cked my solemn mask by a single smile would have been to break down
irrepressibly, and never since I set foot in India had I felt a parallel
desire to laugh and to weep. There was a pang in it which I recognize
as impossible to convey, arising from the point of contact, almost
unimaginable yet so clear before me, of the uncompromising ideals of
the atelier and the naive demands of the Oriental, with an unhappy
photographer caught between and wriggling. The situation was really
monstrous, the fatuous rejection of all that fine scheming and exquisite
manipulation, and it did not grow less so as Mr. Kauffer continued to
unfold it. Armour had not, apparently, proceeded to the scene of his
labours without instructions. In the pig-sticking delineation he had
been specially told that the Maharajah and the pig were to be in the
middle, with the rest nowhere and nothing between. Other injunctions
were as clear, and as clearly disregarded. Armour, like the Maharajahs,
had simply 'REfuse' to abandon his premeditated conceptions of how the
thing should be done. And here was the result, for the laughter of the
gods and anybody else that might see. I asked Kauffer unguardedly if no
sort of pressure could be brought to bear upon these chaps to make them
pay up. His face beaming with hope and intelligence, he suggested that
I should approach the Foreign Office in his behalf; but this I could not
quite see my way to. The coercion of native rulers, I explained, was a
difficult and a dangerous art, and to insist, for example, that one
of them should recognize his own complexion might be to run up a
disproportionate little bill of our own. I did, however, compound
something with Kauffer; I hope it wasn't a felony. 'Look here,' I said
to Kauffer, 'this isn't official, you know, in any way, but how would
it do to write that scamp Kandore a formal letter regretting that the
portrait does not suit him, and asking his permission to dispose of it
to me? Of course it is yours to do as you like with already, but that is
no reason why you shouldn't ask. I should like it, but the Porcha tiger
beat will do as well.'

Kauffer nearly fell upon my neck.

'That Kandore will buy it to put in one bonfire first,' he assured me,
and I sincerely hoped for his sake that it would be the case.

'Of course it's understood,' I bethought me to say, 'that I get it, if I
do get it, at Mr. Armour's price. I'm not a Maharajah, you know, and it
isn't a portrait of me.