Only the Sphinx confronted them, after all, when they arrived at the
theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent
her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain;
Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the front of the box.
Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows, which were assisting her
a good deal with the house in exploring and being explored, enabling
Colonel John Cummins, who sat by her side, to observe how very perfect
and adorable the cut of her bodice was. Since Colonel Cummins was
accustomed to say in moments when his humour escaped his discretion,
that there was more in a good fit than meets the eye, the _rôle_ of Lady
Dolly's elbows could hardly be dismissed as unimportant. Moreover, the
husband attached to the elbows belonged to the Department of which
Colonel John was the head, so that they rested, one may say, upon a very
special plane.
Alicia disturbed it with the necessity of taking Colonel Cummins' place,
which Lady Dolly accepted with admirable spirit, assuring the usurper,
with the most engaging candour, that she simply ought never to be seen
without turquoises. "Believe it or not as you like, but I like you
better every time I see you in that necklace." Lady Dolly clasped her
hands, with her fan in them, in the abandonment of her affection, and
"love you better" floated back and dispersed itself among the men.
Alicia smiled the necessary acknowledgment. All the women she knew made
compliments to her; it was a kind of cult among them. The men had
sometimes an air of envying their freedom of tongue. "Don't say that,"
she returned lightly, "or Herbert will never give me any diamonds." She,
too, looked her approval of Lady Dolly's bodice but said nothing. It was
doubtless precisely because she distained certain forms of feminine
barter that she got so much for nothing.
"And where," demanded Lady Dolly, in an electric whisper, "did you find
that dear, sweet little priest? Do introduce him to me--at least, bye
and bye, when I've thought of something to say. Let me see, wasn't it
Good Friday last week? I'll ask him if he had hot-cross buns--or do
people eat those on Boxing Day? Pancakes come in somewhere, if one could
only be sure!"
Stephen clung persistently to the back of the box. His senses were
filled for the moment by its other occupants, the men in the fresh
correctness of their evening dress, whose least gesture seemed to spring
from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front, a kind of
lustrous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to enjoy. They
were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed to proceed partly
from the usual sources and partly from their own personalities; he saw
them in a way which underlined their significance at every point. It
seemed to Stephen that in a manner he profaned this temple of what he
held to be poorest and cheapest in life, a paradox of which he was but
dimly aware in his dejection. A sharp impression of his physical
inferiority to the other men assailed him; his appreciation of their
muscular shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to
which he held failed to offer him a refuge. His eye wandered restlessly
as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing most present with
him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck of his cassock. He fixed
his attention presently in a climax of passive discomfort on the
curtain, where, unconsciously, his gaze crept with a subtle
interrogation in it to the wide eyeballs of the Sphinx.
The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production in the
middle of the week, and although the gallery and rupee seats under it
were nearly empty. The piece accounted for both. When Duff Lindsay said
at dinner that it wasn't "up to much," he spoke, I fancy, from the
nearest point of view he could take to that of the Order of St.
Barnabas. As a matter of fact, _The Victim of Virtue_ was up to a very
great deal, but its points were so delicate that one must have been
educated rather broadly to grasp them, which is again, perhaps, a
foolish contrariety of terms. At all events, they carried no appeal to
the theatre-goers from the sailing ships in the river or the regiments
in the fort, who turned as one man that night to Jimmy Finnigan.
Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect. He savoured
the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the _Saturday Review_;
he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the productions of this
particular playwright through that medium for a long time. They formed a
manifestation of the outer world fit enough to draw a glance of
speculation from the inner; their author was an acrobat of ideas.
Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes of the angels, yet we have the
habit of supposing that they sometimes look down upon us. It was thus,
if the parallel is not exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of
_The Victim of Virtue_. His attitude was quite taken before the
orchestra ceased playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism,
on the basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such
things. Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed
promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips, as it were, against the
rising of the curtain. He thought of Hilda separately, and he looked for
her upon the boards with the _naiveté_ of a desire to see the woman he
knew.
When finally he did see her she made before him a picture that was to
remain with him always as his last impression of an art from which in
all its manifestations on that night he definitely turned. From the
aigrette in her hair to the paste buckle on her shoe she was _mondaine_.
