Hilda Part 14

"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, embarra.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionately 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 dare say," 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 s.p.a.ce too."

Molyneux impartially slapped his leg. "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 a.s.sure 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? n.o.body. 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 hara.s.sed 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 toilettes in _Her Second Son_ were simply magnificent. Not to be surpa.s.sed 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 Stacey 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 dare say 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. "d.a.m.n 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_[7] missed again, by thunder!...

paid to converse with itinerant females ... seven columns ... infernal idiocy."

[Footnote 7: Country post.]

Hilda descended in safety and at leisure, reflecting with some amus.e.m.e.nt 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.

CHAPTER XII.

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 a.s.sume official duties, you must take a larger view of your dignities than the clubs are accustomed to admit. For the s.e.x 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 n.o.body 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 s.e.x 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 cla.s.sify 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-cla.s.s hysteria of third-cla.s.s 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 la.s.situde--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."