The moon
shed her light upon it, and the palms threw fretted shadows down. Beyond
them, on four sides, lines of street-lamps shone, and tram-drivers
whistled bullock carts off the lines, and street pedlars lifted their
cries. A torch marked the core of the group of exhorters; it struck pale
gold from Laura's hair, and made glorious the buttons of the man who
beat the drum. She talked to the people in their own language; the "open
air" was designed for the people. "Kiko! Kiko!" (Why! Why!) Lindsay
heard her cry, where he stood in the shadow, on the edge of the crowd.
He looked down at a coolie woman with shrivelled breasts crouched on her
haunches upon the ground, bent with the bricks of half a century, and
back at the girl beside the torch. "Do not delay until to-morrow!" Laura
besought them. "_Kul-ka dari mut karo!_" A sensation of disgust assailed
him; he turned away. Then, in an impulse of atonement--he felt already
so responsible for her--he went back and dropped a coin into the coolie
creature's lap. But he grew more miserable as he stood, and finally
walked deliberately to a wooden bench at a distance, where he could not
hear her voice. Only the hymn pursued him; they sang presently a hymn.
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