"Oh, her gift!" said Alicia Livingstone. "It is the lowest, isn't it--in
the scale of human endowment? Mimicry."
Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned her
eyes and her delicate chin toward Duff Lindsay with the protest.
Lindsay's cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if
they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.
"Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn't interpret. He's
a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen
mask. The actress takes a different rank. This one does, anyway."
"You're mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys," remarked
Surgeon-Major Livingstone.
"Mere imitators!" cried Mrs. Barberry.
Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her. She smiled upon their
energy, and, so to speak, disappeared. It was one of her little ways,
and since it left seeming conquerors on her track nobody quarrelled with
it.
"I've met them in London," she said. "Oh, I remember one hot little
North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes--and they were
always disappointing. There seemed to be, somehow, no basis--nothing to
go upon."
She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful,
deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were unanimous in
calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily refined. That
was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and say; it will
do to go on with. From the way Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he
might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only to the
somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens
to find out anything at all.
"You found that they had no selves," he said, and the manner of his
words was encouraging and provocative. His proposition was obscured to
him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her
comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him. "But Miss
Hilda Howe has one."
"Is she a lady?" asked Mrs. Barberry.
"I don't know. She's an individual. I prefer to rest my claim for her on
that."
"Your claim to what?" trembled upon Miss Livingstone's lips, but she
closed them instead and turned her head again to listen to Mrs.
Barberry. The turns of Alicia's head had a way of punctuating the
conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and
relief.
"I saw her in _A Woman of Honour_, last cold weather," Mrs. Barberry
said; "I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from the
Fort, and I said, 'Never again!' Fortunately the girls were just out,
and not one of them understood, but those poor boys didn't know where to
look! And no more did I. So disgustingly real."
Alicia's eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger, and a
little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling, hovered about her
lips.
"I was in England last year," she said; "I--I saw _A Woman of Honour_ in
London. What could possibly be done with it by an Australian scratch
company in a Calcutta theatre! Imagination halts."
"Miss Howe did something with it," observed Mr. Lindsay. "That and one
or two other things carried one through last cold weather. One supported
even the gaieties of Christmas week with fortitude, conscious that there
was something to fall back upon. I remember I went to the State ball,
and cheerfully."
"That's saying a good deal, isn't it?" commented Dr. Livingstone,
vaguely aware of an ironical intention. "By Jove, yes."
"Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn't he?" Mrs. Barberry said. "Such a
magnificent head. I adore him in Shakespeare."
"He knows the conventions, and uses them with security," Lindsay
replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air,
demanded: "Is the story true?"
"The story of their relations? I suppose there are fifty. One of them
is."
Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a
reminiscence of amateur theatricals. "Their relations!" she murmured to
Dr. Livingstone. "What awful things to talk about."
"The story I mean," Alicia explained, "is to the effect that Mr.
Bradley, who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when he
met this girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her passion
for her art--I mean, of course, her affections----"
"My dear girl, we know what you mean," cried Mrs. Barberry, entering a
protest, as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.
"And precisely the reverse happened."
"One imagines it was something like that," Lindsay said.
"Oh, did she know about the bet?" cried Mrs. Barberry.
"That's as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man," Lindsay
contributed again.
"Tables turned, eh? Dare say it served him right," remarked Dr.
Livingstone. "If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
Barberry, we ought to be off."
"He is going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with
enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught it
two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear of him?
Good-bye, you nice thing,"--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--"Good-bye,
Mr. Lindsay. Fancy a live bacillus from Hong Kong! I should like it
better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still--good-bye."
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."