5

The Maharajah had his own army which although forbidden by law to carry firearms could still prove useful with sabres and the iron-bound bamboo staves, known as lâtees, with which most disputes among rival zemindars were traditionally settled. If it came to a fight whose side would the Maharajah’s troops be on? Of course they would be no match for the sepoys but they still might come in handy to frighten the badmashes in the bazaar. The Collector had to pay a routine visit to the opium factory some way out of Krishnapur and so it was decided that Fleury and Harry Dunstaple should accompany him for part of the way and pay a visit to the Maharajah’s palace which was not far from the opium factory...in normal circumstances a newcomer like Fleury might be expected to pay a casual visit of courtesy to the Maharajah to collect some exotic items of local colour for his diary, subsequently perhaps to be published under the title Highways and Byways of Hindustan, or something of that sort. At the same time the two young men might be able to see how the land lay with respect to the troops. It was, of course, out of the question to ask openly for the Maharajah’s support because such a question would imply a drastic lack of confidence. Besides, Harry, as a military man loyal to the General, could not have been expected to convey such a request. All the same, one never knew...perhaps the Maharajah’s son, Hari, whom Harry had met several times and who was a great favourite of the Collector’s might pledge this support without being asked.

At the last moment Fleury discovered that Miriam had been invited to accompany the party; it appeared that she had displayed a sudden interest in the workings of an opium factory and that the Collector had decided she should see one for herself. Fleury was obscurely displeased by this discovery.

“It may be perilous,” he grumbled.

“It certainly won’t be more perilous, dearest Dobbin, than remaining by myself in a bungalow surrounded by native servants who are scarcely known to us,” replied Miriam with a smile. “Besides, I shall be in the company of Mr Hopkins. Surely that is protection enough.”

“In Calcutta you said he had taken leave of his senses.”

“On the contrary, sir, it was you who said that.”

Fleury had noticed before that his sister seemed to become more animated in the Collector’s presence and he suspected her of some flirtatious design. While they were waiting for the Collector’s carriage to call for them he noticed further that Miriam was wearing her favourite bonnet, which she seldom wore merely in his own company. His sense of propriety was offended, as indeed it often was, but more by Miriam’s opinions than by her behaviour. Although adventurous in some respects, Fleury had rather strict ideas about how his elder sister should behave. But he could find nothing precisely to accuse her of. Regulating Miriam’s behaviour was made even more difficult by the fact that she had, to a large extent, supervised his own childhood. “And don’t call me ‘Dobbin’,” he added crossly as an afterthought.

Ahead, the sun was rising above the rim of the plain into the dust-laden atmosphere. The Collector was in an expansive mood again: the motion of the open landau, the coolness and beauty of the morning filled him with confidence. He set himself to explain to Fleury about the character of rich natives: their sons were brought up in an effeminate, luxurious manner. Their health was ruined by eating sickly sweetmeats and indulging in other weakening behaviour. Instead of learning to ride and take up manly sports they idled away their time girlishly flying kites. Everything was for show with your rich native...he would travel the countryside with a splendid retinue while at home he lived in a pigsty. But fortunately, young Hari, the Maharajah’s son, had been educated by English tutors and was a different kettle of fish. To this information Harry Dunstaple added gruffly: “You have to be careful thrashing a Hindu, George, because they have very weak chests and you can kill them...Father says it’s a thinness of the pericardium.” Fleury murmured his thanks for this warning, indicating that he would do his best to hold himself back from the more fatal blows...but he privately hoped that the situation would not arise. He was still having difficulty adapting himself to his new “broad-shouldered” character.

In due course they turned off their road on to another track which ran between fields of mustard, shining yellow and green. Ahead of them what looked like a mountain of dried mud shimmered over a scanty jungle of brush and peepul trees; the Collector uttered a grunt of pleasure: evidently the sight of so much mud reminded him of his own “mud walls”. As they got nearer, the mountain of mud transformed itself into high, shabby walls, unevenly battlemented. The track led towards massive wooden gates, bound and studded in iron, set between square towers of mud and plaster. These towers were not solid, Fleury noticed as the landau passed between them, but hollow and three-sided with an open floor of rafters built halfway up. The hollowed-out space seethed with soldiers, some practically naked, others amazingly uniformed like Zouaves with blue tunics and baggy orange trousers and armed to the teeth with daggers and clubs. Many of the more naked of the soldiers were still reclining, however, on the straw mattresses which covered the floor.

“Rabble,” said Harry with a superior smile. “Our Adjutant, Chambers, says they’re no more use in a fight than the chorus at Covent Garden. Over there is where the so-called Prime Minister lives.” The building indicated by Harry was in the French style with balconies and shuttered windows. It had an abandoned air.

They had passed into an outer courtyard, in the centre of which was a derelict fountain and a plot of grass where a hoopoe dug busily with its long beak. Pieces of wood, old mattresses and broken cartwheels lay around. To the left, between low buildings which might have been stables, stood another archway leading to the Maharajah’s apartments. They proceeded through into the next courtyard and halted by some stone steps to allow the young men to alight. Then the landau turned in a wide circle and bore the two silhouetted heads, one wearing a pith helmet, the other a bonnet, back towards the arches, beneath which they presently vanished.

Fleury and Harry had promptly been surrounded by a swarm of servants in an extravagantly conceived but grimy livery; in the midst of this chattering throng they made their way along a stifling corridor, up another flight of steps and out on to a long stone verandah, where they at last felt a faint, refreshing breeze on their faces. Beside elaborately carved doors a guard in Zouave uniform dozed with his cheek against the shaft of a spear. Their host awaited them within, the servants explained, and they found themselves pushed forward in a gale of muffled giggles.

The room they were thus urged into proved to be a delightful place, with an atmosphere of coolness, light and space; three of its walls were of blood-coloured glass alternating with mirrors and arranged in flower-shaped wooden frames; outside, green louvred shutters deflected the sunlight. Chandeliers of Bohemian glass hung in a line across the middle of the room with himalayas of crystal climbing between the lipped candle-glasses. Along the fourth wall, which was solid rather than of glass, ran primitive portraits of several past maharajahs. These faces stared down at the two young Englishmen with arrogance and contempt...though really it was just one face, Fleury noticed, as he passed along, repeated again and again with varying skill and in varying head-dresses, composed of coal-black eyes which seemed to be all pupil, and fat, pale cheeks garnished with a wispy black beard and mustache.

Near a fireplace of marble inlaid with garnets, lapis lazuli and agate, the Maharajah’s son sat on a chair constructed entirely of antlers, eating a boiled egg and reading Blackwood’s Magazine. Beside the chair a large cushion on the floor still bore the impression of where he had been sitting a moment earlier; he preferred squatting on the floor to the discomfort of chairs but feared that his English visitors might regard this as backward.

“Hello there, Lieutenant Dunstaple,” he exclaimed, springing to his feet and striding forward to greet them, “I see you’ve been kind enough to bring Mr Fleury along...How splendid! How kind!” And he continued to give the impression of striding forward by a simulated movement which, however, only carried him a matter of inches towards his visitors and was a compromise between his welcoming nature, which urged him to advance and shake people warmly by the hand, and his status as the Maharajah’s heir, which obliged him to stand his ground and be approached. This mimed movement in the presence of inferiors entitled to some respect, which included all the British in India, had developed swiftly in the course of social contact with Europeans so that by now it had become not only quite unconscious, but also so perfect as utterly to destroy perspective. The result was that Fleury found himself having to advance a good deal further than he expected and arrived at his host somewhat off balance, his last few steps a succession of afterthoughts.

“Why did my dear friend Mr Hopkin not call to see me? I am hurt. You must tell him so. It’s most very unkind of him. How’s your wrist, Dunstaple?”

“A little better thank you,” Harry said, rather stiffly, as they crossed a rich, dusty carpet scattered here and there with ragged tiger skins. Nearer at hand Fleury was startled to see that the face of their host exactly resembled that of the score of portraits on the wall; the same fat, pale cheeks and glittering black eyes surmounted a plump body clad, not in Mogul robes, but in an ill-cut frock coat. He had been watching Fleury intently and now, seeing that he was about to open his mouth, broke in hastily: “No, please don’t call me ‘Highness’ or any of that nonsense. We don’t stand on ceremony in this day and age...Leave that sort of thing to Father...Just call me Hari...There are two Haris, eh? Well, never mind. How delightful. What a pleasure!”

Fleury said: “I hope we haven’t interrupted your breakfast, but I fear that we have.”

“Not in the least, old fellow. A boiled egg and Blackwood’s is the best way to begin the day. Now, come and sit down. I say, are you alright, Dunstaple?” For Harry, stepping forward, had given a rather odd lurch and had almost plunged on to one of the ragged tiger skins. His face, now they came to look at it, was as white as milk, though given a superficial tinge of colour by the bloodstained glass of the windows.

“It’s nothing. It’s just the heat. I shall be alright in a moment. Damned silly!”

“Correct!” cried Hari. “It’s nothing. You’ll be all right in twinkling. Come and sit down while I get the bearer to bring refreshment. Where is he the wretched fellow?” And he hurried to the door shouting.

In response to their master’s shouts more servants in grimy livery poured in, barefoot but in knee breeches, carrying two more chairs constructed of antlers; these they placed adjacent to Hari’s and to a small table supported by rhinoceros feet on which Hari had abandoned his half-eaten boiled egg. Tea was brought, and three foaming glasses of iced sugar cane juice, a delightful shade of dark green. Harry Dunstaple, looking a little green himself, rejected this delicious drink, but Fleury who loved sweet things and had never noticed the filth and flies that surround the pressing of sugar cane, drank it down with the greatest pleasure, and then admired the empty glass which was embossed with the Maharajah’s crest. Harry asked permission to undo the buttons of his tunic and with a shaking hand began to fumble with them.

“Sir, make yourself altogether as if in your home, I beg you! Bearer, bring more cushion.”

Cushions were arranged on the floor and Harry was persuaded to lie down. “Damned silly. Alright in a moment,” Fleury heard him mutter again, as he stretched out and closed his eyes.

“Bearer, bring tiger skin!” and a tiger skin was also stretched over Harry, but he kicked it aside petulantly. He was much too hot already without tiger skins. Fleury was very concerned by Harry’s sudden debility (could it be cholera?) and wondered aloud whether he should not take him back promptly to the cantonment and put him under his father’s care.

“Oh, Mr Fleury, it is much too damnably hot to travel now until evening.”

“They make such a frightful fuss,” muttered Harry without opening his eyes. “Just give me an hour or so and I shall be right as rain.” He sounded quite cross.

“Mr Fleury, Dunstaple will have refreshing repose here and during this time I shall show you palace. I call Prime Minister to watch Dunstaple and tell us if condition worsen.”

Harry’s groan of irritation at this further intervention was ignored and the Prime Minister was summoned. They waited for him in silence. When he at last appeared he proved to be a stooped, elderly gentleman, also wearing a frock coat but without trousers or waistcoat; he wore instead a dhoti, sandals, and on his head a peaked cap covered in braid like that of a French infantry officer. He evidently spoke no English for he put his palms together and murmured “ Namaste” in the direction of Fleury. He seemed unsurprised to find an English officer stretched on the floor.

There was a rapid exchange in Hindustani which ended in Hari gaily shouting: “Correct!” and taking Fleury by the arm; as they left the room the Prime Minister was sitting on the floor with his knees to his chin, staring introspectively at the supine Harry.

Once outside Hari brightened visibly. “Mr Fleury, dear sir, I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Collector, you know, Hopkin is my very good friend, most interested in advance of science. This English coat, sir, is it very costly? Forgive me asking but I admire the productions of your nation very strongly. May I feel the material? And this timepiece in pocket, a half hunter is it not called? English craftsmen are so skilled I am quite lost in admiration for, you see, here our poor productions are in no wise to be compared with them. Yes, I see you are looking at my coat which is also of English flannel, though bought in Calcutta, unfortunately, and cut by durzie from bazaar and not by your Savile Rows. Timepiece is purchased in London and not Calcutta also I think?”

“It was a present from my father.”

“Correct! From your father, you say. I have heard that fathers most frequently give to the sons who leave home the Holy Bible, your very sacred scripture of Christian religion, is that not the case? Did your father give you also Holy Bible when you came to India?”

“As a matter of fact the only book he gave me was Bell’s Life.”

“Your father gave you Bell’s Life? But is that not a sporting magazine? That is not sacred scripture? I do not understand why your father gave you this book instead of Holy Bible...Sir, please explain this to me because I do not understand in the smallest amount.” And Hari gazed at Fleury in bewilderment.

Meanwhile, they had moved on to an outer verandah overlooking the river and formed of the same mud battlements Fleury had noticed on the approach. It was the same river, too, which, after a few twists and turns, passed the lawn of the Residency six or seven miles away. But it was no cooler here; a gust of hot air as from the opening of an oven door hit Fleury in the face as he stepped out...the river, moreover, had shrunk away to a narrow, barely continuous stream on the far bank, leaving only a wide stretch of dry rubble to mark its course with here and there a few patches of wet mud. Half a dozen water buffaloes were attempting to cool themselves in this scanty supply of water.

“He didn’t give it me instead of the Bible,” explained Fleury, who had attempted the mildest of pleasantries and now regretted it. He added untruthfully, sensing that the situation required it: “He had already given me the Bible on a previous occasion.”

“Correct! Bell’s Life he gave you for pleasure. All is no longer ‘as clear as mud’. The Holy Bible it must be a very beautiful work, very beautiful. Religion I do enjoy very greatly, Mr Fleury, do you not also? Oh, it is one of the best things in life beyond shadows of doubt.” And Hari stared at Fleury with a smile of beatitude on his fat, pale cheeks. Fleury said: “Yes, how true! I’d never thought of it like that before. We should enjoy religion, of course, and ‘lift up our hearts’...of course we should.” He was surprised and touched by this remark of Hari’s and wondered why he had never thought of it himself. They were now pacing over a continuation of the verandah made of wooden planks, many of them loose, which spanned an interior courtyard...below were a number of buildings that might have been godowns or servants’ quarters; there was a well, too, and a man washing himself by it, and more servants in livery squatting with their backs to the mud wall of the palace. A peacock, feathers spread, was revolving slowly on the dilapidated roof of one of the buildings below and Hari, under a sudden impulse of warmth towards Fleury, pointed it out and said: “That is very holy bird in India because our God Kartikeya ride peacock. He was born in River Ganga as six little baby but Parvati, lady of Siva, she loved them all so very very dearly she embraced them so tight she squeezed into one person but with six face, twelve arm, twelve leg...‘and so on and so forth’, as my teacher used to say, Mr Barnes of Shrewsbury.” Hari closed his eyes and smiled with an expression of deep contentment, whether at the thought of Kartikeya or of Mr Barnes of Shrewsbury, it was impossible to say.

