"What are the first words of the young child? What are the first words
in your own hearts?" he cried, indicating that organ with a dramatic
forefinger. "_I want_! It is the passionate cry of youth. By indomitably
uttering it, he can dislodge mountains into the sea. And in India to-day
there exist mountains necessary to be hurled into the sea!" His
significant pause was not lost on his hearers--or on Roy.
"'Many-branched and endless are the thoughts of the irresolute.' But to
him who cries ardently, '_I want_,' there is no impediment, except
paucity of courage to snatch the seductive object. Deaf to the anaemic
whisper of compunction, remembering that sin taints only the weak, he
will be translated to that dizzy eminence, where right and wrong, truth
and untruth, become as pigmies, hardly discerned by the naked eye. There
dwells Kali--the shameless and pitiless; and believing our country that
deity incarnate, _her_ needs must be our gods. 'Her image make we in
temple after temple--Bande Mataram?'" The invocation was flung back to
him in a ragged shout. Here and there a student leapt to his feet
brandishing a clenched fist. "Compose your laudable intoxication,
brothers. I do not say, 'Be violent.' There is a necromancy of the
spirit more potent than weapons of the flesh:--the delusion of
irresistible suggestion that will conquer even truth itself...."

Abstraction piled on abstraction; perversion on perversion; and that
deluded crowd plainly swallowing it all as gospel truth----! To Roy the
whole exhibition was purely disgustful; as if the man had emptied a
dust-bin under his aristocratic nose. Once or twice he glanced covertly
at Dyan, standing beside him; at the strained intentness of his face,
the nervous clenched hand. Was this the same Dyan who had ridden and
argued and read 'Greats' with him only four years ago--this hypnotised
being who seemed to have forgotten his existence----?

Thank God! At last it was over! But while applause hummed and fluttered,
there sprang on to the platform, unannounced, a wiry keen-faced man,
with the parted beard of a Sikh.

"Brothers--I demand a hearing!" he cried aloud; "I who was formerly
hater of the British, preaching all manner of violence--I have been
three years detained in Germany; and I come back now, with my eyes
open, to say all over India--cease your fool's talk about
self-government and tossing mountains into the sea! Cease making
yourselves drunk with words and waving