That same Sunday, Alicia had been able to say to Lindsay about Hilda Howe, “We have not stood still—we know each other well now,” and when he commented with some reserve upon this to follow it up. “But these things have so little to do with mere length of time or number of opportunities,” she declared. “One springs at some people.”
A Major-General, interrupting, said he wished he had the chance; and they talked about something else. But perhaps this is enough to explain a note which went by messenger from the Livingstones' pillared palace in Middleton Street to Number Three, Lal Behari's Lane, on Monday morning. It was a short note, making a definite demand with an absence of colour and softness and emotion which was almost elaborate. Hilda, at breakfast, tore off the blank half sheet, and wrote in pencil—
“I think I can arrange to get her here about five this afternoon. No rehearsal—they're doing something to the gas-pipes at the theatre, so you will find me, anyway. And I'll be delighted to see you.”
She twisted it up and addressed it, reconsidered that, and made the scrap more secure in a yellow envelope. It had an embossed post-office stamp, which she sacrificed with resignation. Then she went back to an extremely uninteresting vegetable curry, with the reflection—“Can she possibly imagine that one doesn't see it yet?”
Alicia came before five. She brought a novel of Gissing's, in order apparently that they might without fail talk about Gissing. Hilda was agreeable; she would talk about Gissing, or about anything, tipped on the edge of her bed—Alicia had surmounted that degree of intimacy at a bound by the declaration that she could no longer endure the blue umbrellas—and clasping one knee, with an uncertain tenure of a chipped bronze slipper deprived of its heel. Wonderful silk draperies fell about her, with ink-spots on the sleeves; her hair was magnificent.
“It's so curious to me,” she was saying of the novel, “that anyone should learn all that life as you do, at a distance, in a book. It's like looking at it through the little end of an opera-glass.”
“I fancy that the most desirable way,” said Alicia, glancing at the door.
“Don't you believe it. The best way is to come out of it, to grow out of it. Then all the rest has the charm of novelty and the value of contrast, and the distinction of being the best. You, poor dear, were born an artificial flower in a cardboard box. But you couldn't help it.”
“Everybody doesn't grow out of it.” The concentration in Alicia's eyes returned again with vacillating wings.
“She can't be here for a quarter of an hour yet.” The slipper dropped at this point, and Hilda stooped to put it on again. She kept her foot in her hands, and regarded it pensively.
“Shoes are the one thing one shouldn't buy in the native quarter,” she continued; “at all events, ready-made.”
“You have an audacity—” Alicia ended abruptly in a wan smile.
“Haven't I? Are you quite sure he wants to marry her?”
“I know it.”
“From him?”
“From him.”
“Oh!”—Hilda deliberated a moment nursing her slipper—“Really? Well, we can't let that happen.”
“Why not?”
“You have a hardihood! Is no reason plain to you? Don't you see anything?”
Alicia smiled again painfully, as if against a tension of her lips. “I see only one thing that matters—he wants it,” she said.
“And won't be happy till he gets it! Rubbish, my dear! We are an intolerably self-sacrificing sex.” Hilda felt about for pillows, and stretched her length along the bed. “They've taught us well, the men; it's a blood disease now, running everywhere in the female line. You may be sure it was a barbarian princess that hesitated between the lady and the tiger. A civilised one would have introduced the lady and given her a dot, and retired to the nearest convent. Bah! It's a deformity, like the dachshund's legs.”
Alicia looked as if this would be a little troublesome, and not quite worth while, to follow.
“The happiness of his whole life is involved,” she said simply.
“Oh dear yes—the old story! And what about the happiness of yours? Do you imagine it's laudable, admirable, this attitude? Do you see yourself in it with pleasure? Have you got a sacred satisfaction of self-praise?”
Contempt accumulated in Miss Howe's voice, and sat in her eyes. To mark her climax she kicked her slippers over the end of the bed.
“It is idiotic—it's disgusting,” she said.
Alicia caught a flash from her. “My attitude!” she cried. “What in the world do you mean? Do you always think in poses? I take no attitude. I care for him, and in that proportion I intend that he shall have what he wants—so far as I can help him to it. You have never cared for anybody—what do you know about it?”