Fleury, however, glanced at him in dismay: he had forgotten for the moment just what sort of religion it was that Hari enjoyed...a mixture of superstition, fairy-tale, idolatry and obscenity, repellent to every decent Englishman in India. As if to underline this thought, the bearer who had served refreshments a little earlier suddenly appeared in the courtyard below. He held something in his hand as he laughed and exchanged a few words with the other servants and it flashed in the sunlight; he raised it, examined it casually, then dropped it on the flagstones where it shattered. Fleury was certain that it was the glass from which he himself had been drinking a little earlier.

They walked on, Fleury chilled by this trivial incident; how could one respond warmly to someone who regarded your touch as pollution? But Hari, on the other hand, had noticed nothing and was still thinking warmly of Fleury...how different he was from the stiff, punctilious Dunstaple! He could hardly bear to look at Dunstaple’s face: there was something obscene about blue eyes...In fact, that had been the only real drawback to Mr Barnes, for he too had had blue eyes.

“And so on and so forth,” he repeated with pleasure. “Mr Barnes has gone back to England. Perhaps you have made acquaintance with him? No? One year ago he wrote me letter from Shrewsbury. He is a very fine gentleman. I would like to ask special favour of you, Mr Fleury, sir. I would like to have pleasure of making daguerrotype of you, you see I am most very interested in science, sir. In Krishnapur I am only one who make daguerrotype and all who want picture come and see me. Mr and Mrs Hopkins, Collector and his bride, come to me, and many other married persons in cantonment. I have made pictures to send to England for absent brides and love ones. You also have bride in England, sir, I think? No? How is that? Your bride is perhaps no longer ‘in the land of the living’?” And Fleury was obliged to explain that so far he had not succeeded in capturing a bride...he had been unable to find one to suit his fancy. Hari’s brow puckered at this, for it was evident that Fleury was impeded from choosing a bride by being unable to find one suited to some special requirements of his own, beyond the usual ones of birth and dowry...but what these might possibly be he had not the faintest idea; in this matter Hari’s incomprehension was shared by Fleury’s own relations in Norfolk and Devon.

“Soon I make daguerrotype but first I show you my pater. Come with me please. At this hour when it is so very much hot he is usually to be found ‘in arms of Morpheus’ which means, I understand, that he is asleeping. It is best time to look at pater when he is asleeping...Correct!” and Hari, laughing cheerfully, led the way.

As they walked on through breathless mud corridors and climbed narrow stone steps Fleury found himself thinking again of Kartikeya, what a charming story, after all! Six babies pressed by love into one, there was surely no harm in such a pleasant fairy story.

They were now progressing through windowless inner apartments, dimly lit by blazing rags soaked in linseed or mustard oil and stuck on five-pronged torches. In the distance an oil lamp of blue glass cast a sapphire glow over a small, fat gentleman sprawled on a bed and clad only in a loin cloth; above the bed an immense jewelled and tasselled punkah swept steadily back and forth. A bearer stood beside the bed holding an armful of small cushions.

“Father is asleeping,” Hari explained softly. “He has blue light for asleeping, green light for awaking, red light for entertaining ladies, and so on and so forth. To make comfortable he has cushion under every joint of body...bearer watch him to place cushion under joint when he move.”

Hardly had Hari given this explanation when the Maharajah with a grunt kicked out one of his short, plump legs. Instantly cushions appeared under knee and ankle. Fleury could now see that the Maharajah’s face was yet another copy of the portraits he had seen earlier and of Hari himself. As he watched, the Maharajah’s mouth opened, stained red with betel, and he belched resonantly. “Father is breaking wind,” commented Hari. “Now come with me please, my dear Mr Fleury, and I shall show you many wonderful things. First and foremost, you would like perhaps to see abominable pictures?”

“Well...”

Hari spoke to one of the bearers who advanced with a cup containing blazing, oil-soaked rags on the end of a long, silver pole. He held this close to the wall and a large and disgusting oil-painting sprang out of the gloom. But Fleury found that the picture was such an intricate mass of limbs that he was quite unable to fathom what it was all about (though it was clearly very lewd indeed).

“Sir, shall I show you more disgraceful pictures? Very disgraceful indeed?”

“No thank you,” said Fleury, and then, not wanting to sound ungrateful, he added gruffly: “I’m afraid I’m not very well up in this sort of thing.”

“Correct! For a gentleman ‘well up’ in science and progress it is not in the least rather interesting. Come, I show you many other things.”

Suddenly there came what sounded like the lowing of a cow from the adjoining apartment; Hari frowned and spoke sharply to one of the servants, evidently to tell him to steer the animal in another direction, but already it was clattering towards them. “This is most backward,” muttered Hari. “I am sorry you have witnessed such a thing, Mr Fleury. My father should not be permitting it. Always in India cow here, cow there, cow everywhere!” The cow, alarmed by the servants, hastened forward and was only diverted at the last moment from charging the sleeping Maharajah. An elderly servant hurried after it with a large silver bowl.

“To catch dropping,” explained Hari as they moved on. “Here march of science is only just beginning, you understand.”

They now found themselves in the armoury, which turned out to contain not only arms of every imaginable sort but many other things as well. But Fleury could only stare with indifference and wish they could discuss religion or science or some such topic. He had some spying to do, too, on the Maharajah’s troops, better not forget that! He was unaware of Hari’s sensitive and vulnerable eyes devouring his every reaction to the objects he was being shown.

“This is not rather interesting at all,” apologized Hari with intensity. “This is spear-pistol. Shoot and stab one gentleman at the same time. When sharp point stabs gentleman breast, mechanism releases trigger, shoots gentleman also.”

“Good heavens,” said Fleury languidly.

“This big knife open out into four small knife, stab person four times.”

“Well...”

“And here is brass cannon which can be mounted on camel saddle. This is rather very dull also, don’t you think?” And Hari began to look rather annoyed.

“I think, Fleury, that you will not find this absorbing, too,” he pursued relentlessly, indicating a rack of flint-lock guns with extraordinarily long barrels which could be re-loaded from horseback without dismounting, a sporting rifle by Adams with a revolving magazine, a cap in the shape of a cow pat with a feather of gold tinsel sprouting from it which had belonged to Hari’s grandfather, and an ostrich egg.

Fleury stifled a yawn, which Hari unfortunately noticed but yet he continued as if unable to stop himself: “This is astrological clock, very complicated...The circle in centre shows zodiacal sign over which the sun pass once in year...From movement of this black needle which passes over circle in twenty-four hours the ascendant of horoscope can be ascertained. But I see that this miserable machine, which show also, I forget to add, phases of moon, sunrise and sunset, day of week, is not worthy of your attention also. Correct. It is all very humble and useless materials such as you do not have in London and Shrewsbury. Now, Fleury, I make daguerrotype.”

As soon as the landau had arrived at the opium factory the Collector handed Miriam over to Mr Rayne and vanished about his business in the neighbourhood. Mr Rayne then handed her over in turn to one of his deputies, Mr Simmons, and instructed him to show her the process by which opium is refined. Mr Simmons was a little younger, Miriam found, than her brother; he was a nice young man whose freckled skin was peeling seriously in several places. Not many ladies visited the factory and Mr Simmons, in any case, was unused to their company. His manner was excessively deferential and he blushed frequently for no apparent reason. In addition, he was very zealous in his explanations and allowed few details of the preparation of opium to escape Miriam’s notice. He conducted her round immense iron vats and invited her to peer at mysterious fermenting liquids...mysterious because although Miriam was told all about them, she discovered that Mr Simmons’s words slipped through her mind like fish through a sluice-gate the instant after he had spoken them...this was embarrassing and she had to be careful that he did not notice. But gradually it became clear that although Mr Simmons was overwhelmed by the superior qualities of the gentler sex, to the extent that a too personal smile or frown from her would have crushed him as easily as a moth beneath the sole of her shoe, he did not include the possibility of intelligence among these qualities. He did not expect to be understood or remembered from one instant to the next.

Miriam was content, however. The drowsy scent of the poppy hung everywhere in the hot darkness of the warehouses and lulled her senses. She felt wonderfully at peace and was sorry when at last the tour came to an end and she was taken to watch the workmen making the finished opium into great balls, each as big as a man’s head, which would be packed forty to a chest and auctioned in Calcutta. Each of these head-sized balls, explained Mr Simmons quietly but with the air of someone speaking his words into a high wind, would fetch about seventy-six shillings, while to the ryot and his family the Government paid a mere four shillings a pound. As he talked he nervously scratched his peeling wrists and brow while Miriam, diverted, sleepily tried to think of a sensible question and watched the falling flakes of skin drift to the ground.

When the Collector returned, Miriam smuggled a last yawn into her gloved hand, said goodbye to Mr Simmons and climbed back into the landau, which now had its hood raised against the sun. Mr Simmons blushed again and a few more flakes of skin drifted away. Miriam raised her gloved hand to wave and the yawn it was holding seemed to float away on the poppy-scented air. She would have liked to recommend a certain pomade to Mr Simmons but was afraid that in doing so she might crush him like a moth beneath her shoe. How sleepy she felt! If the Collector began to talk to her she would never be able to stay awake.

Before they had properly emerged from the jungle of scrub on to the road an incident occurred to revive her. A naked man suddenly stepped out on to the track they were following. He was tall and well built; in one hand he carried the trident of the devotee of Siva, in the other a brass pot containing smouldering embers. His hair and beard hung in untidy yellowish ropes over his bronzed body, almost as far as his male parts. In a moment the landau had creaked and swayed past him; the path was deeply rutted and they kept rising and falling, as if in a small boat breasting a succession of unexpected waves. The Collector could not help turning to Miriam sternly, shocked on her behalf...but Miriam’s cheeks had only pinkened slightly and she said with a faint smile: “You must tell me why such men do not wear clothes, Mr Hopkins. In winter they must surely feel the cold.”

“I believe that he must belong to a Hindu sect which has renounced the material world. Such men see their nakedness as a symbol of this renunciation and keep a fire constantly burning at their side to signify the burning up of earthly desires.” He added reluctantly: “One can’t help but admire the rigour with which they pursue their beliefs.”

“Even though they follow an erroneous path?”

“One has to admit, Mrs Lang, that few Christians follow the true one with as much zeal. Indeed, this renders the conversion of the native very difficult for beside this ascetic fervour he sees the Christian priest living in a comfortable house with a wife and family...and I fear he’s not impressed. Not only the clergyman but the whole Christian community must seem very dissolute to him, I’m afraid...What use is it if we bring the advantages of our civilization to India without also displaying a superior morality? I believe that we are all part of a society which by its communal efforts of faith and reason is gradually raising itself to a higher state...There are rules of morality to be followed if we are to advance, just as there are rules of scientific investigation...Mrs Lang, we are raising ourselves, however painfully, so that mankind may enjoy in the future a superior life which now we can hardly conceive! The foundations on which the new men will build their lives are Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops!...”

The Collector talked on and on but Miriam, soothed by the heat and the poppy fumes, cradled by the worn leather upholstery of the landau, found that her eyelids kept creeping down in spite of herself. Even when the Collector began to shout, as he presently did, about the progress of mankind, about the ventilation of populous quarters of cities, about the conquest of ignorance and prejudice by the glistening sabre of man’s intelligence, she could not manage to keep her eyes properly open.

And so, as the landau creaked away into the distance, dust pouring back from the chimneys of its wheels, the Collector’s shouts rang emptily over the Indian plain which stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction, and Miriam fell at last into a deep sleep.

In the meantime, although Fleury had not yet noticed it, Hari’s good humour had deserted him. He continued to point things out to Fleury...some embroidered rugs and parasols, and a collection of sea-shells, but he did so carelessly, as if it were of no importance to him whether or not Fleury found them of interest.

“You know also how to make daguerrotype, I suppose.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Not? Ah? But I thought all advance people...” Hari raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Hari,” said Fleury presently, and from his tone it was hard to tell whether he was breathless with excitement or was simply having trouble keeping up with his host, who was now bounding along a dim inner corridor at the greatest speed. “I say, I hope you don’t mind me calling you Hari, but I feel that we understand each other so well...”

The speed and gloom which attended their progress prevented Fleury from seeing Hari’s frostily raised eyebrow.

“Would you mind if we went a little slower? It’s fearfully hot.” But Hari appeared not to hear this request.

“Do we understand each other? Sit here, please.”

They had entered a whitewashed room giving on to the courtyard Fleury had seen earlier from above. No sooner had he stepped over the threshold than he was seized by a fit of coughing, for the air in here was laden with mercury vapour and a variety of other fumes no less toxic, emanating from crystals and solutions of chlorine, bromine, iodine, and potassium cyanide. On a table there was a mercury bath, a metal container in the shape of an inverted pyramid with a spirit lamp already burning beneath it. A camera box had been placed on an ornate metal stand, pointing at a chair by the window. Still coughing, Fleury was steered towards the chair and made to sit down; it had a rod at the back surmounted by an iron crescent for keeping the sitter’s head still. Fleury’s head was forced firmly back into it and some adjustments were made behind him, tightening two thin metal clamps which nestled in his hair above each ear.

“Of course we do, Hari,” said Fleury warmly, though rather stiffly because of the immobility of his head. “I can see you feel the same about all those not very useful things you have just been showing me as I feel about the sort of junk the Collector has in the Residency. What you and I object to is the emptiness of the life behind all these objects, their materialism in other words. Objects are useless by themselves. How pathetic they are compared with noble feelings! What a poor and limited world they reveal beside the world of the eternal soul!” Fleury paused, guiltily aware that he was indulging “feelings” once more. “As you were walking along just now pointing out how uninteresting everything was, I suddenly realized that it makes no difference that I was born in England and that you were born in India...Your ancestors have been taking an interest in just the same sort of irrelevant rubbish as mine have. D’you see what I mean?”

