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, you know, Rosa Norton takes her benefit. Rosy's as well known here as the Ochterlony monument; she's been coming every cold weather for ten years, poor old Rosy. Don't you think you could do her a bit of an interview for Wednesday's paper? She'll write up very well—get her on variety entertainments in the Australian bush.”
Mr. Molyneux Sinclair looked pained to hesitate. “Personally,” he said confidentially, “I should like it immensely, and I daresay I could get it past the editor. But we're so short-handed.”
Miss Howe held up a forefinger which seemed luminous with solution. “Don't you bother,” she said, “I'll do it for you; I'll write it myself. My 'prentice hand I'll try on Rosy, and you shall have the result ready to print on Tuesday morning. Will that do?”
That would do supremely. Mr. Sinclair could not conceal the admiration he felt for such a combination of talents. He did not try; he accompanied it to the door, expanding and expanding until it seemed more than ever obvious that he found the sub-editorial sphere unreasonably contracted. Hilda received his final bow from the threshold of what he called his “sanctum,” and had hardly left the landing in descent when a square-headed, collarless, red-faced male in shirt sleeves came down, descending, as it seemed, in bounds from parts above. “Damn it, Sinclair!” she heard, as he shot into the apartment she had left, “here's the whole council meeting report set up and waiting three-quarters of an hour—press blocked; and the printer Babu says he can get nothing out of you. What the devil.... If the dak's* missed again, by thunder!... paid to converse with itinerant females... seven columns... infernal idiocy....”
* Country post.
Hilda descended in safety and at leisure, reflecting with amusement as she made her way down that Mr. Sinclair was doubtless waiting until his lady visitor was well out of earshot to make it warm for the editor.
I find myself wondering whether Calcutta would have found anything very exquisitely amusing in the satisfactions which exchanged themselves between Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady and the Reverend Stephen Arnold, had it been aware of them; and I conclude reluctantly that it would not. Reluctantly, because such imperviousness argues a lack of perception, of flair in directions which any Continental centre would recognise as vastly tickling, regrettable in a capital of such vaunted sophistication as that which sits beside the Hooghly. It may as well be shortly admitted, however, that to stir Calcutta's sense of comedy you must, for example, attempt to corner, by shortsightedness or faulty technical equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from England to assume official duties, you must take a larger view of your dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit. For the sex that does not hunt jackals it is easier—you have only to be a little frivolous and Calcutta will invent for you the most side-shaking nickname, as in the case of three ladies known in a viceroyalty of happy legend as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I should be sorry to give the impression that Calcutta is therefore a place of gloom. The source of these things is perennial, and the noise of laughter is ever in the air of the Indian capital. Between the explosions, however, it is natural enough that the affairs of a priest of College Street and an actress of no address at all should slip unnoticed, especially as they did not advertise it. Stephen mostly came, on afternoons when there was no rehearsal, to tea. He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts which answered fairly well the purposes of a sense of humour, and nobody could question hers; it operated obscurely to keep them in the house.
She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been sent to her to take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of beauty; although she mentioned to herself that he took it with a difference, a vast temperamental difference which she was aware of not having yet quite sounded. The depths of his faith of course—there she could only scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did not often find herself, away from which, indeed, he sometimes gently guided her. The atmospheres of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world, and it was here that Hilda looked when she would make him a parallel for Lindsay, and here that she found her measure of disappointment. He warmed himself and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and she was not on the whole the poorer by any exchange they made, but she was sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the flavour of adventure. She found herself inclined—and the experience was new—to make an effort for a reward which was problematical and had to be considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin and hesitating hand under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious concentrated quality, and a strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also the impression—was it too fantastic?—of words carried over a medium, an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a midwife to one's idea. But the comparison was irritating, and after a time she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of Arnold's sex than she would have thought it possible to be—one hardly paused to consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would certainly not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she was less oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own. Perhaps it is already evident that this was her grievance with life, when the joy of it left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her personal lines, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body claimed of her and found her willing to perform, the fact that it meant more to her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best when she got up in the morning than was justifiable from any point of view except the biological. She had no heroic quarrel with these conditions—her experience had not been upon that plane—but she bemoaned them with sincerity as too fundamental, too all pervading; one came upon them at every turn, grinning in their pretty chains. It was absurd, she construed, that a world of mankind and woman kind with vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially subjected. So primitive, it was, she argued in her vivid candour, and so interfering—so horribly interfering! Personally she did not see herself one of the fugitive half of the race; she had her defences; but the necessity of using them was matter for complaint when existence might have been so delightful a boon without it, full of affinities and communities in every direction. She had not, I am convinced, any of the notions of a crusader upon this popular subject, nor may I portray her either shocked or revolted, only rather bored, being a creature whom it was unkind to hamper; and she would have explained quite in these simple terms the reason why Stephen Arnold's saving neutrality of temperament was to her a pervasive charm of his society.
