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.