Chapter 5

Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's Company was not the only combination that offered itself to the entertainment of Calcutta that December Saturday night. The ever-popular Jimmy Finnigan and his "Surprise Party"—he sailed up the Bay as regularly as the Viceroy descended from the hills—had been advertising "Side-splitting begins at 9:30. Prices as usual," with reference to this particular evening for a fortnight. In the Athenian Theatre—it had a tin roof, and nobody could hear the orchestra when it rained—the Midgets were presenting the earlier collaborations of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan, every Midget guaranteed under nine years of age. Colonel Pike's Great Occidental Circus had been in full blast on the Maidan for a week. It became a great occidental circus when Colonel Pike married the proprietress. They were both staying at the Grand Oriental Hotel at Singapore when she was made a relict through cholera, and he had more time than he knew what to do with, to say nothing of moustaches that predestined him to a box-office. And certainly circumstances justified the lady's complaisance, for while hitherto hers had been but a fleeting show, it was now, in the excusably imaginative terms of Colonel Pike, an architectural feature of the cold weather. There was the mystic bower, too, in an octagonal tent under a pipal tree, which gave you, by an arrangement of looking-glasses, the most unaccountable sensations for one rupee; and a signboard cried "Know Thyself!" where a physiological display lurked from the eyes of the police behind a perfectly respectable skeleton at one end of Peri Chandra's Gully. Llewellyn Stanhope saw that there was competition, sighed to think how much, as he stood in the foggy vestibule of the Imperial Theatre wrapped in the impressive folds of his managerial cape, and pulled his moustache and watched the occasional carriage that rolled his way up the narrow lane from Chowringhee. He thought bitterly, standing there, of Calcutta's recognition of the claims of legitimate drama, for the dank darkness was full of the noise of wheels and the flashing of lamps on the way to accord another season's welcome to Jimmy Finnigan. "I might've learned this town well enough by now," he reflected, "to know that a bally minstrel show's about the size of it." Mr. Stanhope had not Mr. Finnigan's art of the large red lips and the twanging banjo; his thought was scornful rather than envious. He aspired, moreover, to be known as the pilot of stars, at least in the incipience of their courses, to be taken seriously by association, since nature had arranged that he never could be on his intrinsic merits. His upper lip was too short for that, his yellow moustache too curly, while the perpetual bullying he underwent at the hands of leading ladies gave him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully misunderstood. The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed him, coming down with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke in the uttermost ends of the earth, with a strong inclination to bring the cause of that misfortune before the Consular Courts. They seldom succeeded in this design, since Llewellyn was usually able to prove to them in advance that it would be fruitless and expensive, but the paths of Eastern capitals were strewn with his compromises, in Japanese yen, Chinese dollars, Indian rupees, for salaries which no amount of advertising could wheedle into the box-office. When the climax came Llewellyn usually went to hospital and received the reporters of local papers in pathetic audience there, which counteracted the effect of the astounding statements the stars made in letters to the editor, and yet gave the public clearly to understand that owing to its coldness and neglect a number of ladies and gentlemen of very superior talents were subsisting in their midst mainly upon brinjals and soda water. "I'm in hospital," Mr. Stanhope would say to the reporters, "and I'm d—— glad of it."—he always insisted on the oath going in, it appealed so sympathetically to the domiciled Englishman grown cold to superiority—"for, upon my soul, I don't know where I'd turn for a crust if I weren't." In the end the talented ladies and gentlemen usually went home by an inexpensive line as the voluntary arrangement of a public to whom plain soda was a ludicrous hardship, and native vegetables an abomination at any price. Then Llewellyn and Rosa Norton—she had a small inalienable income, and they were really married, though they preferred for some inexplicable reason to be thought guilty of more improper behaviour—would depart in another direction full of gratification for the present and of confidence for the future. Llewellyn usually made a parting statement to the newspapers that, although his aims were unalterably high, he was not above profiting by experience, and that next season he could be relied upon to hit the taste of the community with precision. This year, as we know, he had made a serious effort by insisting that at least a proportion of his ladies and gentlemen should be high kickers, and equal to an imitation, good enough for the Orient, of most things done by the illustrious Mr. Chevalier. But the fact that Mr. Stanhope had selected The Offence of Galilee to open with tells its own tale. He was convinced, but not converted, and he stood there with his little legs apart, chewing a straw above the three uncut emeralds that formed the chaste decoration of his shirt-front, giving the public of Calcutta one more chance to redeem itself.

It began to look as if Calcutta were not wholly irredeemable. A ticca-gharry deposited a sea captain; three carriages arrived in succession; an indefinite number of the Duke's Own, hardly any of them drunk, filed in to the rupee seats under the gallery; an overflow from Jimmy Finnigan, who could no longer give his patrons even standing room. When this occurred, Llewellyn turned and swung indifferently away in the direction of the dressing-rooms. When Jimmy Finnigan closed his doors so early there was no further cause for anxiety. Calcutta was abroad and stirring, and would turn for amusement even to The Offence of Galilee.

