11
The Collector was certainly worried about the banqueting hall; if he had only sent Vokins it was not because he doubted that Lieutenant Dunstaple was in difficulties, it was because the other three batteries and every inch of the rampart were in difficulties too. At first he had considered sending men from the Residency; the firing from the direction of the native town had been weak at first. It had even seemed as if the sepoys might be short of ammunition because they had been firing nails, bits of ramrod, even stones. But the fire had grown heavier and a twelve-pounder had begun to send round shot crashing through the upper storeys; then the enemy infantry had advanced into the native houses of dried mud surrounding the site of the demolished mosque. He cursed himself for not having had them levelled too; what he had not realized was that earth makes better material for fortification than masonry, which shatters, cracks and sends out splinters like shrapnel.
Soon after nine o’clock the Collector set out for the Cutcherry to see how they were getting on there. He took a cane and a pith helmet; in the buttonhole of his coat he wore a pink rose which one of the ladies had given him the evening before. He was pleased with the rose; it helped him to appear calm and cheerful. Now that the defence of the Residency had begun his main function must be to keep up the morale of the garrison. With this in mind he walked over to the Cutcherry as if he were going for a morning stroll, paying no attention whatsoever to the musket balls which sometimes droned by. He even paused on the way to inspect the odd collection of animals that had gathered to shelter from the sun in the shadow of the Church.
They were dogs mainly, but there was also a mongoose or two and even a monkey with a bell round its neck and a sailor cap fastened to its head with elastic. The Collector thought he recognized one of the dogs as belonging to Dr Dunstaple from having seen it run against one of his own dogs (Towser, 1852-55, much loved but now dead and buried beside the sundial with a little gravestone all of his own, RIP) at a meeting of the North of India Coursing Club. This dog of the Doctor’s, Towser’s former adversary, was a brown mongrel . . - although he had run remarkably fast and close, the Collector recalled, and had even jerked the hare, in the end he had let her go and she had escaped into a sugar-cane khet. So there had been no kill. But now he seemed to recognize the Collector for he sat up among the other somnolent dogs, amongst whom Chloë was dozing, and gave a little bark, staring up at him with intelligent brown eyes as he moved on.
A few yards away, still in the shadow of the Church, was another collection of dogs, uncivilized ones this time and dreadful to behold. In spite of the years he had spent in the East the Collector had never managed to get used to the appearance of the pariah dogs. Hideously thin, fur eaten away by mange to the raw skin, endlessly and uselessly scratching, timorous, vicious, and very often half crippled, they seemed like a parody of what Nature had intended. He had once, as it happened, on landing for the first time at Garden Reach in Calcutta, had the same thought about the human beggars who swarmed at the landing-stage; they, too, had seemed a parody. Yet when the Collector piously gave to the poor, it was to the English poor, by a fixed arrangement with his agent in London; he had accepted that the poverty of India was beyond redemption. The humans he had got used to, in time… the dogs never.
A musket ball striking a puff of dust from the Church wall reminded him of his duties, however, and he passed on towards the Cutcherry with a dignified step, thinking that the pets, too, had been a mistake . - . he should never have allowed them into the enclave. There was no ration for dogs … nor, come to that, for monkeys or mongooses; they would all starve unless relief came soon -. . or their masters would share their own food with them and all would starve together. It would have been better to have shot them all. But a civilized man does not shoot his dog … his “best friend”. Yes, but these were exceptional circumstances. Now there was even talk of shooting wives if the situation became hopeless, to spare them a worse fate at the hands of the sepoys.
The dogs, both pets and pariahs, slumbered on uneasily, tongues lolling in the great heat, while the Collector disappeared on his way towards the rattle of rifle fire and the crashing of artillery. A little later, if they had had the energy to lift their heads from their paws, they might have seen him coming back. He looked just the same, more or less, though now he was walking more quickly and did not pause to notice them. The pink rose he was wearing had withered in his buttonhole in the few minutes it had been exposed to the hot wind and sun.
He went straight to his study when he got back to the Residency, closed the door and drank off a glass of brandy. He had done what he had intended: he had made a confident tour of the Cutcherry buildings; he had spoken encouragingly to the men firing through the windows from behind stacks of records and documents (an excellent protection from musket fire); he had visited the half dozen wounded who had been removed to the Magistrate’s office until they could be conveyed to the library in the Residency, where the hospital had been provisionally established; he had even gone outside to speak to the men at the rampart. But now he needed to marshal his courage again.
He was standing at his desk with the empty glass in his hand when a stray musket ball ricocheted off “The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice” by the window. He instantly dropped to the floor in fear. He could hear that musket ball droning about the room, lethally bisecting it again and again like a billiard ball going from one cushion to another. He remained crouching there for a long time before he was able to convince himself that it was quite impossible, physically speaking, scientifically speaking, for a musket ball to go on and on ricocheting like that in a rectangular room; it could only be his imagination. So he forced himself to stand up again and suffered no ill-effects; a small but significant triumph for the scientific way of looking at things. Presently he felt sufficiently restored to make another confident sortie, this time to encourage the men in Dunstaple’s battery.
12
“Save, Lord, or else we perish. The living, the living, shall praise thee …”
At the banqueting hall the little garrison was standing to arms, waiting for the enemy assault. Loaded Enfield rifles had been propped against the balustrade and the cannon loaded with canister. While they waited Harry had been giving some elementary instruction in the use of the Enfield rifle to Fleury, Barlow and Vokins; he had explained that this rifle was the 1853 model, three grooves, with a cartridge of two and a half drams exploded by percussion cap. To hit a human figure at 100 yards you aim at the waist. At 150 yards raise the sliding bar, raise the sight and aim with the 200 yards point at the thigh. At 200 yards aim at the waist with the 200 yards point. At 300 yards aim at the waist with the three hundred yards point. Any questions? No, there did not seem to be any questions. Vokins’s teeth were chattering in spite of the heat and he looked like someone in whose mind thighs and waists and percussion caps and sliding bars had become inextricably entangled. Fleury, his mind a hopeless jumble of figures, was wool-gathering again, though trying to look politely interested, and was vaguely trying out various poses in his mind for daguerrotypes to appear in the Illustrated London News. Only Barlow seemed to have been taking an intelligent interest.