PART TWO:  "The MacGregor House" (pp. 65-113)
Color Keys: Theme, Narration, Plot Event, Glossary

Opening Epigraph [Indian Hindi morning raga, translated into English by Dipali Nag]

[THEME - Opening IMAGES - delivered in third person point of view by the unnamed Narrator]
“Next, there is the image of a garden: not the Bibighar garden but the garden of the MacGregor House . . . “ (67). 
“From the house there is the sound of a young girl singing.  She sings a raga, the song of the young bride” leaving her parents to journey far away “to the land of my husband” (67).

[Exposition:] Brief history of the MacGregor House and the Bibighar,  and the MacGregor’s House’s “first ghost,” Janet MacGregor (67- 68).

[THEME: Image:] “Stone steps lead from the gravel driveway to the front entrance” (68).
. . . . “It was on the stone steps leading to the verandah that the girl stumbled at the end of her headlong flight in the dark from the Bibighar gardens; stumbled, fell, and crawled on her hands and knees the rest of the way to safety and into the history of a troubled period” (68-69).
[CF. to Part One’s opening image of the girl running (3) – we eventually learn in Part Two that this girl is Daphne Manners, who runs from the scene of her rape in Bibighar gardens, August 9, 1942]

Paul Scott on the development of the character Daphne Manners from the originating image of the girl running:  "Bombarding the image with experience, the girl I'd met briefly in Calcutta came back to mind.  Momentarily I saw that girl running.  Alas - she was a big, husky, not awfully attractive girl.  My imagination fined her down, but at the point where the resilience of the girl in the image matched that of the girl in Calcutta, the fining-down process stopped - and Daphne Manner was born as tall, gangling - rather awkward.  She was invested at once with a tendency to knock things over, and the running in darkness suggested shortness of sight, and spectacles which she was too vain to wear.  Experience also connected her to that Anglicized Indian [that] the girl in Calcutta [Scott had met] had been in love with.  So Daphne too had an Anglicized Indian lover . . . . my image had an air of tragedy about it" (Scott, "Method" 62).

[CF: parallels between Edwina Crane and Daphne Manners continue to unfold:]
"There are the action, the people, and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs" (Part 1; p. 3)]
[THEME NOTE:  The rape of Daphne Manners will resonate as Scott’s dominant metaphor for British-Indian relations: Manners case ends “with the spectacle of two nations in violent opposition, not for the first time nor as yet for the last because they were then still locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together and seemed to have confused the image of their two destinies (Part 1; p. 3).]  

[NARRATION: Interviewee #1 is Lady Lili Chatterjee] 
Lady Chatterjee's testimony begins, p. 69, with:
”Yes, I remember Miss Crane, . . . . Long ago as it is I still regret having thought of her at the time as a mediocre person . . . .” (69).

Paul Scott on the Narrative "DEVICE" of the Raj Quartet:
    "Use of The Writer - sometimes called The Stranger or The Traveller (according to circumstances.)  RARE APPEARANCES BUT ALLOWS FOR THE FLEXIBILITY NEEDED IN THIS FOUR VOLUME HISTORY OF AN AGE AND A PERIOD.
    "Interviews, letters, extracts from works or accounts written or tape-recorded by THE CHARACTERS (who have been approached for information) PLUS THE WRITER'S OWN RECONSTRUCTIONS.
    "THE WRITER NOT PRECISELY ME.  SO THAT I MANAGE TO ACHIEVE DETACHMENT AS WELL AS INVOLVEMENT"  (Scott, "Notes" 167).

"There are three characters who speak their recollections to a narrator who is really myself - Lili Chatterjee, whom Daphne Manners was staying with; Sister Ludmila, a now blind old woman who ran a refuge for the homeless and dying at the time of the riots; and Robin White, who was the Deputy Commissioner for the district"  (Scott, "Method" 65-66; emphasis mine).

"The narrator is the detective who assembles his clues in the form of recurring images gleaned from interviews, depositions, and diaries, and presents his material frequently in re-creations, as though he is coming to his information at the same time as the reader.  Aside from the facts, what actually happened that fateful night of August 9. 1942, he seeks to discover the complex interplay of historical events, class and race forces, and elements in human psychology that share in the related tragedies" (Weinbaum 93). 

Excepting Miss [Edwina] Crane, Connie White (the DC Robin White’s wife) and [Lady] Ethel Manners, Lili Chatterjee views European women as “mostly lumps” and “nearly all harpies” (69).  Lili also gives her view of women’s position—“a duty to speak our minds” unless among that “fortunate few …allowed to express themselves through action” (69)--[e.g. like Daphne Manners?]

Lili explains why she mistakenly “wrote Miss Crane off as mediocre” (68-71)
[THEME / NARRATION: note the return to key elements of Part One, such as Miss Crane taking down Gandhi’s picture (70)]  
Lili also explains how she finally came to know Miss Crane better in the end—but too late (71)—and begins to explain why she changed her opinion of Miss Crane:  “She was not mediocre.  She showed courage,” “physical courage” (72).  Lili seems to digress from her focus on Miss Crane, offering a self-portrait of herself (72-73), and bring up “my great niece Parvati” given to “singing a morning or evening raga…Well, of course you’ve seen her.  But have you understood yet who she is?” (73).

[THEME:  Scott's Theory of History:]  “These are not divisible, are they, these sights and people I’ve listed . . . . Even when I’m not looking for a meaning one springs naturally to my mind.” (75)

[NARRATION NOTE:  Lili is addressing her reminiscences and thoughts to someone—and her voice and interview will be interrupted from time to time by voice and commentary of the interviewer--an unnamed Narrator (e.g., p. 72, 73-75).]

