“Hurry up or we’ll all be soaked,” the Collector exhorted the Padre silently. And then his thoughts wandered again and he began to worry about the speed with which the vegetation was growing around the ramparts. The grass, the creepers, the shrubs, the plants of every kind grew thicker every day, and the thicker they grew, the better cover they provided for the sepoys to advance undetected on the ramparts, but for some terrible reason, on the ramparts themselves nothing would grow.
The black cloud was right above them now and some of the congregation had begun to stir uneasily in expectation of the downpour, wondering whether the Padre would manage to get through the service before it fell. But even as he at last turned and, more like a conjuror than ever, whipped the cloth from the object on the table, which turned out to be a saucepan containing water scooped from the shattered font, the first heavy drops began to drum on the altar table; and while the Padre was saying: “Hope Mary Ellen, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen,” the Collector, forgetting that he had only just renounced an interest in the vain pomp and glory of the world, thought crossly: “That won’t do the Louis XVI table any good at all.”
24
Now in the banqueting hall another pleasant tea-party was taking place, even though tea itself was in such short supply that there was really only hot water to drink.
“Another cup, Mr Willoughby?” asked Lucy who, as hostess, was behaving impeccably. A wonderful change had come over her since the episode with the cockchafers. It was as if they had served to draw some morbid agent from her blood, as if they had been a great black and damson poultice to draw off her petulant humours and leave her as placid as a Madonna. Sometimes, of course, she would still get cross with her favourites, but only when their behaviour fell below an acceptable standard, when they refused invitations and that sort of thing. But who would think of refusing Lucy’s invitations, providing as they did the last vestige of a social occasion within the enclave? Evidently not even the Magistrate, for there he was, drinking his cup of hot water with enjoyment and gazing in fascination at his hostess.
It had not been a good day for the Magistrate. He had come to the banqueting hall in order to have a look at the river from the roof; the river had risen and widened so much that the entire countryside seemed to be sliding past and one felt as if one were standing on the deck of a ship. From the roof of the banqueting hall the sal trees on the distant bank might have been the masts of other ships. The Magistrate knew, alas, what would be happening when this great volume of water reached the depression made by the giant’s footprint a few miles away...The embankments which he had vainly tried to have reinforced by the zemindars would now be brimming and beginning to overflow...within a few hours the country around the embankments would be flooded and ignorance, stupidity and superstition would have triumphed once more as they have triumphed again and again in human affairs since time began! With a bitter sigh the Magistrate returned his thoughts to Lucy.
Lucy herself said she remembered nothing of the dreadful cockchafer affair. She could recall seeing the first black insect flying towards her and then she must have fainted. The next thing she had known, Louise and Miriam were wrapping her unclothed person in a clean towel while, not far away, the Padre was discussing religious matters with Harry and Fleury. Louise and Miriam had been doing their work with set faces and compressed lips but that was doubtless because of the smell of the insects which was frightful. True, they had behaved coldly to her afterwards but that was probably because they were envious of the success of her tea parties, to which she did not always feel obliged to invite them...But why should she always invite them? She hated having nothing but women around her. Why did they not give tea parties for their own men (if they were able to find any)?
“Can I top you up, Mr Willoughby?” asked Lucy in the most polished social manner that anyone could desire, and soon the Magistrate was drinking his third cup of hot water, and still gazing at her in fascination, or to be more precise, at the back of her neck, which was the part of her which most interested him. Lucy was quite pleased by the Magistrate’s interest and was considering making him one of her favourites.
The Magistrate had long been interested in Lucy but not because Cupid had at last managed to lodge an arrow in his stony heart. Alas, it was for a less creditable reason...it was because he wanted, though for the loftiest scientific purposes, to take advantage of her. Until now the Magistrate had been in the position of a scientist who has made a discovery which he knows to be true but is unable to prove. For years it had been evident to him that the phrenological system was sound and he had been tormented by his inability to demonstrate it to people who, like the Collector, were inclined to scoff. But now, at last, in Lucy he had a person ideally suited to his purposes...a person who was subject to a very powerful propensity. Lucy was Amative. Nobody could deny Lucy’s Amativeness. Not only had she a history of past Amativeness (the fact that she was a “fallen woman” and so forth), but anyone who looked at her could see Amativeness written all over her. She positively glowed with it. Nobody, no scientist anyway, would or could deny that Lucy had this propensity to an extraordinary degree, of this the Magistrate was sure. So all that remained for him to do was to demonstrate that Lucy’s organ of Amativeness was extraordinarily well developed. He was in no doubt but that this was the case. But for the moment, as ill-luck would have it, he was unable to verify it. The trouble was that the organ was in a rather awkward situation at the base of the skull, below the inion (that is, the external occipital protuberance), a part of the body which, in most ladies, Nature has thoughtfully cloaked with a fine growth of hair. The Magistrate licked his lips and took a swig of hot water. He did not know quite what to do about this.
