Hilda Part 3

"Perhaps. But having perceived to pa.s.s 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 slightest 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 any one should be walking there, to begin with, any one, 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 gla.s.s of country spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a draggled person with a Bulgarian, a Levantine or a j.a.panese smile, who no longer possessed a carriage, to whom the able-bodied seamen 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, for 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 blood"

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 mult.i.tude of heads pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter. 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 Christian theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's shoe-shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the st.i.tching.

There were endless shoe-shops, and they all belonged to Powson or Singson or Samson, while one signboard 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 ca.s.sock, 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 intelligence 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 for ever 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 pa.s.s un.o.bservedly 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 some 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Krist, Da.s.s 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 street lights 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 vigourous; 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 a mother before whose name 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 shoulder, fingering a forage-cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sociation--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 s.p.a.ce 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 forward, 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, t.i.ttering 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 greatly 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 s.p.a.ce 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 the short close bodice that she wore above them, like a Bengali woman, left visible the narrow gap of flesh which n.o.body notices when it is brown. 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 every one 'ere this night, h'every one, that the Saviour is mighty to keep. I've 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' every 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' his 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 G.o.d," 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 G.o.d's word for that. Now just a little word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got G.o.d'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 gla.s.s 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 pet.i.tion. 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 a.s.sumed 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 others broke in upon the Ensign with like exclamations. They had a recurrent, perfunctory sound, and pa.s.sed 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 insistant 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 G.o.d, How will you do? How will you do?"

The Duke's Own sang l.u.s.tily, with a dogged enjoyment that made little of the words. Some of them a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 any one 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 Christ-heart, "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 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 grat.i.tude 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 twirled a battered straw 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 G.o.d!" remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of the Duke's Own, who were inclined to be amused. "That will do, thank you.