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 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 himself
as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and moving to
the great future already shining behind coming aeons 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 rather
the ego and the energy of him merged in a wave of blessed tendency in
this world, thankful if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy
to survive at all. It should be understood that Arnold did not hope to
attain the simplicity of this by means equally simple. He held vastly,
on the contrary, to fast days and flagellations, to the ministry of
symbols, the use of rigours. The spiritual consummation which the eye
of faith enabled him to anticipate upon the horizon of Bengal should be
hastened, however imperceptibly, by all that he could do to purify and
intensify his infinitesimal share of the force that was to bring it
about. Meanwhile he made friends with the fathers of Bengali schoolboys,
who appreciated his manners, and sent him with urbanity flat baskets of
mangoes and nuts and oranges, pomegranates from Persia, and little round
boxes of white grapes in sawdust from Kabul. He seldom dwelt upon the
converts that already testified to the success of the mission; it might
be gathered that he had ideas about premature fruition.
As they stepped out together into the street, Lindsay thrust his hand
within Arnold's elbow. It was an impulse, and the analysis of it would
show elements like self-reproach, and a sense of value continually
renewed, and a vain desire for an absolutely common ground. The physical
nearness, the touch, was something, and each felt it in the remoteness
of his other world with satisfaction. There was absurdly little in what
they had to say to each other; they talked of the Viceroy's attack of
measles and the sanitary improvements in the cloth dealers' quarter.
Their bond was hardly more than a mutual decency of nature, niceness
of sentiment, clearness of eye. Such as it was, it was strong enough
to make both men wish it were stronger, a desire which was a vague
impatience on Lindsay's part with a concentration of hostility to
Arnold's soutane. It made its universal way for them, however, this
garment. Where the crowd was thickest people jostled and pressed with
one foot in the gutter for the convenience of the padre sahib. He, with
his eyes cast down, took the tribute with humility, as meet, in a
way that made Lindsay blaspheme inwardly at the persistence of
ecclesiastical tradition.
Suddenly, as they passed, the irrelevant violence of tongues, the
broken, half-comprehensible tumult was smitten and divided by a wave of
rhythmic sound. It pushed aside the cries of the sweetmeat sellers, and
mounted above the cracked bell that proclaimed the continual auction
of Kristo Dass and Friend, dealers in the second-hand. In its vivid
familiarity it seemed to make straight for the two Englishmen, to
surround and take possession of them, and they paused. The source of it
was plain--an open door under a vast white signboard dingily lettered
“The Salvation Army.” It loomed through the smoke and the streetlights
like a discovery.
“Our peripatetic friends,” said Arnold, with his rare smile; and as if
the music seized and held them, they stood listening.
“I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
All day on Sunday and six days a week!
I've got a Saviour that's mighty to keep
Fifty-two weeks in the year.”
It was immensely vigorous; the men looked at each other with fresh
animation. Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they picked
their steps across the street to the door, and there hesitated, revolted
in different ways. Perhaps, I have forgotten to say that Lindsay came
to Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse, and had had a mother before
whose name, while she lived, people wrote “The Hon.” Besides, the
singing had stopped, and casual observation from the street was checked
by a screen.
“I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are,” said Arnold.
Their methods were just on the other side of the screen. A bullet-headed
youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulders, fingering a
cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment, passing the two men
beside the door, and a light, clear voice seemed to call after him--
“Ah! don't go away!”
Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical speculation
whether now, at the week's end, the soul of Hilda Howe was still
pursuing the broad road to perdition. The desire to enter sprang up
in him: he was reminded of a vista of some interest which had recently
revealed itself by an accident, and which he had not explored. It had
almost passed out of his memory; he grasped at it again with something
like excitement, and fell adroitly upon the half inclination in Arnold's
voice.
“I suppose I can't expect you to go in?” he said.
“Precisely why not?” Stephen retorted. “My dear fellow, we make broad
our sympathies, not our phylacteries.”
At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic was
the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with amusement the
pulpit tone of the little epigram. But this moment found him only aware
of the consent in it. His hand on Arnold's elbow clinched the agreement;
he half pushed the priest into the room, where they dropped into seats.
