It was, as he sketched it, a
great thing--the work of his life--a really comprehensive survey of a most
fascinating subject--to be written with all the special and laboriously
acquired knowledge of Wressley of the Foreign Office--a gift fit for an
Empress.
He told Miss Venner that he was going to take leave, and hoped, on his return,
to bring her a present worthy of her acceptance. Would she wait? Certainly she
would. Wressley drew seventeen hundred rupees a month. She would wait a year
for that. Her mamma would help her to wait.
So Wressley took one year's leave and all the available documents, about a
truck-load, that he could lay hands on, and went down to Central India with his
notion hot in his head. He began his book in the land he was writing of. Too
much official correspondence had made him a frigid workman, and he must have
guessed that he needed the white light of local color on his palette. This is a
dangerous paint for amateurs to play with.
Heavens, how that man worked! He caught his Rajahs, analyzed his Rajahs, and
traced them up into the mists of Time and beyond, with their queens and their
concubines. He dated and cross-dated, pedigreed and triple-pedigreed, compared,
noted, connoted, wove, strung, sorted, selected, inferred, calendared and
counter-calendared for ten hours a day.
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