Her dress, of some indefinite, slight white material, clasped at the
waist with a belt that gave the beam of turquoises and the gleam of
silver, ministered as much to the capricious ideal of the moment as to
the lines and curves of the person it adorned. The set was the
inevitable modern drawing-room, and she sat well out on a sofa with her
hands, in long black gloves, resting stiffly, palm downward, on each
side of her. It was as if she pushed her body forward in an impulse to
rise: her rigid arms thrust her shoulders up a little and accented the
swell of her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato attitude. It expressed a
temperament, a character, fifty other things, but especially epitomised
the restraints and the licenses of a world of drawing-rooms. In that
first brief mute instant of disclosure she was all that she presently,
by voice and movement, proclaimed herself to be, so dazzling and
complete that Stephen literally blinked at the revelation. He made an
effort, for a moment or two, to pursue and detect the woman who had been
his friend; then the purpose of his coming gradually faded from his
mind, and he stood with folded arms and absorbed eyes watching the
other, the Mrs. Halliday on the sofa, setting about the fulfilment of a
purple destiny.
The play proceeded and Stephen did not move--did not wince. When Mrs.
Halliday, whose mate was exacting, exclaimed, "The greatest apostle of
expediency was St. Paul. He preached 'wives, love your husbands,'" he
even permitted himself the ghost of a smile. At one point he wished
himself familiar with the plot; it was when Hamilton Bradley came
jauntily on as Lord Ingleton, assuring Mrs. Halliday that immorality was
really only shortsightedness. Lady Dolly, in front, repeated Lord
Ingleton's phrase with ingenuous wonder. "I know it's clever," she
insisted, "but what does it mean? Now that other thing--what was
it?--'Subtract vice, and virtue is what is left'--that's an easy one.
Write it down on your cuff for me, will you, Colonel Cummins? I _shall_
be so sick if I forget it."
Stephen was perhaps the only person in the box quite oblivious of Lady
Dolly. He looked steadily over her animated shoulders at the play,
wholly involved in an effort which the author would doubtless have
resented, to keep its current and direction through the floating débris
of constrained sayings with which it was encumbered, to know in advance
whither it was carrying its Mrs. Halliday, and how far Lord Ingleton
would accompany. When Lord Ingleton paused, as it were, to beg four
people to "have nothing to do with sentiment--it so often leads to
conviction," and the house murmured its amusement, Arnold shifted his
shoulders impatiently. "How inconsistent," Lord Ingleton reproached Mrs.
Halliday a moment later, "to wear gloves on your hands and let your
thoughts go candid." Arnold turned to Duff. "There's no excuse for
that," he said, but Lindsay was hanging upon Hilda's rejoinder and did
not hear him.
At the end of the first act, where, after introducing Mrs. Halliday to
her husband's divorced first wife, Lord Ingleton is left rubbing his
hands with gratification at having made two such clever women "aware of
each other," Stephen found himself absolutely unwilling to discuss the
piece with the rest of the party. As he left the box to walk up and down
the corridor outside where it was cooler, he heard the voice of Colonel
Cummins lifted in further quotation: "'To be good _and_ charming--what a
sinful superfluity!' I'm sure nobody ever called you superfluous, Lady
Dolly," and was vividly aware of the advisability of taking himself and
his Order out of the theatre. He had not been gratified, or even from
any point appealed to. Hilda's production of Mrs. Halliday was so
perfect that it failed absolutely to touch him, almost to interest him.
He had no means of measuring or of valuing that kind of woman, the
restless brilliant type that lives upon its emotions and tilts at the
problems of its sex with a curious comfort in the joust. He was too far
from the circle of her modern influence to consider her with anything
but impatience if he had met her original person, and her reflection,
her reproduction, seemed to him frivolous and meaningless. If he went
then, however, he would go as he came, in so far as the play was
concerned; the first act, relying altogether upon the jugglery of its
dialogue, gave no clue to anything. He owed it to Hilda, after all, to
see the piece out. It was only fair to give her a chance to make the
best of it. He decided that it was worth a personal sacrifice to give it
her and went back.
He was sufficiently indignant with the leading idea of the play, and
sufficiently absorbed in its progress, at the end of the second act, to
permit Lady Dolly to capture him before it occurred to him that he had
the use of his legs. Her enthusiasm was so great that it reduced him to
something like equivocation. She wanted to know if anything could be
more splendid than Mr. Bradley as Lord Ingleton; she confided to Stephen
that that was what she called _real_ wickedness, the kind that did the
most harm, and invited him, by inference, to a liberal judgment of
stupid sinners. He sat emitting short unsmiling sentences with eyes
nervously fugitive from Lady Dolly's too proximate opulence until the
third act began. Then he gave place with embarrassed alacrity to Colonel
Cummins, and folded his arms again at the back of the box.
