Hilda | Page 9

their wide sleeves and looked up and
down, stolid and smiling. They stood in their alien petticoat trousers for
the commercial stability of the locality, and the rows of patent-leather
slippers that glistened behind them testified to it further. Everything
else shifted and drifted, with a perpetual change of complexion, a
perpetual worsening of clothes. Only Powson bore a permanent yoke of
prosperity. It lay round his thick brown neck with the low clean line of
his blue cotton smock, and he carried it without offensive
consciousness, looking up and down by no means in search of
customers, rather in the exercise of the opaque, inscrutable philosophy
tied up in his queue.
Lindsay liked Bentinck street as an occasional relapse from the scenic
standards of pillared and verandahed Calcutta, and made personal
business with his Chinaman for the sake of the racial impression
thrown into the transaction. Arnold, in his cassock, waited in the
doorway with his arms crossed behind him, and his thin face thrust as
far as it would go into the air outside. It is possible that some
intelligence might have seen in this priest a caricature of his profession,
a figure to be copied for the curate of burlesque, so accurately did he
reproduce the common signs of the ascetic school. His face would have
been womanish in its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon
it, only occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and
sweetness which had the effect of being permitted, conceded. He had
the long thin nose which looked as if, for preference, it would be for
ever thrust among the pages of the Fathers; and anyone might observe
the width of his mouth without perhaps detecting the patience and
decision of the upper lip. The indignity of spectacles he did not yet
wear, but it hovered over him; it was indispensable to his personality in

the long run. In figure he was indifferently tall and thin and stooping,
made to pass unobservedly along a pavement, or with the directness of
humble but important business among crowds. At Oxford he had
interested some of his friends and worried others by wistful inclinations
toward the shelter of that Mother Church which bids her children be at
rest and leave to her the responsibility. Lindsay, with his robust sense
of a right to exist on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and
decent animal, under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner,
was among those who observed his waverings without prejudice, or
anything but an affectionate solicitude that whichever way Arnold went
he should find the satisfactions he sought. The conviction that settled
the matter was accidental, the work of a moment, a free instinct and a
thing made with hands--the dead Shelley where the sea threw him and
the sculptor fixed him, under his memorial dome in the gardens of
University College. Here one leafy afternoon Arnold came so near
praying that he raised his head in some confusion at the thought of the
profane handicraftsman who might claim the vague tribute of his spirit.
Then fell the flash by which he saw, deeply concealed in his bosom and
disguised with a host of spiritual wrappings, what he
uncompromisingly identified as the artistic bias, the æsthetic point of
view. The discovery worked upon him so that he spent three days
without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the effort to find out
whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of spirit, or how far the
paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept upon his devotions. In
the end he cast the artistic bias, the æsthetic point of view, as far from
him as his will would carry, and walked away in another direction from
which, if he turned his head, he could see the Church of Rome sitting
with her graven temptations gathered up in her skirts, looking
mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the Clarke Mission to
Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood in the door of
Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck street while Lindsay explained to
Ahsing his objection to patent-leather toe caps; six years which had not
worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully admitted, he
had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of
achievement--lowered them with a heroism which took account of
himself as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and
moving to the great future, already shining behind coming æons, of the

universal Kingdom. Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his
deductions from the granular nature of all change, moral and material.
He never talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with
peculiar oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw