I find myself wondering whether Calcutta would have found anything very
exquisitely amusing in the satisfactions which exchanged themselves
between Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady and the Reverend Stephen
Arnold, had if been aware of them, and I conclude reluctantly that it
would not. Reluctantly because such imperviousness argues a lack of
perception, of _flair_, in directions which any continental centre would
recognise as vastly tickling, regrettable in a capital of such vaunted
sophistication as that which sits beside the Hooghly. It may as well be
shortly admitted, however, that to stir Calcutta's sense of comedy you
must, for example, attempt to corner, by shortsightedness or faulty
technical equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from
England to assume official duties, you must take a larger view of your
dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit. For the sex that does
not hunt jackals it is easier--you have only to be a little frivolous
and Calcutta will invent for you the most side-shaking nickname, as in
the case of three ladies known in a viceroyalty of happy legend as the
World, the Flesh and the Devil. I should be sorry to give the impression
that Calcutta is therefore a place of gloom. The source of these things
is perennial, and the noise of laughter is ever in the air of the Indian
capital. Between the explosions, however, it is natural enough that the
affairs of a priest of College street and an actress of no address at
all should slip unnoticed, especially as they did not advertise it.
Stephen mostly came, on afternoons when there was no rehearsal, to tea.
He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts which answered fairly well
the purposes of a sense of humour, and nobody could question hers; it
operated obscurely to keep them in the house.
She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been sent to her to
take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of beauty,
although she mentioned herself that he took it with a difference, a vast
temperamental difference which she was aware of not having yet quite
sounded. The depths of his faith, of course--there she could only scan
and hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did not often find
herself, away from which, indeed, he sometimes gently guided her. The
atmospheres of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world, and
it was here that Hilda looked when she would make him a parallel for
Lindsay, and here that she found her measure of disappointment. He
warmed himself and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and
she was not, on the whole, the poorer by any exchange they made, but she
was sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between
them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the flavour
of adventure. She found herself inclined--and the experience was new--to
make an effort for a reward which was problematical and had to be
considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin and hesitating hand
under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious, concentrated quality and a
strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also
the impression--was it too fantastic--of words carried over a medium, an
invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the
way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running
with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to
one's idea. But the comparison was subtly irritating, and after a time
she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to
the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of Arnold's sex
than she would have thought it possible to be--one hardly paused to
consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would certainly
not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to Stephen
Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she was less
oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own. Perhaps it
is already evident that this was her grievance with life, when the joy
of if left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her
personal curves, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of
her and found her willing to perform: the fact that it meant more to
her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she
got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view except
the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these conditions--her
experience had not been upon that plan--but she bemoaned them with
sincerity as too fundamental, too all-pervading; one came upon them at
every turn, grinning in their pretty chains. It was absurd, she
construed, that a world of mankind and womankind with vastly interesting
possibilities should be so essentially subjected to a single end. So
primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour, and so
interfering--so horribly interfering! Personally she did not see herself
one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her defences; but the
necessity of using them was matter for complaint when existence might
have been so delightful a boon without it, full of affinities and
communities in every direction. She had not, I am convinced, any of the
notions of a crusader upon this popular subject, nor may I portray her
either shocked or revolted, only rather bored, being a creature whom it
was unkind to hamper; and she would have explained quite in these simple
terms the reason why Stephen Arnold's saving neutrality of temperament
was to her a pervasive charm of his society.
She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not classify
him, that she had never known any one like him before; and there was in
this no doubt a vague perception that the confession showed a limitation
of experience on her part for which he might be inclined to call her to
account, since cultured young Oxonians with an altruistic bias, if they
do not exactly abound, are still often enough to be discovered if one
happens to belong to the sphere which they haunt, they and their ideals.
Not that any such consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the
disabilities of her own. She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching
her lips, and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance
following her into its queer by-ways--her sphere's--full of spangles and
lime-light, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival artistry.
