icted by periodic famine and pestilence,
even as men and women lived before the dawn of history, for untold
centuries, for hundreds of thousands of years.

Sec. 4

How strange we English seem in India, a little scattered garrison. Are
we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy
who has brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization
through the gates of the East? Are we makers or just a means, casually
taken up and used by the great forces of God?

I do not know, I have never been able to tell. I have never been able to
decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.

I think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once
gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and
disciplined people who are yet neither subdued nor subordinated....
These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render
the paradox of the English character and this spectacle of a handful of
mute, snobbish, not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated
men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred
millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in
India I would find myself in little circles of the official
English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out"
people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and
gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as
mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me.
And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat
of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of
deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as if out of a thickly rusted
sheath one had pulled a sword and found it--flame....

I recall one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between
Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. The
theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit
by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for
the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the
great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family,
officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at
hand. Behind were English of a more dubious social position, also
connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian family or so, very dressy
and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and