He heard somewhere within the noise of a chair pushed back, and a door farther down the pa.s.sage opened outwards, disclosing Laura Filbert with her hand upon the handle. She made a supple, graceful picture.
"Good-evening, Mr. Lindsay," she said as he advanced. "Won"t you come in?" She clung to the handle until he had pa.s.sed into the room, then she closed the door after him. "I was expecting you," she said. "Mr. Harris, let me make you acquainted with Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Harris."
Mr. Harris was sitting sideways on one of the three cheap little chairs.
He was a clumsily built youth, and he wore the private"s garb of the Salvation Army. It was apparent that he had been reading a newspaper; he had a displeasing air of possession. At Laura"s formula he looked up and nodded without amiability, folded his journal the other side out and returned to it.
"Please take a seat," Laura said, and Lindsay took one. He had a demon of self-consciousness that possessed him often, here he felt dumb.
Nor did he in the very least expect Mr. Harris. He crossed his legs in greater discomfort than he had dreamed possible, looking at Laura, who sat down like a third stranger, curiously detached from any sense of hospitality.
"Mr. Lindsay is anxious about his soul, Mr. Harris," she said pleasantly. "I guess you can tell him what to do as well as I can."
"Oh!" Lindsay began, but Mr. Harris had the word. "Is he?" said Mr.
Harris, without looking up from his paper. "Well, what I"ve got to say on that subject I say at the evenin" meetin", which is a proper an" a public place. He can hear it there any day of the week."
"I think I have already heard," remarked Lindsay, "what you have to say."
"Then that"s all right," said Mr. Harris, with his eyes still upon his newspaper. He appeared to devour it. Laura looked from one to the other of them and fell upon an expedient.
"If you"ll excuse me," she said, "I"ll just get you that bicycle story you were kind enough to lend me, Mr. Harris, and you can take it with you. The Ensign"s got it," and she left the room. Lindsay glanced round, and promptly announced to himself that he could not come there again.
It was taking too violent an advantage. The pursuit of an angel does not imply that you may trap her in her corner under the Throne. The place was divided by a calico curtain, over which plainly showed the top of a mosquito curtain--she slept in there. On the walls were all tender texts about loving and believing and bearing others" burdens, interspersed with photographs, mostly of women with plain features and enthusiastic eyes, dressed in some strange costume of the Army in Madras, Ceylon, China. A little wooden table stood against the wall holding an alb.u.m, a Bible and hymn-books, a work-basket and an irrelevant j.a.panese doll which seemed to stretch its absurd arms straight out in a gay little ineffectual heathen protest. There was another more embarra.s.sing table: it had a coa.r.s.e cloth; and was garnished with a loaf and b.u.t.ter-dish, a plate of plantains and a tin of marmalade, knives and teacups for a meal evidently impending. It was atrociously, sordidly intimate, with its core in Harris, who when Miss Filbert had well gone from the room looked up. "If you"re here on private business," he said to Lindsay, fixing his eyes, however, on a point awkwardly to the left of him, "maybe you ain"t aware that the Ensign"--he threw his head back in the direction of the next room--"is the person to apply to. She"s in command here. Captain Filbert"s only under her."
"Indeed?" said Lindsay. "Thanks."
"It ain"t like it is in the Queen"s army," Harris volunteered, still searching Lindsay"s vicinity for a point upon which his eyes could permanently rest, "where, if you remember, Ensigns are the smallest officer we have."
"The commission is, I think, abolished," replied Lindsay, governing a deep and irritated frown.
"Maybe so. This Army don"t pretend to pattern very close on the other--not in discipline anyhow," said Mr. Harris with ambiguity. "But you"ll find Ensign Sand very willing to do anything she can for you.
She"s a hard-working officer."
A sharp wail smote the air from a point close to the lath and canvas part.i.tion, on the other side, followed by hasty hushings and steps in the opposite direction. It enabled Lindsay to observe that Mrs. Sand seemed at present to be sufficiently engaged, at which Mr. Harris shifted one heavy limb over the other, and lapsed into silence, looking sternly at an advertis.e.m.e.nt. The air was full of their mutual annoyance, although Duff tried to feel amused. They were raging as primitively, under the red flannel shirt and the tan-coloured waistcoat with white silk spots, as two cave-men on an Early British coast; their only sophistication lay in Harris"s newspaper and Lindsay"s idea that he ought to find this person humorous. Then Laura came back and resolved the situation.
"Here it is," she said, handing the volume to Mr. Harris; "we have all enjoyed it. Thank you very much." There was in it the oddest mixture of the supreme feminine and the superior officer. Harris, as he took the book, had no alternative.
"Good-evening, then, Captain," said he, and went, stumbling at the door.
