The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [223]
“How excellent, how serious! The girl has a remarkable gift.” The Collector was surprised to find himself responding to a poem composed by one of the ladies; hitherto he had considered the poems of value only for their therapeutic properties. Alas, Miss Carpenter had been unable to resist appending yet another explanation: that this last verse was a reference to Newton’s description of himself as “only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth”. This was altogether too much for the Magistrate. “Half of this poem appears to have been copied from books, Miss Carpenter, and the other half is plainly rubbish. It’s entirely beyond my understanding why you should feel you have to say ‘Afric’s wondrous brute’ instead of ‘elephant’ like everyone else, and ‘forest monarch’ instead of ‘tree'. Nobody in his right mind goes about calling trees ‘forest monarchs’...I’ve really never heard such nonsense!”
The ladies gasped at this frontal attack, not just on poor Miss Carpenter, but on poetry itself. If you can’t call an elephant Afric’s wondrous brute” what can you call it? Why write poetry at all? Miss Carpenter’s eyes filled with tears.
“Look here, Tom, that’s very extreme,” grumbled the Collector, displeased. “I found it a very fine poem indeed. One of the best we’ve heard, I should think. Mind you,” he added as his confidence once more deserted him, “the subject of the Exhibition, as you know, is one that holds a particular interest for me.”
Miss Carpenter coloured prettily at this speech and appeared not to hear the Magistrate’s derisive: “Ha!” “The fellow is quite impossible!” mused the Collector crossly.
Not everyone, the Collector was aware, is improved by the job he does in life; some people are visibly disimproved. The Magistrate had performed his duties for the Company conscientiously but they had not had a good effect on him: they had made him cynical, fatalistic, and too enamoured of the rational. His interest in phrenology, too, had had a bad effect; it had reinforced the determinism which had sapped his ideals, for he evidently believed that all one’s acts were limited by the shape of one’s skull. Given the swelling above and behind the ear on each side of his skull (he had once insinuated) there was not very much the Collector could do to remedy his inability to make rapid decisions...Though, of course, one could not be “absolutely sure” without making exact measurements. He had also begun to say something about a bump on each side of the Collector’s crown which signified “love of approbation”, but noticing, at last, how badly the Collector was responding to this opportunity for self-knowledge he had desisted with a sigh.
“By the way, Tom,” said the Collector as the meeting broke up, “I found something odd on my desk in the office just now. Four chapatis, to be exact. And yesterday I found some in a despatch box. What d’you make of it?”
“That’s strange. I found some too.” The two men looked at each other, surprised.
Presently they heard that chapatis were turning up all over Krishnapur. The Padre had found some on the steps of the Church and had assumed that they were some sort of superstitious offering. Mr Barlow, who worked in the Salt Agency, had been brought some by his watchman. Mr Rayne who, in addition to his official duties at the opium factory, was the Honorary Secretary of the Krishnapur Mutton Club and of the Ice Club, was shown chapatis by the watchmen employed in the protection of both these institutions. It soon became clear that it was chiefly among the watchmen that the chapatis were circulating; they had been given them by watchmen from other districts, without apparently knowing for what purpose, and told to bake more and then pass them on again to watchmen of yet other districts. The Collector discovered by questioning his own watchman that it was he who had left the chapatis on the desk in his office. Although he had baked twelve more chapatis and passed them on, as he had been instructed, he had felt it his duty to inform the Collector Sahib and so