Chapter Five

An Audit by the Gods

(I)

Thus spoke the gods from their place above the firmament
Turning from the feasting and the music and the mirth: 
“There is time and tide to burn;
Let us stack the plates a turn
And study at our leisure what the trouble is with earth.”

Down, down they looked through the azure of the Infinite
Scanning each the meadows where he went with men of yore,
Each his elbows on a cloud,
Making reckoning aloud —
Till the murmur of God wonder was a titan thunder-roar.

“War rocks the world!  Look, the arquebus and culverin
Vanish in new sciences that presage T. N. T! 
Lo, a dark, discolored swath
Where they drive new tools of wrath! 
Do they justify invention?  Will they scrap the Laws that Be?

“Look!  Mark ye well:  where we left a people flourishing
Singing in the sunshine for the fun of being free,
Now they burden man and maid
With a law the priests have laid,
And the bourgeois blow their noses by a communal decree!

“Where, where away are the liberties we left to them —
Gift of being merry and the privilege of fun? 
Is delight no longer praise? 
Will they famish all their days
For a future built of fury in a present scarce begun?”

“Most Precious friend ... please visit me!”

The one thing in India that never happens is the expected.  If the actual thing itself does occur, then the manner of it sets up so many unforeseen contingencies that only the subtlest mind, and the sanest and the least hidebound by opinion, can hope to read the signs fast enough to understand them as they happen.  Naturally, there are always plenty of people who can read backward after the event; and the few of those who keep the lesson to themselves, digesting rather than discussing it, are to be found eventually filling the senior secretaryships, albeit bitterly criticized by the other men, who unraveled everything afterward very cleverly and are always unanimous on just one point—­that the fellow who said nothing certainly knew nothing, and is therefore of no account and should wield no influence, Q. E. D.

And as we belong to the majority, in that we are uncovering the course of these events very cleverly long after they took place, we must at this point, to be logical, denounce Theresa Blaine.  She was just as much puzzled as anybody.  But she said much less than anybody, wasted no time at all on guesswork, pondered in her heart persistently whatever she had actually seen and heard, and in the end was almost the only non-Indian actor on the stage of Sialpore to reap advantage.  If that does not prove unfitness for one of the leading parts, what does?  A star should scintillate—­should focus all eyes on herself and interrupt the progress of the play to let us know how wise and beautiful