His Honour, and a Lady

Even for an editor’s office it was a small room, and though it was on the second floor, the walls looked as if fungi grew on them in the rains. The floor was littered with publications; for the Word of Truth was taken seriously in Asia and in Oxford, and “exchanged” with a number of periodicals devoted to theosophical research, or the destruction of the opium revenue, or the protection of the sacred cow by combination against the beef-eating Briton. In one corner lay a sprawling blue heap of the reports and resolutions before mentioned, accumulating the dust of the year, at the end of which Tarachand would sell them for waste paper. For the rest, there was the editorial desk, with a chair on each side of it, the editorial gum-pot and scissors and waste-paper basket; and portraits, cut from the Illustrated London News, askew on the wall and wrinkling in their frames, of Max Müller and Lord Ripon. The warm air was heavy with the odour of fresh printed sheets, and sticky with Tarachand’s personal anointing of cocoa-nut oil, and noisy with the clamping of the press below, the scolding of the crows, the eternal wrangle of the streets. Through the open window one saw the sunlight lying blindly on the yellow-and-pink upper stories, with their winding outer staircases and rickety balconies and narrow barred windows, of the court below.

Tarachand finished his proof and put it aside to cough. He was bent almost double, and still coughing when Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty came in; so that the profusion of smiles with which he welcomed his brother journalist was not undimmed with tears. They embraced strenuously, however, and Mohendra, with a corner of his nether drapery, tenderly wiped the eyes of Tarachand. For the moment the atmosphere became doubly charged with oil and sentiment, breaking into a little storm of phrases of affection and gestures of respect. When it had been gone through with, these gentlemen of Bengal sat opposite each other beaming, and turned their conversation into English as became gentlemen of Bengal.

“I deplore,” said Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty concernedly, with one fat hand outspread on his knee, “to see that this iss still remaining with you – ”

The other, with a gesture, brushed his ailment away. “Oh, it iss nothing – nothing whatever! I have been since three days under astronomical treatment of Dr. Chatterjee. ‘Sir,’ he remarked me yesterday, as I was leaving his höwwse, ‘after one month you will be again salubrious. You will be on legs again —take my word!’”

Mohendra leaned back in his chair, put his head on one side, and described a right angle with one leg and the knee of the other. “Smart chap, Chatterjee!” he said, in perfect imitation of the casual sahib. He did not even forget to smooth his chin judicially as he said it. The editor of the Word of Truth, whose social opportunities had been limited to his own caste, looked on with admiration.

“And what news do you bring? But already I have perused the Bengal Free Press of to-day, so without doubt I know all the news!” Tarachand made this professional compliment as coyly and insinuatingly as if he and Mohendra had been sweethearts. “I cannot withhold my congratulations on that leader of thiss morning,” he went on fervently. “Here it is to my hand; diligently I have been studying it with awful admiration.”

Mohendra’s chin sank into his neck in a series of deprecating nods and inarticulate expressions of dissent, and his eyes glistened. Tarachand took up the paper and read from it: —

“‘The Satrap and the Colleges.’

“Ah, how will His Honour look when he sees that!

“‘Is it possible, we ask all sane men with a heart in their bosom, that Dame Rumour is right in her prognostications? Can it be true that the tyrant of Belvedere will dare to lay his hand on the revenue sacredly put aside to shower down upon our young hopefuls the mother’s milk of an Alma Mater upon any pretext whatsoever? We fear the affirmative. Even as we go to press the knell of higher education may be sounding, and any day poor Bengal may learn from a rude Notification in the Gazette that her hope of progress has been shattered by the blasting pen of the caitiff Church. We will not mince matters, nor hesitate to proclaim to the housetops that the author of this dastardly action is but a poor stick. Doubtless he will say that the College grants are wanted for this or for that; but full well the people of this province know it is to swell the fat pay of boot-licking English officials that they are wanted. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse, and any excuse will serve when an autocrat without fear of God or man sits upon the gaddi. Many are the pitiable cases of hardship that will now come to view. One amongst thousands will serve. Known to the writer is a family man, and a large one. He has been blessed with seven sons, all below the age of nine. Up to the present he has been joyous as a lark and playful as a kitten, trusting in the goodness of Government to provide the nutrition of their minds and livelihoods. Now he is beating his breast, for his treasures will be worse than orphans. How true are the words of the poet —

“‘Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes,Tenets with books, and principles with times!’

