Hilda by Sara Jeannette Duncan (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

with her enthusiasm and her cognisance. It may be remembered, too, that there was in the very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there. Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were facts. She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.

She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would not find any concessions among its features if she could help it. It was a trick she played upon her own consciousness; she would not look; but she could see without looking. She saw that which explained itself to be best, fittest, most reasonable, and thus she sometimes wandered with Arnold anticipatively, on afternoons when there was no matinee, through the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the Pacific slope.

She would not search to-morrow; but she took toward it one of those steps of vague intention, at the end of which we beckon to possibilities. She wrote to Stephen and asked him to come to see her then. She had not spoken to him since the night of the Viceroy's party, when she put her Bohemian head out of the ticca-gharry to wish him good-night, and he walked home alone under the stars, trying to remember a line of Horace, a chaste one, about woman's beauty. She sent the note by post. There was no answer but that was as usual; there never was an answer unless something prevented him; he always came, and ten minutes before the time. Hilda sat under the blue umbrellas when the hour arrived, devising with full heart-beats what she would say, creating fifty different forms of what he would say, while the hands slipped round the clock past the moment that should have brought his step to the door. Hilda noted it and compared her watch. A bowl of roses stood on a little table near a window; she got up and went to it, bending over and rearranging the flowers. The light fell on her and on the roses; it was a beautiful attitude, and when at a footfall she looked up expectantly it was more beautiful. But it was only another boarder--a Mr. Gonzalves, with a highly-varnished complexion, who took off his hat elaborately as he passed the open door. Hilda became conscious of her use of the roses and abandoned them. Presently she sat down on a Bentwood rocking-chair and swayed to and fro, aware of an ebbing of confidence. Half an hour later she was still sitting there. Her face had changed, something had faded in it; her gaze at the floor was profoundly speculative, and when she glanced at the empty door it was with timidity. Arnold had not come and did not come.

The evening passed without explanation, and next morning the post brought no letter. It was simplest to suppose that her own had not reached him, and Hilda wrote again. The second letter she sent by hand, with a separate sheet of paper addressed for signature. The messenger brought back the sheet of paper with strange initials, "J. L. for S. A.," and there was no reply. There remained the possibility of absence from Calcutta, of illness. That he should have gone away was most unlikely, that he had fallen ill was only too probable. Hilda looked from her bedroom window across the varying expanse of parapeted flat roofs and mosque bubbles that lay between her and College street, and curbed the impulse in her feet that would have resulted in the curious spectacle of Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady calling in person at a monastic gate to express a kind of solicitude against which precisely it was barred. A situation, after all, could be too pictorial, looked at from the point of view of the Order, a consideration which flashed with grateful humour across her anxiety. Alicia would have known; but both the Livingstones had gone for a short sea change to Ceylon with Duff Lindsay and some touring people from Surrey. They were most anxious, Hilda remembered, that Arnold should accompany them. Could he in the end have gone? There was, of course, the accredited fount and source of all information, the Brother Superior; but with what propriety could Hilda Howe apply for it? Llewellyn might write for her: but it was glaringly impossible that the situation should lay itself so far open to Llewellyn. Looking in vain for resources she came upon an expedient. She found a sheet of cheap notepaper, and made it a little greasy. On it she wrote with red ink in the cramped hand of the bazaar _Kerani_:[9]

[Footnote 9: Hired writer.]


"Sir:--Will you please to inform to me if Mr. Arnold has gone
mofussil or England as I have some small business with him. Yours
obedient servant,

"Wun Sing."


"It can't be forgery," she reflected, "since there isn't a Wun Sing," and added an artistic postscript, "Boots and shoes verry much cheap for cash." She made up the envelope to match and addressed it, with consistent illiteracy, to the head of the mission. The son of the Chinese basketmaker, who dwelt almost next door, spoke neither English nor Hindustani, but showed an easy comprehension of her promise of backsheesh when he should return with an answer. She had a joyful anticipation, while she waited, of the terms in which she should tell Arnold how she passed, disguised as a Chinese shoemaker, before the receptive and courteous consciousness of his spiritual senior; of how she penetrated, in the suggestion of a pig-tail and an unpaid bill, within the last portals that might be expected to receive her in the form under which, for example, certain black and yellow posters were presenting her to the Calcutta public at that moment. She saw his scruples go swiftly down before her laughter and the argument of her tender anxiety, which she was quite prepared to learn foolish and unnecessary. There was even an adventurous instant in which she leaped at actual personation, and she looked in rapture at the vivid risk of the thing before she abandoned it as involving too much. She sent no receipt-form this time--that was not the practice of the bazaar--and when, hours after, her messenger returned with weariness, and dejection written upon him in the characters of a perfunctory Chinese smile, she could only gather from his negative head and hands that no answer had been given him, and that her expedient had failed.