Hilda took a calm, unprejudiced view of the ceiling. “I assure you I'm not an angel,” she cried. “Haven't I cared! Several times.”
“Not really—not lastingly.”
“I don't know about really; certainly not lastingly. I've never thought the men should have a monopoly of nomadic susceptibilities. They entail the prettiest experiences.”
“Of course, in your profession—”
“Don't be nasty, sweet lady. My affections have never taken the opportunities of our profession. They haven't even carried me into matrimony, though I remember once, at Sydney, they brought me to the brink! We must contrive an escape for Duff Lindsay.”
“You assume too much—a great deal too much. She must be beautiful—and good.”
“Give me a figure. She's a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty that lilies have from her personal chastity and her religious enthusiasm. Touch those things and bruise them, as—as marriage would touch and bruise them—and she would be a mere fragment of stale vegetation. You want him to clasp that to his bosom for the rest of his life?”
“I won't believe you. You're coarse and you're cruel.”
Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone's eyes with this. Hilda, still regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.
“I'm sorry, dear,” she said. “I forgot. You are usually so intelligent, one can be coarse and cruel with comfort, talking to you. Go into the bathroom and get my salts—they're on the washhand-stand—will you? I'm quite faint with all I'm about to undergo.”
Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts. Ignoring the third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside and laid her hand on Hilda's head.
“Oh Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick—so sorry,” she said. It was a cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a necessity.
“I am not very bad,” Hilda improvised. “Hardly more than a headache.”
“She makes light of everything,” Miss Filbert said, smiling toward Alicia, who stood silent, the prey of her impression. Discovering the blue salts bottle, Laura walked over to her and took it from her hands.
“And what,” said the barefooted Salvation Army girl to Miss Livingstone, “might your name be?”
There was an infinite calm interest in it—it was like a conventionality of the other world, and before its assurance Alicia stood helpless.
“Her name is Livingstone,” called Hilda from the bed, “and she is as good as she is beautiful. You needn't be troubled about HER soul—she takes Communion every Sunday morning at the Cathedral.”
“Hallelujah!” said Captain Filbert, in a tone of dubious congratulation.
“Much better,” said Hilda cheerfully, “to take it at the Cathedral, you know, than nowhere.”
Miss Filbert said nothing to this, but sat down upon the edge of the bed, looking serious, and stroked Hilda's hair.
“You don't seem to have much fever,” she said. “There was a poor fellow in the Military Hospital this morning with a temperature of one hundred and seven. I could hardly bear to touch him.”
“What was the matter?” asked Hilda idly, occupied with hypotheses about the third person in the room.
“Oh, I don't know exactly. Some complication, I suppose, of Satan's tribute—”
“Divinest Laura!” Hilda interposed quickly, drawing her head back. “Do take a chair. It will be even more soothing to see you comfortable.”
Captain Filbert spoke again to Alicia, as she obeyed. “Miss Howe is more thoughtful for others than some of our converted ones,” she said, with vast kindness. “I have often told her so. I have had a long day.”
“It may improve me in that character,” Hilda said, “to suggest that if you will go about such people, a little carbolic disinfectant is a good thing, or a crystal or two of permanganate of potash in your bath. Do you use those things?”
Laura shook her head. “Faith is better than disinfectants. I never get any harm. My Master protects me.”
“My goodness!” Hilda said. And in the silence that occurred, Captain Filbert remarked that the only thing she used carbolic acid for was a decayed tooth. Presently Alicia made a great effort. She laid hands on Hilda's previous reference as a tangibility that remained with her.
“Do you ever go to the Cathedral?” she said.
The faintest shade of dogmatism crossed Captain Filbert's features, as when on a day of cloud fleeces the sun withdraws for an instant from a flower. Since her sect is proclaimed beyond the boundaries of dogma it may have been some other obscurity, but that was the effect.
“No. I never go there. We raise our own Ebenezer; we are a tabernacle to ourselves.”
“Isn't it exquisite—her way of speaking!” cried Hilda from the bed, and Laura glanced at her with a deprecating, reproachful smile, in reproof of an offence admittedly incorrigible. But she went on as if she were conscious of a stimulus.