There was a fascination in bringing him out of his remoteness near to
those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do. This
remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear
by the most indefinite signs possible that he saw what she saw, peering
over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle outside found it
enough.
He was there when she came back from the _Chronicle_ office, patient
under the blue umbrellas; he had brought her a book, and they had told
him she would not be long in returning. He had gone so far as to order
tea for her, and it was waiting with him. "Make it," she commanded; "why
haven't you had some already?" and while he bent over the battered
Britannia metal spout she sank into the nearest seat and let her hat
make a frame for her face against the back of it. She was too tired, she
said, to move, and her hands lay extended, one upon each arm of her
chair, with the air of being left there to be picked up at her
convenience. Arnold, over the tea-pot, agreed that walking in Calcutta
was an insidious pleasure--one gathered a lassitude--and brought her
cup. She looked at him for an instant as she took it.
"But I am not too tired to hear what you have on your mind," she said.
"Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his convictions?
Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the roof after all?"
"You get these things so out of perspective," Stephen said, "that I
don't think I should tell you if they were so. But they're not. Kally
Nath is to be baptised to-morrow. We are certain to get our oratory."
"I am very glad," Hilda interrupted. "When one prays for so long a time
together it must be better to have fresh air. It will certainly be
better for Brother Colquhoun. He seems to have such a weak chest."
"It will be better for us all." Arnold seemed to reflect, across his
tea-cup, how much better it would be. Then he added, "I saw Lindsay last
night."
"Again? And----"
"I think it is perfectly hopeless. I think he is making way."
"Sickening! I hoped you would not speak to him again. After all--another
man--it's naturally of no use!"
"I spoke as a priest!"
"Did he swear at you?"
"Oh dear no! He was rather sympathetic. And I went very far. But I could
get him to see nothing--to feel nothing."
"How far did you go?"
"I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit
sacrilege. He seemed to think he could make it up to her."
"If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed--you don't
suspect the irony in it," Hilda said. "Pray who is to make it up to
him?"
"I suppose there is that point of view."
"I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you. I had her
here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before
him. I succeeded, too--he gave me the most uncomfortable looks--but I
might as well have let it alone. The great purpose of nature," Hilda
went on, putting down her cup, "reasonable beings in their normal state
would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary
insanities. And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be
permanent. That's a platitude, I know," she added, "but it's
irresistibly suggested."
Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of the
room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the
vision of a drawing-room in Addison gardens, occupied by his mother and
sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the
moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed
sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if,
indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the
wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the
qualm--it was really something like that--which the wide sweep of her
cynicism brought him.
"From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He seemed
determined enough, but depressed and not hopeful. I fancied she was
being upheld--I thought she would easily pull through. Indeed, I wasn't
sure that there was any great temptation. Somebody must be helping him."
"The Devil, no doubt," Hilda replied, concisely; "and with equal
certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone."
Arnold gave her a look of surprise. "Surely not my cousin!" he
protested. "She can't understand."
"Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to _her_! I think she understands. I
think she's only too tortuously intelligent."
Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. "May I ask----?" he began
formally.
"Oh, yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely
self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay
herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it, to tell you such a thing
about a member of your family?" she went on, at Arnold's blush; "but you
asked me, you know. And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring
this precious union about. I think she is taking a kindergarten method
with the girl--having her there constantly, and showing her little
scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away.
People in Alicia's condition have no sense of immorality."
"That makes it all the more painful," said Arnold; but the interest in
his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was not quite
a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication between Alicia
and Lindsay. He sat for a moment without saying more, covering his eyes
with his hand.
"Why should you care so much?" Hilda asked gently. "You are at the very
antipodes of her sect. You can't endorse her methods--you don't trust
her results."
