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By Root 5925 0

a senior lady, the wife of a recently retired judge, now read in a commanding voice a long poem of which the Collector could make neither head nor tail, though it seemed to have something to do with Nature, serpents, and the fall of Troy. He allowed his mind to wander and, as his eyes came to rest on his wife, he thought that if there should indeed be trouble at Krishnapur it was just as well that she would not be there to see it; perhaps he should have insisted that the children go home with her; he would have done so but he had feared that the fuss, even if the ayah went too, would be too much for her nerves...Never mind, he had almost decided to retire in a year’s time, at the end of the next cold season. He did not have to worry, as did the poor Magistrate, about securing a pension. He had a glorious and interesting life awaiting him in England whenever he considered that his duty in India was done.

But still those chapatis lodged in his mind, undissolved. In this room it was even harder to believe in trouble than it had been in the hall, indeed, it was hard to believe that one was in India at all, except for the punkahs. His eyes roamed with satisfaction over the walls, thickly armoured with paintings in oil and water-colour, with mirrors and glass cases containing stuffed birds and other wonders, over chairs and sofas upholstered in plum cretonne, over showcases of minerals and a cobra floating in a bottle of bluish alcohol, over occasional tables draped to the floor with heavy tablecloths on which stood statuettes in electro-metal of great men of literature, of Dr Johnson, of Molière, Keats, Voltaire and, of course, Shakespeare...but now he was obliged to return his attention to the proceedings.

Miss Carpenter had begun to read a poem in praise of the Great Exhibition; the Collector groaned inwardly, not because he found the subject unsuitable, but because it had so evidently been chosen as homage to himself; poems about the Exhibition recurred every few weeks and seldom failed to excite the Magistrate’s most cutting remarks. This was undoubtedly because his own interest in the Exhibition was as well-known to the Magistrate as to the ladies; indeed, it was more than an interest for he had been a prominent member of the selection committee for the Bengal Presidency and, having taken his furlough in 1851, had attended the Exhibition in an official capacity. It was generally held in the cantonment that the Magistrate resented the fact that the Collector should be in with all the “big dogs” in the Company simply because he was in the habit of collecting artistic and scientific bric à brac.

“Power, like the trunk of Afric’s wondrous brute,

Had, on that stage, its double triumph found,

To lift the forest monarch by the root,

Or pick a quivering needle from the ground.”

Although it was usually considered unwise to offer explanations to the Magistrate as you went along, Miss Carpenter was unable to prevent herself explaining that this image of the Exhibition was a reference to the versatile talent of Edmund Burke. But as the air of interrogation among her fellow poetesses only deepened as a result of this explanation she was obliged to add an explanation to her explanation, to the effect that this talent of Burke’s had been compared to an elephant’s trunk, which could uproot an oak or pick up a needle. The ladies shifted their terrified eyes to the Magistrate to see how he was responding; his face remained ominously impassive, however, beneath its ginger growth. Miss Carpenter bravely proceeded:

“Whilst they, the Royal Founders of the scene,

Through ranks of gazing myriads calmly move,

And Britons throng to proffer to their Queen

The willing dues of loyalty and love.”

“Really, this is not at all bad,” thought the Collector in spite of his alarm on her behalf; he was fond of Miss Carpenter, who was serious and pretty, and anxious to please.

“Pebbles and shells which little children find

Of rainbow-tinted hues, on ocean’s shore;

Though full of learning to the thoughtful mind,

Themselves how vain, how shortly