The Path of a Star - Sara Jeannette Duncan (digital book reader TXT) 📗

floor. Three or four messengers squatted beside the wall, with slumbrous heads between their knees. Occasionally a shout came from the room inside, and one of them, crying "Hazur!" with instant alacrity, stretched himself mightily, loafed upon his feet and went in, emerging a moment later carrying written sheets, with which he disappeared into the regions below. The staircase took a lazy curve and went up; under it, through an open window, the sun glistened upon the shifting white and green leaves of a pipal tree, and a crow sat on the sill and thrust his grey head in with caws of indignant expostulation. A Government peon in scarlet and gold ascended the stair at his own pace, bearing a packet with an official seal. The place, with its ink-smeared walls and high ceilings, spoke between dusty yawns of the languor and the leisure which might attend the manipulation of the business of life, and Hilda paused for an instant to perceive what it said. Then she walked behind her card into the next room, where a young gentleman, reading proofs in his shirt sleeves, flung himself upon his coat and struggled into it at her approach. He seemed to have the blackest hair and the softest eyes and the neatest moustache available, all set in a complexion frankly olive, amiable English cut, in amiable Oriental colour, and the whole illumined, when once the coat was on and the collar perfectly turned down, by the liveliest, most engaging smile. Standing with his head slightly on one side and one hand resting on the table, while the other saw that nothing was disarranged between collar and top waistcoat button, he was an interjection point of invitation and attention.

"The Editor of the Chronicle?" Hilda asked with diffident dignity, and very well informed to the contrary.

"NOT the editor--I am sorry to say." The confession was delightfully vivid--in the plenitude of his candour it was plain that he didn't care who knew that he was sorry he was not the editor. "In journalistic parlance, the sub editor," he added. "Will you be seated, Miss Howe?" and with a tasteful silk pocket handkerchief he whisked the bottom of a chair for her.

"Then you are Mr. Molyneux Sinclair," Hilda declared. "You have been pointed out to me on several first nights. Oh, I know very well where the Chronicle seats are!"

Mr. Sinclair bowed with infinite gratification, and tucked the silk handkerchief back so that only a fold was visible. "We members of the Fourth Estate are fairly well known, I'm afraid, in Calcutta," he said. "Personally, I could sometimes wish it were otherwise. But certainly not in this instance."

Hilda gave him a gay little smile. "I suppose the editor," she said, with a casual glance about the room, "is hammering out his leader for to-morrow's paper. Does he write half and do you write half, or how do you manage?"

A seriousness overspread Mr. Sinclair's countenance, which nevertheless irradiated, as if he could not help it, with beaming eyes. "Ah, those are the secrets of the prison-house, Miss Howe. Unfortunately it is not etiquette for me to say in what proportion I contribute the leading articles of the Chronicle. But I can tell you in confidence that if it were not for the editor's prejudices--rank prejudices--it would be a good deal larger."

"Ah, his prejudices! Why not be quite frank, Mr. Sinclair, and say that he is just a little tiny bit jealous of his staff. All editors are, you know." Miss Howe shook her head in philosophical deprecation of the peccadillo, and Mr. Sinclair cast a smiling, embarrassed glance at his smart brown leather boot. The glance was radiant with what he couldn't tell her as a sub-editor of honour about those cruel prejudices, but he gave it no other medium.

"I'm afraid you know the world, Miss Howe," he said, with a noble reserve, and that was all.

"A corner of it here and there. But you are responsible for the whole of the dramatic criticism,"--Hilda charged him roundly,--"the editor can't claim any of THAT."

An inquiring brown face under an embroidered cap appeared at the door; a brown hand thrust in a bunch of printed slips. Mr. Sinclair motioned both away, and they vanished in silence.

"That I can't deny," he said. "It would be useless if I wished to do so--my style betrays me--I must plead guilty. It is not one of my legitimate duties--if I held this position on the Times, or say the Daily Telegraph, our London contemporaries, it would not be required of me. But in this country everything is piled upon the sub-editor. Many a night, Miss Howe, I send down the last slips of a theatre notice at midnight and am here in this chair"--Mr. Sinclair brought his open palm down upon the arm of it--"by eleven the following day!" Mr. Sinclair's chin was thrust passionately forward, moisture dimmed the velvety brightness of those eyes which, in more dramatic moments, he confessed to have inherited from a Nawab great-grandfather. "But I don't complain," he said, and drew in his chin. It seemed to bring his argument to a climax, over which he looked at Hilda in warm, frank expansion.

"Overworked, too, I daresay," she said, and then went on a trifle hurriedly. "Well, I must tell you, Mr. Sinclair, how kind your criticism always is, and how much I personally appreciate it. None of the little points and effects one tries to make seem to escape you, and you are always generous in the matter of space too."

Molyneux impartially threw out his hand. "I believe in it!" he exclaimed. "Honour where honour is due, Miss Howe, and the Stanhope Company has given me some very enjoyable evenings. And you'll hardly believe me, but it is a fact, I assure you, I seldom get a free hand with those notices. Suicidal to the interests of the paper as it is, the editor insists as often as not on cutting down my theatre copy!"

