Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/119



And shoulders shrugging, eyes looking pity or contempt, and the very old maids who had been sent to India by their doting parents as a last chance at the matrimonial grab-bag, used their lorgnettes in the approved Mayfair style.

Yes. Calcutta was only an imperial suburb, a tropical annex to Belgravia and Marlborough House!

Within three days of his arrival the thing had become nearly a pathological obsession with him, and he seemed to read the sneering, malicious story of his disgrace in every face he saw in the crowded thorough fares of Calcutta. He imagined that even the natives were looking at him with contempt: the patent-leathered Bengalis, oily with ghee; the lean, monkey-faced Madrassis; the acrid-scented Sansis with baskets of unclean food slung across their backs; the ruffianly Punjaubis, the soft-stepping, neat Parsees, and the big boned, gray-eyed, white-skinned men from the farther north, who looked about them with an odd mixture of wonder and derision.

Later on, he used to remark that it was only the touch of the blade against his heart—“I know it sounds no end silly,” he would add—that kept him, if not from becoming stark mad, then at least from committing assault and battery with intent to kill on some innocent Briton or harmless Bengali.

But, out of the blade, some flooding, massive energy, like a tide of unknown power and beauty and glory, seemed to surge through him, driving his misgivings away with the strength of tremendous, dynamic values and, finally, on the fifth day, quite suddenly, directing his feet to the government office on Park