Hilda | Page 8

time, and
taking his third refusal with a haggard eye."
Alicia still contemplated the teacups, but with intentness. She lifted her
head to look at them; one might have imagined a beauty suddenly
revealed.
"Why aren't you?" she said. "I wonder, too."
"I should like it enormously," he laughed. "I've lain awake at nights
trying to find out why it isn't so. Perhaps you'll be able to tell me. I
think it must be because she's such a confoundedly good fellow."
Alicia turned her face toward him sweetly, and the soft grey fur made a
shadow on the whiteness of her throat. Her buffeting was over; she was
full of an impulse to stand again in the sun.
"Oh, you mustn't depend on me," she said. "But why are you going?
Don't go. Stay and have another cup of tea."
CHAPTER III.
The fact that Stephen Arnold and Duff Lindsay had spent the same
terms at New College, and now found themselves again together in the
social poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their
walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in
Bentinck street. It seems desirable to supply a reason why any one
should be walking there, to begin with, any one, at all events, not a
Chinaman or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture or an
able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser
pockets, and describing an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the
nearest glass of country spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a
draggled person with a Bulgarian, a Levantine or a Japanese smile, who

no longer possessed a carriage, to whom the able-bodied seamen
represented the whole port. The cramped, twisting thoroughfare was
full of people like this; they overflowed from the single narrow border
of pavement to the left and walked indifferently upon the road among
the straw-scatterings and the dung-droppings; and when the tramcar
swept through and past with prodigious whistlings and ringings, they
swerved as little as possible aside, for three parts of the tide of them
were neither white nor black, but many shades of brown, written down
in the census as "of mixed blood" and wearing still, through the
degenerating centuries, an eyebrow, a nostril of the first Englishmen
who came to conjugal ties of Hindustan. The place sent up to the stars a
vast noise of argument and anger and laughter, of the rattling of hoofs
and wheels; but the babel was ordered in its exaggeration, the red
turban of a policeman here and there denoted little more than a unit in
the crowd. There were gas-lamps, and they sent a ripple of light like a
sword-thrust along the gutter beside the banquette, where a pariah dog
nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted. They picked out, too, the
occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built into the squalid stucco
sheer with the road that made history for Bentinck street, and explained
that whatever might be the present colour of the little squat houses and
the tall lean ones that loafed together into the fog round the first bend,
they were once agreeably pink and yellow, with the magenta cornice,
the blue capital, that fancy dictated. There, where the way narrowed
with an out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the
lights grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond
with an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and
Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical. A torch
flamed this way and that stuck in the wall over the head of a squatting
bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels of betel, and an oiled
rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady little flame, blue and yellow, beside
a sweetmeat seller's basket, and showed his heap of cakes that they
were well-browned and full of butter. From the "Cape of Good Cheer,"
where many bottles glistened in rows inside, came a braying upon the
conch, and a flame of burnt brandy danced along the bar to the honour
and propitiation of Lakshmi, that the able-bodied seaman might be
thirsty when he came, for the "Cape of Good Cheer" did not owe its
prosperity, as its name might suggest, to any Providence of Christian

theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's
shoe-shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering and the
stitching. There were endless shoe-shops, and they all belonged to
Powson or Singson or Samson, while one signboard bore the broad
impertinence, "Macpherson." The proprietors stood in the door, the
smell came out in the street--that smell of Chinese personality steeped
in fried oil and fresh leather that out-fans even the south wind in
Bentinck street. They were responsible but not anxious, the proprietors;
they buried their fat hands in