Three days later the Notification appeared. John Church sat tensely
through the morning, unconsciously preparing himself for
emergencies—deputations, petitions, mobs. None of these occurred. The
day wore itself out in the usual routine, and in the evening His Honour
was somewhat surprised to meet at dinner a member of the Viceroy’s
Council who was not aware that anything had been done. He turned with
some eagerness next morning to the fourth page of his newspaper, and
found its leading article illuminating the subject of an archæological
discovery in Orissa, made some nine months previously. The
Lieutenant-Governor was an energetic person, and did not understand the
temper of Bengal. He had published a Notification subversive of the
educational policy of the Government for sixty years, and he expected
this proceeding to excite immediate attention. He gave it an importance
almost equal to that of the Derby Sweepstakes. This, however, was in
some degree excusable, considering the short time he had spent in
Calcutta and the persevering neglect he had shown in observing the tone
of society.
Even the telegram to the sympathetic Member of Parliament failed of
immediate transmission. Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty wrote it out with
emotion; then he paused, remembering that the cost of telegrams paid for
by enthusiastic private persons was not easily recoverable from
committees. Mohendra was a solid man, but there were funds for this
purpose. He decided that he was not justified in speeding the nation’s
cry for succour at his own expense; so he submitted the telegram to the
committee, which met at the end of the week. The committee asked
Mohendra to cut it down and let them see it again. In the end it arrived
at Westminster almost as soon as the mail. Mohendra, besides, had his
hands and his paper full, at the moment, with an impassioned attack upon
an impulsive judge of the High Court who had shot a bullock with its
back broken. As to the _Word of Truth_, Tarachand Mookerjee was
celebrating his daughter’s wedding, at the time the Notification was
published, with tom-toms and sweetmeats and a very expensive nautch, and
for three days the paper did not appear at all.
The week lengthened out, and the Lieutenant-Governor’s anxiety grew
palpably less. His confidence had returned to such a degree that when
the officers of the Education Department absented themselves in a body
from the first of his succeeding entertainments he was seriously
disturbed. “It’s childish,” he said to Judith. “By my arrangement not a
professor among them will lose a pice either in pay or pension. If the
people are anxious enough for higher education to pay twice as much for
it as they do now these fellows will go on with their lectures. If not,
we’ll turn them into inspectors, or superintendents of the technical
schools.”
“I can understand a certain soreness on the subject of their dignity,”
his wife suggested.
Church frowned impatiently. “People might think less of their dignity in
this country and more of their duty, with advantage,” he said, and she
understood that the discussion was closed.
The delay irritated Ancram, who was a man of action. He told other
people that he feared it was only the ominous lull before the storm, and
assured himself that no man could hurry Bengal. Nevertheless, the terms
in which he advised Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty, who came to see him every
Sunday afternoon, were successful to the point of making that Aryan
drive rather faster on his way back to the _Bengal Free Press_ office.
At the end of a fortnight Mr. Ancram was able to point to the
verification of his prophecy; it had been the lull before the storm,
which developed, two days later, in the columns of the native press,
into a tornado.
“I tell you,” said he, “you might as well petition Sri Krishna as the
Viceroy,” when Mohendra Lal Chuckerbutty reverted to this method of
obtaining redress. Mohendra, who was a Hindoo of orthodoxy, may well
have found this flippant, but he only smiled, and assented, and went
away and signed the petition. He yielded to the natural necessity of the
pathetic temperament of his countrymen—even when they were university
graduates and political agitators—to implore before they did anything
else. An appeal was distilled and forwarded. The Viceroy promptly
indicated the nature of his opinions by refusing to receive this
document unless it reached him through the proper channel—which was the
Bengal Government. The prayer of humility then became a shriek of
defiance, a transition accomplished with remarkable rapidity in Bengal.
In one night Calcutta flowered mysteriously into coloured cartoons,
depicting the Lieutenant-Governor in the prisoner’s dock, charged by the
Secretary of State, on the bench, with the theft of bags of gold marked
“College Grants”; while the Director of Education, weeping bitterly,
gave evidence against him. The Lieutenant-Governor was represented in a
green frock-coat and the Secretary of State in a coronet, which made
society laugh, and started a wave of interest in the College Grants
Notification. John Church saw it in people’s faces at his garden
parties, and it added to the discomfort with which he read
advertisements of various mass meetings, in protest, to be held
throughout the province, and noticed among the speakers invariably the
unaccustomed names of the Rev. Professor Porter of the Exeter Hall
Institute, the Rev. Dr. MacInnes of the Caledonian Mission, and Father
Ambrose, who ruled St. Dominic’s College, and who certainly insisted, as
part of _his_ curriculum, upon the lives of the Saints.
The afternoon of the first mass meeting in Calcutta closed into the
evening of the last ball of the season at Government House. A petty
royalty from Southern Europe, doing the grand tour, had trailed his
clouds of glory rather indolently late into Calcutta; and, as society
anxiously emphasized, there was practically only a single date available
before Lent for a dance in his honour. When it was understood that Their
Excellencies would avail themselves of this somewhat contracted
opportunity, society beamed upon itself, and said it knew they
would—they were the essence of hospitality.
There are three square miles of the green Maidan, round which Calcutta
sits in a stucco semi-circle, and past which her brown river runs to the
sea. Fifteen thousand people, therefore, gathered in one corner of it,
made a somewhat unusually large patch of white upon the grass, but were
not otherwise impressive, and in no wise threatening. Society, which had
forgotten about the mass meeting, put up its eye-glass, driving on the
Red Road, and said that there was evidently something “going
on”—probably a football team of Tommies from the Fort playing the town.
Only two or three elderly officials, taking the evening freshness in
solitary walks, looked with anxious irritation at the densely-packed
mass; and Judith Church, driving home through the smoky yellow twilight,
understood the meaning of the cheers the south wind softened and
scattered abroad. They brought her a stricture of the heart with the
thought of John Church’s devotion to these people. Ingrates, she named
them to herself, with compressed lips—ingrates, traitors, hounds! Her
eyes filled with the impotent tears of a woman’s pitiful indignation;
her heart throbbed with a pang of new recognition of her husband’s
worth, and of tenderness for it, and of unrecognised pain beneath that
even this could not constitute him her hero and master. She asked
herself bitterly—I fear her politics were not progressive—what the
people in England meant by encouraging open and ignorant sedition in
India, and whole passages came eloquently into her mind of the speech
she would make in Parliament if she were but a man and a member. They
brought her some comfort, but she dismissed them presently to reflect
seriously whether something might not be done. She looked courageously
at the possibility of imprisoning Dr. MacInnes. Then she too thought of
the ball, and subsided upon the determination of consulting Lewis
Ancram, at the ball, upon this point. She drew a distinct ethical
satisfaction from her intention. It seemed in the nature of a
justification for the quickly pulsating pleasure with which she looked
forward to the evening.