The Raj Quartet, Volume 1: The Jewel in the Crown: The Jewel in the Crown Vol 1 (Phoenix Fiction) (3 page)

Acknowledging that women such as herself tended to turn to if not actually to seek sanctuary in religion, she walked on the following evening in the other direction and when she came to the Protestant church she turned into the compound and went up the broad gravel path, past
the hummocky graves marked by the headstones of those who had died far from home, but who in their resting place, had they woken, might have been comforted by the English look of the church and its yard and the green trees planted there. The side door of the church was on the latch. She went in and sat in a pew at the back, stared at the altar and gazed at the darkening East window of stained glass which she saw every Sunday in the company of the Nesbitt-Smiths.

The god of this church was a kind, familiar, comfortable god. She had him in her heart but not in her soul. She believed in him as a comforter but not as a redeemer. He was very much the god of a community, not of the dark-skinned community that struggled for life under the weight of the Punjabi sky but of the privileged pale-faced community of which she was a marginal member. She wondered whether she would be Crane to Him, or Miss Crane, or Edwina. If she thought of Him as the Son she would, she presumed, be Edwina, but to God in His wrath, undoubtedly Crane.

“Miss Crane?”

Startled by the voice she looked over her shoulder. It was the senior chaplain, an elderly man with a sharp pink nose and a fringe of distinguishing white hair surrounding his gnomic head. His name was Grant, which caused restrained smiles during services when he intoned prayers that began Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee. She smiled now, although she was embarrassed being found by him there, betraying herself as a woman in need almost certainly not of rest but of reassurance. A plain somewhat horse-faced woman in her middle twenties, alone in an empty Protestant church, on a day when no service was due, was somehow already labeled. In later years, Miss Crane came to look upon that moment as the one that produced in her the certainty of her own spinsterhood.

“You are resting from your labours,” Mr. Grant said in his melodious congregational voice, and added, more directly, when she had nodded and looked down at her lap, “Can I be of any help, child?” so that without warning she wanted to weep because child was what her father had often called her in his sober, loving moments. However she did not weep. She had not wept since her father’s death and although there would come a time when she did once more it had not arrived yet. Speaking in a voice whose steadiness encouraged her, she said, “I’m thinking of staying on,” and, seeing the chaplain’s perplexity, the way he glanced round the church as if something had begun to go on there which
nobody had bothered to forewarn him of but which Miss Crane knew about and thought worth staying for, she explained, “I mean in India, when the Nesbitt-Smiths go home.”

The Chaplain said, “I see,” and frowned, perhaps because she had called them the Nesbitt-Smiths. “It should not be difficult, Miss Crane. Colonel and Mrs. Ingleby, for instance, strike me as worth approaching. I know you are well thought of. Major and Mrs. Nesbitt-Smith have always spoken highly.”

The future looked dark, a blank featureless territory with, in its centre, a pinprick of light that seemed to be all that was left of Edwina Crane.

“I think I should like,” she said, giving expression to a thought that had never properly been a thought until now, “to train for the mission.”

He sat down next to her and together they watched the East window.

“Not,” she went on, “no, not to carry the Word. I am not a truly religious woman.” She glanced at him. He was still watching the window. He did not seem to be particularly upset by her confession. “But there are schools, aren’t there?” she said. “I meant train to teach at the mission schools.”

“Ah yes, I see, to teach not our own children but those of our dark brethren in Christ?”

She nodded. She found herself short of breath. He turned to look at her fully, and asked her, “Have you seen the school here?”

Yes, she had seen the school, close to the railway station, but—“Only from the outside,” she told him.

“Have you ever talked to Miss Williams?”

“Who is Miss Williams?”

“The teacher. But then you would be unlikely to know her. She is a lady of mixed blood. Would you like to visit the school?”

“Very much.”

