"I must take issue with the expression 'superior culture'," said Fleury; but neither of the older men paid any attention to him.

"The, great majority of natives have yet to see the first sign of our superior culture," said the Magistrate. "If they're lucky they may have seen some red-faced youth from Haileybury or Addiscombe riding by once or twice in their lives."

("I say, 'superior culture' is a very doubtful proposition, but I think . . .")

"Come, come, Tom, think of the system of justice that the Company has brought to India. Even if there were nothing else . . ."

"This justice is a fiction! In the Krishnapur district we have two magistrates for almost a million people. There are many districts where it's worse."

("Look here, what I think . . .")

"Things are not yet perfect, of course," sighed the Collector. "All the same, I should go so far as to say that in the long run a superior civilization such as ours is irresistible. By combining our advances in science and in morality we have so obviously found the best way of doing things. Truth cannot be resisted!

Er, that's to say, not successfully," the Collector added as a round shot struck the corner of the roof and toppled one of the pillars of the verandah.

"But what I think is this," declared Fleury when the rubble had ceased to fall, determined at last to get his word in. "It's wrong to talk of a 'superior civilization' because there isn't such a thing. _All_

civilization is bad. It mars the noble and natural instincts of the heart. Civilization is decadence!"

"What rubbish!"

"I have seldom heard such gibberish," agreed the Collector, chortling as he got to his feet. "By the way, what on earth are you dressed like that for?"

Somewhat taken aback by the speed with which his theories had been dismissed, Fleury could not at first think what the Collector was talking about. All the same, he was indeed rather oddly dressed in a blue velvet smoking jacket and tasselled smoking cap. He had brought them out with him, assuming that in India, as in England, gentlemen wore such garments while smoking in order to protect their clothes and hair from a smell offensive to the ladies. It had turned out that in India no one took the trouble . . . one of the many ways, alas, in which Indian society failed to live up to the rigorous standards set at home. With the shortage of clothes becoming acute Harry had found himself unable to replace his ripped tunic, so Fleury had generously given him the "Tweedside", which he had taken a fancy to and which, in any case, Fleury had been finding oppressively warm . . . not that the smoking jacket was much cooler. As for the tasselled cap, he had improved it by attaching a flannel flap to the back to protect his neck from the sun, and a visor to the front, fashioned from the black cardboard binding of a book of sermons lent him by the Padre. The title of this book, inscribed in gothic letters of gold, glinted like braid as he accompanied the Collector out into the sunlight.

By contrast with the comfort of a few moments earlier the Collector suffered a painful return to reality as he stepped out into the glare. Worries, temporarily forgotten, assailed him once more . . . still no sign of a relieving force! The dwindling garrison . . . almost every day now someone was killed. The health of the garrison was beginning to deteriorate from the poor diet and lack of vegetables. Slight wounds became serious . . . from serious wounds death was inevitable. He stood, blinking, outside the Cutcherry for a moment, appalled, unable to decide where to go next. But then, remembering that his daughters were very likely observing his dismay through the telescope and were perhaps even concluding that he had just been shot, he grasped Fleury by the arm and steered him towards the Residency; he needed someone's company to nerve himself for his daily visit to the hospital. Besides, he might take the opportunity to counter the demoralizing effect of the Magistrate's words on the young man's mind.

He began to say something about the principles behind a civilization being more important than the question of whether they were actually realized in a concrete manner . . - He had a firm grip on the arm of his audience, too, which is usually helpful when you have an argument to put across. But he found himself finishing what he had to say rather lamely, partly because Fleury was sulking over the rapid rejection of his own theories and refused to agree with him, partly because they were both chased into the lee of the hospital by an enemy rocket which careered down at them in wild loops out of the sky and, for an awful moment, seemed to be chasing them personally. Fortunately, it did not explode for it landed quite close to them, burying its cone-shaped iron head in the earth no more than ten yards away. Fleury indignantly began to prise it out of the earth with his sabre which was, perhaps, rather rash of him since smoke was still pouring from the vents in its case even if the fuse on its base appeared to be extinct. It was a six-pound Congreve rocket, one of many which had dived wildly into the enclave.

"One of the advantages of our civilization," said Fleury. But the Collector failed to grasp even this simple irony and observed mildly: "One of these days I'm afraid their rocketeers may hit something, if only by accident."

He continued to stand irresolutely beside the smoking rocket, thinking: "If we lose any more men we won't be able to man the defences adequately. Then we'll be in a pickle." At this moment Dr Dunstaple saw them through the window and sent a message out to ask Fleury if he would mind fetching half a dozen bottles of mustard from the Commissariat; he had another suspected case of cholera to deal with. Fleury hurried away and, after a short struggle with himself, the Collector made up his mind to enter the hospital.

The hospital had first been established in the Residency library, but this had proved too small and so it had been moved into the row of storehouses and stables immediately behind the Residency; this row of sheds had been roughly divided into two wards, one under the care of each doctor. Between the two wards what had, in happier days, been the saddle-room had been converted into an operating theatre where, surrounded by a mass of harness and saddlery, the two doctors united (at least, in principle) to perform amputations. Untidy stacks of _bhoosa_ cattle feed piled up in the corners of the wards were another reminder that their former occupants had been quadrupeds and now provided a convenient refuge for rats and other vermin.

The door to Dr Dunstaple's ward stood open and even before the Collector had reached it the stench of putrefaction and chloroform had advanced to greet him. He moved forward, however, with an expression of good cheer on his face, while flies tried to crowd on to his smiling lips and eyes and swarmed thirstily on to his sweating forehead. At the far end of the ward he glimpsed the Padre kneeling in prayer beside a supine figure. As he passed into the acute stench rising from the nearest bed he clenched his fists in his pockets and prayed: "Please God, if I'm to die may I be killed outright and not have to lie in this infernal place!"

Dr Dunstaple, still waiting for Fleury to return with the bottles of mustard, had seen the Collector and came bustling forward, saying in a loud, exasperated tone: "Heaven knows what experiment that damn fella's up to now! Whatever it is, I wash my hands of it!"

The Collector gave him a worried look. In the few days since the siege had begun a disturbing change had come over the Doctor. In normal times the Collector found this fat little man endearing and slightly ridiculous. His arms and legs looked too short for his round body; his energy made you want to laugh. But recently his plump, good-humoured face had set into lines of bad temper and bitterness. His rosy complexion had taken on a deeper, unhealthy flush, and although clearly exhausted, he was, nevertheless, in a constant state of frenetic activity and fuss, talking now of one thing, now of another. There was something very harrowing about the way the Doctor passed from one subject to another without logical connection, yet what disturbed the Collector even more was the fact that he so often returned to the same topic: . . . that of Dr McNab. Of course, he had always enjoyed making fun of McNab, retailing stories about drastic remedies for simple ailments and that sort of thing. Alas, the Doctor had become increasingly convinced that McNab was experimenting, was ignoring his medical training to follow fanciful notions of his own.

Dr Dunstaple had begun to talk about the patient beside whose bed, a soiled straw mattress on a _charpoy_, the Collector found himself standing; the man was a Eurasian of very pale skin and dark eyes which feverishly swept the room. He was suffering, explained the Doctor in a rapid, overbearing tone as if expecting the Collector to disagree with him, from severe laceration, the result of a shrapnel burst, of the soft parts of the right hand; the thumb was partially detached near the upper end of the metacarpal bone. Though the lips of the wound were retracted and gaping there was no haemorrhage and it seemed possible that the deep arteries had escaped injury . . .

"Was that unreasonable to suppose ?" demanded the Doctor suddenly. The Collector, who had been listening uncomfortably to these explanations, shook his head, but only slightly, not wanting to give the impression that he was passing judgement either one way or the other. At the same time he had become aware that another patient, an English private soldier who had escaped from Captainganj only to be wounded at Cutter's battery during the attack of the first of June, and who was strapped down to a _charpoy_ near where the Padre was kneeling, had begun to sing, loudly and monotonously, as if to keep up his spirits. His song finished he immediately began it again, and so loudly as almost to drown the Doctor's vehement medical commentary:

"I'm ax'd for a song and 'mong soldiers 'tis plain,

I'd best sing a battle, a siege or campaign.

Of victories to choose from we Britons have store,

And need but go back to eighteen fifty-four."

"A compress, dipped in cold water, placed on the palm after the edges of the wound had been evenly approximated and two or three interrupted sutures applied . . . then strapped, bandaged . . ."

"The Czar of all Russia, a potentate grand,

Would help the poor Sultan to manage his land;

But Britannia stept in, in her lady-like way,

To side with the weakest and fight for fair play."

"Stop that noise!" roared the Doctor. "Look here, Mr Hopkins, after twenty-four hours the integuments of the palm were flaccid and discoloured . . . Imagine how I felt! If you put any pressure on the wound a thin, sanious fluid with bubbles of gas escaped, causing considerable pain . . ."

"On Alma's steep banks, and on Inkerman's plain,

At famed Balakiava, the foe tried in vain

To wrest off the laurels that Britons long bore

But always got whopped in eight_een_ fifty-four. . ."

"Then," said the Doctor, gripping the Collector's arm for he had stepped back, dizzy from the heat and smell, not to mention the noise (for, in addition to this desperate chanting there were groans and cries of men calling for attention), "the thumb was dark and cold and insensible. Another twelve hours and the dark hue of mortification had already spread over half the palm . . . the thumb and two fingers were already cold, livid and without sensation . . ."

"It's true at a distance they fought very well

With round shot and grape shot and rocket and shell

But when our lads closed and bayonets got play

They didn't quite like it and so. . . ran away!"

"The pulse was small and frequent, the smell from the mortifying parts was particularly offensive, Mr Hopkins. I now advised amputation of the forearm, close to the carpal end . . . _Silence!_ I _had_ thought that it would be enough to remove part of the hand only, but this was out of the question . . . Ah, this wasn't good enough for McNab! He said gangrene must follow . . - d'you hear? So for forty-eight hours it was left wrapped in a linseed poultice. This was not my idea. I knew the whole hand must come off in the end and that there would be no gangrene of the stump . . . Here, sir, you can see for yourself the way the flaps are uniting in healthy granulations. D'you think that was McNab's linseed poultice? Had we waited a moment longer the man would have sunk completely!"

"No, no," broke in the Collector hurriedly. "Please don't undo the dressing. I shall see it when you're discharged fit," he added brightly to the patient who paid no attention to him whatsoever; the man's eyes continued to roam about feverishly.

The Doctor tried to detain him for further explanations but the Collector forced him aside, unable to spend another moment by this bedside. He strode to the nearest window and looked out, clumsily knocking over a pitcher of water as he did so. It emptied itself in slow gulps on to the earthen floor by his feet. Beyond the deep shadow in which the horses of the Sikh cavalry stamped and thrashed in a frenzy of irritation from the flies which attacked them, he thought he could perceive a splash of colour from the few surviving roses beneath the shade of the wickerwork screens. He gazed at them greedily.

Then Fleury came into view, carrying the bottles of mustard and looking excited. Seeing the Collector at the window he called: "Mrs Scott has been taken ill."

The Collector immediately put his finger to his lips and shook his head vigorously, pointing towards the next ward, to indicate that Fleury should inform McNab. Fleury, however, simply stopped in his tracks and stared at the Collector in astonishment, unable to comprehend why the most important personage in the garrison should suddenly resort to this baffling pantomine. He came closer and the Collector, concluding that Fleury was a dimwit (a conclusion supported, moreover, by his peculiar ideas on civilization) said in an undertone: "Tell Dr McNab. Dunstaple already has too much to do. He must be spared. Here, give me those." And he took the bottles of mustard through the window, thinking: "What a time the poor mite has chosen to come into the world!"

The Doctor seemed surprised at first to be presented with the mustard and looked so irritated that the Collector wondered whether there had not been some mistake. But then the Doctor remembered, he had a case of cholera . . . it was almost certainly cholera, though sometimes when the men first reported sick it was hard to know from their symptoms whether they were suffering from cholera or from bilious remittent fever.

_Cholera_. The Collector could see Dr Dunstaple's anger swelling, as if himself infected by the mere sound of the three syllables. And the Collector dreaded what was to come, for the subject of cholera invariably acted like a stimulant on the already overwrought Doctor. Cholera, evidently, had been the cause of the dispute between him and McNab which had brought about an unfortunate rift between the two doctors. Now he began, once again, to speak with a terrible eloquence about the iniquities of McNab's "experimental" treatments and quackery cures. Suddenly, he seized the Collector's wrist and dragged him across the ward to a mattress on which, pale as milk beneath a cloud of flies, a gaunt man lay shivering, stark naked.

"He's now in the consecutive fever . . How d'you think I cured this man? How d'you think I saved his life?"

The Collector offered no suggestions so the Doctor explained that he had used the best treatment known to medical science, the way he had been taught as a student, the treatment which, for want of a specific, every physician worthy of the name accorded his cholera patients . . . calomel, opium and poultices, together with brandy as a stimulant. Every half hour he gave pills of calomel (half a grain), opium and capsicum (of each one-eighth of a grain). Calomel, the Collector probably didn't know, was an admirable aperient for cleansing the upper intestinal canal of the morbid cholera poison. At the same time, to relieve the cramps he had applied flannels wrung out of hot water and sprinkled with chloroform or turpentine to the feet, legs, stomach and chest, and even to the hands and arms. Then he had replaced them with flannels spread with mustard as his dispensers were now doing . . - At this point the Doctor tried to pull the Collector to yet another bed, where a Eurasian orderly was spreading mustard thickly with a knife on the chest and stomach of yet another tossing, groaning figure. But the Collector could stand no more and, shaking himself free, made for the door with the Doctor in pursuit.

The Doctor was grinning now and wanted to show the Collector a piece of paper. The Collector allowed himself to be halted as soon as he had inhaled a draught of fresh air. He stared in dismay at the unnaturally bright flush of the Doctor's features, at the parody of good humour they wore, remembering many happier times when the good humour had been real.

"I copied it from the quack's medical diary . . . With his permission, of course. He's always making notes. No doubt he thinks he will make an impression with them. Read it. It concerns a cholera case . . . He wrote it, I believe, in Muttra about three years ago. Go on. Read it . - ." And he winked encouragingly at the Collector.

The Collector took the paper with reluctance and read:

"She has almost no pulse.

Body as cold as that of a corpse.

Breath unbelievably cold, like that

from the door of an ice-cavern.

She has persistent cramps and vomits

constantly a thin, gruel-like fluid

without odour.

Her face has taken on a terribly cadav-

erous aspect, sunken eyes, starting

bones, worse than that of a corpse.

Opening a vein it is hard to get any

blood . . . what there is, is of a dark,

treacly aspect . . ."

The Collector looked up, puzzled. "Why d'you show me this?"

"That was his wife!" cried the Doctor triumphantly. "Don't you see, he takes notes all the time. Nothing will stop him Even his wife! Nothing!"

