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

It was part of her that she could swim in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in Alicia's. Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent quality.

"It's everything to everything, don't you think? And especially, thank Heaven, to my trade." Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms. That was the case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.

"To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a picture of them with your own body--your face and hands and voice--compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to do it, or a pen or a chisel!"

"I know what you mean," said Alicia. She had a little flush, and an excited hand among the wine-glasses. "No, I don't want any; please don't bother me!" to the man at her elbow with something in aspic. "It's much more direct--your way."

"And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned, abiding so originally among the instincts! Oh, yes! if we are lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents. The ideal has dignity enough. They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare's--with being unliterary. You might--good Heavens!--as well accuse a painter of not being a musician? Our business lies behind the words--they are our mere medium! Rosalind wasn't literary--why should I be? But don't indulge me in my shop, if it bores you," Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that Miss Livingstone was never further from being bored.

"Oh, please go on! If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows confessed the tedium of Calcutta small-talk. "But why do you say you are lightly esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone--and you hold the public in the hollow of your hand!"

Hilda smiled. "Dear old public! It does its best for us, doesn't it? One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never believing in its treachery in the end. But I don't know why I say we are lightly esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all. I've done nothing--I've no right. In ten years perhaps--no, five--I'll write signed articles for the _New Review_ about modern dramatic tendencies. Meanwhile you'll have to consider that the value of my opinions is prospective."

"But already you have succeeded--you have made a place."

"In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg. I think they remember me in Trichinopoly too, and--yes, it may be so--in Manila. But that wasn't legitimate drama," and Hilda smiled again in a way that coloured her unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia's eyes, in rose and gold. She waited an instant for these tints to materialise, but Miss Howe's smile slid discreetly into her wine-glass instead.

"There's immense picturesqueness in the Philippines," she went on, her look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way with her hat. "Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions. One wonders what America will do with those friars, when she does take hold there."

"Do you think she is going to?" asked Alicia, vaguely. It was the merest politeness--she did not wait for a reply. With a courageous air which became her charmingly she went on, "Don't you long to submit yourself to London? I should."

"Oh, I must. I know I must. It's in the path of duty and conscience--it's not to be put off forever. But one dreads the chained slavery of London"--she hesitated before the audacity of adding, "the sordid hundred nights," but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as if she watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.

"You are magnificently sure," she said. Alicia herself felt curiously buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together, and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In Hilda's there was an instant of consideration before she said:

"I might as well tell you--you won't misunderstand--that I am sure. I expect things of myself. I hold a kind of mortgage on my success; when I foreclose it will come, bringing the long, steady, grasping chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never a day to live in, only to accomplish, every moment straddled with calculation, an end to all the byeways where one finds the colour of the sun. The successful London actress, my dear--what excursion has she? A straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper--an existence of pure artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality. It's the house forever on your back; at the last you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings. There never was reward so qualified by its conditions."

"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"

"Oh, yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but the eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much understood in the proscenium--but there are so many, honestly, that London being at the top of the hill, I'm not panting up. My way of going has twice wound round the world already. But I'm talking like an illustrated interview. You will grant the impertinence of all I've been saying when I tell you that I've never yet had an illustrated interview."

"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked. "Don't they make you sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"

Hilda threw her head back and laughed almost, Alicia noted, like a man. She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief, as woman often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much as she wanted to, and it was as clear as possible that tights presented themselves quite preposterously to any discussion of her profession. They were things to be taken for granted, like the curtain and the wings; they had no relation to clothing in the world.

Alicia laughed too. After all, they were absurd--her outsider's prejudices. She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar again for her point of view about the illustrated interviews. "They _are_ atrocities," she said. "On their merits they ought to be cast out of even the suburbs of art and literature. But they help to make the atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do that, of course"----the pursed seriousness of her lips gave Alicia the impression that, though the whole world took offence, the expediency of the illustrated interview was beyond discussion.

The servant brought them coffee. "Shall we smoke here," said Miss Livingstone, "or in the drawing-room?"

"Oh, do you want to? Are you quite sure you like it? Please don't on my account--you really mustn't. Suppose it should make you ill?" If Hilda felt any tinge of amusement she kept it out of her face. Nothing was there but cheerful concern.

"It won't make me ill." Alicia lifted her chin with delicate assertiveness. "I suppose you do smoke, don't you?"

"Occasionally--with some people. Honestly, have you ever done it before?"

"Four times," said Alicia, and then turned rose-colour with the apprehension that it sounded amateurish to have counted them. "I thought it was one of your privileges to do it always, just as you--"

"Go to bed with our boots on and put ice down the back of some Serene Highness's neck. I suppose it is, but now and then I prefer to dispense with it. In my bath, for instance, and almost always in omnibuses."

"How absurd you are! Then we'll stay here."

Miss Howe softly manipulated her cigarette and watched Alicia sacrifice two matches.

"There's Rosa Norton of our company," she went on. "Poor dear old Rosy. She's fifty-three--grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear; but blow her if she won't be as Bohemian as anybody. I've seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin. I got up and went away."

"But I can't possibly affect you in that way," said Alicia, putting her cigarette down to finish, as an afterthought, a marron glacee. "I'm not old and I'm not grotesque."

"No, but--oh, all right. After you with the matches, please."

"I _beg_ your pardon. How thoughtless of me! Dear me, mine has gone out. Do you suppose anything is wrong with them? Perhaps they're damp."

"Trifle dry, if anything," Hilda returned, with the cigarette between her lips, "but in excellent order, really." She took it between her first and second finger for a glance at the gold letters at the end, leaned back and sent slow, luxurious spirals through her nostrils. It was rather, Alicia reflected, like a horse on a cold day--she hoped Miss Howe wouldn't do it again. But she presently saw that it was Miss Howe's way of doing it.

"No, you're not old and grotesque," Hilda said, contemplatively; "you're young and beautiful." The freedom seemed bred, imperceptibly and enjoyably, from the delicate cloud in the air. Alicia flushed ever so little under it, but took it without wincing. She had less than the common palate for flattery of the obvious kind, but this was something quite different--a mere casual and unprejudiced statement of fact.

"Fairly," she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be dismissed between them.

"You made a vivid impression here last year," said Alicia. She felt delightfully terse and to the point.

"You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know him well?"

Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold--it would have annoyed her to know how cold--with distance.

"He is an old friend of my brother's," she said. Hilda had the sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface. She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette, crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.

"Most impressionable," she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to the rest of the people--bah, you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way pancreatic influences can be idealised--made to serve ennobling ends. But Mr. Lindsay is--different."

"Yes?" Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her, the asking note was in the word.

"We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it."

"A statue?"

"No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to me--I knew her before he did--but the picture was and the performance. She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel--I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come from her hair or eyes or something. I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended."