The Curse of the “Star”

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He sat in the high-ceilinged room at the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, stripped down to his shorts, the typing table set squarely under the overhead fan. As he worked at the last article the sweat dripped from his nose and his chin, falling onto the keyboard and onto the backs of his hands. Overhead the big fan blades whispered softly through the air and the ancient, defective electric motor buzzed with each revolution.

His body was leaned down by the months in China. His body and spirit both. The contract called for six articles. This was the last. The first one in the series had been glib, fresh, slightly sardonic.

But China infects a man with its own special sort of weariness. The top level politicians are fair game for irony. But the people, the incredible people, the courteous, smiling, child-like people — withered old women of thirty trotting under two hundred pound loads, the swollen-bellied, stick-legged children of famine, the boy-soldiers of twelve in gray quilted uniforms — a man who can deal with them in words of irony has an ineradicable smallness of soul.

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