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 less conventional 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 look-out for 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 anyone 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 farthest 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 unspeakable 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? 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, 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, 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 like 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 bazar. 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 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 the
well-known passage with Pilate, about which the newspapers absurdly
reported later that if Miss Howe had not been a Protestant, and so
impervious the Pope 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 yawped 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 Caesar, 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 whenever 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 rebelled against 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 shock of the woman's earthly passion with its
divine object 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 lay
bound and delivered, 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 of the playwright--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--”
“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 mast-head 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.