Next morning they smoked the after-breakfast pipe in the verandah, still regarding each other curiously, Pagett in a light gray frock-coat and garments much too thin for the time of the year, and a puggried sun-hat carefully and wonderfully made; Orde in a shooting-coat, riding-breeches, brown cowhide boots with spurs, and a battered flax helmet. He had ridden some miles in the early morning to inspect a doubtful river-dam. The men’s faces differed as much as their attire. Orde’s, worn and wrinkled about the eyes and grizzled at the temples, was the harder and more square of the two, and it was with something like envy that the owner looked at the comfortable outlines of Pagett’s blandly receptive countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye, and the mobile, clean-shaved lips.
“And this is India!” said Pagett for the twentieth time, staring long and intently at the gray feathering of the tamarisks.
“One portion of India only. It’s very much like this for 300 miles in every direction. By the way, now that you have rested a little—I wouldn’t ask the old question before—what d’you think of the country?”
“’Tis the most pervasive country that ever yet was seen. I acquired several pounds of your country coming up from Karachi. The air is heavy with it, and for miles and miles along that distressful eternity of rail there’s no horizon to show where air and earth separate.”
“Yes. It isn’t easy to see truly or far in India. But you had a decent passage out, hadn’t you?”
“Very good on the whole. Your Anglo-Indian may be unsympathetic about one’s political views; but he has reduced ship life to a science.”
“The Anglo-Indian is a political orphan, and if he’s wise he won’t be in a hurry to be adopted by your party grandmothers. But how were your companions unsympathetic?”
“Well, there was a man called Dawlishe, a judge somewhere in this country, it seems, and a capital partner at whist, by the way, and when I wanted to talk to him about the progress of India in a political sense [Orde hid a grin which might or might not have been sympathetic], the National Congress movement, and other things in which, as a Member of Parliament, I’m of course interested, he shifted the subject, and when I once cornered him, he looked me calmly in the eye, and said: ‘That’s all Tommy Rot. Come and have a game at Bull.’ You may laugh, but that isn’t the way to treat a great and important question; and, knowing who I was, well, I thought it rather rude, don’t you know; and yet Dawlishe is a thoroughly good fellow.”
“Yes; he’s a friend of mine, and one of the straightest men I know. I suppose, like many Anglo-Indians, he felt it was hopeless to give you any just idea of any Indian question without the documents before you, and in this case the documents you want are the country and the people.”
“Precisely. That was why I came straight to you, bringing an open mind to bear on things. I’m anxious to know what popular feeling in India is really like, y’know, now that it has wakened into political life. The National Congress, in spite of Dawlishe, must have caused great excitement among the masses?”