Again and yet again have we exposed the hollow, heartless and vicious policy of the acting Lieutenant-Governor, but, alas! without result.

“‘Destroy his fib or sophistry – in vain;The creature’s at his dirty work again!’

But will this province sit tamely down under its brow-beating? A thousand times no! We will appeal to the justice, to the mercy of England, through our noble friends in Parliament, and the lash will yet fall like a scorpion upon the shrinking hide of the coward who would filch the people from their rights.’”

Tarachand stopped to cough, and his round liquid eyeballs, as he turned them upon Mohendra, stood out of their creamy whites with enthusiasm. “One word,” he cried, as soon as he had breath: “you are the Macaulay of Bengal! No less. The Macaulay of Bengal!”

(John Church, when he read Mohendra’s article next day, laughed, but uneasily. He knew that in all Bengal there is no such thing as a sense of humour.)

“My own feeble pen,” Tarachand went on deprecatingly, “has been busy at this thing for the to-morrow’s issue. I also have been saying some worthless remark, perhaps not altogether beyond the point,” and the corrected proof went across the table to Mohendra. While he glanced through it Tarachand watched him eagerly, reflecting every shade of expression that passed over the other man’s face. When Mohendra smiled Tarachand laughed out with delight, when Mohendra looked grave Tarachand’s countenance was sunk in melancholy.

“‘Have the hearts of the people of India turned to water that any son of English mud may ride over their prostrate forms?’”

he read aloud in Bengali. “That is well said.

“‘Too often the leaders of the people have waited on the Lieutenant-Governor to explain desirable matters, but the counsel of grey hairs has not been respected. Three Vedas, and the fourth a cudgel! The descendants of monkeys have forgotten that once before they played too many tricks. The white dogs want another lesson.’

“A-ha!” Mohendra paused to comment, smiling. “Very good talk. But it is necessary also to be a little careful. After that – it is my advice – you say how Bengalis are loyal before everything.”

The editor of the Word of Truth slowly shook his head, showing, in his contemptuous amusement, a row of glittering teeth stained with the red of the betel. “No harm can come,” he said. “They dare not muzzle thee press.” The phrase was pat and familiar. “When the loin-cloth burns one must speak out. I am a poor man, and I have sons. Where is their rice to come from? Am I a man without shame, that I should let the Sirkar turn them into carpenters?” In his excitement Tarachand had dropped into his own tongue.

“‘Education to Bengalis is as dear as religion. They have fought for religion, they may well fight for education. Let the game go on; let European officials grow fat on our taxes; let the wantons, their women, dance in the arms of men, and look into their faces with impudence, at the tamashos of the Burra Lât as before. But if the Sirkar robs the poor Bengali of his education let him beware. He will become without wings or feathers, while Shiva will protect the helpless and those with a just complaint.’

“Without doubt that will make a sensation,” Mohendra said, handing back the proof. “Without doubt! You can have much more the courage of your opinion in the vernacular. English – that iss another thing. I wrote myséêlf, last week, some issmall criticism on the Chairman of the Municipality, maybe half a column – about that new drain in Colootollah which we must put our hand in our pocket. Yesterda-ay I met the Chairman on the Red Road, and he takes no notiss off my face! That was not pleasant. To-day I am writing on issecond thoughts we cannot live without drainage, and I will send him marked copy. But in that way it iss troublesome, the English.”

“These Europeans they have no eye-shame. They are entirely made of wood. But I think this Notification will be a nice kettle of fish! Has the Committee got isspeakers for the mass meeting on the Maidan?”

Mohendra nodded complacently. “Already it is being arranged. For a month I have known every word spoken by His Honour on this thing. I have the best information. Every week I am watching the Gazette. The morning of publication ekdum2 goes telegram to our good friend in Parliament. Agitation in England, agitation in India! Either will come another Royal Commission to upset the thing, or the Lieutenant-Governor is forced to retire.”

Mohendra’s nods became oracular. Then his expression grew seriously regretful. “Myséêlf I hope they will – what iss it in English? —w’itewass him with a commission. It goes against me to see disgrace on a high official. It is not pleasant. He means well – he means well. And at heart he is a very good fellow – personally I have had much agreeable conversation with him. Always he has asked me to his garden-parties.”

“He has set fire to his own beard, brother,” said the editor of the Word of Truth in the vernacular, spitting.

“Very true – oh, very true! And all the more we must attack him because I see the reptile English press, in Calcutta, in Bombay, in Allahabad, they are upholding this dacoity. That iss the only word – dacoity.” Mohendra rose. “And we two have both off us the best occasion to fight,” he added beamingly, as he took his departure, “for did we not graduate hand in hand that same year out off Calcutta University?”

“God knows, Ancram, I believe it is the right thing to do!”

John Church had reached his difficult moment – the moment he had learned to dread. It lay in wait for him always at the end of unbaffled investigation, of hard-fast steering by principle, of determined preliminary action of every kind – the actual executive moment. Neither the impulse of his enthusiasm nor the force of his energy ever sufficed to carry him over it comfortably; rather, at this point, they ebbed back, leaving him stranded upon his responsibility, which invariably at once assumed the character of a quicksand. He was never defeated by himself at these junctures, but he hated them. He turned out from himself then, consciously seeking support and reinforcement, to which at other times he was indifferent; and it was in a crisis of desire for encouragement that he permitted himself to say to Lewis Ancram that God knew he believed the College Grants Notification was the right thing to do. He had asked Ancram to wait after the Council meeting was over very much for this purpose.

“Yes, sir,” the Chief Secretary replied; “if I may be permitted to say so, it is the most conscientious piece of legislation of recent years.”

The Lieutenant-Governor looked anxiously at Ancram from under his bushy eyebrows, and then back again at the Notification. It lay in broad margined paragraphs of beautiful round baboo’s handwriting, covering a dozen pages of foolscap, before him on the table. It waited only for his ultimate decision to go to the Government Printing Office and appear in the Gazette and be law to Bengal. Already he had approved each separate paragraph. His Chief Secretary had never turned out a better piece of work.

“To say precisely what is in my mind, Ancram,” Church returned, beginning to pace the empty chamber, “I have sometimes thought that you were not wholly with me in this matter.”

“I will not disguise from you, sir” – Ancram spoke with candid emphasis – “that I think it’s a risky thing to do, a – deuced risky thing.” His Honour was known to dislike strong language. “But as to the principle involved there can be no two opinions.”

His Honour’s gaunt shadow passed and repassed against the oblong patch of westering February sunlight that lightened the opposite wall before he replied.

“I am prepared for an outcry,” he said slowly at last. “I think I can honestly say that I am concerned only with the principle – with the possible harm, and the probable good.”

Ancram felt a rising irritation. He reflected that if His Honour had chosen to take him into confidence earlier, he – Mr. Ancram – might have been saved a considerable amount of moral unpleasantness. By taking him into confidence now the Lieutenant-Governor merely added to it appreciably and, Ancram pointed out to himself, undeservedly. He played with his watch-chain for distraction, and looked speculatively at the Notification, and said that one thing was certain, they could depend upon His Excellency if it came to any nonsense with the Secretary of State. “Scansleigh is loyal to his very marrow. He’ll stand by us, whatever happens.” No one admired the distinguishing characteristic of the Viceroy of India more than the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal.

“Scansleigh sees it as I do,” Church returned; “and I see it plainly. At least I have not spared myself – nor any one else,” he added, with a smile of admission which was at the moment pathetic, “in working the thing up. My action has no bearing that I have not carefully examined. Nothing can result from it that I do not expect – at least approximately – to happen.”

Ancram almost imperceptibly raised his eyebrows. The gesture, with its suggestion of dramatic superiority, was irresistible to him; he would have made it if Church had been looking at him; but the eyes of the Lieutenant-Governor were fixed upon the sauntering multitude in the street below. He turned from the window, and went on with a kind of passion.

“I tell you, Ancram, I feel my responsibility in this thing, and I will not carry it any longer in the shape of a curse to my country. I don’t speak of the irretrievable mischief that is being done by the wholesale creation of a clerkly class for whom there is no work, or of the danger of putting that sharpest tool of modern progress – higher education – into hands that can only use it to destroy. When we have helped these people to shatter all their old notions of reverence and submission and self-abnegation and piety, and given them, for such ideals as their fathers had, the scepticism and materialism of the West, I don’t know that we shall have accomplished much to our credit. But let that pass. The ultimate consideration is this: You know and I know where the money comes from – the three lakhs and seventy-five thousand rupees – that goes every year to make B.A.s of Calcutta University. It’s a commonplace to say that it is sweated in annas and pice out of the cultivators of the villages – poor devils who live and breed and rot in pest-stricken holes we can’t afford to drain for them, who wear one rag the year through and die of famine when the rice harvest fails! The ryot pays, that the money-lender who screws him and the landowner who bullies him may give their sons a cheap European education.”

“The wonder is,” Ancram replied, “that it has not been acknowledged a beastly shame long ago. The vested interest has never been very strong.”

“Ah well,” Church said more cheerfully, “we have provided for the vested interest; and my technical schools will, I hope, go some little way toward providing for the cultivators. At all events they will teach him to get more out of his fields. It’s a tremendous problem, that,” he added, refolding the pages with a last glance, and slipping them into their cover: “the ratio at which population is increasing out here and the limited resources of the soil.”

He had reassumed the slightly pedantic manner that was characteristic of him; he was again dependent upon himself, and resolved.

“Send it off at once, will you?” he said; and Ancram gave the packet to a waiting messenger. “A weighty business off my mind,” he added, with a sigh of relief. “Upon my word, Ancram, I am surprised to find you so completely in accord with me. I fancied you would have objections to make at the last moment, and that I should have to convince you. I rather wanted to convince somebody. But I am very pleased indeed to be disappointed!”

“It is a piece of work which has my sincerest admiration, sir,” Ancram answered; and as the two men descended the staircases from the Bengal Council Chamber to the street, the Lieutenant-Governor’s hand rested upon the arm of his Chief Secretary in a way that was almost affectionate.

CHAPTER XIII

Three days later the Notification appeared. John Church sat tensely through the morning, unconsciously preparing himself for emergencies – deputations, petitions, mobs. None of these occurred. The day wore itself out in the usual routine, and in the evening His Honour was somewhat surprised to meet at dinner a member of the Viceroy’s Council who was not aware that anything had been done. He turned with some eagerness next morning to the fourth page of his newspaper, and found its leading article illuminating the subject of an archæological discovery in Orissa, made some nine months previously. The Lieutenant-Governor was an energetic person, and did not understand the temper of Bengal. He had published a Notification subversive of the educational policy of the Government for sixty years, and he expected this proceeding to excite immediate attention. He gave it an importance almost equal to that of the Derby Sweepstakes. This, however, was in some degree excusable, considering the short time he had spent in Calcutta and the persevering neglect he had shown in observing the tone of society.

Even the telegram to the sympathetic Member of Parliament failed of immediate transmission. Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty wrote it out with emotion; then he paused, remembering that the cost of telegrams paid for by enthusiastic private persons was not easily recoverable from committees. Mohendra was a solid man, but there were funds for this purpose. He decided that he was not justified in speeding the nation’s cry for succour at his own expense; so he submitted the telegram to the committee, which met at the end of the week. The committee asked Mohendra to cut it down and let them see it again. In the end it arrived at Westminster almost as soon as the mail. Mohendra, besides, had his hands and his paper full, at the moment, with an impassioned attack upon an impulsive judge of the High Court who had shot a bullock with its back broken. As to the Word of Truth, Tarachand Mookerjee was celebrating his daughter’s wedding, at the time the Notification was published, with tom-toms and sweetmeats and a very expensive nautch, and for three days the paper did not appear at all.

The week lengthened out, and the Lieutenant-Governor’s anxiety grew palpably less. His confidence had returned to such a degree that when the officers of the Education Department absented themselves in a body from the first of his succeeding entertainments he was seriously disturbed. “It’s childish,” he said to Judith. “By my arrangement not a professor among them will lose a pice either in pay or pension. If the people are anxious enough for higher education to pay twice as much for it as they do now these fellows will go on with their lectures. If not, we’ll turn them into inspectors, or superintendents of the technical schools.”

“I can understand a certain soreness on the subject of their dignity,” his wife suggested.

Church frowned impatiently. “People might think less of their dignity in this country and more of their duty, with advantage,” he said, and she understood that the discussion was closed.

The delay irritated Ancram, who was a man of action. He told other people that he feared it was only the ominous lull before the storm, and assured himself that no man could hurry Bengal. Nevertheless, the terms in which he advised Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty, who came to see him every Sunday afternoon, were successful to the point of making that Aryan drive rather faster on his way back to the Bengal Free Press office. At the end of a fortnight Mr. Ancram was able to point to the verification of his prophecy; it had been the lull before the storm, which developed, two days later, in the columns of the native press, into a tornado.

“I tell you,” said he, “you might as well petition Sri Krishna as the Viceroy,” when Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty reverted to this method of obtaining redress. Mohendra, who was a Hindoo of orthodoxy, may well have found this flippant, but he only smiled, and assented, and went away and signed the petition. He yielded to the natural necessity of the pathetic temperament of his countrymen – even when they were university graduates and political agitators – to implore before they did anything else. An appeal was distilled and forwarded. The Viceroy promptly indicated the nature of his opinions by refusing to receive this document unless it reached him through the proper channel – which was the Bengal Government. The prayer of humility then became a shriek of defiance, a transition accomplished with remarkable rapidity in Bengal. In one night Calcutta flowered mysteriously into coloured cartoons, depicting the Lieutenant-Governor in the prisoner’s dock, charged by the Secretary of State, on the bench, with the theft of bags of gold marked “College Grants”; while the Director of Education, weeping bitterly, gave evidence against him. The Lieutenant-Governor was represented in a green frock-coat and the Secretary of State in a coronet, which made society laugh, and started a wave of interest in the College Grants Notification. John Church saw it in people’s faces at his garden parties, and it added to the discomfort with which he read advertisements of various mass meetings, in protest, to be held throughout the province, and noticed among the speakers invariably the unaccustomed names of the Rev. Professor Porter of the Exeter Hall Institute, the Rev. Dr. MacInnes of the Caledonian Mission, and Father Ambrose, who ruled St. Dominic’s College, and who certainly insisted, as part of his curriculum, upon the lives of the Saints.

The afternoon of the first mass meeting in Calcutta closed into the evening of the last ball of the season at Government House. A petty royalty from Southern Europe, doing the grand tour, had trailed his clouds of glory rather indolently late into Calcutta; and, as society anxiously emphasized, there was practically only a single date available before Lent for a dance in his honour. When it was understood that Their Excellencies would avail themselves of this somewhat contracted opportunity, society beamed upon itself, and said it knew they would – they were the essence of hospitality.

There are three square miles of the green Maidan, round which Calcutta sits in a stucco semi-circle, and past which her brown river runs to the sea. Fifteen thousand people, therefore, gathered in one corner of it, made a somewhat unusually large patch of white upon the grass, but were not otherwise impressive, and in no wise threatening. Society, which had forgotten about the mass meeting, put up its eye-glass, driving on the Red Road, and said that there was evidently something “going on” – probably a football team of Tommies from the Fort playing the town. Only two or three elderly officials, taking the evening freshness in solitary walks, looked with anxious irritation at the densely-packed mass; and Judith Church, driving home through the smoky yellow twilight, understood the meaning of the cheers the south wind softened and scattered abroad. They brought her a stricture of the heart with the thought of John Church’s devotion to these people. Ingrates, she named them to herself, with compressed lips – ingrates, traitors, hounds! Her eyes filled with the impotent tears of a woman’s pitiful indignation; her heart throbbed with a pang of new recognition of her husband’s worth, and of tenderness for it, and of unrecognised pain beneath that even this could not constitute him her hero and master. She asked herself bitterly – I fear her politics were not progressive – what the people in England meant by encouraging open and ignorant sedition in India, and whole passages came eloquently into her mind of the speech she would make in Parliament if she were but a man and a member. They brought her some comfort, but she dismissed them presently to reflect seriously whether something might not be done. She looked courageously at the possibility of imprisoning Dr. MacInnes. Then she too thought of the ball, and subsided upon the determination of consulting Lewis Ancram, at the ball, upon this point. She drew a distinct ethical satisfaction from her intention. It seemed in the nature of a justification for the quickly pulsating pleasure with which she looked forward to the evening.