The chaplain nodded and presently, after the appearance of having thought more deeply, said, “Then I will arrange it, and if you are of the same mind I will write to the superintendent in Lahore, not that there is anything much for you to judge by in Miss Williams’ little school.” He shook his head. “No, Miss Crane. This isn’t an area where we’ve had much success, although more than the Catholics and the Baptists. There are of course a great number of schools throughout the country, of
various denominations, all committed to educating what I suppose we must call the heathen. In this matter the Church and the missions have always led the way. The Government has been, shall we say, slow to see the advantages. So, perhaps, have the Indians. The school here, for instance. A handful of children at the best of times. At the times of the festivals none. I mean, of course, the Hindu and Moslem festivals. The children come, you see, mainly for the chappattis, and in the last riots the school was set fire to, but that was before your time.”

The mission school was not the one she had had in mind which was close to the railway, the Joseph Wainwright Christian School, a substantial building, a privately endowed school for Eurasian children, the sons and daughters of soldiers, railway officials and junior civil servants whose blood had been mixed with that of the native population. The mission school was on the outskirts of the native town itself, a poor, small, rectangular building with a roof of corrugated iron in a walled compound bare of grass, with nothing to identify it apart from the cross roughly painted on the yellow stucco above the door. She was too ashamed to admit her mistake to Mr. Grant, who had brought her in a tonga, and now handed her down and led her through the opening in the wall where once, before the last riots, there might have been a gate.

To come with him at midday she had had to obtain permission from Mrs. Nesbitt-Smith and explain her reason for wanting leave of absence from the task of teaching the young Nesbitt-Smiths. Mrs. Nesbitt-Smith had stared at her as if she were mad and exclaimed, “Good heavens, Crane! What on earth has possessed you?” And then added, with what looked like genuine concern, which was touching and therefore far more upsetting than the outburst, “You’d be with blacks and half-castes, cut off from your own kind. And besides, Edwina, we’re all very fond of you.”

She was undoubtedly acting like a fool, far from sure even that she was acting on an impulse she had interpreted correctly. To begin with, to have confused the Eurasian school with the mission school proved how ignorant she was of what was there under her own nose, proved how little was really known by people such as herself about the life of the town they were supposed to have a duty to, a duty whose proper execution earned them the privileges they enjoyed. If she had not even known where this particular mission school was, what, she wondered, could she
hope to contribute to other mission schools or deserve to gain from them?

The door of the school was open. There was a sound of children singing. When they reached the door the singing stopped. Mr. Grant said that Miss Williams was expecting them and then stood aside. She crossed the threshold directly into the schoolroom. The woman on the dais said, “Stand up, children,” and motioned with her arms at the pupils who were seated on several rows of benches, facing her. They stood up. A phrase written in block capitals on the blackboard drew Miss Crane’s attention. Welcome Miss Crane Mem. At another sign from the teacher the children chanted it slowly. “Welcome, Miss Crane Mem.” Trying to say, “Thank you,” she found her tongue and the roof of her mouth dry. The visit on which she had set out in the role of a suppliant for employment was looked upon here as the visit of an inquisitive memsahib. She was terrified of the obligation this put her under and of the stuffy whitewashed room, the rows of children and the smell of burning cowpats that was coming through the open doors and windows from the back of the compound where no doubt the God-sent chappattis were being cooked. And she was afraid of Miss Williams, who wore a grey cotton blouse, long brown skirt and black button boots, and was younger than she and sallow-complexioned in the way that some of the most insufferable of the European women were who had spent a lifetime in the country; only in Miss Williams’ case the sallowness denoted a half-Indian origin, the kind of origin for which Miss Crane had been taught to feel a certain horror.

Miss Williams left the dais on which there were the teacher’s desk and only one chair. Invited, Miss Crane sat, and the chaplain stood next to her. He had said, “Miss Crane, this is Miss Williams,” but had not said, “Miss Williams, this is Miss Crane,” and as Miss Crane sat down she attempted to smile at the girl to apologize for an omission not her own, but her lips were as parched as her mouth, and she was conscious, then, of an expression growing on her face similar to that which she had seen so often on Mrs. Nesbitt-Smith’s. It became etched more deeply when at last she submitted to the duty to look at the children, found herself the lone inarticulate object of their curiosity and awe, perhaps their fear. The simple dress she had put on, her best in order to look her best—white muslin with a frilled hem but no other decoration beyond the mother-of-pearl buttons down the pleated choker; and the hat, a straw boater perched squarely upon her piled-up hair; the folded parasol of white cotton with
a pink lining, a gift from Mrs. Nesbitt-Smith last Christmas—now seemed to envelop her, to encumber her with all the pompous frippery of a class to which she did not belong.