It was hard to tell whether Hari saw what he meant or not, for he merely grunted and fished in the pocket of his waistcoat for his watch; this was a gold watch, as it happened, but one would not have thought so, because Hari had spent so much time in the mercury-laden atmosphere of this room that both watch and chain had become coated with a white amalgam. He was frowning now as he picked up a copper plate coated with silver and began to polish it with soft leather and pumice, using slow, deliberate strokes parallel to the edges of the plate, first in one direction, then in the other.

“A spear that shoots someone as well as stabbing him? Ludicrous! And all these other things you have shown me, collections of this and that, sea-shells and carved ivory, disgraceful pictures, chairs made of antlers and astronomical clocks, d’you know what they remind me of?”

“No,” said Hari sullenly. He was now looking pale as well as angry, perhaps from his exertions or because he had inhaled too much mercury vapour...He was still polishing the silvered copper plate but had exchanged the leather for a pad of silk.

“They remind me of the Great Exhibition!”

“They had disgraceful pictures in Great Exhibition, I did not know?” said Hari, curious in spite of himself and slightly mollified by this comparison.

“No, of course not. But what I mean is that the Great Exhibition was not, as everyone said it was, a landmark of civilization; it was for the most part a collection of irrelevant rubbish such as your ancestors might well have collected.”

Hari winced at this reference to his ancestors and turned paler than ever; his polishing of the plate intensified. But Fleury did not notice. He was seething with excitement and would have sprung to his feet, gesticulating, had not his head been firmly wedged in the iron ring.

“Take the Indian Court in the Crystal Palace, it was full of useless objects. There were spears, a life-sized elephant with a double howdah, swords, umbrellas, jewels, and rich cloths...the very things you have just been showing me. In fact, the whole Exhibition was composed merely of collections of this and that, utterly without significance...There was an Observatory Hive...ah, the tedious comparisons that were made between mankind and the hive’s ‘quietly-employed inhabitants, those living emblems of industry and order.’!”

Hari, whose face remained stony and expressionless, had finished polishing; the plate no longer had a silver appearance but seemed black. He now had to focus the lens of the camera on Fleury.

“Take your hands off chest, Fleury,” he ordered, for Fleury was gripping his lapels and the movement of his breathing would undoubtedly blur the image.

“I’m afraid I’m not making myself very clear,” Fleury groaned; he had become carried away with his denunciation of materialism and was dizzy, moreover, with the heat and the fumes of chemicals and the pressure of the clamps on his skull. “What I mean is that collections of objects, whether weapons or sea-shells or a life-sized stuffed elephant, are nothing but distractions for people who have been unable to make a real spiritual advance.”

“And Science? Were there not many wonderful machines?”

“It’s true that the Agricultural Court was often full of bushy-whiskered farmers staring at strange engines...But reflect, these engines were merely improved methods for doing the wrong thing.”

“The wrong thing! I am sad, Fleury, that you should be so very backwards. These machines make more food, more money, save very much labour,” said Hari coldly and vanished under a tent of dark muslin hung over a frame in one corner of the room. An instant later his head reappeared from beneath the draped muslin, black eyes glittering in his pale, flabby face. “And this that I am doing to you at the moment, perhaps this is not progress also!” he demanded angrily. His head vanished again.

Fleury gazed at the muslin tent bewildered. He could hear Hari muttering angrily to himself as he made the metal plate sensitive to light by passing it through his two wooden coating boxes, which between them were largely responsible for the toxic fumes which Fleury could feel assailing his powers of reason. Each box contained a blue-green glass jar: in one jar there was a small amount of iodine crystals, in the other, a mysterious substance called “quickstuff” which contained bromine and chlorine compounds and served to increase the sensitivity of the plate. By holding the plate over the evaporating iodine crystals for less than a minute Hari allowed a thin layer of light-sensitive iodide of silver to form over it; when it had turned orange-yellow he held it over the “quickstuff” until it turned deep pink, then back over the iodine for a few seconds. Then, grinding his teeth with rage, he slipped the sensitized plate into a wooden frame to protect it from light while it was not in the camera, and emerged trembling from his dark muslin tent.

“Perhaps this is not progress also?” he repeated, waving the boxed plate in front of Fleury’s pinioned head in a threatening manner. “To make metal sensitive to light.”

“Yes, it is progress, of course...but, well, only in the art of making pictures. Mind you, that is no doubt wonderful in its way. But the only real progress would be to make a man’s heart sensitive to love, to Nature, to his fellow men, to the world of spiritual joy. My dear Hari, Plato did more for the human race than Monsieur Daguerre.”

Hari put the plate in the camera and pulled out the protective slide. “I beg you not to insult any more my ancestors nor this very worthy gentleman, Mr Daguerre.”

“Please don’t think I mean to insult them,” cried Fleury. “That’s the very last thing I want to do. It’s just that we must change the direction of our society before it’s too late and we all become like these engines which will soon be galloping across India on railway lines. An engine has no heart!”

“Keep still!” Hari, watch in hand, snatched the cap off the lens and by the look on his face he might have been wishing it was the muzzle of a cannon that was pointing at Fleury.

“Oh dear!” thought Fleury, “I seem to have offended him somehow.”

Hari counted off two minutes, replaced the lens cap, snatched out the plate and slipped it over the heated mercury bath. Fleury goggled at him, dismayed.

“I am very sad,” declared Hari with frosty dignity, “that you, Fleury, should reveal yourself so frightfully backward.”

He shook his head over the mercury bath with lofty distress. “This will be portrait of very backward man indeed, I am very much regretting to say.”

A discouraged silence fell between the two young men as they waited for the fine mercury globules to settle on the parts of the plate which had been affected by light. When this process had been accomplished Hari picked the plate up with a pair of pliers and poured over it a solution of hyposulphite of soda to wash off the unchanged iodide and make the image permanent; then, still holding it with pliers he washed it with a solution of gold chloride to increase the brilliance of the image. All that now remained to be done was to wash the plate in water, dry it over the spirit lamp, and put it into a frame behind glass for the image was as delicate as the wing of a butterfly and as easily harmed. This done, Hari sighed and took it over to show Fleury, whose head was still clamped in the ring. Hari’s anger had given way to sadness and disapproval.

“It looks as if it has been drawn by the brush of the fairy queen Mab,” said Fleury, hoping that this conceit would soothe Hari’s wounded feelings.

“It is the portrait of a very backward man indeed,” replied Hari severely. And with that he turned and trudged out of the room with heavy steps, leaving Fleury to free himself from the clamps as best he could.

6

The river which flowed, when there was any water in it, past the Maharajah’s palace to wander here and there on the vast and empty plain passed alongside the cantonment and the now yellow lawns of the Residency, beneath the iron bridge, along the native town (which had been built, unlike the cantonment mainly on the western bank so that the devout would be facing the rising sun as they stood on the steps of the bathing ghat ), past the burning ghat, and out on to the plain again, reaching at long last, some eight miles from Krishnapur, a stretch of half a mile where it ran between embankments. At this point the plain ceased to be quite flat. There was a slight depression in it of four or five miles in circumference, made by the footprint of one of the giant gods who had strode back and forth across India in prehistoric times settling their disputes and hurling pieces of the continent at one another. The land was particularly fertile here, either because it had been blessed by the footprint, as the Hindus believed, or, as the British believed, because it was regularly flooded and coated with a nourishing silt.

This flooding, though, was a nuisance and it grew worse every year because of the attrition of the embankments. Cattle were drowned and crops lost. To stop the flooding by reinforcing the embankments was the great ambition of both the Collector and the Magistrate. While the Collector had been visiting the opium factory the Magistrate, accompanied by his bearer, Abdallah, had ridden out of Krishnapur to visit the embankments and consult the landowners whose coolies would be needed for the work of reinforcement. Why go to so much trouble when the river could be persuaded not to flood by the sacrifice of a black goat on its banks, the landowners had wanted to know.

“But that doesn’t work. You’ve tried it before. Every year the floods are worse.”

The landowners remained silent out of polite amazement that anybody could be so stupid as to doubt the efficacy of a sacrifice when properly performed by Brahmins. They were torn between amusement and distress at such obtuseness.

“The Sircar will make you supply labour,” declared the Magistrate at last, but he knew that the Government could do no such thing in the present state of the country, and the landowners knew that he knew. The hollowness of this threat embarrassed them. To spare the Magistrate’s feelings they feigned expressions of sorrow, alarm, of despair at the prospect of this coercion...but when the Magistrate had at last ridden away, though not before he was out of earshot, they shouted with laughter, held their sides, and even rolled in the dust in undignified glee. Their glee redoubled when soon after the Magistrate’s departure they heard that there had been a massacre of the feringhees at Captainganj. Then an argument broke out which began playfully but soon became serious, involving prestige. The argument was this: would the Magistrate get back to Krishnapur alive or would he be killed on the way?

The Magistrate and Abdallah (who, although he enjoyed seeing Mr Willoughby discomfited, was saddened that it should be Hindus who gained an advantage over him) rode slowly back to the cantonment. The Magistrate ignored the heat of the sun which beat down on his pith helmet and touched off his blazing ginger whiskers. How he hated stupidity and ignorance! He hoped that the river, when it broke its banks again this year, would drown the stupid men he had just been talking to...but he knew that this was not likely: when disasters occur it is only the poor who suffer. Abdallah wanted to cheer up the Magistrate by telling him a Mohammedan joke against the Hindus.

“Sahib, why are the crocodiles in Krishnapur so fat?” The Magistrate rode on without answering.

“Because they eat up all the sins which Hindus wash off in the river!” And Abdallah laughed loudly so that Mr Willoughby would know that it was a joke.

Later in the afternoon the Collector and the Magistrate sat together in the Collector’s study and the Magistrate described the result of his journey. By now it was the late afternoon. When he had finished both men sat in discouraged silence. The Collector was thinking: “Even after all these years in India Willoughby doesn’t understand the natives. He’s too rational for them. He can’t see things from their point of view because he has no heart. If I had been there they would have listened to me.” Aloud he said: “The river will have to flood again this year then, Tom. But immediately the flooding is over we’ll tackle the embankments before they have time to forget that their wretched black goat didn’t work.”

The study was the Collector’s favourite room; it was panelled in teak and contained many beloved objects. The most important of these was undoubtedly The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice, a bas-relief in marble by the window; it was here that the angle of the light gave most life to the brutish expression of Ignorance at the moment of being disembowelled by Truth’s sabre, and yet emphasised at the same time how hopelessly Prejudice, on the point of throwing a net over Truth, had become enmeshed in its own toils. There was another piece of sculpture beside his desk: Innocence Protected by Fidelity by Benzoni, representing a scantily clothed young girl asleep with a garland of flowers in her lap; beside her a dog had its paw on the neck of a gagging snake which had been about to bite her.

Yet Art did not hold sway alone in the Collector’s study for on one corner of the desk in front of him there stood a tribute to scientific invention; he had come across it during those ecstatic summer days, now as remote as a dream, which he had spent in the Crystal Palace. It was the model of a carriage which supplied its own railway, laying it down as it advanced and taking it up again after the wheels had passed over. So ingenious had this invention seemed to the Collector, such was the enthusiasm it had excited at the Exhibition, that he could not fathom why six years should have passed away without one seeing these machines crawling about everywhere.

Beside the model carriage stood another ingenious invention, a drinking glass with compartments for soda and acid following separate channels; the idea was that the junction of the two streams should come just at the moment of entering the mouth, causing effervescence. The Collector had only once attempted to use it; all the same, he admired its ingenuity and had grown fond of it, as an object. “The trouble with poor Willoughby,” he mused now, surreptitiously observing the face of his companion and noting, as far as the now cinnamon whiskers permitted, how it was raked, harrowed, even ploughed up by free-thinking and cynicism, “is that he’s not a whole man, as I am...For science and reason is not enough. A man must also have a heart and be capable of understanding the beauties of art and literature. What a narrow range the man has!” The Collector’s mood of self-satisfaction, which had been brought on by his agreeable conversation with the pretty Mrs Lang, deepened as he strolled to the window and saw the mosque three or four hundred yards away, for the mosque was a perfect example of what was right with himself and wrong with the Magistrate.

The Magistrate had argued that if there was going to be trouble it could not be allowed to remain there...its narrow windows commanded the Residency completely; beside it stood some mud hovels which were less of a problem: a few well-aimed shot should reduce them to powder which the next breeze would blow away. What the Magistrate in the blindness of his rationalism failed to appreciate was the spiritual importance of the mosque; the Mohammedans would be outraged if it were demolished and with every justification. The Collector could not afford to alienate the Mohammedans, who were generally considered to be the most loyal section of the native population, and besides, a member of a civilized society does not go around knocking down places of worship, even those belonging to a different faith from his own. The Collector frowned, annoyed with himself. He should have thought of the second reason first.

“He surely can’t be paying us another visit already,” grumbled the Magistrate, unaware of the unfavourable judgement which had been passed on his character a few moments earlier in the Collector’s mind.

At the window they both listened to the familiar thud of hoofs and jingle of harness which announced the arrival of the General and his sowars from Captainganj.

“Damn the fellow!” sighed the Collector. “I expect he’s come to sneer at my ramparts again.” But even as he spoke he saw the cluster of riders rein up in front of the Residency and realized that something was amiss. The General, instead of waiting to be lifted, had plunged forward over the horse’s head and slithered to the ground. And there he continued to lie until the sowars came to pick him up. But the glare even at this time of day was still so intense that the Collector, looking out from the semi-darkness of his study, could not be sure that he had actually seen what he had just seen...The sudden shouting and commotion that echoed immediately afterwards from the hall left him in little doubt, however.

As he stepped outside on to the portico the light and heat smote him, causing him to falter and put a hand on the wrought-iron railing, which he snatched away instantly, his fingers seared. He waited at the top of the stairs and watched then, as the sowars came towards him carrying the General. Blood was running freely from the General’s body and splashing audibly on to the baked earth. The sowars were evidently trying to stop the flowing of blood by holding him first one way, then another, as someone eating toast and honey might try, by vigilance and dexterity, to prevent it dripping. The General’s blood continued to patter on the earth, however, and all the way up the steps and into the hall where he was laid down at last, after some hesitation, on a rather expensive carpet.

