The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [346]
The lovely Mrs Wright, still on her knees, stirred sleepily and the Collector saw her profile mirrored in a pool of rainwater beside her.
“O Lord, save this woman thy servant.”
The Collector’s moving lips silently accompanied the response. “Who putteth her trust in thee.”
“Be thou to her a strong tower.”
“From the face of the enemy.”
“Lord, hear our prayer.”
“And let our cry come unto thee.”
The Collector had pulled a grey handkerchief from his pocket to mop his brow and was gazing at it with pleasure, thinking again that he was a simple man at heart. The reason for his pleasure, as well as for the handkerchief’s greyness, was that he had washed it himself...and really he had done just as good a job as the dhobi had been doing for the most extravagant prices. He had not washed merely a handkerchief either...his underclothes, too, had a grey look, and so did his shirt, whose grey cuffs peeped from beneath the dirty, tattered sleeves of his morning coat. He had done it all himself and without soap. Miriam had offered to do it for him, and so had Eliza and Margaret, and he could, of course, easily have given it to the dhobi in spite of his inflated prices. But it was the principle of the thing that mattered. He wanted to help those who were ashamed to be seen washing their own clothes but could not afford the dhobi’s new prices...While quite capable of overlooking more serious misfortunes, the Collector was sensitive to such cases of threatened dignity. And so, to the dhobi’s astonishment and terror, the Collector had suddenly materialized beside him at the water-trough. For a while he had stood there at his side studying how he worked, how he soaked the garments and slapped them rhythmically against the smooth stone slabs. Then he had set to work himself, though rather clumsily, he was still weak from his illness. Soon the slapping of his own clothes had counterpointed the rhythmic slapping of the dhobi’s.
The news that the Collector had been seen doing his own laundry caused a mild sensation at first and was interpreted as the long-awaited collapse, particularly by those members of the garrison who had once belonged to the “bolting” party. But then the other faction, the shattered remains of the erstwhile “confident” party, had argued rather differently...far from being a sign of collapse it was, in fact, a sign of the Collector’s resolve, his determination not to submit to oppression, to fight back, in other words. Soon he was joined by other Europeans and henceforth it became a common sight to see one or other of the ladies or gentlemen of the “confident” party slapping away at the trough where once the dhobi had slapped (for on the day after the Collector’s appearance the dhobi had vanished from the enclave, either because he considered it too dangerous to remain any longer now that the commander of the garrison had assumed the caste of dhobi or, more likely, because he resented the competition). But perhaps the general, median view that was held by the garrison of this strange behaviour of the Collector was that it signified nothing more than his eccentricity.
“Yes, I’m a simple man. I don’t believe in standing on ceremony,” the Collector congratulated himself piously. “But then, what else could I be when I look like a scarecrow and smell like a fox?” How ragged all these devout figures looked! One would have thought it was the congregation of a workhouse. Louise Dunstaple, who had once been so fair, now looked like some consumptive Irish girl you might find walking the London streets; in spite of the angry red spots on her pale brow she no longer wore the poultice of flour...the temptation had been too much for her and she had eaten it. To make things worse the women had now discovered lice in their hair. He had visited the billiard room that morning and his nerves had been set on edge by the distressing scenes he had witnessed. Yet the sobbing of the unfortunate women who had found lice in their hair had been easier to endure than the malicious pleasure of those