The Empire Trilogy (74 page)

It was hard to tell whether Hari saw what he meant or not, for he merely grunted and fished in the pocket of his waistcoat for his watch; this was a gold watch, as it happened, but one would not have thought so, because Hari had spent so much time in the mercury-laden atmosphere of this room that both watch and chain had become coated with a white amalgam. He was frowning now as he picked up a copper plate coated with silver and began to polish it with soft leather and pumice, using slow, deliberate strokes parallel to the edges of the plate, first in one direction, then in the other.

“A spear that shoots someone as well as stabbing him? Ludicrous! And all these other things you have shown me, collections of this and that, sea-shells and carved ivory, disgraceful pictures, chairs made of antlers and astronomical clocks, d'you know what they remind me of?”

“No,” said Hari sullenly. He was now looking pale as well as angry, perhaps from his exertions or because he had inhaled too much mercury vapour...He was still polishing the silvered copper plate but had exchanged the leather for a pad of silk.

“They remind me of the Great Exhibition!”

“They had disgraceful pictures in Great Exhibition, I did not know?” said Hari, curious in spite of himself and slightly mollified by this comparison.

“No, of course not. But what I mean is that the Great Exhibition was not, as everyone said it was, a landmark of civilization; it was for the most part a collection of irrelevant rubbish such as your ancestors might well have collected.”

Hari winced at this reference to his ancestors and turned paler than ever; his polishing of the plate intensified. But Fleury did not notice. He was seething with excitement and would have sprung to his feet, gesticulating, had not his head been firmly wedged in the iron ring.

“Take the Indian Court in the Crystal Palace, it was full of useless objects. There were spears, a life-sized elephant with a double howdah, swords, umbrellas, jewels, and rich cloths...the very things you have just been showing me. In fact, the whole Exhibition was composed merely of collections of this and that, utterly without significance...There was an Observatory Hive...ah, the tedious comparisons that were made between mankind and the hive's ‘quietly-employed inhabitants, those living emblems of industry and order.'!”

Hari, whose face remained stony and expressionless, had finished polishing; the plate no longer had a silver appearance but seemed black. He now had to focus the lens of the camera on Fleury.

“Take your hands off chest, Fleury,” he ordered, for Fleury was gripping his lapels and the movement of his breathing would undoubtedly blur the image.

“I'm afraid I'm not making myself very clear,” Fleury groaned; he had become carried away with his denunciation of materialism and was dizzy, moreover, with the heat and the fumes of chemicals and the pressure of the clamps on his skull. “What I mean is that collections of objects, whether weapons or sea-shells or a life-sized stuffed elephant, are nothing but distractions for people who have been unable to make a real spiritual advance.”

“And Science? Were there not many wonderful machines?”

“It's true that the Agricultural Court was often full of bushy-whiskered farmers staring at strange engines...But reflect, these engines were merely improved methods for doing the wrong thing.”

“The wrong thing! I am sad, Fleury, that you should be so very backwards. These machines make more food, more money, save very much labour,” said Hari coldly and vanished under a tent of dark muslin hung over a frame in one corner of the room. An instant later his head reappeared from beneath the draped muslin, black eyes glittering in his pale, flabby face. “And this that I am doing to you at the moment, perhaps this is not progress also!” he demanded angrily. His head vanished again.

Fleury gazed at the muslin tent bewildered. He could hear Hari muttering angrily to himself as he made the metal plate sensitive to light by passing it through his two wooden coating boxes, which between them were largely responsible for the toxic fumes which Fleury could feel assailing his powers of reason. Each box contained a blue-green glass jar: in one jar there was a small amount of iodine crystals, in the other, a mysterious substance called “quickstuff” which contained bromine and chlorine compounds and served to increase the sensitivity of the plate. By holding the plate over the evaporating iodine crystals for less than a minute Hari allowed a thin layer of light-sensitive iodide of silver to form over it; when it had turned orange-yellow he held it over the “quickstuff” until it turned deep pink, then back over the iodine for a few seconds. Then, grinding his teeth with rage, he slipped the sensitized plate into a wooden frame to protect it from light while it was not in the camera, and emerged trembling from his dark muslin tent.