Now you can tell how well developed an organ is in two ways: either by seeing how big it is, or by feeling the heat it generates. As a matter of interest, this very organ of Amativeness was first brought to the attention of its discoverer, Professor Gall, when he noticed its unusual heat in a hysterical widow. But for the Magistrate one way presented as many difficulties as the other. For the very reason that he could not lift Lucy’s dark tresses and have a look, he could not slip his hand on to her neck. To a person more interested in the advance of science he might perhaps have tried to explain what he was after, but with Lucy he perceived that this would not be a success. What was he to do? He could think of nothing but disguising himself and rushing her on a dark night. He would need only the briefest of feels. Full of hot water, he belched dejectedly.
As he rose to take his leave the Magistrate thought again of the stupidity of the zemindars who had refused to reinforce the embankments; near him, in the lumber of possessions, was an oil painting of a stag at bay: that was just how he felt himself...Reason being savaged by a pack of petty stupidities which, because of their number, would in the end bring him down. His ginger-clad lips parted and he belched again, more dejectedly than ever.
A few miles away, however, a handful of confident zemindars were standing on the embankment with the water almost licking their sandals. There were a number of Brahmin priests there too, and a man holding a black goat. Everyone was chuckling nostalgically at the thought of the Magistrate, who was very likely dead by now. One of them asked another if he remembered how the Magistrate Sahib had tried to make them strengthen the embankments and this caused such merriment that one of the landowners almost fell into the water. In due course the black goat was sacrificed with the appropriate ceremonies to appease the river and nobody was in the least surprised when, little by little, the river began to fall. By the following morning, aided by another black goat for good measure, it had dropped several inches and the worst was over.
Although the level of the river had begun to drop, there was no corresponding decrease in the rain that continued to pour out of the skies. If anything, it grew worse. And heavy rain, at this period of the siege, was something that the garrison could have well done without. The truth was
that as the days went by and the heavy rain showed no sign of slackening for very long it became clear that something very frightening had begun to happen. The earthen ramparts which had been hastily thrown up to give substance to the Collector’s revised plan of fortification were steadily melting away beneath the drumming rain. The fortifications were vanishing before the garrison’s startled eyes!
Something clearly had to be done, and done quickly, for the ramparts were not diminishing at a steady rate...the longer the rain lasted, the more quickly the ramparts melted. Where a week ago a man could stand up to his full height behind them without being seen, now he had to stoop; tomorrow, perhaps, he would have to get down on his hands and knees. Action must be taken immediately. All eyes followed the Collector as he strode about the enclave grimacing and muttering to himself.
When the garrison had begun to give up hope that he would act, he at last did something. Even though members of the erstwhile “bolting” party had declared him incapable of any further action and took a gloomy view in general of his morale, he somehow mustered his last resources and confounded their gloomy forecast by leading out a party of Sikhs and native pensioners to shovel under the downpour. The “confident” party were all the more delighted because even they had come to entertain one or two small doubts. But the Collector, always inclined to be moody and difficult, had taken on a persecuted look again. As the garrison watched him from the shelter of the verandah they could tell that the rain was having a bad effect on him; he clearly did not like the way it beat on his head and shoulders raising a fine spray; nor did he seem partial to the way it poured down the neck of his shirt and coursed down his trouser legs. He was seen to cast frequent despairing glances at the sky, at the melting rampart, and, indeed, in every conceivable direction; despairing glances were aimed positively everywhere.
The rain had also altered his appearance. His once magnificent ruff of side-whiskers had been slicked down against his cheeks like wet fur and his ears had flattened apprehensively against his head. Only his beard continued to grow these days, for he had given up shaving; a bad sign. The longer his beard grew the more ginger it became; another bad sign. No longer did he lecture people on the splendours of the Exhibition or on the advance of civilization. Civilization might be standing rock still, or even going backwards, for all the Collector seemed to care these days. It was clearly all up with the Collector. But still, he stayed out there shovelling, confounding the pessimists...even though his task was clearly hopeless. You dug up a spadeful of earth, but by the time you threw it on the rampart it was nothing but muddy water.
In due course, however, the Collector had to give up the idea of shovelling under these conditions. The rain was too heavy. He issued an order that all the able-bodied men in the garrison should turn out with shovels during the rare intervals between the downpours. From then on, by day and night, the garrison laboured to keep that shield of earth between themselves and the sepoys. The Collector had the remaining wooden shutters stripped off the Residency windows and dug into the mud of the ramparts to prevent them melting. But to no avail...they continued to wash away in streams of yellow-brown water.
Why would nothing grow on the ramparts? Everywhere else the ground was held solid under the rain by the vast grip of the vegetation which had so rapidly sprung up. But on the ramparts nothing appeared; when the Collector tried transplanting weeds, bushes, vegetation of every kind, within a few hours everything had wilted.
In desperation then he ordered certain solid objects in the Residency to be carried out to arrest that dreadful bleeding away of earth. The furniture was the first to go. He strode about the Residency and the banqueting hall, followed by those men who were still strong enough to lift heavy objects. Every now and again, without a word, he would point at some object, a chair perhaps, or a sideboard or a marquetry table which had graced some Krishnapur drawing-room, and his henchmen would dart forward, seize it, and carry it away. Can you imagine how the owner of a fine chesterfield sofa must have felt to see it thus frogmarched away to its doom under the lashing rain? At this stage the Collector seemed to be sparing only occupied beds and charpoys, his own desk and chair, and the Louis XVI table from the drawing-room. Disputes arose. More than one unwary member of the garrison found that his bed had vanished while he had been defending the rampart against a sepoy assault. Sometimes a person would arrive just as the divan on which he had been sleeping was dragged away.
