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 ekdum[[B]] 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.”
[B]. In one breath.
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.