Hilda stared at her dilemma. Its properties were curiously simple. His world and hers, with the same orbit, had no point of contact. Once swinging round their eastern centre, they had come close enough for these two, leaning very far out, to join hands. When they loosed it seemed they lost.

The more she gazed at it the more it looked a preposterous thing that in a city vibrant with human communication by all the methods which make it easy, it should be possible for one individual thus to drop suddenly and completely from the knowledge of another--a mediaeval thing. Their isolation as Europeans of course accounted for it; there was no medium in the brown population that hummed in the city streets. Hilda could not even bribe a servant without knowing how to speak to him. She ravaged the newspapers; they never were more bare of reference to consecrated labours. The nearest approach to one was a paragraph chronicling a social evening given by the Wesleyans in Sudder street, with an exhibition of the cinematograph. In a moment of defiance and determination she sent a telegram studiously colourless. "Unable find you wish communicate please inform. A. Murphy." He had never forgotten the incongruity she was born to: in occasional scrupulous moments he addressed her by it; he would recognise and understand. There was no reply.

The enigma pressed upon her days, she lived in the heaviness of it, waiting. His silence added itself up, brought her a kind of shame for the exertions she had made. She turned with obstinacy from the further schemes her ingenuity presented. Out of the sum of her unsuccessful efforts grew a reproach of Arnold; every one of them increased it. His behaviour she could forgive, arbitrarily putting against it twenty potential explanations, but not the futility of what she had done. Her resentment of that undermined all the fairness of her logic, and even triumphed over the sword of her suspense. She never quite gave up the struggle, but in effect she passed the week that intervened pinioned in her unreason--bands that vanished as she looked at them, only to tie her thrice in another place.

Life became a permanent interrogation-point. Waiting under it, with a perpetual upward gaze, perhaps she grew a little dizzy. The sun of March had been increasing, and the air that Saturday afternoon had begun to melt and glow and hang in the streets with a kind of inertia, like a curtain that had to be parted to be penetrated. Hilda came into the house and faced the stairs with an inclination to leave her body on the ground floor and mount in spirit only. When she glanced in at the drawing-room door and saw Arnold sitting under the blue umbrellas, a little paler, a thought more serene than usual, she swept into the room as if a tide carried her, and sank down upon a foot-stool close to him, as if it had dropped her there. He had risen at her appearance. He was all himself but rather more the priest; his face of greeting had exactly its usual asking intelligence, but to her the fact that he was normal was lost in the fact that he was near. He held out his hand, but she only sought his face speechless, hugging her knees.

"You are overcome by the sun," he said. "Lie down for a moment," and again he offered her a hand to help her to rise. She shook her head but took his hand, enclosing it in both of hers with a sort of happy deliberation, and drew herself up by it, while her eyes, shining like dark surfaces of some glorious consciousness within, never left his face. So she stood beside him with her head bowed, still dumb. It was her supreme moment; life never again brought her anything like it. It was not that she confessed so much as that she asserted, she made a glowing thing plain, cried out to him, still standing silent, the deep-lying meaning of the tangle of their lives. She was shaken by a pure delight, as if she unclosed her hand to show him a strange jewel in her palm, hers and his for the looking. The intensity of her consciousness swept round him and enclosed him, she knew this profoundly, and had no thought of the insulation he had in his robe. The instant passed; he stood outside it definitely enough, yet some vibration in it touched him, for there was surprise in his involuntary backward step.

"You must have thought me curiously rude," he said, as if he felt about for an explanation, "but your letters were only given to me an hour ago. We have all been in retreat, you know."

"In _retreat_!" Hilda exclaimed. "Ah, yes. How foolish I have been! In retreat," she