“Mrs Rayne,” he boomed with a severity born of this unwelcome stimulation. “Could you please open the window? The doctors have ordered them to be left open during the day to guard against an epidemic from bad air and our cramped conditions.” The authority of his tone silenced the chatter, but his words produced some faint moans of protest and rebellion. They were so hot already! If the hot wind was allowed to blow through the room it became intolerable. They could not suffer it! “And a mouse ran over me last night!” cried Miss Barlow, the daughter of the Salt Agent. “I felt its nasty, scratchy little feet on my face.”
“The dhobi has begun to charge an outrageous price, Mr Hopkins,” complained a sleepy voice from behind one of the hanging sheets. “Can nothing be done to stop him?”
The Collector, suspecting that this was the voice of the passive, lovely, pregnant, perpetually weary Mrs Wright, widow of a railway engineer, experienced another annoying twinge of desire, and after listening to some further grievances relieved his feelings by delivering an unusually stern homily.
The cause of the trouble among the ladies was, as he suspected, not simple but compound. Many of the ladies were now having to look after themselves for the first time in their lives. They had to fetch their own water from the well behind the Residency when they wanted to wash. They had to light fires for themselves (sometimes the old gentlemen from the drawing-room helped them in this but they took such a long time about it that the ladies found it almost easier to do it for themselves) and to boil their own kettles for tea. The two dhobis who had remained within the Residency enclave were now beginning to profit by their loyalty and had been able to treble their prices, it seemed, without diminishing their custom...those ladies unable, or unwilling, to pay such prices were having to wash their own clothing, and perhaps that of their menfolk as well. And now combine all these painful, unaccustomed chores with the conditions in which they were having to live...delicate creatures accustomed to punkahs and khus tatties, now exposed all day long to the hot wind which, incidentally, rendered the few punkahs still in motion quite useless! No wonder they were in such a poor frame of mind.
There were other grievances, however. One of the older ladies, Mrs Rogers, had been turned out of the private room she had been sharing with her husband to make way for a lady expecting her confinement, and she was very cross indeed at finding herself in the middle of what she did not hesitate to call, echoing the Collector’s own thoughts, “a rabble”. The ladies in the billiard room had divided themselves into groups according to the ranks of husbands or fathers. Mrs Rogers, who was the wife of a judge, found herself unable to join any of the groups because of her elevated rank, and so she was in danger of starving to death immediately, for to make things easier rations were issued collectively, a fact which had undoubtedly hastened this social stratification. The Collector had to address Mrs Rogers personally and in the hearing of the other ladies on the subject of the “unusual circumstances” which required certain sacrifices...but he knew very well that Mrs Rogers, having established at least symbolically her superior social position, would be only too glad now to join more lowly ladies. For up to now the deference to which she was entitled, but which she had found difficulty in exacting, had been a dreadful weight in these “unusual circumstances” for poor Mrs Rogers to carry.
But all was not harmony even within these groups for in the most lowly of them the Collector had to settle one of the most serious problems of all; this was caused by the fact that the spoiled Mrs Lacy, who although not yet nineteen was already a widow (her husband having been killed at Captainganj), had a Portuguese maid. A row had developed because Mrs Lacy had felt justified in keeping her maid occupied exclusively with her own comfort, while the other ladies believed that the girl’s services should be shared. The Collector found Mrs Lacy in tears, the ladies round her looking sulky, and the Portuguese girl looking distressed to be the cause of so much strife. The Collector was not troubled by the democratic notion that in the “unusual circumstances” the Portuguese girl might have enough on her hands simply looking after herself; he solved the problem by a judicious division of the girl’s labours. She should do certain things for the group in common, certain things for Mrs Lacy alone. Mrs Lacy dried her red eyes, satisfied that her honour at least had been vindicated.
Lucy Hughes provided a problem which the Collector was unable to solve. She was ostracized even by the members of the lowest group, in fact, by everyone except Louise. The charpoy on which she had spread her bedding had been pushed to the very end of the room, beneath the oven blast of the open window. It was the only bed that had any space around it, for even Louise’s bed, which was next to hers, stood at a small, but eloquent distance.
All the younger women except Lucy had crowded round him closely to hear him speak; Lucy sat alone on her bed, hugging her knees plaintively. She seemed to be close to tears and the Collector felt sorry for her...but he had so many other matters to think of. To make things more difficult his earlier stirrings of sensuality returned as he looked around the circle of young women who had come so close to him. Their flushed, rice-powdered faces gazed up at him trustingly, even provocatively...he felt that he had a power over them, even the most virtuous of them, for no other reason than that he was a man (any man in his position would have had this same power). He thought: “Crowding them together like this has a strange effect on them...it seems to excite their feminine nature.”
