The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [232]
And so the merriment continued. What a wonderful time everyone was having...even the ragged natives watching from the edge of the clearing were probably enjoying the spectacle...and how delightful the weather was! The Indian winter is the perfect climate, sunny and cool. It was only later that evening that Fleury remembered that he had wanted to ask Captain Hudson, who had looked an intelligent fellow, if he thought any more trouble was to be expected...Because naturally it would be foolish for himself and Miriam to visit the Dunstaples in Krishnapur, as they intended, if there was to be unrest in the country.
The Collector had been astonished, on hearing of the mutiny of the 19th at Berhampur, at the lack of alarm in official circles over this development. Later he heard that General Hearsey had been obliged to address the sepoys at Barrackpur to reassure them that there was no intention of forcibly converting them to Christianity, as they suspected. The English, Hearsey had explained to them, were “Christians of the Book”, which meant that nobody could become a Christian without first reading and understanding the Book and voluntarily choosing to become a Christian. It was believed in Calcutta, though not by the Collector, that this speech, delivered in their own language in strong, manly tones by an officer they trusted, had had a beneficial effect on the sepoys. The Collector, in the meantime, had arrived at a painful decision. In spite of his anxiety to return to Krishnapur after his wife’s departure he had decided that it was his duty to stay in Calcutta for a few more days to warn people of the danger that he himself had first perceived in those ominous chapatis he had found on his desk.
Fleury had only met the Collector on one occasion and at the time, unfortunately, he had not realized that he was meeting someone who would soon provide an interesting topic of conversation for despairing drawing-rooms. During the two years the Collector had spent in England at the beginning of the decade he had been an active member of numerous committees and societies: the Magdalen Hospital for reclaiming prostitutes, for example, and the aristocratic Mendicity Society for relieving beggars, not to mention any number of literary, zoological, antiquarian and statistical societies. That, of course, was entirely as it should be; anyone of his private means would have done the same. But Hopkins had gone further. Not only had he returned to India full of ideas about hygiene, crop rotation, and drainage, he had devoted a substantial part of his fortune to bringing out to India examples of European art and science in the belief that he was doing as once the Romans had done in Britain. Those who had seen it said that the Residency at Krishnapur was full of statues, paintings and machines. Perhaps it was only to be expected that the Collector’s efforts to bring civilization to the natives would be laughed at in Calcutta; but now here he was again, almost as entertaining, in the role of a prophet of doom.
In no time he became a familiar figure in Calcutta as he traversed the city paying calls on various dignitaries. If someone happened to see him making his way along Chowringhee he would say to himself: “There goes Hopkins. I wonder who he’s going to warn this time.” The Collector’s foretelling of the wrath to come, based largely, people said, on his actually having eaten the chapatis he had found soon became a great source of amusement. Fleury, among others, followed his progress with amazement and relish. It even became something of a vogue in Government circles to be called on by the Collector and more than one host entertained his dinner guests with an account of how the Collector had buttonholed somebody or other to predict disaster. And when he visited you he would launch into a confused harangue about