There was a panic in Dhurrumtolla; a “ticca-gharry”--the shabby
oblong box on wheels, dignified in municipal regulations as a hackney
carriage--was running away. Coolie mothers dragged naked children up
on the pavement with angry screams; drivers of ox-carts dug their lean
beasts in the side, and turned out of the way almost at a trot; only the
tram-car held on its course in conscious invincibility. A pariah tore
along beside the vehicle barking; crows flew up from the rubbish heaps
in the road by half-dozens, protesting shrilly; a pedlar of blue bead
necklaces just escaped being knocked down. Little groups of native
clerks and money-lenders stood looking after, laughing and speculating;
a native policeman, staring also, gave them sharp orders to disperse,
and they said to him, “Peace, brother.” To each other they said,
“Behold, the driver is a 'mut-wallah'” (or drunken person); and
presently, as the thing whirled farther up the emptied perspective,
“Lo! the syce has fallen.” The driver was certainly very drunk; his whip
circled perpetually above his head; the syce clinging behind was stiff
with terror, and fell off like a bundle of rags. Inside, Hilda Howe,
with a hand in the strap at each side and her feet against the opposite
seat, swayed violently and waited for what might happen, breathing
short. Whenever the gharry thrashed over the tram-lines, she closed her
eyes. There was a point near Cornwallis Street where she saw the
off front wheel make sickeningly queer revolutions; and another,
electrically close, when two tossing roan heads with pink noses appeared
in a gate to the left, heading smartly out, all unawares, at precisely
right angles to her own derelict equipage. That was the juncture of
the Reverend Stephen Arnold's interference, walking and discussing with
Amiruddin Khan, as he was, the comparative benefits of Catholic and
Mohammedan fasting. It would be easy to magnify what Stephen did in that
interruption of the considerate hearing he was giving to Amiruddin. The
ticca-gharry ponies were almost spent, and any resolute hand could
have impelled them away from the carriage-pole with which the roans
threatened to impale their wretched sides. The front wheel, however,
made him heroic, going off at a tangent into a cloth merchant's shop,
and precipitating a crash while he still clung to the reins. The door
flew open on the under side, and Hilda fell through, grasping at the
dust of the road; while the driver, discovering that his seat was no
longer horizontal, entered suddenly upon sobriety, and clamoured with
tears that the cloth-merchant should restore his wheel--was he not a
poor man? Hilda, struggling with her hat-pins, felt her dress brushed by
various lean hands of the bazar, and observed herself the central figure
in yet another situation. When she was in a condition to see, she saw
Arnold soothing the ponies; Amiruddin, before the vague possibility of
police complication having slipped away. Stephen had believed the gharry
empty. The sight of her, in her disordered draperies, was a revelation
and a reproach.
“Is it possible!” he exclaimed, and was beside her. “You are not hurt?”
“Only scraped, thanks. I am lucky to get off with this.” She held up her
right palm, broadly abraded round the base, where her hand had struck
the road. Arnold took it delicately in his own thin fingers to examine
it; an infinity of contrast rested in the touch. He looked at it with
anxiety so obviously deep and troubled, that Hilda silently smiled.
She who had been battered, as she said, twice round the world, found it
disproportionate.
“It's the merest scratch,” she said, grave again to meet his glance.
“Indeed, I fear not.” The priest made a solicitous bandage with his
handkerchief, while the circle about them solidified. “It is quite
unpleasantly deep. You must let me take you at once to the nearest
chemist's and get it properly washed and dressed, or it may give you a
vast amount of trouble--but I am walking.”
“I will walk too,” Hilda said readily. “I should prefer it, truly.” With
her undamaged hand she produced a rupee from her pocket, where a few
coins chinked casually, looked at it, and groped for another. “I really
can't afford any more,” she said. “He can get his wheel mended with
that, can't he?”
