The Siege of Krishnapur

by James Gordon Farrell

  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 …�
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  “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 narr
ow 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.