Pleased with this scientific observation, he allowed himself for a moment to enjoy the sexual aura of which he was the centre and which was so strong that he could somehow feel, without actually having to touch them, the softness of these feminine bodies, clothed only in soft muslin or cotton and unprotected by the stays and spine-pads habitually worn even by the youngest of them outside the privacy of this room. But all too soon his conscience was awakened by the looks of disapproval cast in his direction by some of the older ladies, who had thought it improper to crowd close to him. So far his sense of touch had been exercised only in imagination but at this moment a round shot struck the outside wall in an adjoining room a few yards away. The sudden noise caused two of these young bodies to cling to him for a moment...and he could not restrain his large hands from comforting them. By the window a shower of brick dust slowly descended on Lucy’s lonely head and she began to cry.
Now it was time for him to unwrap the parcel he had brought with him, which contained a large quantity of flour, suet and jam from his private Residency store. This was to be divided equally between the groups, so that each could make a roly-poly pudding. He watched in wonder the excitement that this announcement provoked, the eagerness with which the younger ladies set about dividing it up, laughing like children and clapping their hands in anticipation. “It’s true,” he mused, “they’re just like children.”
Sometimes they exasperated him with their vulnerability, their pettiness. But they lived such sheltered, useless lives, even their children were given to ayahs to look after. What could one expect of them? At the best of times they had so little to occupy their hands and minds. And now, during the siege, it was worse; whatever tendencies had already existed in the characters of those who made up the garrison, the siege had exaggerated (this was another pleasing scientific observation which he must remember to pass on to the Magistrate). “They wait all day for their husbands to come. They have no resources of their own.”
His mission accomplished, he turned to leave. But his sense of taste, which had so far escaped the assault on the other four, was now confronted with a hastily brewed cup of tea in a child’s christening mug (for lack of china) and a rock bun. He drank the tea and nibbled a little of the bun, but asked permission to save the rest to sustain him as he made his daily round. He took it with him, wrapped in a piece of paper, with the secret intention of giving it to the Doctor’s mongrel, poor Towser’s friend and rival of yester-year, if he met him during the day.
He slowly descended the stairs, no longer noticing the landslide of
furniture, boxes, curios, antlers, rowing oars and other trophies, but thinking: “Women are weak, we shall always have to take care of them, just as we shall always have to take care of the natives; no doubt, there are exceptions...women of character like Miss Nightingale, but not unfortunately like Carrie or Eliza or Margaret...Even a hundred years from now...” the Collector feebly tried to imagine 1957...“it will still be the same. They are made of a softer substance. They arouse our desire, but they are not our equals.”
As he went out on to the portico and down the steps the sunlight once again smote him painfully, like a solid substance. Above, at the bedroom window he knew that Eliza and Margaret would be weakly waiting with the brass telescope which they used throughout the livelong day to watch over him lest any harm should befall him as he made his leisurely progress round the defences.
Later in the morning the Collector found himself reclining in a mass of paper documents on the floor of the vernacular record room in the company of the Magistrate and of Fleury, who had been permitted a temporary absence from his post as no attack seemed imminent. A strange contentment had settled over the Collector, perhaps because his senses, usually kept under lock and key, had enjoyed their unaccustomed exercise that morning, perhaps because he was most comfortably supported by the documents. There were salt reports bound in red tape under each elbow; a voluminous, but extraordinarily comfortable correspondence with a local landowner concerning the Permanent Settlement cradled his back at just the right angle, and opium statistics, rising to a mound beneath his knees and cushioning the rest of his body, filled him with a sense of ease verging on narcosis. From outside, a few yards away, came the regular discharge of cannons and mortars; but inside, such was the thickness of the paper padding, one felt very safe indeed. True, daylight appeared in places where holes had been made by round shot in the brickwork, but even that could be looked on as an advantage for it provided ventilation and prevented pockets of bad air forming; elsewhere it had become necessary to burn camphor and brown paper.
The Collector had been discoursing in an objective way on the perplexing question of why, after a hundred years of beneficial rule in Bengal, the natives should have taken it into their heads to return to the anarchy of their ancestors. One or two mistakes, however serious, made by the military in their handling of religious matters, were surely no reason for rejecting a superior culture as a whole. It was as if, after the improving rule of the Romans, the Britons had decided to paint themselves with woad again. “After all, we’re not ogres, even though we don’t marry among the natives or adopt their customs.”
“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 an
other 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 Empire Trilogy Page 66
