He had nothing left now from the Exhibition. He had thrown his pistols away since he had no more soft lead balls to use in them. He sighed regretfully as he picked his way slowly through the tattered refugees camped here and there on the floor, wondering what had become of his Louis XVI table. Beauty, of course, and Art, also needed warmth of feeling, there was no getting away from it … and, in passing, he allowed himself to feel a cautious contempt for the greedy merchants of England for whom the Exhibition had been an apotheosis.
The Collector’s eye came to rest on the corner where Miriam lay; she was too weak to help Dr McNab now, but although she could no longer be of any service to the ailing figures who lay nearby, she had refused to let the Collector move her mattress up to the dais where the air was better and where cholera clouds would be less likely to hang (if such things existed, which of course they had been proved not to by Dr McNab, but all the same … ). Not that the air was very bad anywhere now since most of the roof had been removed by round shot and considerable holes had been made in the walls. At night, indeed, it became quite chilly and a fire had to be built in the centre of the hall. It was Louise who usually attended to Miriam, bringing her a ration of water and helping her nearer the fire at night. The Collector’s chivalry was aroused by Miriam’s weakness, for the heart of a gentleman still beat beneath his ragged morning-coat; besides, he found her an attractive young woman in spite of everything, for she could still smile as sweetly as ever. “Can I do anything for you?” he asked her, thinking absently: “She has a mind of her own.”
“I’m perfectly airight. You must consider your other responsibilities,” said Miriam, proving it yet again. She smiled, rejecting his chivalry.
“Ah, duty!” sighed the Collector. “Mind you, where would we be without it?”
Of all the ladies who had survived both shot and cholera (for the dreaded disease had taken its toll of the billiard room as of other parts of the garrison) none now displayed greater fortitude than Louise. Although she had come to dislike Dr McNab, believing him to have been indirectly responsible for her father’s death, she remained constantly at his side, helping him to care for the sick and wounded. From this pale and anaemic-looking girl who had once thought only of turning the heads of young officers, and whom the Collector had considered insipid, he now saw a young woman of inflexible willpower emerging. He watched her as he passed the section of the hall reserved for the sick, the wounded, and the dying. Her cotton dress was rent almost from the armpit to the hem and as she leaned forward to bring a saucer of water to the lips of a wounded man, the Collector glimpsed three polished ribs and the shrunken globe of her breast; modesty was one of the many considerations which no longer troubled her. She stood up, mopping her brow with the back of a skeleton wrist. The Collector moved on, walking unsteadily. He went out for a few moments and stood on the steps between the Greek pillars, looking in the direction of the Residency for any sign of movement. But he could see none. These pillars, he could not help noticing, were dreadfully pocked and tattered by shot. He thought contemptuously: “So they weren’t marble after all.” He lingered for a moment sneering at the guilty red core that was revealed beneath the stucco of lime and sand. He hated pretence. But then, with a shrug, he went back inside: this was hardly the time for sneering at pillars.
At the far end of the hall a great pile of earth was growing steadily; here the Sikhs were trying to dig a well. They had run out of water the day before. In spite of their weariness and thirst they declined to drink the water which the Europeans had been using and which was stored in half a dozen hip-baths brought over from the Residency a week earlier (only one of which still contained any water). The Magistrate, nowadays a mere heap of bones decked with cinnamon whiskers, had summoned a little energy with which to pour scorn on the “death by superstition” which faced the brave Sikhs. The Sikhs, ignoring him, had been digging steadily for hours; now they were beginning to shovel up wet earth. The Collector sat on his heels by the edge of the pit and watched for a few minutes before continuing on his way.
Outside on the verandah the sun was shining with the crisp brilliance of the Indian winter. What a lovely day it was! In spite of everything the Collector felt his spirits lift as he sat down beside Lucy on a sheltered corner of the verandah and watched her making cartridges. Mingled with the brimstone smell of burned powder he fancied that he could smell the perfume of roses from the Residency garden, pruned this year by musket fire. Then the smell of warm grass came to join that of the roses and gunpowder and he fell asleep for a few moments, dreaming of cricket fields and meadows. When he awoke Lucy was still at his side and the position of the sun had hardly changed.
For the first three or four days after the Residency had been abandoned a number of the ladies had been employed in making cartridges; now, because of the shortage of lead for the moulds, the job had been left to Lucy, who had become extraordinarily skilful. She sat cross-legged, like a native in the bazaar, surrounded by her implements … the knife and the straight edge for cutting the cartridge paper, the wooden mandrels for rolling the paper into shape, the powder flask, the two-and-a-half dram tin measures for measuring out the powder … and finally, alas, the pot of grease, the cause of all the trouble. Lucy’s grease, however, was a mixture of beeswax and rancid butter. A Hindu could have eaten a pound of it with pleasure.
The Collector watched with admiration as Lucy’s deft fingers dipped a cartridge up to the shoulder in the grease and then set it neatly in a row with the others she had made. At intervals the defenders would come from one part or another of the ramparts to collect a supply of them; but for the moment the firing was slack. The sepoys must be well aware that the garrison’s ammunition was all but finished. They could tell by what was being fired at them. They knew that in another day or two they would not even have to charge the ramparts; they would merely have to step over them and kill off the garrison as they pleased. But of course, by then the garrison would have blown itself up.
The Collector, in a remote and academic sort of way, was musing on this question of ammunition, considering whether there was anything left which still might be fired. But surely they had thought of everything. All the metal was gone, first the round objects, then the others. Now they were on to stones. Without a doubt the most effective missiles in this matter of improvised ammunition had been the heads of his electrometal figures, removed from their bodies with the help of Turtons’ indispensable file. And of the heads, perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective of all had been Shakespeare’s; it had scythed its way through a whole astonished platoon of sepoys advancing in single file through the jungle. The Collector suspected that the Bard’s success in this respect might have a great deal to do with the ballistic advantages stemming from his baldness. The head of Keats, for example, wildly festooned with metal locks which it had proved impossible to file smooth had flown very erratically indeed, killing only a fat money-lender and a camel standing at some distance from the field of action.