Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her
skirt, and struck out into the Maidan. It spread before her green where
the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and yellow in
the distance, where the light lay on the top of the withered grass. It
was like a great English park, with something of the village common,
only the trees, for the most part, made avenues over it, running an
arbitrary half-mile this way or that, with here and there a group dotted
about in the open; and the brimming tank-ponds were of India and of
nowhere else in the world. The sun was dipping behind the masts that
showed where the straight border of the river ran, and the shadows of
the pipals and the banyans were richly purple over the roads. The light
struck on the stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee
which made behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push
them back, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the
Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether. Calcutta, the
teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that chaste
frontage and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here cattle
grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles of the
trees. Calcutta, the capital, indeed, was superimposed; one felt that
always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the air among the
tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space and
indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What
persisted, then, under the span of the sky was the old India of rich
traditions, and a thinking bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the
evening to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the
rim of the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction and
fabrication.
The grass was crisp and pleasant. Hilda deliberately sought its solace
for her feet, letting their pressure linger. All day long the sun had
been drawing the sweetness and the life out of it, and now the air had a
sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of harvests. The crickets had
been at it since five o'clock, and though the city rose not half a mile
across the grass, it was the crickets she heard and listened to. In
making private statements of things, the crickets offered a chorus of
agreement and they never interrupted. Not that she had much to consider,
poor girl, which lent itself to a difference of opinion. One might have
thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own, not badly
equipped. She had all the arguments--which is like saying all the
arms--and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical
outcome of these things had been an intimate object-lesson in the small
value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and
made it more piquant. She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence
at the result, because it had always admitted the existence of
dominating facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only
the absurd unexpectedness of coming across one herself. One might think
round such a fact and talk round it--there were less exquisite
satisfactions--but it was not to be cowed or abated, and in the end the
things one said were only words.
Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through her
veins, with her blood, warm and free. The primitive things she saw
helped her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her profound
sweet presciences. A coolie woman, carrying a basket on her head,
stopped and looked at her with full, glistening eyes; they smiled at
each other and passed on. She found herself upon a narrow path, worn
smooth by other barefooted coolie-folk; it made in its devious way
toward the rich mists where the sun had gone down and Hilda followed it,
breasting the glow and the colour and wide, flat expanse, as if in the
India of it there breathed something exquisitely sensuous and
satisfying. It struck sharp on her senses; she almost consciously
thanked heaven for such a responsive set of nerves. Always and
everywhere she was intensely conscious of what she saw, and of how she
saw it; and it was characteristic of her that she found in that saffron
February evening, spreading to a purple rim with wandering points of
colour in a soldier's coat or a coachman's turban, an atmosphere and a
_mise en scène_ for her own complication. She could take a tenderly
artistic view of that, more soothing a good deal than any result that
came of examining it in other lights. And she did, aware, with smiling
eyes, of how colourable, how dramatic it was.
Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome seemed
a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time for that.
For the present, there on the Maidan with the south wind, she took it
with her head thrown up, in her glad, free fashion, as something that
came in the way of life--the delightful way of life--with which it was
absurd to quarrel because of a slight inconvenience or incongruity,
things which helped, after all, to make existence fascinating.
A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem,
dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up and drew in the
crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes and drifted on
the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet. All India and
all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought
her, as she gave her senses up to it, a kind of dual perception of being
near the core, the throbbing centre of the world's meaning.
Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay. He hastened to meet her, in
his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that lay between
them, and gave transit to her senses from that other plane. They
encountered each other in full recognition of the happiness of the
accident, and he turned back with her as a matter of course. It was a
kind of fruition of all that light and colour and passive delight that
they should meet and take a path together, he at least was aware. Hilda
asked him if he was quite all right now, and he said "Absolutely" with a
shade of emphasis. She charged him with having been a remarkable case,
and he piled up illustrations of what he felt able to do in his
convalescence. There was something in the way he insisted upon his
restoration which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.
"And I hear I may congratulate you," she said. "You have got what you
wanted."
"Someone has told you," he retorted, "who is not friendly to it."
"On the contrary, someone who has given it the most cordial
support--Alicia Livingstone."
He mused upon this for an instant, as if it presented Alicia for the
first time under such an aspect.
"She has been immensely kind," he asserted, "but she wasn't at first. At
first she was hostile, like you, only that her hostility was different,
just as she is different. She had to be converted," he went on
hopefully, "but it was less difficult than I imagined. I think she takes
a kind of pride in conquering her prejudices, and being true to the real
breadth of her nature."
"I am sure she would like her nature to be broad. She might very well be
content that it is charming. And what is the difference between her
hostility and mine?"
"The main difference," Lindsay said, with a gay half round upon her, "is
that hers has sweetly vanished, while yours"--he made a dramatic
gesture--"walks between us."
"I know. I tried to stiffen her. I appealed to the worst in her on your
behalf. But it wasn't any use. She succumbed, as you say, to her nobler
instincts."
Hilda stabbed a great crisp fallen teak leaf with her parasol, and spent
the grimness of this in twirling it.
