Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that
offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday
night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise Party"--he
sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the
hills--had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9:30. Prices as
usual," with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight. In
the Athenian Theatre--it had a tin roof, and nobody could hear the
orchestra when it rained--the Midgets were presenting the earlier
collaborations of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed
under nine years of age. Colonel Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been
in full blast on the Maidan for a week. It became a great occidental
circus when Colonel Pike married the proprietress. They were both
staying at the Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a
relict through cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do
with, to say nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office.
And certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while
hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably
imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold
weather. There was the mystic bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a
pipal tree, which gave you, by an arrangement of looking-glasses, the
most unaccountable sensations for one rupee; and a signboard cried "Know
Thyself!" where a physiological display lurked from the eyes of the
police behind a perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri
Chandra's Gully. Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition,
sighed to think how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the
Imperial Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape,
and pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that rolled
his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee. He thought bitterly,
standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims of legitimate
drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of wheels and the
flashing of lamps on the way to accord another season's welcome to Jimmy
Finnigan. "I might've learned this town well enough by now," he
reflected, "to know that a bally minstrel show's about the size of it."
Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan's art of the large red lips and the
twanging banjo; his thought was scornful rather than envious. He
aspired, moreover, to be known as the pilot of stars, at least in the
incipience of their courses, to be taken seriously by association, since
nature had arranged that he never could be on his intrinsic merits. His
upper lip was too short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while
the perpetual bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave
him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully
misunderstood. The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection
with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed him, coming down
with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke in the uttermost ends
of the earth, with a strong inclination to bring the cause of that
misfortune before the Consular Courts. They seldom succeeded in this
design, since Llewellyn was usually able to prove to them in advance
that it would be fruitless and expensive, but the paths of Eastern
capitals were strewn with his compromises, in Japanese yen, Chinese
dollars, Indian rupees, for salaries which no amount of advertising
could wheedle into the box-office. When the climax came Llewellyn
usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in
pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding
statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the
public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a
number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting
in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda water. "I'm in hospital,"
Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and I'm d---- glad of it."--he
always insisted on the oath going in, it appealed so sympathetically to
the domiciled Englishman grown cold to superiority--"for, upon my soul,
I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the
talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line
as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a
ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price.
Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton--she had a small inalienable income, and
they were really married, though they preferred for some inexplicable
reason to be thought guilty of more improper behaviour--would depart in
another direction full of gratification for the present and of
confidence for the future. Llewellyn usually made a parting statement to
the newspapers that, although his aims were unalterably high, he was not
above profiting by experience, and that next season he could be relied
upon to hit the taste of the community with precision. This year, as we
know, he had made a serious effort by insisting that at least a
proportion of his ladies and gentlemen should be high kickers, and equal
to an imitation, good enough for the Orient, of most things done by the
illustrious Mr. Chevalier. But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected
_The Offence of Galilee_ to open with tells its own tale. He was
convinced, but not converted, and he stood there with his little legs
apart, chewing a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the
chaste decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one
more chance to redeem itself.
It began to look as if Calcutta were not wholly irredeemable. A
ticca-gharry deposited a sea captain; three carriages arrived in
succession; an indefinite number of the Duke's Own, hardly any of them
drunk, filed in to the rupee seats under the gallery; an overflow from
Jimmy Finnigan, who could no longer give his patrons even standing room.
When this occurred, Llewellyn turned and swung indifferently away in the
direction of the dressing-rooms. When Jimmy Finnigan closed his doors so
early there was no further cause for anxiety. Calcutta was abroad and
stirring, and would turn for amusement even to _The Offence of Galilee_.
Eventually--that is, five minutes before the curtain rose--the
representatives of the leading Calcutta journals decided that they were
justified in describing the house as a large and fashionable audience.