Stephen's hand went to his breast instinctively, for the words in the
air were holy by association, and stopped there, since even the breadth
of his sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General
Booth. Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General Booth;
he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline and bushy,
from a frame on the wall at the end of it. The texts on the other walls
seemed emanations from him; and the man in the short loose, collarless
red coat, with “Salvation Army” in crooked black letters on it, who
stood talking in high, rapid tones with his hands folded, had the look
of a puppet whose strings were pulled by the personality in the frame
above him. It was only by degrees that they observed the other objects
in the room--the big drum on the floor in the empty space where the
exhorters stood, the dozen wooden benches and the possible score of
people sitting on them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting
up the curtness of the texts. There were half a dozen men of the Duke's
Own packed in a row like a formation, solid on their haunches; and three
or four unshaven and loose-garmented, from crews in the Hooghly, who
leaned well forwards their elbows on their knees, twirling battered
straw hats, with a pathetic look of being for the instant off the
defensive. One was a Scandinavian, another a Greek, with earrings. There
was a ship's cook, too, a full-blooded negro, very respectable with a
plaid tie and a silk hat; and beside, two East Indian girls of different
shades, tittering at the Duke's Own in an agony of propriety; a Bengali
boy, who spelled out the English on the cover of a hymn-book; and a very
clean Chinaman, who appreciated his privilege, since it included a
seat, a lamp, and a noise, though his perception of it possibly went no
further. The other odds and ends were of the mixed country blood, like
the girls, dingy, undecipherable. They made a shadow for the rest, lying
along the benches, shifting unnoticeably.
Three people, two of them women, sat in the open space at the end of
the room where the smoky fog from outside thickened and hung visibly in
mid-air, and there was the empty seat of the man who was talking. Laura
Filbert was one of the women. She might have been flung upon her chair;
her head drooped over the back, buried in the curve of one arm. A
tambourine hung loosely from the hand nearest her face; the other lay,
palm outward in its abandonment, among the folds that covered her limbs.
The folds hung from her waist, and she wore above them a short close
bodice like a Bengali woman. Her head covering had slipped, and
clung only to the knot of hair at the nape of her neck; she lacked,
pathetically, the conscious hand to draw it forward. She was unaware
even of the gaze of the Duke's Own, though it had fixity and absorption.
The man with folded hands went on talking. He seemed to have caught as a
text the refrain of the hymn that had been sung. “Yes, indeed,” he said.
“I can tell heveryone 'ere this night, heveryone, that the Saviour is
mighty to keep. I 'ave got it out of my own personal experience, I 'ave.
Jesus don't only look after you on a Sunday, but six days a week, my
friends, six days a week. Fix your eye on Him and He'll keep His eye on
you--that's all your part of it. I don't mean to say I don't stumble an'
fall into sin. There's times when the Devil will get the upper 'and, but
oh, my friends, I ask you, each an' hevery one of you, is that the fault
of Jesus? No, it is not 'Is fault, it is the fault of the person. The
person 'as been forgetting Jesus, forgetting 'is Bible an' 'is prayers;
what can you expect? And now I ask you, my friends, is Jesus a-keeping
you? And if He is not, oh, my friends, ain't it foolish to put off
any longer? 'Ere we are met together to-night; we may never all meet
together again. You and I may never 'ear each other speaking again or
see each other sitting there. Thank God,” the speaker continued, as his
eye rested on Arnold and Lindsay, “the vilest sinner may be saved, the
respectable sinner may be saved. We've got God's word for that. Now just
a little word of prayer from Ensign Sand 'ere--she's got God's ear, the
Ensign 'as, and she'll plead with 'im for all unconverted souls inside
these four walls to-night.”
Laura lifted her head at this and dropped with the other exhorters
on her knees on the floor. As she moved she bent upon the audience a
preoccupied gaze, by which she seemed to observe numbers, chances, from
a point remote and emotionally involved. Lindsay's impression was that
she looked at him as from behind a glass door. Then her eyes closed as
the other woman began, and through their lids, as it were, he could see
that she was again caught up, though her body remained abased, her hands
interlocked between her knees, swaying in unison with the petition. The
Ensign was a little meagre freckled woman, whose wisps of colourless
hair and tight drawn-down lips suggested that in the secular world she
would have been bedraggled and a nagger. She gained an elevation, it was
plain, from the Bengali dress; it kept her away from the temptation
of cheap plush and dirty cotton lace; and her business gave her a
complacency which was doubtless accepted as sanctification by her
fellow-officers, especially by her husband, who had announced her
influence with the Divine Being, and who was himself of an inferior
commission. She prayed in a complaining way, and in a strained minor
key that assumed a spiritual intimacy with all who listened, her key to
hearts. She told the Lord in confidence that however appearances might
be against it every soul before him was really longing to be gathered
within His almighty arms, and when she said this, Laura Filbert, on the
floor, threw back her head and cried “Hallelujah!” and Duff started.