"One can so easily get an affair of one's own out of all
proportion--" Duff said. "And I should be sorry--do you really want me
to talk about this?"
"Don't be stupid. Of course."
He took her permission with plain avidity.
"Well, it grew plain to Miss Livingstone, as it will to everybody else
who knows or cares," he said; "I mean chiefly Laura's tremendous
desirability. Her beauty would go for something anywhere, but I don't
want to insist on that. What marks her even more is the wonderful purity
and transparency of her mind; one doesn't find it often now, women's
souls are so clouded with knowledge. I think that sort of thing appeals
especially to me because my own design isn't in the least esoteric. I'm
only a man. Then she was so ludicrously out of her element. A creature
like that should be surrounded by the softest refinement in her daily
life. That was my chance. I could offer her her place. It's not much to
counterbalance what she is, but it helps, roughly speaking, to equalise
matters."
Hilda looked at him with sudden critical interest, missing an emanation
from him. It was his enthusiasm. A cheerfulness had come upon him
instead. Also what he said had something categorical in it, something
crisp and arranged. He himself received benefit from the consideration
of it, and she was aware that if this result followed, her own
"conversion" was of very secondary importance.
"So!" she said meditatively, as they walked.
"After it happens, when it is an accomplished fact, it will be so
plainly right that nobody will think twice about it," Duff went on in an
encouraged voice. "It's odd how one's ideas materialise. I want her
drawing-room to be white and gold, with big yellow silk cushions."
"When its it to happen?"
"Beginning of next cold weather--in not quite a year."
"Ah! then there will be time. Time to get the white and gold furniture.
It wouldn't be my taste quite. Is it Alicia's?"
"It's our own at present, Laura's and mine. We have talked it over
together. And I don't think she would ask Miss Livingstone. In matters
of taste women are rather rivals, aren't they?"
"Oh, Lord!" Hilda exclaimed, and bit her lip. "Where is Miss Filbert
now?"
"At No. 10, Middleton street."
"With the Livingstones?"
"Is it so astonishing? Miss Livingstone has been most practical in her
kindness. I have gone back, of course, to my perch at the club, and
Laura is to stay with them until she sails."
"She sails?"
"In the _Sutlej_, next Wednesday. She's got three months' leave. She
really hasn't been well, and her superior officer is an accommodating
old sort. She resigns at home, and I'm sending her to some dear old
friends of mine. She hasn't any particular people of her own. She's got
a notion of taking lessons of some kind--perfectly unnecessary, but if
it amuses her--during the summer. And of course she will have to get her
outfit together."
"And in December," said Hilda, "she comes out and marries you."
"Not a Calcutta wedding. I meet her in Madras and we come up together."
"Ideal," said Hilda; "and is Calcutta much scandalised?"
"Calcutta doesn't know. If I had had my way in the beginning I fancy I
would have trumpeted it. But now I suppose it's wiser--why should one
offer her up at their dinner-tables?"
"Especially when they would make so little of her," said Hilda absently.
The coolie-track had led them into the widest part of the Maidan, where
it slopes to the south, and the huts of Bowanipore. There was nothing
about them but a spreading mellowness and the baked turf under-foot. The
cloudy yellow twilight disclosed that a man little way off was a man and
not a horse but did hardly more. "I'm tired," Hilda said suddenly, "let
us sit down," and sank comfortably on the fragrant grass. Lindsay
dropped beside her and they sat for a moment in silence. A cricket
chirped noisily a few inches from them. Hilda put out her hand in that
direction and it ceased. Sounds wandered across from the encircling
city, evening sounds, softened in their vagrancy, and lights came out,
topaz points in the level glow.
"She is making a tremendous sacrifice," Lindsay went on; "I seem to see
its proportions more clearly now."
Hilda glanced at him with infinite kindness. "You are an awfully good
sort, Duff," she said, "I wish you were out of Asia."
"Oh, a magnificent sort." The irony was contemplative, as if he examined
himself to see.
"You can make her life delightful to her. The sacrifice will not endure,
you know."
"One can try. It will be worth doing." He said it as if it were a maxim,
and Hilda, perceiving this, had no answer ready. As they sat without
speaking, the heart of the after-glow drew away across the river and
left something chill and empty in the spaces about them. Things grew
hard of outline, the Maidan became an unlimited expanse of commonplace,
grey and unyielding; the lines of gas-lamps on the roads came very near.
"What a difference it makes!" Lindsay exclaimed, looking after the
vanished light, "and how suddenly it goes!"
Hilda turned concerned eyes upon him, and then looked with keen sadness
far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said with
apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She
made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if
the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined, he
kept her hand while he said, "You will always represent something in
mine. I can depend upon you--I shall know that you are there."
"Yes," she said, sincerely, "Yes, indeed;" and it seemed to her that he
looked thin and intense as he stood beside her--unless it was only
another effect of atmosphere. "After all," she said, as they turned to
walk back again across the withered grass, "your fever has taken a good
deal out of you."