The Viceroy had taken a box and sent an Aide-de-Camp to sit in it, also
a pair of M.P.s from the North of England, whom he was expected to
attend to in Calcutta, and the governess. The Commander-in-Chief had not
been solicited to be present, the theatrical season demanding an economy
in such personalities if they were to go round; but a Judge of the High
Court had a party in the front row, and a Secretary to the Bengal
Government sat behind him. To speak of unofficials, there must have been
quite forty lakhs of tea and jute and indigo in the house, very genial
and prosperous, to say nothing of hides and seeds, and the men who sold
money and bought diamonds with the profits, which shone in their wives'
hair. A duskiness prevailed in the bare arms and shoulders; much of the
hair was shining and abundant, and very black. A turn of the head showed
a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy
mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent
and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote
motherhood of the zenana and the origin of the sun. An audience of
fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars--the evening was warm under
the gas-lights--sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself. Not an
old woman in it from end to end, hardly a man turned fifty, and those
who were had the air and looked to have the habits of twenty-five--an
audience that might have got up and stretched itself but for good
manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait for the
rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an atmosphere of
affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with imperious chins, the
use of quick orders in a world of personal superiority.
Thus the stalls--they were spindling cane-bottomed chairs--and the
boxes, in one of which the same spindling cane-bottomed chairs
supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss
Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other people.
The Duke's Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with all the flotsam
and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the lookout for any offensive
personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting freely. Here, too,
was an ease of shoulder and a freedom from the cares of life--at a
venture the wives were taking in washing in Brixton, and the children
sent to Board School at the expense of the nation. And in a climate like
this it was a popular opinion that a man must either enjoy himself or
commit suicide.
The Sphinx on the crooked curtain looked above and beyond them all. It
was a caricature of the Sphinx, but could not confine her gaze.
Hilda's audience that night knew all about _The Offence of Galilee_ from
the English illustrated papers. The illustrated papers had a great way
of ministering to the complacency of Calcutta audiences; they contained
photographs of almost every striking scene, composed at the leisure of
the cast, but so vividly supplemented with descriptions of the leading
lady's clothes that it hardly required any effort of the imagination to
conjure up the rest. The postures and the chief garments of Pilate--he
was eating pomegranates when the curtain rose and listening to scandal
from his slave maidens about Mary Magdalene--were at once recognised in
their resemblance to those of the photographs, and in the thrill of this
satisfaction any discrepancies in cut and texture passed generally
unobserved. A silent curiosity settled upon the house, half reverent, as
if with the Bible names came thronging a troop of sacred associations to
cluster about personalities brusquely torn out of church, and people
listened for familiar sentences with something like the composed gravity
with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson. But
as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves
without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and
a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to
note the breaking up of this sentiment. It was plain, after all, that no
standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. The relief
was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe at
him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint
inclination to be amused. It was to be a play evidently like any other
play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar appeals. It is
doubtful whether this idea was critically present to any one but Stephen
Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance offered
them, and leaned back in their chairs with the usual patient
acknowledgment that one mustn't expect too much of a company that found
it worth while to come to Calcutta. The house grew submissive and
stolid, but one could see half-awakened prejudices sitting in the
dress-circle. The paper-chasing Secretary said to the most intelligent
of his party that on the whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting
that the preference belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with a
notable lady novelist; and the most intelligent--it was Mrs.
Barberry--replied that it did seem strange. The depths under the gallery
were critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile
and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank
into the furthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's box, and knew
all the misery of outrage. Pilate and the slave-maidens, Pilate's fat
wife and an unspeakably comic centurion, offered as yet hardly more than
a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole performance was already
projected upon Arnold's suffering imagination. This, then, was what
Patullo had done with it. But what other, he asked himself in quiet
anger, could Patullo have been expected to do--the fellow he remembered?
Arnold tilted his chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre
brows, at the opposite wall. He looked once at the door, but some spirit
of self-torture kept him in his seat. If so much offence could be made
with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred story, what
sacrilege might not be committed with the divine personalities
concerned--with Our Lord and His Mother? He remembered, with the touch
of almost physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two
pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of
surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the
trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source of
Patullo's intolerable inspiration. Certain muscles felt responsive at
the thought of Patullo which Arnold had forgotten he possessed; it was
so seldom that a missionary priest, even of athletic traditions, came in
contact with anybody who required to be kicked.
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 Cæsar, 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.