“Perhaps this is not progress also?” he repeated, waving the boxed plate in front of Fleury's pinioned head in a threatening manner. “To make metal sensitive to light.”

“Yes, it is progress, of course...but, well, only in the art of making pictures. Mind you, that is no doubt wonderful in its way. But the only
real
progress would be to make a man's heart sensitive to love, to Nature, to his fellow men, to the world of spiritual joy. My dear Hari, Plato did more for the human race than Monsieur Daguerre.”

Hari put the plate in the camera and pulled out the protective slide. “I beg you not to insult any more my ancestors nor this very worthy gentleman, Mr Daguerre.”

“Please don't think I mean to insult them,” cried Fleury. “That's the very last thing I want to do. It's just that we must change the direction of our society before it's too late and we all become like these engines which will soon be galloping across India on railway lines. An engine has no heart!”

“Keep still!” Hari, watch in hand, snatched the cap off the lens and by the look on his face he might have been wishing it was the muzzle of a cannon that was pointing at Fleury.

“Oh dear!” thought Fleury, “I seem to have offended him somehow.”

Hari counted off two minutes, replaced the lens cap, snatched out the plate and slipped it over the heated mercury bath. Fleury goggled at him, dismayed.

“I am very sad,” declared Hari with frosty dignity, “that you, Fleury, should reveal yourself so frightfully backward.”

He shook his head over the mercury bath with lofty distress. “This will be portrait of very backward man indeed, I am very much regretting to say.”

A discouraged silence fell between the two young men as they waited for the fine mercury globules to settle on the parts of the plate which had been affected by light. When this process had been accomplished Hari picked the plate up with a pair of pliers and poured over it a solution of hyposulphite of soda to wash off the unchanged iodide and make the image permanent; then, still holding it with pliers he washed it with a solution of gold chloride to increase the brilliance of the image. All that now remained to be done was to wash the plate in water, dry it over the spirit lamp, and put it into a frame behind glass for the image was as delicate as the wing of a butterfly and as easily harmed. This done, Hari sighed and took it over to show Fleury, whose head was still clamped in the ring. Hari's anger had given way to sadness and disapproval.

“It looks as if it has been drawn by the brush of the fairy queen Mab,” said Fleury, hoping that this conceit would soothe Hari's wounded feelings.

“It is the portrait of a very backward man indeed,” replied Hari severely. And with that he turned and trudged out of the room with heavy steps, leaving Fleury to free himself from the clamps as best he could.

The river which flowed, when there was any water in it, past the Maharajah's palace to wander here and there on the vast and empty plain passed alongside the cantonment and the now yellow lawns of the Residency, beneath the iron bridge, along the native town (which had been built, unlike the cantonment mainly on the western bank so that the devout would be facing the rising sun as they stood on the steps of the bathing
ghat
), past the burning
ghat
, and out on to the plain again, reaching at long last, some eight miles from Krishnapur, a stretch of half a mile where it ran between embankments. At this point the plain ceased to be quite flat. There was a slight depression in it of four or five miles in circumference, made by the footprint of one of the giant gods who had strode back and forth across India in prehistoric times settling their disputes and hurling pieces of the continent at one another. The land was particularly fertile here, either because it had been blessed by the footprint, as the Hindus believed, or, as the British believed, because it was regularly flooded and coated with a nourishing silt.

This flooding, though, was a nuisance and it grew worse every year because of the attrition of the embankments. Cattle were drowned and crops lost. To stop the flooding by reinforcing the embankments was the great ambition of both the Collector and the Magistrate. While the Collector had been visiting the opium factory the Magistrate, accompanied by his bearer, Abdallah, had ridden out of Krishnapur to visit the embankments and consult the landowners whose coolies would be needed for the work of reinforcement. Why go to so much trouble when the river could be persuaded not to flood by the sacrifice of a black goat on its banks, the landowners had wanted to know.

“But that doesn't work. You've tried it before. Every year the floods are worse.”

The landowners remained silent out of polite amazement that anybody could be so stupid as to doubt the efficacy of a sacrifice when properly performed by Brahmins. They were torn between amusement and distress at such obtuseness.

