The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [288]
But Sin is hydra-headed; chop a sin off here and a dozen more are bristling in its place. Sometimes as he toiled about the glaring compound the Padre was obliged to stop for a cool drink of water in a shady place; he would have dropped from exhaustion, otherwise. And in these brief interludes of peace he found himself having to admire, in a perfectly objective way, the incredible ingenuity of the Lord’s ways. He did not move in mysterious ways so much as in beatifically cunning ones. For at the same time as He had shown the Padre the path he must follow, the path had instantly sprouted new obstacles. Perhaps it would not have been such a difficult matter to isolate sin in the normal life of the cantonment and stamp it out, but now, with his flock herded together in extreme contiguity, many of them at the young age when temptation of the flesh and of the mind is most acute, his task together with occasions for sinful behaviour seemed to increase daily as by a system of compound interest. The closer together that people live the more they sin...in the Padre’s experience such a proposition was axiomatic.
So the Padre had toiled on, trying to stem the tide. Sometimes he became dizzy with fatigue and suffered strange imaginings; the sinful jars in the Church, for example. But in a sense the Padre was not wrong about these jars for they were a concrete symbol of the material world that was constantly encroaching on the shrinking spiritual sandbank where the Christians of Krishnapur were standing. Krishnapur! Even the name of their community was that of a heathen deity.
Now, in the hour of darkness before dawn, the Padre stumbled on around the defences where men waited in silent huddled groups for the order to stand to arms. The darkness at this hour was at its most intense; frequently he tripped over unseen objects in his path, and more than once he fell, hurting himself badly. At each post he exhorted the huddled figures to penitence. He knew they were sinners, he told them; they must repent now before it was too late.
“Look down, we beseech thee,” he pleaded, his voice echoing weirdly in the darkness, “and hear us calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws of this death which is ready now to swallow us up: Save, Lord, or else we perish. The living, the living, shall praise thee...”
Did his exhortations move the hearts of those shadowy, motionless figures whom he could feel standing there in the darkness but whom he could not see? They remained as silent as the stone jars. He hurried on with the fear in his heart that he was failing.
“Stir up thy strength, O Lord, and come out and help us; for thou givest not alway the battle to the strong, but canst save by many or by few. O let not our sins now cry against us for vengeance...”
At each post he handed out a bundle of devotional tracts for the men to read as soon as it became light. Hands took them from him in silence; no word was spoken. He was afraid now that he would not be able to complete the circuit of the defences before dawn. It seemed to him that the darkness was becoming less opaque...and soon he realized why he was no longer stumbling: it was because he was becoming aware of objects in the darkness.
“O Almighty Lord,” he intoned in such a high, weird voice that all the pariah dogs in the compound set up a howl and the Collector, at last awake and cursing himself as he fumbled for his clothes, said to himself: “The poor fellow has gone off his head with the strain.”
“...who art a most strong tower to all them that put their trust in thee...”
“Dammit, bring a light,” shouted the Collector to the trembling, haggard Vokins, afraid that he might have to do battle with the sepoys in his nightshirt.
“Be now and evermore our defence; grant us victory if it be thy will; look in pity upon the wounded and the prisoners; cheer the anxious; comfort the bereaved; succour the dying...”
That high voice