She had not yet felt at liberty to tell him that she could not classify him, that she had never known anyone like him before; and there was in this no doubt a vague perception that the confession showed a limitation of experience on her part for which he might be inclined to call her to account; since cultured young Oxonians with an altruistic bias, if they do not exactly abound, are still often enough to be discovered if one happens to belong to the sphere which they haunt, they and their ideals. Not that any such consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the disabilities of her own. She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching her lips, and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance following her into its queer byways—her sphere's—full of spangles and limelight, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival artistry. There was a fascination in bringing him out of his remoteness near to those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do. This remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs possible, that he saw what she saw, peering over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle outside found it enough.
He was there when she came back from the Chronicle office, patient under the blue umbrellas; he had brought her a book, and they had told him she would not be long in returning. He had gone so far as to order tea for her, and it was waiting with him. “Make it,” she commanded; “why haven't you had some already?” and while he bent over the battered Britannia metal spout she sank into the nearest seat and let her hat make a frame for her face against the back of it. She was too tired, she said, to move, and her hands lay extended, one upon each arm of her chair, with the air of being left there to be picked up at her convenience. Arnold, over the teapot, agreed that walking in Calcutta was an insidious pleasure—one gathered a lassitude—and brought her cup. She looked at him for an instant as she took it.
“But I am not too tired to hear what you have on your mind,” she said. “Have Kally Nath Mitter's relations prevailed over his convictions? Won't your landlord let you have your oratory on the roof after all?”
“You get these things so out of perspective,” Stephen said, “that I don't think I should tell you if they were so. But they're not. Kally Nath is to be baptized to-morrow. We are certain to get our oratory.”
“I am very glad,” Hilda interrupted. “When one prays for so long a time together it must be better to have fresh air. It will certainly be better for Brother Colquhoun. He seems to have such a weak chest.”
“It will be better for us all.” Arnold seemed to reflect, across his teacup, how much better it would be. Then he added, “I saw Lindsay last night.”
“Again? And—”
“I think it is perfectly hopeless. I think he is making way.”
“Sickening! I hoped you would not speak to him again. After all—another man—it's naturally of no use!”
“I spoke as a priest!”
“Did he swear at you?”
“Oh dear no! He was rather sympathetic. And I went very far. But I could get him to see nothing—to feel nothing.”
“How far did you go?”
“I told him that she was consecrated, that he proposed to commit sacrilege. He seemed to think he could make it up to her.”
“If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed—you don't suspect the irony in it” Hilda said. “Pray who is to make it up to him?”
“I suppose there is that point of view.”
“I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you. I had her here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before him. I succeeded too—he gave me the most uncomfortable looks—but I might as well have let it alone. The great end of nature,” Hilda went on, putting down her cup, “reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities. And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent. That's a platitude, I know,” she added, “but it's irresistibly suggested.”
Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the qualm—it was really something like that—which the wide sweep of her cynicism brought him.
“From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He seemed determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful. I fancied she was being upheld—I thought she would easily pull through. Indeed, I wasn't sure that there was any great temptation. Somebody must be helping him.”
“The devil, no doubt,” Hilda replied concisely; “and with equal certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone.”
Arnold gave her a look of surprise. “Surely not my cousin!” he protested. “She can't understand.”
“Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER! I think she understands. I think she's only too tortuously intelligent.”
Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. “May I ask?—” he began, formally.
“Oh yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it, to tell you such a thing about a member of your family?” she went on, at Arnold's blush; “but you asked me, you know. And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring this precious union about. I think she is taking a kindergarten method with the girl—having her there constantly and showing her little scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away. People in Alicia's condition have no sense of immorality.”
“That makes it all the more painful,” said Arnold; but the interest in his tone was a little remote, and his gesture, too, which was not quite a shrug, had a relegating effect upon any complication between Alicia and Lindsay. He sat for a moment without saying more, covering his eyes with his hand.
“Why should you care so much?” Hilda asked gently. “You are at the very antipodes of her sect. You can't endorse her methods—you don't trust her results.”
