At one time everyone had sat in a circle and every member of the Society had been willing to voice an opinion on the poem which had just been read. Those were the days when every single poem had bristled with good qualities like a hedgehog and had glutted itself with praise like a jackal, the happy days before the Magistrate had been invited. Soon after his arrival the circle had begun to disintegrate, the ladies had progressively dropped away from each side of him until, soon, they faced him in a semi-circle, and now, at last, directly, as if in the dock. The Collector had bravely installed himself at the Magistrate’s side in order to plead mitigating circumstances.

By this time the poetry reading had begun and Mrs Worseley, wife of one of the railway engineers, had faltered to the end of a sonnet about an erl-king. Everyone, including the Collector, was now watching the Magistrate in dismay, waiting for his verdict; although sure about most things, the Collector lacked confidence in his own judgement when it came to poetry and was obliged to defer to the Magistrate, but not without the private suspicion that his own judgement might be superior after all.

“Mrs Worseley, I found your poem defective in metre, rhyme, and invention. And to be quite honest I consider that we’ve had far too many erl-kings in recent weeks, though I can assure you that even one erl-king would be more than enough for me.” Mrs Worseley hung her head, but looked quite relieved, thinking that she had got off lightly.

Mrs Adams, a senior lady, the wife of a recently retired judge, now read in a commanding voice a long poem of which the Collector could make neither head nor tail, though it seemed to have something to do with Nature, serpents, and the fall of Troy. He allowed his mind to wander and, as his eyes came to rest on his wife, he thought that if there should indeed be trouble at Krishnapur it was just as well that she would not be there to see it; perhaps he should have insisted that the children go home with her; he would have done so but he had feared that the fuss, even if the ayah went too, would be too much for her nerves … Never mind, he had almost decided to retire in a year’s time, at the end of the next cold season. He did not have to worry, as did the poor Magistrate, about securing a pension. He had a glorious and interesting life awaiting him in England whenever he considered that his duty in India was done.

But still those chapatis lodged in his mind, undissolved. In this room it was even harder to believe in trouble than it had been in the hall, indeed, it was hard to believe that one was in India at all, except for the punkahs. His eyes roamed with satisfaction over the walls, thickly anmoured with paintings in oil and water-colour, with mirrors and glass cases containing stuffed birds and other wonders, over chairs and sofas upholstered in plum cretonne, over showcases of minerals and a cobra floating in a bottle of bluish alcohol, oven occasional tables draped to the floor with heavy tablecloths on which stood statuettes in electro-metal of great men of literature, of Dr Johnson, of Moliere, Keats, Voltaire and, of course, Shakespeare … but now he was obliged to return his attention to the proceedings.

Miss Carpenter had begun to read a poem in praise of the Great Exhibition; the Collector groaned inwardly, not because he found the subject unsuitable, but because it had so evidently been chosen as homage to himself; poems about the Exhibition recurred every few weeks and seldom failed to excite the Magistrate’s most cutting remarks. This was undoubtedly because his own interest in the Exhibition was as well-known to the Magistrate as to the ladies; indeed, it was more than an interest for he had been a prominent member of the selection committee for the Bengal Presidency and, having taken his furlough in 1851, had attended the Exhibition in an official capacity. It was generally held in the cantonment that the Magistrate resented the fact that the Collector should be in with all the “big dogs” in the Company simply because he was in the habit of collecting artistic and scientific bric a brac.

Although it was usually considered unwise to offer explanations to the Magistrate as you went along, Miss Carpenter was unable to prevent herself explaining that this image of the Exhibition was a reference to the versatile talent of Edmund Burke. But as the air of interrogation among her fellow poetesses only deepened as a result of this explanation she was obliged to add an explanation to her explanation, to the effect that this talent of Burke’s had been compared to an elephant’s trunk, which could uproot an oak or pick up a needle. The ladies shifted their terrified eyes to the Magistrate to see how he was responding; his face remained ominously impassive, however, beneath its ginger growth. Miss Carpenter bravely proceeded:

“Really, this is not at all bad,” thought the Collector in spite of his alarm on her behalf; he was fond of Miss Carpenter, who was serious and pretty, and anxious to please.

“How excellent, how serious! The girl has a remarkable gift.” The Collector was surprised to find himself responding to a poem composed by one of the ladies; hitherto he had considered the poems of value only for their therapeutic properties. Alas, Miss Carpenter had been unable to resist appending yet another explanation: that this last verse was a reference to Newton’s description of himself as “only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth”. This was altogether too much for the Magistrate. “Half of this poem appears to have been copied from books, Miss Carpenter, and the other half is plainly rubbish. It’s entirely beyond my understanding why you should feel you have to say ‘Afric’s wondrous brute’ instead of ‘elephant’ like everyone else, and ‘forest monarch’ instead of ‘tree’. Nobody in his right mind goes about calling trees ‘forest monarchs’ … I’ve really never heard such nonsense!”

The ladies gasped at this frontal attack, not just on poor Miss Carpenter, but on poetry itself. If you can’t call an elephant “Afric’s wondrous brute” what can you call it? Why write poetry at all? Miss Carpenter’s eyes filled with tears.

“Look here, Tom, that’s very extreme,” grumbled the Collector, displeased. “I found it a very fine poem indeed. One of the best we’ve heard, I should think. Mind you,” he added as his confidence once more deserted him, “the subject of the Exhibition, as you know, is one that holds a particular interest for me.”

Miss Carpenter coloured prettily at this speech and appeared not to hear the Magistrate’s derisive: “Ha!” “The fellow is quite impossible!” mused the Collector crossly.

Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved. The Magistrate had performed his duties for the Company conscientiously but they had not had a good effect on him: they had made him cynical, fatalistic, and too enamoured of the rational. His interest in phrenology, too, had had a bad effect; it had reinforced the determinism which had sapped his ideals, for he evidently believed that all one’s acts were limited by the shape of one’s skull. Given the swelling above and behind the ear on each side of his skull (he had once insinuated) there was not very much the Collector could do to remedy his inability to make rapid decisions … Though, of course, one could not be “absolutely sure” without making exact measurements. He had also begun to say something about a bump on each side of the Collector’s crown which signified “love of approbation”, but noticing, at last, how badly the Collector was responding to this opportunity for self-knowledge he had desisted with a sigh.