Again, as the Collector put on his pith helmet and gave the brim a twitch, came the monotonous, desperate chanting he had heard before.

"Now, now my brave boys, that the Russian is shamed

Beat, bothered, and bowed down and peace is proclaimed,

Let's drink to our Queen, may she never want store,

Of heroes like those of eight_een_ fifty-four."

14

From the beginning of the siege the Union Jack had floated from the highest point of the Residency roof and had constantly drawn the fire of the sepoy sharpshooters. Passing into the shadow of the Residency on his way to Cutter's battery, the Collector looked up and saw that the flag was once again in difficulties. The halyards had been severed and great splinters of wood had been struck off the shaft so that it looked as if a strong wind might well bring it down altogether. On one occasion, indeed, the staff had been completely shattered and a great cheer had gone up from the sepoys . . . but as soon as darkness permitted, another staff and new halyards had been erected in its place. The flag was crucial to the morale of the garrison; it reminded one that one was fighting for something more important than one's own skin; that's what it reminded the Collector of, anyway. And somewhere up there, too, in the most perilous position of all within the enclave, there was an officer crouching all day behind the low brick wall of the tower, watching the movements of the sepoys with a telescope.

While the Collector's eyes had been lifted to the sky a loathsome creature had approached him along the ground; it was the hideous pariah dog, looking for Fleury. Since the Collector had last set eyes on the animal a ricocheting musket ball had taken off part of its rat-like tail, which now terminated in a repulsive running sore. The Collector launched a kick at it and it hopped away yelping.

As the Collector raised his eyes again for a last, inspirational glance at the flag before moving on, a dreadful smell of putrefaction was borne to his nostrils and he thought: "I must have something done about that tonight before we have an epidemic." This smell was no longer coming from the bodies of men and horses rotting outside the ramparts as it had done for the first few days; these, thank Heaven, had now been cleaned by the kites, vultures and jackals; it came from the dead horses and artillery bullocks that lay scattered over the Residency lawns and gardens, hit by the random shot and shells that unceasingly poured into the compound. But there was also a powerful and atrocious smell from behind the wall he had built to shield the croquet court, which lay between the Residency and Dunstaple's house. Here it was that Mr Rayne, aided by Eurasians from the opium agency, conducted the slaughter and butchery of the Commissariat sheep, commandeered at the outbreak of the mutiny from the Krishnapur Mutton Club on the Collector's instructions.

The smell, which was so atrocious that the butchers had to work with cloths tied over their noses, came from rejected offal which they were in the habit of throwing over the wall in the hope that the vultures would deal with it. But the truth was that the scavengers of the district, both birds and animals, were already thoroughly bloated from the results of the first attack . . . the birds were so heavy with meat that they could hardly launch themselves into the air, the jackals could hardly drag themselves back to their lairs. And so, out of the garrison's sight, but not out of range of their noses, a mountain of corruption had steadily built up. Combined with the animals scattered on the lawns, the smells from the hospital and from the privies, and from the human beings living in too close contact with insufficient water for frequent bathing, an olfactory background, silent but terrible, was unrolling itself behind the siege.

The back wall of Dr Dunstaple's house, which like the Residency was built of wafer-like red bricks, had been amazingly pocked by the shot which dashed against it; hardly a square foot of smooth surface remained now to be seen. In some places round shot had smashed through one wall after another so that if you had been unwise enough to raise your head to the appropriate angle you could have followed their passage through a series of rooms. After one such journey, the Collector had been told, a shot had finally burst through the wall into the Doctor's drawing-room on the other side of the building, scattering candlesticks and dropping them to roll along the carpet, right up to where Mrs Dunstaple and a group of disobedient ladies playing truant from the suffocating air of the cellar were cowering under the piano. From these larger holes in the wall Enfield rifles bristled and occasionally orange flowers blossomed from their muzzles; the wall in the room behind them had been painted black so that no movement could be seen against them.

From the house a shallow trench had been dug out towards the crescent of earthworks behind which the cannons had been placed. Here, too, there was a pit about fourteen feet deep with a ladder against the side, down which the Collector now stiffly climbed. Lieutenant Cutter was standing at the bottom with his finger to his lips.

"Are they mining?"

"Yes. We're digging a listening gallery." Cutter described in a whisper what was happening: at the head of the gallery a man sat and worked with a short-handled pick or crowbar to loosen the earth; just behind him sat another man with an empty wine case to fill up with the loose earth; when full, this was drawn back by a rope.

The sepoys here were very close and it was thought inevitable that sooner or later they would begin mining, given the number of men at their disposal. For several nights the Collector had stayed up until dawn reading his military manuals by the light of an oil-lamp in his study to instruct himself in the art of military mining; only Cutter of the officers, two Cornish privates from Captainganj, and one or two Sikhs, had had any experience of mining before. What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. As the Collector pored over his manuals, from time to time rubbing his tired eyes, he knew that he was using science and progress to help him out of his difficulties and he was pleased. The inventions on his desk, the carriage which supplied its own track and the effervescent drinking vessel, watched him in silent admiration as he worked.

The Collector had learned that there are two cardinal rules of defensive mining . . . One is that your branch galleries (whose purpose is for listening to the approaching enemy miners) should run _obliquely_

forward in order not to present their sides to the action of enemy mines . . . The other is that the distance between the ends of the branch galleries should be such that the enemy cannot burrow between them unheard (a distance which varies with the nature of the soil but which can be roughly taken as twenty yards).

The trouble with these cardinal rules, though wonderful in their way, was that they required a great deal of digging. No doubt they would have served perfectly if there had been enough men in the garrison to dig listening galleries in the approved manner, reaching towards the enemy like the spread fingers of a hand. But Cutter lacked men. The best he and the Collector had been able to devise was a single lateral tunnel, slightly crescent-shaped to follow the contour of the ramparts, and which more resembled the hook of a man whose hand had been amputated.

The Collector, at the head of the gallery, strained his ears despondently for the scrape of the sepoy picks, but the only sound that came to them was the ghostly echo of a phrase of Vauban he had read: _Place assiégée, place prise!_ For the Collector knew the truth of the matter: the sepoys did not even have to resort to mining. By using their artillery to make a breach in the defences and then digging a properly directed series of saps to approach it, they would be able to take the Residency in a matter of days. It was a commonplace of siegecraft that there was no way of countering such a methodical attack except by making sorties to harass the enemy and destroy his works . . . But where could he find the men to make sorties without hopelessly denuding the ramparts in several places?

Meanwhile Cutter, in a whisper, was explaining that he wanted to run an offensive gallery under the enemy lines and explode a mine of his own to breach their defences. With a sudden attack they might succeed in spiking or capturing the Sepoy cannons, in particular the eighteen-pounder which was slowly but surely reducing Dr Dunstaple's house to rubble. The Collector hesitated to agree to this . . . There was another difficulty: the shortage of powder. Anything less than, say, two hundred pounds of powder at a depth of twelve feet underground would be insufficient to make the required breach. Yet with two hundred pounds of powder you could fire a cannon a hundred times! And the slightest error of length or direction would mean that all this valuable powder would be thrown away fruitlessly.

"Very well," he said at length, "but make sure it does what it's supposed to."

Later, as he walked away, he recalled a work by another French military engineer, Cormontaingne, who had described in his imaginary _Journal of the Attack of a Fortress_ the inevitable progress of a siege through its various stages up to the thirty-fifth day, ending with the words: "It is now time to surrender." That, at least, was one option not open to the Collector.

The Collector, conscious of himself gently floating in the blue prism of his daughters' telescope like a snake in a bottle of alcohol, now had to cross the most dangerous piece of ground within the enclave. He strode out firmly, pulling down the peak of his pith helmet and lowering his head as if walking into a blizzard. It was here on this lawn, green and wellwatered during the magnificent Indian winter, that he had been host to many enjoyable garden parties. Over there, beneath that group of now shattered eucalyptus trees, had stood the band of one of the infantry regiments. Once he had looked out from the upper verandah of the Residency as the bandsmen were assembling; it was evening and somehow the deep scarlet of their uniforms against the dark green of the grass had stained his mind with a serious joy . . . so that even now, in spite of everything, those two colours, scarlet and dark green, still seemed to him the indelible colours of the rightness of the world, and of his place in it. Looking towards the river as he skirted a shell crater, across a parched brown desert dotted with festering animals, he had to make an effort of imagination to perceive that this was indeed the same place where he and his guests had sat drinking tea.

From his pocket the Collector produced the last of his clean, white handkerchiefs (soon he, too, would be in the power of the _dhobi_ who had been terrorizing the ladies with his new prices) and held it to his nose while he considered a new and disagreeable problem. By now so many gentlemen had been killed that a large quantity of stores and other belongings had been collected. What he had to decide was whether to allow them to be auctioned, as they would have been in normal times, or to confiscate them for the good of the community. Ultimately, it seemed to him, the question boiled down to this: was it right that only those who had money to buy these provisions in the event of a famine should survive? The Magistrate was not the ideal person to ask for his view on such a matter. As the Collector had feared he had been unable to restrain his sarcasm.

"In the outside world people perish or survive depending on whether they have money, so why should they not here?"

"This is a different situation," the Collector had replied, scowling. "We must all help each other and depend on each other."

"And must we not outside?"

"People have more resources in normal times."

"Yet many perish even so, simply because they lack money."

The Collector's sigh was muffled by the handkerchief as he reached the fiercely humming rib-cage, head and flanks of a horse which had collapsed there with the saddle still strapped ludicrously to what was now only a rim of bones. Further on there was the carcase of a water buffalo, its eyes seething, its head and long neck looking as if they had literally been run into the ground. The Collector was fond of water buffaloes, which he found to have a friendly and apologetic air, but he could not think why there should have been one on his lawn.

By the time he had paid a visit to the banqueting hall the light was beginning to fade; on his way back, the Collector removed his pith helmet to air his scalp. It was his belief, based as yet on no scientific evidence, that lack of air to the scalp caused premature baldness; for this reason he had taken a particular interest in the hat shown at the Great Exhibition which had had a special ventilation valve in the crown; moreover, when the present troubles had started he had been considering the most delicate and interesting experiment to evaluate this suspicion and which would have involved hiring natives in large numbers to keep their heads covered and submit to certain statistical investigations.

At the thought of statistics, the Collector, walking through the chaotic Residency garden, felt his heart quicken with joy . . . For what were statistics but the ordering of a chaotic universe? Statistics were the leg-irons to be clapped on the _thugs_ of ignorance and superstition which strangled Truth in lonely byways. Nothing was able to resist statistics, not even Death itself, for the Collector, armed with statistics, could pick up Death, sniff it, dissect it, pour acid on it, or see if it was soluble. The Collector knew, for example, that in London during the second quarter of 1855 among 3,870 men of the age of 20 and upwards who had succumbed, there had been 2 peers of the realm, 82 civil servants, 2S policemen, 209 officers, soldiers and pensioners, 103 members of the learned professions including 9 clergymen, 4 barristers, 23 solicitors, 3

physicians, 12 surgeons, 43 men of letters, men of science or artists, and twelve eating-and coffee-house keepers . . . and so much more the Collector knew. He knew that out of 20,257 tailors 108 had passed to a better world; that 139 shoemakers had gone to their reward out of 26,639 . . . and that was still only a fraction of what the Collector could have told you about Death. If mankind was ever to climb up out of its present uncertainties, disputations and self-doubtings, it would only be on such a ladder of objective facts.

Suddenly, a shadow swooped at him out of a thin grove of peepul trees he was passing through. He raised a hand to defend himself as something tried to claw and bite him, then swooped away again. In the twilight he saw two green pebbles gazing down at him from beneath a sailor cap. It was the pet monkey he had seen before in the shadow of the Church; the animal had managed to bite and tear itself free of its jacket but the sailor hat had defied all its efforts. Again and again, in a frenzy of irritation it had clutched at that hat on which was written _HMS John Company_ . . . but it had remained in place. The string beneath its jaw was too strong.

Near the trees the Collector could see some dogs slumbering beside a well used by gardeners in normal times for the complicated system of irrigation which brought water to the Residency flower beds. He could recognize certain of these dogs from having seen them in the station bobbery pack on their way to hunt jackals with noisy, carefree young officers; they included mongrels and terriers of many shapes and sizes but also dogs of purer breed . . . setters and spaniels, among them Chloë, and even one or two lap-dogs. What a sad spectacle they made! The faithful creatures were daily sinking into a more desperate state. While jackals and pariah dogs grew fat, they grew thin; their soft and luxurious upbringing had not fitted them for this harsh reality. If they dared approach the carcase of a horse or bullock, or the fuming mountain of offal beside the croquet wall, orange eyes, bristling hair and snapping teeth would drive them away.

It was dark by the time the Collector's tour was over and the night was brilliantly starlit. Tonight, as always, in the darkness around the enclave he could see bonfires burning. Were they signals? Nobody knew. But every night they reappeared. Other, more distant bonfires could be seen from the roof, burning mysteriously by themselves out there on the empty plain where in normal times there was nothing but darkness.

During the daytime it had become the custom for a vast crowd of onlookers to assemble on the hillslope above the melon beds to witness the destruction of the Residency. They came from all over the district, as to a fair or festival; there was music and dancing; beyond the noise of the guns the garrison could hear the incessant sighing of native instruments, of flutes and sitars accompanied by finger-drums; there were merchants and vendors of food and drink, nuts, sherbets and sugarcane . . . sometimes a caprice of the wind would torment the garrison with a spicy smell of cooking chicken as a relief from the relentless smell of putrefaction (at intervals the Collector would stop and curse himself for having so ignorantly ordered the offal to be jettisoned to windward); in addition there were the _ryots_ from the indigo plantations and those from the opium fields in bullock-carts or on foot, there were the peasants from the villages, the travelling holy men, the cargoes of veiled Mohammedan women, the crowds from the Krishnapur bazaars and even one or two elephants carrying local zemindars, surrounded like Renaissance princes with livened retainers. This cheerful and multifarious crowd assembled every day beneath awnings, tents and umbrellas to watch the _feringhees_ fighting for their lives. At first the Collector had found this crowd of spectators a bitter humiliation, but now he seldom gave it a thought. He had issued orders that no powder was to be wasted on dispersing them, even though they were well within range.

The Collector still had one more call to make; this was to a shed with open, barred windows which formed the very last of the long row of stables, now converted into the hospital. It was here, in the days when life in Krishnapur had been on a grander scale, that a former Resident, anxious to emulate the local rajahs, had kept a pair of tigers. Now, where once the tigers had lived, Hari strode endlessly back and forth behind the bars, while the Prime Minister, sitting on a pile of straw, followed his movements with expressionless eyes.