Even when he had at last succeeded in freeing himself from the metal clamps Fleury was by no means sure how to find his way back to the room where he had left Harry stretched on the floor. He started tentatively through a dim series of naked, malodorous chambers; his head was still singing from the combined effect of the clamps and the mercury fumes. Presently he came to the end of the connecting rooms and was faced with a crumbling staircase. He climbed it impatiently and found himself in another chamber as empty as the one he had just left. The air was better here, however, and there were a number of windows screened by intricately carved marble...in one corner of the ceiling there was the bulging, basket-like growth of a bee’s nest. Beyond the window was a verandah, part of which was shaded by lattice curtains and here a number of the Maharajah’s servants were drowsing on charpoys in a long row like the Forty Thieves, their liveries piled untidily beside them. They paid no attention to Fleury as he passed.

The heat and glare were stupendous; the countryside lay motionless in the grip of heat and light and somehow it had taken on the appearance of an Arctic landscape. From where he stood there was nothing but white or grey to be seen: there was the same dim, lurid sky, beneath which clouds of dust resembled driving snow. Returning his eyes to the shade of the verandah Fleury continued to see a grove of leafless sal trees imprinted on his retina like the bars of a glowing furnace.

He heard the sound of rapid footsteps and turning the next corner almost collided with Harry Dunstaple who demanded: “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. There’s been a disturbance at Captainganj and Father sent his sais with a message to warn us...We must get back to the cantonment immediately.”

Over Harry’s shoulder Fleury saw the Prime Minister hastening towards them. In spite of the physical effort he was making his face still wore an expressionless, introverted look.

“The blighter’s been following me everywhere,” Harry muttered with exasperation. “I’ve no idea what he wants. Go away !” he added loudly as the Prime Minister scampered up.

“I think he was told to keep an eye on you in case your illness got worse. How are you feeling, by the way?”

“Oh, right as rain.” But Harry’s face was still pale and beaded with sweat, nevertheless. “Where’s His Highness? We must leave immediately.”

The sepoys had mutinied and attacked their officers on parade, Harry explained as they set off to find the courtyard where the sais was waiting with horses for them. Nobody knew yet how serious it was. “It’s damnable,” he added. “I came out here without a pistol.” And Fleury realized from the tone of his voice that Harry, finding himself unarmed, was suffering not from fear but from disappointment. Here was a possibility of some action at last and he was going to miss it!

With Harry aggressively striding out in the lead they clattered rapidly through another series of chambers, empty except for an occasional servant asleep on the floor. There was no sign either of Hari or of the Maharajah, but the Prime Minister continued to dodge along introvertedly behind them. They came at last, by a stroke of luck, to the door by which they had originally entered the palace. Stepping outside, they were again struck by an oven-draught of hot air.

The sais who had come to warn them was now asleep in the shade of the wall and it took some moments to rouse him. The Prime Minister, his sacred thread just visible beneath his frock coat, squatted mutely on his heels at a distance and observed them in an impartial manner. He was still sitting there when at last they rode away. As the sun shone fully on Harry’s scarlet tunic, which he had re-buttoned in readiness for any military engagements which might present themselves, its colour intensified until it was almost impossible to look at with the naked eye. Then they were cantering through the outer gates where the Maharajah’s army, on which the Collector had earlier been pinning some hopes, still seemed to be in a state of repose, very much as it had been earlier.

7

Picture a map of India as big as a tennis court with two or three hedgehogs crawling over it...each hedgehog might represent one of the dust-storms which during the summer wander aimlessly here and there over the Indian plains, whirling countless tons of dust into the atmosphere as they go...until the monsoon rolls in and squashes them flat. Because there was a dust-storm in the vicinity it seemed, and was, much darker than usual. This darkness could not help but be associated with the terrible massacre at Captainganj; even the Collector, who had gone up on to the roof to be alone and had found the stars blotted out, caught himself thinking so.

Harry and Fleury had spent the late afternoon riding about the country warning indigo planters to come into the Residency. When they returned to the cantonment for the second time they found their way obstructed by abandoned carriages and hackeries; such a panic had taken place that the road to the Residency had become jammed with vehicles and people had been obliged to continue on foot, bringing what possessions they could with them or having them carried by coolies on their heads.

In the darkness of the Residency drive, which was lit only by a flaring torch on the portico, the silhouettes of men and horses thrashed and wrestled with boxes, bundles, and mysterious unnameable objects which they clung to with desperate tenacity; it was as if they were struggling up to their waists through a swamp of pitch towards the solitary, dancing flame of the Residency. Curiously enough, they struggled in almost total silence except for laboured breathing and an occasional strained whisper.

Those who managed to win through this slough of darkness and despair found themselves in the hall, which more resembled purgatory than Heaven, and was crowded with ladies and children who sat huddled on trunks and boxes. They stared about them with that wide-eyed, alert look which people have during emergencies but which is really the result of shock; if you spoke to one of these alert-looking ladies she would have difficulty understanding you.

Almost five hours had passed since the General had dived bleeding from his horse, thereby conceding the weakness of his arguments. During this time the Collector had hardly for a moment stopped giving orders. At first he had found it difficult because the refugees were stunned; even when he shouted no one paid any attention to him. So he had changed his tactics: he had assembled all the young lieutenants and ensigns who had managed to escape unhurt from Captainganj (for once the senior officers had borne the brunt of the slaughter) together with half a dozen civilian officials. With this retinue at his heels he had stalked about the Residency doing his best to impose order on chaos, organizing a skeleton defence for the “mud walls”, allocating rooms for the women and children, sending out parties of loyal Sikhs to patrol the cantonment. All these orders he murmured to the dazed young men around him and, curiously enough, the quieter his tone, the more greedily his orders were swallowed and the more hastily executed. Soon he was barely whispering his commands.

Now, on the roof, all was quiet except for that laboured breathing, the crunching of gravel and the creaking of wheels that filtered up from the struggling mass in the darkness below. The Collector cursed them silently. Why had they to bring their useless possessions? Already the rooms and corridors of the Residency were shrinking with the deposit of furniture, boxes, and bric à brac. He knew now that he should have forbidden everything except food and weapons...but in their place, ah, could he have brought himself to leave behind his statues, his paintings, his inventions?

On his way to the roof he had looked into his bedroom. The General lay in a coma in the dressing-room; his whistling breath could be heard through the half open door and the Collector could just glimpse the nimbus of mosquito net which enveloped him. Miriam and Louise Dunstaple were watching together beside his cot now that Dr Dunstaple had gone to aid Dr McNab in treating the other wounded who had escaped from Captainganj.

Presently the stars began to appear and the night became brighter. Some time later, the Magistrate joined him on the roof.

“Thank heavens they got away with some cannons, Tom,” said the Collector.

The Magistrate made no reply except to sigh and peer over the balustrade at the seething mass of men and possessions below. It was evident that he did not think that cannons would make any difference. Nevertheless, enough men had escaped from Captainganj to make a useful force. Two dozen British officers of native regiments, twice that number of English private soldiers, and the majority of the Sikh cavalry, numbering over eighty men; add to that at least a hundred European civilians, either Company officials or planters and, finally, a large but as yet undetermined number of Eurasians. Perhaps there would also be a handful of loyal sepoys. But all the same the Magistrate was right: against the vast numbers that the rebel sepoys were capable of marshalling the Residency force was insignificant.

Now the moon rose and other gentlemen began to appear on the roof. Among the first was Dr Dunstaple who seemed in surprisingly good spirits and was anxious to tell the Collector an amusing story about Dr McNab. An hour or two earlier, while the two doctors had been working together to sew up a young ensign, McNab had suddenly asked him if he had heard of the native way to staunch wounds...a way which he was, he said, eager to try out for himself. “‘And what’s that, McNab?’ says I. ‘It’s this,’ says he...” and here, although McNab had barely a trace of Scottish accent, Dr Dunstaple set himself to imitate him in an exaggerated and amusing way. “‘Hae ye no hairrd o’ burtunga ants, Dunstaple?’ ‘As a matter of fact, McNab,’ says I, ‘I cannot say that I have ever heard burtunga ants mentioned in the entire course of my existence.’ ‘Och, then, lesten to this, laddie,’ says he. It seems that the little beggars have large and powerful jaws. What you have to do, he tells me, is to press together the lips of the wound and place the ants on it at intervals. They bite immediately. The necks are then snipped off and the bodies fall to the ground leaving the edges of the wound firmly held by the heads and jaws. ‘Och, Dunstaple, I hae foond me a naist o’ the wee baisties and I shall see for maeself ere long.”’ And Dr Dunstaple laughed heartily at the thought and repeated: “Hae ye no hairrd o’ burtunga ants, Dunstaple?”

When Harry Dunstaple and Fleury came up on to the roof the Doctor, failing to notice that neither the Collector nor the Magistrate were enjoying it, insisted on repeating the anecdote about McNab, adding that all the time Ensign Smith had been listening with his face as grey as porridge, expecting McNab to produce his ants then and there. It was something for Fleury to put in his book about Progress, he chuckled...the strides that medicine was making in India.

By this time Fleury and Harry, though each still considered himself privately to have nothing in common with the other, had become firm friends. It so happened that they had had an adventure together; they had had to ride all the way back to Krishnapur unarmed through mutinous countryside and then the Collector had sent them out again to warn indigo farmers...and at one point they had heard what had sounded mighty like a musket shot which, although not very near, might or might not have been fired in their direction but, they decided, probably had been. Harry clung to this adventure, such as it was, all the more tenaciously when he found that because of his sprained wrist he had missed an adventure at Captainganj.

Those of his peers who had escaped with life and limb from the Captainganj parade ground did not seem to be thinking of it as an adventure, those who had managed to escape unhurt were now looking tired and shocked. And they seemed to be having trouble telling Harry what it had been like. Each of them simply had two or three terrible scenes printed on his mind: an Englishwoman trying to say something to him with her throat cut, or a comrade spinning down into a whirl-pool of hacking sepoys, something of that sort. To make things worse, one kept finding oneself about to say something to a friend who was not there to hear it any more. It was hard to make any sense out of what had happened, and after a while they gave up trying. Of the score of subalterns who had managed to escape, the majority had never seen a dead person before...a dead English person, anyway...one occasionally bumped into a dead native here and there but that was not quite the same. Strangely enough, they listened quite enviously to Harry talking about the musket shot which had “almost definitely” been fired at himself and Fleury. They wished they had had an adventure too, instead of their involuntary glimpse of the abattoir.

It was much cooler on the roof. The moon hung, soft and brilliant, above the cantonment trees and the dust in the atmosphere caused it to shine with a curious dream-like radiance which Fleury had never seen before outside India. In its light he could make out figures huddled on bedding, for a number of gentlemen had found it too hot to sleep without punkahs in the interior of the building and had come up here. Others were standing and talking together in low tones. Presently the Padre’s voice rose above them, reciting the Prayer in Time of Wars and Tumults...“Save and deliver us we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies; abate their pride, assuage their malice and confound their devices; that we, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved ever more from all perils, to glorify thee, who art the only giver of victory...”

A weird, melancholy cry started up now, echoing over the moonlit hedges and tamarinds and spreading like a widening ripple over the dark cantonment. Beside Fleury, the Magistrate said: “Listen to the jackals...The natives say that if you listen carefully you hear the leader calling ‘ Soopna men raja hooa...‘ which means ‘I am the king in the night’...and then the other jackals reply: ‘ Hooa! hooa! hooa!’ ‘You are! you are! you are!”’ Fleury could make out nothing at first, but later, as he was falling asleep it seemed to him that he could, after all, hear these very words. Below, the last refugees had now struggled out of the darkness with their burdens and all was quiet. At last Fleury fell asleep, and as he slept, a fiery beacon lit up the cantonment, and then another, and another.

The Collector awoke to a pleasant smell of wood-smoke, which for some reason reminded him of Northumberland where he had spent his childhood. He had slept in his clothes, of course, and had woken once or twice as people came through his bedroom to attend to the General. He had had a nightmare, too, in which he had found himself struggling to free himself from a stifling presence that had wrapped itself round him like a shroud. But he had slept well, on the whole, and felt refreshed. He had Miriam to thank for that because, while watching by the General’s beside she had made it her business politely to discourage all those who wanted to wake the Collector to tell him that the cantonment was burning, as if there was anything he could do about it. As soon as he was properly awake, however, she told him what the pleasant smell was.

In any case, it was by no means the whole cantonment which had burned; the watchers on the roof had only counted five or six different fires, and the majority of these were of already deserted bungalows, inhabited only by the ghosts of magnificent company officials. The other bungalows still for the most part had their servants to protect them, however tepidly. More important, the sepoys were still at Captainganj, arguing among themselves as to whether it would be best to sack the cantonment or to march straight to Delhi to restore the Emperor. It was said that the sepoys were also sending a horseman to Saint Petersburg to acquire the assistance of the King of Russia whom they believed would be sympathetic to their cause.

Before the morning grew too hot the Collector summoned the Magistrate to the roof to plan the defence of the enclave. The Residency was the most solid as well as the most imposing building in the cantonment. It stood, together with Dr Dunstaple’s house, the Church and the Cutcherry, in a compound of several acres which was roughly three-sided. Against one of these three sides the native town abutted in the shape of a handful of not very substantial mud houses and, of course, of the mosque which the Magistrate, blinded by rationalism, had been so anxious to destroy.

“We’ll establish a battery in the flowerbeds down there to protect us against attack from the native town,” said the Collector. He saw the Magistrate shift his gaze to the mosque and knew what he was thinking. He himself, as it happened, was coming to see the mosque less as a sign of his own largeness of mind than as a source of trouble to the cannons in the flower-beds. However, the Magistrate made no comment and together they crossed the roof. From here they could see the cantonment spread out in the shape of a fan, roughly bisected by the Mall, where in peaceful times Europeans took their evening stroll; anywhere else it was considered undignified to be seen on foot. The line of tamarinds which gave it shade came to an end on the far side of the cantonment at the old parade ground, long since abandoned, perhaps fortunately, for a better site at Captainganj.

“Tom, I want you to pick the men you need and establish a battery behind the Cutcherry rampart. You’ll command it with Lieutenant Peterson to advise you. We’ll need another battery in front of Dunstaple’s house. I intend to put Lieutenant Cutter in charge there. At the ramparts in between the batteries we’ll establish pickets every few yards with rifles and bayonets. In the meantime we must do what we can to build them up higher.”

