Chapter 18

Finally the days of Laura Filbert's sojourn under the Livingstones' roof followed each other into the past that is not much pondered. Alicia at one time valued the impression that life in Calcutta disappeared entirely into this kind of history, that one's memory there was a rubbish heap of which one naturally did not trouble to stir up the dust. It gave a soothing wistulness to discontent to think this, which a discerning glance might often have seen about her lips and eyebrows as she lay back among her carriage cushions under the flattery of the south wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly, however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her general standard of worthlessness. She turned away from them more actively than from the rest, but it was because they bristled, naturally enough, with dilemmas and distresses which she made a literal effort to forget. As a matter of fact, there were not very many days, and they were largely filled with millinery. Even the dilemmas and distresses, when they asserted themselves, were more or less overswept, as if for the sake of decency, by billows of spotted muslin, with which Céline, who felt the romance of the situation, made herself marvellously clever. Céline, indeed, was worth in this exigency many times her wages. Alicia hastened to "lend" her to the fullest extent, and she spent hours with Miss Filbert contriving and arranging, a kind of conductor of her mistress's beneficence. It became plain that Laura preferred the conductor to the source, and they stitched together while she, with careful reserves, watched for the casual sidelights upon modes and manners that came from the lips of the maid. At other times she occupied herself with her Bible—she had adopted, as will be guessed, the grateful theory of Mrs. Sand, that she had only changed the sphere of her ministrations. She had several times felt, seated beside Céline, how grateful she ought to be that her spiritual paths for the future would be paths of such pleasantness, though Céline herself seemed to stand rather far from their border, probably because she was a Catholic. Mrs. Sand came occasionally to upbuild her, and after that Laura had always a fresh remembrance of how much she had done in giving so generous a friend as Duff Lindsay to the Army in Calcutta. It was reasonable enough that there should be a falling off in Mr. Lindsay's attendance just now in Laura's absence, but when they were united, Mrs. Sand hoped there would be very few evening services when she, the Ensign, would miss their bright faces. Lindsay himself came every afternoon, and Laura made his tea for him with precision, and pressed upon him, solicitously, everything there was to eat. He found her submissive and wishful to be pleasant. She sat up straight and said it was much hotter than they had it this time of year up-country but nothing at all to complain of yet. He also discovered her to be practical; she showed him the bills for the muslins, and explained one or two bargains. She seemed to wish to make it clear to him that it need not be, after all, so very expensive to take a wife. In the course of a few days one of the costumes was completed, and when he came she had it on, appearing before him for the first time in secular dress. The stays insisted a little cruelly on the lines of her figure, and the tight bodice betrayed her narrow-chested. Above its frills her throat protruded unusually, with a curve outward like that of some wading birds, and her arms, in their unaccustomed sleeves, hung straight at her sides. She had put on a hat that matched: it was the kind of pretty, disorderly hat with waving flowers that demands the shadow of short hair along the forehead, and she had not thought of that way of making it becoming. Among these accessories the significance of her face retreated to a point vague and distant; its lightly-pencilled lines seemed half erased. She made no demand upon him for admiration on this occasion, she seemed sufficiently satisfied with herself; but after a time, when they were sitting together on the sofa, and he still pursued the lines of her garment with questioning eyes, she recalled him to the conventionalities of the situation.

"You needn't be afraid of mussing it," she said.

The ship she took her departure in sailed from its jetty in the river at six o'clock in the morning. Preparations for her comfort had been completed over night; indeed, she slept on board, and Duff had only the duty and the sentiment of actual parting in the morning. He found her in a sequestered corner of the fresh-swabbed quarter-deck. She wore her Army clothes—she had come on board in one of the muslins—and she was softly crying. From the jetty on the other side of the ship arose, amid tramping feet and shouted orders and the creaking of the luggage-crane, the overruling sound of a hymn. Ensign Sand and a company had come apparently to pay the last rites to a fellow-officer whom they should no more meet on earth, bearing her heavenly commission.

"Farewell, faithful friend, we must now bid adieu

To those joys and pleasures we've tasted with you.

We've laboured together, united in heart,

But now we must close, and soon we must part."

They had said good-bye to her and God bless you, all of them, but they evidently meant to sing the ship out of port. Lindsay sat down beside the victim of the demonstration and quietly took her hand. There was a consciousness newly guilty in his discomfort, which he owed perhaps to a ghost of futility that seemed to pace up and down before him, between the ranks of the steamer-chairs. Nevertheless, as she presently turned a calmed face to him with her pale apology, he had the sensation of a rebound toward the ideal that had finally perished in the spotted muslin, and when a little later he watched the long backward trail of smoke as the steamer moved down the clear morning river, he remembered that it was a satisfaction to have prevailed.

The Sutlej had gone far on her tranquil course by the evening of a dinner in Middleton street, at which the guests, it was understood, were to proceed later to a party given at Government House by his Excellency the Viceroy. Alicia, when she included Duff in her invitations, felt an assurance that the steamer must by that time have reached Aden, and rose almost with buoyancy to the illusion you can make, if you like, with the geographical mile. She could hardly have left him out in any case—he could almost have demanded an explanation—since it was one of those parties which she gave every now and then, undiscouraged, with the focus of Hilda Howe. It had to be every now and then, because Calcutta society was so little adapted to appreciate meeting talented actresses—there were so many people whom Alicia had to consider as to whether they would "mind." Hilda marvelled at the sanguine persistence of Miss Livingstone's efforts in this direction, the results were so fragmentary, so dislocated and indecisive, but she also rejoiced. She took life, as may have appeared, at a broad and generous level, it quite comprehended the salient points of a Calcutta dinner party; and it was seldom that she failed, metaphorically speaking, to carry away a bone from the feast. If you found this reprehensible, she would have told you she had observed that they do it in Japan, where manners are the best in the world.

Doubtless Hilda would have dwelt longer upon such a dinner-party than I, with no consolatory bone to gnaw in private, find myself inclined to do. To me it is depressing, and a little cruel, to be compelled to betray the inadequacy of the personal element at Alicia's banquets, especially in connection with the conspicuous excellence of the cooking. A poverty of cuisine would have provoked no contrast, and one irony the less would have been offered up to the gods that season. The limitations of her resources were, of course, arbitrary, that is plain in the fact that she asked such a person as the Head of the Department of Education, with no better reason than that he had laid almost the whole of Shelley under critical notes for the benefit of Calcutta University, and the necessary item, his wife, who did even less harm by making exquisite lampshades. There was a civilian who had written a few years before an article in the Nineteenth Century about the aboriginal tribes of Madras, and the lady attached to him, who had been at one time the daughter of a Lieutenant-Governor. The Barberrys were there because Mrs. Barberry loved meeting anybody that was clever, admired brains beyond anything; and an Aide-de-Camp who had to be asked because Mrs. Barberry was, and Captain Salter Symmes, who took leading male parts in Mr. Pinero's plays when they were produced in Simla, and was invariably considered up there to have done them better than any professional they have at home, though he was even more successful as a contortionist when the entertainment happened to be a burlesque. Taking Hilda and Lindsay and Stephen Arnold as a basis, Alicia had built up her party, with the contortionist, as it were, at the apex, on his head. The Livingstones had family connection with a leading London publishing firm, and Alicia may possibly have reflected, as she surveyed her completed work, how much better than capering captains she could have done in Chelsea, though it cannot be admitted likely that she would harbour, at that particular instant, so ungracious a thought. And indeed it was a creditable party; it would almost unanimously call itself, next day, a delightful one. Miss Howe made the most agreeable excitement—you might almost have heard the heart-beats of the wife of the literary and on one occasion current civilian, as she just escaped being introduced, and so availed herself of the dinner's opportunity for intimate observation without letting herself in a particle—most clever. Mrs. Barberry, of course, rushed upon the spear, as she always did, and made a gushing little speech, with every eye upon her, in the middle of the room, without a thought of consequences. The Aide-de-Camp was also empressé, one would have thought that he was acting himself, the way he bowed and picked up Hilda's fan—a grace lingered in it from the minuet he had danced the week before, in ruffles and patches, with the daughter of the Commander-in-Chief. Duff got out of the way to enable the newly-introduced Head of the Department of Education to inform Miss Howe that he never went to the theatre in Calcutta himself, it was much too badly ventilated; and Stephen Arnold, arriving late, shot like an embarrassed arrow through the company to Alicia's side, and was still engaged there in grieved explanation when dinner was announced.

There were pink water-lilies, and Stephen said grace—those were the pictorial features. Half of the people had taken their seats when he began; there was a hasty scramble, and a decorous, half-checked smile. Hilda, at the first word of the brief formula, blushed hotly; then she stood while he spoke, with bowed head and clasped hands, like a reverently inclining statue. Her long lashes brushed her cheek; she drew a kind of isolation from the way her manner underlined the office. The civilian's wife, with a side-glance, settled it off-hand that she was absurdly affected; and, indeed, to an acuter intelligence it might have looked as if she took, with the artistry of habit, a cue that was not offered.

That was the one instant, however, in which the civilian's wife, observing the actress, was gratified; and it was so brief that she complained afterward that Miss Howe was disappointing. She certainly went out of her way to be normal. Since it was her daily business to personate exceptional individuals, it seemed to be her pleasure that night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the circumstance; she looked with warm pleasure at the orchids the men wore and the jewelled necks of the women. The social essence of Alicia's little dinner-party passed into her, and she moved her head like the civilian's wife. She felt the champagne investing her chatter and the chatter of the Head of the Department of Education with the most satisfying qualities, which were only very slightly dashed when she glanced over the brim of her glass at Stephen, sitting at the turn of the oval, giving a gravely humble but perfunctory attention to Mrs. Barberry and drinking water. The occasion grew before her into a gorgeous flower, living, pulsating, and in the heart of its light and colour the petals closed over her secret, over him, the unconscious priest with the sloping shoulders, thinking of abstinence and listening to Mrs. Barberry.