The Path of a Star | Page 8

this last sentence. Alicia lay back
upon her wolf-skins like a long-stemmed flower cast down among them,
and looked away from the subject at the teacups. Duff picked up his hat.
He had the subtlest intimations with women.
"It's an intoxicating atmosphere," he said. "My continual wonder is that
I'm not in love with her. A fellow in a novel, now, in my situation,
would be embroiled with half his female relations by this 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 anyone
should be walking there, to begin with, anyone, 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 seaman
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. 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 Mood," 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 our
theology. But most of the brightness abode in the Chinamen's shoe
shops, where many lamps shone on the hammering