..'
The words might have been written for Sir Evelyn Baring.
Though, as a rule, he found it easy to despise those with whom he
came into contact, he could not altogether despise General
Gordon. If he could have, he would have disliked him less. He had
gone as far as his caution had allowed him in trying to prevent
the fatal appointment; and then, when it had become clear that
the Government was insistent, he had yielded with a good grace.
For a moment, he had imagined that all might yet be well; that he
could impose himself, by the weight of his position and the force
of his sagacity, upon his self-willed subordinate; that he could
hold him in a leash at the end of the telegraph wire to Khartoum.
Very soon he perceived that this was a miscalculation. To his
disgust, he found that the telegraph wire, far from being an
instrument of official discipline, had been converted by the
agile strategist at the other end of it into a means of extending
his own personality into the deliberations at Cairo. Every
morning Sir Evelyn Baring would find upon his table a great pile
of telegrams from Khartoum--twenty or thirty at least; and as the
day went on, the pile would grow. When a sufficient number had
accumulated he would read them all through, with the greatest
care. There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before
him--in its incoherence, its eccentricity, its impulsiveness, its
romance; the jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah,
the whirl of contradictory policies--Sir Evelyn Baring did not
know which exasperated him most.
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