“What about the river?”

Again they crossed the roof. Below them the barren lawns stretched away towards the river; on its far bank lay melon beds, rich green contrasting pleasantly in that glaring landscape of whites and greys with the bright yellow of the melons. These melons, the Collector knew, were only eaten by the very poorest natives in Krishnapur and by one other person, namely the Magistrate himself who during the hot weather liked to scoop out the pips, pour in a bottle of claret, and then dip his ginger whiskers into the cool mixture of wine and juice. “A sad example,” thought the Collector with pity, “of the eccentricity to which men living by themselves are subject. Thank heaven that I myself have been spared such peculiar habits.”

Aloud he said, “An attack from this direction isn’t likely in my opinion. The ground beyond the ramparts is open for quite a distance. The only cover is the near bank of the river and that must be a good three hundred yards away. On the far bank the ground rises and they can’t approach unobserved. But above all there’s the banqueting hall. They’d be mad to attack that.”

The banqueting hall stood on a rise in the ground which corresponded to the hill beyond the melon beds. It was a solid building, not much used any longer. In design it was an unhappy mixture of Greek and gothic; the six pillars of its façade were an echo of the six imposing pillars of its illustrious parent, East India House in Leadenhall Street. Inside there was wood panelling, a great baronial fireplace complete with inglenooks, and even a minstrel gallery. It possessed stained-glass windows, too, but perhaps the most surprising pieces of ornament were outside, the four giant marble busts of Greek philosophers which gazed out over the plain from each corner of the roof.

“They might attack there even so,” said the Magistrate doubtfully.

“If they do, so much the better.” Through modesty the Collector had failed to mention the final attribute which rendered the banqueting hall utterly impregnable, for it was here that he had allowed the books he was reading on fortification to influence the plan of his “mud walls”. He had chosen the simple and traditional tenaille trace: a system of flanks and faces arranged something like the points of a star to cover each other so that, at least in theory, there was no angle at which the rampart might be attacked without the risk of cross-fire. Of course, once past the banqueting hall these elaborate fortifications petered out again into the same wandering line that followed the prickly pear of the compound wall and which might well be contemptuously dismissed by a military man as “mud walls”.

“We’ll put Major Hogan in charge to keep him quiet. And we’ll give them a six-pounder, though I don’t suppose they’ll find much use for it. Now we’d better get down and set up those batteries while we still have the chance.”

Major Hogan was a rather muddled and peppery old fellow who was generally considered to have been too long in the East. The garrison under his command was composed of Harry Dunstaple (relegated there until his wrist was properly mended), a couple of portly Sikhs, half a dozen very elderly native pensioners who had loyally presented themselves on hearing of the Company’s difficulties, a taciturn man from the Salt Agency called Barlow and, lastly, Fleury. Major Hogan, as it happened, was the only officer over the rank of lieutenant to have survived the slaughter at Captainganj. He might have laid claim to the military command of the whole enclave but had not done so...Years had passed since he had last taken any serious interest in his profession.

Although disappointed to be posted to the safest place inside the enclave, Harry swallowed his feelings and set to work to improve the Collector’s fortifications. Soon Fleury was hard at work too, sitting in the shade of a Greek pillar and directing the native pensioners who came tottering up from the river bed with boulders where to put them. But Fleury had little stamina and presently this tedious job became too much for him; so he sauntered away in a rather unmilitary fashion. Harry would have reprimanded him, because one cannot have a soldier, even an amateur soldier like Fleury, leaving his post whenever he gets bored, but Harry had just received delivery of his six-pounder and could think of little else...it was made of brass and he had set his two Sikhs to polishing it. Brass cannons are lighter than iron but gunners who knew their business, like Harry, preferred them because they were less likely to burst. But brass does have a disadvantage, too. If a great number of shots are fired the muzzle becomes distorted into an ellipse from the shot constantly hammering upwards against its rim, and then loading becomes difficult or impossible. But several hundred shots would have to be fired before this happened, which would take weeks or months of siege warfare...and there was no question of the garrison at Krishnapur having to hold out for more than a few days, while help was sent from Barrackpur or Dinapur. So Harry had no need to worry about that.

Fleury had wandered over to the Residency hoping to find someone to have a chat with, perhaps even Louise if he were lucky...but everything was in turmoil. All the men were working in a frenzy to throw more earth on to the ramparts before the sepoys had a chance to attack...they did not even appear to see Fleury standing there amiably in his Tweedside lounging jacket. And where the women were, heaven only knew...though he would not have been surprised to learn that they were organizing something else, somewhere else. Fleury wandered away, feeling unwanted. At the Church, there was more feverish activity; a difference of opinion was taking place because the Collector had ordered food, powder and shot to be stored in the Church; the Padre and some members of his congregation were entertaining serious doubts about the propriety of this. But while the more spiritual were entertaining doubts, the military were shifting the stores. Fleury watched the great earthenware jars containing grain, rice, flour and sugar being carried into the Church and arranged in rows at the back.

When he returned to the banqueting hall he found Harry behaving rather oddly. He was gazing in a trance at the brass cannon and running his fingers over its soft, hairless, metal skin. It might have been a naked young girl the way Harry was looking at it. He gave a start when he heard Fleury approach, however, and slapped the chase in a more manly fashion.

“Look here, Harry, you must tell me all about cannons. To begin with, what’s this thing like a door-knob on the end for?”

“That’s the cascable,” muttered Harry, taken aback. He could see that Fleury was not going to be such a success as he had hoped.

“Sometimes, Tom, I wonder that I am not an atheist myself!”

It was the Collector who had uttered this heartfelt cry. He and the Magistrate were standing in the vernacular record room of the Cutcherry; from outside there came the steady clinking of spades as a detachment of English private soldiers, the remainder of the General’s “odds and ends” on their way to Umballa, threw gravel against the outer wall.

The Collector was displeased; he had just had to arbitrate a dispute over the graveyard between the Padre and the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father O’Hara. A small portion of the graveyard had been reluctantly allotted to Father O’Hara by the Padre for his Romish rites in the event of any of the half dozen members of his Church succumbing during the present difficulties. But when Father O’Hara had asked for a bigger plot, the Padre had been furious; Father O’Hara already had enough room for six people, so he must be secretly hoping to convert some of the Padre’s own flock to his Popish idolatry. The Collector had settled the dispute by saying with asperity: “In any case, nobody’s dead yet. We’ll talk about it again when you can show me the bodies.”

The vernacular record room, which had a surprisingly cheerful appearance, was the very centre of the British administration in Krishnapur and as such was the object of the Magistrate’s scientific scrutiny. He had come to see this room as an experimental greenhouse in which he watched with interest, but without emotion, as an occasional green shoot of intelligence was blighted by administrative stupidity, or by ignorance, or by the prejudices of the natives.

As a matter of fact, it even looked like a greenhouse. Its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with tier over tier of stone shelves; to protect the records from white ants they were tied up in bundles of cotton cloth brilliantly dyed in different colours for ease of reference...and these bright colours gave the shelves the gay appearance of flowerbeds. This cloth protection, however, was not always effective and sometimes when he opened a bundle the Magistrate would find himself looking, not at the document he required, but at a little heap of powdery earth. And then he would give a shout of bitter laughter which echoed across the compound and had more than once caused the Collector to raise his eyebrows, fearful for his sanity. In India all official proceedings, even the most trivial, were conducted in writing, and so the rapidity with which the piles of paper grew was alarming and ludicrous. The Magistrate was constantly having to order extensions to be made to his laboratory. Sometimes, when tired, he no longer saw it as an experimental greenhouse but instead as an animal of masonry that crept steadily forward over the earth, swallowing documents as it went.

The Collector, his splendid ruff of whiskers standing out clearly against a bank of yellow bundles, was looking at the Magistrate in a moody, persecuted sort of way. The Magistrate himself was standing with his head against a bank of cinnamon-coloured documents which so nearly matched the colour of his own hair and whiskers that for a moment it seemed as if his eyes, nose and ears were floating disembodied above the morning coat. He knew what the Collector was feeling persecuted about and could not resist persecuting him a little more, thinking with relish: “His high-mindedness could hardly be expected to survive the pressure of circumstances.” He enquired innocently: “How about the mosque?”

The Collector winced. “The Engineers are going to knock it down presently. We have a futwah, of course, but one still doesn’t like to have to do it.”

A futwah, or judgement, had been obtained from the Cazee in Krishnapur after tedious negotiations by messenger and in return for a promise of future favours. It sanctioned the demolition of the mosque on the strength of a precedent of the Emperor Alumgire; that pious monarch, while at war with the Mahrattas, had pulled down a mosque which sheltered them from his artillery...In that instance the doctors of the law had declared that the Almighty would pardon the removal of His temple for the destruction of His enemies. But at Krishnapur it was for the protection, not the destruction of unbelievers that the mosque was to be demolished. The Collector was not convinced by this precedent and doubted whether the Mohammedans would be very satisfied with it either, particularly as the Cazee was already letting it be known that the futwah had been extorted from him. Yet even the dire risk of arousing Mohammedan resentment was not at the heart of the Collector’s disquiet, for beside the practical reason, the question of resentment, there lay its moral shadow, the fact that a civilized man does not countenance the destruction of places of worship.

They had moved out now and were standing at the door of the Cutcherry. Some distance away, squinting into the glare, the Magistrate could make out Lieutenant Dunstaple and young Fleury talking together in the shade of a peepul tree with the wonderful enthusiasm and sincerity of youth (but which, reflected the Magistrate, can be a bit sickening if you have too much of it). But the Magistrate was, in any case, not interested in youth for the moment...he was more interested in the Collector’s skull and character, and in the relationship between them. Indeed, he was perplexed. He had believed himself capable of reading that skull as easily as you or I would read a newspaper. But the fact remained that although the Collector’s organ of Cautiousness seemed, according to his skull, to be unduly pronounced, he had not been behaving as if it were well developed at all. On the contrary, he had been behaving as if it were rudimentary, even atrophied. He had been making rapid decisions all day. It was very worrying.

The advance of science is not, the Magistrate knew, like a man crossing a river from one stepping-stone to another. It is much more like someone trying to grope his way forward through a London fog. Just occasionally, in a slight lifting of the fog, you can glimpse the truth, establish the location not only of where you are standing but also perhaps of the streets round about where the fog still persists. The wise scientist deliberately searches for such liftings of the fog because they allow him to fill in the map of his knowledge by confirming it. The Magistrate knew that to prove the truth of his phrenological beliefs he must find a person who, unlike the Collector, was subject to one powerful propensity only, which could then be verified beyond dispute by the development of the skull. The Collector was too difficult a case; the fog of ambiguity, of counter-active organs, clung too thickly round his head.

The sight of Harry not far away reminded the Collector of something as he stood at the Cutcherry door...He must send young Dunstaple for the “fallen woman” in the dak. In all the fuss of the past twenty-four hours nobody had thought to warn her and bring her in. It was probable, however, that she knew of the danger but was too conscious of her shame to show herself at the Residency. Still, she could not possibly stay where she was; a terrible fate lay in store for an unprotected Englishwoman, he did not doubt. Admittedly, it would be a problem having her in the Residency with the other ladies but there was nothing to be done about that. She must come in, no matter how greatly she had sinned.

The Collector had heard a little about her and was inclined to be charitable. She had come out to India as someone’s “niece”, a rather remotely connected “niece”, one gathered. Calcutta was full of such “nieces”...girls who had come out from England sent by anyone who could scrape up an acquaintance with a respectable family in India, as members of “the fishing fleet” to find a husband. The war had taken such a toll of young men! Only in India was there still a plentiful supply to be found, because many young men had chosen India without necessarily intending to choose celibacy as well. Poor girl, it was probably not her fault. No doubt she would still make a good wife for some homesick young ensign willing to incur the disapproval of his colonel. He sighed. Now he must get back to work.

“We’ll see what happens, in any case,” he observed cryptically, and walked out into the sunlight. The Magistrate watched his head glow for a moment before a bearer sprang forward to protect it with the shade of a black umbrella. He too sighed. More than ever he longed to grasp the Collector’s skull and make some exact measurements of it.

Now that the greatest heat of the day was over, the engineers were setting to work on the demolition of the mosque. Presently, the Collector found himself alone once more in his study. He stood near the window, one hand resting on the marble head of Innocence Protected by Fidelity. “It really wasn’t altogether my fault,” he suggested to himself hopefully.

A strange thing was happening to the mosque; a golden cloud had begun to spread outwards from its walls into the still air. Gradually the cloud darkened and spread into a thick cloak of dust that completely masked the building from the Collector’s troubled eyes, as if to protect him from the evidence of his own barbarity.

While the Collector was observing the slow demolition of the mosque Harry Dunstaple, attended by Fleury and a couple of Sikh sowars, had gone to rescue the “fallen woman” from the dak bungalow...this was exactly the sort of daring and noble enterprise that appealed to the two young men’s imaginations, rescuing girls at the gallop was very much their cup of tea, they thought.

The difficulty about the dak was that it had not been built, as it should have been, in the cantonment but in the middle of the native town, which made the expedition dangerous. To make matters worse the sun was setting; they had to hurry lest they be caught in the native town after nightfall. After the tranquillity of the cantonment the noisy crowds surging through the streets came as a shock to Fleury; as they penetrated deeper into the bazaar men shouted at them, words he could not understand, but they were plainly jeering. Their progress was constantly impeded by the crush; a perilously swaying cargo of Mohammedan women passed by on a camel, their masked heads turned towards Fleury; he felt himself stared at weirdly by their tiny, embroidered eye-holes.

Sahib. Yih achcha jagah nahin!” one of the Sikhs said to him. “No good place, Sahib. Come quick.” He was leading them towards a short cut which would take them away from the principal road through the bazaar.

They plunged into a wilderness of dark and stinking streets, so narrow that there was hardly room for two people to pass each other. Their way led down flights of twisting steps and past shadowy doorways redolent of smoke, excrement and incense; sometimes the street narrowed to a mere slit between houses and once a massive, comatose Brahmin bull stumbled past them. Then, abruptly, they emerged from the stifling darkness into light and air. The dak bungalow lay beside them. While Fleury waited at the gate with the Sikhs Harry darted inside for the “fallen woman”.

