The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  Mr Chaudhuri had held the Dibrapur appointment for not quite a year. His predecessor, old Miss de Silva, a Eurasian woman from Goa, had been dead for just a bit longer. With Mary de Silva’s death Miss Crane had lost the last person in the world who called her Edwina. On her first visit to Dibrapur as superintendent, seven years ago, the older woman – fat, white-haired, ponderous, and with a voice as dark and forthcoming as her extraordinary popping black eyes – had said, ‘You got the job I wanted. My name’s Mary de Silva. My mother was as black as your hat.’

  ‘Mine’s Edwina Crane,’ Miss Crane said, shaking the pudgy, man-strong hand, ‘I didn’t know you wanted the job, and my mother’s been dead for longer than I care to remember.’

  ‘Well in that case I’ll call you Edwina, if you don’t mind. I’m too old to bow and scrape to a new superintendent. And also if you don’t mind we’ll start by talking about the bloody roof.’

  So they had talked about the roof, and the walls, and the tube-well that wanted resinking in another place, and then about the children, and Mary de Silva’s intention to send, by hook or crook, a boy called Balarachama Rao to the Government Higher School in Mayapore. ‘His parents won’t hear of it. But I’ll hear of it. Where do you stand, Edwina Crane?’

  ‘In matters of this sort, Mary de Silva,’ she replied, ‘I stand to do what the teachers on the spot advise me should be done.’

  ‘Then find a decent lodging in Mayapore for Master Balarachama. That’s the snag. He’s got no place to live if he’s admitted. The parents say they’ve no relatives there. Which is nonsense. Indians have relatives everywhere. I ought to know.’ Her skin was no sallower than little Miss Williams’s had been.

  Miss Crane found lodgings in Mayapore for Balarachama and spent a month, which is to say most of her time in four weekly visits to Dibrapur, persuading his parents to let him go. When she had at last succeeded Mary de Silva said, ‘I’m not going to thank you. It was your duty. And it was mine. But come back now and help me break into the bottle of rum I’ve been saving since Christmas.’ So she went back with Mary de Silva to the bungalow the Chaudhuris now lived in, half a mile down the road from the school, and drank rum, heard the story of Mary de Silva’s life and told her own. There had been many other occasions of drinking rum and lime in Mary de Silva’s living-room, discreetly, but in enough quantity for tongues to be loosened and for Miss Crane to feel that here, in Dibrapur, with Mary de Silva, she had come home again after a lifetime travelling. For six years she went weekly to Dibrapur, and stayed the night with Mary de Silva. ‘It’s not necessary you know,’ Miss de Silva said, ‘but it’s nice. The last superintendent only came once a month and never stayed the night. That was nice too.’

  At the end of the six years, when the roof of the school had been repaired once and needed repairing again, and the new tube-well had been sunk, the walls patched and painted twice, there came the day she reached the schoolhouse and found it closed, and, driving on to Mary de Suva’s bungalow, found the old teacher in bed, lying quietly, temporarily deserted by the servant who had gone down to Dibrapur to fetch the doctor. Miss de Silva was mumbling to herself. When she had finished what she had to say, and nodded, her eyes focused on Miss Crane. She smiled and said, ‘Well, Edwina. I’m for it. You might see to the roof again,’ then closed her eyes and died as if someone had simply disconnected a battery.

