1.07.11. Book 7: 11. Never More Again
11. NEVER MORE AGAIN
"IT is the last thing I would allow, murmuring. I hope I do not murmur; often I am about to wish matters were differently arranged, and sometimes am about to try to effect a change, but I generally stop short," thus Ragland as he sat down after his first rebuff and tried to compose his mind. There is no doubt that it was strangely ruffled, and the deeps within him moved rebelliously for a time. "I pray, though I am sorry to say with some difficulty, ‘Let me be a corn of wheat,’ " he had written just before speaking to his three special friends on the Committee, from whom he did not get much encouragement, and now that the two Committees had turned down his second hope, he sets himself valiantly not "to grow weary of his work." This just then included long journeys as Secretary, and he addressed himself to the required preparations. "My secularities begin to be drudgery," he had remarked, a little testily perhaps, some time before, being but human after all; he was knee-deep in them now.
Fusses of packing and getting off, who does not know them? For never by any remote chance does an Indian journey of the sort now required consent to arrange itself without every kind of tangle-up known to the ingenious Oriental mind. At the last hour things-tent-pegs, for example, lanterns, pots and pans, or anything you happen to be unable to do without-"are not." Relatives of indispensables fall ill, marry-if need be, die. Prove that they have frequently died before and you start the fox on a fresh run; you don’t unearth him. If you have engaged bulls, or hope you have, you find prices have risen. It is the marriage season, or a festival is on, or ploughing or sowing or harvesting. And as all these functions occur oftener than once a year, you cannot possibly elude them all at any time. If by any blessed chance you slip through, you are pulled up by "more-than-may-be-borne-sun," or, if that won’t do, "rain that says I cease not." At last he was off and, trundling slowly through his hundreds of miles of bullock-cart travelling, he had time to think, time to remember the years of the right hand of the Most High.
He acquiesced in the Committee’s ruling. The big garden-roller and all the little rollers did their best to roll the lawn back to its wonted respectable smoothness, and being a good lawn, and indeed most properly ashamed of itself, it tried to lend itself to the process. But, as poets are made, so are pioneers:
Making a poet out of a man: The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain, For the reed which grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river.