After a few minutes Harry emerged alone, looking perturbed, to confer with Fleury. The “fallen woman”, whose name was Miss Hughes, was refusing to come. What on earth should he do? They could not possibly leave her alone for a second night without protection...And now, not content with refusing to come she was even thinking of killing herself again. Anyway, that is what she had said she was thinking of doing. She had implied that then he and all the others would not have to worry about her any longer. She might as well be dead, anyway, loathsome creature that she was, because now...(Harry had blushed at that “now” knowing only too well what it referred to)...because now she had nothing to live for. She had ruined herself.

“Nonsense!” Harry had declared gruffly. “You have a jolly great deal to live for.”

“Just tell me one single thing!” And Miss Hughes had turned her tear-stained face, which was like that of a sensual little angel, towards Harry.

“Well...Any amount of things.”

“What things?”

But Harry had been unable to think of anything. This was not the sort of thing he was good at. So he had dashed out to see if Fleury had any ideas. All this time the light was fading. To remain here after dark would be to invite disaster. So there was no time to lose. The two young men stared at each other in dismay.

“Tell her...tell her...” But Fleury, too, found himself baffled by this unexpected development. And it was not that his mind had gone completely blank, as Harry’s had...because he could think of a number of ways for a dishonoured woman to spend the rest of her life...becoming a nun, good works to achieve redemption, that sort of thing. The trouble was that these did not sound to him like the sort of lives one could recommend to someone who thought she had nothing to live for; they sounded too uncomfortable for that.

But this was getting them nowhere. The Sikhs were beginning to roll their eyes ironically, and the horses were becoming restive too.

“Look here, tell her what a joy it is just to be alive. You know, the smell of new-mown hay, crystal mountain streams, the beauty of the setting sun, the laughter of little children...or rather, no...never mind the children...And, of course, you might also bring in the woman taken in adultery, the casting of first stones, Our Lord loving sinners and so forth.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if I stayed here and you spoke to Miss Hughes?” pleaded Harry.

“Certainly not. She knows you.”

So Harry again hurried inside, his lips moving silently as he rehearsed Fleury’s reasons for life being worth living. Outside, meanwhile, Fleury had to pretend not to notice that the Sikhs, their irony verging on impertinence, were ostentatiously saying goodbye to each other.

So it was that when Harry again emerged, distressed and still without Miss Hughes, it was less the fear of death in the native town than of appearing foolish in the eyes of the Sikhs, which caused the two young men to ride back to the Residency, leaving Miss Hughes to her fate. But they did not feel very pleased with themselves.

8

Days passed and still the sepoys made no decision to attack the Krishnapur cantonment. They moved out once, but after only a mile they stopped, engaged in disputes, and then moved back to Captainganj again. This movement of retreat caused some of the Europeans to hope that the affair might pass away without further bloodshed, but neither the Collector nor the Magistrate shared this optimism. A strange calm prevailed.

By acting as if the Company still retained some authority in the region, by staging a pantomime of administrative government to an empty theatre, the Collector had done his best to keep everything going as usual. But he found that all business in the courts and offices had ceased, except for the opium-eaters who came for the drug at the usual hour. There was another sign of this ominous calm, too, for the native sub-officers out in the district reported that crime had ceased altogether. The Collector remembered something he had once read...a Sanskrit poem describing how, in an overwhelmingly hot season, the cobra lay under the peacock’s wing and the frog reclined beneath the hood of the cobra. So it must be, he thought, in Krishnapur, where all personal antagonism had been forgotten in the general feeling of expectation.

At the same time, however, as this sudden absence of crime was noticed, there was evidence of unrest in the native town. Merchants had latticed up the fronts of their shops with bamboo hurdles to protect them against the looting which they evidently expected. The wealthier merchants had even hired small armies of mercenaries to protect their property. These men, armed with swords and lâtees, were to be seen swaggering about the streets in various uniforms of their own confection, shouting with laughter if they saw a European and boasting that they were now the masters.

The Collector was grateful for the days of respite. He knew that if the sepoys had attacked immediately after the mutiny at Captainganj they would have had little chance of defending themselves in the Residency. For the past few days everyone had been working to make the defences solid. It was true that some of the ladies were becoming bad-tempered and disconsolate from the heat, from the absence of active punkahs (the punkah-wallahs were vanishing one by one), and from the scarcity of khus tatties, the frames woven with fragrant grass over which water was thrown in order to cool the air during the hot weather. But on the whole the community had worked together, frantically and with a common purpose, until now order prevailed where there had only been confusion before. And the Collector thought admiringly of that observation hive of bees they had had in the Crystal Palace. What fine little beasts bees were!

He was standing in his bedroom with one elbow on the chimney piece as he mused on the qualities of bees. But suddenly it occurred to him that he could no longer hear the General’s whistling breath from the adjoining dressing-room. This breath had grown daily less audible...yet how tenaciously the old General had been fighting to survive! Dr Dunstaple proclaimed it a miracle that he should have lasted so long.

The Collector was moving towards the dressing-room where Louise was watching by the General’s bedside, when he heard another noise coming from outside in the compound, a strange, resonant murmur, a humming sound which slowly grew in volume until it reverberated everywhere, and which sounded, by an odd coincidence with his reflections of a moment earlier, not unlike the sound of bees about to swarm. As he hesitated a bearer knocked and came in with a message from the Magistrate, asking him to come immediately to the Cutcherry.

Outside the offices the Collector found the explanation for the resonant humming he had heard. A crowd of Eurasians and native Christians had assembled with bundles of bedding and other possessions loaded on to hackeries or balanced on their heads; the noise came from their humming, a sound like that made by the native infantry when striking camp, combined with a high-pitched wail of discontent.

The Magistrate, looking harassed, was sitting at his desk. From the wall the portrait of the young Queen surveyed her two subjects with bulging blue eyes.

“What on earth is the matter with them?”

“They want to come into the enclave. They say they’re loyal to the Company and that as Christians they’ll certainly be murdered by the sepoys. They’re probably right, at that.” Noting the look of dismay on the Collector’s face he added: “I know, but what can we possibly do? I suppose we could take in the Eurasians at a pinch but we can’t possibly have any more native Christians...We have more than enough as it is. We haven’t enough food.”

“We can’t just leave them out there to be massacred, for Heaven’s sake!” cried the Collector, who had turned pale and was groping for a chair. The Magistrate was taken aback by the Collector’s show of emotion. He said: “I’m sorry, but we won’t be able to stand a siege for any time at all if we have to feed such a crowd. Of course, it’s up to you to decide, but I can’t recommend you to take them in.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

“We’ll take in the ‘crannies’, if you like...They would be the most in danger, anyway. All I can suggest for the native Christians is that we give each of them a certificate to say that they’ve been loyal to the Government, for when these difficulties are over. They can be rewarded afterwards.”

“A fat lot of good a certificate will be!” groaned the Collector, but there was no alternative that he could see. He stayed for an hour in the Cutcherry helping the Magistrate to sign and issue the certificates. All the time he remained there the high-pitched, resonant humming did not cease for a moment.

It was only as he was walking back to the Residency that he remembered the General and summoned a bearer, telling him to go and enquire how the General was. The bearer, however, did not move. Instead, he replied quietly that it was unnecessary...He had just heard...he dropped his eyes and after a moment’s hesitation murmured...“... is dunniah fänê sā; rehlat keah” (that his spirit had begun its march from this transitory world).

It was about noon that the General died. The humming of the native Christians was the only sound to break the silence. As the afternoon wore on, the humming was silenced by the great heat; all living creatures were obliged to crawl into some shade in order to survive. For a while the silence now became profound at the Residency, as it did every afternoon. Besides, there was nothing further for the garrison to do; by now they had made their defences as secure as was possible in the circumstances. The ladies, having fought polite but ruthless battles for a place under those punkahs in the billiard room that were still moving (that is to say, those which still had a native attached to the other end), lay stretched out on charpoys and mattresses in their chemises and petticoats like arrangements of wilted flowers, their faces, necks, and arms shining with perspiration. Flies and mosquitoes tormented them and they longed for the evening which would bring, if not coolness, at least a fall in the temperature.

About three o’clock the deathly silence was broken by a terrible noise of banging and hammering which startled them awake. It was the native carpenters knocking together a coffin for the General. The Padre was to bury him that evening. Towards four o’clock, when the heat had at last begun to die down a little, the aggrieved humming started up again. This time it came from a little further away...from outside the Residency gates, where the native Christians had been moved, each holding his certificate of loyalty to the Company.

The Padre, too, was distressed by this humming. He had complained to the Collector about the Christians being left outside, just as he had complained about the storing of great jars of grain and powder at the back of the Church, but it had done no good. The Collector had been polite and soothing, but he stubbornly continued to ignore the Padre’s demands.

The Padre was dismayed that his authority, which ought to have increased at this time of danger, had instead melted away. Even on the day following the disaster at Captainganj when he had taken the Sunday evening service in the expectation, at such a critical time, of finding it full to capacity, he had found himself with a congregation of a mere half dozen, all ladies.

He had intended beforehand, picturing to himself a large and anxious congregation, to preach a comforting sermon on a text from the Psalms: “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put any confidence in man. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put any confidence in princes.” But seeing that mere handful of worshippers in the empty, echoing Church, he had been seized by righteous anger and had preached instead on the theme: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

He had heard, he declared, that there were those in the British community who blamed their present perilous situation on the missionary activity of the Church. They blamed a colonel of a regiment at Barrackpur who had been preaching Christianity in the bazaar. They blamed Mr Tucker, the Judge at Fatehpur, for the piety which had made him have the Ten Commandments translated into the vernacular and chiselled on stones to be placed by the roadside...

“They blame the pale-faced Christian knight with the great Excalibur of Truth in his hand, who is cleaving right through all the most cherished fictions of Brahmanism...the literature of Bacon and Milton that is exciting a new appetite for Truth and Beauty...the exact sciences of the West with their clear, demonstrable facts and inevitable deductions which are putting to shame the physical errors of Hinduism.

“They blame the pious men who have circulated this missionary address to the more educated natives in our Presidency,” cried the Padre, flourishing a pamphlet in the pulpit, “demonstrating that our European civilization, which is rapidly uniting all the nations of the earth by means of railways, steam-vessels and the Electric Telegraph, is the forerunner of an inevitable absorption of all other faiths into the One Faith of the white ruler. They blame these devoted men for daring to suggest such a thing! They blame Lord Canning for giving a donation to the Baptist college at Srirampur and Lady Canning for visiting the female schools of Calcutta! They blame our most saintly men of God...and I ask you, brethren, for what sin do they blame them? They blame them for buying little native orphans during famines in order to bring them up in the true Way. Is this a crime? No, it is the service of Our Lord!

“Brethren, if our little community is now in peril it is because of Sin. The bad lives that are led by many of the Christians among us are a cause of discontent to Him...and make Him, who is above all, withdraw His protection. Sin is the one thing above all others which grieves Him... Sin is the thing which God most hates...”

The Padre paused. It had grown dark in the Church. On each side of the pulpit a wrought-iron bracket, raised like a skeletal arm, held a thick white candle. The two small flames from these candles suddenly furnished him with inspiration and he began to explain their significance...As the world grows darker, so the flame of truth grows brighter...just as these candles were slowly growing brighter as darkness fell outside. He was talking in a different tone, hurriedly, even incoherently. In spite of the wafting punkahs which made the candles flicker, it was stifling in the Church. He left the candles and returned to the subject of Sin. He felt there was something he had left unsaid, something that it was vital to explain to his congregation. No doubt they were suffering from weariness after the anxious night they had passed. But if they were tired, so was he. He had never felt more tired in his life, nor more suffocated by omnipresent Sin. The heat was appalling...but Sin dazed him even more.

As he continued to talk, somewhat at random, the conviction slowly gained on him that he was delivering his sermon not to the half dozen ladies in front of him but to the ranks of great earthenware jars at the back of the Church. They crouched there in their shadowy pews, perfectly motionless. He pleaded with them to listen to the Word of God, but they made no answer. Ignoring the ladies, who were becoming uneasy, he tried again and again to formulate the one elusive argument that would win over those dim, sinful ranks of jars. But they remained deaf to the exhortations which echoed round their stony ears.

Although Miss Hughes had not yet killed herself (she was reluctantly reserving this measure until Harry was satisfied that he had done justice to the cause of life) she had steadfastly maintained her refusal to move from the dak bungalow. Neither of the two young men had expected her to survive that first night. They were even more surprised when she continued to survive.

Fleury secretly believed that it was Harry’s lack of eloquence which had caused Miss Hughes to stay where she was.

Unfortunately, when Fleury rather condescendingly agreed to accompany Harry on another mission to convince Miss Hughes, he found that he was quite unable to get into his stride. Miss Hughes appeared quite insensible to the wonders of the natural world, on which he had been counting. Worse, he soon discovered that the wonders of man’s own creation (Shakespeare, and so on) meant no more to her than had “the golden glories of the morning”, about which she had peremptorily cut him short, to ask him to kill a mosquito that had somehow become obsessed with her lovely naked arms. Harry and Fleury exchanged uneasy glances.

“Oh, do look! I feel sure it’s bitten me.” Miss Hughes sulkily rubbed her arm, blinking like a child. The two young men peered dutifully at her smooth skin, which was of a delicate, transparent whiteness, showing here and there the faintest of duck egg blue veins. Fleury, forgetting for the moment that he was supposed to be looking for the place where the mosquito had had the good fortune to penetrate this lovely skin, gazed with frank admiration at Miss Hughes, thinking what a fair substance her sex was made of. What large, sad eyes she had! What glistening dark hair! Her features, though small, were perfectly sculpted: how delightful that tiny nose and delicate mouth! And he immediately began to consider a poem to celebrate her alabaster confection.

On account of the heat, and perhaps also on account of her despair as a “fallen woman”, Miss Hughes had received the two young men in her chemise, reclining on her bed in a way so forlorn that no normally good-hearted gentleman, unless a man of granite principles, could have resisted an impulse to comfort her; beside her chemise she wore only her drawers and two or three cotton petticoats. The criteria of female beauty, as Fleury knew very well, tend to change from place to place and from generation to generation: now it is eyes that are important, now it is the slenderness of your hands; perhaps for your grandmother her bosom was crucial, for your daughter it may be her ankles or even (who can tell?) her absence of bosom. Fleury and Harry were particularly sensitive to necks. Louise Dunstaple, Fleury had already noticed, had a lovely neck, and so did Miss Hughes. There was something so defenceless about Miss Hughes’s neck, it was so different from their own muscular, masculine necks that the two young men could hardly keep their eyes off it. Her dark hair was piled up into an untidy chignon beneath which a number of dark wisps had escaped; above the collar of her chemise, as she moved her head, delicate tendons played like the filaments of a spider’s web. What a beautiful neck it was! And the fact that it could plainly have done with a good scrubbing somehow made it all the more attractive, all the more sensual, all the more real. That is what Fleury was thinking as he gazed at Miss Hughes.

Miss Hughes, who sensed that she was being found attractive, permitted herself to cheer up a little and asked the young men to call her Lucy. They needn’t think though, that she was going to the Residency with them. She could not bear the shame of everyone knowing she had been ruined. The frankness with which she spoke of her “ruin” rather took one’s breath away at first, but one soon got used to it. It was evident that she was still resolved to kill herself, if the sepoys did not do so first. And no matter how hard they tried to persuade her they were quite unable to make her yield on this point. The most that she was prepared to concede was that she might notify them once she had decided not to delay the fatal act any longer, to allow them “a last chance” (provided she did not get drunk again and kill herself spontaneously the way she almost had the other day)...it was purely out of friendship towards them that she agreed to this, and on condition that they did not bring the Padre.

“Oh, it’s trying to bite me again!” she exclaimed. “You said you wouldn’t let it!” And the rest of the visit passed pleasantly enough with Harry sitting on one side of her bed and Fleury on the other, each keeping a watch on one of her arms to prevent the mosquito from again ravishing the unfortunate girl.

Talking it over later, Fleury said: “Look here, we should be asking ourselves why Lucy won’t come into the Residency...Instead of which we waste our time thinking of plans to kidnap her or reasons why life is worth living.”

“She won’t come because she’s ashamed of what that cad did to her. I should like to give him a deuced good thrashing.” Harry, lying on his mattress in the banqueting hall looked as if he would have given a great deal to have a horsewhip and the offending officer placed within reach.

“Precisely. She’s ashamed. But above all it’s the ladies who make her feel ashamed. I mean she doesn’t seem to mind us. Now if we could get one of the ladies to go and visit her and act as if being seduced wasn’t the end of the world...D’you see what I’m getting at?”

“That sounds a good idea...but who would go?”

“I’m sure Miriam would go willingly but she’s got her migraine at the moment. You don’t think we could ask Louise?”

“Oh, I say, she’s my sister! And she doesn’t know anything about...you know, being seduced and all that rot. She wouldn’t be any good at all at that sort of thing.”

“But she doesn’t have to know anything about it. She would just have to go along with us and ask her to come to the Residency.”

“Oh no, George, steady on. You probably don’t know how gup spreads in India. One has to think of her reputation, after all. She is my sister, you know.”

And that seemed to be the end of the matter. But they both wondered whether one morning they would wake up to hear that Lucy had been found lifeless.

9

Fleury had been so busy with one thing and another that he had not had the chance of seeing very much of Louise. This was a pity because he still had not settled the question of the spaniel, Chloë. It was not a very suitable time to start giving people dogs. A dog must eat and perhaps food would soon be in short supply. On the other hand, although he did not care for dogs he had grown sentimental about the idea of Chloë as a gift for Louise: he wanted to see the golden ringlets of Chloë’s ears beside Louise’s golden tresses (afterwards, Chloë could be got rid of in some way or another).

At last, on the eighth day after the mutiny at Captainganj, Fleury found an opportunity for a private word with Louise. Harry, who was still busy reinforcing the banqueting hall, had sent Fleury to invite his sister to visit his battery, of which he was very proud. He found her attending the Sunday school which the Padre was holding in the vestry: it was her custom to bring little Fanny and then stay to soothe the smaller children if they became distressed by the Padre’s explications. But hardly had Fleury delivered his message when Louise was obliged to hand him the baby she was holding in order to comfort another member of the Padre’s audience. Fleury, who was unused to babies, was thus obliged to sit with the infant squirming on his lap and to listen to what was being said.

The Padre, who had decided, perhaps rashly, to address the children on the subject of the Great Exhibition, was telling them about the wonders to be found in the Palace of Glass: the machines, the jewels and the statues.

“And yet, children, all these wonderful things were only the natural products of the earth put into more useful and beautiful forms: trees into furniture, wool into garments and so on. Man is able to make these things but he isn’t clever enough to make trees, flowers and animals. They must have been made by someone with far greater knowledge than us, in other words...”

“By God,” piped up a little boy with a shining halo of curls.

“Precisely. Only God could produce something so complicated in its structure and workings. Everywhere in the world we see design and that, of course, plainly shows that there must have been a designer...”

“Oh Padre!” cried Fleury who had unfortunately heard these words and was unable to let them pass, “should we not rather speak to these little ones of the love of God we find in our hearts than about design, production and calculation? Only too soon the materialism of the adult world will smother these innocent little lambs!” And as he uttered the word “lambs” he picked up the baby from his lap and brandished it in his excitement. For a moment it looked as if the unfortunate infant he was wielding might slip from his grasp and dash out its little brains on the floor...but Louise swiftly darted forward and took it from him before the disaster could occur. Discountenanced by this removal of his evidence Fleury watched the Padre turn pale.

“Mr Fleury,” he muttered. “I must ask you not to interrupt. I was merely proving the existence of God by logical means to these little ones, so that they might know that they are completely in His power...so that they might know that of themselves they are nothing but sinners who can only be washed clean by the Blood of our Lord.” The Padre paused. Fleury had dropped his eyes and was shaking his head sadly, whether in penitence or disagreement it was impossible to say. The Padre was silent for a little while longer wondering what heretical assumption could have just shaken Fleury’s head for him. Could it be that he did not believe in the Atonement?

But the children were waiting so he began cautiously to talk about the lighthouse he had seen at the Exhibition, a splendid lighthouse with a fixed light and moving prisms. What did it remind him of?

“Of God,” piped up the little boy with glittering curls.

“Well, not exactly. It reminded me of the Bible. Why? Because I thought of the many lives it had saved the way a lighthouse saves men from shipwreck. The Bible is the lighthouse of the world. Those nations which are not governed by it are heathenish and idolatrous. Men without the Bible worship stars and stones. For example, ancient history gives an account of two hundred children being burned to death as a sacrifice to Saturn...which is, of course, the Moloch of the Scriptures.” The Padre surveyed the class. “You wouldn’t like that, children, would you?” The children agreed that they would not care for it in the least.

Presently it was time for the Sunday school to disband. The Padre went to a cupboard and took out a large, flat wooden box. This box he brought over to the children and when he had opened it they uttered a gasp, for inside there nestled rows of crystallized fruit glowing amber, ruby and emerald. Some of the smaller children could not resist reaching out their tiny fingers to this box. But the Padre said: “I’m going to give you each a piece of sugar fruit, children, but you must not eat it yourselves, for we have been taught that it is better to give than to receive. Outside the gate you will see some poor Christian natives sitting on the ground...I shall now go to the gate with you and there you must each give your piece of sugar fruit to one of these unfortunate men.”

By this time there was only a handful of native Christians left. They sat in the dust with their backs to one or other of the tamarind trees which made an imposing crescent of shade around the gates. They were silent, too, for one cannot keep on wailing or humming indefinitely, and they looked as if they had given up hope of being offered protection. There were also one or two money-lenders, known as bunniahs, who had come along to buy up the “certificates of loyalty” as a speculative investment, at a price which varied between four and eight annas at first, but which soon dropped to nothing for a rumour was going about that now, at last, the sepoys were making a definite move to crush the feringhees in the Residency; that very evening they would advance from Captainganj and take up positions to attack at dawn. Apart from the bunniahs there were, of course, the inevitable bystanders one finds everywhere in India, idly looking on, wherever there is anything of interest happening (and even where there is nothing) because they are too poor to have anything better to do, and the least sign of activity or purpose, even symbolic (a railway station without trains, for example), exerts a magnetic influence over them which nothing in their own devastated lives can counter.

The ragged group of native Christians received the sugar fruit from their little benefactors expressionlessly and in silence. But when the children had gone back into the enclave they wasted no time in throwing it into the ditch for, although Christians, many of them considered themselves to be Hindus as well, indeed primarily, and had no intention of being defiled like the sepoys with their greased cartridges.

Fleury had contrived to walk back with Louise and Fanny to the Dunstaples’ house. Because he was nervous of Louise he playfully tried to tease Fanny about what pretty dimples she had; but Fanny failed to respond and the teasing fell rather flat. To tell the truth, this was by no means the first time that Fanny had been used as a conversation piece by some lovesick suitor trying to get on a more relaxed footing with Louise, and she resented it. Presently she ran off, leaving Fleury feeling more awkward in Louise’s company than ever.

Disconcerted, Fleury said humbly: “I’m afraid I must apologize, Miss Dunstaple, for that disturbance during Sunday school...and as for the baby which you so wisely took from me, to be honest I’d quite forgotten I had it in my hands.”

“Really, Mr Fleury, there’s no need to apologize because there was no harm done, after all, though I must say that I do wonder if there is anything achieved by sending such young children to Sunday school.”

“I fear the Padre was angry with me for speaking out like that,” Fleury said. The rolls of fair curls which escaped from beneath Louise’s bonnet seemed to him so like a spaniel’s ear that, for a moment, he was able to imagine that it was not Louise but Chloë who was walking along beside him. Something told him, however, that it would not be a good idea to give Chloë to Louise, at least for the immediate future.

Louise was surveying him with a gentle frown. “I’m sure you’re right, Mr Fleury, to plead for love rather than calculation to order our lives but...forgive me if I speak frankly...should you not also give a thought to the distress you are causing the poor Padre Sahib with your views?”

“My dear Miss Louise! I should never for a moment wish to cause distress to the Padre Sahib. But think how important it is that we should find the right way to lead our lives! And it is only by argument that we can find the right way...There is no other way to find the truth.”

“Alas,” said Louise, looking sad, “I sometimes wonder whether we shall ever find the right way. I wonder whether we shall ever live together in harmony, one class with another, one race with another...Will not the labouring classes always be resentful of our privileges? Will not the natives always be ready to rise up against the ‘pale-faced Christian knight with the Excalibur of Truth in his hand’ as the Padre so picturesquely referred to him last week?”

Fleury was having trouble smothering his excitement; when he became excited he invariably began to sweat copiously and he did not want Louise to see him in such a disgusting state; it seemed unfair, the higher his spirit soared, the more his face, neck and armpits seeped...but such is man’s estate.

“Oh Louise,” he exclaimed, “that is why it’s so important that we bring to India a civilization of the heart, and not only to India but to the whole world...rather than this sordid materialism. Only then will we have a chance of living together in harmony. Will there even be classes and races on that golden day in the future? No! For we shall all be brothers working not to take advantage of each other but for each other’s good!”

Louise was perhaps looking a little taken aback by the excitement she had suddenly aroused in Fleury. She was certainly looking with curiosity at his vehement, perspiring features. But Fleury with an involuntary groan of ecstasy had whipped a folded paper from the pocket of his Tweedside lounging jacket.

“These are the words of a very dear friend of mine from Oxford, a poet (like myself), who is now working as an inspector of schools...” And Fleury began to declaim in such ringing tones that a couple of native pensioners slumbering in the shade of one of the cannons started up, under the impression that they were being ordered to stand to arms.

“Children of the future, whose day has not yet dawned, you, when that day arrives, will hardly believe what obstructions were long suffered to prevent it coming! You who, with all your faults, have neither the avidity of aristocracies, nor the narrowness of middle classes, you, whose power of simple enthusiasm is your great gift, will not comprehend how progress towards man’s best perfection...the adorning and ennobling of his spirit...should have been reluctantly undertaken; how it should have been for years and years retarded by barren commonplaces, by worn out claptraps. You will know nothing of the doubts, fears, prejudices they had to dispel. But you, in your turn, with difficulties of your own, will then be mounting some new step in the arduous ladder whereby man climbs towards his perfection: towards that unattainable but irresistible lodestar, gazed after with earnest longing, and invoked with bitter tears; the longing of thousands of hearts, the tears of many generations.”

Louise did not speak. Her eyes shone, as if with tears. She looked distressed, but perhaps it was simply the strain of listening to Fleury in such a heat. A pariah dog, half bald with manage, as thin as a greyhound, and with a lame back leg, which had been sniffing Fleury’s shoes and had slunk away whining as he began to declaim, now cautiously came hopping back again to investigate. He aimed a kick at it.

“My brother has spoken to me of this poor girl in the dak bungalow,” said Louise hurriedly after a silence. “I’m afraid Father is rather angry with you for suggesting that I should go to the dak to persuade her to come here. But please don’t think that I’m angry too. I think it right that a woman should go to bring the poor sinful creature back into the Residency...Isn’t it punishment enough that she has been dishonoured? And no doubt it was more the man’s fault than her own. And could it not be that she was more foolish than sinful? But, of course I know nothing of these matters as my dear brother is forever telling me.”

Fleury was deeply touched by these sympathetic words; at the same time he was too overwhelmed by Louise’s loveliness to be able to gaze directly at her face. Meanwhile, the pariah dog, which for some reason found him strangely exciting, had again come stealthily hopping back and was attempting to lean lovingly against his ankles.

Word of mutiny at the prison and Treasury reached the Residency an hour before dusk. Not long after five o’clock, when the streets of Krishnapur were most crowded, a strange clinking sound was heard. People wondered at first where it was coming from; it seemed to be all around them. As it grew louder they realized that among the familiar inhabitants of the town a number of strangers had appeared: they moved in long lines through the evening crowds, looking neither to right nor left, moving with a curious, rapid shuffle away from the middle of the town; presently, it became clear that the sound came from the ankle chains with which they were shackled. The prison guards had mutinied on a signal given by the sepoys at Captainganj and had freed their prisoners.

Soon afterwards came the news that the Treasury sepoys had also mutinied: a number of them had been seen hurrying through the now empty streets of Krishnapur from the direction of the Treasury. They wore dhotis instead of uniforms and carried heavy, oddly-shaped burdens on their shoulders and around their necks; they had broached a cart-load of silver rupees and filled the legs of their breeches with them. Now it seemed that they were staggering away with heavy, trunkless men on their shoulders.