  After seeing Mary de Silva’s body safely and quickly transported to Mayapore and buried in the churchyard of St Mary, Miss Crane put the task of finding a temporary teacher into the hands of Mr Narayan to give him something to do, and went back to Dibrapur to reopen the school and keep it going until the temporary arrived. She also wrote to the headquarters of the mission to report Miss de Silva’s death and the steps she had taken to keep the school going until a permanent appointment was made. She recommended a Miss Smithers, with whom she had worked in Bihar. She did not get Miss Smithers. She got first of all a cousin of Mr Narayan who drank, and then, from Calcutta, Mr D. R. Chaudhuri, BA, BSc – qualifications which not only astonished her but made her suspicious. Mission headquarters had been rather astounded too, so she gathered from their letter, but not suspicious. Mr Chaudhuri did not profess to be a Christian, they told her, on the other hand he did not profess any other religion. He had resigned from an appointment in a Government training college and had asked the mission to employ him in the humblest teaching capacity. They had offered him several posts, all of which he declined until, suddenly, the post in Dibrapur fell vacant, and this, from their description, had appealed to him as ‘the right kind of beginning’. ‘He will be wasted in Dibrapur, of course, and is unlikely to be with you for long,’ they wrote, in confidence. ‘He will be accompanied by his wife, so perhaps you would arrange to see that the late Miss de Silva’s bungalow is made ready for them. We understand he has private but limited means. You will find Mr Chaudhuri a reserved young man and, by and large, unwilling to discuss the reasons for his decision to abandon a more distinguished academic career. We have, however, satisfied ourselves from interviews with Mr Chaudhuri and inquiries outside, that his wish to teach young children in the villages arises from a genuine sympathy for the depressed classes of his own race and a genuine belief that educated men like himself should more often be prepared to sacrifice their private interests in the interest of the country as a whole. It appears, too, that he feels his work in this direction should be with schools such as our own, not because of the religious basis of our teaching but because he has a low opinion of the local government primary schools and thinks of them as staffed by teachers to whom politics are more important than any educational consideration.’

  In spite of this promising situation there had been between herself and Mr Chaudhuri right from the beginning what Miss Crane thought of as an almost classical reserve – classical in the sense that she felt they each suspected the other of hypocrisy, of unrevealed motives, of hiding under the thinnest of liberal skins deeply conservative natures, so that all conversations they had that were not strictly to do with the affairs of the school seemed to be either double-edged or meaningless.

  For weeks Miss Crane fought against her own reserve. She did not minimise her grief for and memories of Miss de Silva when it came to analysing the possible causes of it. Knowing that Mr Chaudhuri had been told she visited Miss de Silva once a week, she visited him once a week too and stayed overnight in old Miss de Suva’s bungalow, now unrecognisable as the same place, furnished as it was by Mr and Mrs Chaudhuri in the westernised-Indian style. She did this in case he should misunderstand her not doing it; at the same time she was aware that he might have taken her visits as a sign of her not trusting in his competence. She continued the visits in the hope that eventually she would feel at home there once more.

  Tall, wiry, and square-shouldered, Mr Chaudhuri had the fine-boned face of a Bengali, was handsome in a way Miss Crane recognised but did not personally consider handsome. With every feature and plane of his face sharp and prominent and in itself indicative of strength, the whole face, for her, still suggested weakness – and yet not weakness, because even weakness required to be conveyed as a special expression, and Mr Chaudhuri’s face was capable of conveying only two: blank indifference or petulant annoyance. His smile, she saw, would have been pleasant if it had ever got up into his eyes as well.

  His English was excellent, typically Indian in its inflexions and rhythms, but fluent as spoken and crisply correct when written. He also taught it very well. He made Mr Narayan, by comparison, look and sound like a bazaar comedian. And yet, with Mr Narayan, Miss Crane found conversation easy and direct. Not so with Mr Chaudhuri. There had been a period in her career when, highly sensitive herself to the sensitivity of Indians who knew the English language, even some of its subtlest nuances, but seldom if ever the rough and tumble of its everyday idiom, she had inured herself to the temptation to say things like, Don’t be silly; or, Nonsense. For some years now, though, she had not bothered to put a curb on her tongu
e, and wished she never had. When you chose your words the spontaneity went out of the things you wanted to say. She had learned to hate the feeling it gave her of unnaturalness. If she had always been as outspoken as she was now, she thought, then even if she had made enemies she might also have made friends. By developing self-confidence in the manner of her speech earlier in her career she believed she might have developed an inner confidence as well, the kind that communicated itself to people of another race as evidence of sincerity, trustworthiness. Too late for that, the outspokenness, she knew, often looked to Indians like the workaday thoughtless rudeness of any Englishwoman. Only Englishwomen themselves admired it, although with men like Mr Narayan she could conduct a slanging match and feel no bones were broken. With Mr Chaudhuri she found herself reverting to the soft phrase, the cautious sentiment, and then spoiling whatever effect this had had by letting slip words that came more easily to her. She had said Nonsense! to him early on in their association and had seen at once that her tenuous hold on his willingness to co-operate was temporarily lost. From this unfortunate set-back they had never made much advance. If Mrs Chaudhuri had been a more sophisticated woman Miss Crane felt she might have made progress with Mr Chaudhuri through intimate contact with his wife, but apart from a High School education and her years spent at the feet of a music teacher, Mrs Chaudhuri was uninstructed in the ways of the sophisticated world and had a remarkably old-fashioned notion of the role of a wife.

