← catalogue

The Path of a Star

by Sara Jeannette Duncan · English · Gutenberg #5102 · 506,183 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Path of a Star
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Path of a Star

Author: Sara Jeannette Duncan


        
Release date: June 6, 2006 [eBook #5102]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5102

Credits: Produced by Don Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PATH OF A STAR ***




Produced by Don Lainson





THE PATH OF A STAR


By Mrs. Everard Cotes

(AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)


1899



CHAPTER I


She pushed the portiere aside with a curved hand and gracefully
separated fingers; it was a staccato movement and her body followed it
after an instant's poise of hesitation, head thrust a little forward,
eyes inquiring and a tentative smile, although she knew precisely who
was there. You would have been aware at once that she was an actress.
She entered the room with a little stride and then crossed it quickly,
the train of her morning gown--it cried out of luxury with the cheapest
voice--taking folds of great audacity as she bent her face in its loose
mass of hair over Laura Filbert, sitting on the edge of a bamboo sofa,
and said--

“You poor thing! Oh, you POOR thing!”

She took Laura's hand as she spoke, and tried to keep it; but the hand
was neutral, and she let it go. “It is a hand,” she said to herself,
in one of those quick reflections that so often visited her ready-made,
“that turns the merely inquiring mind away. Nothing but feeling could
hold it.”

Miss Filbert made the conventional effort to rise, but it came to
nothing, or to a mere embarrassed accent of their greeting. Then her
voice showed this feeling to be superficial, made nothing of it, pushed
it to one side.

“I suppose you cannot see the foolishness of your pity,” she said. “Oh
Miss Howe, I am happier than you are--much happier.” Her bare feet, as
she spoke, nestled into the coarse Mirzapore rug on the floor, and her
eye lingered approvingly upon an Owari vase three feet high, and thick
with the gilded landscape of Japan, which stood near it, in the cheap
magnificence of the room.

Hilda smiled. Her smile acquiesced in the world she had found,
acquiesced, with the gladness of an explorer, in Laura Filbert as a
feature of it.

“Don't be too sure,” she cried; “I am very happy. It is such a pleasure
to see you.”

Her gaze embraced Miss Filbert as a person, and Miss Filbert as a
pictorial fact, but that was because she could not help it. Her eyes
were really engaged only with the latter Miss Filbert.

“Much happier than you are,” Laura repeated, slowly moving her head from
side to side as if to negative contradiction in advance. She smiled too;
it was as if she had remembered a former habit, from politeness.

“Of course you are--of course!” Miss Howe acknowledged. The words were
mellow and vibrant; her voice seemed to dwell upon them with a kind of
rich affection. Her face covered itself with serious sweetness. “I can
imagine the beatitudes you feel--by your clothes.”

The girl drew her feet under her, and her hand went up to the only
semi-conventional item of her attire. It was a brooch that exclaimed in
silver letters “Glory to His Name!” “It is the dress of the Army in this
country,” she said; “I would not change it for the wardrobe of a queen.”

“That's just what I mean.” Miss Howe leaned back in her chair with her
head among its cushions, and sent her words fluently across the room,
straight and level with the glance from between her half-closed eyelids.
A fine sensuous appreciation of the indolence it was possible to enjoy
in the East clung about her. “To live on a plane that lifts you up like
that--so that you can defy all criticism and all convention, and go
about the streets like a mark of exclamation at the selfishness of the
world--there must be something very consummate in it or you couldn't go
on. At least I couldn't.”

“I suppose I do look odd to you.” Her voice took a curious, soft,
uplifted note. “I wear three garments only--the garments of my sisters
who plant the young shoots in the rice-fields, and carry bricks for the
building of rich men's houses, and gather the dung of the roadways to
burn for fuel. If the Army is to conquer India it must march bare-footed
and bare-headed all the way. All the way,” Laura repeated, with a
tremor of musical sadness. Her eyes were fixed in appeal upon the other
woman's. “And if the sun beats down upon my uncovered head, I think, 'It
struck more fiercely upon Calvary'; and if the way is sharp to my unshod
feet, I say, 'At least I have no cross to bear.'” The last words seemed
almost a chant, and her voice glided from them into singing--


     “The blessed Saviour died for me,
      On the cross!  On the cross!
      He bore my sins at Calvary,
      On the rugged cross!”


She sang softly, her body thrust a little forward in a tender swaying--


     “Behold His hands and feet and side,
      The crown of thorns, the crimson tide,
      'Forgive them, Father!' loud He cried,
      On the rugged cross!”


“Oh, thank you!” Miss Howe exclaimed. Then she murmured again, “That's
just what I mean.”

A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross the
moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it, with penetrant anxiety. “Did
you really enjoy that hymn?” she asked.

“Indeed I did.”

“Then, dear Miss Howe, I think you cannot be very far from the Kingdom.”

“I? Oh, I have my part in a kingdom.” Her voice caressed the idea. “And
the curious thing is that we are all aristocrats who belong to it. Not
the vulgar kind, you understand--but no, you don't understand. You'll
have to take my word for it.” Miss Howe's eyes sought a red hibiscus
flower that looked in at the window half drowned in sunlight, and the
smile in them deepened.

“Is it the Kingdom of God and His righteousness?” Laura Filbert's clear
glance was disturbed by a ray of curiosity, but the inflexible quality
of her tone more than counterbalanced this.

“There's nothing about it in the Bible, if that's what you mean. And yet
I think the men who wrote 'The time of the singing of birds has come,'
and 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,' must have belonged to it.”
 She paused, with an odd look of discomfiture. “But one shouldn't talk
about things like that--it takes the bloom off. Don't you feel that way
about your privileges now and then? Don't they look rather dusty and
battered to you after a day's exposure in Bow Bazar?”

There came a light crunch of wheels on the red soorkee drive outside,
and a switch past the bunch of sword-ferns that grew beside the door.
The muffled crescendo of steps on the stair and the sound of an inquiry
penetrated from beyond the portiere, and without further preliminary
Duff Lindsay came into the room.

“Do I interrupt a rehearsal?” he asked; but there was nothing in the way
he walked across the room to Hilda Howe to suggest that the idea abashed
him. For her part she rose and made one short step to meet him, and then
received him as it were with both hands and all her heart.

“How ridiculous you are!” she cried. “Of course not. And let me tell you
it is very nice of you to come this very first day when one was dying to
be welcomed. Miss Filbert came too, and we have been talking about our
respective walks in life. Let me introduce you. Miss Filbert--Captain
Filbert, of the Salvation Army--Mr. Duff Lindsay of Calcutta.”

She watched with interest the gravity with which they bowed, and the
difference in it: his the simple formality of his class, Laura's a
repressed hostility to such an epitome of the world as he looked,
although any Bond Street tailor would have impeached his waistcoat, and
one shabby glove had manifestly never been on. Yet Miss Filbert's first
words seemed to show a slight unbending. “Won't you sit there?” she
said, indicating the sofa corner she had been occupying. “You get
the glare from the window where you are.” It was virtually a command,
delivered with a complete air of dignity and authority; and Lindsay, in
some confusion, found himself obeying. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” he
said. “One doesn't really mind in the least. Do you--do you object to
it? Shall I close the shutters?”

“If you do,” said Miss Howe delightedly, “we shall not be able to see.”

“Neither we should,” he assented; “the others are closed already. Very
badly built these Calcutta houses, aren't they? Have you been long in
India, Miss--Captain Filbert?”

“I served a year up-country, and then fell ill and had to go home on
furlough. The native food didn't suit me. I am stationed in Calcutta
now, but I have only just come.”

“Pleasant time of the year to arrive,” Mr. Lindsay remarked.

“Yes; but we are not particular about that. We love all the times and
the seasons, since every one brings its appointed opportunity. Last
year, in Mugridabad, there were more souls saved in June than in any
other month.”

“Really?” asked Mr. Lindsay; but he was not looking at her with those
speculations. The light had come back upon her face.

“I will say good-bye now,” said Captain Filbert. “I have a meeting at
half-past five. Shall we have a word of prayer before I go?”

She plainly looked for immediate acquiescence; but Miss Howe said,
“Another time, dear.”

“Oh, why not?” exclaimed Duff Lindsay. Hilda put the semblance of a
rebuke into her glance at him, and said, “Certainly not.”

“Oh,” Captain Filbert cried, “don't think you can escape that way! I
will pray for you long and late to-night, and ask my lieutenant to do
so too. Don't harden your heart, Miss Howe--the Lord is waiting to be
compassionate.”

The two were silent, and Laura walked toward the door. Just where the
sun slanted into the room and made leaf-patterns on the floor she turned
and stood for an instant in the full tide of it; and it set all the
loose tendrils of her pale yellow hair in a little flame, and gave the
folds of the flesh-coloured sari that fell over her shoulder the texture
of draperies so often depicted as celestial. The sun sought into her
face, revealing nothing but great purity of line and a clear pallor
except where below the wide light blue eyes two ethereal shadows brushed
themselves. Under the intentness of their gaze she made as if she would
pass out without speaking; and the tender curves of her limbs, as she
wavered, could not have been matched out of mediaeval stained glass. But
her courage, or her conviction, came back to her at the door, and she
raised her hand and pointed at Hilda.

“She's got a soul worth saving.”

Then the portiere fell behind her, and nothing was said in the room
until the pad of her bare feet had ceased upon the stair.

“She came out in the Bengal with us,” Hilda told him--this is not a
special instance of it, but she could always gratify Duff Lindsay in
advance--“and she was desperately seedy, poor girl. I looked after her a
little, but it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got me on her mind.
And as the two hundred and eighty million benighted souls of India are
her continual concern, I seem a superfluity. To think of being the two
hundred and eighty millionth and first oppresses one.”

Lindsay listened with a look of accustomed happiness.

“You weren't at that end of the ship?” he demanded.

“Of course I was--we all were. And some of us--little Miss Stace, for
instance--thankful enough at the prospect of cold meat and sardines for
tea every night for a whole month. And, after Suez, ices for dinner on
Sundays. It was luxury.”

Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache. “I don't call it fair
or friendly,” he said, “when you know how easily it could have been
arranged. Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told you
that the second-class saloon was no place for you. For YOU!”

Plainly she did not intend to argue the point. She poised her chin in
her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help seeing, as
he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful. But this had been so
long acknowledged between them that she could hardly have been conscious
that she was insisting on it afresh. Then by the time he might have
thought her launched upon a different meditation, her mind swept back to
his protest, like a whimsical bird.

“I didn't want to extract anything from the mercantile community of
Calcutta in advance,” she said. “It would be most unbusinesslike.
Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself, as
leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season. Then I
think,” she said with defiance, “that I shall avoid you.”

“And pray why?”

“Because you would put too much in. According to your last letters you
are getting beastly rich. You would take all the tragedy out of the
situation, and my experience would vanish in your cheque.”

“I don't know why my feelings should always be cuffed out of the way
of your experiences,” Lindsay said. She retorted, “Oh yes, you do”;
and they regarded each other through an instant's silence with visible
good-fellowship.

“A reasonably strong company this time?” Lindsay asked.

“Thank you. 'Company' is gratifying. For a month we have been a
'troupe'--in the first-class end. Fairish. Bad to middling. Fifteen
of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with
light comedy, or the latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors
with a thousand candlepower. Bradley and I will have to do most of the
serious work. But I have improved--oh, a lot. You wouldn't know my Lady
Whippleton.”

It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which
appeared to prevent Lindsay's kindling.

“Then Bradley is here too?” he remarked.

“Oh yes,” she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face. “But it
is much better than it was, really. He is hardly ever troublesome now.
He understands. And he teaches me a great deal more than I can tell you.
You know,” she asserted, with the effect of taking an independent view,
“as an artist he has my unqualified respect.”

“You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when they
are not women,” Duff said. “I don't believe their behaviour is a bit
more affected by their artistry than it would be by a knowledge of the
higher mathematics.”

She turned indignant eyes on him. “Fancy YOUR saying that! Fancy your
having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry! At what
Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?” she cried derisively.
“Well, it shows that one can't trust one's best friend loose among the
conventions!”

He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such matters
were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when she added, with
apparent inconsistency and real dejection, “It IS a hideous bore.”

Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it
aside he felt that she was generous. Yet something in him--perhaps the
primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch impulse
to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to say, “He gives
up a good deal, doesn't he, for his present gratification?”

“He gives up everything! That is the disgusting part of it. Leander
Morris offered him--But why should I tell you? It's humiliating enough
in the very back of one's mind.”

“He is a clever fellow, no doubt.”

“Not too clever to act with me! Oh, we go beautifully--we melt, we run
together. He has given me some essential things, and now I can give them
back to him. I begin to think that is what keeps him now. It must be
awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in--in anybody, and watch
it grow.”

“Doubtless,” said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her eyebrows
twitched together, but she said nothing. Although she knew his very
moderate power of analysis he seemed to look, with his eyes on the
carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it with a cynical
clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little hardness came about her
mouth. “Well,” he said, visibly detaching himself from the matter, “it's
a satisfaction to have you back. I have been doing nothing, literally,
since you went away, but making money and playing tennis. Existence,
as I look back upon it, is connoted by a varying margin of profit and a
vast sward.”

She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely,
considering the advisability of returning. “It's a pity you can't act,”
 she said; “then you could come away and let it all go.”

Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed. “How simple life is
to you!” he said. “But anyway I couldn't act.”

“Oh no, you couldn't, you couldn't! You are too intensely absorbent, you
are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would never consent even
for an instant to be the flame in anybody else--any of those people who,
for the purpose of the state, are called imaginary. Never!”

It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was: “I wish you would go
on. You can't think how gratifying it is--after the tennis.”

“If I went on I have an idea that I might be disagreeable.”

“Oh then, stop. We can't quarrel yet--I've hardly seen you. Are you
comfortable here? Would you like some French novels?”

“Yes, thank you. Yes, please!” She grew before him into a light and
conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of speech.
He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the spring she had
detached herself from, and after failing for a quarter of an hour he got
up to go.

“I shan't bother you again before Saturday,” he said; “I know what a
week it will be at the theatre. Remember you are to give the man
his orders about the brougham. I can get on perfectly with the cart.
Good-bye! Calcutta is waiting for you.”

“Calcutta is never impatient,” said Miss Howe. “It is waiting with yawns
and much whisky and soda.” She gave him a stately inclination with her
hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his heart in a
burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and turned. He
stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood, but the sun
was gone. “You might tell me more about your friend of the altruistic
army,” he said.

“You saw, you heard, you know.”

“But--”

“Oh,” cried she, disregardingly, “you can discover her for yourself, at
the Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street--you man!”

Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way down
the stairs her voice appealed to him over the banisters.

“You might as well forget that. I didn't particularly mean it.”

“I know you didn't,” he returned. “You woman! But you yourself--you're
not going to play with your heavenly visitant?”

Hilda leaned upon the banisters, her arms dropping over from the elbows.
“I suppose I may look at her,” she said; and her smile glowed down upon
him.

“Do you think it really rewards attention?--the type, I mean.”

