Mr. Edward Jones had been shot with bewildering suddenness from Cambridge quadrangles into the Indian Educational Service.  Of India he knew nothing, of education he knew less, but boldly took it upon him to combine the two unknowns for the earning of his living.  If wise and beneficent men offered him a modest wage for becoming a professor and exponent of that which he did not know, he had no objection to accepting it; but there were people who wondered why it should be that, out of forty million English people, Mr. Edward Jones should be the chosen one to represent England to the youth of Duri, and asked whether there were no keen, strictly conscientious, sporting, strong Englishmen available; no enthusiastic educational experts left in all the British Isles, that Mr. Edward Jones of all people had come to Duri?

“What do you want?” he asked (how he hated these poverty-stricken, smelly, ignoble creatures.  Why was he not a master at Eton, instead of at Duri High School.  Why wouldn’t somebody give him a handsome income for looking handsome and standing around beautifully—­like these aide-de-camp Johnnies and “staff” people.  Since there was nothing on earth he could do well, he ought to have been provided with a job in which he could look well).

“May I borrow the Sahib’s knife?” asked Moussa Isa, “I have broken my pencil and cannot draw.”  Mr. Edward Jones picked up the penknife that lay on his desk, the cheap article of restricted utility supplied to Government Offices by the Stationery Department, and handed it to Moussa Isa.  Even as he took it with respectful salaam, Moussa Isa summed up its possibilities.  Blade two inches long, sharp-pointed, handle six inches long, wooden; not a clasp knife, blade immovable in handle.  It would do—­and he turned to go to his seat and presumably to sharpen his pencil.

Idly watching the boy and thinking of other things, Jones saw him try the point of the knife on his thumb, walk up behind the other occupant of his desk, his Brahmin neighbour, seize that neighbour by the hair, push his head sharp over on to the shoulder, and plunge the knife into his neck; seat himself, and commence to draw with the unfortunate Brahmin’s pencil.

Jones sprang to his feet and rushed to the spot, to find that he had not been dreaming.  No—­on the back seat drooped a boy bleeding like a stuck pig and another industriously drawing, his face illuminated by a smile of contentment.

Jones pressed his thumbs into the neck of the sufferer, as he called to an assistant-supervisor to run to the hospital for Dr. Almeida, hoping to be able to close the severed jugular from which welled an appalling stream of blood.

“It is quite useless, Sahib,” observed Moussa, “nor can a doctor help.  When one has got it there, he may give his spear to his son and turn his face to the wall.  That dog will never say ‘Hubshi’ to a Somal again.”

“Catch hold of that boy,” said Mr. Edward Jones to another assistant-supervisor who clucked around like a perturbed hen.