“The
Sircar
will make you supply labour,” declared the Magistrate at last, but he knew that the Government could do no such thing in the present state of the country, and the landowners knew that he knew. The hollowness of this threat embarrassed them. To spare the Magistrate's feelings they feigned expressions of sorrow, alarm, of despair at the prospect of this coercion...but when the Magistrate had at last ridden away, though not before he was out of earshot, they shouted with laughter, held their sides, and even rolled in the dust in undignified glee. Their glee redoubled when soon after the Magistrate's departure they heard that there had been a massacre of the
feringhees
at Captainganj. Then an argument broke out which began playfully but soon became serious, involving prestige. The argument was this: would the Magistrate get back to Krishnapur alive or would he be killed on the way?

The Magistrate and Abdallah (who, although he enjoyed seeing Mr Willoughby discomfited, was saddened that it should be Hindus who gained an advantage over him) rode slowly back to the cantonment. The Magistrate ignored the heat of the sun which beat down on his pith helmet and touched off his blazing ginger whiskers. How he hated stupidity and ignorance! He hoped that the river, when it broke its banks again this year, would drown the stupid men he had just been talking to...but he knew that this was not likely: when disasters occur it is only the poor who suffer. Abdallah wanted to cheer up the Magistrate by telling him a Mohammedan joke against the Hindus.

“Sahib, why are the crocodiles in Krishnapur so fat?” The Magistrate rode on without answering.

“Because they eat up all the sins which Hindus wash off in the river!” And Abdallah laughed loudly so that Mr Willoughby would know that it was a joke.

Later in the afternoon the Collector and the Magistrate sat together in the Collector's study and the Magistrate described the result of his journey. By now it was the late afternoon. When he had finished both men sat in discouraged silence. The Collector was thinking: “Even after all these years in India Willoughby doesn't understand the natives. He's too rational for them. He can't see things from their point of view because he has no heart. If I had been there they would have listened to me.” Aloud he said: “The river will have to flood again this year then, Tom. But immediately the flooding is over we'll tackle the embankments before they have time to forget that their wretched black goat didn't work.”

The study was the Collector's favourite room; it was panelled in teak and contained many beloved objects. The most important of these was undoubtedly
The Spirit of Science Conquers Ignorance and Prejudice
, a bas-relief in marble by the window; it was here that the angle of the light gave most life to the brutish expression of Ignorance at the moment of being disembowelled by Truth's sabre, and yet emphasised at the same time how hopelessly Prejudice, on the point of throwing a net over Truth, had become enmeshed in its own toils. There was another piece of sculpture beside his desk:
Innocence Protected by Fidelity
by Benzoni, representing a scantily clothed young girl asleep with a garland of flowers in her lap; beside her a dog had its paw on the neck of a gagging snake which had been about to bite her.

Yet Art did not hold sway alone in the Collector's study for on one corner of the desk in front of him there stood a tribute to scientific invention; he had come across it during those ecstatic summer days, now as remote as a dream, which he had spent in the Crystal Palace. It was the model of a carriage which supplied its own railway, laying it down as it advanced and taking it up again after the wheels had passed over. So ingenious had this invention seemed to the Collector, such was the enthusiasm it had excited at the Exhibition, that he could not fathom why six years should have passed away without one seeing these machines crawling about everywhere.

Beside the model carriage stood another ingenious invention, a drinking glass with compartments for soda and acid following separate channels; the idea was that the junction of the two streams should come just at the moment of entering the mouth, causing effervescence. The Collector had only once attempted to use it; all the same, he admired its ingenuity and had grown fond of it, as an object. “The trouble with poor Willoughby,” he mused now, surreptitiously observing the face of his companion and noting, as far as the now cinnamon whiskers permitted, how it was raked, harrowed, even ploughed up by free-thinking and cynicism, “is that he's not a whole man, as I am...For science and reason is not enough. A man must also have a heart and be capable of understanding the beauties of art and literature. What a narrow range the man has!” The Collector's mood of self-satisfaction, which had been brought on by his agreeable conversation with the pretty Mrs Lang, deepened as he strolled to the window and saw the mosque three or four hundred yards away, for the mosque was a perfect example of what was right with himself and wrong with the Magistrate.