“How you will talk of types! Didn't you see that she was unique? You
may come back if you like, for a quarter of an hour, and we will discuss
her.”

Lindsay looked at his watch. “I would come back for a quarter of an hour
to discuss anything, or nothing,” he replied, “but there isn't time. I
am dining with the Archdeacon. I must go to church.”

“Why not be original and dine with the Archdeacon without going to
church? Why not say on arrival: 'My dear Archdeacon, your sermon and
your mutton the same evening--c'est trop! I cannot so impose upon your
generosity. I have come for the mutton!'”

Thus was Captain Laura Filbert superseded, as doubtless often before,
by an orthodox consideration. Duff Lindsay drove away in his cart; and
still, for an appreciable number of seconds, Miss Howe stood leaning
over the banisters, her eyes fixed full of speculation on the place
where he had stood. She was thinking of a scene--a dinner with an
Archdeacon--and of the permanent satisfactions to be got from it; and
she renounced almost with a palpable sigh the idea of the Archdeacon's
asking her.



CHAPTER II


“Oh, her gift!” said Alicia Livingstone. “It is the lowest, isn't it--in
the scale of human endowment? Mimicry.”

Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned
her eyes and her delicate chin up to Duff Lindsay with the protest.
Lindsay's cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if
they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.

“Mimicry isn't a fair word,” he said. “The mimic doesn't interpret. He's
a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen
mask. The actress takes a different rank. This one does, anyway.”

“You're mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys,” remarked
Surgeon-Major Livingstone.

“Mere imitators!” cried Mrs. Barberry.

Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her. She smiled upon their
energy and, so to speak, disappeared. It was one of her little ways, and
since it left seeming conquerors on her track nobody quarrelled with it.

“I've met them in London,” she said. “Oh, I remember one hot little
North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes--and they were
always disappointing. There seemed to be somehow no basis--nothing to go
upon.”

She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful
deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were unanimous in
calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily refined. That
was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and say; it will
do to go on with. From the way Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he
might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only to the
somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens
to find out anything at all.

“You found that they had no selves,” he said, and the manner of his
words was encouraging and provocative. His proposition was obscured
to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her
comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him. “But Miss
Hilda Howe has one.”

“Is she a lady?” asked Mrs. Barberry.

“I don't know. She's an individual. I prefer to rest my claim for her on
that.”

“Your claim to what?” trembled upon Miss Livingstone's lips, but
she closed them instead, and turned her head again to listen to Mrs.
Barberry. The turns of Alicia's head had a way of punctuating the
conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and
relief.

“I saw her in A Woman of Honour, last cold weather,” Mrs. Barberry said;
“I took a dinner-party of five girls and five subalterns from the Fort,
and I said, 'Never again!' Fortunately the girls were just out, and not
one of them understood, but those poor boys didn't know where to look!
And no more did I. So disgustingly real.”

Alicia's eyes veiled themselves to rest on a ring on her finger, and a
little smile, which was inconsistent with the veiling, hovered about her
lips.

“I was in England last year,” she said; “I--I saw A Woman of Honour in
London. What could possibly be done with it by an Australian scratch
company in a Calcutta theatre! Imagination halts.”

“Miss Howe did something with it,” observed Mr. Lindsay. “That and one
or two other things carried one through last cold weather. One supported
even the gaieties of Christmas week with fortitude, conscious that there
was something to fall back upon. I remember I went to the State ball,
and cheerfully.”

“That's saying a good deal, isn't it?” commented Dr. Livingstone,
vaguely aware of an ironical intention. “By Jove! yes.”

“Hamilton Bradley is good, too, isn't he?” Mrs. Barberry said. “Such a
magnificent head. I adore him in Shakespeare.”

“He knows the conventions, and uses them with security,” Lindsay
replied, looking at Alicia; and she, with a little courageous air,
demanded--

“Is the story true?”

“The story of their relations? I suppose there are fifty. One of them
is.”

Mrs. Barberry frowned at Lindsay in a manner which was itself a
reminiscence of amateur theatricals. “Their relations!” she murmured to
Dr. Livingstone. “What awful things to talk about!”

“The story I mean,” Alicia explained, “is to the effect that Mr.
Bradley, who is married, but unimportantly, made a heavy bet, when he
met this girl, that he would subdue her absolutely through her passion
for her art--I mean, of course, her affections--”

“My dear girl, we know what you mean,” cried Mrs. Barberry, entering a
protest as it were, on behalf of the gentlemen.

“And precisely the reverse happened.”

“One imagines it was something like that,” Lindsay said.

“Oh, did she know about the bet?” cried Mrs. Barberry.

“That's as you like to believe. I fancy she knew about the man,” Lindsay
contributed again.

“Tables turned, eh? Daresay it served him right,” remarked Dr.
Livingstone. “If you really want to come to the laboratory, Mrs.
Barberry, we ought to be off?”

“He is going to show me a bacillus,” Mrs. Barberry announced with
enthusiasm. “Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught
it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me--wasn't it dear of him!
Good-bye, you nice thing”--Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia--“Good-bye,
Mr. Lindsay. Fancy--a live bacillus from Hong Kong! I should like it
better if it came from fascinating Japan, but still--goodbye.”

With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
room, and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were
tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in
a vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could
almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given
forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the
bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a
trifle gross and material. Certainly as she sat there in her grace and
slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early
morning about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to
present her in. With a suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the
traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she
appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty
elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it
was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of
her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness
of movement which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a
personal world of many effects. Into her making of tea, for example, she
put nothing more sophisticated than sugar, and she ordered more bread
and butter in the worst possible rendering of her servants' tongue,
without a thought except that the bread and butter should be brought.
Lindsay liked to think that with him she was particularly simple
and direct, that he was of those who freed her from the pretty
consciousness, the elegant restraint that other people fixed upon her.
It must be admitted that this conviction had reason in establishing
itself, and it is perhaps not surprising that, in the security of it,
he failed to notice occasions when it would not have held, of which this
was plainly one. Alicia reflected, with her cheek against the Afghan
wolf-skins on the back of the chair. It was characteristic of her eyes
that one could usually see things being turned over in them. She would
sometimes keep people waiting while she thought. She thought perceptibly
about Hilda Howe, slanting her absent gaze between sheltering eyelids
to the floor. Presently she rearranged the rose in its green glass vase,
and said, “Then it's impossible not to be interested.”

“I thought you would find it so.”

Alicia was further occupied in bestowing small fragments of cress
sandwich upon a terrier. “Fancy your being so sure,” she said, “that you
could present her entertainingly!” She looked past him toward the light
that came in at the draped window, and he was not aware that her regard
held him fast by the way.

“Anyone could,” he said cheerfully. “She presents herself. One is only
the humblest possible medium. And the most passive.”

Alicia's eyes were still attracted by the light from the window. It
silhouetted a rare fern from Assam which certainly rewarded them.

“I like to hear you talk about her. Tell me some more.”

“Haven't I exhausted metaphor in describing her?”

“Yes,” said Miss Livingstone, with conviction; “but I'm not a bit
satisfied. A few simple facts sometimes--sometimes are better. Wasn't it
a little difficult to make her acquaintance?”

“Not in the very least. I saw her in A Woman of Honour, and was
charmed. Charmed in a new way. Next day I discovered her address--it's
obscure--and sent up my card for permission to tell her so. I explained
to her that one would have hesitated at home, but here one was protected
by the custom. And she received me warmly. She gave me to understand
that she was not overwhelmed with tribute of that kind from Calcutta.
The truthful ring of it was pathetic, poor dear.”

“That was in--”

“In February.”

“In February we were at Nice,” Alicia said, musingly. Then she took up
her divining-rod again. “One can imagine that she was grateful. People
of that kind--how snobbish I sound, but you know what I mean--are rather
stranded in Calcutta, aren't they? They haven't any world here;” and,
with the quick glance which deprecated her timid clevernesses, she
added, “The arts conspire to be absent.”

“Ah, don't misunderstand. If there was any gratitude it was all mine.
But we met as kindred, if I may vaunt myself so much. A mere theory of
life will go a long way, you know, toward establishing a claim of that
sort. And, at all events, she is good enough to treat me as if she
admitted it.”

“What is her theory of life?” Alicia demanded quickly. “I should be glad
of a new one.”

Lindsay's communicativeness seemed to contract a little, as at the touch
of a finger light, but cold.

“I don't think she has ever told me,” he said. “No, I am sure she has
not.” His reflection was: “It is her garment--how could it fit another
woman!”

“But you have divined it--she has let you do that! You can give me your
impression.”

He recognised her bright courage in venturing upon impalpabilities, but
not without a shade of embarrassment.

“Perhaps. But having perceived, to pass on--it doesn't follow that one
can. I don't seem able to lay my hand upon the signs and symbols.”

The faintest look of disappointment, the lightest cloud of submission,
appeared upon Miss Livingstone's face.

“Oh, I know!” she said. “You are making me feel dreadfully out of it,
but I know. It surrounds her like a kind of atmosphere, an intellectual
atmosphere. Though I confess that is the part I don't understand in
connection with an actress.”

There was a sudden indifference in this last sentence. Alicia lay back
upon her wolf-skins like a long-stemmed flower cast down among them, and
looked away from the subject at the teacups. Duff picked up his hat. He
had the subtlest intimations with women.

“It's an intoxicating atmosphere,” he said. “My continual wonder is that
I'm not in love with her. A fellow in a novel, now, in my situation,
would be embroiled with half his female relations by this time, and
taking his third refusal with a haggard eye.”

Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness. She lifted
her head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty suddenly
revealed.

“Why aren't you?” she said. “I wonder, too.”

“I should like it enormously,” he laughed. “I've lain awake at nights
trying to find out why it isn't so. Perhaps you'll be able to tell me. I
think it must be because she's such a confoundedly good fellow.”

Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur made a
shadow on the whiteness of her throat. Her buffeting was over; she was
full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.

“Oh, you mustn't depend on me,” she said. “But why are you going? Don't
go. Stay and have another cup of tea.”



CHAPTER III


The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same terms
at New College, and now found themselves again together in the social
poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their
walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in
Bentinck Street. It seems desirable to supply a reason why anyone should
be walking there, to begin with, anyone, at all events, not a Chinaman,
or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture, or an able-bodied seaman
luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets, and describing
an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest glass of country
spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a
Bulgarian, a Levantine, or a Japanese smile, who no longer possessed a
carriage, to whom the able-bodied seaman represented the whole port.
The cramped twisting thoroughfare was full of people like this; they
overflowed from the single narrow border of pavement to the left, and
walked indifferently upon the road among the straw-scatterings and
the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar swept through and past with
prodigious whistlings and ringings, they swerved as little as possible
aside. Three parts of the tide of them were neither white nor black, but
many shades of brown, written down in the census as “of mixed Mood,” and
wearing still, through the degenerating centuries, an eyebrow, a nostril
of the first Englishmen who came to conjugal ties of Hindustan. The
place sent up to the stars a vast noise of argument and anger and
laughter, of the rattling of hoofs and wheels; but the babel was ordered
in its exaggeration, the red turban of a policeman here and there
denoted little more than a unit in the crowd. There were gas-lamps, and
they sent a ripple of light like a sword-thrust along the gutter beside
the banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted.
They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built
into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for
Bentinck Street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour
of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together
into the fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and
yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue capital, that fancy dictated.
There where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and
the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads
passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial,
remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human,
practical. A torch flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the
head of a squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels
of betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little
flame, blue and yellow, beside a sweetmeat seller's basket, and showed
his heap of cakes that they were well-browned and full of butter. From
the “Cape of Good Cheer,” where many bottles glistened in rows inside,
came a braying upon the conch, and a flame of burnt brandy danced along
the bar to the honour and propitiation of Lakshmi, that the able-bodied
seaman might be thirsty when he came, for the “Cape of Good Cheer” did
not owe its prosperity, as its name might suggest, to any Providence of
our theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's shoe
shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the stitching. There
were endless shoe shops, and they all belonged to Powson or Singson or
Samson, while one sign-board bore the broad impertinence “Macpherson.”
 The proprietors stood in the door, the smell came out in the
street--that smell of Chinese personality steeped in fried oil and fresh
leather that out-fans even the south wind in Bentinck Street. They were
responsible but not anxious, the proprietors: they buried their fat
hands in their wide sleeves and looked up and down, stolid and smiling.
They stood in their alien petticoat trousers for the commercial
stability of the locality, and the rows of patent leather slippers that
glistened behind them testified to it further. Everything else shifted
and drifted, with a perpetual change of complexion, a perpetual
worsening of clothes. Only Powson bore a permanent yoke of prosperity.
It lay round his thick brown neck with the low clean line of his blue
cotton smock, and he carried it without offensive consciousness, looking
up and down by no means in search of customers, rather in the exercise
of the opaque, inscrutable philosophy tied up in his queue.

Lindsay liked Bentinck Street as an occasional relapse from the scenic
standards of pillared and verandahed Calcutta, and made personal
business with his Chinaman for the sake of the racial impression thrown
into the transaction. Arnold, in his cassock, waited in the doorway with
his arms crossed behind him, and his thin face thrust as far as it would
go into the air outside. It is possible that some intelligences might
have seen in this priest a caricature of his profession, a figure to be
copied for the curate of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the
common signs of the ascetic school. His face would have been womanish
in its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only
occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness which
had the effect of being permitted, conceded. He had the long thin nose
which looked as if for preference it would be forever thrust among the
pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe the width of his mouth
without perhaps detecting the patience and decision of the upper lip.
The indignity of spectacles he did not yet wear, but it hovered over
him; it was indispensable to his personality in the long-run. In
figure he was indifferently tall and thin and stooping, made to pass
unobservedly along a pavement or with the directness of humble but
important business among crowds. At Oxford he had interested some of his
friends and worried others by wistful inclinations toward the shelter of
that Mother Church which bids her children be at rest and leave to her
the responsibility. Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to exist
on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent animal,
under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was among those who
observed his waverings without prejudice or anything but an affectionate
solicitude that, whichever way Arnold went, he should find the
satisfactions he sought. The conviction that settled the matter was
accidental, the work of a moment, a free instinct and a thing made with
hands--the dead Shelley where the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed
him, under his memorial dome in the gardens of University College. Here
one leafy afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head
in confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which
he saw deeply concealed in his bosom, and disguised with a host of
spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic
bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that
he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the
effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of
spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept
upon his devotions. In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic
point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away
in another direction, from which, if he turned his head, he could see
the Church of Rome sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in
her skirts, looking mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the
Clarke Mission to Calcutta, a “Clarke Brother,” six years when he stood
in the door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck Street, while Lindsay
explained to Ahsing his objection to patent leather toe-caps; six years
which had not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully
admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of
achievement--lowered them with a heroism which took account of himself
as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and moving to
the great future already shining behind coming aeons of the universal
Kingdom. Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his deductions
from the granular nature of all change, moral and material. He never
talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar
Oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather
the ego and the energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in
this world, thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy
to survive at all. It should be understood that Arnold did not hope to
attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple. He held vastly,
on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of
symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye
of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be
hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and
intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it
about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys,
who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of
mangoes and nuts and oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round
boxes of white grapes in sawdust from Kabul. He seldom dwelt upon the
converts that already testified to the success of the mission; it might
be gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.

