The Empire Trilogy (92 page)

“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-and-such 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 all right 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 possibility 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 had 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 starlit 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.

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.