Part 22 (1/2)
”He lunched with us yesterday. He was more enthusiastic than ever about you.”
”I wish you could tell me that he hadn't mentioned my name. I don't want his enthusiasm. The pit gives one that.”
”Hilda, tell me; what is your idea of--of what it ought to be? What is the princ.i.p.al part of it? Not enthusiasm--adoration?”
”Goodness, no! Something quite different and quite simple--too simple to explain. Besides, it is a thing that requires the completest ignorance to discuss comfortably. Do you want me to vivisect my soul? You yourself, can you talk about what most possesses you?”
”Oh,” protested Alicia, ”I wasn't thinking about myself,” and at the same moment the door opened and Hilda said, ”Ah! Mr. Lindsay.”
There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss Howe's greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a difference, and that he must find other things to say. He found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish her tea before she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place in the conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about cream and sugar. Alicia waited, it was her way; she sank almost palpably into the tapestries until some reviving circ.u.mstance should bring her out again, a process which was quite compatible with her little laughs and comments. She waited, offering repose, and unconscious even of that. You know Hilda Howe as a creature of bold reflections. Looking at Alicia Livingstone behind the teapot, the conviction visited her that a s.e.x three-quarters of this fibre explained the monastic clergy.
”It is reported that you have performed the wonderful, the impossible,”
Lindsay said; ”that Llewellyn Stanhope goes home solvent.”
”I don't know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm. He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between the acts. The only way it would go, in this capital.”
”Oh, do produce Ibsen,” Alicia exclaimed; ”I've never seen one of his plays--doesn't it sound terrible!”
”If people will elect to live upon a coral strand--oh, I should like to, for you and Duff here, but Ibsen is the very last man to deliver to a scratch company. He must have equal merit, or there's no meaning.
You see he makes none of the vulgar appeals. It would be a tame travesty--n.o.body could redeem it alone. You must keep to the old situations, the reliable old dodges, when you play in any part of Asia.”
”I never shall cease to regret that I didn't see you in The Offence of Galilee?” Duff said. ”Everyone who knows the least bit about it said you were marvellous in that.”
”Marvellous,” said Alicia
Hilda gazed straight before her for an instant without speaking. The others looked at her absent eyes. ”A bazar trick or two helped me,”
she said, and glanced with vivacity at any other subject that might be hanging on the wall, or visible out of the window.
”And are you really invincible about not putting it on again in Calcutta?” Duff asked.
”Not in Calcutta, or anywhere. The rest hate it--n.o.body has a chance but me,” Hilda said, and got up.
”Oh, I don't know,” Alicia began, but Miss Howe was already half-way out of the discussion, in the direction of the door. There was often a brusqueness in her comings and goings, but she usually left a flavour of herself behind. One turned with facility to talk about her, this being the easiest way of applying the stimulus that came of talking to her.
It was more conspicuous than either of these two realised that they accepted her retreat without a word, that there was even between them a consciousness of satisfaction that she had gone.
”This morning's mail,” said Alicia, smiling brightly at Lindsay, ”brought you a letter, I know.” It was extraordinary how detached she could be from her vital personal concern in him. It seemed relegated to some background of her nature while she occupied herself with the immediate play of circ.u.mstance or was lost in her observation of him.
”How kind of you to think of it,” Lindsay said. ”This was the first by which I could possibly hear from England.”
”Ah, well, now you will have no more anxiety. Letters from on board s.h.i.+p are always difficult to write and unsatisfactory,” Alicia said. Miss Filbert's had been postcards, with a wide unoccupied margin at the bottom.
”The Sutlej seems to have arrived on the third; that's a day later, isn't it, than we made out she would be?”
Alicia consulted her memory, and found she couldn't be sure. Lindsay was vexed by a similar uncertainty, but they agreed that the date was early in the month.
”Did they get comfortably through the Ca.n.a.l? I remember being tied up there for forty-eight hours once.”
”I don't think she says, so I fancy it must have been all right.
The voyage is bound to do her good. I've asked the Simpsons to watch particularly for any sign of malaria later, though. One can't possibly know what she may have imported from that slum in Bentinck Street.”