As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his hand
within Arnold's elbow. It was an impulse, and the analysis of it would
show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value continually
renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common ground. The physical
nearness, the touch, was something, and each felt it in the remoteness
of his other world with satisfaction. There was absurdly little in what
they had to say to each other; they talked of the Viceroy's attack of
measles and the sanitary improvements in the cloth dealers' quarter.
Their bond was hardly more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness
of sentiment, clearness of eye. Such as it was, it was strong enough
to make both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague
impatience on Lindsay's part with a concentration of hostility to
Arnold's soutane. It made its universal way for them, however, this
garment. Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and pressed with
one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the padre sahib. He, with
his eyes cast down, took the tribute with humility, as meet, in a
way that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at the persistence of
ecclesiastical tradition.

Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the
broken, half-comprehensible tumult was smitten and divided by a wave of
rhythmic sound. It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat sellers, and
mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the continual auction
of Kristo Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-hand. In its vivid
familiarity it seemed to make straight for the two Englishmen, to
surround and take possession of them, and they paused. The source of it
was plain--an open door under a vast white signboard dingily lettered
“The Salvation Army.” It loomed through the smoke and the streetlights
like a discovery.

“Our peripatetic friends,” said Arnold, with his rare smile; and as if
the music seized and held them, they stood listening.


     “I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
      All day on Sunday and six days a week!
      I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
      Fifty-two weeks in the year.”


It was immensely vigorous; the men looked at each other with fresh
animation. Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they picked
their steps across the street to the door, and there hesitated, revolted
in different ways. Perhaps, I have forgotten to say that Lindsay came
to Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse, and had had a mother before
whose name, while she lived, people wrote “The Hon.” Besides, the
singing had stopped, and casual observation from the street was checked
by a screen.

“I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are,” said Arnold.

Their methods were just on the other side of the screen. A bullet-headed
youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulders, fingering a
cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment, passing the two men
beside the door, and a light, clear voice seemed to call after him--

“Ah! don't go away!”

Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical speculation
whether now, at the week's end, the soul of Hilda Howe was still
pursuing the broad road to perdition. The desire to enter sprang up
in him: he was reminded of a vista of some interest which had recently
revealed itself by an accident, and which he had not explored. It had
almost passed out of his memory; he grasped at it again with something
like excitement, and fell adroitly upon the half inclination in Arnold's
voice.

“I suppose I can't expect you to go in?” he said.

“Precisely why not?” Stephen retorted. “My dear fellow, we make broad
our sympathies, not our phylacteries.”

At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic was
the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with amusement the
pulpit tone of the little epigram. But this moment found him only aware
of the consent in it. His hand on Arnold's elbow clinched the agreement;
he half pushed the priest into the room, where they dropped into seats.
Stephen's hand went to his breast instinctively, for the words in the
air were holy by association, and stopped there, since even the breadth
of his sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General
Booth. Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General Booth;
he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline and bushy,
from a frame on the wall at the end of it. The texts on the other walls
seemed emanations from him; and the man in the short loose, collarless
red coat, with “Salvation Army” in crooked black letters on it, who
stood talking in high, rapid tones with his hands folded, had the look
of a puppet whose strings were pulled by the personality in the frame
above him. It was only by degrees that they observed the other objects
in the room--the big drum on the floor in the empty space where the
exhorters stood, the dozen wooden benches and the possible score of
people sitting on them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting
up the curtness of the texts. There were half a dozen men of the Duke's
Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and three
or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the Hooghly, who
leaned well forwards their elbows on their knees, twirling battered
straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the instant off the
defensive. One was a Scandinavian, another a Greek, with earrings. There
was a ship's cook, too, a full-blooded negro, very respectable with a
plaid tie and a silk hat; and beside, two East Indian girls of different
shades, tittering at the Duke's Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali
boy, who spelled out the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very
clean Chinaman, who appreciated his privilege, since it included a
seat, a lamp, and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no
further. The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like
the girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest, lying
along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.

Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end of
the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung visibly in
mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking. Laura
Filbert was one of the women. She might have been flung upon her chair;
her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm. A
tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay,
palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs.
The folds hung from her waist, and she wore above them a short close
bodice like a Bengali woman. Her head covering had slipped, and
clung only to the knot of hair at the nape of her neck; she lacked,
pathetically, the conscious hand to draw it forward. She was unaware
even of the gaze of the Duke's Own, though it had fixity and absorption.

The man with folded hands went on talking. He seemed to have caught as a
text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung. “Yes, indeed,” he said.
“I can tell heveryone 'ere this night, heveryone, that the Saviour is
mighty to keep. I 'ave got it out of my own personal experience, I 'ave.
Jesus don't only look after you on a Sunday, but six days a week, my
friends, six days a week. Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on
you--that's all your part of it. I don't mean to say I don't stumble an'
fall into sin. There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but
oh, my friends, I ask you, each an' hevery one of you, is that the fault
of Jesus? No, it is not 'Is fault, it is the fault of the person. The
person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' 'is prayers;
what can you expect? And now I ask you, my friends, is Jesus a-keeping
you? And if He is not, oh, my friends, ain't it foolish to put off
any longer? 'Ere we are met together to-night; we may never all meet
together again. You and I may never 'ear each other speaking again or
see each other sitting there. Thank God,” the speaker continued, as his
eye rested on Arnold and Lindsay, “the vilest sinner may be saved, the
respectable sinner may be saved. We've got God's word for that. Now just
a little word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got God's ear, the
Ensign 'as, and she'll plead with 'im for all unconverted souls inside
these four walls to-night.”

Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters
on her knees on the floor. As she moved she bent upon the audience a
preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers, chances, from
a point remote and emotionally involved. Lindsay's impression was that
she looked at him as from behind a glass door. Then her eyes closed as
the other woman began, and through their lids, as it were, he could see
that she was again caught up, though her body remained abased, her hands
interlocked between her knees, swaying in unison with the petition. The
Ensign was a little meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless
hair and tight drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she
would have been bedraggled and a nagger. She gained an elevation, it was
plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation
of cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a
complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her
fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her
influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior
commission. She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained minor
key that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened, her key to
hearts. She told the Lord in confidence that however appearances might
be against it every soul before him was really longing to be gathered
within His almighty arms, and when she said this, Laura Filbert, on the
floor, threw back her head and cried “Hallelujah!” and Duff started.
The mothers broke in upon the Ensign with like exclamations. They had a
recurrent, perfunctory sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again
cried “Praise the Lord!” Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty
impulse to leave the premises. Then she rose, and he watched with the
Duke's Own to see what she would do next. The others looked at her too,
as she stood surprisingly fair and insistent among them, Ensign Sand
with humble eyes and disapproving lips. As she began to speak the
silence widened for her words, the ship's cook stopped shuffling his
feet. “Oh come,” she said, “Come and be saved!” Her voice seemed to
travel from her without effort, and to penetrate every corner and every
consciousness. There was a sudden dip in it like the fall of water, that
thrilled along the nerves. “Who am I that ask you? A poor weak woman,
ignorant, unknown. Never mind. It is not my voice but the voice in your
heart that entreats you 'Come and be saved!' You know that voice; it
speaks in the watches of the night; it began to speak when you were a
little, little child, with little joys and sorrows and little prayers
that you have forgotten now. Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender
voice”--her own had dropped to the cooing of doves--“it is hard to
know why all the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper
it! Strange, strange! But the world is full of the clamour of its own
foolishness, and the voice is lost in it, except in places where people
come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches. You hear
it now in the echo from my lips, 'Come and be saved.' Why must I beg of
you? Why do you not come hastening, running? Are you too wise? But when
did the wisdom of this world satisfy you about the next? Are you too
much occupied? But in the day of judgment what will you do?”--


     “When you come to Jordan's flood,
      How will you do?  How will you do?”


It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her
opportunity. Laura gave her no glance of surprise--perhaps she was
disciplined to interruptions--but caught up her own tambourine, singing,
and instantly the chorus was general, the Big drum thumping out the
measure, all the tambourines shaking together.


     “You who now contemn your God,
      How will you do?  How will you do?”


The Duke's Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made little of
the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment,
but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the
thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with
their feet. Through the medley of voices--everybody sang except Arnold
and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's seemed to flow, separate and
clear, threading the jangle upon melody, and turning the doggerel into
an appeal, direct, intense. When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to
him, in the unmistakable intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.


     “Death will be a solemn day
      When the soul is forced away,
      It will be too late to pray;
      How will you do?”


It was simple enough. All her supreme desire to convince, to turn, to
make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the room with
whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could
seek with a kind of right to response. But the sensation Duff Lindsay
tried to sit still under was not simple. It had the novelty, the shock,
of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped
and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears. His soul seemed
shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet the buffets themselves were
enthralling. In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to
depart, picked up his stick, but Arnold was sitting holding his chin,
wrapped in quiet interest, and took no notice. The hymn stopped, and
he found a few minutes' respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the
meeting, unveiling each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over
the leaves of the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware,
for airs and verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his
untaken, sinful citadel. There was time to bring him calmness enough to
wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the sort
of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch his state
with interest. Then, before he knew it, they were all down on their
knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not aware of the meaning
of a single word that she said, only that her voice was threading itself
in and out of his consciousness burdened with a passion that made it
exquisite to him. Her appeal lifted itself in the end into song, low and
sweet.


     “Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
      Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
      There to my heart was the blood applied,
      Glory to His name!”


They let her sing it alone, even the tempting chorus, and when it was
over Lindsay was almost certain that his were not the preliminary
pangs of conversion by the methods of the Salvation Army. Deliberately,
however, he postponed further analysis of them until after the meeting
was over. He would be compelled then to go away, back to the club to
dinner, or something; they would put out the lights and lock the place
up: he thought of that. He glanced at the lamps with a perception of the
finality that would come when they were extinguished--she would troop
away with the others into the darkness--and then at his watch to see how
much time there was left. More exhortation followed and more prayer; he
was only aware that she did not speak. She sat with her hand over her
eyes, and Lindsay had an excited conviction that she was still occupying
herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect whether
anyone else was aware of it, this connection that she was blazoning
between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into a sense of
ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of stuffy smells.
When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a rapt effort to tell
her that he perceived her intention. That he should be grateful, that he
should approve, was neither here nor there; the indispensable thing was
that she should know him conscious, receptive. She read three or four
sacred verses, a throb of tender longing from the very Christheart,
“Come unto Me.”... The words stole about the room like tears. Then she
would ask “all present,” she said, to engage for a moment in silent
prayer. There was a wordless interval, only the vague street noises
surging past the door. A thrill ran along the benches as Laura brought
it to an end with sudden singing. She was on her feet as the others
raised their heads, breaking forth clear and jubilant.


     “I am so wondrously saved from sin,
      Jesus so sweetly abides within;
      There at the Cross where He took me in,
      Glory to His name!”


She smiled as she sang. It was a happy confident smile, and it was
plain that she longed to believe it the glad reflection of the last
ten minutes' spiritual experience of many who heard her. Lindsay's
perception of this was immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested for
an instant of glad inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy of her
calling, he felt a pang of compunction. It was a formless reproach, too
vague for anything like a charge, but it came nearest to defining itself
in the idea that he had gone too far--he who had not left his seat. When
the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand said, “The meeting is now open
for testimonies,” he knew that all her hope was upon him, though she
looked at the screen above his head; and he sat abashed, with a prodigal
sense surging through him of what he would rejoice to do for her in
compensation. In the little chilly silence that followed he surprised
his own eyes moist with disappointment--it had all been so anxious and
so vain--and he felt relief and gratitude when the man who beat the drum
stood up and announced that he had been saved for eleven years, with
details about how badly he stood in need of it when it happened.

“Hallelujah!” said Ensign Sand cheerfully, with a meretricious air
of hearing it for the first time. “Any more?” and a Norwegian sailor
lurched shamefacedly upon his feet. He had a couple of inches of
straggling yellow beard all round his face, and fingered an old felt
hat.

“I haf' to say only dis word. I goin' sdop by Jesus. Long time I subbose
I sdop by Jesus. I subbose--”

“Glory be to God!” remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of the
Duke's Own who were inclined to be amused. “That will do, thank you.
Now, is there nobody else? Speak up, friends. It'll do you no harm, none
whatever; it'll do you that much good you'll be surprised. Now, who'll
be the next to say a word for Jesus?” She was nodding encouragement at
the negro cook as if she knew him for a wavering soul, and he, sunk in
his gleaming white collar, was aware, in silent smiling misery, that the
expectations of the meeting were toward him. Laura had again hidden her
eyes in her hand. The negro fingered his watch chain foolishly, and
the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her
perception that an African in his best clothes under conviction of sin
was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself
upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It
was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat,
got upon his feet instead.

“I also,” he said, “would offer my humble testimony to the grace of
God--with all my heart.”

It was as if he had repeated part of the creed in the performance of his
office. Then he turned and bent gravely to Lindsay, “Shall we go now?”
 he whispered, and the two made their way to the door, leaving a silence
behind them which Lindsay imagined, on the part of Ensign Sand at least,
to be somewhat resentful. As they passed out a voice recovered itself,
and cried, “Hallelujah!” It was Laura's; and all the way to the
club--Arnold was dining with him there--Lindsay listened to his friend's
analysis of religious appeal to the emotions, but chiefly heard that
clear music above a sordid din, “Hallelujah!” “Hallelujah!”



CHAPTER IV


When Alicia Livingstone, almost believing she liked it, drove to Number
Three, Lal Behari's Lane, and left cards upon Miss Hilda Howe, she was
only partially rewarded. Through the plaster gate-posts, badly in want
of repair, and bearing, sunk in one of them, a marble slab announcing
“Residence with Board,” she perceived the squalid attempt the place made
at respectability, the servants in dirty livery salaaming curiously,
the over-fed squirrel in a cage in the door, the pair of damaged wicker
chairs in the porch, suggesting the easiest intercourse after dinner,
the general discoloration. She observed with irritation that it was
a down-at-heels shrine for such a divinity, in spite of its six dusty
crotons in crumbling plaster urns, but the irritation was rather at her
own repulsion to the place than at any inconsistency it presented. What
she demanded and expected of herself was that Number Three, Lal Behari's
Lane should be pleasing, interesting, acceptable on its merits as a
cheap Calcutta boarding-house. She found herself so unable to perceive
its merits that it was almost a relief to see nothing of Miss Howe
either; Hilda had gone to rehearsal, to the “dance-house” the servant
said, eyeing the unusual landau. Alicia rolled back into streets with
Christian names, distressed by an uncertainty as to whether her visit
had been a disappointment or an escape. By the next day, however, she
was well pulled together in favour of the former conclusion--she could
nearly always persuade herself of such things in time--and wrote a frank
sweet little note in her picturesque hand--she never joined more than
two syllables--to say how sorry she had been, and would Miss Howe come
to lunch on Friday. “I should love to make it dinner,” she, said to
herself, as she sealed the envelope, “but before one knows how she will
behave in connection with the men--I suppose one must think of the other
people.”