"Cuts it down, does he? The brute!" said Miss Howe.

"I've known him sacrifice a third of it for an indigo market report. Now, I ask you, who reads an indigo market report? Nobody. Who wants to know how Jimmy Finnigan's--how the Stanhope Company's latest novelties went off? Everybody. Of course, when he does that sort of thing, I make it warm for him next morning?"

The door again opened and admitted a harassed little Babu in spectacles, bearing a sheaf of proof slips, who advanced timidly into the middle of the room and paused.

"In a few minutes, Babu," said Mr. Sinclair; "I am engaged."

"It iss the Council isspeech of the Legal Member, sir, and it iss to go at five p.m. to his house for last correction."

"Presently, Babu. Don't interrupt. As I was saying, Miss Howe, I make it warm for him till he apologises. I must say he always apologises, and I don't often ask more than that. But I was obliged to tell him the last time that if it happened again one of us would have to go."

"What did he say to that?"

"I don't exactly remember. But it had a tremendous effect--tremendous. We became good friends almost immediately."

"Quite so. We miss you when you don't come, Mr. Sinclair--last Saturday night, for example."

"I HAD to go to the Surprise Party. Jimmy came here with tears in his eyes that morning. 'My show is tumbling to pieces,' he said. 'Sinclair, you've got to come to-night.' Made me dine with him--wouldn't let me out of his sight. We had to send a reporter to you and Llewellyn that night."

"Mr. Sinclair, the notice made me weep."

"I know. All that about the costumes. But what can you expect? The man is as black as your hat."

"We have to buy our own costumes," said Hilda, with a glance at the floor, "and we haven't any too much, you know, to do it on."

"The toilets in Her Second Son were simply magnificent. Not to be surpassed on the boards of the Lyceum in tasteful design or richness of material. They were ne plus ultra!" cried Mr. Sinclair. "You will remember I said so in my critique."

"I remember. If I were you I wouldn't go so far another time. There's a lot of cotton velvet and satin about it, you know, between ourselves, and Finnigan's people will be getting the laugh on us. That's one of the things I wanted to mention. Don't be quite so good to us. See? Otherwise--well, you know how Calcutta talks, and what a pretty girl Beryl Stace is, for example. Mrs. Sinclair mightn't like it, and I don't blame her."

"As I said before, Miss Howe, you know the world," Mr. Sinclair replied, with infinite mellow humour, and as Miss Howe had risen he rose too, pulling down his waistcoat.

"There was just one other thing," Hilda said, holding out her hand. "Next Wednesday, you know, Rosa Norton takes her benefit. Rosy's as well known here as the Ochterlony monument; she's been coming every cold weather for ten years, poor old Rosy. Don't you think you could do her a bit of an interview for Wednesday's paper? She'll write up very well--get her on variety entertainments in the Australian bush."

Mr. Molyneux Sinclair looked pained to hesitate. "Personally," he said confidentially, "I should like it immensely, and I daresay I could get it past the editor. But we're so short-handed."

Miss Howe held up a forefinger which seemed luminous with solution. "Don't you bother," she said, "I'll do it for you; I'll write it myself. My 'prentice hand I'll try on Rosy, and you shall have the result ready to print on Tuesday morning. Will that do?"

That would do supremely. Mr. Sinclair could not conceal the admiration he felt for such a combination of talents. He did not try; he accompanied it to the door, expanding and expanding until it seemed more than ever obvious that he found the sub-editorial sphere unreasonably contracted. Hilda received his final bow from the threshold of what he called his "sanctum," and had hardly left the landing in descent when a square-headed, collarless, red-faced male in shirt sleeves came down, descending, as it seemed, in bounds from parts above. "Damn it, Sinclair!" she heard, as he shot into the apartment she had left, "here's the whole council meeting report set up and waiting three-quarters of an hour--press blocked; and the printer Babu says he can get nothing out of you. What the devil.... If the dak's* missed again, by thunder!... paid to converse with itinerant females... seven columns... infernal idiocy...."

* Country post.

Hilda descended in safety and at leisure, reflecting with amusement as she made her way down that Mr. Sinclair was doubtless waiting until his lady visitor was well out of earshot to make it warm for the editor.


CHAPTER XII

I find myself wondering whether Calcutta would have found anything very exquisitely amusing in the satisfactions which exchanged themselves between Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope's leading lady and the Reverend Stephen Arnold, had it been aware of them; and I conclude reluctantly that it would not. Reluctantly, because such imperviousness argues a lack of perception, of flair in directions which any Continental centre would recognise as vastly tickling, regrettable in a capital of such vaunted sophistication as that which sits beside the Hooghly. It may as well be shortly admitted, however, that to stir Calcutta's sense of comedy you must, for example, attempt to corner, by shortsightedness or faulty technical equipment, a civet cat in a jackal hunt, or, coming out from England to assume official duties, you