“Wherever the morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary enough,” she said; “a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army, He is Lord of our hosts.”
“A kind of chant,” murmured Hilda, and Miss Livingstone became aware that she might if she liked play with the beginnings of magnetism. Then that impression was carried away as it were on a puff of air, and it is hardly likely that she thought of it again.
“I suppose all the elite go to the Cathedral?” Laura said. The sanctity of her face was hardly disturbed, but a curiosity rested upon it, and behind the curiosity a far-off little, leaping tongue of some other thing. Hilda on the bed named it the constant feminine, and narrowed her eyes.
“Dear me, yes,” she said for Alicia. “His Excellency the Viceroy and all his beautiful A.D.C.'s, no end of military and their ladies, Secretaries to the Government of India in rows, fully choral, Under-Secretaries so thick they're kept in the vestibule till the bells stop. 'And make Thy chosen people joyful'!” she intoned. “Not forgetting Surgeon-Major and Miss Alicia Livingstone, who occupy the fourth pew to the right of the main aisle, advantageously near the pulpit.”
“You know already what a humbug she is,” Alicia said, but Captain Filbert's inner eye seemed retained by that imaginary congregation.
“Well, it wouldn't be any attraction for me,” she said, rising to go through the little accustomed function of her departure. “I'll be going now, I think. Ensign Sand has fever again, and I have to take her place at the Believers' Meeting.” She took Hilda's hand in hers and held it for an instant. “Good-bye, and God bless you—in the way you most need,” she said, and turned to Alicia, “Good-bye. I am glad to know that we will be one in the glad hereafter though our paths may diverge”—her eye rested with acknowledgment upon Alicia's embroidered sleeves—“in this world. To look at you I should have thought you were of the bowed down ones, not yet fully assured, but perhaps you only want a little more oxygen in the blood of your religion. Remember the word of the Lord—'Rejoice! again I say unto you, rejoice!' Goodbye.”
She drew her head-covering farther forward, and moved to the door. It sloped to her shoulders and made them droop; her native clothes clung about her breast and her hips in the cringing Oriental way. Miss Howe looked after her guest with a curl of the lip as uncontrollable as it was unreasonable. “A saved soul, perhaps. A woman—oh, assuredly,” she said in the depths of her hair.
The door had almost closed upon Captain Filbert when Alicia made something like a dash at an object about to elude her. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “wait a minute. Will you come and see me? I think—I think you might do me good. I live at Number Ten, Middleton Street. Will you come?”
Laura came back into the room. There was a little stiffness in her air, as if she repressed something.
“I have no objection,” she said.
“To-morrow afternoon—at five? Or—my brother is dining at the club—would you rather come to dinner?”
“Whichever is agreeable to you will suit me.” She spoke carefully, after an instant's hesitation.
“Then do come and dine—at eight,” Alicia said; and it was agreed.
She stood staring at the door when Laura finally closed it, and only turned when Hilda spoke.
“You are going to have him to meet her,” she said. “May I come too?”
“Certainly not.” Alicia's grasp was also by this time on the door handle.
“Are you going too? You daren't talk about her!” Hilda cried.
“I'm going too. I've got the brougham. I'll drive her home,” said Alicia, and went out swiftly.
“My goodness!” Hilda remarked again. Then she got up and found her slippers and wrote a note, which she addressed to the Reverend Stephen Arnold, Clarke Mission House, College Street. “Thanks immensely,” it ran, “for your delightful offer to introduce me to Father Jordan and persuade him to show me the astronomical wonders he keeps in his tower at St. Simeon's. An hour with a Jesuit is an hour of milk and honey, and belonging to that charming Order, he won't mind my coming on a Sunday evening—the first clear one.”
Miss Howe signed her note and bit consideringly at the end of her pen. Then she added: “If you have any influence with Duff Lindsay, it may be news to you that you can exert it with advantage to keep him from marrying a cheap ethereal little religieuse of the Salvation Army named Filbert. It may seem more fitting that you should expostulate with her, but I don't advise that.”
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg