“Well, when he’s done with them.”
“I wouldn’t keep you waiting; good heavens, you take precedence of any Indian visitor, of course. I meant what’s the good. Why mix yourself up with pitch?”
“I say he’s innocent——”
“Innocence or guilt, why mix yourself up? What’s the good?”
“Oh, good, good,” he cried, feeling that every earth was being stopped. “One’s got to breathe occasionally, at least I have. I mayn’t see her, and now I mayn’t see him. I promised him to come up here with him to you, but Turton called me off before I could get two steps.”
“Sort of all-white thing the Burra Sahib would do,” he muttered sentimentally. And trying not to sound patronizing, he stretched his hand over the table, and said: “We shall all have to hang together, old man, I’m afraid. I’m your junior in years, I know, but very much your senior in service; you don’t happen to know this poisonous country as well as I do, and you must take it from me that the general situation is going to be nasty at Chandrapore during the next few weeks, very nasty indeed.”
“So I have just told you.”
“But at a time like this there’s no room for—well—personal views. The man who doesn’t toe the line is lost.”
“I see what you mean.”
“No, you don’t see entirely. He not only loses himself, he weakens his friends. If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line. These jackals”—he pointed at the lawyers’ cards—“are looking with all their eyes for a gap.”