  *

  Before Miss Crane set out in the Ford for Dibrapur on the morning of the 8th of August Joseph tried to dissuade her from going. He said there would be trouble. He had heard rumours.

  She said, ‘We are always hearing rumours. Does that stop you from doing your work? Of course not. I have work in Dibrapur. So to Dibrapur I must go.’

  He offered to come with her.

  ‘And who will look after the house, then?’ she asked. ‘No, Joseph, for both of us it is business as usual.’

  It was business as usual all the way to Dibrapur, which she reached at four o’clock in the afternoon, having stopped on the way to eat her sandwiches and drink coffee from the flask. In the villages there were people who shouted Quit India! and others who asked for baksheesh. Driving slowly to avoid hitting cows and buffalo, dogs, hens and children, she smiled and waved at the people whatever they shouted.

  In Kotali, the last village before the schoolhouse, she stopped the car and spoke to some of the mothers whose children went to Mr Chaudhuri for lessons. The mothers said nothing about trouble. She did not mention it herself. They would know better than she what was to be expected. Kotali looked very peaceful. Leaving the village behind she met the children making their way home, carrying their food-tins and canvas bags. Their average age was eight. She stopped the car again and distributed some of the boiled sweets.

  Reaching the schoolhouse she drove into the compound. Here there were trees and shade. She found Mr Chaudhuri tidying up the schoolroom. ‘Is there any news?’ she asked, rather hoping that if trouble were coming and this were to be an eleventh hour it would be made productive of something more than politeness.

  ‘News?’ he replied. ‘What sort of news, Miss Crane?’

  ‘Of the Congress vote.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘No, I have not listened.’

  In the room of the schoolhouse that served as an office there was a radio. Sometimes Mr Chaudhuri used the radio as a medium of instruction. She turned it on now. There was music. She switched off. It was European music. The only music she ever listened to when with the Chaudhuris was Indian classical music.

  ‘Perhaps, however,’ he said, ’there is news of the roof?’

  ‘No, there isn’t. I’ve checked through all the estimates again and there’s not one that’s low enough. Can’t you find someone to do it cheaper?’

  ‘I have tried all who are willing to do it at all. If we wait much longer even the low estimates will go up. And these people cannot work for nothing.’

  She was about to say, Well, that’s not what I’m asking, I’m not asking them to do it for nothing. She would have said that to Mr Narayan. She held back from saying it to Mr Chaudhuri. Instead she said, ‘No. Well, come on. I’d like a cup of tea.’ And even that sounded brusque.

  Mr Chaudhuri closed the school, padlocked the door, and joined her in the Ford. At his bungalow tea was not ready. He did not apologise; but while she was resting on her bed, waiting to be called, she heard him taking his wife to task for not ordering things better. When tea was ready it was served on the verandah. Mrs Chaudhuri did not join them. She moved between kitchen and verandah, carrying things with her own hands, smiling but saying little, and when there seemed to be nothing more that they wanted stood in the shadow of the doorway, pretending not to be there, but watching her husband for the slightest indication from him that something had been forgotten, or was wrong, or needed to be replenished.

  ‘It is this,’ Miss Crane often told herself, ‘this awful feudal attitude to his wife that makes it difficult for me to like him.’