It was Friday, and Hilda was lunching. The two had met among the
faint-tinted draperies of Alicia's drawing-room--there was something
auroral even about the mantelpiece--a little like diplomatists using
a common tongue native to neither of them. Perhaps Alicia drew the
conventions round her with the greater fluency; Hilda had more to cover,
but was less particular about it. The only thing she was bent upon
making imperceptible was her sense of the comedy of Miss Livingstone's
effort to receive her as if she had been anybody else. Alicia was hardly
aware of what she wanted to conceal, unless it was her impression that
Miss Howe's dress was cut a trifle too low in the neck, that she was
almost too effective in that cream and yellow to be quite right. Alicia
remembered afterwards to smile at it, that her first ten minutes of
intercourse with Hilda Howe were dominated by a lively desire to set
Celine at her--with such a foundation to work upon what could Celine
not have done? She remembered her surprise, too, at the ordinary things
Hilda said in that rich voice, even in the tempered drawing-room tones
of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under the gallery,
and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with them, movements
which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women
and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them,
and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazar rode on
long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the
encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they
might have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and
acknowledged no demand for more than the smile.

The cutlets had come before Hilda's impression was at the back of her
head, her defences withdrawn, her eyes free and content, her elbow on
the table. They had found a portrait-painter.

“He has such an eye,” said Alicia, “for the possibilities of character.”

“Such an eye that he develops them. I know one man he painted. I suppose
when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the meantime he and
everybody else had forgotten about it. All but Salter. Salter re-created
it on the original lines, and brought it up, and gave it a
lodging behind the man's, wrinkles. I saw the picture. It was
fantastic--psychologically.”

“Pysychology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know,” Alicia said.
“Do let him give you a little more. It's only Moselle.” She felt
quite direct and simple too in uttering her postulate. Her eyes had a
friendly, unembarrassed look, there was nothing behind them but the joy
of talking intelligently about Salter.

Hilda did not even glance away. She looked at her hostess instead,
with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have
mistaken it to be insincere. It was part of her that she could swim
in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in
Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent
quality.

“It's everything to everything, don't you think? And especially, thank
Heaven, to my trade.” Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the
way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms. That was the
case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.

“To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make
a picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and
voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to
do it, or a pen or a chisel!”

“I know what you mean,” said Alicia. She had a little flush, and an
excited hand among the wineglasses. “No, I don't want any; please don't
bother me!” to the man at her elbow with something in aspic. “It's much
more direct--your way.”

“And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned,
abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh yes! if we are lightly
esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has dignity
enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to
appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare's--with being
unliterary. You might--good Heavens!--as well accuse a painter of not
being a musician! Our business lies behind the words--they are our mere
medium! Rosalind wasn't literary--why should I be? But don't indulge me
in my shop, if it bores you,” Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that
Miss Livingstone was never further from being bored.

“Oh, please go on! If you only knew,” her lifted eyebrows confessed
the tedium of Calcutta small talk. “But why do you say you are lightly
esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone--and you hold the public in
the hollow of your hand!”

Hilda smiled. “Dear old public! It does its best for us, doesn't it?
One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never believing in
its treachery in the end. But I don't know why I say we are lightly
esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all. I've done nothing--I've
no right. In ten years perhaps--no, five--I'll write signed articles for
the New Review about modern dramatic tendencies. Meanwhile you'll have
to consider that the value of my opinions is prospective.”

“But already you have succeeded--you have made a place.”

“In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg, I think they remember me in
Trichinopoly too, and--yes, it may be so--in Manila. But that wasn't
legitimate drama,” and Hilda smiled again in a way that coloured her
unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia's eyes, in rose and gold. She waited
an instant for these tints to materialise, but Miss Howe's smile slid
discreetly into her wineglass instead.

“There's immense picturesqueness in the Philippines,” she went on, her
look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way with her
hat. “Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions. One wonders what
America will do with those friars, when she does go there.”

“Do you think she is going?” asked Alicia vaguely. It was the merest
politeness--she did not wait for a reply. With a courageous air which
became her charmingly, she went on, “Don't you long to submit yourself
to London? I should.”

“Oh, I must. I know I must. It's in the path of duty and
conscience--it's not to be put off for ever. But one dreads the chained
slavery of London”--she hesitated before the audacity of adding, “the
sordid hundred nights,” but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as
if she had watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.

“You are magnificently sure,” she said. Alicia herself felt curiously
buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate
achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had
become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together,
and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In Hilda's there was an
instant of consideration before she said--“I might as well tell you--you
won't misunderstand--that I AM sure. I expect things of myself. I hold a
kind of mortgage on my success; when I foreclose it will come, bringing
the long, steady, grasping chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never
a day to live in, only to accomplish, every moment straddled with
calculation, an end to all the byways where one finds the colour of the
sun. The successful London actress, my dear--what existence has she? A
straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights
in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net
result in every newspaper--an existence of pure artificiality infested
by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality. It's
the house for ever on your back; at the last you are buried in it,
smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings.
There never was reward so qualified by its conditions.”

“Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?”

“Oh yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But then
you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but the
eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could
begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much
understood even in the profession--but there are so many, honestly, that
London being at the top of the hill, I'm not panting up. My way of
going has twice wound round the world already. But I'm talking like an
illustrated interview. You will grant the impertinence of all I've
been saying when I tell you that I've never yet had an illustrated
interview.”

“Aren't they almost always vulgar?” Alicia asked. “Don't they make you
sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?”

Hilda threw her head back and laughed, almost, Alicia noted, like a man.
She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief,
as women often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much
as she wanted to, and it was as clear as possible that tights presented
themselves quite preposterously to any discussion of her profession.
They were things to be taken for granted, like the curtain and the
wings; they had no relation to clothing in the world.

Alicia laughed too. After all, they were absurd--her outsider's
prejudices. She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar
again for her point of view about the illustrated interviews. “They ARE
atrocities,” she said. “On their merits they ought to be cast out
of even the suburbs of art and literature. But they help to make
the atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do that,
of course--” and the pursed seriousness of her lips gave Alicia the
impression that, though the whole world took offence, the expediency of
the illustrated interview was beyond discussion.

The servant brought them coffee. “Shall we smoke here,” said Miss
Livingstone, “or in the drawing-room?”

“Oh, do you want to? Are you quite sure you like it? Please don't on my
account--you really mustn't. Suppose it should mike you ill?” If Hilda
felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her face. Nothing was
there but cheerful concern.

“It won't make me ill.” Alicia lifted her chin with delicate
assertiveness. “I suppose you do smoke, don't you?”

“Occasionally--with some people. Honestly, have you ever done it
before?”

“Four times,” said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the
apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them. “I thought
it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you--”

“Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some Serene
Highness's neck. I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer to dispense
with it. In my bath, for instance, and almost always in omnibuses.”

“How absurd you are! Then we'll stay here.”

Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia sacrifice
two matches.

“There's Rosa Norton of our company,” she went on. “Poor, dear old Rosy!
She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look
of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear;
but blow her, if she won't be as Bohemian as anybody. I've seen her
smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin. I got up and went
away.”

“But I can't possibly affect you in that way,” said Alicia, putting her
cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glace. “I'm not
old and I'm not grotesque.”

“No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please.”

“I BEG your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone out.
Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're damp.”

“Trifle dry, if anything,” Hilda returned, with the cigarette between
her lips, “but in excellent order, really.” She took it between her
first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end,
leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils. It
was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss
Howe wouldn't do it again. But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's
way of doing it.

“No, you're not old and grotesque,” Hilda said contemplatively; “you're
young and beautiful.” The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and
enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air. Alicia flushed ever so
little under it, but took it without wincing. She had less than the
common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something
different--a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.

“Fairly,” she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there
was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be
dismissed between them.

“You made a vivid impression here last year,” said Alicia. She felt
delightfully terse and to the point.

“You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know
him well?”

Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of
them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would
have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.

“He is an old friend of my brother's,” she said. Hilda had the sensation
of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface.
She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette crisped over
with grey, in its blackened calyx.

“Most impressionable,” she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. “As to
the rest of the people--bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its
torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know,
the way hepatic influences can be idealised--made to serve ennobling
ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different.”

“Yes?” Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her,
the asking note was in the word.

“We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the
queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square,
to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it.”

“A statue?”

“No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to
me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was, and the performance.
She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all
colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come
from her, from her hair or her eyes or something. I almost expected to
see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended.”

“It sounds most unusual,” Alicia said, with a light smile. Her interest
was rather obviously curbed.

“It happens every day, really, only one doesn't stop and look; one
doesn't go round the corner.”

There was another little silence, full of the unwillingness of Miss
Livingstone's desire to be informed.

Hilda knocked the ash of her cigarette into her finger-bowl, and waited.
The pause grew so stiff with embarrassment that she broke it herself.

“And I regret to say it was I who introduced them,” she said.

“Introduced whom?”

“Mr. Lindsay and Miss Laura Filbert of the Salvation Army. They met at
Number Three; she had come after my soul. I think she was disappointed,”
 Hilda went on tranquilly, “because I would only lend it to her while she
was there.”

“Of the Salvation Army! I can't imagine why you should regret it. He is
always grateful to be amused.”

“Oh, there is no reason to doubt his gratitude. He is rather intense
about it. And--I don't know that my regret is precisely on Mr. Lindsay's
account. Did I say so?” They were simple, amiable words, and
their pertinence was very far from insistent; but Alicia's crude
blush--everything else about her was so perfectly worked out--cried
aloud that it was too sharp a pull up. “Perhaps though,” Hilda hurried
on with a pang, “we generalise too much about the men.”

What Miss Livingstone would have found to say--she had certainly no
generalisation to offer about Duff Lindsay--had not a servant brought
her a card at that moment, is embarrassing to consider. The card saved
her the necessity. She looked at it blankly for an instant, and then
exclaimed, “My cousin, Stephen Arnold! He's a reverend--a Clarke Mission
priest, and he will come straight in here. What shall we do with our
cigarettes?”

Miss Howe had a pleasurable sense that the situation was developing.

“Yours has gone out again, so it doesn't much matter, does it? Drown
the corpse in here, and I'll pretend it belongs to me.” She pushed
the finger-bowl across, and Alicia's discouraged remnant went into it.
“Don't ask me to sacrifice mine,” she added, and there was no time for
remonstrance; Arnold's voice was lifting itself at the door.

“Pray may I come in?” he called from behind the portiere.

Hilda, who sat with her back to it, smiled in enjoying recognition of
the thin, high academic note, the prim finish of the inflection. It
reminded her of a man she knew who “did” curates beautifully.

Arnold walked past her with his quick, humble, clerical gait, and it
amused her to think that he bent over Alicia's hand as if he would bless
it.

“You can't guess how badly I want a cup of coffee.” He flavoured what he
said, and made it pretty, like a woman. “Let me confess at once, that is
what brought me.” He stopped to laugh; there was a hint of formality
and self-sacrifice even in that. “It is coffee-time, isn't it?” Then
he turned and saw Hilda, and she was, at the moment, flushed with the
luxury of her sensations, a vision as splendid as she must have been
to him unusual. But he only closed his lips and thrust his chin out a
little, with his left hand behind him in one of his intensely clerical
attitudes, and so stood waiting. Hilda reflected afterwards that she
could hardly have expected him to exclaim, “Whom have we here?” with
upraised hands, but she had to acknowledge her flash of surprise at his
self-possession. She noted, too, his grave bow when Alicia mentioned
them to each other, that there was the habit of deference in it, yet
that it waved her courteously, so to speak, out of his life. It was all
as interesting as the materialisation of a quaint tradition, and she
decided not, after all, to begin a trivial comedy for herself and
Alicia, by asking the Reverend Stephen Arnold whether he objected to
tobacco. She had an instant's circling choice of the person she would
represent to this priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their
lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really
hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the
shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went
to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness
stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced
her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him of too
general an accessibility, too unthinking a largesse. She went on
smoking, but almost immediately her cigarette took its proper note of
insignificance. Alicia, speaking of it once afterwards to Arnold, found
that he had forgotten it.

“Even in College Street you have heard of Miss Howe,” Alicia said, and
the negative, very readable in Arnold's silent bow, brought Hilda a
flicker of happiness at her hostess's expense.

“I don't think the posters carry us as far as College Street,” she
said, “but I am not difficult to explain, Mr. Arnold. I act with Mr.
Stanhope's Company. If you lived in Chowringhee you couldn't help
knowing all about me, the letters are so large.” The bounty of her
well-spring of kindness was in it under the candour and the simplicity;
it was one of those least of little things which are enough.

Arnold smiled back at her, and she saw recognition leap through the
armour-plate of his ecclesiasticism. He glanced away again quickly, and
looked at the floor as he said he feared they were terribly out of it
in College Street, for which, however, he had evidently no apology to
offer. He continued to look at the floor with a careful air, as if it
presented points pertinent to the situation. Hilda felt herself--it
was an odd sensation--too sunny upon the nooked, retiring current that
flowed in him. He might have turned to the cool accustomed shadow that
Alicia made, but she was aware that he did not, that he was struggling
through her strangeness and his shyness for something to say to her. He
stirred his coffee, and once or twice his long upper lip trembled as if
he thought he had found it; but it was Alicia who talked, making light
accusations against the rigours of the Mission House, complaining of her
cousin that he was altogether given over to bonds and bands, that she
personally would soon cease to hold him in affection at all; she saw so
little of him it wasn't really worth while.

This was old fencing ground between them, and Stephen parried her
pleasantly enough, but his eyes strayed speculatively to the other
end of the table, where, however, they rose no higher than the firm,
lightly-moulded hand that held the cigarette.

“If I could found a monastic order,” Hilda said, “one of the rules
should be a week's compulsory retirement into the world four times a
year.” She spoke with a kind of grave brightness; it was difficult to
know whether she was altogether in jest.

“There would be secession all over the place,” Arnold responded, with
his repressed smile. “You would get any number of probationers; I wonder
whether you would keep them!”

“During that week,” Hilda went on, “they should be compelled to dine
and dance every night, to read a 'Problem' novel every morning before
luncheon, to marry and be given in marriage, and to go to all the
variety entertainments. Think of the austere bliss of the return to the
cloisters! All joy lies in a succession of sensations, they say. Do you
remember how Lord Ormont arranged his pleasures? Oh yes, my brotherhood
would be popular, as soon as it was understood.”

Alicia hurried in with something palliating--she could remember
flippancies of her own that had been rebuked--but there was no sign
or token of disapproval in Arnold's face. What she might have
observed there, if she had been keen enough in vision, was a slight
disarrangement, so to speak, of the placid priestly mask, and something
like the original undergraduate looking out from beneath.

Hilda began to put on her gloves. The left one gaped at two finger-ends;
she buttoned it with the palm thrown up and outward, as if it were the
daintiest spoil of the Avenue de l'Opera.