Eventually—that is, five minutes before the curtain rose—the representatives of the leading Calcutta journals decided that they were justified in describing the house as a large and fashionable audience. The Viceroy had taken a box and sent an Aide-de-Camp to sit in it, also a pair of M.P.s from the North of England, whom he was expected to attend to in Calcutta, and the governess. The Commander-in-Chief had not been solicited to be present, the theatrical season demanding an economy in such personalities if they were to go round; but a Judge of the High Court had a party in the front row, and a Secretary to the Bengal Government sat behind him. To speak of unofficials, there must have been quite forty lakhs of tea and jute and indigo in the house, very genial and prosperous, to say nothing of hides and seeds, and the men who sold money and bought diamonds with the profits, which shone in their wives' hair. A duskiness prevailed in the bare arms and shoulders; much of the hair was shining and abundant, and very black. A turn of the head showed a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote motherhood of the zenana and the origin of the sun. An audience of fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars—the evening was warm under the gas-lights—sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself. Not an old woman in it from end to end, hardly a man turned fifty, and those who were had the air and looked to have the habits of twenty-five—an audience that might have got up and stretched itself but for good manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait for the rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an atmosphere of affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with imperious chins, the use of quick orders in a world of personal superiority.

Thus the stalls—they were spindling cane-bottomed chairs—and the boxes, in one of which the same spindling cane-bottomed chairs supported, in more expensive seclusion, Surgeon-Major and Miss Livingstone, the Reverend Stephen Arnold, and two or three other people. The Duke's Own sat under the gallery, cheek by jowl with all the flotsam and jetsam of an Eastern port, well on the lookout for any offensive personalities from the men of the ships, and spitting freely. Here, too, was an ease of shoulder and a freedom from the cares of life—at a venture the wives were taking in washing in Brixton, and the children sent to Board School at the expense of the nation. And in a climate like this it was a popular opinion that a man must either enjoy himself or commit suicide.

The Sphinx on the crooked curtain looked above and beyond them all. It was a caricature of the Sphinx, but could not confine her gaze.

Hilda's audience that night knew all about The Offence of Galilee from the English illustrated papers. The illustrated papers had a great way of ministering to the complacency of Calcutta audiences; they contained photographs of almost every striking scene, composed at the leisure of the cast, but so vividly supplemented with descriptions of the leading lady's clothes that it hardly required any effort of the imagination to conjure up the rest. The postures and the chief garments of Pilate—he was eating pomegranates when the curtain rose and listening to scandal from his slave maidens about Mary Magdalene—were at once recognised in their resemblance to those of the photographs, and in the thrill of this satisfaction any discrepancies in cut and texture passed generally unobserved. A silent curiosity settled upon the house, half reverent, as if with the Bible names came thronging a troop of sacred associations to cluster about personalities brusquely torn out of church, and people listened for familiar sentences with something like the composed gravity with which they heard on Sundays the reading of the second lesson. But as the stage-talk went on, the slave-maidens announcing themselves without delay comfortably modern and commonplace, and Pilate a cynic and a decadent, though as distinctively from Melbourne, it was possible to note the breaking up of this sentiment. It was plain, after all, that no standard of ideality was to be maintained or struggled after. The relief was palpable; nevertheless, when Pilate's wife cast a shrewish gibe at him over the shoulder of her exit, the audience showed but a faint inclination to be amused. It was to be a play evidently like any other play, the same coarse fibre, the same vivid and vulgar appeals. It is doubtful whether this idea was critically present to any one but Stephen Arnold, but people unconsciously tasted the dramatic substance offered them, and leaned back in their chairs with the usual patient acknowledgment that one mustn't expect too much of a company that found it worth while to come to Calcutta. The house grew submissive and stolid, but one could see half-awakened prejudices sitting in the dress-circle. The paper-chasing Secretary said to the most intelligent of his party that on the whole he liked his theology neat, forgetting that the preference belonged to Mr. Andrew Lang in connection with a notable lady novelist; and the most intelligent—it was Mrs. Barberry—replied that it did seem strange. The depths under the gallery were critically attentive, though Llewellyn Stanhope felt them hostile and longing for verbal brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank into the furthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's box, and knew all the misery of outrage. Pilate and the slave-maidens, Pilate's fat wife and an unspeakably comic centurion, offered as yet hardly more than a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole performance was already projected upon Arnold's suffering imagination. This, then, was what Patullo had done with it. But what other, he asked himself in quiet anger, could Patullo have been expected to do—the fellow he remembered? Arnold tilted his chair back and stared, with arms folded and sombre brows, at the opposite wall. He looked once at the door, but some spirit of self-torture kept him in his seat. If so much offence could be made with the mere crust and envelope, so to speak, of the sacred story, what sacrilege might not be committed with the divine personalities concerned—with Our Lord and His Mother? He remembered, with the touch of almost physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source of Patullo's intolerable inspiration. Certain muscles felt responsive at the thought of Patullo which Arnold had forgotten he possessed; it was so seldom that a missionary priest, even of athletic traditions, came in contact with anybody who required to be kicked.