The Path of a Star

CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A statue?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Introduced whom?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not yet!” Alicia cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And next week?” cried Alicia.

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

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

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

“Oh, quite.”

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

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

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

“It pays! It pays!”