For these promotion is far off and the mill-
grind of every day very near and instant. The Secretariats know them only by
name; they are not the picked men of the Districts with the 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 honor 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, for the sake
of a little masculine society, into Simla. When his leave was over he would
return to his swampy, sour-green, undermanned district, 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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