unaware of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo's invention and its
insufferable mixture with the fabric of which every thread was precious
beyond imagination. He looked down with tender patience and compassion
upon the development of the woman's intrigue in the palace, through the
very flower of her crafts and guiles, to save him who had transfigured
her from the hands of the rabble and the high priests; he did not even
shrink from the inexpressibly grating note of the purified Magdalene's
final passionate tendering of her personal sacrifice to the enamoured
Pilate as the price of His freedom, and when at the last she wept at His
feet, where He was bound waiting for His cross, and wrapped them, in the
agony of her abandonment, in the hair of her head, the priest's lips
almost moved in words other than those the playwright had given his
Christ to say--words that told her he knew the height and the depth of
her sacrifice and forgave it, "Neither do I condemn thee...." In his
exultation he saw what it was to perform miracles, to remit sins. The
spark of divinity that was in him glowed to a white heat; the woman on
the stage warmed her hands at it in two consciousnesses. She was stirred
through all her artistic sense in a new and delicious way, and wakened
in some dormant part of her to a knowledge beautiful and surprising. She
felt in every nerve the exquisite quality of that which lay between
them, and it thrilled her through all her own perception of what she
did, and all the applause at how she did it. It was as if he, the
priest, was borne out upon a deep, broad current that made toward solar
spaces, toward infinite bounds, and as if she, the actress, piloted
him....

The Sphinx on the curtain--it had gone down in the old crooked
lines--again looked above and beyond them all. I have sometimes fancied
a trace of malignancy about her steady eyeballs, but perhaps that is the
accident or the design of the scene-painter; it does not show in
photographs. The audience was dispersing a trifle sedately; the
performance had been, as Mrs. Barberry told Mr. Justice Horne,
interesting but depressing. "I hope," said Alicia to Stephen, fastening
the fluffy-white collar of the wrap he put round her, "that I needn't be
sorry I asked you to come. I don't quite know. But she did redeem it,
didn't she? That last scene, where she knows what they are doing to
Him----"

"Can you not be silent?" Arnold said, almost in a whisper; and her look
of astonishment showed her that there were tears in his eyes. He left
the theatre and walked light-headedly across Chowringhee and out into
the starlit empty darkness of the Maidan, where presently he stumbled
upon a wooden bench under a tree. There, after a little, sleep fell upon
his amazement, and he lay unconscious for an hour or two, while the
breeze stole across the grass from the river, and the masthead lights
watched beside the city. He woke chilled and normal, and when he reached
the Mission House in College street his servant was surprised at the
unusual irritation of a necessary rebuke.




CHAPTER VI.


While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting for
Duff Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a notable
presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees crossed on the
bench furthest back in the corner obscurest of the Salvation Army
Headquarters in Bentinck street. It had become his accustomed place;
sitting there he had begun to feel like the adventurer under Niagara, it
was the only spot from which he could observe, try to understand, and
cope with the torrential nature of his passion. Nearer to the fair charm
of her presence in the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and the
sound of the big drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away. His
persistent refusal of a better place also profited him in that it
brought to Ensign Sand and the other "officers" the divination that he
was one of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not
noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there,
a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came
round. After his first contribution Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual
interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the
fullest privacy of which she was capable. The gravity which the
gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the
"amount"; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount. Even
Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold away
from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional
allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they
fell he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness, to
visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four hours
he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them and her face,
they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the manner
of their intention. After the first quarter of an hour it is to be
feared Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of emotional
hypnotism. He recognised his situation plainly enough, and there was no
appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold for example could
properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.

On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through
other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience, which he meditated
mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was one quite adapted to
deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his
transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into. When
Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked
at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of
the room. She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he
almost immediately began to read his life, and it was because he thought
he had done this with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind
her that evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest,
with her _sari_ drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck
street, and said with directness, "I should like to come and see you.
When may I? Any time that suits you. Have you half an hour to spare
to-morrow?"

It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which she
welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory. Not the
frankness, though, or the touch of "Now we are getting to business,"
that stood somehow in her expression. She looked alert and pleased.

"You would like to have a little talk, wouldn't you?" she said. Her
manner took Lindsay a trifle aback, it suggested that she conferred this
privilege so freely. "To-morrow--let me see, we march in the morning,
and I have an open-air at four in the afternoon--the Ensign takes the
evening meeting. Yes, I could see you to-morrow about two or about
seven, after I get back from the Square." It was not unlike a
professional appointment.

Lindsay considered. "Thanks," he said, "I'll come at about seven--if you
are sure you won't be too exhausted to have me after such a day."

He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly reddened
at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta's road dust, and a
dry crack crept into the silver voice with which she said
matter-of-factly, "We are never too exhausted to attend to our Master's
business."

Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation, he looked gravely the
other way. "And the address?" he said.

"Almost next door--we all live within bugle-call. The entrance is in
Crooked lane. Anybody will tell you."

At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting. Arnold said "Thanks"
again and passed out--she seemed to be holding it for him--and picked
his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite. From
there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked
lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part
in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also
localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make
her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and
found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in
advance, to say that she had not expected him. "Friendly creature!" he
said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that
already there was one who guessed, who knew.