Before it was finished he had the gratification of recognising at least
one Hilda that he knew. The newspapers found in her interpretation the
development of a soul, and one remembered, reading them, that a _cliché_
is a valuable thing in a hurry. A phrase which spoke of a soul bruised
out of life and rushing to annihilation would have been more precise.
The demand upon her increased steadily as the act went on, and as she
met it, there slipped into her acting some of her own potentialities of
motive and of passion. She offered to the shaping circumstance rich
material and abundant plasticity, and when the persecution of her
destiny required her to throw herself irretrievably away, she did it
with a splendid appreciation of large and definite movements that was
essentially of herself.
The moment of it had a bold gruesomeness that caught the breath--a
disinterment on the stage in search of letters that would prove the
charge against the second year of Mrs. Halliday's married life, her
letters buried with the poet. It was an advantage which only the husband
of Mrs. Halliday would have claimed to bring so helpless a respondent
before even the informal court at the graveyard; but it gave Hilda a
magnificent opportunity of wild, mad apostrophe to the skull, holding it
tenderly with both hands, while Lord Ingleton smiled appreciatively in
advance of the practical benevolence which was to sustain the lady
through the divorce court and in the final scene offer to her and to the
prejudices of the British public the respectability of his name.
It was over with a rush at the end, leaving the audience uncertain
whether, after all, enough attention had been paid to that tradition of
the footlights which insists on so nice a sense of opprobrium and
compensation, but convinced of its desire to applaud. Duff Lindsay
turned, as the wave of clapping spent itself, to say to Stephen that he
had never respected Hamilton Bradley's acting so much. He said it to
Herbert Livingstone instead; the priest had disappeared.
The outgoers looked at Arnold curiously as he made his way among them in
a direction which was not that of the exit. He went with hurried
purpose, in the face of them all, toward the region, badly lighted and
imperfectly closed, which led to the rear of the stage. He opened doors
into dark closets, and one which gave upon the road, retraced his
unfamiliar steps and asked a question, to which--it was so unusual from
one in his habit--he received a hesitating but correct reply. A moment
later he passed Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope, who stood in his path with a
hostile stare and got out of it with a deferential bow, and knocked at a
door upon which was pasted the name, in large red letters cut from a
poster, of Miss Hilda Howe. It was a little ajar, so he entered, when
she cried, "Come in!" with the less hesitation. Hilda sat on the single
chair the place contained in the dress and make-up of the last scene. A
Mohammedan servant, who looked up incuriously, was unlacing her shoes.
Various garments hung about on nails driven into the unpainted walls,
others overflowed from a packing-box in one corner. A common teak-wood
dressing-table held make-up saucers and powder-puffs and some remnants
of cold fowl which had not been partaken of, apparently, with the
assistance of a knife, and fork. A candle stood in an empty soda-water
bottle on each side of the looking-glass, and there was no other light.
On the floor a pair of stays, old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern.
The place looked sordid and miserable, and Hilda, sitting in the middle
of it, still in the yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all
wrong at that range, gave it a note of false artifice, violent and
grievous. Stephen stood in the doorway grasping the handle, saying
nothing, and an instant passed before she knew with certainty, in the
wretched light, that it was he. Then she sprang up and made a step
toward him as if toward victory and reward, but checked herself in time.
"Is it possible?" she exclaimed. "I did not know you were in the
theatre."
"Yes," he said, with moderation, "I have seen this--this damnable play."
"Damnable? Oh!----"
"It has caused me," he went on, "to regret the substance of my letter
this morning. I failed to realise that this was the kind of work you
devote your life to. I now see that you could not escape its malign
influence--that no woman could. I now think that the alternative that
has been revealed to you, of remaining in Calcutta, is a chance of
escape offered you by God himself. Take it. I withdraw my foolish,
ignorant opposition."
"Oh," she cried, "do you really think----"
"Take it," he repeated and closed the door.
Hilda sat still for some time after the servant had finished unlacing
her shoes. A little tender smile played oddly about her carmined lips.
"Dear heart," she said aloud, "I was going to."