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 Krist, 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 street lights 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 vigourous; 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 a mother before whose name 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 shoulder, fingering a forage-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."