One gropes in Crooked lane after the lights of Bentinck street have done
all that can be expected of them. There are various things to avoid,
washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of
rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted
these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was
positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out; and the man showed
him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It
was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"[2] lived. There were
three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Arnold's trivial coin,
and one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho--it was
finished. Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the
landing to avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired
Miss Filbert's whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted
a cigar, disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and
a dirty shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At all events,
he had the information. Lindsay was to keep straight on; it was the
third story, "and a lovelie airie flat, too, sir, for this part of the
town." Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution and just missed
treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John's. At
the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the
side of a passage. The partition in which the door was came considerably
short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite
stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile
pattern. Lindsay dared no further, but lifted up his voice in the Indian
way to summon a servant. "_Qui hai!_"[3] he called; "_Qui hai!_"

[Footnote 2: Festival-making women.]

[Footnote 3: "Whoever is there!"]

He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a door
further down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura Filbert with
her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful picture. "Good
evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced. "Won't you come in?" She
clung to the handle until he had passed into the room, then she closed
the door after him. "I was expecting you," she said. "Mr. Harris, let me
make you acquainted with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."

Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cane-bottomed
chairs. He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's garb of
the Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been reading a
newspaper; he had a displeasing air of possession. At Laura's formula he
looked up and nodded without amiability, folded his journal the other
side out and returned to it.

"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a demon
of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt dumb. Nor
did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris. He crossed his legs in
greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible, looking at Laura, who
sat down like a third stranger, curiously detached from any sense of
hospitality.

"Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris," she said
pleasantly. "I guess you can tell him what to do about it as well as I
can."

"Oh!" Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word. "Is he?" said Mr.
Harris, without looking up from his paper. "Well, what I've got to say
on that subject I say at the evenin' meetin', which is a proper an' a
public place. He can hear it there any day of the week."

"I think I have already heard," remarked Lindsay, "what you have to
say."

"Then that's all right," said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon his
newspaper. He appeared to devour it. Laura looked from one to the other
of them and fell upon an expedient.

"If you'll excuse me," she said, "I'll just get you that bicycle story
you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take it with
you. The Ensign's got it," and she left the room. Lindsay glanced round
and promptly announced to himself that he could not come there again. It
was taking too violent an advantage. The pursuit of an angel does not
imply that you may trap her in her corner under the Throne. The place
was divided by a calico curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a
mosquito curtain--she slept in there. On the walls were all tender texts
about loving and believing and bearing others' burdens, interspersed
with photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic
eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras, Ceylon,
China. A little wooden table stood against the wall holding an album, a
Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an irrelevant Japanese doll
which seemed to stretch its absurd arms straight out in a gay little
ineffectual heathen protest. There was another more embarrassing table;
it had a coarse cloth and was garnished with a loaf and butter-dish, a
plate of plantains and a tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a
meal evidently impending. It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with
its core in Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room
looked up. "If you're here on private business," he said to Lindsay,
fixing his eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him,
"maybe you ain't aware that the Ensign"--he threw his head back in the
direction of the next room--"is the person to apply to. She's in command
here. Captain Filbert's only under her."

"Indeed?" said Lindsay. "Thanks."

"It ain't like it is in the Queen's army," Harris volunteered, still
searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eye could
permanently rest, "where, if you remember, ensigns are the smallest
officer we have."

"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, trying to
govern a deep and irritated frown.

"Maybe so. This Army don't pretend to pattern very close on the
other--not in discipline, anyhow," said Mr. Harris with ambiguity. "But
you'll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can for you.
She's a hard-working officer."

A sharp wail smote the air from a point suspiciously close to the lath
and canvas partition on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and
steps in the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mr.
Sand seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at which Mr. Harris
shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed into silence, looking
sternly at an advertisement. The air was full of their mutual annoyance,
although Duff tried to feel amused. They were raging as primitively,
under the red flannel shirt and the tan-coloured waistcoat with white
silk spots, as two cave-men on an Early British coast; their only
sophistication lay in Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he
ought to find this person humourous. Then Laura came back and resolved
the situation.

"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have all
enjoyed it. Thank you very much." There was in it the oddest mixture of
the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the
book, had no alternative.

"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went stumbling at the door.

"Mr. Harris," said Laura, equably, "found salvation about a month ago.
He is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage works
here. He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in
in the evening."

"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay.

"He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find
himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he
wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign
doesn't think there's any objection."

Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cane-bottomed chairs, her
_sari_ drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native
dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated
ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with
anything else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing,
Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him
seemed to resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something
disappointingly thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a
unit in a glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her
knowledge or her desire. This brought him, with something like a shock,
to a sense of how far he had depended on her interest for his soul's
sake to introduce her to a wider view of him.

"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly, it
seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile.
"Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"

"There are some things I should certainly like you to know," replied
Lindsay; "but you can't think how difficult"----he glanced at the lath
and plaster partition, but she, to whom publicity was a condition
salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no
interpretation for that.

"I know it's sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our
tongues."

The misunderstanding was almost absurd, but he saw only its
difficulties, knitting his brows.

"I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad," he said. "I
cannot be sure that you will even listen to it."

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