There was no answer. The flaming colors of an Aquarium poster caught my eye
and I wondered whether it would be wise or prudent to lure Charlie into the
hands of the professional mesmerist, and whether, if he were under his power,
he would speak of his past lives. If he did, and if people believed him--but
Charlie would be frightened and flustered, or made conceited by the
interviews. In either case he would begin to lie, through fear or vanity. He
was safest in my own hands.
"They are very funny fools, your English," said a voice at my elbow, and
turning round I recognized a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali law student,
called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England to become
civilized. The old man was a retired native official, and on an income of five
pounds a month contrived to allow his son two hundred pounds a year, and the
run of his teeth in a city where he could pretend to be the cadet of a royal
house, and tell stories of the brutal Indian bureaucrats who ground the faces
of the poor.
Grish Chunder was a young, fat, full-bodied Bengali dressed with scrupulous
care in frock coat, tall hat, light trousers and tan gloves. But I had known
him in the days when the brutal Indian Government paid for his university
education, and he contributed cheap sedition to Sachi Durpan, and intrigued
with the wives of his schoolmates.
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