Hari had been moved here "for the good of the community", causing the Collector another severe inflammation of conscience. It had been noticed that the one part of the enclave which the sepoys had been careful to avoid hitting with their cannons was precisely the spot where Hari was quartered. Word of his whereabouts had no doubt filtered out to the sepoy lines by way of the native servants who continued to defect one by one as the plight of the garrison became more desperate. Once this unfortunate discovery had been made, the Collector found himself morally obliged (it was his duty) to make use of it. So Hari had been turned out of the relative comfort and safety of the Residency and lodged in the tiger house which conveniently happened to be adjacent to the hospital.

Hari had not taken well to this change. Watching him as the days went by, the guilty Collector had noticed signs of physical and moral decline. His fat cheeks, always pale, had taken on a greyish tinge. He had complained, first that he could not eat, then that the food he was given was not fit for a human being . . . It was true that the food was not very good, but what could one expect during a siege? And food was not the only trouble. Always inclined to petulance, Hari had now taken on a permanent look of discontent.

"You should go outside, visit people, talk with them, perhaps even do a spot of fighting," the Collector had counselled him, increasingly disturbed by the change which was taking place in Hari's character. Hari had been so full of enthusiasm, so interested in every new and progressive idea. And now he was so listless!

"You give permission to going outside camp, perhaps?"

"Well, no, not outside the ramparts, of course."

"Ha!"

"But you must occupy yourself. You can't remain here in this room for ever. Who knows how long the siege will go on?"

"Correct! You keep me prisoner but you pretend to yourself that you do not keeping prisoner myself and Prime Minister. You want me to kill for British perhaps my own little brothers and sisters who plead with me for lives, raising little hands very piteously? I will not do it, Mr Hopkin, I will rather die than do it, I can assure you. It is no good. You torture me first. I still not killing little brother and sister."

"Oh, I say, look here . . . no one is asking you to kill your brother and sister. You mustn't exaggerate."

"Yes, you asking me to killing brother and sister and you asking Prime Minister to sticking with bayonet his very old widow mother lady!"

"Oh, what rubbish!"

"Oh, what rubbish, you say, but I knowing very different. All is not well that end well if I killing little babies for Queen, I assure you. I die rather than do that. Prime Minister also, to my way of thinking!"

The Prime Minister, sitting on his heap of straw, his eyes as expressionless as ever, had shown no sign of being partial either to killing babies or not killing them, or to anything whatsoever.

"If only the poor lad could have brought someone a bit more stimulating as a companion," the Collector had thought miserably. "He's pining away for lack of something to occupy his mind."

Once again the Collector had to take out his handkerchief and hold it to his nose, this time because he was passing the open doors and windows of the hospital. He could not shut his ears, though, to the cries and groans; he even believed he could hear the monotonous chanting of the Crimean veteran as he hurried by, but he already had enough to think about with Hari. As he approached the tiger house he braced himself for the inevitable reproaches. But today, for some reason, Hari's interest in the world seemed to have revived.

As usual he was striding up and down behind the bars while the Prime Minister sat passively on his heap of straw. There was a significant change, however. Hari was looking excited, indeed feverishly so . . . but something else had changed, too, and for a while the Collector could not think what it was. Then it came to him: the Prime Minister's head was bare. It was not simply that he had removed his French military cap, he had removed his hair as well. His skull was shaved and oiled, and it gleamed in the lamplight. For some reason it was covered by a hair net with a large mesh.

The Collector assumed that this shaving of the Prime Minister's skull had some religious significance; he knew that Hindus are always shaving their heads for one reason or another; but then he noticed that Hari's eyes kept returning to the gleaming cranium as to a work of art. Looking a little closer, he noticed that what he had taken for the strings of a net were, in fact, ritual lines drawn in ink on the Prime Minister's scalp.

"I become devotee of Frenloudji!" exclaimed Hari.

"Frenloudji?"

"Frenla-ji! Correct? Science of head!"

"Oh, phren_ol_ogy! I see what you mean!"

"Correct! Let me explain you about phrenology . . . Most interesting science and exceedingly useful for getting the measure of your man . . . I have got measure of Prime Minister without least difficulties. You see, head is furnished with vast apparatus of mental organ and each organs extend from the gentleman's medulla oblongata, or top of spinal marrow, to surface of brain or cerebellum. Every gentleman possess all organ to greater or lesser degree. Let us say, he possess big organ of Wit, if he say very amusing things then organ of Wit is very big and powerful and we see large bump on right and left of forehead here . . ." and Hari pointed to a spot somewhat above each of the Prime Minister's eyebrows.

"This organ is very big in Mr F. Rabelais and Mr J. Swift. In Prime Minister not so big. In you, Mr Hopkin, not so big. In me, not so big." The Prime Minister fingered his sacred thread but offered no comment.

"The man who discovered this science, Dr Gall of Vienna, remove many skulls from people he had known in life. He found brain which is covered by dura mater . . ." (Hari pronounced this with relief, as if it were the name of an Indian dish) "has same shape as skull having during life. So that's why we see bump or no bump on Prime Minister's head."

"I see," said the Collector, who felt that his understanding of phrenology might be vulnerable to any further explanations from Hari.

"There are certain parts at base of brain, in middle and posterior regions, size of which cannot be discover during life and whose function therefore remain unknown. But some bumps we seen even though in difficult position. You see, for example . . . _Amativeness_ . . ." Hari snatched up a book lent him by the Magistrate, and read: "Amativeness. The cerebellum is the organ of this propensity, and it is situated between the mastoid processes on each side. . . and so on and so forth . . . The size is indicated during life by the thickness of the neck at these parts. The faculty gives rise to the sexual feeling. In newborn children the cerebellum is the least developed of all the cerebral parts. It is to the brain as one to twenty and in adults as one to six. The organ attains its full size from the age of eighteen to twenty-six. It is less in females, in general, than in males. In old age it frequently diminishes."

Hari put the book down and beckoned the Collector to come and examine the Prime Minister.

"Amativeness is not very powerful organ in Prime Minister. In me, very powerful. In Father it is fearfully, fearfully powerful so that all other organ wither away, I'm thinking . . ." Hari laughed heartily and then suddenly clutched his organ of Wit.

"Well, I must be on my way, Hari," said the Collector sadly. How distressed he felt to see this young man's open mind tainted by the Magistrate! But before Hari allowed him to leave he insisted on staring indiscreetly for a long time at the back of the Collector's neck and even prodding it with a muttered, "Excuse liberty, please." His only verdict, however, was a cough and modestly lowered eyes.

As he was returning to the Residency he thought he heard a voice calling from the far side of the hospital, beyond the churchyard wall. He went to investigate and saw the faint silhouette of the Padre, digging wearily with a spade and muttering to himself as he worked. Beside the path the Collector dimly perceived three long forms sewn up in bedding.

"Padre, is there no one to help you?"

But the Padre made no reply, perhaps had not even heard. He went on digging and muttering to himself. The Collector could just hear his words: ". . . Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay . . ."

The Collector spoke to him again, but still the Padre paid no attention. So in the end the Collector took the spade himself and made the Padre lie down on the path beside the corpses.

Then, for an hour or more the Collector dug steadily by himself. At first he thought: "This is easy. The working classes make a lot of fuss about nothing." But he had never used a spade in his life before and soon his hands became blistered and painful. He was invaded by a great sadness, then. The sadness emanated from the three silent figures sewn up in bedding and he thought again of his death statistics, but was not comforted . . . And as he dug, he wept. He saw Hari's animated face, and numberless dead men, and the hatred on the faces of the sepoys . . . and it suddenly seemed to him that he could see clearly the basis of all conflict and misery, something mysterious which grows in men at the same time as hair and teeth and brains and which reveals its presence by the utter and atrocious inflexibility of all human habits and beliefs, even including his own. Presently, he heard the Padre's voice whispering over the bodies in the darkness: "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." When the Collector had finished digging two of the graves he helped the Padre carry the bodies over and bury them, and then set to work on the third grave. By the time a fatigue party came out of the darkness to relieve him he had composed himself again, which was just as well in the circumstances, for no garrison is encouraged by the sight of its commander in tears.

Now at last the Collector's long day was over. A lamp was burning in his study and in the glass of the bookcases he saw his own image, shadowy in detail, wearing an already rather tattered morning coat, the face also in shadow, anonymous, the face of a man like other men, who in a few years would be lost to history, whose personality would be no more individual than this shadowy reflection in the glass. "How alike we all are, really . . . There's so little difference between one man and another when one comes to think of it."

As he moved to turn out the lamp before going upstairs he thought how normal everything still was here. It might have been any evening of the years he had spent in Krishnapur. Only his ragged coat, his boots soiled from digging graves, his poorly trimmed whiskers, and his exhausted appearance would have given one to suspect that there was anything amiss. That and the sound of gunfire from the compound.

On his way upstairs he passed Miriam in the hall and without particularly meaning to he put his arm around her. She was on her hands and knees when this happened, searching the floor with a candle for some pearls she had dropped when the string she was wearing had broken; in spite of their increasingly ragged appearance it had become the habit for the ladies to wear all the jewellery they possessed for safe-keeping. They should have been quite easy to find but some had rolled away into the forest of dusty, carved legs of tables and chairs which here comprised the lumber of "possessions". When the Collector touched her she did not faint or seem offended; she returned the pressure quite firmly and then sat back on her heels, brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes with her knuckles because her hands were dirty. She looked at him for a long time but did not say anything. After a while she went on looking for her pearls and he went on his way upstairs. He did not know what had made him do that. It had been discouragement more than anything. At that moment he had been feeling the need for some kind of comfort . . . perhaps any kind would have done . . . a good bottle of claret, for example, instead. Still, Mrs Lang was a sensible woman and he did not think she would mind. "Funny creatures, women, all the same," he mused. "One never knows quite what goes on in their minds."

Later, while he was drinking tea at the table in his bedroom with three young subalterns from Captainganj a succession of musket balls came through the window, attracted by the oillamp . . . one, two, three, and then a fourth, one after another. The officers dived smartly under the table, leaving the Collector to drink his tea alone. After a while they re-emerged smiling sheepishly, deeply impressed by the Collector's sangfroid. Realizing that he had forgotten to sweeten his tea, the Collector dipped a teaspoon into the sugarbowl. But then he found that he was unable to keep the sugar on the spoon: as quickly as he scooped it up, it danced off again. It was clear that he would never get it from the sugar-bowl to his cup without scattering it over the table, so in the end he was obliged to push the sugar away and drink his tea unsweetened. Luckily, none of the officers had noticed.

That night, as soon as he closed his eyes the bed on which he lay began to spin round and round; within a few seconds, it seemed, he had been drawn down into a sleep where shattering events raged back and forth over his unconscious mind. Gradually, however, they receded and he fell into a more calm, profound sleep . . . but not so profound that he could not hear, though at a great distance, the heart-rending screams of Mrs Scott giving birth a few rooms away on the next floor. Once, he suddenly started up in bed, thinking: "The poor mite! What a world to be born into!" but perhaps that was merely part of a long, sad, ineffably sad dream he had before dawn.

But as it turned out, the baby was not born alive and Mrs Scott herself, in spite of everything that was done to save her, sank rapidly and died before morning. In the first light Dr McNab, who had not slept at all, sat at a table by the window in the room where Mrs Scott had died (which formed part of the flagstaff tower), writing in his notebook the brief details of what had happened. He wrote: "Caesarean section. Felt head of child, which had come low down, suddenly recede; symptoms of ruptured uterus followed . . . The foetus could easily be felt through the abdominal walls and was apparently quite loose, while it could not be reached by the vagina; it was evident that the uterus had given way. The patient not yet in a very collapsed state, but declining rapidly. Proceeded to remove the foetus by gastrotomy . . . an incision about six inches in breadth was made in the median line between the umbilicus and pubes; the foetus was easily reached and, as expected was found loose in the peritoneal cavity; it was removed (dead) together with the whole of the cord and the placenta; not much haemorrh age occurred, nor was much blood found in the abdomen. Stimulants, opiates etc. were liberally employed afterwards, but in spite of them the woman sank, and died in about three hours . . ."

Dr McNab paused for a moment in his writing and turned round in his chair to stare at the bed, which was now empty for Mrs Scott, sewn in her bedding, had been carried to the Church where she would lie until darkness came and it was safe to bury her. He frowned thoughtfully, as if trying to concentrate, then he went on writing.

In this room where throughout the night the most terrible shrieks of pain had echoed, there was now no sound to break the silence except the scratching of Dr McNab's pen-nib as he wrote and an occasional clink of china as he dipped it into the inkwell. Outside, the gunfire continued steadily.

15

It had been planned that on Tuesday, 7 July, Cutter should spring his mine beneath the sepoy positions; Harry and Fleury had been selected to join the sortie that was to coincide with this event. Tuesday also happened to be Fleury's birthday, and he was sentimental about birthdays, particularly his own; at the same time he affected to regard them as events of no importance.

Your sister, as a rule, can be relied on to nemember when your birthday is; but when on the Monday evening Miriam and several other ladies and gentlemen gathered on the Residency verandah to sing hymns before retiring to bed Fleury could see no sign of awareness on his sister's face that an unusual event was soon to occur. She sang away unconcernedly, with great feeling: "O God our help in ages past. . ." She had a beautiful voice and normally Fleury loved to hear her singing; but this evening he suspected that she was putting it on for the Collector's benefit. The Collector, although not singing himself (for he had no voice), was leaning against the louvred wooden shutters in the semi-darkness, listening. Many members of the garrison were becoming a little perturbed about the Collector. His face had taken on a more haggard look and he was sometimes heard to be muttering to himself . . . once or twice he had even been heard laughing to himself as he walked about; it was an uncomfortable laugh, and if he saw you looking at him he would stop immediately; his face would become stern and expressionless once more inside its cat-like ruff of whiskers. There was no reason to make too much of this, however . . . a man has to be allowed a few personal idiosyncrasies, after all, and the Collector had done a splendid job so far. All the same, the Collector was in complete command of the garrison and everything that happened in the enclave happened at his behest. The siege, in a manner of speaking, was _his idea_. It would be unfortunate, to put it mildly, if now or at some later stage he should collapse when so much depended on him. So no wonder that people had begun to watch him rather uneasily. Mind you, he was probably still as sound as a bell. And it could hardly be a bad thing that he had come to listen to the singing of hymns. It was a pity that his face could not be seen more clearly in the shadows.

Miriam stood in the light of the lamp. Her face had grown pink, her eyes shone, and her breast heaved. She had never sung so thrillingly before.

"Yes," thought Fleury, "she's going at it hammer and tongs for _his_ benefit!" Full of self-pity he made his way back to his lonely _charpoy_ in the banqueting-hall.

The following morning he and Harry waited tensely with their horses in the shelter of Dr Dunstaple's house for the signal that Cutter was ready to spring his mine. The sortie was to be led by Lieutenant Peterson. A number of other gentlemen were also there, including Mr Ronald Rose, one of the railway engineers, Mr Simmons, the skin of whose face had now been totally flayed by the sun, and the Schleissner brothers, Claude and Michael, both ensigns from Captainganj.

