Under the Greek porch of Number Ten, Middleton Street, in the white
sunlight between the shadows of the stucco pillars, stood a flagrant
ticca-gharry. The driver lay extended on the top of it, asleep, the syce
squatted beneath the horse's nose, and fed it perfunctorily with hay
from a bundle tied under the vehicle behind. A fringe of palms and ferns
in pots ran between the pillars, and orchids hung from above, shutting
out the garden where heavy scents stood in the sun, and mynas chattered
on the drive. The air was full of ease, warm, fretillante, abandoned to
the lavish energy of growing things; beyond the discoloured wall of the
compound rose the tender cloud of a leafing tamarisk against the blue.
A long time already the driver had slept immovably, and the horse,
uncomplaining but uninterested, had dragged at the wisps of hay.
Inside there was no longer a hint of Mrs. Barberry, even a dropped
handkerchief agreeably scented. The night nurse had realised herself
equally superfluous and had gone; the other, a person of practical
views, could hardly retain her indignation at being kept from day to day
to see her patient fed, and hand him books and writing materials. She
had not even the duty of debarring visitors, but sat most of the time in
the dressing-room where echoes fell about her of the stories with which
riotous young men, in tea and wheat and jute, hastened Mr. Lindsay's
convalescence. There she tapped her energetic fat foot on the floor in
vain, to express her views upon such waste of scientific training. She
had Surgeon Major Livingstone's orders; and he on this occasion had his
sister's.
There was an air of relief, of tension relaxed, between the two women in
the drawing-room; it was plain that Alicia had communicated these things
to her visitor, in their main import. Hilda was already half disengaged
from the subject, her eye wandered as if in search for the avenue to
another. By a sudden inclination Alicia began the story of Laura
Filbert on her knees at Lindsay's door. She told it in a quiet, steady,
colourless way, pursuing it to the end--it came with the ease of
frequent private rehearsals--and then with her elbows on her knees and
her chin in her palms she stopped and gazed meditatively in front of
her. There was something in the gaze to which Hilda yielded an attention
unexpectedly serious, something of the absolute in character and life
impervious to her inquiry. Yet to analysis it was only the grey look
of eyes habituated to regard the future with penetration and to find
nothing there.
“Have you told him?” Hilda asked after an instant's pause, during which
she conceded something, she hardly knew what; she meant to find out
later.
“I haven't seen him. But I will tell him, I promise you.”
“I have no doubt you will! But don't promise ME. I won't even witness
the vow!” Hilda cried.
“What does it matter? I shall certainly tell him.” The words fell
definitely like pebbles. Hilda thoughtfully picked them up.
“On the whole,” she said, “perhaps it would be as well. Yes, it is
my advice. It is quite likely that he will be revolted. It may be
curative.”
Alicia turned away her head to hide the faint frown that nevertheless
crept into her voice. “I don't think so,” she said. “How you do juggle
with things! I don't know why I talk to you about this--this matter. I
am sure I ought not.”
“I was going to say,” pursued Hilda, indifferent to her scruple, “that
I shouldn't be at all surprised if his illness leaves him quite
emotionally sane. The poison has worked itself out of his blood--perhaps
the passion and the poison were the same.”
“I wonder!” Alicia said. She said it mechanically, as the easiest
comment.
“When I knew you first your speculation would have been more active, my
dear. You would have looked into the possibility and disputed it. What
has become of your modernity?”
It was the tenderest malice, but it obtained no concessive sign. Alicia
seemed to weigh it. “I think I like theories better than illustrations,”
she said in defence.
“One can look at theories as one looks at the sky, but an illustration
wants a careful point of view. For this one perhaps you are a little
near.”
“Perhaps,” Alicia assented, “I am a little near.” She glanced quickly
down as she spoke, but when she raised her eyes they were dry and clear.
“I can see it better,” Hilda went on, with immense audacity, “much
better.”
“Isn't it safer to feel?”
“Jamais de la vie! The nerves lie always.”
They were on the edge of the vortex of the old dispute. Alicia leaned
back among the cushions and regarded the other with an undecided eye.
“You are not sure,” said Hilda, “that you won't ask me, at this point,
to look at the pictures in that old copy of the Persian classic--I
forget its lovely name--or inquire what sort of house we had last night.
Well, don't be afraid of hurting my feelings. Only, you know, between us
as between more doubtful people, the door must be either open or shut. I
fancy you take cold easily; perhaps you had better shut the door.”
“Not for worlds,” Alicia said, with promptitude. Then she added, rather
cleverly, “That would be spoiling my one view of life.”
Hilda smiled. “Isn't there any life where you live?” She glanced round
her, at the tapestried elegance of the room, with sudden indifference.
“After all,” she said, “I don't know what I am doing here, in your
affairs. As the world swings no one could be more remote from them or
you. I belong to its winds and its highways--how have you brought me
here, a tramp-actress, to your drawing-room?”
Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt. “Don't go away,”
she said. Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was hardly a
foot between them. She went on with a curious excitement.
“My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure impulse, you
don't know. One only asks the things that minister--one goes and finds
and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's head under any roof. What
difference does it make? The only thing that counts, that rules, is the
chance of seeing something else, feeling something more, doing something
better.”
Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on the
actress's skirt. Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary movement.
It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action of flight. Then
she glanced about her again with a kind of appraisement, which ended
with Alicia and embraced her. What she realised seemed to urge her,
I think, in some weak place of her sex, to go on intensely, almost
fiercely.
“Everything here is aftermath. You are a gleaner, Alicia Livingstone. We
leave it all over the world for people of taste, like you, in the glow
of their illusions. I couldn't make you understand our harvest; it is of
the broad sun and the sincerity of things.”