The mothers broke in upon the Ensign with like exclamations. They had a
recurrent, perfunctory sound, and passed unnoticed; but when Laura again
cried “Praise the Lord!” Lindsay found himself holding in check a hasty
impulse to leave the premises. Then she rose, and he watched with the
Duke's Own to see what she would do next. The others looked at her too,
as she stood surprisingly fair and insistent among them, Ensign Sand
with humble eyes and disapproving lips. As she began to speak the
silence widened for her words, the ship's cook stopped shuffling his
feet. “Oh come,” she said, “Come and be saved!” Her voice seemed to
travel from her without effort, and to penetrate every corner and every
consciousness. There was a sudden dip in it like the fall of water, that
thrilled along the nerves. “Who am I that ask you? A poor weak woman,
ignorant, unknown. Never mind. It is not my voice but the voice in your
heart that entreats you 'Come and be saved!' You know that voice; it
speaks in the watches of the night; it began to speak when you were a
little, little child, with little joys and sorrows and little prayers
that you have forgotten now. Oh, it is a sweet voice, a tender
voice”--her own had dropped to the cooing of doves--“it is hard to
know why all the winds do not carry it, and all the leaves whisper
it! Strange, strange! But the world is full of the clamour of its own
foolishness, and the voice is lost in it, except in places where people
come to pray, as here to-night, and in those night watches. You hear
it now in the echo from my lips, 'Come and be saved.' Why must I beg of
you? Why do you not come hastening, running? Are you too wise? But when
did the wisdom of this world satisfy you about the next? Are you too
much occupied? But in the day of judgment what will you do?”--
“When you come to Jordan's flood,
How will you do? How will you do?”
It was the voice and tambourine of Ensign Sand, quick upon her
opportunity. Laura gave her no glance of surprise--perhaps she was
disciplined to interruptions--but caught up her own tambourine, singing,
and instantly the chorus was general, the Big drum thumping out the
measure, all the tambourines shaking together.
“You who now contemn your God,
How will you do? How will you do?”
The Duke's Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made little of
the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment,
but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the
thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with
their feet. Through the medley of voices--everybody sang except Arnold
and Lindsay and the Chinaman--Laura's seemed to flow, separate and
clear, threading the jangle upon melody, and turning the doggerel into
an appeal, direct, intense. When Lindsay presently saw it addressed to
him, in the unmistakable intention of her eyes, he caught his breath.
“Death will be a solemn day
When the soul is forced away,
It will be too late to pray;
How will you do?”
It was simple enough. All her supreme desire to convince, to turn, to
make awfully plain, had centred upon the single person in the room with
whom she had the advantage of acquaintance, whose face her own could
seek with a kind of right to response. But the sensation Duff Lindsay
tried to sit still under was not simple. It had the novelty, the shock,
of a plunge into the sea; behind his decorous countenance he gasped
and blinked, with unfamiliar sounds in his ears. His soul seemed
shudderingly repelling Laura's, yet the buffets themselves were
enthralling. In the strangeness of it he made a mechanical movement to
depart, picked up his stick, but Arnold was sitting holding his chin,
wrapped in quiet interest, and took no notice. The hymn stopped, and
he found a few minutes' respite, during which Ensign Sand addressed the
meeting, unveiling each heart to its possessor; while Laura turned over
the leaves of the hymn-book, looking, Lindsay was profoundly aware,
for airs and verses most likely to help the siege of the Army to his
untaken, sinful citadel. There was time to bring him calmness enough to
wonder whether these were the symptoms of emotional conversion, the sort
of thing these people went in for, and he resolved to watch his state
with interest. Then, before he knew it, they were all down on their
knees again, and Laura was praying; and he was not aware of the meaning
of a single word that she said, only that her voice was threading itself
in and out of his consciousness burdened with a passion that made it
exquisite to him. Her appeal lifted itself in the end into song, low and
sweet.
“Down at the Cross where my Saviour died,
Down where for cleansing from sin I cried,
There to my heart was the blood applied,
Glory to His name!”
