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
Céline at her--with such a foundation to work upon, what could Céline
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 glacée. "I'm not
old and I'm not grotesque."
"No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."
"I _beg_ your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone out.
Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're damp."
"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette between
her lips, "but in excellent order, really." She took it between her
first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end,
leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils. It
was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss
Howe wouldn't do it again. But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's
way of doing it.
"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said, contemplatively; "you're
young and beautiful." The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and
enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air. Alicia flushed ever so
little under it, but took it without wincing. She had less than the
common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something
quite different--a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.
"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there
was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be
dismissed between them.
"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia. She felt
delightfully terse and to the point.
"You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know
him well?"
Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of
them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would
have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.
"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said. Hilda had the sensation
of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.
She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette, crisped over
with grey, in its blackened calyx.
"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to
the rest of the people--bah, you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its
torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know,
the way pancreatic influences can be idealised--made to serve ennobling
ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different."
"Yes?" Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her,
the asking note was in the word.
"We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the
queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square to
look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it."
"A statue?"
"No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to
me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was and the performance.
She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all
colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come
from her hair or eyes or something. I almost expected to see her sail
away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended."
"It sounds most unusual," Alicia said, with a light smile. Her interest
was rather obviously curbed.
"It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one
doesn't go round the corner."
There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss
Livingstone's desire to be informed.
Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger bowl and waited.
The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke it herself.
"And I regret to say it was I who introduced them," she said.
"Introduced whom?"
"Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They met at
Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was disappointed,"
Hilda went on tranquilly, "because I would only lend it to her while she
was there."
"Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it. He is
always grateful to be amused."
"Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude. He is rather intense
about it. And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's
account. Did I say so?" They were simple, amiable words, and their
pertinence was far from insistent: but Alicia's crude blush--everything
else about her was perfectly worked out--cried aloud that it was too
sharp a pull up. "Perhaps, though," Hilda hurried on with a pang, "we
generalise too much about the men."
What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no
generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant brought
her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider. The card saved
her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then
exclaimed, "My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a reverend--a Clarke Mission
priest, and he will come straight in here. What shall we do with our
cigarettes?"
Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was developing.
"Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it? Drown the
corpse in here, and he won't guess it belongs to you." She pushed the
finger bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant went into it.
"Don't ask me to sacrifice mine," she added, and there was no time for
remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting itself at the door.
"Pray may I come in?" he called from behind the portière.
Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of
the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It
reminded her of a man she knew who "did" curates beautifully. Arnold
walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it amused her
to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would bless it.
"You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee." He flavoured what he
said, and made it pretty, like a woman. "Let me confess at once, that is
what brought me." He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality and
self-sacrifice even in that. "It is coffee time, isn't it?" Then he
turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the
luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been to
him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a
little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical
attitudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she
could hardly have expected him to exclaim, "Whom have we here?" with
upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his
self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet
that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all
as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she
decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and
Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to
tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would
represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their
lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really
hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the
shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went
to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness
stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced
her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too
general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on
smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of
insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found
that he had forgotten it.
"Even in College street you have heard of Miss Howe," Alicia said, and
the negative very readable in Arnold's silent brow brought Hilda a
flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.
"I don't think the posters carry us as far as College street," she said,
"but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with Mr.
Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't help
knowing all about me, the letters are so large." The bounty of her
well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity;
it was one of those least of little things which are enough.
Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the
armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism. He glanced away again quickly, and
looked at the floor as he said he feared they were terribly out of it in
College street, for which, however, he had evidently no apology to
offer. He continued to look at the floor with a careful air, as if it
presented points pertinent to the situation. Hilda felt herself--it was
an odd sensation--too sunny upon the nooked, retiring current that
flowed in him. He might have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that
Alicia made, but she was aware that he did not, that he was struggling
through her strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her. He
stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled as if
he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked, making light
accusations against the rigours of the Mission House, complaining of her
cousin that he was altogether given over to bonds and bands, that she
personally would soon cease to hold him in affection at all; she saw so
little of him it wasn't really worth while.
This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her
pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other end
of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the firm,
lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.
"If I could found a monastic order," Hilda said, "one of the rules
should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times a
year." She spoke with a kind of grave brightness: it was difficult to
know whether she was altogether in jest.
"There would be a secession all over the place," Arnold responded, with
his repressed smile. "You would get any number of probationers; I wonder
whether you would keep them!"
"During that week," Hilda went on, "they should be compelled to dine and
dance every night, to read a 'Problem' novel every morning before
luncheon, to marry and be given in marriage, and to go to all the
variety entertainments. Think of the austere bliss of the return to the
cloisters! All joy lies in a succession of sensations, they say. Do you
remember how Lord Ormont arranged his pleasures? Oh, yes, my brotherhood
would be popular, as soon as it was understood."
Alicia hurried in with something palliating--she could remember
flippancies of her own that had been rebuked--but there was no sigh or
token of disapproval in Arnold's face. What she might have observed
there, if she had been keen enough in vision, was a slight
disarrangement, so to speak, of the placid priestly mask, and something
like the original undergraduate looking out from beneath.
Hilda began to put on her gloves. The left one gaped at two finger-ends;
she buttoned it with the palm thrown up and outward, as if it were the
daintiest spoil of the Avenue de l'Opéra.
"Not yet!" Alicia cried.
"Thanks, I must. To-night is our last full rehearsal, and I have to
dress the stage for the first act before six o'clock. And after pulling
all that furniture about, I shall want an hour or two in bed."
"You! But it's monstrous. Is there nobody else?"
"I wouldn't let anybody else," Hilda laughed. "Don't forget, please,
that we are only strolling players, odds and ends of people, mostly from
the Antipodes. Don't confound our manners and customs with anything
you've heard about the Lyceum. Good-bye. It has been charming. Good-bye,
Mr. Arnold."
But Alicia held her hand. "The papers say it is to be _The Offence of
Galilee_, after all," she said.
"Yes. Hamilton Bradley is all right again, and we've found a pretty fair
local Judas--amateur. We couldn't possibly put it on without Mr.
Bradley. He takes the part of"--Hilda glanced at the hem of the
listening priestly robe--"of the chief character, you know."
"That was the great Nonconformist success at home last year, wasn't it?"
Arnold asked; "Leslie Patullo's play? I knew him at Oxford. I can't
imagine--he's a queer chap to be writing things like that."
"It works out better than you--than one might suppose," Hilda returned,
moving toward the door. "Some of the situations are really almost novel,
in spite of all your centuries of preaching." She sent a disarming smile
with that, looking over her shoulder in one of her most effective
hesitations, one hand holding back the portière.
"And next week?" cried Alicia.
"Oh, next week we do _L'Amourette de Giselle_--Frank Golding's re-vamp.
Good-bye! Good-bye!"
"I wonder very much what Patullo has done with _The Offence of
Galilee_," Arnold said, after she had gone.
"Come and see, Stephen. We have a box, and there will be heaps of room.
It's--suitable, isn't it?"
"Oh, quite."
"Then dine with us--the Yardleys are coming--and go on. Why not?"
"Thanks, very much indeed. It is sure to reward one. I think I shall be
able to give myself that pleasure."
Arnold made a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed, became
a cup of tea; and his talk, while he staid, seemed to suffer less from
the limitations of his Order than it usually did. He was fluent and
direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more than his prayers, that
his glance at the world had still a speculation in it; and when he went
away, he left Alicia with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring
a vague inward corollary upon her day--
"It pays! It pays!"