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 stomach-turning 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.”