The flower-dealer eyed his customers with contemptuous speculation, seeing what had claimed their eyes. There was nothing new, the “mem” passed every day at this hour. She did no harm and no good. He, too, looked at her as she came closer, offering her paper to Alladiah Khan, a man impatient in his religion, who refused it, mumbling in his beard. With a gesture of appeal she pressed it on him, saying something. Then Alladiah's green turban shook, his beard, dyed red in Mecca, waggled; he raised his arm, and Laura in white astonishment darted from under it. They seldom did that.
Alicia caught at the stall table and clung to it, as Lindsay made his stride forward. She saw him twist his hand in the beard of Mecca and fling the man into the road; she was aware of a vague thankfulness that it ended there, as if she expected bloodshed. More plainly she saw the manner of Duff's coming back to the girl and the way in which, with a look of half-frightened satisfaction, Laura gave herself up to him. He was hurrying her away without a word. Her surrender was as absolute and final as if she had been one of those desirable things he said he wanted to buy. Alicia intercepted, as it were, the indignity of being forgotten, stepping up to them. “Take her home in the carriage,” she said to Duff, “and send it back for me. I shall be here a long time still—quite a long time.” She stared at Captain Filbert as she spoke, but made no answer to the “Good-morning! God bless you!” with which the girl perfunctorily addressed her. When they left her she looked down at the long-stemmed rose, the perfect one, and drove a thorn of it deep into her palm, as other creatures will sometimes hurt themselves more to suffer less. It was not in the least fantastic of her, for she was not aware that she still held it, but that was the only rose she brought away.
CHAPTER XVII
Hilda left the road, with a trace of its red dust on the hem of her skirt, and struck out into the Maidan. It spread before her, green where the slanting sun searched through the short blades, brown and yellow in the distance, where the light lay on the top of the withered grass. It was like a great English park, with something of the village common, only the trees, for the most part, made avenues over it, running an arbitrary half-mile this way or that, with here and there a group dotted about in the open; and the brimming tank-pots were of India, and of nowhere else in the world. The sun was dipping behind the masts that showed where the straight border of the river ran, and the shadows of the pipals and the banyans were richly purple over the roads. The light struck on the stuccoed upper verandahs of the houses in Chowringhee which made behind their gardens the other border, and seemed to push them back, to underline their scattered insignificance, hinting that the Maidan at its pleasure might surge over them altogether. Calcutta, the teeming capital, lived in the streets and gullies behind that chaste frontage, and quarrelled over drainage schemes; but out here cattle grazed in quiet companies, and squirrels played on the boles of the trees. Calcutta the capital indeed was superimposed; one felt that always at this time, when the glow came and stood in the air among the tamarinds, and there was nothing anywhere but luminous space and indolent stillness, and the wrangling and winging of crows. What persisted then under the span of the sky, was the old India of rich tradition, and a bullock beneath the yoke, jogging through the evening to his own place where the blue haze hid the little huts on the rim of the city, the real India, and the rest was fiction and fabrication.
The grass was crisp and pleasant. Hilda deliberately sought its solace for her feet, letting their pressure linger. All day long the sun had been drawing the fragrance and the life out of it, and now the air had a sweet, warm, and grateful scent, like that of harvests. The crickets had been at it since five o'clock, and though the city rose not half a mile across the grass, it was the crickets she heard and listened to. In making private statements of things, the crickets offered a chorus of agreement, and they never interrupted. Not that she had much to consider, poor girl, which lent itself to a difference of opinion. One might have thought her, to meet a situation at any point like her own, not badly equipped. She had all the argument—which is like saying all the arms—and the most accurate understanding; but the only practical outcome of these things had been an intimate lesson in the small value of the intelligence, that flavoured her state with cynicism and made it more piquant. She did not altogether scorn her own intelligence as the result, because it had always admitted the existence of dominating facts that belonged to life and not to reason; it was only the absurd unexpectedness of coming across one herself. One might think round such a fact and talk round it—there were less exquisite satisfactions—but it was not to be cowed or abated, and in the end the things one said were only words.
Out there in the grassy spaces she let her thoughts flow through her veins with her blood, warm and free. The primitive things she saw helped her to a fulness of life; the south wind brought her profound sweet presciences. A coolie-woman, carrying a basket on her head, stopped and looked at her with full glistening eyes; they smiled at each other, and passed on. She found herself upon a narrow path, worn smooth by other barefooted coolie-folk; it made in its devious way toward the rich mists where the sun had gone down; and Hilda followed, breasting the glow and the colour and the wide, flat expanse, as if in the India of it there breathed something exquisitely sensuous and satisfying. It struck sharp on her senses; she almost consciously thanked Heaven for such a responsive set of nerves. Always and everywhere she was intensely conscious of what she saw and of how she saw it; and it was characteristic of her that she found in that saffron February evening, spreading to a purple rim, with wandering points of colour in a soldier's coat or a coachman's turban, an atmosphere and a mise en scene for her own complication. She could take a tenderly artistic view of that, more soothing a good deal than any result that came of examining it in other lights. And she did, aware, with smiling eyes, of how full of colour, how dramatic it was.
Nevertheless, she had hardly closed with it; any material outcome seemed a great way off, pursuable by conjecture when there was time for that. For the present, there on the Maidan with the south wind, she took it with her head thrown up, in her glad, free fashion, as something that came in the way of life—the delightful way of life—with which it was absurd to quarrel because of a slight inconvenience or incongruity, things which helped, after all, to make existence fascinating.
A marigold lay in the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem, dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up, and drew in the crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes and drifted on the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet. All India and all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought her, as she gave her senses up to it, a kind of dual perception of being near the core, the throbbing centre of the world's meaning.
Her awakened glance fell upon Duff Lindsay. He hastened to meet her, in his friendly way; and she was glad of the few yards that lay between them and gave transit to her senses from that other plane. They encountered each other in full recognition of the happiness of the accident, and he turned back with her as a matter of course. It was a kind of fruition of all that light and colour and passive delight that they should meet and take a path together; she at least was aware. Hilda asked him if he was quite all right now, and he said “Absolutely” with a shade of emphasis. She charged him with having been a remarkable case, and he piled up illustrations of what he felt able to do in his convalescence. There was something in the way he insisted upon his restoration which made her hasten to take her privilege of intimacy.