Until steam replaces
manual power in the working of the Empire, there must always be
this percentage must always be the men who are used up,
expended, in the mere mechanical routine. For these promotion is
far off and the mill-grind of every day very instant. The
Secretariats know them only by name; they are not the picked men
of the Districts with Divisions and Collectorates awaiting them.
They are simply the rank and file the food for fever sharing with
the ryot and the plough-bullock the honour of being the plinth on
which the State rests. The older ones have lost their aspirations;
the younger are putting theirs aside with a sigh. Both learn to
endure patiently until the end of the day. Twelve years in the rank
and file, men say, will sap the hearts of the bravest and dull the
wits of the most keen.
Out of this life Otis Yeere had fled for a few months; drifting, in
the hope of a little masculine society, into Simla. When his leave
was over he would return to his swampy, sour-green,
under-manned Bengal district; to the native Assistant, the native
Doctor, the native Magistrate, the steaming, sweltering Station, the
ill-kempt City, and the undisguised insolence of the Municipality
that babbled away the lives of men. Life was cheap, however. The
soil spawned humanity, as it bred frogs in the Rains, and the gap of
the sickness of one season was filled to overflowing by the
fecundity of the next.
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