"I say, I've just remembered, it's my birthday today," Fleury remarked casually to Harry, and then scowled at his blunder; he had not meant to tell anyone, then he had blurted it out.

"Many happy returns," said Harry, rather absentmindedly. He would have shown more interest but in a few moments, whirling his sabre, he would be riding for the enemy lines. Beside this crimson thought Fleury's birthday seemed anaemic.

Fleury clenched his teeth morosely, thinking: "Cutter is taking a devilish long time with his mine."

As a matter of fact, Fleury had something else on his mind besides his birthday. Recently he had been employing his idle hours (for a siege can be very dull to a man of culture) in a deep and thorough investigation of the military arts. Like the Collector he believed that nothing need be outside the scope of the man of intelligence. And so he had made a rapid, sceptical reading of the Collector's authorities, Vauban and so forth, groaning derisively to Harry over their lack of imagination, errors of logic, and sluggish mental processes. The only idea which had caused him any enthusiasm he had found in Carnot, who had attempted to prove mathematically that by using a thirteen-inch mortar to discharge six hundred iron balls at a time any besieging force could be rapidly wiped out.

For three or four days he had pestered the Collector with offers of advice, but then his enthusiasm for Carnot's idea had lapsed in favour of one of his own. This was a design for a new weapon which would, he believed, create a revolution in the cavalry charge. Now, the great difficulty in the cavalry charge, as Fleury saw it, is that you very often have to deal with two of the enemy at once, with the result that while you are cutting the head off one of your assailants his companion is doing the same for you. The weapon which Fleury had designed and made for himself in order to overcome this difficulty resembled a giant pitchfork with prongs roughly at a distance of a man's outstretched arms; it also had a wide tail, like that of a magnified bishop's crozier which, reversed, could be used for dragging people off horses; on the shaft, for psychological reasons, there fluttered a small Union Jack. His only problem was to find a place to attach the weapon to his saddle. For the time being the prongs of the instrument (which he had christened the Fleury Cavalry Eradicator) sprouted over his horse's head like a pair of weird antlers. Well, would it work or not? He would soon find out. Meanwhile, what on earth was Cutter up to?

The Collector, too, was waiting impatiently. So much depended on the success of this operation. He had been standing in the pit beside the battery for the past few minutes, since Cutter had disappeared along the shaft; at the Collector's side two Sikhs were working a primitive bellows attached to improvised pipes of canvas, pumping air to the head of the shaft. Up there somewhere, at a place which he estimated would be directly beneath the enemy position, Cutter had picked a small chamber in the side of the gallery wall in which to stow the charge, the intention being to increase the force of the explosion by keeping it out of the direct line of the gallery. Boxes of powder had been dragged up to him. He had stowed them and set the fuse of powder-hose; now he was tamping, that is to say, filling up the head of the gallery to prevent the charge blowing back down it; this, too, had to be done with care for if he disturbed the fuse and it failed to function the tamping would have to be unpicked again, a dangerous business; to add to the difficulty he had to work in complete darkness without so much as a candle, for fear of the powder exploding too soon.

At last Cutter crawled out of the gallery; he looked exhausted and in need of fresh air. He was ready now to spring the mine, was the attacking force ready? Yes. He lit a candle and ducked back into the gallery; in order to save powder he had not brought the fuse right back to the shaft; this powderhose fuse had been extemporized from a tube of linen sewn by the ladies; it was immensely long and about an inch in diameter, and had provided the ladies with a task which had occupied their fingers for many hours; filled with powder it would burn at ten to twenty feet a second, so Cutter had no time to loiter in the gallery after he had touched it off.

The Collector raised his hand to give the signal for cannons and rifles to fire as Cutter touched off the fuse and sprinted back down the gallery. A storm of gunfire broke out. Cutter just reached the shaft in time to see the cavalry squadron (accompanied by Fleury on what looked like a reindeer) springing over the rampart and spurring for the enemy lines; then there was a great explosion and he was pelted with earth and pebbles from the mouth of the gallery.

To Fleury it seemed that the yellow earth was erupting before him scattering dark objects which might have been sepoys. It was as yet impossible to see in the dust cloud whether the enemy defences had been breached. Ahead of him Lieutenant Peterson flourished his sabre shouting soundlessly and then held it out stiff and straight in front of him over his horse's straining head. He vanished into the curtain of yellow dust followed by two Sikhs, then by Harry, then by the rest of the squadron including Fleury himself. In the yellow fog sepoys were wandering stunned and defenceless; everywhere the riders cut them down. In front of Fleury two _sowars_ hesitated, uncertain whether to spur forward and do battle or to turn tail; behind him Mr Rose lifted his sabre to split the skull of a staggering infantryman. The two _sowars_ continued to vacillate in front of Fleury; he unshipped the Cavalry Eradicator. His victims were ideally positioned, he would never have a better chance! Uttering a peculiar but scientific warcry (he had calculated that maximum discouragement to the enemy would be caused by a mixture of gutturals and sibilants) he drove forward with all his might.

The _sowars_ each stared in amazement at the wicked, glistening point heading straight for his heart; they exchanged a glance of despair. . . but by a miracle the two steel prongs came to a trembling halt an inch from their hearts. They looked along the shaft to where Fleury, his eyes bulging, his face red with exertion, tried to drive the points those extra inches which would put them to death. Then, by a common accord, they turned their horses and bolted. Behind Fleury, Mr Rose, his brawny arms just beginning the downward swing that would split the sepoy's skull, had found himself suddenly whisked out of his saddle and was now struggling like a gaffed salmon on the end of the Eradicator. By the time he had freed himself, cursing, his victim also had vanished. Indeed, all the sepoys had vanished by now or were lying dead or mortally wounded.

"Come on! The guns!"

Throwing down the Eradicator (which he now realized had certain flaws of design) Fleury followed Harry through the choking yellow fog. Lieutenant Peterson was already labouring with two Sikhs to limber up a six-pounder to bring back to their lines; Mr Ford and an indigo planter were working to silence the dreaded eighteen-pounder.

"Spike the twelve-pounder!" shouted Harry and handed Fleury a six-inch nail. Fleury took the nail but shouted back: "Alright but where's the spike?"

"The nail, you fool! Hammer it into the vent and then break it off."

Nobody likes to be called a fool . . . even less a person of Fleury's intelligence . . . Least of all, a person of Fleury's intelligence by a person of Harry's. And how was Fleury to know that spiking guns did not mean what it said (and what any normally intelligent person would have thought it meant: namely, hammering a large spike into the muzzle) but something quite different? Decidedly, Harry was letting his military training go to his head, but he had already hurried away to hammer nails into other guns, so Fleury, too, set to work and made rather a good job, he thought, of spiking the twelvepounder.

The six-pounder and a howitzer were dragged away by Sikhs towards the Residency ramparts. Lieutenant Peterson shouted the order to retreat; the yellow fog had now cleared to a light, sparkling mist and the sepoys were re-grouping to launch a counter-attack. Now only Lieutenant Peterson himself lingered. He had found one of the sepoy ammunition stores, had quickly scattered a train of powder to it, and was now attempting to fire it. At last, he succeeded, swung himself into the saddle and was away. His horse cleared the sepoy rampart and sped like an arrow after his men across the open ground. Suddenly they saw him hit. He slid out of the saddle and bounced in the dust. Without hesitation both Harry and Fleury turned their horses and spurred back to where he lay. Fleury rode on to catch the reins of the Lieutenant's horse while Harry tried to lift him from the ground. Then together they struggled to get him into the saddle, but again he was hit. They felt his body shudder as another ball struck him in the back and they were obliged to give up the attempt. At this moment there was a great flash and an explosion rang around the plain. Harry and Fleury knelt beside Peterson and shook hands with him for the last time, and as they did so the pallor of death came over his face. Fleury struggled for a moment to remove the locket from around his neck to bring back to his wife, but it was too securely fastened. Then they were both in the saddle once more and riding for the safety of the Residency rampart. They sailed over it at last, accompanied by a volley of musket balls.

16

In spite of his difficulties with the Eradicator Fleury came very well out of this attack. He and Harry had both behaved with great bravery in full view of everyone. The ladies in the billiard room, who had been reciting the litany throughout the attack, were chattering with excitement and could talk of little else. Perhaps, if one takes the long view, this gallant action might be seen as a solstice in Fleury's life, for from now on as the days went by he grew steadily less responsive to beauty and steadily more bluff, good-natured and interested in physical things. So pleased was he, so busily engaged in modest assurances that anyone would have done the same in his place, that when at dusk he paid his usual evening visit to the Residency and found Miriam, Louise, Harry and Lucy (whom they had felt sorry for) waiting to lead him to a special celebration, his birthday had gone completely out of his mind. And it was a splendid affair, for Lucy, who was good at that sort of thing, had succeeded in begging a cup of sugar from one of the gentlemen working at the Commissaniat . . . and this sugar, which none of them had tasted for days, made them as festive as if it had been champagne. They had saved some flour and some suet, too, and Miriam had bought a bottle of port wine from someone, and so they had made something which was not exactly a birthday cake, but more a birthday pudding, with "Happy Birthday, Dobbin!" written on top in pieces of broken sugar biscuit (Fleury's brow darkened for a moment at "Dobbin" but evidently Miriam had forgotten) and the whole thing thoroughly soaked in port wine. Of course, the rest of the port wine they drank to Fleury's health. As for Fleury, his eyes kept hurrying back to Louise to see if she were as happy as he was. How lovely she looked, and how gentle!

Louise was as happy as he was, almost. The only thing that slightly diminished her pleasure was the knowledge that she had an unsightly red spot on her forehead and another one, perhaps even a boil, coming up on her neck. In addition, she had been out in the sun without her bonnet, which she had given to a wounded Sikh, and her face had a much pinker look than she considered becoming.

But she was glad that the pudding was a success. It was she who had had to make it because Miriam had turned out to be hopelessly impractical when it had come to the point, the way capable, intelligent people often are when it comes to cooking and making things. And she was glad, too, that Fleuny had turned out not to be a coward . . . of course, she had not expected that he _would_, but all the same, you could never tell and Fleury in some ways was so unusual . . . He had such interesting ideas, for one thing, and he knew everything. She could not think of anything he did not know and it was even a bit embarrassing to see how much more he knew than even the Padre, or the Magistrate, or her father, or even than the Collector. She sometimes thought him a little tactless and that he should sometimes pretend to be a bit more stupid so as not to make older people feel inferior. Perhaps that was why she had not liked him so much at first, and had thought him conceited. But now she thought him wonderful, and so personable, even though one had to admit that he smelled rather strong . . . but then they all did; it was so hard to keep yourself clean without the bearers to help. She herself had begun to smell rather disagreeable. She regretted this but without soap all her efforts to render herself odourless had proved vain . . . her only comfort was that she smelled less than many of the other ladies of her own class and, of course, than _all_ those of the classes beneath her. It was the view of the billiard room that the artillery women could no longer be approached. But she was worried about that spot on her forehead and afraid that Fleury might start seeing her as she really was, and so she kept raising her hand to her forehead, as if in thought.

There was, however, a greater anxiety in Louise's life than either her smell or her spots. She was concerned for her father, Dr Dunstaple. As the days went by he became more and more liable to fits of rage. Nowadays he could hardly open his mouth without abusing Dr McNab, whom he had taken to calling "the Gravedigger". Louise had remonstrated with him but the Doctor was not in the habit of allowing his children to advise him on his conduct, least of all his daughters. He had flown into a rage, insinuating that she was "in league" with McNab. The Doctor had his fit of rage in his own drawing-room, in full hearing of the ladies cowering in the cellar below (as much in fear of his wrath as of the round shot which were slowly knocking the house to pieces around them). Mrs Dunstaple cowered there, too. She had never been able to do anything with her husband when he was angry, never, she sobbed.

So poor Louise, who loved her father very dearly, could only turn to Harry for help. But Harry listened to her in frank disbelief. Girls had a habit, he knew, of distressing themselves over things which did not exist. It was something to do with their wombs, so a fellow-officer had once told him. No doubt Louise was suffering from this womb-anxiety, then. He explained that if Father had started calling McNab "the Gravedigger" it was only from a robust sense of professional rivalry and nothing to worry about. Besides, McNab probably deserved it from all one heard.

Louise longed to confide in someone; above all, she longed to confide in Fleury; he would at least take her seriously; he would show concern. The trouble was that he would almost certainly be unable to refrain from some ill-advised action, such as taking her father's arm as if they were equals and giving him a condescending lecture. That was unthinkable. She must conceal her worries from Fleury.

In the end it was to Miriam that she had told them, thinking: "Miriam is mature and sensible. She'll know what to do." And so she had approached Miriam, though diffidently because one has a natural reluctance to discuss family matters with those outside the family. Miriam had given her a sensible opinion to the effect that the obvious person to ask for advice was a doctor, hence Dr McNab himself! Who could be better? Louise had had misgivings about this at first. But it was certain that her father needed a doctor's attention and that Dr McNab, who had suffered all his colleague's slanders without a murmur, deserved an apology.

Dr McNab, his eyebrows raised considerately, had listened to what Louise had to say. "Aye, you must get him to rest, Miss Dunstaple. The poor man is overworked."

"But how?"

"I wish I could tell you but I cannot. He'll not take advice from me." Then, seeing Louise's distress, he added: "But perhaps we shall think of a way."

Louise's grief and anxiety did not prevent her noticing that, in common with certain of the other gentlemen, Dr McNab appeared to show an interest in Miriam. He treated her with a decorous gallantry, as if her presence beside him in a patched and mended dress of grey cotton, stockingless, hands rough from washing her own clothes and hair full of dust, had been that of a lady in the most elegant drawing-room. When his eyes rested on her face an expression of good humour and sympathy replaced his habitually sad and grave demeanour. Louise had often noticed how thrilling it is to see a smile on the face of someone who does not often smile, particularly someone as grave as Dr McNab. She could not help saying to Miriam after this interview: "I think you have made another conquest among the gentlemen."

"Oh, surely not," said Miriam, laughing. "I don't think I have made a single one. Besides, I have often noticed that the gentlemen only have eyes for you, my dear, and although men are not usually the most intelligent of creatures, this time for once they are right, because you are the prettiest girl in India. I can assure you that if I wanted to make conquests I should take care not to appear in your company."

"You only say that because you're kind, but you know that it really isn't true. What gentleman in the world would not prefer your company to that of an empty-headed creature like me?"

"You must ask my brother that question," said Miriam smiling and taking Louise's arm to put an end to this unctuous exchange. "Let me tell you a secret. We shall both find, if we survive this dreadful siege, gentlemen who think each of us uniquely wonderful and who would not give a farthing for the other. Why?

Who knows why? Because that's the way of the world, that's why." And with this comment, which was further proof to Louise of Miriam's superiority and good sense, the subject had been closed.

