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

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 hidingunder 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 minimize her grief for and memories of Miss de Silva when it came to analyzing 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 Silva’s bungalow, now unrecognizable as the same place, furnished as it was by Mr. and Mrs. Chaudhuri in the westernized-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 recognized 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 inflections 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