“I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it,” Alicia said, wearing,
as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.
But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
impulse to the end. “Shall I be quite candid?” she said. “I find the
atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted.”
Alicia with a face of astonishment made a half movement towards the
window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at
Hilda and in her mechanical smile. “Oh,” she said, “I see what you mean;
and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so little imagination.”
“Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you could add
up or measure,” Hilda cried remorselessly. “You have none!”
As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands. “At
least I had enough to know you when you came!” she cried. “I felt you,
too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me to--to respond
properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be the one valuable thing
that I can have--the only permanent fact that is left.”
Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort. “Who said anything about
giving up?” she interrupted.
“Why, you did! But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean it, if
you say so.” She turned the appeal of her face and saw a sudden pitiful
consideration in Hilda's, and as if it called them forth two tears
sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her delicate head upon her
lap.
“Dear thing! I didn't indeed. If I meant anything it was that I'm
overstrung. I've been horribly harried lately.” She possessed herself
of one of Alicia's hands and stroked it. Alicia kept her head bent for
a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment, upon the other
woman's shoulder. Her defences crumbled so utterly that Hilda felt
guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery. They sat together for a
moment or two in silence with only that supervening sense of successful
aggression between them, and the humiliation was Hilda's. Presently
it grew heavy, embarrassing. Alicia got up and began a slow, restless
pacing up and down before the alcove they sat in. Hilda watched her--it
was a rhythmic progress--and when she came near with a sound of brushing
silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a
long breath as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner
obtained, assimilated.
“Oh yes,” Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile,
“I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself more--worth
while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take up modelling.
There's rather a good man here just now.”
“Yes,” Hilda assented. “Read for the pure idea--take up modelling. It
is most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like those things
sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far as I count--oh,
my dear, do nothing more. You are already an achieved effect--a
consummation of the exquisite in every way. Generations have been chosen
among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious
and tender and discriminating in a hundred years. You are as rare as I
am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more
than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you
have for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady,
my dear.”
“Such niminy piminy things,” said Alicia, contradicting the light
of satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the room
overhead, and the light died out. “And what good do they do me?” she
cried in soft misery. “What good do they do me!”
“Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now? What
simple, honester opportunity do you want than a sick-room in your own
house?”
Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side. “Oh,
hush!” she cried. “Go on!”
“It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room should be
full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your profile should come
between him and the twilight with a scent of violets.”
“It sounds like a plot,” Alicia murmured.
“It IS a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot.
If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you
perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent
ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're
naturally too scrupulous, but nobody asked us. 'Without our aid He did
us make,' you know.”
“But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if I
could.”
Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back
and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees
were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her
symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that
sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a
tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he sometimes thought of wine
and death and roses.
“I would go farther,” she said, and looked as if some other thing
charged with sweetness had come before her.
“And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success,” Alicia
faltered.
“Ah, if one gained one would hold,” Hilda said; and while she smiled on
her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came
upon her lips. Her thought turned inward absently; it embraced with
sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity, obedience. As if she knew
her betrayal already complete, “I wish I had such a chance,” she said.
“You wish you had such a chance!”
“I didn't mean to tell you--you have enough to do to work out your own
problem; but--”
She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a
miser might keep back gold. She let her secret escape through her eyes
instead. She was deliberately radiant and silent. Alicia looked at
her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the
Promised Land.
“Then after all he has prevailed,” she said.
“Who?”
“Hamilton Bradley.”
Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all
the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it
beautiful.
“How you will hold me to my metier,” she said. “Hamilton Bradley has
given up trying.”
“Then--”
“Then think! Be clever. Be very clever.”
Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A turquoise
on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual. Presently
she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other
woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their
astonishment.
“Well?” said Hilda.
“I can think of no one--there IS no one--except--oh, it's too absurd!
Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!”
The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an instant
she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came back, dashed
with a gravity, a gentleness.
“I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it seems,”
she went on, while Alicia gazed, “the announcement of it--like a thing
born. But it is that--a thing born.”
“I don't understand--in the least,” Alicia exclaimed.
“Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature with
its feet in a trap. The insane, insane improbability of it!” She laughed
again. It was delicious to hear her.
“But--he is a priest!”
“Much more difficult. He is a saint.”
Alicia glanced at the floor. The record of another lighter moment
twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.
“Are you quite certain?” she said. “You told me once that--that there
had been other times.”
“They are useful, those foolish episodes. They explain to one the
difference.” The tone of this was very even, very usual, but Alicia was
aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of aggression, that almost
ranged her hostile. She hurried out of that position.
“If it were possible,” she said, frowning at her embarrassment. “I see
nothing--nothing REALLY against it.”
“I should think not! Can't you conceive what I could do for him?”
“And what could he do for you?” Alicia asked, with a flash of curiosity.
“I don't think I can let you ask me that.”
“There are such strange things to consider! Would he withdraw from the
Church? Would you retire from the stage? I don't know which seems the
more impossible!”
Hilda got up.
“It would be a criminal choice, wouldn't it?” she said. “I haven't
made it out. And he, you know, still dreams only of Bengali souls for
redemption, never of me at all.”
A servant of the house with the air of a messenger brought Alicia a
scrap of paper. She glanced at it, and then, with hands that trembled,
began folding it together.
“He has been allowed to get up and sit in a chair,” she murmured, “and
he wants me to come and talk to him.”
“Well,” said Hilda. “Come.”
She put her arm about Alicia, and drew her out of the room to the foot
of the stairs. They went in silence, saying nothing even when they
parted, and Alicia, of her own accord, began to ascend. Halfway up she
paused and looked down. Hilda turned to meet her glance, and something
of primitive puissance passed, conscious, comprehended, between the eyes
of the two women.