The Path of a Star | Page 9

and the stitching.
There were endless shoe shops, and they all belonged to Powson or
Singson or Samson, while one sign-board 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 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
intelligences 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 forever 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
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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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