“It is three times his fare,” Arnold said austerely, “and he deserved
nothing--but a fine, perhaps.” The man was suppliant before them,
cringing, salaaming, holding joined palms open. Hilda lifted her head
and looked over the shoulders of the little rabble, where the sun stood
golden upon the roadside and two naked children played with a torn pink
kite. Something seemed to gather into her eyes as she looked, and when
she fixed them softly upon Arnold, to speak, as it had spoken before.
“Ah,” she said. “Our deserts.”
It was the merest echo, and she had done it on purpose, but he could
not know that, and as she dropped the rupees into the craving hands, and
turned and walked away with him, he was held in a frightened silence.
There was nothing perhaps that he wanted to talk of more than of
his experience at the theatre; he longed to have it simplified and
explained; yet in that space of her two words the impossibility of
mentioning it had sprung at him and overcome him. He hoped, with instant
fervour, that she would refrain from any allusion to The Offence of
Galilee. And for the time being she did refrain. She said, instead,
that her hand was smarting absurdly already, and did Arnold suppose the
chemist would use a carbolic lotion? Stephen, with a guarded look,
said very possibly not, but one never knew; and Hilda, thinking of
the far-off day when the little girl of her was brought tactfully to
disagreeable necessities; covered a preposterous impulse to cry with
another smile.
A thudding of bare feet overtook them. It was the syce, with his arms
full of thin paper bags, the kind that hold cheap millinery. “Oh, the
good man!” Hilda exclaimed. “My parcels!” and looked on equably, while
Arnold took them by their puckered ends. “I have been buying gold lace
and things from Chunder Dutt for a costume,” she explained. The bags
dangled helplessly from Arnold's fingers; he looked very much aware of
them. “Let me carry at least one,” she begged. “I can perfectly with my
parasol hand;” but he refused her even one. “If I may be permitted to
take the responsibility,” he said happily, and she rejoined, “Oh,
I would trust you with things more fragile.” At which, such is the
discipline of these Orders, he looked steadily in front of him, and
seemed deaf with modesty.
“But are you sure,” said Hilda, suddenly considerate, “that it looks
well?”
“Is the gold lace then so very meretricious?”
“It goes doubtfully with your cloth,” she laughed, and instantly looked
stricken with the conviction that she might better have said something
else. But Arnold appeared to take it simply and to see no gibe in it,
only a pleasant commonplace.
“It might look queer in Chowringhee,” he said, “but this is not a
censorious public.” Then, as if to palliate the word, he added, “They
will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry myself, when
it is plain that I might ride--and they see me doing that every day.”
All the same the paper bags swinging beside the girdled black skirt did
impart a touch of comedy, which was in a way a pity, since humour goes
so far to destroy the picturesque. Hilda without the paper bags would
have been vastly enough for contrast. She walked--one is inclined to
dwell upon her steps and face the risk of being unintelligible--in a
wide-sleeved gown of peach-coloured silk, rather frayed at the seams; a
trifle spent in vulnerable places, surmounted by an extravagant collar
and a Paris hat. The dress was of artistic intention inexpensively
carried out, the hat had an accomplished chic; it had fallen to her in
the wreck and ruin of a too ambitious draper of Coolgardie. As a matter
of fact it was the only one she had. The wide sleeves ended a little
below the elbow, and she carried in compensation a pair of long
suede gloves, a compromise which only occasionally discovered itself
buttonless, and a most expensive umbrella, the tribute of a gentleman in
that line of business in Cape Town, whose standing advertisement is now
her note of appreciation. Arnold in his unvarying gait paced beside
her; he naturally shrank, so close to her opulence, into something
less impressive than he was; a mere intelligence he looked, in a quaint
uniform, with his long lip drawn down and pursed a little in this
accomplishment of duty, and his eyes steadily in front of him. Hilda's
lambent observation was everywhere, but most of all on him; a fleck of
the dust from the road still lay upon the warm bloom of her cheek, a
perpetual happy curve clung about her mouth. So they passed in streets
of the thronging people, where yards of new-dyed cotton, purple and
yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the
pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, golden-tongued Kali, half
visible through the door of a mud hut--where all the dealers in brass
dishes and glass armlets and silver-gilt stands for the comfortable
hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds and accepted them
with indifference. So they passed, worthy of a glance from that divinity
who shapes our ends.
