The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [328]
“The letter killeth, the Spirit giveth life, all the same, if you see what I mean,” quoted Fleury feebly. He found himself unable to match the Padre’s positive assertions with anything better than vague equivocations. Nevertheless, like all intellectual young men he disliked coming off worst in an argument, whatever the subject. He fell into a sullen silence as the Padre continued to harangue him, and looked around to see if the Collector would be thinking of relieving him soon. But the Collector had left his tombstone and melted deeper into the darkness.
“You cannot escape the fact,” said Fleury, returning to the attack, “that our century has developed a morality higher and finer than anything the world has known before, based on the spirit of the New Testament, ignoring the letter of the Old Testament. The nineteenth century has witnessed a refinement of morality unknown to the antique world!”
“Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee!”
The Padre’s words echoed after the Collector as he retreated through the darkness and he thought: “Young Fleury is perfectly right...How arid the eighteenth century was in comparison to our own. They did their best, no doubt, but they were at best only a preparation for our own century. How barren in taste they were, how lacking in feeling! What a poor conception of Man, what fruitless ratiocination! Everything which they approached so ineffectually, we have brought to culmination. The poor fellows had no conception how far Art, Science, Respectability, and Political Economy could be taken. Where they hesitated and blundered we have gone forward...Ah!” He stumbled. A round shot, skipping through the darkness, landed in the mud wall of the churchyard, showering him with pebbles.
Somehow the shock of this narrow escape had a sobering effect on him and his confidence drained away, and with it his satisfaction with his own epoch. He thought again of those hundred and fifty million people living in cruel poverty in India alone...Would Science and Political Economy ever be powerful enough to give them a life of ease and respectability? He no longer believed that they would. If they did, it would not be in his own century but in some future era. This notion of the superiority of the nineteenth century which he had just been enjoying had depended on beliefs he no longer held, but which had just now been itching, like amputated limbs which he could feel although they no longer existed.
The round shot had also served to remind him of the new line of defence, the need for which was becoming daily more desperate. And so he turned towards the Residency to see how the new fortifications were progressing. Alas, the Collector knew that Machiavelli, another member of his staff of nocturnal counsellors, would not have wanted him to construct this second line of defence. It was the opinion of that cynical man that if a possibility of retreat existed, the defenders would use it, and thus bring about their own defeat. But there was nothing the Collector could do about that...Sooner or later he would have to reduce the perimeter of the enclave. Even at the beginning of the siege the ramparts had been too sparsely manned. Now, with two or three men dying every day and sometimes more, the interval between each rifle grew daily larger, and only the inability of the sepoys to concert an attack with all their disparate forces had allowed the defences to remain intact.
“Besides, Machiavelli was not speaking of Englishmen, but Italians...A very different matter.”
At first, the Collector had considered a new line which would form a loop around the Residency, the Church, and the banqueting hall, but he knew that the labour of digging an adequate trench and rampart over such a distance must now be beyond the strength of his garrison, who were obliged to fight during the day and dig at night. He had considered leaving the banqueting hall outside, but he soon realized that this was out of the question;