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.