Now, although she was glad that the birthday pudding was a success, Louise found herself with yet another cause for family distress: the attention that Harry was paying to Lucy. Anyone who knew him less well than his sister might not have noticed how his manner had changed. How gruff he had become, how paternal, how full of authority!

"You'd better sit here, Lucy, where you can serve out the pudding and see that that young beggar Fleury doesn't get too much, ha ha, even though it is his birthday." And Harry had indicated a place on the floor beside himself. The party, as it happened, was taking place on the carpet of the Residency drawingroom, in the lee of a shattered grand piano; additional protection to their flanks was offered by the gorse bruiser which had been moved from the dining-room, a marble statue of Cupid sharpening his arrows on a stone ("How appropriate," thought Louise grimly, "for poor, innocent Harry"), a colossal statue of the Queen in zinc, and a display case of lightning conductors for ships (as used in HM Navy); all of these objects had once graced the Crystal Palace.

"You sit there, Lou, and, Miriam, you sit there," Harry was proceeding commandingly. "That's right, everyone. That's the spirit."

Astonished by how insufferable her brother had suddenly become, Louise could not help thinking that Miriam, who was older and in every way more mature than Harry, must object to being ordered about by him . . . but she did not seem to; she seemed perfectly content to be given orders. Yet nobody seemed more content than Lucy. "Shall I do this? Shall I do that? Is that the right way?" she kept asking Harry, turning to him meltingly for more gruff instructions than could possibly be required. Although Louise was still glad that she had saved Lucy's life by sending that letter to the _dak_ bungalow she could not help feeling that she had been rather taken advantage of . . . If you save someone's life you do not expect them to start promptly making mincemeat of your innocent brother's affections with melting glances and flashings of pretty smiles. Not that Louise would normally have minded a pretty girl like Lucy capturing Harry's heart . . . to have their hearts besieged and captured was, after all, at least one of the things that men were there for.

What Louise could not forget, however, was that Lucy had been dishonouned. This lovely and quite innocent-looking girl who was sitting there with them now cheerfully eating pudding had allowed, perhaps even encouraged, certain things to be done to her by a man; she had perhaps allowed her clothes to be fumbled with and disarranged . . . she might even perhaps, for all Louise knew, have been seen naked by him. The thought of Lucy's delightfully shaped body, of which she herself had inadvertently glimpsed intimate parts in the billiard room (for Lucy was careless where modesty was concerned), exposed to the eyes of a gentleman, was very distressing to Louise. She was ready to be friendly and forgiving to Lucy, and she was ready to believe that the sin had been less Lucy's than that of her seducer . . . but she could not believe it a good thing that Harry should become infatuated with her. That a man (let us not call him a gentleman) should have been permitted to view that sacred collection of bulges, gaps, tufts of hair and rounded fleshy slopes which, as clear as the tossing arms of the semaphore on Diamond Head, signalled their own message:

"Womanhood"; on this, apply cosmetics of exonerating circumstances though you might, Louise could only put an ugly complexion, for it added up to the betrayal of her sex.

But now it was time for Fleury's birthday present to be handed to him and, once again, although the idea had been Miriam's, the hard work had had to be done by Louise. With the Collector's permission they had cut the cloth off the billiard tables and made him a coat of Lincoln green together with a cap of the same material, garnished with a turquoise peacock's feather.

"I say, he looks as if he has just come from Sherwood Forest," cried Harry gruffly in his new insufferable manner. "Ho there, Locksley! Ha, ha!"

"Oh shut up, Dunstaple!" said Fleury, delighted with his new coat and secretly pleased to be compared with Robin Hood. He put the coat on and turned slowly in front of the ladies, exclaiming: "What a splendid fit it is!" and indeed it was a good fit, even though one arm seemed to be rather longer than the other ("That's so he can fire his long-bow the more easily, ha, ha!" cried Harry obnoxiously, causing Lucy to swoon with laughter). "Thank heaven it fits, anyway," thought Louise sadly. For some reason, she had no idea why, she suddenly felt close to tears. With one hand to her forehead, as if she were "thinking" again, she used the other one to give her collar a little tug to make sure no one could see her new boil, the one on her neck.

At this moment the Collector happened to pass through the drawing-room and seeing Miriam sitting with her brother and the young Dunstaples and Miss Hughes, could not help thinking how she still looked only a girl herself, even though she had been a widow for three years or more. They invited him to taste the birthday pudding, which he did, pronouncing it excellent and thinking: "What charming young people they are, to be sure. Why cannot every man and woman in India be so delightful to talk to?"

An expression of warmth had softened the Collector's features as he knelt beside the group of young people to sample their pudding, but Miriam watching his face closely, saw the shadow return as he stood up. Perhaps it was the endless worry of the siege: he was always anxious, she knew, as dusk was falling, particularly at the beginning of a moonless night when the sepoys might make a surprise attack. Would there be a moon tonight? She could not remember.

But the Collector was still following his earlier thoughts and wondering how it could ever be that the hundred and fifty million people living in India could ever have the social advantages that made young people like the Fleurys and the Dunstaples so delightful, so confident, and so charming.

He left the young people and strode wearily through the hall, muttering to himself aloud: "Surely it's impossible under any system of government or social economy ?" The Collector frowned. A number of people lying on bedding in the hall among the lumber of "possessions" were watching him uneasily; perhaps they had seen him talking to himself. But again he thought: "Can it be that the Indian population will ever enjoy the wealth and ease of the better classes ?" This was the melancholy question which had invited the shadow back over the Collector's countenance and which, presently, pursued him out into the pitch-dark compound to watch the construction of a new line of defence and to assist in the nightly digging of graves.

17

The Padre had become harder and more cunning in the service of the Lord; otherwise it is doubtful whether he would have survived the first weeks of the siege. Nobody had worked harder than the Padre; he had done his best. But he was only one man, surrounded by sinners and himself a sinner, born of Adam.

As silk-worms secrete silk, so human beings secrete sin. There is a normal quantity of sin which, for their everlasting punishment, any community of erring humans cannot help spinning in the course of their lives. But what puzzled the Padre was the nature of the particular divine grievance for which they were now suffering such an extreme punishment. What could it be? He had asked himself this question many times as the days had crawled by. And now, suddenly, as he began to dig the first of the evening's graves, illumination came to him. In the eye of his mind, whose blindness had been cured, the Padre again saw Fleury sitting among the children at Sunday school and shaking his head as if he did not believe in the Atonement. He paused in the act of digging, a heap of dusty soil on his spade. It could not be anything else. Their troubles had begun soon after the arrival of Fleury in Krishnapur.

He heard a footstep in the darkness. For a moment he thought that it must be Fleury himself, guided like a ram into a thicket. But it was the Collector carrying a spade. He had come to lend a hand.

"Three again tonight?"

"Alas!"

The Collector tried to remember who had died during the preceding night and day. One of these would be Peterson whose remains had been retrieved after dark; although only a few hours had passed the pariah dogs and vultures had already cleaned away the soft parts of Peterson's face and the flesh from his arms, leaving only the hands; these hands on the end of his outstretched, skeletal arms, had the appearance of gloves and lent the corpse an air of ghastly masquerade. Another of the bodies would be that of Jackson, the soldier who had been singing the song about the Crimea in order to keep his spirits up in the hospital. Day by day his bursts of singing had become more infrequent until at last they had been silenced altogether. Jackson had spent his last days lying with flies fighting over his staring eyes in the middle of the stench and horror of the hospital. The Collector had tried to speak to him but had got no reply. He was not sorry that Jackson was dead at last. The other shrouded corpse was that of Mr Donnelly, an indigo farmer and a Roman Catholic, who had died of a heart attack.

"We only need to dig two, Padre. Father O'Hara will be here presently to dig the other one in his own plot."

The Padre paid no attention; he was digging energetically. The Collector could see of him only the faint glimmer of his face and hands as he worked; his long clerical habit had rendered the rest of him invisible in the thick darkness.

"By the way, do we know which one _is_ Donnelly ?"

But the Padre remained engrossed in his own thoughts. His puny arms had become as strong again as when he had been a rowing-man at Brasenose; now the Collector, whose own hands had roughened like those of a member of the labouring classes, had to struggle to keep up with him.

"That could be a bit of a problem," mused the Collector.

"I believe, Mr Hopkins," said the Padre presently, "though as yet I have found no direct evidence of it, that there may be German rationalism at work within our midst. I hope I am mistaken."

"Ah?" The Collector's tired mind resisted the prospect of becoming excited over a possible invasion by German nationalism.

"Perhaps you are not aware of how the Church is ravaged in Germany, Mr Hopkins. In the universities there I have heard that unbelief is rife. Men who style themselves scholars do not hesitate to lead the young astray by directing them to study the Bible as if it were the work of man and not the revelation of God. It is said that a certain Herr de Wette denies that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses and maintains that they were written at a period long after his death."

"Oh, the Germans, you know . . ." The Collector with a shovelful of earth dismissed the Germans. But this attempt to soothe the Padre and render further theological exchanges unnecessary did not succeed.

"True, compared with the simple, healthy British mind the German mind is sickly and delights to feed on such morbid fantasies. But still, we must not forget how quickly unsound ideas can spread, particularly among the young and impressionable. They spread among the young like cholera! The German Church has no discipline; for its ministers it requires no adherence to the Thirty-nine Articles or to the Prayer Book. In Germany a clergyman can believe and teach whatever he wants, a disgraceful state of affairs. I hear there is a man called Schleiermacher who does not subscribe to many of the fundamental teachings of Christianity such as the Fall and the Atonement, but who is yet allowed to call himself a minister of the Prussian Church!"

"I don't think we in England need be anxious . . ." began the Collector, but the Padre cut him short, waving his spade in the darkness.

"Rationalism! A vain belief in the power of the reason to investigate religious matters. Ah, Mr Hopkins, the abuse of man's power of reason is the curse of our day."

The Collector remained mute. He did not believe this last remark to be true. But he saw no prospect of the Padre listening sympathetically to his reservations and considered it fruitless to antagonize him.

"I say, you don't happen to know which of these bodies is Donnelly's, do you?" he asked again, indicating the three shrouded mounds of darkness lying beside the path.

"As we read in the Book of Isaiah: 'Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee'!"

"Well, of course, there are some ways in which no doubt. . ." mumbled the Collector. At the same time he realized with a shock how much his own faith in the Church's authority, or in the Christian view of the world in which he had hitherto lived his life, had diminished since he had last inspected them. From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of nationalism and despair.

Another footstep sounded in the darkness. The Padre paused, leaning on his spade, his eyes feverishly searching for the identity of the newcomer. This time he knew it must be Fleuny, guided to an appointment with him so that his heretical notions might be extirpated. The Collector noticed that while he himself was scarcely ankle deep in the grave he was digging, the Padre had already lowered himself to the level of his knees, for while the Padre argued, he dug.

Meanwhile, the burly form of Father O'Hara had loomed out of the shadows. He had a spade over his shoulder. "Glory be to God!" he muttered as he tripped over something in the darkness. "Did ye ever see such a dark? I've no mind for this at all at all. Are ye there, Mr Hopkins, sor?"

"Just at your side, Father O'Hara. Mind you don't fall into the. . . ah . . . Here, let me give you a hand up."

"Now then, show me the lads and I'll be after taking mine to his eternal rest, God help him."

"Hm, Padre? Perhaps you could tell Father O'Hara which is Mr Donnelly?"

The Padre knelt on the path beside the three dark forms and peered at them uncertainly in the dim light afforded by the stars. After a pause for consideration he said: "Mr Donnelly is the one at the end."

"What! This little lad Jim Donnelly, is it? Not at all, not at all. He's no more Jim Donnelly than I am meseif. This big lad here'll be your man."

"The small one is Donnelly," declared the Padre in a tone of conviction.

"Not at all. Sure, I've known him all me life."

"I fear you are mistaken."

"Indeed I am not! That big man over there is Donnelly if I ever saw him . . . He's the very image."

"Father O'Hara," broke in the Collector with authority. "Both you and the Padre are mistaken. I happen to know that the man in the middle is Donnelly. Now kindly take him away and bury him in the appropriate place and with the appropriate rites."

"But, Mr Hopkins . . ."

"Which lad is it?"

"This medium-sized corpse is the one you require."

"Should we not open up the stitching to make sure?"

"Certainly not. The middle one is Donnelly without a doubt. Now take him away." And the Collector returned to his digging. The matter was settled.

"Well, come along then, if you're Jim Donnelly and we'll put you in the earth," declared Father O'Hara shouldering the medium-sized corpse. He hesitated for a moment as if waiting for a possible disclaimer from the shrouded figure on his back, then, as none came, he staggered away with it into the darkness. They could hear him bumping into gravestones and blessing himself and muttering for some time as he groped his way towards his own plot.

So rapidly was the Padre now digging that to the weary Collector it seemed that he must be visibly sinking into the ground. The Collector, too, set to work in a more determined fashion, thinking with a mixture of virtue and self-pity: "I'm tired but it's my duty. It's right that a leader should bury with his own hands his followers and comrades." All the same, he was rather put out when the Padre dropped his spade for a moment to drag the shorter of the two remaining corpses over to measure against his half-dug trench. "He might at least have chosen the bigger one since he's dug twice as much of his grave as I have."

"Can I be of any assistance?" asked a voice at the Collector's side, causing him to jump violently for he had heard nothing and now a luminous green wraith appeared to be trembling at his elbow. But it was only Fleury. He had stopped by on his way back to the banqueting hall for the night's watch, still full of the energy generated by his love for Louise.

"Is that Mr Fleury?" came the Padre's voice.

"Yes."

A gargle of joy came from where the Padre was digging. Misinterpreting the reason for it the Collector said firmly: "He's taking over my spade for a while, Padre," and went to sit down on a nearby tombstone.

For a few moments there was no sound but the scrape of the spades in the earth; then, gentle as a dove, cunning as a serpent, came the Padre's voice. "I hear, Mr Fleury, that in Germany there is much discussion of the origin of the Bible. . ."

"Oh, is there?" Fleury's mind was still lovingly reviewing the birthday party which had just taken place; he was trying to remember all the charming and intelligent remarks he had just made in Louise's presence; he had done rather well, he thought . . . "I wonder what she thought when I said such-andsuch and everyone laughed? I wonder what she thought when Harry was telling everyone about us spiking the guns? I wonder . . ."

"Yes," went on the Padre, making a superhuman effort to maintain his conversational tone. "It is being studied as if it were not a sacred text, by the method of philological and linguistic investigation."

"Oh yes, I think I may have heard something along those lines."

Louise, Fleury had noticed, had a way, while seated of shifting her position slightly with a thoughtful look. There was something so feminine about it.

"A great variety of opinion has been advanced," continued the Padre impartially, breaking into a sweat. "Now people think one thing, now another."

"You mean like 'the dancing clergy' . . . Some people think it's alright for them to do so, some don't?"

"I suppose the question of the 'dancing clergy' might be so considered," agreed the Padre mildly, but thinking: 'Surely the Devil is putting words on this young man's tongue!' "But I was thinking more of another much-debated question whether the Bible is literally true or not?"