At Miss Williams’ command a little girl, barefoot and dressed in a shapeless covering that looked like sacking, but whose pigtail was decked with flowers for the occasion, came forward with a nosegay, curtsied and held the nosegay up. Miss Crane took it. Again she tried to say “Thank you,” but her words must have been unintelligible because the little girl had to look at Miss Williams for confirmation that the ritual of presentation was over. Neither seeing nor smelling the flowers, Miss Crane held them to her nose, and when she looked up again the little girl was back in her place, standing with other little girls in the front row.

“I think,” Mr. Grant said, “that the children may sit down again, don’t you, Miss Crane? Then presently they can either sing the song or say the poem I’m sure Miss Williams here has been rehearsing hard all morning.”

For a moment Miss Crane stared helplessly at the flowers in her lap, aware that Miss Williams and Mr. Grant were both watching her, both waiting for her. She nodded her head, ashamed because in the first public duty of her life she was failing.

Sitting down when Miss Williams told them to, the children were silent. Miss Crane thought that they had sensed her discomfort and had interpreted it as displeasure or boredom. She forced herself to look at Miss Williams and say, “I should love to hear the song,” then remembered Mr. Grant had said poem or song, and added, “or the poem. Or both. Please let them do what they have rehearsed.”

Miss Williams turned to the class and said in her slow, curiously accented English, “Now children, what shall we sing? Shall we sing the song about There is a Friend?” and then, “Achchha,” a word Miss Crane knew well enough, but which was followed by rapid words in Hindustani she could not catch because they sped by too quickly. I can’t, she thought, even speak the language properly, so how can I hope to teach?

Once more the children got to their feet. Miss Williams beat time in the air, slowly, and sang the first line of the hymn which otherwise Miss Crane might not easily have recognized; and then paused, beat again and set them all singing, unevenly, shyly, and in voices still unused to the odd, flat, foreign scale.

    
There’s a Friend for little children

        
Above the bright blue sky,

    
A Friend Who never changes,

        
Whose love will never die;

    
Our earthly friends may fail us,

        
And change with changing years,

    
This Friend is always worthy,

        
Of that dear Name He bears.

    
There’s a rest for little children,

        
Above the bright blue sky,

    
Who love the Blessèd Saviour

        
And to the Father cry;

    
A rest from every turmoil,

        
From sin and sorrow free,

    
Where every little pilgrim

        
Shall rest eternally.

As they sang Miss Crane looked at them. They were a ragged little band. As a child the hymn had been one of her favourites and if it had been sung as English children sang it, with a piano or organ accompaniment, as it used to be sung in her father’s shabby school, she might have been borne down by an intensity of feeling, or regret and sadness for a lost world, a lost comfort, a lost magic. But she was not borne down, nor uplifted. She felt an incongruity, a curious resistance to the idea of subverting these children from worship of their own gods to worship of one she herself had sung to when young but now had no strong faith in. But she had, too, a sudden passionate regard for them. Hungry, poor, deprived, hopelessly at a disadvantage, they yet conveyed to her an overwhelming impression of somewhere—and it could only be there, in the black town—being loved. But love, as their parents knew, was not enough. Hunger and poverty could never be reduced by love alone. There were, to begin with, free chappattis.

And it came to Miss Crane then that the only excuse she or anyone of her kind had to be there, alone, sitting on a chair, holding a nosegay, being sung to, the object of the awe of uninstructed children, was if they sat there conscious of a duty to promote the cause of human dignity and happiness. And then she was no longer really ashamed of her dress, or deeply afraid of the schoolhouse or of the smell of burning cowpats.
The cowpats were all that there was for fuel, the schoolhouse was small and stuffy because there was not enough money spent, not enough available, to make it large and airy, and her dress was only a symbol of the status she enjoyed and the obligations she had not to look afraid, not to be afraid, to acquire a personal grace, a personal dignity, as much as she could of either, as much as was in her power, so that she could be a living proof of there being, somewhere in the world, hope of betterment.