As it was growing dark Lucy appeared at the Residency gates, accompanied by the Dunstaples’ khansamah and a large amount of baggage. Harry and Fleury were beside themselves with astonishment and relief. What had caused Lucy to relent? Presently they learned that Louise had sent the khansamah with a letter, begging Lucy to accept her friendship and pleading with her to come into the Residency. Surprisingly enough, Lucy had agreed and now here she was. And not a moment too soon either. Behind her, just visible against the darkening sky, a pillar of smoke climbed from the dak bungalow. Then, as the thatched roof caught, the native town was brightly illuminated for a few moments before fading back into the darkness once again.

That night the entire cantonment burned. The Collector had expected that it would and consequently he at first showed no particular sign of alarm as people came to report, while he was at supper, that new fires had been sighted from the Residency roof. He continued eating placidly at the head of the table which had been set up in his bedroom and to which he had invited a number of guests, just as he might have done in normal times downstairs.

The table, although smaller than that of the dining-room, was set no less elegantly with glistening silver and glass. It also held one of the Collector’s favourite possessions, a centrepiece by Elkington and Mason of Birmingham in electro-silver and on which candle-holders in the shape of swans’ necks alternated with winged cherubim holding dishes. It was not simply that this centrepiece was an object of remarkable beauty in itself, it was also a representative of a new and wonderful method of multiplying works of art.

This was yet another startling advance which had occurred in the Collector’s lifetime. Indeed, not much more than a decade had passed since the first small medals, coated by the aid of electricity, had been shown as curiosities. Now articles of far greater complexity even than this elaborate centre-piece were being produced, not singly, but by the thousand. Perfect copies had been made by electric agency of the celebrated cup by Benvenuto Cellini in the British Museum. Who could doubt the benefits which would result from placing such articles within the means of all classes of society...articles which could not fail to produce a love of the fine arts?

The Collector had several examples of electro-plating scattered about the Residency...in particular a heavy-thighed “Eve” in electro-bronze leaning against a tree-trunk around which a snake had wound itself (“How popular snakes were with sculptors these days!” he mused parenthetically): this piece stood on the landing at the top of the stairs. He also had a smaller piece in his drawing-room made of an alloy of nickel, copper and zinc which very nearly approached the colour of silver...this represented “ Fame Scattering Rose Petals on Shakespeare’s Grave”. His wife, too, on her own account, possessed a number of electro-metallic dogs. Could anyone doubt, the Collector wondered, sitting slumped in his chair for he was very tired and watching absently the winking highlights of the electro-silver before his eyes, that this was another invention which would rapidly make mankind sensitive to Beauty? Yes, he remembered sadly, the Magistrate had doubted it, and had scoffed when he had suggested that one day electro-metallurgy would permit every working man to drink from a Cellini cup.

The other people at the table included the Magistrate, Miriam, Major Hogan, Dr McNab, Mr and Mrs Rayne, the pretty Misses O’Hanlon, and, at the far end of the table in the most inconspicuous places they could find, his two eldest daughters, for whom a meal in the presence of their authoritarian father was an ordeal almost as alarming as the prospect of the siege itself. They had all seen a shadow of despondency pass over the Collector’s face and naturally assumed, as anyone would, that it had been caused by the news that several bungalows were in flames. Only Miriam guessed otherwise, for he would surely never allow himself to appear despondent in the face of their common danger...moreover, in the past few days she had come to know him a little better and had noticed more than once that when he was tired his mind had a habit of slipping away from the urgent business it should have been attending to, and browsing on quite other matters. And she wondered what he might be thinking about now.

The atmosphere around the table was very strained. Since the Collector himself was saying nothing about their predicament none of his guests felt that it would be proper to introduce the subject, yet how could they possibly talk of anything else? The truth was that every single topic of conversation they attempted promptly fled back like a bolt of lightning to this predicament. Only the Magistrate seemed to be deriving any pleasure from the atmosphere of constraint which hung over the table, and he presently observed: “I wonder what the Apostles found to talk about during the Last Supper.” But this remark, to put it mildly, was not found to be amusing, and was coldly received...not that the Magistrate would mind about that.

What made things worse was that messages did not cease to arrive for the Collector. Whichever of the young officers it was who was in command of the sentinels posted around the enclave and on the Residency roof had no doubt been ordered to report the least new development, and he was performing his duties with punctiliousness. Every fresh beacon that sprang out of the darkness of the cantonment, in the view of this officer, constituted a new development. A verbal message was sent to the Collector and intercepted at the door of his bedroom by his English manservant, Vokins. Vokins then advanced, portentously discreet, to whisper it into the Collector’s ear. The Collector’s eyebrows would rise sadly, but he would listen without looking up, slumped in his chair and twirling the stem of his claret glass. Perhaps he would nod slowly, puffing out his cheeks in an odd and gloomy sort of way as he did so. The Collector’s guests could not hear what was whispered in his ear, of course; the only person who knew the content of these messages was Vokins. Vokins, however, did not inspire confidence by his demeanour. He was a pale and haggard sort of individual at the best of times; now his pallor increased and the bones of his skull seemed to stand out more sharply, in a way which the Magistrate found interesting but which everyone else found sepulchral.

The trouble was that Vokins, as he made his solemn journeys from the door to the Collector’s ear, did not understand that many of these messages were redundant (for, after all, once a cantonment has been set alight the number of bungalows blazing, more or less, is a matter of relative indifference). Vokins thought they were cumulative and progressive; Vokins lacked the broader view. He tended only to see the prospect of the Death of Vokins. Although some of the Collector’s guests might have been hard put to it to think of what a man of Vokins’s class had to lose, to Vokins it was very clear what he had to lose: namely his life. He was not at all anxious to leave his skin on the Indian plains; he wanted to take it back to the slums of Soho or wherever it came from.

By the time pudding was being served his expression had become tragic and he was uttering his messages in a muted gasp of terror...so that in the end even the Collector noticed and looked up enquiringly, as if to say: “Whatever is the matter with the fellow?” but then, evidently concluding that it was the heat, sank back into his own thoughts which were still following, in a meandering fashion, the theme of progress.

When the last of these messages was whispered funereally into his ear (five more bungalows adding warmth to the already stifling night) such a look of dismay came over the Collector’s face that the two pretty Misses O’Hanlon could not resist a rapid intake of breath at the sight of it. But the Collector had merely been thinking of Prince Albert’s Model Houses for the Labouring Classes and of another argument he had had with the Magistrate about them...how shocked he had been at the Magistrate’s attitude to these model houses!

On his way to the Crystal Palace a small block of houses had caught his eye not far from the south entrance to the Exhibition and a little to the west of the Barracks. He had paused, thinking how cheerful they were in their modest way. They had stood there, respectful but unabashed, without giving themselves airs amid the grander edifices round about. They were square and simple (like the British working man himself, as one of his colleagues of the Sculpture Jury had lyrically expressed it) with a large window upstairs and downstairs, and they were built in pairs with a modestly silhouetted coping stone above the entrance but no flamboyant decoration. They were not dour and sullen like so many of the houses in the populous districts; they were proud, but yet knew their places. In short, they were so delightful that for a moment one even had to envy the working man his luck to be able to live in them as one passed on one’s way towards the Exhibition.

But when the Collector had grown eloquent about these charming little dwellings, for this was in the early days before he had realized that the Magistrate was impermeable to optimism where social improvements were concerned, the Magistrate had spoken with equal vehemence about the exploitation of the poorer classes, the appalling conditions in which they were expected to live and so on, dismissing Prince Albert’s model houses as a sop to the royal conscience. The Collector had protested that he was certain that the Prince’s houses had been prompted, in a genuine spirit of sympathy, by the reports published by the Board of Health’s inspectors about the wretched home accommodation of the poorer classes, the utter lack of drainage, of water supply and ventilation.

“What prompted these trivial improvements, on the contrary,” the Magistrate had replied, “was a fear of a cholera epidemic among the wealthier classes!”

Well, the Collector mused, it is impossible to argue with someone who ascribes generous motives to self-interest, and he looked up mournfully past the optimistic glints scattered by the electro-silver branches of the centre-piece to the fox-red growth that sprouted from the Magistrate’s permanently contemptuous features. “What on earth is that?” he wondered aloud, having noticed, beyond the Magistrate, through the open window a tinge of buttercup in the night sky. Then, he added: “Oh yes, I see,” and got to his feet.

Downstairs in his study he lit a cheroot and shortly afterwards put it out again; instead he plucked his watch from its nest below his ribs. Once more he had to go upstairs; it was time for the last and most unpleasant task of the day. As he opened the door of his study he was confronted by a stuffed owl in a glass bell; one of its shoulders had long ago been eaten away by insects and it glared accusingly at the Collector with its glittering yellow eyes. But if the owl did not like the Collector, the Collector did not like the owl...for this owl was one of a vast population of owls, and of other stuffed birds which had come to roost in the Residency, together with a million other useless possessions. The Collector had long ago realized that he should have ordered them to be left to their fate. Instead, these possessions were stacked all over the Residency, all over Dunstaple’s house, and even in the banqueting hall. Only the Magistrate had refused to allow this useless but prized rubbish into the Cutcherry, which, of course, had meant more for everyone else. Now every room, every corridor, every staircase was occluded with the garrison’s acquisitions. “But still, are not possessions important? Do they not show how far a man has progressed in society from abject and anti-social poverty towards respectability? Possessions are surely a physical high-water mark of the moral tide which has been flooding steadily for the past twenty years or more.”

Amid the lumber of furniture, vases, crockery, musical instruments, and countless other objects, several more birds, motionless within their bubbles of glass, watched him wearily climb the stairs. He paused at the top, frowning. A ghostly voice had whispered in his ear: “The world is a bridge. Pass over it but do not build a house on it.” Was that a Christian or a Hindu proverb? He could not remember.

To accommodate the new arrival the Collector had had to turn out an indigo planter and his wife who had lodged themselves, uninvited, in the only remaining room. They had made a disagreeable fuss and had left, still grumbling, to seek shelter from Dr Dunstaple. Now, in their place, Hari was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his elbows propped on his knees and a sullen expression on his face. The Collector was annoyed to see that the room was lit only by a single candle; he spoke sharply to the bearer waiting at the door and he hurried away to find an oil-lamp.

“My dear Hari, why ever did you not call for more light? How long have you been sitting in the dark like this?”

Hari shrugged his shoulders crossly, as if to indicate that lights were of no importance to him. In the shadows the Collector could make out the form of another seated figure, but the light of the solitary candle was too dim for him to see who it was.

“I left instructions that everything for your comfort...”

“Oh, comfort...You think that I worry anxiously about such a thing as comfort!”

“I should have come before this but you must understand, I’ve had so many things to see to.” But not meaning to sound plaintive, he added firmly: “One’s duty has to come first, of course.” Hari shrugged again, but made no other reply.

The Collector was fond of Hari; it distressed him deeply that he should have to take advantage of him but he could see no alternative. He sighed and waited with impatience for the bearer to bring the lamp. To conduct this interview in semidarkness seemed furtive and unmanly to him.

When the lamp came at last it illuminated not only Hari but also the other figure seated on the carpet, who turned out to be the Prime Minister. Of course, he had come too! And he could not help thinking ungratefully: “Another mouth to feed!” Not that the Prime Minister looked as if he ate very much, however, he was only a bundle of skin and bones. The Prime Minister, in any case, seemed indifferent to his fate; he was gazing incuriously at the carpet a few inches in front of the Collector’s feet.

“I know that it must seem ungrateful of me to detain you here in the circumstances. I should like you to know that, personally speaking, it is the very last thing I should want to do. But I have to think of the safety of those under my protection...hm...a great number of women and children...”

“I show loyalty...You take advantage of loyalty. You give certificate to sweepers and send him away. Me you keep!” Hari’s voice rose in shrill indignation. “Me you keep prisoner and Prime Minister also! Very frankly, Mr Hopkin (although Hari correctly referred to ‘Mr and Mrs Hopkins’ he had a habit, distressing to the Collector, of reducing each separately to the singular), very frankly, it is all ‘as clear as mud’ to me. Please to explain these questions.”

Humiliated, the Collector could only repeat what he had said before about the safety of women and children.

Hari and the Prime Minister had presented themselves at the gates towards the end of the afternoon; evidently Hari and his father, the Maharajah, had had a disagreement over the question of loyalty to the British. Hari, firmly on the side of Progress, had insisted on leading the Palace army to their defence. But the Maharajah had declined to let him do any such thing. The whole country was rising to put the feringhees and their vassals to the sword; his own power was certain to increase once the Company was destroyed. He did not want Progress...he wanted money, jewels and naked girls, or rather, since he already had all of these things, he wanted more of them. Hari, like any reasonable person, found these desires (money, jewels, naked girls) incomprehensible. His father was prepared to connive at the destruction of the fount of knowledge...the knowledge that had produced Shakespeare and would soon have railway trains galloping across the Indian continent! He had made a short speech on this topic, summoning the army and the Prime Minister to follow him to the side of the British to defend Progress. But in the end only the Prime Minister had followed him. The army, even if the circumstances had been more enticing, had long since lost its appetite for fighting. There was nothing left for Hari to do but to pledge his loyalty, obtain a certificate, and return to the Palace. The Collector, busy with other matters, had sent a message to ask him to stay. Hari had not wanted to. It is one thing to bring an army to defend one’s friends, another thing to join them simply to be attacked and probably killed. But in the meantime the advantages of having Hari in the Residency had become only too clear to the Collector. Hari’s presence might give the impression that the Maharajah supported the British. At the very least it would guarantee the neutrality of his army. Soon it became obvious to him that he could not let Hari go. Now, thinking about it again he became irritated. “It’s not my fault. How could I have acted differently? It’s unjust of Hari to treat me as if I’m personally responsible!”

“Come, Hari,” he said after a long silence. “You must forgive me for treating you so badly. Let’s go up on the roof and watch the cantonment burning. That’s not a sight we see every day of the week.”

From the roof it seemed as if a perfect semi-circle of fire stretched around the Residency enclave like some mysterious sign isolating a contagion from the dark countryside.