Hilda: A Story of Calcutta

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

"Nobody suggests me!" exclaimed Captain Corby, resentfully. They were gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the Barberrys' glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornity, with its damaged paint and its tied-up harness. Hilda, when its door closed upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in mid-stage of backward transformation.

"I could chaperone you all!" she cried gaily back at them as she passed down the steps; and in the relief of the general exclamation it seemed reasonable enough that Stephen Arnold should lean into the gharry to see that she was quite comfortable. The unusual thing, which nobody else heard, was that he said to her then with shamed discomfort, "It doesn't matter—it doesn't matter," and that Hilda, driving away, found herself without a voice to answer the good-nights they chorussed after her.

Arnold begged a seat in Captain Corby's dog-cart, and Hilda, with her purple train in her lap, heard the wheels following all the way. She re-encountered the lady to whom she had been entrusted, whose name it occurs to me was Winstick, in the cloak-room. They were late; there was hardly anybody else but the attendants; and Mrs. Winstick smiled freely and said she loved the colour of Hilda's dress; also that she would give worlds for an invisible hair-pin—oh, thank you!—and that it was simply ducky of her Excellency to have pink powder as well as white put out. She did hope Miss Howe would enjoy the evening—they would meet again later on; she must not forget to look at the chunam pillars in the ball-room—perfectly lovely. So she vanished; but Hilda went with certainty into the corridor to find Arnold pacing up and down the red strip of carpet, with his hands clasped behind him and his head thrust forward, waiting for her.

They dropped together into the crowd and walked among well-dressed woman, men in civilian black and men in uniform, up and down the pillared spaces of the ball-room. People had not been asked to dance, and they seemed to walk about chiefly for observation. There was, of course, the opportunity of talking and of listening to the band which discoursed in a corner behind palms, but the distraction which is the social Nemesis of bureaucracy was in the air, visibly increasing in the neighbourhoods of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief, and made the commonplaces people uttered to each other disjointed and fragmentary, while it was plain that few were aware whether music was being rendered or not. Anyone sensitive to pervading mental currents in gatherings of this sort would have found the relief of concentration and directness only near the buffet that ran along one side of the room, where the natural instinct played, without impediment, upon soup and sandwiches.

They did not look much at Hilda, even on the arm of her liveried priest. She was a strange vessel, sailing in from beyond their ken, and her pilot was almost as novel, yet they were incurious. Their interests were not in any way diffused: they had one straight line and it led upward, pausing at the personalities clerked above them, with an ultimate point in the head of a department. The Head of the Department was the only person unaware, when addressed, of a travelling eye in search over his shoulder of somebody with whom it would be more advantageous to converse. Yet there were a few people apparently not altogether indifferent to the presence of Miss Howe. She saw them here and there, and when Arnold said, "It must seem odd to you, but I know hardly anybody here. We attempt no social duties," she singled out this one and that, whom Alicia had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with a warm pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the world rather than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and their dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow and nods of considerate assent. Hilda carried him along, as it were, in their direction. She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success and value as a human unit. There was that in her blood which assured her of a welcome; it had logic in it, with the basis of her rarity, her force, her distinction among other women. She pressed forward to human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as a delightful matter of course, going toward the people who were not indifferent to the fact that she was there, who could not be entirely, since they had some sort of knowledge of her.

In no case did they ignore her, but they were so cheerfully engaged in conversation that they were usually quite oblivious of her. She encountered this animated absorption two or three times, then, turning, she found that the absorbed ones had changed their places—were no longer in her path. One lady put herself at a safe distance and then bowed with much cordiality. It was extraordinary in a group of five how many glistening backs would be presented, quite without offence, to her approach. Mrs. Winstick had hidden behind the Superintendent of Stamps and Stationery, to whom she was explaining, between spoonfuls of strawberry ice her terrible situation. And from the lips of another lady, whose face she knew, she heard after she had passed, "Don't you think it's rather an omnium gatherum?"

It was like Hilda Howe to note at that moment, with serious interest, how the little world about them had the same negative attitude for the missionary priest beside her, presenting it with a hardly perceptible difference. Within its limits there was plainly no room for him either. His acquaintances—he had a few—bowed with the kind of respect which implies distance, and in the wandering eyes of the others it was plain that he did not exist. She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure, that he carried himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious. Expecting nothing, he was unaware that he received nothing. It was odd, and in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the unconscious one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these things hurt her; she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over. They brought no stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say. When at last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social manifestation of some dramatic value. In offering up her egotism that way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one could hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her pause. She anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was relieved to find in her light comment that she took the typical Mrs. Winstick less seriously than he had supposed when they drove away from the Livingstones'. It could not occur to him to correct the impression he had then by the sound of his own voice uttering sympathy.

"But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff," she said. "Fancy my thinking I could impose myself! That is the wave's reflection."

"It goes back into the sea, which is its own; and there," said the priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of high moralities out of an inheritance of beauty, "and there, I think, is depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience of the tides and a full beating upon many shores——"

"Ah, my sea! I hear it calling always, even," she said half-reflectively, "when I am talking to you. But sometimes I think I am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always with the calling in my ears"—she seemed to have dropped altogether into reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing, because he could not understand.