The Padre had uttered these final words as casually as his exhausted state and impassioned convictions would allow. He had stopped digging. In his excitement he had dug one end of the grave to a tremendous depth, the other hardly at all, so that the body lying beside it would have to be buried at a peculiar angle . . . But he was not thinking of this, he was waiting for Fleury's reply.

"Will the Padre never cease from these inquisitions?" wondered the Collector irritably. "Haven't we enough to worry about already?" He still felt displeased because the Padre had so selfishly snatched the smaller body.

The Padre was waiting for Fleury to reveal the thoughts in his mind about the Bible, but Fleury was having trouble seeing them against the radiance shed by Louise. What was it that he was supposed to be thinking about? Oh yes, the Bible, literally true or not?

"Frankly," he said in a mature and condescending way, "I tend to agree with Coleridge that it doesn't particularly matter . . ."

"Not _matter!_"

". . . that the important thing about the Bible is not that it tells us that Moses did this or that . . . he may or may not have, for all I know, but I don't think it's important whether these German wallahs manage to prove it one way or another . . . in other words not whether it's literally true, but whether . . ." Fleury's voice took on a more solemn note, ". . . whether it's _morally_ true, whether it appeals to and satisfies our inner spiritual needs. That, if I may say so, is the important question." After a moment he added, more condescendingly than ever: "I dare say our positions differ a trifle, eh, Padre?" This additional comment was designed to put an end to the argument . . . his thoughts wanted to hasten back to the consideration of Louise.

"The Bible is the word of God, Mr Fleury," exclaimed the Padre gesturing in the darkness with his spade. "How will you interpret the spirit precisely, man? How will you say it is this and not that? Every man will set to work subjecting the Bible to his own limited intelligence and end up floundering in apostasy. You will have men like this misguided Schleiermacher who pick and choose among the doctrines of the Church and who decide, puffed up by confidence in their own powers of reason, that the Fall is not a moral teaching or that the Atonement is distasteful to them."

"But if it seems clear that certain parts of the Bible are not, hm, moral according to our latest nineteenth-century conceptions of morality . . ."

"Fallen man is not able to understand the purposes of God," interrupted the Padre, who had thrown away his spade and was trying to ram the small, shrouded corpse into the hole he had dug in such a way that the feet would not stick up into the air. "Human conceptions of morality must be fallible like all human ideas!"

"The letter killeth, the Spirit giveth life, all the same, if you see what I mean," quoted Fleury feebly. He found himself unable to match the Padre's positive assertions with anything better than vague equivocations. Nevertheless, like all intellectual young men he disliked coming off worst in an argument, whatever the subject. He fell into a sullen silence as the Padre continued to harangue him, and looked around to see if the Collector would be thinking of relieving him soon. But the Collector had left his tombstone and melted deeper into the darkness.

"You cannot escape the fact," said Fleury, returning to the attack, "that our century has developed a morality higher and finer than anything the world has known before, based on the _spirit_ of the New Testament, ignoring the letter of the Old Testament. The nineteenth century has witnessed a refinement of morality unknown to the antique world!"

"Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee!"

The Padre's words echoed after the Collector as he retreated through the darkness and he thought:

"Young Fleury is perfectly right . . . How arid the eighteenth century was in comparison to our own. They did their best, no doubt, but they were at best only a preparation for our own century. How barren in taste they were, how lacking in feeling! What a poor conception of Man, what fruitless ratiocination! Everything which they approached so ineffectually, we have brought to culmination. The poor fellows had no conception how far Art, Science, Respectability, and Political Economy could be taken. Where they hesitated and blundered we have gone forward . . . Ah!" He stumbled. A round shot, skipping through the darkness, landed in the mud wall of the churchyard, showering him with pebbles.

Somehow the shock of this narrow escape had a sobering effect on him and his confidence drained away, and with it his satisfaction with his own epoch. He thought again of those hundred and fifty million people living in cruel poverty in India alone . . . Would Science and Political Economy ever be powerful enough to give them a life of ease and respectability? He no longer believed that they would. If they did, it would not be in his own century but in some future era. This notion of the superiority of the nineteenth century which he had just been enjoying had depended on beliefs he no longer held, but which had just now been itching, like amputated limbs which he could feel although they no longer existed.

The round shot had also served to remind him of the new line of defence, the need for which was becoming daily more desperate. And so he turned towards the Residency to see how the new fortifications were progressing. Alas, the Collector knew that Machiavelli, another member of his staff of nocturnal counsellors, would not have wanted him to construct this second line of defence. It was the opinion of that cynical man that if a possiblity of retreat existed, the defenders would use it, and thus bring about their own defeat. But there was nothing the Collector could do about that . . . Sooner or later he would have to reduce the perimeter of the enclave. Even at the beginning of the siege the ramparts had been too sparsely manned. Now, with two or three men dying every day and sometimes more, the interval between each rifle grew daily larger, and only the inability of the sepoys to concert an attack with all their disparate forces had allowed the defences to remain intact.

"Besides, Machiavelli was not speaking of Englishmen, but Italians. . . A very different matter."

At first, the Collector had considered a new line which would form a loop around the Residency, the Church, and the banqueting hall, but he knew that the labour of digging an adequate trench and rampart over such a distance must now be beyond the strength of his garrison, who were obliged to fight during the day and dig at night. He had considered leaving the banqueting hall outside, but he soon realized that this was out of the question; it dominated the Residency . . . even if demolished its ruins would still command the Residency from an impregnable position. And yet the banqueting hall itself could not be defended for more than a few days because it lacked water. But he knew that there must be a solution to his problem and presently, by exercising his powers of observation and reason, he found it.

Among the many inventions in his possession there was an American velocipede. He had never found very much use for it in the past. At the time it had been designed no satisfactory system of pedals had yet been devised and he himself was no longer supple enough to propel it by one foot on the ground, as its inventor had intended. Once or twice, it was true, he had had an eager young assistant magistrate speeding erratically across the lawns on it to the amusement of the ladies and the astonishment of the bearers. But two wheels, he had been obliged to reflect, or even, come to that, a dozen wheels, would never match for speed and convenience the four legs of the horse. Now, however, this machine suddenly rolled out of oblivion into his mind as the very design required for his new system of defence . . . One large wheel, to include the Residency and the churchyard (whose ready-made wall could be incorporated), and a smaller wheel around the banqueting hall. All that was needed was a double sap (a single trench with a rampart on both sides) to join the two wheels.

This system had many advantages. The banqueting hall would act as a barbican to the Residency, protecting one entire hemisphere from a direct attack, the Residency doing the same for the weaker hemisphere of the banqueting hall. If the garrison continued to dwindle, the survivors could be progressively drawn back from the connecting trench into each wheel without necessarily weakening the whole structure. If the worst came to the worst, one wheel could even be abandoned altogether.

When he had paid a visit to Ford, the railway engineer whom he had put in charge of the execution of this elegant idea, and had surveyed the progress of the night's digging, he turned away again into the darkness. Although exhausted, he dreaded the prospect of returning to his empty room to sleep. Once or twice, ignoring the anxiety of his daughters he had not returned to his own bed but slept instead cradled in the documents in the Cutcherry. He had come to love roaming about the enclave in the darkness; the darkness brought relief from the overcrowding of the Residency which disgusted him, from the danger of crossing open spaces, from the hot wind and, above all, from the eyes of the garrison which were continually searching his face for signs of weakness or despair.

Now the night had grown darker, increasing his sense of freedom. A low bank of cloud had spread across the Eastern horizon and was slowly mounting over the entire firmament, concealing the stars. A breathless silence prevailed and the heat bad grown more intense. It seemed to him, too, though he could not be sure, that low on the Eastern horizon there was a glimmer of lightning . . . but perhaps it was musket fire or simply the flickering of those mysterious bonfires which nightly burned on the empty plain. "If it rains it will give us more time, and that's what we most need . . . Time to go as far as our food and powder will take us. After all, it's not as if we have to hold this place for the rest of our lives . . . But why has there been no word of a relieving force?"

As he passed near the churchyard again he heard the sound of the Padre's voice. The Padre's energies, as singleminded as a pack of hounds, were relentlessly running down the one or two heretical notions owned by Fleury which, dodging here and there like tired foxes, had still managed to elude them. Before lighting the lamp in his empty room the Collector crossed to the verandah and stood outside for a moment, watching the bank of cloud cover the shrinking patch of stanlit sky to the west.

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for _us_ . . . but what if we're only an after-glow of _them?_"

He lit the oil-lamp on the table beside a dish of _dal_ and a chapati which his daughters had left for his supper; his shattered bedroom slowly materialized out of the darkness, the splintered woodwork, the broken furniture, the wallpaper hanging in shreds from the shrapnel-pocked walls; this once beautiful, complacent, happy, elegant room was like a physical manifestation of his own grieving mind.

Part Three

18

The Collector had half expected the rains to begin during the night, but when he awoke the sky was cloudless once more; he could sense, however, that they would not be long coming. Already the burning winds had ceased to blow during the day; the air had lost its crisp dryness and consequently the heat seemed more oppressive than ever. Clouds gathered again in the course of the next two days, but after an hour or two they would disperse. From the roof of the banqueting hall he could see that the river, which had been almost dry until now, had swollen greatly, it continued to rise during the night until by the following morning it had submerged the melon beds. This sudden rise of the river was familiar to the Collector; he knew that it was not due to a fall of rain in the district but to the melting of the snows in the high Himalaya. Usually it heralded rains even so, but this year the river gradually subsided once more. Clouds gathered several times but only to disperse again.

Among the disasters which multiplied in the enclave during these last days before the monsoon none came as a more severe blow than the death of Lieutenant Cutter. He had become a hero for the garrison, for English and native defenders alike. Many tears were shed, particularly by the younger ladies, while the Padre made his eloquent funeral oration after the mid-day service on Sunday the 12 July in the Residency cellars.

"Providence has denied his country the privilege of decking his youthful brow with the chaplets which belong to the sons of victory and of fame, but his deeds can never die. The pages of history will record and rehearse them far and wide, and every Englishman, whether in his island home or a wanderer on some foreign shore, will relate with admiration what George Foxlett Cutter did at the siege of Krishnapur!"

By this time the manner of Cutter's death was known throughout the camp and somehow it appeared disconcertingly trivial for a man who had so often exposed himself to such great danger. It had happened at the rampart by Dr Dunstaple's house where Cutter had just shot a sepoy the moment before and seen him fall; at the same instant he had caught sight of another sepoy levelling his musket and had said to the Sikh beside him: "See that man aiming at me, take him down." But the words had hardly passed his lips when the shot struck him. He had been on one knee, but had risen to "attention" and then fallen, expiring without a word or groan, or any valedictory comments whatsoever.

"I had no idea the poor fellow was called 'Foxlett', had you?" Fleury asked Harry. He had to struggle to convince himself that Cutter's heroic stature was not a tiny bit reduced by this peculiar name.

In the meantime the steady trickle of deaths from wounds and sickness continued. A growing despondency prevailed. A rumour spread through the camp that a relieving force from Dinapur had been cut to pieces on the way to Krishnapur. It was said that a massacre had followed the surrender of General Wheeler at Cawnpore and that delicate English girls had been stripped naked and dragged through the streets of Delhi.

Another disaster was the death of little Mary Porter, a child already orphaned by the mutiny. Mary had been playing with some other children in the stable yard and had suddenly fainted. The other children had called Fleury, who was passing. He had picked her up half-conscious, and while he carried her to the hospital she had clung to him with a pitiful force. It is a terrible thing to be clung to by a sick child if you are not used to it; Fleury was very shaken by the power of the protective instinct which was suddenly aroused in him, although to no avail, for there was nothing he could do. She was suffering from sunstroke and she died within a short time. Dr Dunstaple, under whose care she succumbed, was also strongly affected by her death. This was surprising when you consider that these days Death was the genial Doctor's constant drinkingcompanion. Perhaps he had glimpsed in Mary something of his own daughter, Fanny. Whatever the reason, the effect was terrible. He seemed to go out of his mind completely, raving about every imaginable topic from the Calcutta races to Dr McNab's diabolical treatment of cholera. The Collector ordered him to bed and both wards of the hospital were taken over by Dr McNab; but not for long. After a day or two of confinement in a darkened room he returned to the hospital and took over his ward again. No sooner was he back amongst his own patients than he set about exchanging the dressings applied by Dr McNab, even though they were in most cases identical to his own. When the Collector mentioned this to Dr McNab he shook his head and said:

"Aye, the poor man has a way to go yet before he'll be sounds'

Before the Collector continued about his business, Dr McNab asked him to come over to the window for a moment. He wanted to examine the Collector's right eye which had become red and rather swollen. The Collector himself had paid no attention to it, assuming it to be one of the many trivial ailments from which the garrison, deprived of adequate fresh food, was now suffering.

"It's inflamed, Mr Hopkins. Is it painful?"

"Not very."

McNab offered no further comment so the Collector went on his way.

The sight which greeted him now in the tiger house was a pitiful one. Hari no longer paced nervously up and down; he lay sprawled on a pile of dirty straw, his eyes extinct. Around him lay scattered the festering remains of half a dozen meals. There was a powerful stench of urine also, as if he no longer went outside to perform his natural functions. He had turned grey, as Indians do when they are unhappy. His eyes were very bloodshot, like small balls of scarlet in his dark countenance, and his cheeks, of which the Collector had always admired the plumpness and the polish, were now hollow and covered with a dark, wispy down. Half buried in the dirty straw, beside a bone crawling with flies, lay the phrenology book, undisturbed since the Collector's last visit.

The Prime Minister was singing softly to himself when the Collector came in and continued to do so all the time he was there. It was a religious song and a joyful one, the Prime Minister's eyes sparkled. But they sparkled not outwardly but inwardly, for the deity which was causing him such intense satisfaction was inside himself. The Collector was astonished by how little the Prime Minister had changed during his month of captivity. He looked exactly the same except for his hair, which Hari had shaved off for his experiments and which had now grown into a furry black stubble through which the numbered segments of his skull could still be faintly perceived. The siege had simply made no impression on him whatsoever.

Looking at the Prime Minister the Collector was overcome by a feeling of helplessness. He realized that there was a whole way of life of the people in India which he would never get to know and which was totally indifferent to him and his concerns. "The Company could pack up here tomorrow and this fellow would never notice . . . And not only him . . . The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them." The Collector was humbled and depressed by this thought. He noticed that Hari was watching him with dull eyes.

"Hari, I've decided to let you go home. I suggest that you leave here before it grows dark so that the sepoys don't shoot you by mistake."

A shudder, as from a slight cough, passed through Hari's inanimate frame, but there was no other response. Hari continued to stare at him dully. At length, after some preliminary champing of his lips during which the Collector caught a glimpse of a white-coated tongue, Hari spoke.

