Part 25 (1/2)
”Has she an influence for good--over him?” Stephen inquired and cleared his throat. He caught a glance exchanged and frowned.
”Oh, yes,” Duff said, ”I fancy it is for good. For good, certainly. The odd part of it is that he began by having an influence over her which she declares improved her acting. So that was for good, too, as it turned out. I think she makes too much of him. To my mind, he speaks like a bit of consecrated stage tradition and looks like a bit of consecrated stage furniture--he, and his thin nose, and his thin lips, and his thin eyebrows. Personally, I'm sick of his eyebrows.”
”They'll end by marrying,” said Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel Livingstone.
”_Herbert!_ How little you know her!”
”It's possible enough,” Duff said, ”especially if she finds him in any way necessary to her production of herself. Hilda has knocked about too much to have many illusions. One is pretty sure she would place that first.”
”You are saying a thing which is monstrous!” cried Alicia.
Unperturbed, her brother supported his conviction. ”She'll have to marry him to get rid of him,” he said. ”Fancy the opportunities of worrying her the brute will have in those endless ocean voyages!”
”Oh, if you think Hilda could be _worried_ into anything!” Miss Livingstone exclaimed derisively. ”If the man were irritating, do you suppose she wouldn't arrange--wouldn't find means--?”
”She would have him put in irons, no doubt,” Herbert retorted, ”or locked up with the other sad dogs, in charge of the s.h.i.+p's butcher.”
The three laughed immoderately, and Stephen, looking up, came in at the end with a smile. Alicia p.r.o.nounced her brother too absurd, and unfitted by nature to know anything about creatures like Hilda Howe. ”A mere man to begin with,” she said. ”You haven't the ghost of a temperament, Herbert, you know you haven't.”
”He's got a lovely bedside manner,” Lindsay remarked, ”and that's the next thing to it.”
”Rubbis.h.!.+ I don't want to hurry you,” Alicia glanced at the watch on her wrist, ”but unless you and Herbert want to miss half the first act you had better be off. Stephen and I will have our coffee comfortably in the drawing-room and find what excuses we can for you.”
But Stephen put out his hand with a movement of slightly rigid deprecation.
”If it is not too vacillating of me,” he said, ”and I may be forgiven, I think I will change my mind and go. I have no business to break up your party, and besides, I shall probably not have another opportunity--I should rather like to go. To the theatre, of course, that is. Not to Bonsard's, thanks very much.”
”Oh, do come on to Bonsard's,” Lindsay said, and Alicia protested that he would miss the best of Lady Dolly, but Stephen was firm. Bonsard's was beyond the limit of his indulgence.
CHAPTER XXII.
Only the Sphinx confronted them, after all, when they arrived at the theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the front of the box.
Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows, which were a.s.sisting her a good deal with the house in exploring and being explored, enabling Colonel John c.u.mmins, who sat by her side, to observe how very perfect and adorable the cut of her bodice was. Since Colonel c.u.mmins was accustomed to say in moments when his humour escaped his discretion, that there was more in a good fit than meets the eye, the _role_ of Lady Dolly's elbows could hardly be dismissed as unimportant. Moreover, the husband attached to the elbows belonged to the Department of which Colonel John was the head, so that they rested, one may say, upon a very special plane.
Alicia disturbed it with the necessity of taking Colonel c.u.mmins' place, which Lady Dolly accepted with admirable spirit, a.s.suring the usurper, with the most engaging candour, that she simply ought never to be seen without turquoises. ”Believe it or not as you like, but I like you better every time I see you in that necklace.” Lady Dolly clasped her hands, with her fan in them, in the abandonment of her affection, and ”love you better” floated back and dispersed itself among the men.
Alicia smiled the necessary acknowledgment. All the women she knew made compliments to her; it was a kind of cult among them. The men had sometimes an air of envying their freedom of tongue. ”Don't say that,”
she returned lightly, ”or Herbert will never give me any diamonds.” She, too, looked her approval of Lady Dolly's bodice but said nothing. It was doubtless precisely because she distained certain forms of feminine barter that she got so much for nothing.
”And where,” demanded Lady Dolly, in an electric whisper, ”did you find that dear, sweet little priest? Do introduce him to me--at least, bye and bye, when I've thought of something to say. Let me see, wasn't it Good Friday last week? I'll ask him if he had hot-cross buns--or do people eat those on Boxing Day? Pancakes come in somewhere, if one could only be sure!”
Stephen clung persistently to the back of the box. His senses were filled for the moment by its other occupants, the men in the fresh correctness of their evening dress, whose least gesture seemed to spring from an indefinite fulness of life, the two women in front, a kind of l.u.s.trous tableau of what it was possible to choose and to enjoy. They were grouped and shut off in a high light which seemed to proceed partly from the usual sources and partly from their own personalities; he saw them in a way which underlined their significance at every point. It seemed to Stephen that in a manner he profaned this temple of what he held to be poorest and cheapest in life, a paradox of which he was but dimly aware in his dejection. A sharp impression of his physical inferiority to the other men a.s.sailed him; his appreciation of their muscular shoulders had a rasp in it. For once the poverty of spirit to which he held failed to offer him a refuge. His eye wandered restlessly as if attempting futile reconciliations, and the thing most present with him was the worn-all-day feeling about the neck of his ca.s.sock. He fixed his attention presently in a climax of pa.s.sive discomfort on the curtain, where, unconsciously, his gaze crept with a subtle interrogation in it to the wide eyeb.a.l.l.s of the Sphinx.
The stalls gradually filled, although it was a second production in the middle of the week, and although the gallery and rupee seats under it were nearly empty. The piece accounted for both. When Duff Lindsay said at dinner that it wasn't ”up to much,” he spoke, I fancy, from the nearest point of view he could take to that of the Order of St.
Barnabas. As a matter of fact, _The Victim of Virtue_ was up to a very great deal, but its points were so delicate that one must have been educated rather broadly to grasp them, which is again, perhaps, a foolish contrariety of terms. At all events, they carried no appeal to the theatre-goers from the sailing s.h.i.+ps in the river or the regiments in the fort, who turned as one man that night to Jimmy Finnigan.
Stephen was aware, in the abstract, of what he might expect. He savoured the enterprises of the London theatres weekly in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_; he had cast a remotely observing eye upon the productions of this particular playwright through that medium for a long time. They formed a manifestation of the outer world fit enough to draw a glance of speculation from the inner; their author was an acrobat of ideas.
Doubtless we are all clowns in the eyes of the angels, yet we have the habit of supposing that they sometimes look down upon us. It was thus, if the parallel is not exaggerated, that Arnold regarded the author of _The Victim of Virtue_. His att.i.tude was quite taken before the orchestra ceased playing; it was made of negation rather than criticism, on the basis that he had no concern with, and no knowledge of, such things. Deliberately he gave his mind a surface which should shed promiscuous invitation, and folded his lips, as it were, against the rising of the curtain. He thought of Hilda separately, and he looked for her upon the boards with the _naivete_ of a desire to see the woman he knew.
When finally he did see her she made before him a picture that was to remain with him always as his last impression of an art from which in all its manifestations on that night he definitely turned. From the aigrette in her hair to the paste buckle on her shoe she was _mondaine_.