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Fleury now was gasping for breath, but ready to congratulate himself. He sat down on the bottom step with his head between his knees trying to recover. Looking up, however, he found a giant, bearded sepoy standing a yard in front of him, his sabre already raised to despatch him … somehow he managed to parry the blow and struck at the sepoy, but the sepoy turned his sabre with ease, twisted it out of his hand and threw it away, gri
“I think we’ve got rid of them all for the time being,” he said, putting a foot in the small of the sepoy’s back to withdraw his sabre. “The infantry turned, thank Heaven!”
“Think how apt fins are to water, wings to air, how well the earth suits its inhabitants!” exclaimed the Padre, suddenly appearing at Fleury’s side as if conjured up by this reference to Heaven. “In everything on earth we see evidence of design. Turn from your blindness, I beg you in His name. Everything, from fish’s eye, to caterpillar’s food, to bird’s wing and gizzard, bears manifest evidence of the Supreme Design. What other explanation can you find for them in your darkness?”
Fleury stared at the Padre, too harrowed and exhausted to speak. Could it not be, he wondered vaguely, trembling on the brink of an idea that would have made him famous, that somehow or other fish designed their own eyes?
But no, that was, of course, quite impossible. So he submitted to the Padre. But although the evidence of Divine Design could not seriously be questioned, he still thought … well, it was more a matter of feeling really . . - But the Padre was too overjoyed that Fleury’s ears should have at last been opened to the truth to listen to his equivocations about feelings and emotions. He sank down, his knees using the chest of the bearded sepoy as a hassock, and gave thanks, for the sepoys had been repulsed at every quarter.
“We gat not this by our own sword,” he sang in explanation, “neither was it our own arm that saved us: but thy right hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto us.”
13
The Collector had risen a little before dawn. While eating breakfast in the company of his two eldest daughters he made one or two brief, factual entries in his diary under the heading of the previous day, Thursday, 11 June. Breakfast was the main meal of the day and consisted of roast mutton, chapatis, rice and jam. As it stood, the ration of meat, bone included, was sixteen ounces for the men and twelve for the ladies and children, together with an allowance of rice, flour and dal for those, now the majority, who had no provisions of their own. Under the date of 12 June, which was today, the Collector recorded his intention to consult Mr Rayne, who was in charge of the Commissariat, about a possible further reduction of the ration. He was coming to realize that in the end it might be hunger rather than the sepoy ca
With ladies still in his mind he went through into the dressing-room to comb his mustache and pour oil on the stormy sea of his side-whiskers. By this time it was broad daylight and the hot wind which made the day unbearable was already sighing through the rooms and corridors of the Residency; from the window of the dressing-room he could see the horses of the Sikh cavalry, tethered in the lee of the verandah to protect them from sun and shot begi
He tied his cravat with care, plumping it out with his fingers and fastening it with a Madras pearl; as he did so he remembered with displeasure that Vokins was not there to brush his coat and help him on with it. His displeasure increased as he passed through again into the bedroom and caught sight of his daughters, Eliza and Margaret, with whom he had just taken breakfast, already looking alarmed on his behalf, for they had come to dread his daily tours of the ramparts which now took up the whole day and very often did not finish until after dark. He noticed with irritation that the brass telescope with which they kept an anxious watch for him from the window as he made his rounds had been laid on the table in readiness for the day.
As he went to the chest in which he had ordered their personal store of food to be kept, he thought, baffled, that it was absurd, all this emotion! Although, of course, it was right that they should love and respect him as their father, what did they really know of him? His real self was a perfect stranger to them. “May I always accept Papa’s decisions with a good heart, without seeking to oppose them with my own will,” one of them (it was a symptom of his difficulty that he could not remember which) had written piously in her diary. This dutiful phrase had surprised him. It had never occurred to him that either of the girls had a will which might in any circumstances wish to oppose itself to his own. He often thought that he would have liked to understand them better, but how could he? “Is it my fault that they never reveal themselves to me?”
The Collector strode along the wide verandah towards the billiard room carrying a parcel and with the twin devotions of his daughters clinging to him like limpets. The billiard room was long enough to contain two tables end to end and still leave ample room for the players to move about without getting in each other’s way; indeed, it would have been possible to fit a third table in without discomfort. At each end there was a tall window, for the room spa
Even before he had stepped over the threshold the first of his senses had come under attack. The noise in this room was deafening, especially if you compared it, as the Collector did, with how it used to be in the days when it had been reserved for billiards. Ah, then it had been like some gentle rustic scene … the green meadows of the tables, the brown leather of the chairs, and the gentlemen peacefully browsing amongst them. Then there had been no other sound but the occasional click of billiard balls or the scrape of someone chalking his cue. Above the green pastures the billowing blue clouds of cigar smoke had drifted gently by beneath the ceiling like the sky of a summer’s day. But now, alas, the ears were rowelled by high-pitched voices raised in dispute or emphasis; the competition here was extreme for anyone with anything to say: it included a number of crying children, illicit parrots and mynah birds.