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

say—was wasted in the Church and should have gone into the Civil.
    He showed most determination, however, in promoting the education of boys of the middle-class—Anglo-Indians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. If they had above average intelligence they were all one to him, all “children whom the Lord has blessed with brains and sensibilities.” His work here was chiefly that of detecting just where a youth’s talents lay and in persuading him and his parents to set a course in that direction. “Look at young Shankar Ram,” he might say to Miss Crane, who had but the vaguest notion which Shankar Ram he referred to, “he says he wants to be a civil servant. They all want to be civil servants. What chance has he got, though, beyond the post office and telegraphs? He should be an engineer. It may not be in his blood, but it is in his heart and mind.” And so he would set about depressingly often without success looking for ways, for means, for opportunities to send young Shankar Ram out into the great world beyond Muzzafirabad to build bridges. In this, Miss Crane used to think, Mr. Cleghorn looked remarkably unlike an ordinary man of God, for the Shankar Ram in question, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, turned out to be as far away from conversion toChristianity as the women of India were from social emancipation. And over the question of Women, British or Indian, Mr. Cleghorn was infuriatingly conservative. Women’s interests were his blind spot. “Your sex is made, alas,” he said once, “and yet not alas, no, Heaven be praised, your sex is made, Miss Crane, for marriage or for God,” and in the one intimate moment there ever was between them, took her hand and patted it, as if to comfort her for the fact that the first, the temporal of these blessings, was certainly denied her.
    Sometimes Miss Crane wanted to point to the picture on the wall which showed the old Queen resplendent on her throne and say to him, “Well there, anyway, was a woman of affairs,” but never did, and was touched when she unwrapped the presentation parcel and saw an even gaudier copy of the enigmatic picture; touched because she knew that Mr. Cleghorn, deeply considering the parting gift she might most value, had characteristically hit upon the one she could have done without.
    But a couple of days later, as he saw her into the Ladies First Class compartment of a train, while young Joseph, a poor boy who had worked in the mission kitchens but had asked to serve and was coming with her, was seeing to the luggage, Mr. Cleghorn handed her his own personal gift which, unwrapped as the train moved out into the bleak frontier landscape, turned out to be a copy of a book called Fabian Essays in Socialism edited by Mr. George Bernard Shaw. It was inscribed to “My friend and colleague, Edwina Crane,” signed, “Arthur St. John Cleghorn” and dated July 12th, 1914.
    This book she still had, in the bookcase in her room in Mayapore.
    When she paused in the work she was doing at her desk, as she felt entitled to do at her age, which was one for contemplation as well as action, she would sometimes glance at the picture and find her attention fixed on it. After all these years it had acquired a faint power to move her with the sense of time past, of glory departed, even although she knew there had never been glory there to begin with. The India of the picture had never existed outside its gilt frame, and the emotions the picture was meant to conjure up were not much more than smugly pious. And yet now, as always, there was a feeling somewhere in it of shadowy dignity.
    It still stirred thoughts in her that she found difficult to analyze. She had devoted her life, in a practical and unimportant way, trying to prove that fear was evil because it promoted prejudice, that courage was goodbecause it was a sign of selflessness, that ignorance was bad because fear sprang from it, that knowledge was good because the more you knew of the world’s complexity