"Mr. Harris," said Laura equably, "found salvation about a month ago. He is a very steady young man--foreman in one of the carriage works here.
He is now struggling with the tobacco habit, and he often drops in in the evening."
"He seems to be a--a member of the corps," said Lindsay.
"He would be, only for the carriage works. He says he doesn"t find himself strong enough in grace to give up his situation yet. But he wears the uniform at the meetings to show his sympathy, and the Ensign doesn"t think there"s any objection."
Laura was sitting straight up in one of the cheap little chairs, her sari drawn over her head, her hands folded in her lap. The native dress clung to her limbs in sculpturable lines, and her consecrated ambitions seemed more insistent than ever. She had nothing to do with anything else, nothing to do with her room or its arrangements, nothing, Lindsay felt profoundly, to do with him. Her personal zeal for him seemed to resolve itself, at the point of contact, into something disappointingly thin; he saw that she counted with him altogether as a unit in a glorious total, and that he himself had no place in her knowledge or her desire. This brought him, with something like a shock, to a sense of how far he had depended on her interest for his soul"s sake to introduce her to a wider view of him.
"But you have come to tell me about yourself," she said, suddenly it seemed to Lindsay, who was wrapped in the contemplation of her profile.
"Well, is there any special stumbling-block?"
"There are some things I should certainly like you to know," replied Lindsay; "but you can"t think how difficult--" he glanced at the lath and plaster part.i.tion, but she to whom publicity was a condition salutary, if not essential, to spiritual experience, naturally had no interpretation for that.
"I know it"s sometimes hard to speak," she said; "Satan ties our tongues."
The misunderstanding was absurd, but he saw only its difficulties, knitting his brows.
"I fear you will find my story very strange and very mad," he said. "I cannot be sure that you will even listen to it."
"Oh," Laura said simply, "do not be afraid! I have heard confessions! I work at home, you see, a good deal among the hospitals, and--we do not shrink, you know, in the Army, from things like that."
"Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed, staring, "you don"t think--you don"t suppose--"
"Ah! don"t say that! It"s so like swearing."
As he sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something intelligible, the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl of eighteen, also in the dress of the Army, came through from the bedroom part. She smiled in a conscious, meaningless way, as she sidled past them. At the door her smile broadened, and as she closed it after her she gave them a little nod.
"That"s my lieutenant," said Laura.
"The place is like a warren," Lindsay groaned. "How can we talk here?"
Laura looked at him gravely, as one making a diagnosis. "Do you think,"
she said, "a word of prayer would help you?"
"No," said Lindsay. "No, thank you. What is making me miserable," he added quietly, "is the knowledge that we are being overheard. If you go into the next room, I am quite certain you will find Mrs. Sand listening by the wall."
"She"s gone out! She and the Captain and Miss De Souza, to take the evening meeting. n.o.body is in there except the two children, and they are asleep." Her smile, he thought, made a Madonna of her. "Indeed, we are quite alone, you and I, in the flat now. So please don"t be afraid, Mr. Lindsay! Say whatever is in your heart, and the mere saying--"
"Oh," Lindsay cried, "stop! Don"t, for Heaven"s sake, look at me in that light any longer. I"m not penitent. I"m not--what do you call it?--a soul under conviction. Nothing of the sort." He waited with considerateness for this to have its effect upon her; he could not go on until he saw her emerge, gasping, from the inundation of it. But she was not even staggered by it. She only looked down at her folded hands with an added seriousness and a touch of sorrow.
"Aren"t you?" she said. "But at least you feel that you ought to be. I thought it had been accomplished. But I will go on praying."
"Shall you be very angry if I tell you that I"d rather you didn"t? I want to come into your life differently--sincerely."
She looked at him with such absolute blankness that his resolution was swiftly overturned, and showed him a different face.
"I won"t tell you anything about what I feel and what I want to-night except this--I find that you are influencing all my thoughts and all my days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way. You hear as much as that often, and from many people, don"t you? So there is nothing in it that need startle you or make you uncomfortable." He paused, and she nodded in a visible effort to follow him.
"So I am here to-night to ask you to let me do something for you just for my own pleasure--there must be some way of helping you, and being your friend--"
"As Mr. Harris is," she interrupted. "I do influence Mr. Harris for good, I know. He says so."
"Influence me," he begged, "in any way you like."
"I will pray for you," she said. "I promise that."
"And you will let me see you sometimes?" he asked, conceding the point.
"If I thought it would do you any good"--she looked at him doubtfully, clasping and unclasping her hands; "I will see; I will ask for guidance.
Perhaps it is one of His own appointed ways. If you have no objection, I will give you this little book, Almost Persuaded. I am sure you are almost persuaded. Above all, I hope you will go on coming to the meetings."