“Not yet!” Alicia cried.

“Thanks, I must. To-night is our last full rehearsal, and I have to
dress the stage for the first act before six o'clock. And, after pulling
all that furniture about, I shall want an hour or two in bed.”

“You! But it's monstrous. Is there nobody else?”

“I wouldn't let anybody else,” Hilda laughed. “Don't forget, please,
that we are only strolling players, odds and ends of people, mostly
from the Antipodes. Don't confound our manners and customs with anything
you've heard about the Lyceum. Good-bye. It has been charming. Goodbye,
Mr. Arnold.”

But Alicia held her hand. “The papers say it is to be The Offence of
Galilee, after all,” she said.

“Yes. Hamilton Bradley is all right again, and we've found a pretty
fair local Judas--amateur. We couldn't possibly put it on without
Mr. Bradley. He takes the part of”--Hilda glanced at the hem of the
listening priestly robe--“of the chief character, you know.”

“That was the great Nonconformist success at home last year, wasn't
it?” Arnold asked; “Leslie Patullo's play? I knew him at Oxford. I can't
imagine--he's a queer chap to be writing things like that.”

“It works out better than you--than one might suppose,” Hilda returned,
moving toward the door. “Some of the situations are really almost novel,
in spite of all your centuries of preaching.” She sent a disarming
smile with that, looking over her shoulder in one of her most effective
hesitations, one hand holding back the portiere.

“And next week?” cried Alicia.

“Oh, next week we do L'Amourette de Giselle--Frank Golding's re-vamp.
Good-bye! Good-bye!”

“I wonder very much what Patullo has done with The Offence of Galilee,”
 Arnold said, after she had gone.

“Come and see, Stephen. We have a box, and there will be heaps of room.
It's--suitable, isn't it?”

“Oh, quite.”

“Then dine with us--the Yardleys are coming--and go on. Why not?”

“Thanks very much indeed. It is sure to reward one. I think I shall be
able to give myself that pleasure.”

Arnold made a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed, became
a cup of tea; and his talk, while he stayed, seemed to suffer less from
the limitations of his Order than it usually did. He was fluent and
direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more than his prayers; that
his glance at the world had still a speculation in it; and when he went
away, he left Alicia with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring
a vague inward corollary upon her day--

“It pays! It pays!”



CHAPTER V


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.



CHAPTER VI


While Alicia Livingstone fought with her imagination in accounting
for Lindsay's absence from the theatre on the first night of a notable
presentation by Miss Hilda Howe, he sat with his knees crossed on the
bench farthest back and the corner obscurest of the Salvation Army
Headquarters in Bentinck Street. It had become his accustomed place;
sitting there he had begun to feel like the adventurer under Niagara,
it was the only spot from which he could observe, try to understand and
cope with the torrential nature of his passion. Nearer to the fair charm
of his kneeling Laura, in the uncertain flare of the kerosene lamp and
the sound of the big drum, he grew blind, lost count, was carried away.
His persistent refusal of a better place also profited him in that it
brought to Ensign Sand and the other “officers” the divination that he
was one of those shyly anxious souls who have to be enticed into the
Kingdom of Heaven with wariness, and they made a great pretence of not
noticing him, going on with the exercises just as if he were not there,
a consideration which he was able richly to enhance when the plate came
round. After his first contribution, Mrs. Sand regarded his spiritual
interests with almost superstitious reverence, according them the
fullest privacy of which she was capable. The gravity which the
gentleman attached to his situation was sufficiently testified by the
“amount”; Mrs. Sand never wanted better evidence than the amount. Even
Laura, acting doubtless under instructions, seemed disposed to hold
away from him in her prayers and exhortations; only a very occasional
allusion passed her lips which Duff could appropriate. These, when they
fell, he gathered and set like flowers in his tenderest consciousness,
to visit and water them after the sun went down and for twenty-four
hours he would not see her again. Her intonation went with them and her
face; they lived on that. They stirred him, I mean, least of all in the
manner of their intention. After the first quarter of an hour, it is
to be feared, Lindsay suffered no more apprehensions on the score of
emotional hypnotism. He recognised his situation plainly enough, and
there was no appeal in it of which the Reverend Stephen Arnold, for
example, could properly suspect the genuineness or the permanence.

On this Saturday night he sat through the meeting as he had sat through
other meetings, absorbed in his exquisite experience which he meditated
mostly with his eyes on the floor. His attitude was one quite adapted
to deceive Ensign Sand; if he had been occupied with the burden of his
transgressions it was one he might very well have fallen into. When
Laura knelt or sang he sometimes looked at her, at other times he looked
at the situation in the brightness of her presence at the other end of
the room. She gave forth there, for Lindsay, an illumination by which he
almost immediately began to read his life; and it was because he thought
he had done this with accuracy and intelligence that he came up behind
her that evening when the meeting was over as she followed the rest,
with her sari drawn over her head, out into the darkness of Bentinck
Street, and said with directness, “I should like to come and see you.
When may I? Any time that suits you. Have you half an hour to spare
to-morrow?”

It was plain that she was tired, and that the brightness with which
she welcomed his advance was a trifle taught and perfunctory. Not the
frankness though, or the touch of “Now we are getting to business,” that
stood in her expression. She looked alert and pleased.

“You would like to have a little talk, wouldn't you?” she said. Her
manner took Lindsay a trifle aback; it suggested that she conferred this
privilege so freely. “To-morrow--let me see, we march in the morning,
and I have an open-air at four in the afternoon--the Ensign takes the
evening meeting. Yes, I could see you to-morrow about two or about
seven, after I get back from the Square.” It was not unlike a
professional appointment.

Lindsay considered. “Thanks,” he said, “I'll come at about seven--if you
are sure you won't be too exhausted to have me after such a day.”

He saw that her lids as she raised them to answer were slightly reddened
at the edges, testifying to the acridity of Calcutta's road dust, and
a dry crack crept into the silver voice with which she said
matter-of-factly, “We are never too exhausted to attend to our Master's
business.”

Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation; he looked gravely the
other way. “And the address?” he said.

“Almost next door--we all live within bugle-call. The entrance is in
Crooked Lane. Anybody will tell you.”

At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting. Lindsay said “Thanks”
 again, and passed out--she seemed to be holding it for him--and picked
his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite. From
there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked
Lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part
in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also
localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make
her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and
found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in
advance, to say that she had not expected him. “Friendly creature!” he
said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that
already there was one who guessed, who knew.

One gropes in Crooked Lane after the lights of Bentinck Street have done
all that can be expected of them. There are various things to avoid,
washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps
of rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted
these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was
positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out, and the man showed
him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It
was up there, he said, that the “tamasho-mems” * lived. There were three
tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Lindsay's trivial coin, and
one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho--it was finished.
Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the landing to
avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired Miss Filbert's
whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted a cigar,
disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and a dirty
shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At all events he
had the information, Lindsay was to keep straight on, it was the third
storey. Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution, and just missed
treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John's. At
the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the
side of a passage. The partition in which the door was came considerably
short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite
stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile
pattern. Lindsay dared no farther, but lifted up his voice in the Indian
way to summon a servant, “Qui hai?”# he called, “Qui hai?”


     * Festival-making women.

     # “Whoever is there?”


He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a door
farther down the passage opened outwards, disclosing Laura Filbert
with her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful picture.
“Good-evening, Mr. Lindsay,” she said as he advanced. “Won't you come
in?” She clung to the handle until he had passed into the room, then she
closed the door after him. “I was expecting you,” she said. “Mr. Harris,
let me make you acquainted with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris.”

Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cheap little chairs.
He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private's garb of the
Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been reading a newspaper; he
had a displeasing air of possession. At Laura's formula he looked up
and nodded without amiability, folded his journal the other side out and
returned to it.

“Please take a seat,” Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a demon
of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt dumb.
Nor did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris. He crossed his legs in
greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible, looking at Laura, who
sat down like a third stranger, curiously detached from any sense of
hospitality.

“Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris,” she said
pleasantly. “I guess you can tell him what to do as well as I can.”

“Oh!” Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word. “Is he?” said Mr.
Harris, without looking up from his paper. “Well, what I've got to say
on that subject I say at the evenin' meetin', which is a proper an' a
public place. He can hear it there any day of the week.”

“I think I have already heard,” remarked Lindsay, “what you have to
say.”

“Then that's all right,” said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon his
newspaper. He appeared to devour it. Laura looked from one to the other
of them and fell upon an expedient.

“If you'll excuse me,” she said, “I'll just get you that bicycle story
you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take it with
you. The Ensign's got it,” and she left the room. Lindsay glanced round,
and promptly announced to himself that he could not come there again.
It was taking too violent an advantage. The pursuit of an angel does not
imply that you may trap her in her corner under the Throne. The place
was divided by a calico curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a
mosquito curtain--she slept in there. On the walls were all tender texts
about loving and believing and bearing others' burdens, interspersed
with photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic
eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras, Ceylon,
China. A little wooden table stood against the wall holding an album,
a Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an irrelevant Japanese doll
which seemed to stretch its absurd arms straight out in a gay little
ineffectual heathen protest. There was another more embarrassing table:
it had a coarse cloth; and was garnished with a loaf and butter-dish, a
plate of plantains and a tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a meal
evidently impending. It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with its
core in Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room looked
up. “If you're here on private business,” he said to Lindsay, fixing his
eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him, “maybe you ain't
aware that the Ensign”--he threw his head back in the direction of the
next room--“is the person to apply to. She's in command here. Captain
Filbert's only under her.”

“Indeed?” said Lindsay. “Thanks.”

“It ain't like it is in the Queen's army,” Harris volunteered, still
searching Lindsay's vicinity for a point upon which his eyes could
permanently rest, “where, if you remember, Ensigns are the smallest
officer we have.”

“The commission is, I think, abolished,” replied Lindsay, governing a
deep and irritated frown.

“Maybe so. This Army don't pretend to pattern very close on the
other--not in discipline anyhow,” said Mr. Harris with ambiguity. “But
you'll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can for you.
She's a hard-working officer.”

A sharp wail smote the air from a point close to the lath and canvas
partition, on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and steps in
the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mrs. Sand
seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at which Mr. Harris
shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed into silence, looking
sternly at an advertisement. The air was full of their mutual annoyance,
although Duff tried to feel amused. They were raging as primitively,
under the red flannel shirt and the tan-coloured waistcoat with white
silk spots, as two cave-men on an Early British coast; their only
sophistication lay in Harris's newspaper and Lindsay's idea that he
ought to find this person humorous. Then Laura came back and resolved
the situation.

“Here it is,” she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; “we have all
enjoyed it. Thank you very much.” There was in it the oddest mixture of
the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the
book, had no alternative.

“Good-evening, then, Captain,” said he, and went, stumbling at the door.

“Mr. Harris,” said Laura equably, “found salvation about a month ago. He
is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage works here.
He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in in
the evening.”

“He seems to be a--a member of the corps,” said Lindsay.

“He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn't find
himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he
wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign
doesn't think there's any objection.”

Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cheap little chairs, her
sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native dress
clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated ambitions
seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with anything
else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay
felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him seemed to
resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something disappointingly
thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a unit in a
glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her knowledge or her
desire. This brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how
far he had depended on her interest for his soul's sake to introduce her
to a wider view of him.

“But you have come to tell me about yourself,” she said, suddenly it
seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile.
“Well, is there any special stumbling-block?”

“There are some things I should certainly like you to know,” replied
Lindsay; “but you can't think how difficult--” he glanced at the
lath and plaster partition, but she to whom publicity was a condition
salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no
interpretation for that.

“I know it's sometimes hard to speak,” she said; “Satan ties our
tongues.”

The misunderstanding was absurd, but he saw only its difficulties,
knitting his brows.

“I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad,” he said. “I
cannot be sure that you will even listen to it.”

“Oh,” Laura said simply, “do not be afraid! I have heard confessions! I
work at home, you see, a good deal among the hospitals, and--we do not
shrink, you know, in the Army, from things like that.”

“Good God!” he exclaimed, staring, “you don't think--you don't
suppose--”

“Ah! don't say that! It's so like swearing.”

As he sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something intelligible,
the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl of eighteen, also
in the dress of the Army, came through from the bedroom part. She smiled
in a conscious, meaningless way, as she sidled past them. At the door
her smile broadened, and as she closed it after her she gave them a
little nod.

“That's my lieutenant,” said Laura.

“The place is like a warren,” Lindsay groaned. “How can we talk here?”

Laura looked at him gravely, as one making a diagnosis. “Do you think,”
 she said, “a word of prayer would help you?”

“No,” said Lindsay. “No, thank you. What is making me miserable,” he
added quietly, “is the knowledge that we are being overheard. If you go
into the next room, I am quite certain you will find Mrs. Sand listening
by the wall.”

“She's gone out! She and the Captain and Miss De Souza, to take the
evening meeting. Nobody is in there except the two children, and they
are asleep.” Her smile, he thought, made a Madonna of her. “Indeed, we
are quite alone, you and I, in the flat now. So please don't be afraid,
Mr. Lindsay! Say whatever is in your heart, and the mere saying--”

“Oh,” Lindsay cried, “stop! Don't, for Heaven's sake, look at me in that
light any longer. I'm not penitent. I'm not--what do you call
it?--a soul under conviction. Nothing of the sort.” He waited with
considerateness for this to have its effect upon her; he could not go on
until he saw her emerge, gasping, from the inundation of it. But she was
not even staggered by it. She only looked down at her folded hands with
an added seriousness and a touch of sorrow.

“Aren't you?” she said. “But at least you feel that you ought to be. I
thought it had been accomplished. But I will go on praying.”

“Shall you be very angry if I tell you that I'd rather you didn't? I
want to come into your life differently--sincerely.”

She looked at him with such absolute blankness that his resolution was
swiftly overturned, and showed him a different face.

“I won't tell you anything about what I feel and what I want to-night
except this--I find that you are influencing all my thoughts and all my
days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way. You hear as much
as that often, and from many people, don't you? So there is nothing in
it that need startle you or make you uncomfortable.” He paused, and she
nodded in a visible effort to follow him.

“So I am here to-night to ask you to let me do something for you just
for my own pleasure--there must be some way of helping you, and being
your friend--”

“As Mr. Harris is,” she interrupted. “I do influence Mr. Harris for
good, I know. He says so.”

“Influence me,” he begged, “in any way you like.”

“I will pray for you,” she said. “I promise that.”

“And you will let me see you sometimes?” he asked, conceding the point.

“If I thought it would do you any good”--she looked at him doubtfully,
clasping and unclasping her hands; “I will see; I will ask for guidance.
Perhaps it is one of His own appointed ways. If you have no objection,
I will give you this little book, Almost Persuaded. I am sure you
are almost persuaded. Above all, I hope you will go on coming to the
meetings.”

