'What our honourable and esteemed townsman, Mr. Krishn Davenund, has just said, must receive consensus of universal opinion, since it is doubtless of supreme importance to national life. Priest-craft, supernaturalism, et hoc genus omne, are clearly traits of low civilisation, just as popular government, enlargement of franchise, and diffusion of evolutionary theories are significant of higher. Still, Rome was not built in a day. Nor is there use in raising the wind, if we can't ride the whirlwind, or control the storm. Therefore, in the interim, pending wider liberty of speech, I propose that this meeting pass a unanimous resolution condemning such paltry attempts at cockering up superstitious feelings, and that the same be duly recorded in the minutes of our society.'
Before the relieved applause which greeted this diplomacy was over, the waste-paper basket beside Chris Davenant had received another contribution. His roll of manuscript, torn to shreds, lay in it, in obedience to a sudden, swift intuition that if he was ever to rise beyond the chaos of lofty aspirations, the strictly impersonal admiration for great deeds in his fellows, he must leave words behind.
So silent, alone, he walked home to his empty house, his empty life.
But others, though they passed homewards in batches still full of discussion, still drunk with words, were passing to environments which were, in a way, even more empty than his. So empty of the sentiments they had just been formulating, so much at variance with the ideals they had just professed, that the very imagination grows bewildered in the effort to reconcile the two.
Govind the editor, however, had less difficulty than most in accommodating his mental position to a stool stuck over the reeking gutter of a liquor shop, where he refreshed himself with a brandy-and-soda and an infamous cigar. He was in an evil temper, because the meeting, which he frequented chiefly because the speakers provided him with ideas wherewith to spice his own broadsheet, had been unusually discreet; so he would have to write his own sedition; unless he could pick up some scurrilous news instead.
'Nay, friend! I know naught to suit thy purpose,' replied the stout sergeant of police who frequented the same liquor shop, to whom he applied; 'save the finding of the Lady-sahib's jewel-box.'
'And the pearls?' asked Govind, taking out a greasy stump of pencil.
'The pearls!' echoed the policeman scornfully, 'as if pearls were to be found by us! They can be hid in a body's very mouth, and then, if there be not another mouth with a tongue in it, there is silence! But the box is enough to keep the file of the case open, and the inspector content for a while.'
'How many are in the lock-up concerning it?' asked Govind, out of the fulness of his knowledge regarding police methods.
'Six,' yawned the sergeant. 'The coolie who found the box broken and empty, flung in the bushes by the Lat-sahib's house; he was setting the fireworks for the big spectacle to-morrow. He sold it to a pawnbroker. That makes two for us. Then a woman bought the velvet lining from a rag-merchant. That makes four. She gave it to Hashim, tailor, who works for the Huzoors, as a cap to her grandchild. And he, having doubts, informed us. So he makes five. Then the firework-maker's people were turbulent, therefore we arrested one of them to show diligence.'