“Oh, all that! It's of the least consequence.” He spoke with a curious, governed impulse coming from beneath his shaded eyes. “It's seeing another ideal pulled down, gone under, something that held, as best it could, a ray from the source. It's another glimpse of the strength of the tide—terrible. It's a cruel hint that one lives above it in the heaven of one's own hopes, by some mere blind accident. To have set one's feeble hand to the spiritualising of the world and to feel the possibility of that—”
“I see,” said Hilda, and perhaps she did. But his words oppressed her. She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and went to a promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat. She was refreshed and vivified—she wanted to talk of the warm world. She let a decent interval elapse, however; she waited till he took his hand from his eyes. Even then, to make the transition easier, she said, “You ought to be lifted up to-day, if you are going to baptize Kally Nath to-morrow.”
“The Brother Superior will do it. And I don't know—I don't know. The young woman he is to marry withdraws, I believe, if he comes over to us—”
“The, young woman he is to marry! Oh my dear and reverend friend! Avec ces gens la! I have had a most amusing afternoon,” she went on quickly. “I have taken off my hat, now let me remove your halo.” She was safe with her conceit; Arnold would always smile at any imputation of saintship. He held himself a person of broad indulgences, and would point openly to his consumption of tea-cakes. But this afternoon a miasma hung over him. Hilda saw it, and bent herself, with her graphic recital, to dispel it, perceived it thicken and settle down upon him, and went bravely on to the end. Mr. Macandrew and Mr. Molyneux Sinclair lived and spoke before him. It was comedy enough, in essence, to spread over a matinee.
“And that is the sort of thing you store up and value,” he said, when she had finished. “These persons will add to your knowledge of life?”
“Extremely,” she replied to all of it.
“I suppose they will in their measure. But personally I could wish you had not gone. Your work has no right to make such demands.”
“Be reasonable,” she said, flushing. “Don't talk as if personal dignity were within the reach of everybody. It's the most expensive of privileges. And nothing to be so very proud of—generally the product of somebody else's humiliations, handed down. But the humiliations must have been successful, handed down in cash. My father drove a cab and died in debt. His name was Cassidy. I shall be dignified some day—some day! But you see I must make it possible myself, since nobody has done it for me.”
“Well, then, I'll alter my complaint. Why should you play with your sincerity?”
“I didn't play with it,” she flashed; “I abandoned it. I am an actress.”
They often permitted themselves such candours; to all appearance their discussion had its usual equable quality, and I am certain that Arnold was not even aware of the tension upon his nerves. He fidgeted with the tassel of his ceinture, and she watched his moving fingers. Presently she spoke quietly, in a different key.
“I sometimes think,” she said, “of a child I knew, in the other years. She had the simplest nature, the finest instincts. Her impulses, within her small limits, were noble—she was the keenest, loyalest little person; her admirations rather made a fool of her. When I look at the woman she is now I think the uses of life are hard, my friend—they are hard.”
He missed the personal note; he took what she said on its merits as an illustration.
“And yet,” he replied, “they can be turned to admirable purpose.”
“I wonder!” Hilda exclaimed brightly. She had turned down the leaf of that mood. “But we are not cheerful—let us be cheerful. For my part I am rejoicing as I have not rejoiced since the first of December. Look at this!”
She opened a small black leather bag, and poured money out of it, in notes and currency, into her lap.
“Is it a legacy?”
“It's pay,” she cried, with pleasure dimpling about her lips. “I have been paid—we have all been paid! It's so unusual—it makes me feel quite generous. Let me see. I'll give you this, and this, and this,”—she counted into her open palm ten silver rupees,—“all those I will give you for your mission. Prends!” and she clinked them together and held them out to him.
He had risen to go, and his face looked grey and small. Something in him had mutinied at the levity, the quick change of her mood. He could only draw into his shell; doubtless he thought that a legitimate and inoffensive proceeding.
“Thanks, no,” he said, “I think not. We desire people's prayers, rather than their alms.”
He went away immediately, and she glossed over his scandalous behaviour, and said farewell to him as she always did, in spite of the unusual look of consciousness in her eyes. She continued to hold the ten rupees carefully and separately, as if she would later examine them in diagnosing her pain. It was keener and profounder than any humiliation, the new voice, crying out, of a trampled tenderness. She stood and looked after him for a moment with startled eyes and her hand, in a familiar gesture of her profession, upon her heart. Then she went to her room, and deliberately loosened her garments and lay down upon her bed, first to sob like that little child she remembered, and afterwards to think, until the world came and knocked at her door and bade her come out of herself and earn money.