And in the course of the next two or three moments Lindsay found
himself, somewhat to his astonishment, again in the night of the
staircase, dismissed exactly as Mr. Harris had been, by the agency of a
printed volume. Only in his case a figure of much angelic beauty stood
at the top, holding a patent kerosene lamp high, to illumine his way. He
refrained from looking back lest she should see something too human
in his face, and vanish, leaving him in darkness which would be indeed
impenetrable.



CHAPTER VII


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.



CHAPTER VIII


“I have outstayed all the rest,” Lindsay said, with his hat and stick
in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, “because I want
particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious little time,” he
added, glancing at his watch.

She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour for
men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered more when
he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the situation, while
Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and went. There was a mist in
her brain as she talked to the Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries--it
did not in the least obscure what she found to say--and in the midst of
it the formless idea that he must wish to attach a special importance to
his visit. This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke
of out-sitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and
open it. “You might stay to lunch,” she said, addressing a pair of crows
in altercation on the verandah.

“There is nearly half an hour before lunch,” he said. “Can I convince
you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute fool?”

Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a prevision of
the need of support. “I hardly think,” she said, drawing the long breath
with which we try to subdue a tempest within, “that it would take
so long.” She looked with careful criticism at the violets in his
buttonhole.

“I've had a supreme experience,” he said, “very strange and very lovely.
I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it,” he added quickly,
watching her face; “so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it roughly.”

She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. “Why should
you suppose I would touch it roughly?” There was that in her voice which
cried out that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the
brink of his confidence, could not suppose it, did not hear it. He knew
her so well.

“A great many people will,” he said. “I can't bear the thought of their
fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you.”

She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked
straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in
the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived a smile.

“I believe you know already,” Lindsay cried.

“I have heard something. Don't be alarmed--not from people, from Miss
Howe.”

“Wonderful woman! I haven't told her.”

“Is that always necessary? She has intuitions. In this case,” Alicia
went on, with immense courage, “I didn't believe them.”

“Why?” he asked enjoyingly. Anything to handle his delight--he would
even submit it to analysis.

She hesitated--her business was in great waters, the next instant might
engulf her. “It's so curiously unlike you,” she faltered. “If she
had been a duchess--a very exquisite person, or somebody very
clever--remember I haven't seen her.”

“You haven't, so I must forgive you invidious comparisons.” Lindsay
visaged the words with a smile, but they had an articulated hardness.

Alicia raised her eyebrows.

“What do you expect one to imagine?” she asked, with quietness.

“A miracle,” he said sombrely.

“Ah, that's difficult!”

There was silence for a moment between them, then she added perversely--

“And, you know, faith is not what it was.”

Duff sat biting his lips. Her dryness irritated him. He was accustomed
to find in her fields of delicately blooming enthusiasms, and running
watercourses where his satisfactions were ever reflected. Suddenly she
seemed to emerge to her own consciousness, upon a summit from which she
could look down upon the turmoil in herself and beyond it, to where he
stood.

“Don't make a mistake,” she said. “Don't.” She thrust her hand for
a fraction of an instant toward him, and then swiftly withdrew it,
gathering herself together to meet what he might say.

What he did say was simple, and easy to hear. “That's what everybody
will tell me; but I thought you might understand.” He tapped the toe of
his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes. She looked down
and counted them too.

“Then you won't help me to marry her?” he said, definitely, at last.

“What could I do?” She twisted her sapphire ring. “Ask somebody else.”

“Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as
my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good
you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid
colours of the lost.”

The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and
the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting
Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise
of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she
looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more
unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.

“No,” she said. “It must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become
involved--I might do harm.” She had surmounted her emotion; she was able
to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. “I should
do harm,” she repeated.

“You don't count with her effect on you.”

“You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man.”

“But won't you take anything--about her--from me? You know I'm really
not a fool--not even very impressionable?”

“Oh no!” she said impatiently. “No--of course not.”

“Pray why?”

“There are other things to reckon with.” She looked coldly beyond him
out of the window. “A man's intelligence when he is in love--how far can
one count on it?”

There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured, “Oh, I
don't agree,” with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a
simple appeal. “Then after all,” he said, “you're not my friend.”

It goaded her into something like an impertinence. “After you have
married her,” she said, “you'll see.”

“You will be hers then,” he declared.

“I will be yours.” Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a
brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.

“And I thought you broad in these views,” Lindsay said, glancing at her
curiously. Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a heavy step in
the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon Major Livingstone,
looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a
profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin,
though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear
it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his
perturbation away with him as quickly as might be. Alicia saw the cloud
upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling
to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence
on the other side of the door.



CHAPTER IX


That same Sunday, Alicia had been able to say to Lindsay about Hilda
Howe, “We have not stood still--we know each other well now,” and when
he commented with some reserve upon this to follow it up. “But these
things have so little to do with mere length of time or number of
opportunities,” she declared. “One springs at some people.”

A Major-General, interrupting, said he wished he had the chance; and
they talked about something else. But perhaps this is enough to explain
a note which went by messenger from the Livingstones' pillared palace in
Middleton Street to Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, on Monday morning.
It was a short note, making a definite demand with an absence of
colour and softness and emotion which was almost elaborate. Hilda, at
breakfast, tore off the blank half sheet, and wrote in pencil--

“I think I can arrange to get her here about five this afternoon. No
rehearsal--they're doing something to the gas-pipes at the theatre, so
you will find me, anyway. And I'll be delighted to see you.”

She twisted it up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the
scrap more secure in a yellow envelope. It had an embossed post-office
stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation. Then she went back to an
extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the reflection--“Can she
possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?”

Alicia came before five. She brought a novel of Gissing's, in order
apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing. Hilda was
agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about anything, tipped on
the edge of her bed--Alicia had surmounted that degree of intimacy at
a bound by the declaration that she could no longer endure the blue
umbrellas--and clasping one knee, with an uncertain tenure of a chipped
bronze slipper deprived of its heel. Wonderful silk draperies fell about
her, with ink-spots on the sleeves; her hair was magnificent.

“It's so curious to me,” she was saying of the novel, “that anyone
should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book. It's
like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass.”

“I fancy that the most desirable way,” said Alicia, glancing at the
door.

“Don't you believe it. The best way is to come out of it, to grow out
of it. Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the value of
contrast, and the distinction of being the best. You, poor dear, were
born an artificial flower in a cardboard box. But you couldn't help it.”

“Everybody doesn't grow out of it.” The concentration in Alicia's eyes
returned again with vacillating wings.

“She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet.” The slipper dropped at
this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again. She kept her foot in
her hands, and regarded it pensively.

“Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter,” she
continued; “at all events, ready-made.”

“You have an audacity--” Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.

“Haven't I? Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?”

“I know it.”

“From him?”

“From him.”

“Oh!”--Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper--“Really? Well, we
can't let that happen.”

“Why not?”

“You have a hardihood! Is no reason plain to you? Don't you see
anything?”

Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips. “I
see only one thing that matters--he wants it,” she said.

“And won't be happy till he gets it! Rubbish, my dear! We are an
intolerably self-sacrificing sex.” Hilda felt about for pillows, and
stretched her length along the bed. “They've taught us well, the men;
it's a blood disease now, running everywhere in the female line. You may
be sure it was a barbarian princess that hesitated between the lady and
the tiger. A civilised one would have introduced the lady and given her
a dot, and retired to the nearest convent. Bah! It's a deformity, like
the dachshund's legs.”

Alicia looked as if this would be a little troublesome, and not quite
worth while, to follow.

“The happiness of his whole life is involved,” she said simply.

“Oh dear yes--the old story! And what about the happiness of yours? Do
you imagine it's laudable, admirable, this attitude? Do you see yourself
in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred satisfaction of self-praise?”

Contempt accumulated in Miss Howe's voice, and sat in her eyes. To mark
her climax she kicked her slippers over the end of the bed.

“It is idiotic--it's disgusting,” she said.

Alicia caught a flash from her. “My attitude!” she cried. “What in the
world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no attitude. I
care for him, and in that proportion I intend that he shall have what
he wants--so far as I can help him to it. You have never cared for
anybody--what do you know about it?”

Hilda took a calm, unprejudiced view of the ceiling. “I assure you I'm
not an angel,” she cried. “Haven't I cared! Several times.”

“Not really--not lastingly.”

“I don't know about really; certainly not lastingly. I've never thought
the men should have a monopoly of nomadic susceptibilities. They entail
the prettiest experiences.”

“Of course, in your profession--”

“Don't be nasty, sweet lady. My affections have never taken the
opportunities of our profession. They haven't even carried me into
matrimony, though I remember once, at Sydney, they brought me to the
brink! We must contrive an escape for Duff Lindsay.”

“You assume too much--a great deal too much. She must be beautiful--and
good.”

“Give me a figure. She's a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty that
lilies have from her personal chastity and her religious enthusiasm.
Touch those things and bruise them, as--as marriage would touch and
bruise them--and she would be a mere fragment of stale vegetation. You
want him to clasp that to his bosom for the rest of his life?”

“I won't believe you. You're coarse and you're cruel.”

Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone's eyes with this. Hilda, still
regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient
shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.

“I'm sorry, dear,” she said. “I forgot. You are usually so intelligent,
one can be coarse and cruel with comfort, talking to you. Go into the
bathroom and get my salts--they're on the washhand-stand--will you? I'm
quite faint with all I'm about to undergo.”

Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts. Ignoring the
third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside and laid
her hand on Hilda's head.

“Oh Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick--so sorry,” she said. It was a
cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a necessity.

“I am not very bad,” Hilda improvised. “Hardly more than a headache.”

“She makes light of everything,” Miss Filbert said, smiling toward
Alicia, who stood silent, the prey of her impression. Discovering the
blue salts bottle, Laura walked over to her and took it from her hands.

“And what,” said the barefooted Salvation Army girl to Miss Livingstone,
“might your name be?”

There was an infinite calm interest in it--it was like a conventionality
of the other world, and before its assurance Alicia stood helpless.

“Her name is Livingstone,” called Hilda from the bed, “and she is as
good as she is beautiful. You needn't be troubled about HER soul--she
takes Communion every Sunday morning at the Cathedral.”

“Hallelujah!” said Captain Filbert, in a tone of dubious congratulation.

“Much better,” said Hilda cheerfully, “to take it at the Cathedral, you
know, than nowhere.”

Miss Filbert said nothing to this, but sat down upon the edge of the
bed, looking serious, and stroked Hilda's hair.

“You don't seem to have much fever,” she said. “There was a poor fellow
in the Military Hospital this morning with a temperature of one hundred
and seven. I could hardly bear to touch him.”

“What was the matter?” asked Hilda idly, occupied with hypotheses about
the third person in the room.

“Oh, I don't know exactly. Some complication, I suppose, of Satan's
tribute--”

“Divinest Laura!” Hilda interposed quickly, drawing her head back. “Do
take a chair. It will be even more soothing to see you comfortable.”

Captain Filbert spoke again to Alicia, as she obeyed. “Miss Howe is more
thoughtful for others than some of our converted ones,” she said, with
vast kindness. “I have often told her so. I have had a long day.”

“It may improve me in that character,” Hilda said, “to suggest that if
you will go about such people, a little carbolic disinfectant is a good
thing, or a crystal or two of permanganate of potash in your bath. Do
you use those things?”

Laura shook her head. “Faith is better than disinfectants. I never get
any harm. My Master protects me.”

“My goodness!” Hilda said. And in the silence that occurred, Captain
Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid for was a
decayed tooth. Presently Alicia made a great effort. She laid hands on
Hilda's previous reference as a tangibility that remained with her.

“Do you ever go to the Cathedral?” she said.

The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert's features, as
when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant from a
flower. Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries of dogma it
may have been some other obscurity, but that was the effect.

“No. I never go there. We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a tabernacle to
ourselves.”

“Isn't it exquisite--her way of speaking!” cried Hilda from the bed, and
Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful smile, in reproof
of an offence admittedly incorrigible. But she went on as if she were
conscious of a stimulus.

“Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary
enough,” she said; “a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied
fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army, He is
Lord of our hosts.”

“A kind of chant,” murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became aware
that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of magnetism. Then
that impression was carried away as it were on a puff of air, and it is
hardly likely that she thought of it again.

“I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?” Laura said. The sanctity
of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested upon it, and
behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue of some other
thing. Hilda on the bed named it the constant feminine, and narrowed her
eyes.

“Dear me, yes,” she said for Alicia. “His Excellency the Viceroy and all
his beautiful A.D.C.'s, no end of military and their ladies, Secretaries
to the Government of India in rows, fully choral, Under-Secretaries so
thick they're kept in the vestibule till the bells stop. 'And make Thy
chosen people joyful'!” she intoned. “Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and
Miss Alicia Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the
main aisle, advantageously near the pulpit.”

“You know already what a humbug she is,” Alicia said, but Captain
Filbert's inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.

“Well, it wouldn't be any attraction for me,” she said, rising to go
through the little accustomed function of her departure. “I'll be going
now, I think. Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to take her place
at the Believers' Meeting.” She took Hilda's hand in hers and held it
for an instant. “Good-bye, and God bless you--in the way you most need,”
 she said, and turned to Alicia, “Good-bye. I am glad to know that we
will be one in the glad hereafter though our paths may diverge”--her eye
rested with acknowledgment upon Alicia's embroidered sleeves--“in this
world. To look at you I should have thought you were of the bowed down
ones, not yet fully assured, but perhaps you only want a little
more oxygen in the blood of your religion. Remember the word of the
Lord--'Rejoice! again I say unto you, rejoice!' Goodbye.”

She drew her head-covering farther forward, and moved to the door. It
sloped to her shoulders and made them droop; her native clothes clung
about her breast and her hips in the cringing Oriental way. Miss Howe
looked after her guest with a curl of the lip as uncontrollable as it
was unreasonable. “A saved soul, perhaps. A woman--oh, assuredly,” she
said in the depths of her hair.

The door had almost closed upon Captain Filbert when Alicia made
something like a dash at an object about to elude her. “Oh,” she
exclaimed, “wait a minute. Will you come and see me? I think--I think
you might do me good. I live at Number Ten, Middleton Street. Will you
come?”

Laura came back into the room. There was a little stiffness in her air,
as if she repressed something.

“I have no objection,” she said.

“To-morrow afternoon--at five? Or--my brother is dining at the
club--would you rather come to dinner?”

“Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me.” She spoke carefully, after
an instant's hesitation.

“Then do come and dine--at eight,” Alicia said; and it was agreed.

She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and only
turned when Hilda spoke.

“You are going to have him to meet her,” she said. “May I come too?”

“Certainly not.” Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door
handle.

“Are you going too? You daren't talk about her!” Hilda cried.

“I'm going too. I've got the brougham. I'll drive her home,” said
Alicia, and went out swiftly.

“My goodness!” Hilda remarked again. Then she got up and found her
slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend Stephen
Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College Street. “Thanks immensely,” it
ran, “for your delightful offer to introduce me to Father Jordan and
persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders he keeps in his tower
at St. Simeon's. An hour with a Jesuit is an hour of milk and honey, and
belonging to that charming Order, he won't mind my coming on a Sunday
evening--the first clear one.”

Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her pen.
Then she added: “If you have any influence with Duff Lindsay, it may
be news to you that you can exert it with advantage to keep him from
marrying a cheap ethereal little religieuse of the Salvation Army named
Filbert. It may seem more fitting that you should expostulate with her,
but I don't advise that.”



CHAPTER X


The door of Ensign Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful air
when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in any case
it is likely that she would have gone in. Mrs. Sand walked the floor,
carrying a baby, a pale sticky baby with blotches, which had inherited
from its maternal parent a conspicuous lack of buttons. Mrs. Sand's room
was also ornamented with texts, but they had apparently been selected at
random, and they certainly hung that way. The piety of the place seemed
at the control of an older infant, who sat on the floor and played with
his father's regimental cap. On the other side of the curtain Captain
Sand audibly washed himself and brushed his hair.

“What kind of meetin' did you have?” asked Mrs. Sand. “There--there now;
he shall have his bottle, so he shall!”

“A beautiful meeting. Abraham Lincoln White, the Savannah negro, you
know, came as a believer for the first time, and so did Miss Rozario
from Whiteaway and Laidlaw's. We had such a happy time.”

“What sort of collection?”

Laura opened a knotted handkerchief and counted out some copper coins.

“Only seven annas three pice! And you call that a good meeting! I don't
believe you exhorted them to give!”

“Oh, I think I did!” Laura returned mechanically.

“Seven annas and three pice! And you know what the Commissioner wrote
out about our last quarter's earnings! What did you say?”

“I said--I said the collection would now be taken up,” Laura faltered.

“Oh dear! oh dear! Leopold, stop clawing me! Couldn't you think of
anythin' more tellin' or more touchin' than that? Fever or no fever, it
does not do for me to stay away from the regular meetin's. One thing is
plain--HE wasn't there!”

“Who?”

“Well, you've never told me his name, but I expect you've got your
reasons.” Mrs. Sand's tone was not arch, but slightly resentful. “I mean
the gentleman that attends so regular and sits behind, under the window.
A society man, I should say, to look at him, though the officers of this
Army are no respecters of persons, and I don't suppose the Lord takes
any notice of his clothes.”

“His name is Mr. Lindsay. No, he wasn't there.”

The girl's tone was distant and cold. The rebuke about the collection
had gone home to a place raw with similar reproaches.

“I hope you haven't been discouraging him?”

Captain Filbert looked at her superior officer with astonishment.

“I have entreated him to come to the meetings. But he never attends a
Believers' Rally. Why should he?”

“What's his state of mind? He came to see you, didn't he, the other
night?”

“Yes, he did. I don't think he's altogether careless.”

“Ain't he seeking?”

“He wouldn't admit it, but he may not know himself. The Lord has
different ways of working. What else should bring him, night after
night?”

Mrs. Sand glanced meaningly at a point on the floor, with lifted
eyebrows, then at her officer, and finally hid a badly-disciplined smile
behind her baby's head. When she looked back again Laura had flushed
all over, and an embarrassment stood between them, which she felt was
absurd.

“My!” she said,--scruples in breaking it could hardly perhaps have been
expected of her,--“you do look nice when you've got a little colour. But
if you can't see that it's you that brings him to the meetin's, you must
be blind, that's all.”

Captain Filbert's confusion was dispelled, as by the wave of a wand.

“Then I hope I may go on bringing him,” she said. “He couldn't come to a
better place.”

“Well, you'll have to be careful,” said Mrs. Sand, as if with severe
intent. “But I don't say discourage him; I wouldn't say that. You may be
an influence for good. It may be His will that you should be pleasant to
the young man. But don't make free with him. Don't, on any account, have
him put his arm round your waist.”

“Nobody has done that to me,” Laura replied austerely, “since I left
Putney, and so long as I am in the Army nobody will. Not that Mr.
Lindsay” (she blushed again) “would ever want to. The class he belongs
to look down on it.”

“The class he belongs to do worse things. The Army doesn't look down on
it. It's only nature, and the Army believes in working with nature. If
it was Mr. Harris I wouldn't say a word--he marches under the Lord's
banner.”

Captain Filbert listened without confusion; her expression was even
slightly complacent.

“Well,” she said, “I told Mr. Harris last evening that the Lieutenant
and I couldn't go on giving him so much of our time, and he seemed to
think he'd been keeping company with me. I had to tell him I hadn't any
such idea.”

“Did he seem much disappointed?”

“He said he thought he would have more of the feeling of belonging to
the Army if he was married in it; but I told him he would have to learn
to walk alone.”

Mrs. Sand speculatively bit her lips.

“I don't know but what you did right,” she said. “By the grace of God
you converted him, and he hadn't ought to ask more of you. But I have a
kind of feeling that Mr. Lindsay 'll be harder to convince.”

“I daresay.”

“It would be splendid, though, to garner him in. He might be willing to
march with us and subscribe half his pay, like poor Captain Corby, of
the Queen's army, did in Rangoon.”

“He might be proud to.”

“We must all try and bring sin home to him,” Mrs. Sand remarked with
rising energy; “and don't you go saying anything to him hastily. If he's
gone on you--”

“Oh Ensign! let us hope he is thinking of higher things! Let us both
pray for him. Let Captain Sand pray for him too, and I'll ask the
Lieutenant. Now that she's got Miss Rozario safe into the kingdom, I
don't think she has any special object.”

“Oh yes, we'll pray for him,” Ensign Sand returned, as if that might
have gone without saying, “but you--”

“And give me that precious baby. You must be completely worn out. I
should enjoy taking care of him; indeed I should.”

“It's the first--the very first--time she ever took that draggin' child
out of my arms for an instant,” the Ensign remarked to her husband
and next in command later in the evening, but she resigned the infant
without protest at the time. Laura carried him into her own room with
something like gaiety, and there repeated to him more nursery rhymes,
dating from secular Putney, than she would have believed she remembered.

The Believers' Rally, as will be understood, was a gathering of some
selectness. If the Chinaman came, it was because of the vagueness of
his perception of the privileges he claimed; and his ignorance of
all tongues but his own left no medium for turning him out. Qualms of
conscience, however, kept all Miss Rozario's young lady friends away,
and these also doubtless operated to detain Duff Lindsay. One does not
attend a Believers' Rally unless one's personal faith extends beyond
the lady in command of it, and one specially refrains if one's spiritual
condition is a delicate and debatable matter with her. In Wellesley
Square, later in the evening, the conditions were different. It would
not be easy to imagine a scene that suggested greater liberality of
sentiment. The moon shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted
shadows down. Beyond them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone,
and tram-drivers whistled bullock-carts off the lines, and street
pedlars lifted their cries. A torch marked the core of the group of
exhorters; it struck pale gold from Laura's hair, and made glorious the
buttons of the man who beat the drum. She talked to the people in their
own language; the “open air” was designed for the people. “Kiko! Kiko!”
 (Why! Why!) Lindsay heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on
the edge of the crowd. He looked down at a coolie-woman with shrivelled
breasts crouched on her haunches upon the ground, bent with the toil
of half a century, and back at the girl beside the torch. “Do not
delay until to-morrow!” Laura besought them. “Kul ka dari mut karo!” A
sensation of disgust assailed him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse
of atonement--he felt already so responsible for her--he went back
and dropped a coin into the coolie creature's lap. But he grew more
miserable as he stood, and finally walked deliberately to a wooden bench
at a distance where he could not hear her voice. Only the hymn
pursued him; they sang presently a hymn. In the chorus the words were
distinguishable, borne in the robust accents of Captain Sand--


     “Us ki ho tarif,
      Us ki ho tarif!”


The strange words, limping on the familiar air, made a barbarous jangle,
a discordance of a specially intolerable sort.


     “Glory to His name!
      Glory to His name!”


Lindsay wondered, with a poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-woman
were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable
reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee, she ought to be.

His “Good-evening!” when the meeting was over, was a cheerful, general
salutation, and the familiarity of the sight of him was plain in the
response he got, equally general and equally cheerful. Lieutenant
Da Cruz's smile was even further significant, if he had thought of
interpreting it, and there was overt amiability in the manner in which
Ensign Sand put her hymn-books together and packed everybody, including
her husband, whose arm she took, out of the way.

“Wait for me,” Laura said, to whom a Eurasian beggar made elaborate
appeal, as they moved off.

“I guess you've got company to see you home,” Mrs. Sand called out, and
they did not wait. As Lindsay came closer the East Indian paused in his
tale of the unburied wife for whom he could not afford a coffin, and
slipped away.

“The Ensign knows she oughtn't to talk like that,” Laura said. Lindsay
marked with a surge of pleasure that she was flushed, and seemed
perturbed.

“What she said was quite true,” he ventured.

“But--anybody would think--”

“What would anybody think? Shall we keep to this side of the road? It's
quieter. What would anybody think?”

“Oh, silly things.” Laura threw up her head with a half laugh. “Things I
needn't mention.”

Lindsay was silent for an instant. Then “Between us?” he asked, and she
nodded.

Their side of the street, along the square, was nearly empty. He found
her hand and drew it through his arm. “Would you mind so very much,” he
said, “if those silly things were true?” He spoke as if to a child. His
passion was never more clearly a single object to him, divorced from all
complicating and non-essential impressions of her. “I would give all I
possess to have it so,” he told her, catching at any old foolish phrase
that would serve.

“I don't believe you mean anything like all you say, Mr. Lindsay.” Her
head was bent and she kept her hand within his arm. He seemed to be
a circumstance that brought her reminiscences of how one behaved
sentimentally toward a young man with whom there was no serious
entanglement. It is not surprising that he saw only one thing, walls
going down before him, was aware only of something like invitation.
Existence narrowed itself to a single glowing point; as he looked it
came so near that he bounded to meet it.

“Dear,” he said, “you can't know--there is no way of telling you--what I
mean. I suppose every man feels the same thing about the woman he loves;
but it seems to me that my life had never known the sun until I saw you.
I can't explain to you how poor it was, and I won't try; but I fancy God
sends every one of us, if we know it, some one blessed chance, and He
did more for me--He lifted the veil of my stupidity and let me see it,
passing by in its halo, trailing clouds of glory. I don't want to
make you understand, though--I want to make you promise. I want to be
absolutely sure from to-night that you'll marry me. Say that you'll
marry me--say it before we get to the crossing. Say it, Laura.” She
listened to his first words with a little half-controlled smile, then
made as if she would withdraw her hand, but he held it with his own, and
she heard him through, walking beside him formally on her bare feet, and
looking carefully at the asphalt pavement as they do in Putney.

“I don't object to your calling me by my given name,” she said when he
had done, “but it can't go any further than that, Mr. Lindsay, and you
ought not to bring God into it--indeed you ought not. You are no son or
servant of His--you are among those whose very light is darkness, and
how great is your darkness!”

“Don't,” he said shortly. “Never mind about that--now. You needn't be
afraid of me, Laura--there are decent chaps, you know, outside your
particular Kingdom of Heaven, and one of them wants you to marry him,
that's how it is. Will you?”

“I don't wish to judge you, Mr. Lindsay, and I'm very much obliged, but
I couldn't dream of it.”

“Don't dream of it; consider it, accept it. Why, dear creature, you are
mine already--don't you feel that?”

Her arm was certainly warm within his and he had the possession of his
eyes in her. Her tired body even clung to him. “Are you quite sure you
haven't begun to think of loving me?” he demanded.

“It isn't a question of love, Mr. Lindsay, it's a question of the Army.
You don't seem to think the Army counts for anything.”

One is convinced that it wasn't a question of love, the least in the
world; but Lindsay detected an evasion in what she said, and the flame
in him leaped up.

“Sweet, when love is concerned there is no other question.”

“Is that a quotation?” she asked. She spoke coldly, and this time she
succeeded in withdrawing her hand. “I daresay you think the Army very
common, Mr. Lindsay, but to me it is marching on a great and holy
crusade, and I march with it. You would not ask me to give up my
life-work?”

“Only to take it into another sphere,” Duff said unreflectingly. He was
checked, but not discouraged; impatient, but in no wise cast down. She
had not flown, she walked beside him placidly. She had no intention
of flight. He tried to resign himself to the task of beating down her
trivial objections, curbing his athletic impulse to leap over them.

“Another sphere,”--he caught a subtle pleasure in her enunciation. “I
suppose you mean high society; but it would never be the same.”

“Not quite the same. You would have to drive to see your sinners in a
carriage and pair, and you might be obliged to dine with them in--what
do ladies generally dine in?--white satin and diamonds, or pearls.
I think I would rather see you in pearls.” He was aware of the
inexcusableness of the points he made, but he only stopped to laugh
inwardly at their impression, watching the absorbed turn of her head.

“We might think it well to be a little select in our sinners--most of
them would be on Government House list, just as most of your present
ones are on the lists of the charitable societies or the police
magistrates. But you would find just as much to do for them.”

“I should not even know how to act in such company.”

“You can go home for a year, if you like, to be taught, to some people I
know; delightful people, who will understand. A year! You will learn in
three months--what odds and ends there are to know. I couldn't spare you
for a year.”

Lindsay stopped. He had to. Captain Filbert was murmuring the cadences
of a hymn. She went through two stanzas, and covered her eyes for a
moment with her hand. When she spoke it was in a quiet, level, almost
mechanical way. “Yes,” she said. “The Cross and the Crown, the Crown and
the Cross. Father in heaven, I do not forget Thy will and Thy purpose,
that I should bring the word of Thy love to the poor and the lowly, the
outcast and those despised. And what I say to this man, who offers me
the gifts and the gladness of a world that had none for Thee, is the
answer Thou hast put in my heart--that the work is Thine and that I
am Thine, and he has no part or lot in me, nor can ever have. Here is
Crooked Lane. Good-night, Mr. Lindsay.” She had slipped into the devious
darkness of the place before he could find any reply, before he quite
realised, indeed, that they had reached her lodging. He could only utter
a vague “Goodnight,” after her, formulating more definite statements to
himself a few minutes later, in Bentinck Street.



CHAPTER XI


Miss Howe was walking in the business quarter of Calcutta. It was the
business quarter, yet the air was gay with the dimpling of piano notes,
and looking up one saw the bright sunlight fall on yellow stuccoed flats
above the shops and the offices. There the pleasant north wind blew
banners of muslin curtains out of wide windows, and little gardens of
palms in pots showed behind the balustrades of the flat roofs whenever
a storey ran short. Everywhere was a subtle contagion of momentary
well-being, a sense of lifted burden. The stucco streets were too
slovenly to be purely joyous, but a warm satisfaction brooded in them,
the pariahs blinked at one genially, there was a note of cheer even in
the cheeling of the kites where they sat huddled on the roof-cornices or
circled against the high blue sky. It was enjoyable to be abroad, in
the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch with brown humility
half-clad and going afoot, since even brown humility seemed well
affected toward the world, alert and content. The air was full of the
comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced luxuries, and the incense
of wayside trees; it was as if the sun laid a bland compelling hand upon
the city, bidding strange flowers bloom and strange fruits increase.
Brokers' gharries rattled past, each holding a pale young man
preoccupied with a notebook; where the bullock-carts gathered themselves
together and blocked the road the pale young men put excited heads out
of the gharry windows and used remarkable imprecations. One of them, as
Hilda turned into the compound of the Calcutta Chronicle, leaned out to
take off his hat, and sent her up to the office of that journal in the
pleasant reflection of his infinite interest in life. “Upon my word,”
 she said to herself as she ascended the stairs behind the lean legs of
a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt and an embroidered cap, “he's so
lighthearted, so genial, that one doubts the very tremendous effect even
of a failure like the one he contemplates.”

She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean Mussulman, and
followed it past the desks of two or three Bengali clerks, who hardly
lifted their well-oiled heads from their account-books to look at
her--so many mem sahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle gave
prominence came to see the manager-sahib, and they were so much alike.
At all events they carried a passport to indifference in the fact that
they all wanted something, and it was clear to the meanest intelligence
that they appeared to be more magnificent than they were, visions in
dazzling complexions and long kid gloves, rattling up in third-class
ticca-gharries, with a wisp of fodder clinging to their skirts. It was
less interesting still when they belonged to the other class, the shabby
ladies, nearly always in black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court,
or sons before the police magistrate, who came to get it, if possible,
“kept out of the paper.” Successful or not these always wept on their
way out, and nothing could be more depressing. The only gleam of
entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor to the manager-sahib
occurred when the female form enshrined the majestic personality of a
boarding-house madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in leading
Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the local columns of the
Chronicle--a lady who had never known what a bailiff looked like in the
lifetime of her first husband, or her second either. Then at the sound
of a pudgy blow upon a table, or high abusive accents in the rapid
elaborate cadences of the domiciled East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would
glance at Gobind Babu with a careful smile, for the manager-sahib who
dispensed so much galli* was now receiving the same, and defenceless.


     * Abuse.


The manager sat at his desk when Hilda went in. He did not rise--he was
one of those highly sagacious little Scotchmen that Dundee exports in
such large numbers to fill small posts in the East, and she had come
on business. He gave her a nod, however, and an affectionate smile, and
indicated with his blue pencil a chair on the other side of the table.
He had once made three hundred rupees in tea shares, and that gave him
the air of a capitalist and speculator gamely shrewd. Tapping the table
with his blue pencil he asked Miss Howe how the world was using HER.

“Let me see,” said Hilda, a trifle absent-mindedly, “were you here last
cold weather--I rather imagine you were, weren't you?”

“I was; I had the pleasure of--”

“To be sure. You got the place in December, when that poor fellow Baker
died. Baker was a country-bred I know, but he always kept his
contracts, while you got your po-lish in Glesca, and your name is
Macphairson--isn't it?”

“I was never in Glasgow in my life, and my name is Macandrew,” said the
manager, putting with some aggressiveness a paper-weight on a pile of
bills.

“Never mind,” said Hilda, again wrapped in thought, “don't
apologise--it's near enough. Well, Mr. Macandrew,”--her tone came to a
point,--“what is the Stanhope Company's advertisement worth a month to
the Chronicle?”

“A hundred rupees maybe--there or thereabouts;” and Mr. Macandrew, with
a vast show of indifference, picked up a letter and began to tear at the
end of it.

“One hundred and fifty-five I think, to be precise. That communication
will wait, won't it? What is it--Kally Nath Mitter's paper and stores
bill? You won't be able to pay it any quicker if we withdraw our
advertisement.”

“Why should ye withdraw it?”

“It was given to you on the understanding that notices should appear of
every Wednesday and Saturday's performance. For two Wednesdays there has
been no notice, and last Saturday night you sent a fool.”

“So Muster Stanhope thinks o' withdrawin' his advertisement?”

“He is very much of that mind.”

The manager put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back
in his chair, and demonstrated the principle that had given him a gold
watch chain--“never be bluffed.”

“Ye can withdraw it,” he said, with a warily experimental eye upon her.

“How reasonable of you not to make a fuss! We'll have the order
to discontinue in writing, please. If you'll give me a pen and
paper--thanks--and I'll keep a copy.”

“Stanhope has wanted to transfer it to the Market Gazette for some
time,” she went on as she wrote.

“That's not a newspaper. You'll get no notices there.”

“Cheaper on that account, probably.”

“They charge like the very deevil. D'ye know the rates of them?”

“I can't say I do.”

“There's a man on our staff that doesn't like your show. We'll be able
to send him every night now.”

“When we withdraw our advertisement?”

“Just then.”

“All right,” said Hilda. “It will be interesting to point out in the
Indian Empire the remarkable growth of independent criticism in the
Chronicle since Mr. Stanhope no longer uses the space at his disposal. I
hope your man will be very nasty indeed. You might as well hand over the
permanent passes--the gentleman will expect, I suppose, to pay.”

“They'll be in the yeditorial department,” said Mr. Macandrew, but
he did not summon a messenger to go for them. Instead he raised his
eyebrows in a manner that expressed the necessity of making the best of
it, and humorously scratched his head.

“We have four hundred pounds of new type coming out in the Almora--she's
due on Thursday,” he said. “Entirely for the advertisements. We'll have
a fine display next week. It's grand type--none of your Calcutta-made
stuff.”

“Pays to bring it out, does it?” asked Hilda inattentively, copying her
letter.

“Pays the advertisers.” There were ingratiating qualities in the
managerial smile. Hilda inspected them coldly.

“There's your notice of withdrawal,” she said. “Good-morning.”

“Think of that new type, and how lovely Jimmy Finnigan's ad will look in
it.”

“That's all right. Good-morning.” Miss Howe approached the door, the
blue glance of Macandrew pursuant.

“No notices for two Wednesdays, eh? We'll have to see about that. I
was thinkin' of transferrin' your space to the third page; it's a more
advantageous position--and no extra charge--but ye'll not mention it to
Jimmy.”

Miss Howe lifted an arrogant chin. “Do I understand you'll do that, and
guarantee regular notices, if we leave the advertisement with you?”

Mr. Macandrew looked at her expressively, and tore, with a gesture of
moderated recklessness, the notice of withdrawal in two.

“Rest easy,” he said, “I'll see about it. I'd go the len'th of attendin'
myself to-night, if ye could spare two three extra places.”

“Moderate Macandrew!”

“Moderate enough. I've got some frien's stayin' in the same place with
me from Behar--indigo people. I was thinkin' I'd give them a treat, if
three places c'd be spared next to the Chronicle seats.”

“We do Lady Whippleton to-night and the booking's been heavy. Five is
too many, Mr. Macandrew, even if you promised not to write the notice
yourself.”

“I might pay for one;” Macandrew drew red cartwheels on his
blotting-pad.

“Those seats are sure to be gone. I'll send you a box. Stanhope's as bad
as he can be with dysentery--you might make a local out of that. Be sure
to mention he can't see anybody--it's absurd the way Calcutta people
want to be paid.”

“A box'll be Grand,” said Mr. Macandrew. “I'll see ye get plenty of
ancores. Can ye manage the door? Good-day, then.”

Hilda stepped out on the landing. The heavy, regular thud of the presses
came up from below. They were printing the edition that took the world's
news to planters' bungalows in the jungle of Assam and the lonely
policeman on the edge of Manipore. The smell of the newspaper of to-day
and of yesterday, and of a year ago, stood in the air; through an open
door she saw the dusty, uneven edges of files of them, piled on the
floor. Three or four messengers squatted beside the wall, with slumbrous
heads between their knees. Occasionally a shout came from the room
inside, and one of them, crying “Hazur!” with instant alacrity,
stretched himself mightily, loafed upon his feet and went in, emerging a
moment later carrying written sheets, with which he disappeared into the
regions below. The staircase took a lazy curve and went up; under it,
through an open window, the sun glistened upon the shifting white and
green leaves of a pipal tree, and a crow sat on the sill and thrust his
grey head in with caws of indignant expostulation. A Government peon in
scarlet and gold ascended the stair at his own pace, bearing a packet
with an official seal. The place, with its ink-smeared walls and high
ceilings, spoke between dusty yawns of the languor and the leisure which
might attend the manipulation of the business of life, and Hilda paused
for an instant to perceive what it said. Then she walked behind her card
into the next room, where a young gentleman, reading proofs in his
shirt sleeves, flung himself upon his coat and struggled into it at her
approach. He seemed to have the blackest hair and the softest eyes and
the neatest moustache available, all set in a complexion frankly
olive, amiable English cut, in amiable Oriental colour, and the whole
illumined, when once the coat was on and the collar perfectly turned
down, by the liveliest, most engaging smile. Standing with his head
slightly on one side and one hand resting on the table, while the
other saw that nothing was disarranged between collar and top waistcoat
button, he was an interjection point of invitation and attention.

“The Editor of the Chronicle?” Hilda asked with diffident dignity, and
very well informed to the contrary.

“NOT the editor--I am sorry to say.” The confession was delightfully
vivid--in the plenitude of his candour it was plain that he didn't
care who knew that he was sorry he was not the editor. “In journalistic
parlance, the sub editor,” he added. “Will you be seated, Miss Howe?”
 and with a tasteful silk pocket handkerchief he whisked the bottom of a
chair for her.

“Then you are Mr. Molyneux Sinclair,” Hilda declared. “You have been
pointed out to me on several first nights. Oh, I know very well where
the Chronicle seats are!”

Mr. Sinclair bowed with infinite gratification, and tucked the silk
handkerchief back so that only a fold was visible. “We members of the
Fourth Estate are fairly well known, I'm afraid, in Calcutta,” he said.
“Personally, I could sometimes wish it were otherwise. But certainly not
in this instance.”

Hilda gave him a gay little smile. “I suppose the editor,” she said,
with a casual glance about the room, “is hammering out his leader for
to-morrow's paper. Does he write half and do you write half, or how do
you manage?”

A seriousness overspread Mr. Sinclair's countenance, which nevertheless
irradiated, as if he could not help it, with beaming eyes. “Ah, those
are the secrets of the prison-house, Miss Howe. Unfortunately it is
not etiquette for me to say in what proportion I contribute the leading
articles of the Chronicle. But I can tell you in confidence that if it
were not for the editor's prejudices--rank prejudices--it would be a
good deal larger.”

“Ah, his prejudices! Why not be quite frank, Mr. Sinclair, and say that
he is just a little tiny bit jealous of his staff. All editors are,
you know.” Miss Howe shook her head in philosophical deprecation of the
peccadillo, and Mr. Sinclair cast a smiling, embarrassed glance at his
smart brown leather boot. The glance was radiant with what he couldn't
tell her as a sub-editor of honour about those cruel prejudices, but he
gave it no other medium.

“I'm afraid you know the world, Miss Howe,” he said, with a noble
reserve, and that was all.

“A corner of it here and there. But you are responsible for the whole of
the dramatic criticism,”--Hilda charged him roundly,--“the editor can't
claim any of THAT.”

An inquiring brown face under an embroidered cap appeared at the door;
a brown hand thrust in a bunch of printed slips. Mr. Sinclair motioned
both away, and they vanished in silence.

“That I can't deny,” he said. “It would be useless if I wished to
do so--my style betrays me--I must plead guilty. It is not one of my
legitimate duties--if I held this position on the Times, or say the
Daily Telegraph, our London contemporaries, it would not be required of
me. But in this country everything is piled upon the sub-editor. Many
a night, Miss Howe, I send down the last slips of a theatre notice at
midnight and am here in this chair”--Mr. Sinclair brought his open palm
down upon the arm of it--“by eleven the following day!” Mr. Sinclair's
chin was thrust passionately forward, moisture dimmed the velvety
brightness of those eyes which, in more dramatic moments, he confessed
to have inherited from a Nawab great-grandfather. “But I don't
complain,” he said, and drew in his chin. It seemed to bring his
argument to a climax, over which he looked at Hilda in warm, frank
expansion.

“Overworked, too, I daresay,” she said, and then went on a trifle
hurriedly. “Well, I must tell you, Mr. Sinclair, how kind your criticism
always is, and how much I personally appreciate it. None of the little
points and effects one tries to make seem to escape you, and you are
always generous in the matter of space too.”

Molyneux impartially threw out his hand. “I believe in it!” he
exclaimed. “Honour where honour is due, Miss Howe, and the Stanhope
Company has given me some very enjoyable evenings. And you'll hardly
believe me, but it is a fact, I assure you, I seldom get a free hand
with those notices. Suicidal to the interests of the paper as it is, the
editor insists as often as not on cutting down my theatre copy!”

“Cuts it down, does he? The brute!” said Miss Howe.

“I've known him sacrifice a third of it for an indigo market report.
Now, I ask you, who reads an indigo market report? Nobody. Who wants to
know how Jimmy Finnigan's--how the Stanhope Company's latest novelties
went off? Everybody. Of course, when he does that sort of thing, I make
it warm for him next morning?”

The door again opened and admitted a harassed little Babu in spectacles,
bearing a sheaf of proof slips, who advanced timidly into the middle of
the room and paused.

“In a few minutes, Babu,” said Mr. Sinclair; “I am engaged.”

“It iss the Council isspeech of the Legal Member, sir, and it iss to go
at five p.m. to his house for last correction.”

“Presently, Babu. Don't interrupt. As I was saying, Miss Howe, I make it
warm for him till he apologises. I must say he always apologises, and I
don't often ask more than that. But I was obliged to tell him the last
time that if it happened again one of us would have to go.”

“What did he say to that?”

“I don't exactly remember. But it had a tremendous effect--tremendous.
We became good friends almost immediately.”

“Quite so. We miss you when you don't come, Mr. Sinclair--last Saturday
night, for example.”

“I HAD to go to the Surprise Party. Jimmy came here with tears in his
eyes that morning. 'My show is tumbling to pieces,' he said. 'Sinclair,
you've got to come to-night.' Made me dine with him--wouldn't let me
out of his sight. We had to send a reporter to you and Llewellyn that
night.”

“Mr. Sinclair, the notice made me weep.”

“I know. All that about the costumes. But what can you expect? The man
is as black as your hat.”

“We have to buy our own costumes,” said Hilda, with a glance at the
floor, “and we haven't any too much, you know, to do it on.”

“The toilets in Her Second Son were simply magnificent. Not to be
surpassed on the boards of the Lyceum in tasteful design or richness
of material. They were ne plus ultra!” cried Mr. Sinclair. “You will
remember I said so in my critique.”

“I remember. If I were you I wouldn't go so far another time. There's
a lot of cotton velvet and satin about it, you know, between ourselves,
and Finnigan's people will be getting the laugh on us. That's one of
the things I wanted to mention. Don't be quite so good to us. See?
Otherwise--well, you know how Calcutta talks, and what a pretty girl
Beryl Stace is, for example. Mrs. Sinclair mightn't like it, and I don't
blame her.”

“As I said before, Miss Howe, you know the world,” Mr. Sinclair replied,
with infinite mellow humour, and as Miss Howe had risen he rose too,
pulling down his waistcoat.

“There was just one other thing,” Hilda said, holding out her hand.
“Next Wednesday, y

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/5102