The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) by Paul Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

her closed eyes seemed, initially, no more than a likely sign of her preoccupation with images conjured by the chaplain’s words which, for a moment, she thought of having a closer personal look at. Her eyes closed, then opened; presently closed again, only to open again. The third time that the lids snapped shut—abruptly, never slowly or heavily—they usually stayed shut; and Miss Crane was then away; and only a slight backward jerk of her head when the chaplain said Now God the Father God the Son and the congregation exhaled a corporate sigh of relief, proved that she hadn’t heard a word and that the eyes she now just as abruptly opened had been closed in sleep.
    Her violent shaking of the umbrella—not unlike the sound of alighting angry angels—and her firm fast sleep during the service, her reputation for outspokenness, her seeming imperviousness to the little drops of condescension falling from those who, in the way these thingswere reckoned, were above her in social station—all these had contributed to the idea the Mayapore English had of her as a woman whose work for the missionaries had broadened rather than narrowed her. There was certainly nothing sanctimonious about Edwina Crane. The somewhat grudging personal regard she was held in was increased by her refusal to be browbeaten on the women’s committees she sat on. Since the war began the English ladies of Mayapore had not been slow to recognize the need and answer the call for committees: knitting-bee committees, troops’ entertainment committees, social welfare committees, Guides recruitment committees, War Week committees, committees to direct the voluntary work done in the hospital and the Green-lawns Nursing Home and by the ladies who had in mind the welfare of the children of Indian mothers working on the road extension and proposed airstrip out at Banyaganj and in the British-Indian Electrical Factory. Called in originally to help with the Guides recruitment by Mrs. White, the wife of the Deputy Commissioner, she was now a member of the social welfare, the voluntary hospital workers and the Indian mothers committees and if among themselves the ladies spoke of her in tones that would have suggested to a stranger that Miss Crane was only a mission school teacher and as many rungs below them as it was socially possible to be and still be recognized, they themselves collectively understood that actual denigration was not intended, and individually respected her even if they thought her “cranky about the natives.”
    It was the wife of the Deputy Commissioner who was responsible for creating an image of Miss Crane which the ladies of Mayapore had now come to regard as definitive of her. “Edwina Crane,” Mrs. White said, “has obviously missed her vocation. Instead of wasting her time in the missions and thumping the old tub about the iniquities of the British raj and the intolerable burdens borne by what her church calls our dark brethren, she should have been headmistress of a good public school for girls, back in the old home counties.”
    Until the war Miss Crane had not gone out much in European society. Occasional dinners with the chaplain and his wife (it was the chaplain who was responsible for calling the station’s attention to Miss Crane’s tendency to sleep during his sermons), an annual invitation to the Deputy Commissioner’s garden party and once a year to his bungalow during the cold months when his wife “dined the station”—these had been the main events on her white social calendar, indeed still were, but her work on the committees had widened the circle of Englishwomenwho were ready to stop and talk to her in the cantonment bazaar or invite her to coffee or tea, and the particular dinner at the Deputy Commissioner’s to which Miss Crane now went was the one to which higher ranking English were invited, and eminent Indians such as Lady Chatterjee, widow of Sir Nello Chatterjee who had founded the Mayapore Technical