Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

‘Only if you think the Empire is inevitable,’ said Griffin. ‘But it’s not. Take this current moment. We are just at the tail end of a great crisis in the Atlantic, after the monarchic empires have fallen one after the other. Britain and France lost in America, and then they went to war against each other to nobody’s benefit. Now we’re watching a new consolidation of power, that’s true – Britain got Bengal, it got Dutch Java and the Cape Colony – and if it gets what it wants in China, if it can reverse this trade imbalance, it’s going to be unstoppable.

‘But nothing’s written in stone – or even silver, as it were. So much rests on these contingencies, and it’s at these tipping points where we can push and pull. Where individual choices, where even the smallest of resistance armies make a difference. Take Barbados, for example. Take Jamaica. We sent bars there to the revolts—’

‘Those slave revolts were crushed,’ said Robin.

‘But slavery’s been abolished, hasn’t it?’ said Griffin. ‘At least in British territories. No – I’m not saying everything’s good and fixed, and I’m not saying we can fully take the credit for British legislation; I’m sure the abolitionists would take umbrage at that. But I am saying that if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’

He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

‘You really believe that,’ said Robin, amazed. Griffin’s faith astounded him. For Robin, such abstract reasoning was a reason to divest from the world, to retreat into the safety of dead languages and books. For Griffin, it was a rallying call.

‘I have to,’ said Griffin. ‘Otherwise, you’re right. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.’

After that conversation, Griffin seemed to have decided Robin wasn’t about to betray the Hermes Society, for Robin’s assignments vastly increased in number. Not all of his missions involved theft. More often Griffin made requests for materials – etymological handbooks, Grammatica pages, orthography charts – which were easily acquired, copied out, and returned without drawing attention. Still, he had to be clever with when and how he took the books out, as he’d attract suspicion if he kept sneaking away materials unrelated to his focus areas. One time Ilse, the upperclassman from Japan, demanded to know what he was doing with the Old German Grammatica, and he had to stammer out a story about pulling the title by accident in the course of trying to trace a Chinese word back to Hittite origins. No matter that he was at the entirely wrong section of the library. Ilse seemed ready to believe he was simply that dim.

By and large, Griffin’s requests were painless. It was all less romantic than Robin had imagined – and, perhaps, hoped for. There were no thrilling escapades or coded conversations spoken on bridges over running water. It was all so mundane. The great achievement of the Hermes Society, Robin learned, was how effectively it rendered itself invisible, how completely it concealed information even from its members. If one day Griffin disappeared, then Robin would be hard-pressed to prove to anyone the Hermes Society ever existed except as a figment of his imagination. He often felt that he wasn’t a part of a secret society at all, but rather of a large, boring bureaucracy that functioned with exquisite coordination.

Even the thefts became routine. Babel’s professors seemed wholly unaware that anything was being stolen at all. The Hermes Society took silver only in amounts small enough to mask with some accounting trickery, for the virtue of a humanities faculty, Griffin explained, was that everyone was hopeless with numbers.

‘Playfair would let entire crates of silver disappear if no one checked him,’ he told Robin. ‘Do you think he keeps tidy books? The man can barely add figures in two digits.’

Some days Griffin did not mention Hermes at all, but instead spent the hour it took to reach Port Meadow and back inquiring about Robin’s life at Oxford – his rowing exploits, his favourite bookshops, his thoughts on the food in hall and in the Buttery.

Robin answered cautiously. He kept waiting for the ball to drop, for Griffin to spin this conversation into an argument, for his own preference for plain scones to become the proof of his infatuation with the bourgeoisie. But Griffin only kept asking, and gradually it dawned on Robin that perhaps Griffin just missed being a student.