  But it was not that. In the evenings Mrs Chaudhuri sometimes sang to them. Directly she was seated crosslegged on the rush mat, gently supporting the onion-shaped tamboura, she became a different woman; self-assured, holding her bony body gracefully erect, not unlike the way Lady Chatterjee held hers when sitting on a sofa at the DCs. After Mrs Chaudhuri had sung a couple of songs Mr Chaudhuri would say, almost under his breath, ‘It is enough,’ and then Mrs Chaudhuri would rise, take up the tamboura and disappear into an inner room. And Miss Crane knew that Mr and Mrs Chaudhuri loved one another, that Mr Chaudhuri was not a tyrant, that the woman herself preferred the old ways to the new because for her the old ways were a discipline and a tradition, a means of acquiring and maintaining peace of mind and inner stillness.

  On this night, the night of August the 8th, which Miss Crane felt in her bones was a special night, one of crisis, she longed to make Mr Chaudhuri talk, to find the key to his reticence, a way of breaking down his reserve. It would have been easier for her if he had been as old-fashioned in his manners as his wife, because then their association would have been of an altogether different kind. But he was not. He was westernised. He wore European clothes at the school and, at least when she was staying with them, at home. They ate at a table, seated on hardwood chairs and talked about art and music and the affairs of the school, but never politics. There was a cloth on the table, there were knives and forks to eat with, and ordinary china plates. At dinner Mrs Chaudhuri sat with them, although she took almost no part in the conversation and ate practically nothing. A woman servant waited on them, the same woman who did the cooking. Miss Crane would have felt more comfortable if the woman had been an untouchable because that would have proved, in the Chaudhuris, emancipation from the rigidity of caste. But the woman was a Brahmin.

  They had coffee in the room that overlooked the verandah, in which she and Miss de Silva had sat on old cane chairs, but where they now sat on low divans with their feet on Kashmiri rugs. Miss de Silva had been content with an oil lamp; Mr Chaudhuri had rigged up an electric light that ran from a generator in the compound. They sat in the unflattering light of one naked electric bulb around which moths and insects danced their nightly ritual of primitive desire for what might burn their wings. At this point, between the eating and the singing, Mrs Chaudhuri always left them, presumably to help or supervise the woman in the kitchen.

  Tonight Miss Crane drank the bitter coffee, more conscious than ever of the unsympathetic silence that always fell directly she and Mr Chaudhuri were alone. She longed to know the news but accepted in its place as proof that in one respect at least the night was normal: the croaking – beyond the verandah – of the frogs who had come out in their invisible battalions after the evening rains.

  She wanted to say: Mr Chaudhuri, what honestly is the school to you? but did not. To say that to a man was to question a course which, to judge by his actions, he had set his mind, even his heart on. />
  ‘You are a fool, Edwina Crane,’ she told herself later as she undressed, preparing for bed. ‘You have lost another opportunity, because hearts are no longer set on anything and minds function as the bowels decide, and Mr Chaudhuri would talk if you knew the questions to ask and the way to ask them. But he is of that younger generation of men and women who have seen what I have seen, understood what I understand, but see and understand other things as well.’

  *

  And so she slept, and woke at four, as if aware that at such an hour people of her colour might have cause to be wakeful, on their guard. For at this hour the old man in spectacles was also woken and taken, and the Deputy Commissioner in Mayapore was woken, and warned, and told to set in motion those plans whose object was to prevent, to deter. And in the morning, having slept again only fitfully, Miss Crane was also woken and told by Mr Chaudhuri that on the day before in Bombay the Congress had voted in favour of the working committee’s resolution, that the Mahatma was arrested, that the entire working committee wrere arrested, that this no doubt was the signal for arrests all over the country. At nine she walked to the school with Chaudhuri to take the Sunday morning Bible class and found that only the children from Kotali had arrived. So she sent him on his bicycle into Dibrapur. He returned shortly before eleven and told her that the shops were closing in the town, that the police were out in force, that the rumour was that three of the municipal officers had been arrested by order of the District Superintendent of Police in Mayapore and taken to Aligarh, that crowds were collecting and threatening to attack the post office and the police station.