"Mr Hopkin, it is cruel to torture with words. You do better to hang me from mango tree without more ado about nothing."

"Hari, how could you think such a thing?" cried the Collector, shocked. "This is no game. You're free to leave here and go home today. Look here, I know that I've treated you badly . . . But you must believe that I kept you here not because I wanted to, but because I believed it my duty to those whom God (or, well, the Company anyway) has placed in my care. Perhaps it was a mistake . . . perhaps keeping you here has done no good . . . I don't know whether it has made any difference, but now we're obliged to abandon some of our defences and it's certain that your presence can no longer help us. You'll be in great danger if you stay. You must forgive me, Hari, for keeping you here. This was wrong of me, I acknowledge it."

"You acknowledge, Mr Hopkin, you acknowledge! But you ruin health. I die of starvation and disease. I die of musket fire and you acknowledge."

"Please, Hari, you must not think badly of me. You must put yourself in my position. Besides, I'm not well myself . . . indeed, I'm most definitely sick," added the Collector succumbing to a sudden wave of self-pity for it was true, he did not feel in the least well. His right eye, which he had hardly noticed until Dr McNab had looked at it a little while earlier, had begun to throb painfully, and at the same time he felt feverish and nauseated, though perhaps it was only on account of the fetid atmosphere and the stench of urine.

"You must go now, Hari, and take the Prime Minister with you."

Every moment the Collector became more unwell. All the same, he found it pleasant to watch Hari reviving like a thirsty plant which has just been watered. Hari had already got to his feet and little by little was becoming animated again.

"When you're ready, go to the Cutcherry and tell the Magistrate. He'll stop firing while you go across to the sepoy lines. I must ask you not to tell them of our condition, however. Goodbye, Hari." The Collector had a feeling that even if he survived the siege he would never see Hari again. But before he had reached the door Hari had called to him, following him to the door.

"Collector Sahib, though I do not forgive bad treatment from _Sircar_ and from British Collector Sahib, I do not wish to cause personal grievance to my good friend, Mr Hopkin. I like to make to Mr Hopkin as private citizen a small gift of Frenloudji book, which is the only object in my possession and to give him handshake for last time. Correct!"

"Thank you, Hari," said the Collector, and tears came to his eyes, causing the right one to throb more painfully than ever.

A little later from his bedroom, where he had retired for a rest, he watched through his daughters'

brass telescope as the grey shadow of what had once been the sleek and lively Hari moved slowly over to the sepoy lines with, as usual, the Prime Minister dodging along behind him.

"I hope he doesn't tell them what a state we're in, all the same."

19

Now that the time had come for the depleted garrison to shrink back inside the new fortifications, accommodation had to be found for the ladies displaced from Dr Dunstaple's house. Volunteers from the billiard room were needed to move to the banqueting hall so that the new ladies, many of whom were elderly, might be installed in their places in comparative comfort. It was when he was on his way to the billiard room to ask for these volunteers that the Collector suddenly felt faint. The Padre, who was passing, helped him to his bedroom and offered to call one of the doctors.

"No, it's nothing. Just the heat," muttered the Collector, dreading lest he be taken to the hospital.

"Send me the Magistrate."

When the Magistrate duly appeared the Collector, lying feverishly on his bed, asked him to take command of the garrison for a few hours. He explained what had to be done. The retreat must be carefully conducted so that it did not turn into a rout. He cursed himself inwardly for this sudden indisposition, which had come at the worst possible moment. Still, the Magistrate was a competent man. As an afterthought, he explained about the ladies who must volunteer for the banqueting hall.

But although they were terrified of the Magistrate, who in more peaceful times had so often savaged their verses, the ladies in the billiard room stoutly refused to volunteer for the banqueting hall, which they wrongly believed to be more dangerous than the Residency . . . except for Lucy, who was generally acknowledged to have nothing to live for anyway. As for Louise and Miriam, they had decided they must stay in the Residency in order to lend their assistance at the hospital, where the dispensers and orderlies could no longer cope. In the end, since there were no volunteers, the Magistrate was obliged to send the Eurasian women, half a dozen of whom had been quietly living in the Residency pantry and had spread their bedding on the pantry shelves. There were eight ladies to be accommodated. He still had to find room for two more, so he decided to banish the two foolish, pretty O'Hanlons from their billiard-table, sensing that they would make least fuss.

From the window of his room the Collector watched the final preparations being made for the hazardous withdrawal from his original "mud walls" to the new fortifications. Magnified as much by his fever as by the brass telescope to his eye, he saw Hookum Singh, a giant Sikh capable of carrying a barrel of powder on his back, stagger after Harry Dunstaple, emptying the powder in piles at the corners of the Cutcherry building and around pillars and supports. At the same time, a similar operation out of the field of his lens, was being performed at what was left of Dr Dunstaple's house. Fleury, Ford, Burlton, and half a dozen Sikhs, were digging a series of _fougasses_ (holes dug slant-wise in the ground and filled with a charge of powder and stones), again with the intention of preventing the sepoys from converting their retreat into a rout. So far all the preparations had been made as discreetly as possible, under cover of darkness, but now the moment he most dreaded was approaching, the moment when the sepoys would realize that a retreat was taking place and would launch their attack. The Collector's hands trembled so badly that he had to rest the telescope on the shattered window sill. His face throbbed and his eyeball was seared by the white glare through which the dark figures of the men were moving about their work.

Shortly before five o'clock the sepoy cavalry made an attack near the Cutcherry but fortunately the men had not yet left their positions at the rampart. The attack was repulsed. The Collector watched this brief engagement in the dazzling circle of crystal but could no longer understand it. He saw a _sowar_ hit as he spurred towards the Residency. He saw the man's limbs, tightly clenched as he drove his horse towards the Cutcherry guns, suddenly relax as if something inside him had snapped. Then he slithered out of sight into the dust.

Soon he could no longer bear to apply the scorching lens to his right eye and was obliged to hold it to his left, which he did more clumsily than ever. It trembled uncomprehendingly over Harry Dunstaple running towards the ramparts waving a sabre and shouting orders, with the bulging pockets of his Tweedside lounging jacket swinging about his knees . . . over Ford, carefully laying a train back to the wall of the churchyard from one of the _fougasses_ that had been dug . . . over the Sikhs staggering here and there with loads of small stones to shovel into another _fougasse_ not yet completed . . . over the green Fleury having a rest in the shade of a tamarind beside the Church wall . . . and finally over the pariah dog, looking towards Fleury with admiration but from a respectful distance (for Fleury continued to reject its advances). The Collector, his mind too feverish to recollect for more than a moment what all this activity was about, became absorbed in the contemplation of this pariah dog. Its mouth was open, its lips drawn back, and it appeared to be grinning. From the thin, wretched creature it had been at the beginning of the siege it had become quite fat, for recently it had succeeded in eating two small lap-dogs which had unwisely fallen asleep in its presence. Now it was ready for another meal and was keeping a hopeful eye on the battlefield in case some appetizing Englishman or sepoy should fall conveniently near . . . but most of all it would like to eat Fleury, such was the power of its love for this handsome, green-clad young man; it uttered a groan of ecstasy at the thought and a needle of saliva, dripping from its jaws, sparkled in the Collector's telescope.

The Collector, of course, was aware only of a loathsome, sinister, and rather fat dog. . . How he wished this animal were a fluffy spaniel! How delightful that would be! Tea on the lawn, spaniels at one's heels, scarlet and dark green . . . the colours of the rightness of the world and of his place in it! Even in his fever the Collector's amputated hopes and beliefs continued to itch.

But now the men were sprinting back from the ramparts. They were plunging for the shelter of the churchyard wall as a typhoon of musket fire swept the defences, kicking dust into a mist around the ankles of the retreating men. Some fell and were dragged on by their comrades, others had to crawl as best they could, their heads barely emerging from the puffs of dust, across the open space between the Cutcherry and the churchyard wall. On the top of this wall stood Harry Dunstaple, shouting and waving his sabre as if conducting an orchestra, shouting for the men to hasten, for the Cutcherry must be blown up before the charging enemy could reach it and disturb the train.

"Let us have tea on the lawn again!" shouted the Collector from the window, but no one paid any attention to him. His swollen, inflamed face had become unbearable now; he could neither touch it, nor refrain from touching it.

There was a flash through the haze of dust as Ford knelt to fire the train. Already the first squadrons of sepoy cavalry were swooping over the abandoned ramparts and racing for the Cutcherry to kick away just a few inches of that thin trickle of grey powder before it burnt its way home. The Collector's telescope had wandered, however, to the slope above the melon beds where the densely crowded onlookers were shouting, cheering, and waving banners in a frenzy of excitement. "How happy they are!" thought the Collector, in spite of the pain. "It is good that the natives should be happy for surely that is ultimately what we, the Company, are in India to procure . . ." But by misfortune his telescope had now wandered back again and was trained on the Cutchenry at the very moment that it exploded with a flash that burnt itself so deeply into the Collector's brain that he reeled, as if struck in the eye by a musket ball . . . And then there was nothing but smoke, dust, debris, and a crash which dropped a picture from the wall behind him. But at the next instant from the other side of the Residency echoed another, even greater, explosion . . . and that was the last of Dr Dunstaple's house.

The Collector was both clutching at his face and trying not to clutch at it. Yet he must somehow tear the pain out with his hands or he knew that it would kill him. A cheer rang out from the natives assembled above the melon beds; it could be heard even over the boom of cannons and rattle of musketry. He had dropped his telescope; for a few moments he groped on the floor beside the window, but he no longer needed the telescope; he could see perfectly well without it. For a moment, as he looked out of the window, his mind became clear again and he thought: "My God, the sepoys are attacking. I must tell someone. I must warn the men." He could see the sepoy infantry advancing in hordes across the open ground from the direction of the cantonment. The cavalry had already ridden through the pall of dust and smoke that hung over the demolished Cutcherry and now they were ready to hurl themselves at the garrison, hastily assembled behind the churchyard wall. Less than a hundred yards from the wall they swerved and re-grouped for a charge as the infantry swarmed up behind them.

The Collector had become calm again. The reason was that his pain, although it was still there was no longer a part of him. His pain, a round, red, throbbing presence, sat beside him at the window enjoying the spectacle. Since Pain was paying no attention to him, he decided that he might without impropriety ignore Pain. He and Pain together watched a scene which reminded the Collector of the beach. How pleasant it is to sit on the cliffs of Dover and watch the waves rolling in. You can see them beginning so far out . . . you see them slowly grow as they come nearer and nearer to the shore, rise and then thrash themselves against the beach. Some of them vanish inexplicably. Others turn themselves into giants. As the sepoys, sensing that their chance had now come to abolish the _feringhees_ from the face of the earth, massed for a great assault, the Collector could see that this time a giant wave was coming.

"This should be a splendid show," he murmured, and Pain nodded his agreement. The spectators from the melon beds howled with enthusiasm, threw things into the air, and hugged each other from sheer excitement as the charge began. For some reason it began in a thick snowstorm of large white flakes.

Now, as the cries of the spectators rose to a crescendo, they were joined by the familiar stomachturning howl of the charging sepoys, which added an undertow of dread to the Collector's pleasure. Below him, Fleury raced along outside the churchyard wall under the bayonets of the galloping sepoys, touching off the trains to the _fougasses_. Abruptly, in front of the charging sepoys, who were already bewildered by the densely whirling white flakes, the ground erupted. Volleys of stones blew out of the earth.

Simultaneously cannons fired canister into their midst. The wave toppled, thrashed and boiled against the ground, but hardly advanced another step up the beach.

The sepoy officers shouted at their men and tried to rally them. This was the time to charge on, while the cannons were being re-loaded. Victory was theirs if only they would press on _now!_ But the men were blinded and confused by the snowstorm. They could see neither their officers nor the _feringhees_ . . . Then came a sudden, dreadful volley from their left flank, from the wheel of the banqueting hall. A few more seconds of hesitation and all was lost. The cannons were reloaded. Another deadly volley of canister and scarcely a man was left on his feet and capable of charging even had he wanted to do so. It was all over. Thanks to that providential snowstorm the attack had been repulsed. The survivors scrambled back to the sepoy lines pursued by a vengeful squadron of Sikh cavalry.

The Collector had been unable to see the latter part of this action, which had taken place in thick yellow dust and smoke (the snow having mysteriously ceased). But even if there had been no dust, smoke on snow, he would still have been unable to see it, because he was now lying on the floor beside the window, having fallen off his chair. Pain had come to stretch out beside him. Unseen by either Pain or the Collector, the fat pariah dog in the shade of the tamarind was whining and jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of a square meal or two, when all the fuss was over.

Fleury, exhausted and still quaking from his gallant dash beneath the sepoys' glistening bayonets, had slumped down with his back to the new rampart. He picked one of the snowflakes off the parapet and began to read it, but it was not very interesting . . - just a salt report from some sub-district or other. He threw it away and pulled out the Bible, which he had stuffed superstitiously into his shirt to protect his ribs . . . He had heard so many stories of musket balls lodging in Bibles, not of course that he _really_ believed them, but all the same . . . What he wanted to do now was to find some immoral passages with which to confront the Padre, thereby proving to him that this book could not possibly be the word of God (unadulterated, anyway). Now where was it that God commanded the Israelites to massacre the people of Canaan? That would do quite nicely for a start. The Padre (or God) would have trouble wriggling out of that one.

Meanwhile, the Magistrate had ordered the native pensioners to collect up the vernacular records and documents which lay in shallow drifts in the new trenches . . . all that now remained of the experimental greenhouse in which he had observed the progress and ubiquity of the Company's stupidity. More papers lay scattered thickly over the ground between the churchyard wall and the rubble of the Cutchenry but they could not be collected because musket fire once more swept the open spaces. The Magistrate did not mind. He had no love for documents. And these had certainly proved more useful than most.

20

Such was the emotion caused by the attack that it was some time before any of the defenders recalled that the Collector had not been feeling well and wondered what had become of him. There was the binding of wounds and examining of bruises to be considered, and the saying of prayers and sewingup in bedding of those whose lives had been forfeit . . . and above all there was a great deal of talking to be done, for, as the Magistrate scientifically observed, nothing unusual can happen among human beings without generating an immense, compensating volume of chatter.

Fleury, as it happened, wanted to borrow a book and finding the door open took a few respectful steps towards where the Collector was sitting . . . which was on the floor, for some reason. The light was poor in the Collector's bedroom and Fleury might not have noticed how red and swollen his face was, had the Collector not presently fallen sideways, rapping his head on the floor. Immediately all became clear to Fleury and he drew back with horror, thinking: "Cholera!" Then he raced away to find a doctor.

But when Fleury breathlessly informed Dr McNab of his diagnosis McNab did not seem to take it very seriously. He said to Miriam, who was helping him dress the wounds of those hurt in the recent engagement: "The poor Collector has erysipelas. I feared as much when I saw him this morning."

