of cheer even in the cheeling of the kites where they
sat huddled on the roof-cornices or circled against
the high blue sky. It was enjoyable to be abroad,
in the brushing fellowship of the pavements, in touch
with brown humility half-clad and going afoot, since
even brown humility seemed well affected toward the
world, alert and content. The air was full of
the comfortable flavour of food-stuffs and spiced
luxuries, and the incense of wayside trees; it was
as if the sun laid a bland compelling hand upon the
city, bidding strange flowers bloom and strange fruits
increase. Brokers’ gharries rattled past,
each holding a pale young man preoccupied with a notebook;
where the bullock-carts gathered themselves together
and blocked the road the pale young men put excited
heads out of the gharry windows and used remarkable
imprecations. One of them, as Hilda turned into
the compound of the Calcutta Chronicle, leaned out
to take off his hat, and sent her up to the office
of that journal in the pleasant reflection of his
infinite interest in life. “Upon my word,”
she said to herself as she ascended the stairs behind
the lean legs of a Mussulman servant in a dirty shirt
and an embroidered cap, “he’s so lighthearted,
so genial, that one doubts the very tremendous effect
even of a failure like the one he contemplates.”
She sent her card in to the manager-sahib by the lean
Mussulman, and followed it past the desks of two or
three Bengali clerks, who hardly lifted their well-oiled
heads from their account-books to look at her—so
many mem sahibs to whose enterprises the Chronicle
gave prominence came to see the manager-sahib, and
they were so much alike. At all events they
carried a passport to indifference in the fact that
they all wanted something, and it was clear to the
meanest intelligence that they appeared to be more
magnificent than they were, visions in dazzling complexions
and long kid gloves, rattling up in third-class ticca-gharries,
with a wisp of fodder clinging to their skirts.
It was less interesting still when they belonged
to the other class, the shabby ladies, nearly always
in black, with husbands in the Small Cause Court,
or sons before the police magistrate, who came to
get it, if possible, “kept out of the paper.”
Successful or not these always wept on their way out,
and nothing could be more depressing. The only
gleam of entertainment to be got out of a lady visitor
to the manager-sahib occurred when the female form
enshrined the majestic personality of a boarding-house
madam, whose asylum for respectable young men in leading
Calcutta firms had been maliciously traduced in the
local columns of the Chronicle—a lady who
had never known what a bailiff looked like in the
lifetime of her first husband, or her second either.
Then at the sound of a pudgy blow upon a table, or
high abusive accents in the rapid elaborate cadences
of the domiciled East Indian tongue, Hari Babu would
glance at Gobind Babu with a careful smile, for the
manager-sahib who dispensed so much galli* was now
receiving the same, and defenceless.
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