Sofas and tables, beds, chests, dressers and hatstands were thrown on to, or upended along, the ramparts, but still their strange haemophilia continued. Now the Collector’s finger was pointing at other objects, including even those belonging to himself. Statues were pointed at and the shattered grand piano from the drawing-room in the hope that they might help, if only a little, to shore up the weakest banks of soil. For the Collector knew that he had to have earth as a cushion against the enemy cannons; brickwork or masonry splinters or cracks, wood is useless; only earth is capable of gulping down cannon balls without distress. But still it continued to wash away, around the edges of tables, between the legs and fingers of statues. After each fresh deluge only the skeleton of solid objects, the irregular vertebrae of furniture, trunks, packing-cases and other miscellaneous objects, was left standing over the swamp. Even the trench behind the rampart would be brimming with oozing earth.
When the supply of heavy furniture, and of the more ponderous artistic objects, had been exhausted, there began the rape of “the possessions” which had so long encumbered the Residency and the banqueting hall. Very often the last journeys of these beloved objects were accomplished to the tune of distressing protests, or of heart-rending pleas for clemency. You would have thought that there was no one better fitted in the world to understand these pleas than the Collector. He, at least, was qualified to perceive the beauty and value of “the possessions”. Yet he accompanied their tumbrils without a word, his eyes blank and bloodshot, his fur slicked down, his ears still flattened against his skull.
But although a great deal of solid matter had soon accumulated on one or other side of the ramparts and sometimes on both, it had little or no effect. It was like trying to shore up a wall of quicksand. The Collector resorted to even more desperate remedies. He had the banisters ripped off the staircase, for example, but that did no good either. So in the end he took to pointing at the last and most precious of “the possessions”...tiger-skins, bookcases full of elevating and instructional volumes, embroidered samplers, teasets of bone china, humidors and candlesticks, mounted elephants’ feet, and rowing-oars with names of college eights inscribed in gilt paint; the ladies were instructed to improvise sandbags out of linen sheets and pillowslips and fine lace tablecloths. In this last period of devastation even the gorse bruiser and the rest of the Collector’s inventions met their doom.
So impassive and peculiar had the Collector become, so obviously on the verge, everyone thought so (you would have thought so yourself if you had seen him at this time), of giving up the ghost, that his face was scrutinized more closely than ever for any trace of remorse as the gorse bruiser was carried out. But by not so much as a flicker of an eyebrow did he betray his emotion. In the matter of these smaller “possessions”, you might have thought that he would have let you get away with the things which you could not possibly do without, a set of fish-knives, for example, which had been a wedding present, or a sketch of the Himalayas as seen from Darjeeling. But the Collector remained quite implacable. It was almost as if he enjoyed what he was doing.
Soon the Residency and the banqueting hall were virtually stripped. How naked the drawing-room and the dining-room seemed. Beneath the chandeliers only the Louis XVI table, the Queen in zinc (for patriotic reasons), a few objects in electrometal such as Fame scattering petals on Shakespeare’s tomb with the heads of certain men of letters, and a few stuffed birds in the rubble of plaster and brickwork brought down by the sepoy cannons, remained. I think that perhaps the snake in alcohol was left too. And only then, at
long last, when almost everything was gone, did the terrible rain relent just enough for the ramparts to stop their melting.
While the ramparts had been melting, the jungle beyond them had been growing steadily thicker. The officer posted on the tower beneath the flagstaff could now, because of the foliage, scarcely detect an enemy sortie even during the brief periods of moonlight. When the rain was falling and the sky was overcast the number of men on watch at night had had to be doubled, men already exhausted by lack of food and the interminable restoration of the ramparts. One thing was clear: it was as important to clear away the vegetation close to the ramparts as it was to maintain the ramparts themselves. There was already enough cover for a large number of sepoys to approach very close to the enclave without being detected.
Was enough being done about the vegetation? Indeed, was anything at all being done? This was the question, an understandable one in the circumstances, that the garrison soon began to ask. Any moment now they expected that the Collector would make up his mind to do something about it. But he did not seem to be in any hurry. What he was expected to do exactly, nobody quite knew. The vegetation clearly could not be burned off. It was too wet for that. As for cutting it away, it was obvious that to wander about on the other side of the rampart was to invite certain death. The only idea that seemed feasible was for the Collector to put on the rusty suit of armour which stood in the banqueting hall and to go out there with a scythe. But when this idea was mentioned to him he said nothing. He showed no enthusiasm. It was plain that he was in no hurry to execute it.
In the end it was Harry Dunstaple who approached him with a really sensible idea. They must fire chain shot. If chain shot were capable of removing a ship’s rigging it should do the same for the jungle.
The Empire Trilogy Page 76