The compulsion which took Stephen Arnold to Crooked Lane is hardly ours to examine. It must have been strong, since going up to Mrs. Sand involved certain concessions, doubtless intrinsically trifling, but of exaggerated discomfort to the mind spiritually cloistered, whatever its other latitude. Among them was a distinctly necessary apology, difficult enough to make to a lady of rank so superior and authority so voyant in the Church militant, by a mere fighting soul without such straps and buttons as might compel recognition upon equal terms. It is impossible to know how far Stephen envisaged the visit as a duty—the priestly horizon is perhaps not wholly free from mirage—or to what extent he confessed it an indulgence. He was certainly aware of a stronger desire than he could altogether account for that Captain Filbert should not desert her post. The idea had an element of irritation oddly personal; he could not bear to reflect upon it. It may be wondered whether in any flight of venial imagination Arnold saw himself in a parallel situation with a lady. I am sure he did not. It may be considered, however, that among mirages there are unaccountable resemblances—resemblances without shape or form. He might fix his gaze, at all events, upon the supreme argument that those who were given to holy work, under any condition, in any degree, should make no rededication of themselves. This had to support him as best it could against the conviction that had Captain Filbert been Sister Anastasia, for example, of the Baker Institution, and Ensign Sand the Mother Superior of its Calcutta branch, it was improbable that he would have ventured to announce his interest in the matter by his card, or in any other way.
It was a hesitating step, therefore, that carried him up to the quarters, and a glance of some nervous distress that made him aware, as he stood bowing upon her threshold, clasping with both hands his soft felt hat to his breast, that Mrs. Sand was not displeased to see him. She hastened, indeed, to give him a chair; she said she was very glad he'd dropped in, if he didn't mind the room being so untidy—where there were children you could spend the whole day picking up. They were out at present, with Captain Sand, in the perambulator, not having more servants than they could help. A sweeper and a cook they did with; it would surprise the people in this country, who couldn't get along with less than twenty, she often said.
Mrs. Sand's tone was casual; her manner had a quality somewhat aggressively democratic. It said that under her welcome lay the right to criticise, which she would have exercised with equal freedom had her visitor been the Lord Bishop John Calcutta himself; and it made short work of the idea that she might be over-gratified to receive Holy Orders in any form. She was not unwilling, however, to show, as between Ensign and man, reasonable satisfaction; presently, in fact, she went so far as to say, still vaguely remarking upon his appearance there, that she often thought there ought to be more sociability between the different religious bodies; it would be better for the cause. There was nothing narrow, she said, about her, nor yet about Captain Sand. And then, with the distinct intimation that that would do, that she had gone far enough, she crossed her hands in her lap and waited. It became her to have it understood that this visit need have no further object than an exchange of amiabilities; but there might be another, and Mrs. Sand's folded hands seemed to indicate that she would not necessarily meet it with opposition.
Stephen made successive statements of assent. He sat grasping his hat between his knees, his eyes fixed upon an infant's sock which lay upon the floor immediately in front of him, looking at Mrs. Sand as seldom and as briefly as possible, as if his glance took rather an unfair advantage, which he would spare her.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes, certainly,” revolving his hat in his hands. And when she spoke of the fraternity that might be fostered by such visits, he looked for an instant as if he had found an opening, which seemed, however, to converge and vanish in Mrs. Sand's folded hands. He flushed to think afterwards, that it was she who was obliged to bring his resolution to a head, her scent of his embarrassment sharpening her curiosity.
“And is there anything we Army officers can do for you, Mr. Arnold?” she inquired.
There was a hint in her voice that, whatever it was, they would have done it more willingly if she had not been obliged to ask.
“I am afraid,” he said, “my mission is not quite so simple. I could wish it were. It is so easy to show our poor needs to one another; and I should have confidence—” He paused, amazed at the duplicity that grinned at him in his words. At what point more remote within the poles was he likely to show himself with a personal request?
“I have nothing to ask for myself,” he went on, with concentration almost harsh. “I am here to see if you will consent to speak with me about a matter which threatens your—your community—about your possible loss of Miss Filbert.”
Mrs. Sand looked blank. “The Captain isn't leavin' us, as far as I know,” she said.
“Oh—is it possible that you are not aware that—that very strong efforts are being made to induce her to do so?”
