Page:A Nation in Making.djvu/94

way to discouraging the proposal of my friends. Mr. Stevens did not further press his point, and when taking leave of me said that he would be present at the railway station at Barrackpore to see that everything passed off well. I thanked him and said, half in jest, that I deemed it a great honour that the official head of the district should be at the station to receive me. And so he was awaiting my arrival at the railway station when I returned to Barrackpore on the evening of July 4. A Bengalee Assistant Superintendent of Police followed me in a separate carriage all the way to my house, a distance of nearly three miles from the station.

I afterwards learnt that the military force stationed in the cantonment of Barrackpore was kept ready the whole day for fear of any eventualities. The officers of the regiment were mostly Indians, some of them Gaur Brahmins like myself. They came and saw me afterwards. Their interest in my case was quickened by the orders of Government, and they wanted to know more of it than they did before. Bureaucracy is at times nervous and distrustful. In this case it sought to prevent a public demonstration. The very preparations that in its unwisdom it made, helped to spread the story of my imprisonment among a class of people notoriously indifferent to what is taking place in the world outside their own.

The same solicitude on their part to prevent any demonstration in my honour was shown in the little device that was planned to release me from jail, when the period of my imprisonment termin- ated. Prisoners are released at six o'clock in the morning, at least that used to be the case in 1883. I was roused from sleep by the jailor at 4 a.m. and was put into a hackney carriage and driven through various parts of the town till six o'clock, when the jailor dropped me at the Bengalee office. All this was done to avoid a demonstration. But the policy was truly ostrich-like. It helped to create two demonstrations instead of one. The crowds that, in the early hours of the morning had surged round the Presidency Jail to witness my release, came all the way to the Bengalee office. The trick only served to redouble their enthusiasm, there being thus a demonstration in front of the jail and another near the Bengalee office. Wisdom comes late, if indeed it comes at all, to those who, firm in their omniscience, refuse to open their eyes to the growing and irresistible forces of time.