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,
things highly appreciative of bodices, the role 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 love 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 disdained 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 by and
by, 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 the 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 than 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 simplicity 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 accentuated the
swell of her bosom. It was a vivid, a staccato attitude; it expressed
a temperament, a character, fifty other things; but especially it
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 to keep its current and direction through
the floating debris 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 cliche
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 movement 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 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 teakwood 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 women 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.”