Mrs. Sand looked about her as if she expected to find an explanation lying somewhere near her chair. Light came to her suddenly, and brought her a conscious smile; it only lacked force to be a giggle. She glanced at her lap as she smiled; her air was deprecating and off-putting, as if she had detected in what Arnold said some suggestion of a gallant nature aimed at herself. Happily, he was not looking.
“You mean Mr. Lindsay!” she exclaimed, twisting her wedding-ring and its coral guard.
“I hope—I beg—that you will not think me meddlesome or impertinent. I have the matter very much at heart. It seems to lie in my path. I must see it. Surely you perceive some way of averting the disaster in it!”
“I'm sure I don't know what you refer to.” Mrs. Sand's tone was prudish and offended. “She hasn't said a word to me—she's a great one for keeping things to herself—but if Mr. Lindsay don't mean marriage with her—”
“Why, of course!” Arnold, startled, turned furiously red, but Mrs. Sand in her indignation did not reflect the tint. “Of course! Is not that,” he went on after an instant's pause, “precisely what is to be lamented—and prevented?”
Mrs. Sand looked at her visitor with dry suspicion. “I suppose you are a friend of his,” she said.
“I have known him for years. Pray don't misunderstand me. There is nothing against him—nothing whatever.”
“Oh, I don't suppose there is, except that he is not on the Lord's side. But I don't expect any of his friends are anxious for him to marry an officer in the Salvation Army. Society people ain't fond of the Army, and never will be.”
“His people—he has only distant relatives living—are all at home,” Stephen said vaguely. The situation had become slightly confused.
“Then you speak for them, I suppose?”
“Indeed not. I am in no communication with them whatever. I fancy they know nothing about it. I am here entirely—ENTIRELY of my own accord. I have come to place myself at your disposition if there is anything I can do, any word I can say, to the end of preventing this catastrophe in a spiritual life so pure and devoted; to ask you at all events to let me join my prayers to yours that it shall not come about.”
The squalor of the room seemed to lift before his eyes and be suffused with light. At last he had made himself plain. But Mrs. Sand was not transfigured. She seemed to sit, with her hands folded, in the midst of a calculation.
“Then he HAS put the question. I told her he would,” she said.
“I believe he has asked her to marry him and she has refused, more than once. But he is importunate, and I hear she needs help.”
“Mr. Lindsay,” said Mrs. Sand, “is a very takin' young man.”
“I suppose we must consider that. There is position too, and wealth. These things count—we are all so human—even against the Divine realities into possession of which Miss Filbert must have so perfectly entered.”
“I thought he must be pretty well off. Would he be one of them Government officials?”
“He is a broker.”
“Oh, is he indeed?” Mrs. Sand's enlightenment was evidently doubtful. “Well, if they get married Captain Filbert 'll have to resign. It's against the regulations for her to marry outside of the Army.”
“But is she not vowed to her work; isn't her life turned for ever into that channel? Would it not be horrible to you to see the world interfere?”
“I won't say but what I'd be sorry to see her leave us. But I wouldn't stand in her way either, and neither would Captain Sand.”
“Stand in her way! In her way to material luxury, poverty of spirit, the shirking of all the high alternatives, the common moral mediocrity of the world. I would to God I could be that stumbling block! I have heard her—I have seen the light in her that may so possibly be extinguished.”
“I don't deny she has a kind of platform gift, but she's losin' her voice. And she doesn't understand briskin' people up, if you know what I mean.”
“She will be pulled down—she will go under!” Arnold repeated in the depths of his spirit. He stood up, fumbling with his hat. Mrs. Sand and her apartment, her children out of doors in the perambulator, and the whole organisation to which she appertained had grown oppressive and unnecessary. He was aware of a desire to put his foot again in his own world, where things were seen, were understood. He thought there might be solace in relating the affair to Brother Colquhoun.
“It's a case,” said Mrs. Sand judicially, “where I wouldn't think myself called on to say one word. Such things everyone has a right to decide for themselves. But you oughtn't to forget that a married woman”—she looked at Arnold's celibate habit as if to hold it accountable for much—“can have a great influence for good over him that she chooses. I am pretty sure Captain Filbert's already got Mr. Lindsay almost persuaded. I shouldn't be at all surprised if he joined the Army himself when she's had a good chance at him.”
Arnold put on his hat with a groan, and began the descent of the stairs. “Good-afternoon then,” Mrs. Sand called out to him from the top. He turned mechanically and bared his head. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “Good-afternoon.”