By some miracle the other infant, a girl born to Mrs Wright, the widow of a railway engineer who had been killed at the rampart some weeks earlier, survived. Mrs Wright was the sleepy young woman whom the Collector had found so desirable on the occasion of his visit to the billiard room. What was it that had attracted him? Perhaps it was her soft, drawling voice or the fact that, no matter how interesting the topic of your conversation, you would inevitably see her smothering amiable yawns as you talked; you would see the muscles of her jaw tighten and the tears start from her eyes as she tried to repress them. The Collector, for some reason, was attracted to ladies who were overpowered by the fumes of sleep in his presence, but not everybody enjoyed it as much as he did. The Magistrate, for example, when told that Mrs Wright had been taken ill, showed no interest whatsoever, and when further informed, a little later, that she had given birth, observed dryly: “I’m surprised that she had the energy.” This remark naturally made everyone furious. How typical of the Magistrate! The man was odious. No wonder he was so universally detested.
The garrison was extraordinarily affected by Mrs Wright’s baby. Even gentlemen who did not normally display interest in babies sent anxiously to enquire about its progress. And it seemed perfectly natural, given the circumstances, that the child should be named “Hope”, though nobody knew whose idea it had been originally… probably not Mrs Wright’s, however, for though in every respect resembling a Madonna, she was finding it more difficult than ever to stay alert. Only that drear atheist and free-thinker, the Magistrate, was seen raising a sardonic eyebrow at this name.
Now the time had come for Mrs Wright to be churched and the baby christened; every member of the garrison who was not occupied at the ramparts had assembled in the rubblestrewn yard of the Residency to hear the service, for it was no longer safe to hold a service in the ruined Church. A table which the Collector strongly suspected was his favourite Louis XVI had been brought out of the Residency drawing-room and covered with a clean white cloth to serve as an altar table.
“The snares of death compassed me round about, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me.” The Padre’s voice reading the 116th Psalm echoed between the walls of the hospital and those of the Residency. The Collector listened from the Residency verandah, his head uncovered, but seated because he still felt too weak to stand for long. Between the ranks of bared heads (one or another of which would occasionally turn to take a quick glance of inspection at his own face) he could just make out the graceful figure of Mrs Wright herself, kneeling on a hassock in front of the table. Beyond her, there were more ranks of bared heads, this time facing the Collector; their eyes, too, scanned him greedily, looking for fissures … and further away still, two or three faces of sick or wounded men watched from the open windows of the hospital. How haggard and bereft of hope they looked! The Collector shuddered at the thought that he might have had to endure his own illness within those walls.
‘The Lord preserveth the simple,” came the Padre’s voice, quite aptly, it seemed to the Collector for he considered himself to be a simple man. “I was in misery and he helped me.”
His eyes came to rest on the tear-stained face of Mrs Bennett, whose baby had so recently died, and he suffered a pang of pity for her. How terrible it must be for her to attend this service for Mrs Wright whose baby had survived … and while the Padre was speaking the Collector accompanied his words with a silent, sympathetic prayer for Mrs Bennett: “O God, whose ways are hidden and thy works most wonderful, who makest nothing in vain, and lovest all that thou hast made, Comfort this thy servant whose heart is sore smitten and oppressed …” but the rest of the prayer was no longer in his mind, stolen no doubt by the foxes of despair that continued to raid his beliefs … in any case, it faded into a mournful reverie in which he sought an explanation for the death of Mrs Bennett’s child. The Collector felt no confidence at all that her child had not been made in vain.
The lovely Mrs Wright, still on her knees, stirred sleepily and the Collector saw her profile mirrored in a pool of rainwater beside her.
“O Lord, save this woman thy servant.”
The Collector’s moving lips silently accompanied the response. “Who putteth her trust in thee.”
“Be thou to her a strong tower.”
“From the face of the enemy.”
“Lord, hear our prayer.”
“And let our cry come unto thee.”
The Collector had pulled a grey handkerchief from his pocket to mop his brow and was gazing at it with pleasure, thinking again that he was a simple man at heart. The reason for his pleasure, as well as for the handkerchief’s greyness, was that he had washed it himself … and really he had done just as good a job as the dhobi had been doing for the most extravagant prices. He had not washed merely a handkerchief either … his underclothes, too, had a grey look, and so did his shirt, whose grey cuffs peeped from beneath the dirty, tattered sleeves of his morning coat. He had done it all himself and without soap. Miriam had offered to do it for him, and so had Eliza and Margaret, and he could, of course, easily have given it to the dhobi in spite of his inflated prices. But it was the principle of the thing that mattered. He wanted to help those who were ashamed to be seen washing their own clothes but could not afford the dhobi’s new prices… While quite capable of overlooking more serious misfortunes, the Collector was sensitive to such cases of threatened dignity. And so, to the dhobi’s astonishment and terror, the Collector had suddenly materialized beside him at the water-trough. For a while he had stood there at his side studying how he worked, how he soaked the garments and slapped them rhythmically against the smooth stone slabs. Then he had set to work himself, though rather clumsily, he was still weak from his illness. Soon the slapping of his own clothes had counterpointed the rhythmic slapping of the dhobi’s.
The news that the Collector had been seen doing his own laundry caused a mild sensation at first and was interpreted as the long-awaited collapse, particularly by those members of the garrison who had once belonged to the “bolting” party. But then the other faction, the shattered remains of the erstwhile “confident” party, had argued rather differently … far from being a sign of collapse it was, in fact, a sign of the Collector’s resolve, his determination not to submit to oppression, to fight back, in other words. Soon he was joined by other Europeans and henceforth it became a common sight to see one or other of the ladies or gentlemen of the “confident” party slapping away at the trough where once the dhobi had slapped (for on the day after the Collector’s appearance the dhobi had vanished from the enclave, either because he considered it too dangerous to remain any longer now that the commander of the garrison had assumed the caste of dhobi or, more likely, because he resented the competition). But perhaps the general, median view that was held by the garrison of this strange behaviour of the Collector was that it signified nothing more than his eccentricity.