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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 if 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 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 subtly 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 if left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction of her personal curves, 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 plan—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 womankind with vastly interesting possibilities should be so essentially subjected to a single end. 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 any one 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 by-ways—her sphere's—full of spangles and lime-light, 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 tea-pot, 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 baptised 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 tea-cup, 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 purpose 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 baptise 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 miasm 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 matinée.
"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 Murphy. 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 little limits, were noble—she was the keenest, loyalist little person; her admirations rather made a fool of her. When I look at the woman as 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, 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 usual, in spite of the unusual look of consciousness in her eyes. 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.