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.