The editor of the Word of Truth sat in his office correcting a proof. The proof looked insurmountably difficult of correction, because it was printed in Bengali; but Tarachand Mookerjee’s eye ran over it nimbly, and was accompanied by a smile, ever expanding and contracting, of pleased, almost childish appreciation. The day was hot, unusually so for February; and as the European editors up-town worked in their shirt-sleeves, so Tarachand Mookerjee worked in his dhoty, which left him bare from his waist up—bare and brown and polished, like a figure carved in mahogany, for his ribs were very visible. He wore nothing else, except patent leather shoes and a pair of white cotton stockings, originally designed for a more muscular limb, if for a weaker sex. These draperies were confined below the knee by pieces of the red tape with which a considerate Government tied up the reports and resolutions it sent the editor of the Word of Truth for review. Above Tarachand’s three-cornered face his crisp black hair stood in clumps of oily and admired disorder; he had early acquired the literary habit of running his fingers through it. He had gentle, velvety eyes, and delicate features, and a straggling beard. He had lost two front teeth, and his attenuated throat was well sunk between his narrow shoulders. This gave him the look of a poor nervous creature; and, indeed, there was not a black-and-white terrier in Calcutta that could not have frightened him horribly. Yet he was not in the least afraid of a watch-dog belonging to Government—an official translator who weekly rendered up a confidential report of the emanations of the Word of Truth in English—because he knew that this animal’s teeth were drawn by the good friends of Indian progress in the English Parliament.
Tarachand did almost everything that had to be done for the Word of Truth except the actual printing; although he had a nephew at the Scotch Mission College who occasionally wrote a theatrical notice for him in consideration of a free ticket, and who never ceased to urge him to print the paper in English, so that he, the nephew, might have an opportunity of practising composition in that language. It was Tarachand who translated the news out of the European papers into his own columns, where it read backwards, who reviewed the Bengali school-books written by the pundits of his acquaintance, who “fought” the case of the baboo in the Public Works Department dismissed for the trivial offence of stealing blotting-paper. It was, above all, Tarachand who wrote editorials about the conduct of the Government of India: that was the business of his life, his morning and his evening meditation. Tarachand had a great pull over the English editors uptown here; had a great pull, in fact, over any editors anywhere who felt compelled to base their opinions upon facts, or to express them with an eye upon consequences. Tarachand knew nothing about facts—it is doubtful whether he would recognise one if he saw it—and consequences did not exist for him. In place of these drawbacks he had the great advantages of imagination and invective. He was therefore able to write the most graphic editorials.
He believed them, too, with the open-minded, admiring simplicity that made him wax and wane in smiles over this particular proof. I doubt whether Tarachand could be brought to understand the first principles of veracity as applied to public affairs, unless possibly through his pocket. A definition to the Aryan mind is always best made in rupees, and to be mulcted heavily by a court of law might give him a grieved and surprised, but to some extent convincing education in political ethics. It would necessarily interfere at the same time, however, with his untrammelled and joyous talent for the creation and circulation of cheap fiction; it would be a hard lesson, and in the course of it Tarachand would petition with fervid loyalty and real tears. Perhaps it was on some of these accounts that the Government of India had never run Tarachand in.
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:—