"Oh, all that! It's of the least consequence." He spoke with a curious,
governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes. "It's seeing
another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that held, as best it
could, a ray from the source. It's another glimpse of the strength of
the tide--terrible. It's a cruel hint that one lives above it in the
heaven of one's own hopes, by some mere blind accident. To have set
one's feeble hand to the spiritualising of the world, and to feel the
possibility of that----"
"I see," said Hilda, and perhaps she did. But his words oppressed her.
She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and went to a
promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat. She was refreshed and
vivified--she wanted to talk of the warm world. She let a decent
interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his hand from his
eyes. Even then, to make the transition easier, she said, "You ought to
be lifted up to-day, if you are going to baptise Kally Nath to-morrow."
"The Brother Superior will do it. And I don't know--I don't know. The
young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes over to
us----"
"The young woman he is to marry! Oh, my dear and reverend friend! _Avec
ces gens la!_ I have had a most amusing afternoon," she went on,
quickly. "I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your halo." She was
safe with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at any imputation of
saintship. He held himself a person of broad indulgences, and would
point openly to his consumption of tea cakes. But this afternoon a miasm
hung over him. Hilda saw it and bent herself, with her graphic recital,
to dispel it, perceived it thicken and settle down upon him, and went
bravely on to the end. Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair lived and
spoke before him. It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread over a
matinée.
"And that is the sort of thing you store up and value," he said, when
she had finished. "These persons will add to your knowledge of life."
"Extremely," she replied to all of it.
"I suppose they will in their measure. But personally I could wish you
had not gone. Your work has no right to make such demands."
"Be reasonable," she said, flushing. "Don't talk as if personal dignity
were within the reach of everybody. It's the most expensive of
privileges. And nothing to be so very proud of--generally the product of
somebody else's humiliations, handed down. But the humiliations must
have been successful, handed down in cash. My father drove a cab and
died in debt. His name was Murphy. I shall be dignified some day--some
day! But you see I must make it possible myself, since nobody has done
it for me."
"Well, then, I'll alter my complaint. Why should you play with your
sincerity?"
"I didn't play with it," she flashed; "I abandoned it. I am an actress."
They often permitted themselves such candours; to all appearance their
discussion had its usual equable quality, and I am certain that Arnold
was not even aware of the tension upon his nerves. He fidgeted with the
tassel of his ceinture, and she watched his moving fingers. Presently
she spoke, quietly, in a different key.
"I sometimes think," she said, "of a child I knew in the other years.
She had the simplest nature, the finest instincts. Her impulses, within
her little limits, were noble--she was the keenest, loyalist little
person; her admirations rather made a fool of her. When I look at the
woman as she is now I think the uses of life are hard, my friend--they
are hard."
He missed the personal note; he took what she said on its merits as an
illustration.
"And yet," he replied, "they can be turned to admirable purpose."
"I wonder!" Hilda exclaimed brightly. She had turned down the leaf of
that mood. "But we are not cheerful--let us be cheerful. For my part, I
am rejoicing as I have not rejoiced since the first of December. Look at
this!"
She opened a small black leather bag and poured money out of it, notes
and currency, into her lap.
"Is it a legacy?"
"It's pay," she cried, with pleasure dimpling about her lips. "I have
been paid--we have all been paid! It's so unusual--it makes me feel
quite generous. Let me see. I'll give you this, and this, and this"--she
counted into her open palm ten silver rupees--"all those I will give you
for your mission. _Prends!_" and she clinked them together and held them
out to him.
He had risen to go, and his face looked grey and small. Something in him
had mutinied at the levity, the quick change of her mood. He could only
draw into his shell; doubtless he thought that a legitimate and
inoffensive proceeding.
"Thanks, no," he said, "I think not. We desire people's prayers, rather
than their alms."
He went away immediately, and she glossed over his scandalous behaviour
and said farewell to him as usual, in spite of the unusual look of
consciousness in her eyes. Then she went to her room and deliberately
loosened her garments and lay down upon her bed, first to sob like that
little child she remembered, and afterwards to think, until the world
came and knocked at her door and bade her come out of herself and earn
money.