Miriam knew that people can die of erysipelas and when she saw what a state the Collector was in, rolling on the floor in delirium, his face red and swollen, she received an unpleasant shock. Fleury was quite wrong in thinking that Miriam had been nourishing amorous ambitions as far as the Collector was concerned; on the contrary, throughout the siege she had taken great pains not to allow her feelings to attach themselves to any individual man. Once in her life already she had become attached to someone and had allowed herself to be swept down with him in his lonely vortex into the silent depths where nothing moves but drowned sailors coughing sea-weed; only Miriam herself knew how much it had cost her to ascend again from that fascinating, ghostly world towards light and life. She knew that if she were whirled down again it would be for the last time. But there was yet another reason: Miriam was tired of womanhood. She wanted simply to experience life as an anonymous human being of flesh and blood. She was tired of having to adjust to other people's ideas of what a woman should be. And nothing condemned a woman so swiftly to womanhood as grappling with a man. All the same, she was shocked to think that the Collector might not survive.

"It is not yet too severe," said McNab, "but it can spread quickly. We must give him nourishment for it's a very lowering, debilitating disease. I'll ask you to prepare beef tea and arrowroot, Mrs Lang. Your brother perhaps will not mind fetching them from the Commissariat. And a bottle of brandy, too."

While Fleury hurried away for the stores Dr McNab wrote down the details of the Collector's illness

. . . Subject to rigors and vomiting, redness and swelling of the face, pulse 86, respirations 30.

"Why d'you write down everything in that book?" demanded Miriam sharply, irritated by the Doctor's methodical habits. She had a vision of McNab calmly recording the manner of the Collector's death, the way he had already recorded so many in the last weeks. He ignored her question ("because I'm a woman", thought Miriam) but smiled soothingly and said: "Will you look after him for me, Mrs Lang? I shall ask one of the other ladies to help you if need be. Miss Dunstaple perhaps. If he needs an aperient we must give him something which is not too irritating to the alimentary canal, such as castor oil. Above all, we must be careful not to exhaust him further. The poison of erysipelas is exceedingly depressing in its action. Our first object must be to antagonize the poison and at the same time uphold his powers."

The Collector started up with a groan, glaring wildly at Miriam, who could hardly bean to look at his red, bloated face.

"And we must keep him calm, as best we can. In addition to the beef tea and arrowroot, as much as he will take, we'll give him half an ounce of brandy every two hours, and twenty drops of laudanum every four." At the door McNab paused and said with a smile: "I'm sure he'll rally with such a fine young woman to care for him."

With that he took his leave, sighing enigmatically.

As night fell, although the Collector became quieter (no doubt thanks to the laudanum), he remained delirious. The heat was extraordinarily oppressive. No breath of air stirred the Collector's mosquito net. Miriam sat wearily by the window, feeling the perspiration soaking her neck and breast and the hollow of her back, leaking steadily from her armpits and from between her legs, and causing her underclothes to stick to her stomach and thighs. From time to time she crossed the room, soaked a flannel in the tepid water of a basin, and pressed it gently against the Collector's swollen face. At ten o'clock she gave him beef tea and brandy. But he scarcely seemed to notice any of these ministrations. He gulped down what he was given but continued muttering urgently to himself. His daughters, Eliza and Margaret, came to gaze dutifully at their stricken father. They, too, had taken to helping in the hospital and Miriam could read on their pale, shocked faces some of the terrible sights they had seen; after a little while she sent them away to bed.

Time passed, perhaps an hour, before there was a knock on the door and Louise came in, bringing Miriam a cup of tea. It seemed at first glance that Louise was wearing a turban; she had saved her day's ration of flour and had made a poultice of it for a boil which had erupted on her temple; her other boils seemed to be growing slightly better. Miriam, too, had a painful inflammation on her shoulder which she thought would turn into a boil; indeed, so many of the garrison now suffered from them that Louise had ceased to feel ashamed. Still, she would gaze in wonder at Fleury's clear, though dirty, countenance and wonder why he did not get any.

"It's stifling. Let us sit by the window."

"My dear, you must be tired. Let me sit up and watch over Mr Hopkins while you have a rest."

"No, my dear, you are just as tired as I am, and I shall rest presently in the dressing-room where I have made up a bed for myself. If I leave the door open I shall be able to hear him if his condition worsens."

To hear these "my dears" being so liberally dispensed you might have thought that the two girls had become bosom friends. And true enough, in the last few days they had grown much closer to each other. They had so many anxieties and sorrows to share. They had both loved poor little Mary Porter who had died of sunstroke. Fleury, too, continued to grieve for her and was now composing a poem in which her little ghost came tripping along the ramparts sniffing flowers, unperturbed by the flying cannon balls (it was not a very good poem). The fact was that both young women shared an unspoken anxiety for Fleury's safety and though Louise had not yet confided her feelings for him to Miriam, she really did not need to do so for these feelings were plain enough already. Louise now greatly regretted having made Fleury the green coat, which she feared made him too conspicuous . . . and it was a fact that the sepoy sharpshooters could seldom resist trying to hit this brilliant green target. Out of bravado Fleury dismissed these fears as groundless, but he was secretly rather alarmed. Love, pride, and foolishness combined to make him keep on wearing the green coat, however.

"My dear, in a moment I shall have to call one of the bearers to assist Mr Hopkins with his natural functions in case it should be necessary."

Perhaps it was too dark for Miriam to notice how Louise was taken aback by this remark, how she blushed. Even though she had got to know Miriam so well during the siege she was still often taken aback by her boldness. In some respects, she could not help thinking, Miriam was just like a man the way she said things . . . sometimes even worse. What on earth would people think if Miriam started talking of a gentleman's natural functions in front of the wedding guests when she and Fleury got married; in some ways the prospect of such a solecism seemed more terrible to Louise than the possiblity of one or both of them not surviving the siege. Still, that was Miriam all over. There was so much about her that Louise admired, she could only suspend judgement on the rest.

But Miriam had noticed the slight intake of breath; she had been perfectly aware that Louise might be shocked by her words but she had spoken them anyway, partly because she felt too weary not to say what she meant, partly because, though she liked Louise, she sometimes found her sweetness and prudish innocence rather cloying and it gratified her to offend them.

"There seem to be more fires than ever on the hill tonight," said Louise brightly, hoping to divert Miriam from any further discussion of the Collector's natural functions. "How they shouted during the attack this afternoon!"

"I expect they thought they would be down here in a moment to indulge in carnal conversation with us and to murder us," replied Miriam rather cruelly, becoming blunter than ever. But this time Louise did not betray any signs of dismay. She was made of a strong enough fibre to cope with ideas to which she had already become accustomed, like murder and rape; it was novelty that she found hard to accept.

"And everywhere he is in chains!" cried the Collector urgently in his delirium, causing both young ladies to turn anxiously towards his bed . . . but it was nothing, merely a passing fancy in his overheated brain. He continued to gabble away under his breath and the ladies returned to their gossip.

"To be fair, however, it must be said that the natives on the hill also applauded the firmness and resolve which the gentlemen displayed in our defence. Although, of course, it goes without saying another outcome would have pleased them better."

"How bright those fires shine in the darkness! How terrible to think that the men around them wish us ill!" sighed Louise. She tried to recall her life before the siege and the heads of young officers turning to look at her at the Calcutta race-course. Her mother had been so excited at the attention paid to her, almost as if it had not been Louise but she herself who was attracting the attention of the young gentlemen. As for Louise, strolling beneath the shade of her white silk parasol, she had remained so cool and chaste that she had scarcely deigned to notice that young men were admiring her. And yet, of course, she _had_ noticed; the darkness once again hid the colour that rose to her cheeks at the recollection of the airs she had put on during those visits to the race-course. She had been so young and ignorant then; the most important thing in life had been the number of young men who were anxious to dance the opening quadrille with her. Her beauty had been something which had filled even herself with wonder; sometimes in the privacy of her own room she would gaze at some part of herself, at a hand, say, or a breast, and the perfection of its shape would fill her with joy, as if it were not a part of herself but some natural object of beauty. "_Eheu, fugaces!_" she thought and almost said, but was not quite sure how to pronounce it.

"Miriam," she said instead, "I cannot tell you how worried I am for Harry. He is so young and innocent; although he pretends to be a man he is still only a schoolboy. And now he is in such danger! I have tried to talk to him but he will not listen."

"But, my dear, there is no way that danger may be avoided whilst this dreadful siege lasts."

("The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life!" exclaimed the Collector fervently.)

"Alas, it's not physical danger that I fear for him . . . or rather, I fear that too, but since we are all in God's hands I trust that He will not forsake us . . . no, it's another danger that I fear for him. My dear, you cannot have failed to see how Lucy is leading him on. Think what unhappy circumstances would attend his career if he should now be trapped by a penniless girl without family whose reputation is known throughout India."

Miriam was silent. To worry that your brother might make an unfortunate marriage when at any moment he might be killed was something she found difficult to understand. But in a sense, too, she knew that Louise was not wrong to worry about Harry committing such a blunder, for Harry, moving in the social circles in which he _would_ move, if he survived the siege, to the day of his death, would almost certainly suffer the inconveniences of having such a wife, would regret his marriage, and perhaps in due course would come to believe that his life had been ruined. He would be bound by the social fetters of Lucy's unsuitability simply because he too would believe in them.

"I don't think you should worry. Harry will probably get over his affection for Lucy once we return to a normal life again. And in any case, what Lucy may have done was surely not so dreadful and will be soon forgotten. A moment of foolishness with a man in one's youth, Louise dear, is more common even among the better classes than you might think. Lucy is much to be pitied. Let us worry about her future when the siege is over."

"But now she has gone to live in the banqueting hall where she will be able to use her . . ." Louise was going to say "feminine wiles" but hesitated, afraid that Miriam might find this ridiculous, and uncertain, in any case, exactly what "feminine wiles" might amount to. ". . . where she will be able to see Harry all the time," she corrected herself.

"With so many people under the same roof, my dear, Harry will be in no danger."

Presently, in the silence that followed these remarks, the two young women heard the sound of distant guns . . . more distant, it seemed, than the sepoy cannons which had been firing intermittently throughout their conversation; this sound echoed from across the dark rim of the plain. "Could it be the guns of a relief force?" Miriam was wondering as the first fat drops of rain splashed on the verandah.

"Rain! It's come at last!"

Almost immediately the first breath of cooler air reached them. The rain steadily increased in force, blotting out the fires on the hill above the melon beds, increasing the darkness until they could make out nothing in the compound below, and driving them back from the streaming verandah. Soon it had become a continuous deluge as if countless buckets of black ink were being emptied from the sky above them.

"In a moment it will be time to give Mr Hopkins another half ounce of brandy, poor man," sighed Miriam. The excitement of this first fall of rain had filled her with a desire that things should be different, that she should be happy again.

For the rest of the night the rain cascaded from the verandah roof, but the Collector paid no heed to it

. . . he continued to mutter urgently to himself, thrashing weakly, possessed with the vehemence of a strange inner life where no one could reach him. The lamp beside his bed threw a faint glow over his swollen, passionate, tormented face.

21

On the following day Dr McNab made an incision in the Collector's right eyelid and a small quantity of pus escaped. Disturbed, the Doctor examined the rest of the Collector's body with care to see if there were any further local formations of pus gathering beneath the skin. There was a danger that the blood would become poisoned by pus or by some other morbid agent which would render death by pyaemia inevitable. The Collector's delirium still continued and he was undoubtedly becoming weaker; because of these continuing symptoms McNab now substituted bark, chloric aether, and ammonia in effervescence for the laudanum and asked Miriam to increase the brandy to half an ounce every hour. Although he did not say so it was evident that he still regarded the Collector's condition as serious; the one hopeful sign was that his pulse had become fuller and less frequent. Convinced that he was going to die, his brood of terrified, velvet-clad children came to his bedside and stood there, the eldest holding the youngest, dutifully watching the thrashings of their parent, until Miriam packed them off.

For the moment the sepoys had stopped firing and an eerie hush had settled over the Residency. A night and a day of intermittent rainstorms followed. From the roof it could be seen that the sepoys had remained in their positions and were building themselves shelters. The garrison conjectured that the sepoys'

powder had been soaked by the downpour . . . there was even wild talk of breaking out of the enclave and escaping to safety. But, alas, there was no sense in this. Even if they succeeded in breaking through the sepoy lines, where would they go? Where did safety lie on that vast, hostile plain? The silence continued, broken only by the shrieking and quarrelling of crows and parakeets. And now gaily plumed water birds began to appear on the rapidly swelling river. The birds had a new and shiny look; in India only the animals and the people look starved, ragged, and exhausted.

The heat, which had declined a little at the coming of the rains, grew more oppressive than ever. At night a clamour of frogs and crickets arose and this diabolical piping served to string nerves which were already humming tight a little tighter. The connecting trench was constantly full of water now, and because the firing-step was in danger of crumbling there was no alternative for someone who wanted to visit the other wheel but to wade through water and mud. The coming of the rains brought no physical relief to the besieged but in one respect it made things worse; the smell from the decaying offal and from the corpses of men and animals became intolerable and hung constantly, undisturbed by wind, as a foul miasma over the fortifications. While the lull in the firing persisted, the Magistrate ordered earth to be thrown over the rotting mountain of offal in order to cover it like the crust of a pie. But as soon as the next downpour came the crust was soaked, vile gas bubbles would belch forth from it and infect the surrounding air. The ladies in the billiard room kept a small fire of smashed furniture smouldering by the window and occasionally burned camphor in an attempt to palliate this tormenting odour.

But besides the lull in firing the rains did bring one advantage; the spectators were driven away from the hill above the melon beds. No longer did the garrison feel that their sufferings were taking place for the amusement of the crowd. But gradually even so, a new fatalism took hold of everyone. Some of those who did not possess a faith in God which was proof against all adversities now saw that the great hope of a relief force reaching them, which had so far buoyed them up, was an illusory one; even if a relief now came, in many different ways it would be too late . . . and not only because so many of the garrison were already dead; India itself was now a different place; the fiction of happy natives being led forward along the road to civilization could no longer be sustained. Perhaps this was in the Collector's mind as he lay there, silent and motionless now that the fever had left him and he was beginning to recover. By the end of the third day his delirium had diminished, by the fifth day it had gone entirely and the redness and swelling of his face had also begun to disappear. Dr McNab now ordered the stimulants to be decreased gradually from day to days meat and beer from the stores being substituted for the brandy and beef tea. At last, he was convalescent.

The illness had aged him. He lay still for hour after hour, naked beneath a sheet because of the heat and humidity, the mosquito net cast aside for air, too exhausted even to lift an arm to drive away the mosquitoes which constantly settled on his face. Miriam or one of the older children of the garrison who could no longer play outside since the shrinking of the perimeter sat constantly at his bedside to fan him and to defend him against the mosquitoes. He said nothing. He seemed too exhausted even to speak or move his eyes.