“Yes. The wind bloweth where it listeth. If St. Paul had stopped to count ... in Corinth, say. As I take it—” he looked long and passionately at the drummer—“as I take it, the thing is to be St. Paul.”
Harry Spink remained unimpressed. “That’s all talk—I heard all that when I was here before. What I want to know is: What’s your bag? How many?”
“It’s difficult—”
“I see: like the pigs. They run around so!”
Both the young men were silent, Spink pulling at his pipe, the other sitting with bent head, his eyes obstinately fixed on the beaten floor. At length Spink rose and tapped the missionary on the shoulder.
“Say—s’posin’ we take a look around Corinth? I got to get onto my job tomorrow, but I’d like to take a turn round the old place first.”
Willard Bent rose also. He felt singularly old and tired, and his mind was full of doubt as to what he ought to do. If he refused to accompany Harry Spink, a former friend and fellow-worker, it might look like running away from his questions....
They went out together.
II
The bazaar was seething. It seemed impossible that two more people should penetrate the throng of beggars, pilgrims, traders, slave-women, water-sellers, hawkers of dates and sweetmeats, leather-gaitered country people carrying bunches of hens head-downward, jugglers’ touts from the market-place, Jews in black caftans and greasy turbans, and scrofulous children reaching up to the high counters to fill their jars and baskets. But every now and then the Arab “Look out!” made the crowd divide and flatten itself against the stalls, and a long line of donkeys loaded with water-barrels or bundles of reeds, a string of musk-scented camels swaying their necks like horizontal question marks, or a great man perched on a pink-saddled mule and followed by slaves and clients, swept through the narrow passage without other peril to the pedestrians than that of a fresh exchange of vermin.