They let her sing it alone, even the tempting chorus, and when it was
over Lindsay was almost certain that his were not the preliminary
pangs of conversion by the methods of the Salvation Army. Deliberately,
however, he postponed further analysis of them until after the meeting
was over. He would be compelled then to go away, back to the club to
dinner, or something; they would put out the lights and lock the place
up: he thought of that. He glanced at the lamps with a perception of the
finality that would come when they were extinguished--she would troop
away with the others into the darkness--and then at his watch to see how
much time there was left. More exhortation followed and more prayer; he
was only aware that she did not speak. She sat with her hand over her
eyes, and Lindsay had an excited conviction that she was still occupying
herself with him. He looked round almost furtively to detect whether
anyone else was aware of it, this connection that she was blazoning
between them, and then relapsed, staring at his hat, into a sense of
ungrammatical iterations beating through a room full of stuffy smells.
When Laura spoke again his eye leaped to hers in a rapt effort to tell
her that he perceived her intention. That he should be grateful, that he
should approve, was neither here nor there; the indispensable thing was
that she should know him conscious, receptive. She read three or four
sacred verses, a throb of tender longing from the very Christheart,
“Come unto Me.”... The words stole about the room like tears. Then she
would ask “all present,” she said, to engage for a moment in silent
prayer. There was a wordless interval, only the vague street noises
surging past the door. A thrill ran along the benches as Laura brought
it to an end with sudden singing. She was on her feet as the others
raised their heads, breaking forth clear and jubilant.
“I am so wondrously saved from sin,
Jesus so sweetly abides within;
There at the Cross where He took me in,
Glory to His name!”
She smiled as she sang. It was a happy confident smile, and it was
plain that she longed to believe it the glad reflection of the last
ten minutes' spiritual experience of many who heard her. Lindsay's
perception of this was immediate and keen, and when her eyes rested for
an instant of glad inquiry upon his in the chartered intimacy of her
calling, he felt a pang of compunction. It was a formless reproach, too
vague for anything like a charge, but it came nearest to defining itself
in the idea that he had gone too far--he who had not left his seat. When
the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand said, “The meeting is now open
for testimonies,” he knew that all her hope was upon him, though she
looked at the screen above his head; and he sat abashed, with a prodigal
sense surging through him of what he would rejoice to do for her in
compensation. In the little chilly silence that followed he surprised
his own eyes moist with disappointment--it had all been so anxious and
so vain--and he felt relief and gratitude when the man who beat the drum
stood up and announced that he had been saved for eleven years, with
details about how badly he stood in need of it when it happened.
“Hallelujah!” said Ensign Sand cheerfully, with a meretricious air
of hearing it for the first time. “Any more?” and a Norwegian sailor
lurched shamefacedly upon his feet. He had a couple of inches of
straggling yellow beard all round his face, and fingered an old felt
hat.
“I haf' to say only dis word. I goin' sdop by Jesus. Long time I subbose
I sdop by Jesus. I subbose--”
“Glory be to God!” remarked Ensign Sand again, spiking the guns of the
Duke's Own who were inclined to be amused. “That will do, thank you.
Now, is there nobody else? Speak up, friends. It'll do you no harm, none
whatever; it'll do you that much good you'll be surprised. Now, who'll
be the next to say a word for Jesus?” She was nodding encouragement at
the negro cook as if she knew him for a wavering soul, and he, sunk in
his gleaming white collar, was aware, in silent smiling misery, that the
expectations of the meeting were toward him. Laura had again hidden her
eyes in her hand. The negro fingered his watch chain foolishly, and
the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her
perception that an African in his best clothes under conviction of sin
was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself
upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It
was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat,
got upon his feet instead.
“I also,” he said, “would offer my humble testimony to the grace of
God--with all my heart.”
It was as if he had repeated part of the creed in the performance of his
office. Then he turned and bent gravely to Lindsay, “Shall we go now?”
he whispered, and the two made their way to the door, leaving a silence
behind them which Lindsay imagined, on the part of Ensign Sand at least,
to be somewhat resentful. As they passed out a voice recovered itself,
and cried, “Hallelujah!” It was Laura's; and all the way to the
club--Arnold was dining with him there--Lindsay listened to his friend's
analysis of religious appeal to the emotions, but chiefly heard that
clear music above a sordid din, “Hallelujah!” “Hallelujah!”