They talked of the accident. “You stopped the horses, didn't you?” Hilda
said, and the speculation in her eyes was concerned with the extent to
which a muscular system might dwindle, in that climate, under sacerdotal
robes worn every day.
“I told them to stop, poor things,” Arnold said; “they had hardly to be
persuaded.”
“But you didn't save my life or anything like that, did you?” she
adventured like a vagrant in the sun. The blood was warm in her. She
did not weigh her words. “I shouldn't like having my life saved. The
necessity for feeling such a vast emotion--I shouldn't know how to cope
with it.”
“I will claim to have saved your other hand,” he smiled. “You will be
quite grateful enough for that.”
She noted that he did not hasten, behind blushes, into the shelter of
a general disavowal. The cassock seemed to cover an obligation to
acknowledge things.
“I see,” she said, veering round. “You are quite right to circumscribe
me. There is nothing so boring as the gratitude that will out. It is
only the absence of it, too plainly expressed, that is unpleasant. But
you won't find that in me either.” She gave him a smile as she lowered
her parasol to turn into the shop of Lahiri Dey, licensed to sell
European drugs, that promised infinite possibilities of friendship; and,
he, following, took pleased and careful possession of it.
An hour later, as they approached Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, Miss
Howe looked pale, which is not surprising since they had walked and
talked all the way. Their talk was a little strenuous too; it was as if
they had fallen upon an opportunity, and, mutually, consciously made the
most of it.
“You must have some tea immediately,” Arnold said, before the battered
urns and the dusty crotons of her dwelling.
“A little whisky and soda, I think. And you will come up, please, and
have some too. You must.”
“Thanks,” he said, looking at his watch. “If I do--”
“You'll have the soda without the whisky! All right!” she laughed, and
led the way.
“This is vicious indulgence,” Arnold said of his beverage, sitting
under the inverted Japanese umbrellas. “I haven't been pitched out of a
ticca-gharry.”
It is doubtful whether the indulgence was altogether in the soda, which
is, after all, ascetic in its quality, and only suitably effervescent,
like ecclesiastical humour. It may very probably be that there was no
indulgence; indeed, one is convinced that the word, like so many words,
says too much. The springs of Arnold's chair were bursting through
the bottom, and there were stains on its faded chintz-arms, but it
was comfortable, and he leaned back in it, looking up at the paper
umbrellas. You know the room; I took you into it with Duff Lindsay, who
did not come there from rigidities and rituals, and who had a qualified
pleasure in it. But there were lines in the folds of the flowered
window-curtains dragging half a yard upon the floor, which seemed to
disband Arnold's spirit, and a twinkle in the blue bead of a bamboo
screen where the light came through that released it altogether. The
shabby violent-coloured place encompassed him like an easy garment,
and the lady with her feet tucked up on a sofa and a cushion under her
tumbled head, was an unembarrassing invitation to the kind of happy
things he had not said for years. They sat in the coolness of the room
for half an hour, and then, after a little pause, Hilda said suddenly--
“I am glad you saw me in The Offence of Galilee on Saturday night. We
shall not play it again.”
“It has been withdrawn?”
“Yes. The rights, you know, really belong to Mr. Bradley; and he can't
endure his part.”
“Is there no one else to--”
“He objects to anyone else. We generally play together.” This was
inadvertent, but Stephen had no reason to imagine that she contracted
her eyebrows in any special irritation. “It is an atrocious piece,” she
added.
“Is it?” he said absently, and then, “Yes, it is an atrocious piece. But
I am glad, too, that I saw you.”
He looked away from her, reddening deeply, and stood up. He bade her a
measured and precise farewell. It seemed as if he hurried. She only half
rose to give him her unwounded hand, and when he was gone she sank back
again thoughtfully.