[NARRATION by Unnamed Narrator] The present state of the MacGregor House, where Lili Chatterjee lives, is described (73-74).  Lili is called one of “an admirable quartet—admirable because they overcame that little obstacle of the colour of the skin” [echoeing Edwina Crane’s phrasing, Part 1: p. 63]--another in this “quartet” identified as sister widower Lady Ethel Manners.  
[NARRATION: This narrator also reveals outcomes for some of the “actors” in the 1942 Mayapore crisis, in a retrospective flashforward? & foreshadowing of characters and events that have not yet been introduced or explained yet]: Brigadier Reid and “the girl” are gone; “young Kumar” has been lost “into oblivion” and Ronald Merrick lost, too, in temporary “anonymity” (74), and “Miss Crane set fire to herself.  [THEME:] They are the chance victims of the hazards of a colonial ambition.” (75).

[NARRATION: Lili’s narration briefly resumed (75):] 
The next name Lili mentions is Daphne Manners, “referring to the girl” [of the opening images in Part I & II],  the unnamed Narrator tells us.
 [Scott's Theory of History:] Associations of sights and people are “not divisible” but linked with meanings that “spring naturally to my mind,” Lili remarks (75).] 

[NARRATION: Unnamed Narrator] The ghosts of MacGregor House:
Daphne Manners’ “continuing presence” is heard in “the tinkling of shattered glass,” “the occasional tread of stoutly shod feet,” “the singing of [recent] songs” popular in pre-WWII England (75).
 Janet MacGregor, “a girl” imagined as given to silence, “blood on her bodice and death approaching” (75).
He then relates more of Lili Chatterjee’s history (75).

[NARRATION: Lili Chatterjee’s narration resumes, free associating apparently at random among various people & topics, but also implicitly suggesting that the reader should consider their connections (75-85):]  Lili speaks of her late husband Nello Chatterjee, then the stages of Hindu life—including the last sannyasa, noting that women can also become sannyasi (76-77), free associating back and forth among Miss Crane, Daphne, and Parvati (77-79), recounting the racist slights done herself when she visited Miss Crane in Mayapore General Hospital, discussing British suspicions of Miss Crane’s failure to become a “heroine” and identify Indian assailants (80-82), mean-spirited speculations about Lili’s friendship with Lady Manners, and hostility toward her niece Daphne who came to live with Lili at MacGregor House and was envied for catching the eye of Ronald Merrick, an eligible and good looking bachelor.  

Lili also presents her (too) late realization that Merrick’s “reasons for cottoning on to Daphne” were “complicated” and insidious (82-83). 
     “I often wish I could have that time all over again, but knowing what I know now.  Not just for Daphne’s sake, but for Miss Crane’s sake.  I think I could have stopped Miss Crane from becoming sannyasi in that especially horrible way.  It’s all right to give everything up as long as you realized just what it is you’ve had.  Poor Miss Crane didn’t” (84).  Lili thus links the fates of Daphne Manners and Edwina Crane, and gives her own interpretation of Miss Crane’s suicidal death by fire as “becoming sannyasi” [cf. pp. 76-77].  
Lili describes her last visit to Edwina Crane (84-85), raising again the motif of the two pictures—the blank spaces on the walls taking them down had left in Miss Crane’s bungalow during Lili’s last visit (84, 85)
Lili wishes now that she had answered differently when Miss Crane asked her why she came to see her; 
Lili wishes she had said, “’Because neither of us must give up, and I can see you’re about to.’” (84)
But she hadn’t, and Miss Crane changed the subject to Daphne Manners (85)—though not “young Kumar,” whom Miss Crane did not know (85). 

[NARRATION: Unnamed Narrator, referring to himself as “a guest” (86):]
The family meal with Lady Chatterjee and Parvati is described, and their servants (85-86).

READ Part 2: pp. 87-113

Lili leads this guest  up to Daphne’s room (86-87), and he introduces two letters that Daphne wrote to her aunt, and that Lady Manners afterward gave to her friend Lady Chatterjee; as well as  Daphne’s photograph (87).
He calls these artifacts “dead, strangely inarticulate. . . . They do not resurrect the writer” (87).
So too are the photos of Clancy and Barrett found among “Miss Crane’s unclaimed personal effects” preserved at mission headquarters in Calcutta (87) [which the unnamed Narrator has evidently examined (88)].

[NARRATION - Lili Chatterjee resumes:]
Lili comments on Daphne’s photograph, which doesn’t give “a real idea of her personality” (88), amid digressions about other photographs.  Lili resented Daphne’s photograph: “It came here into this house, into this bedroom, when Daphne wasn’t alive to come back in herself” (89).  Lili describes Daphne, their first meeting at Ethel Manners’ in ‘Pindi [Rawalpindi], and Daphne’s parents (89-91).

[NARRATION: Unnamed Narrator]  “Picture her then: Daphne Manners, a big girl . . . leaning on the balcony outside her window, gazing with concentration . . . at a landscape calculated to inspire [even] in the most sympathetic western heart a degree of cultural shock” (91).  And with the “vast panorama” comes also the “smell” of “ordure,” of India, after a time translating itself “from repellent to almost attractive”  (91; & see 92).

[Unnamed Narrator gives us some oblique information about himself, his goals and indirectly his method :]  He refers to himself as “the returning traveler” (92), returned to India after “an eighteen-year absence ended by chance and luck” with an “intention to pin down the truth about Miss Crane, Miss Manners, and young Kumar, and the events that seemed first to flutter and then to shatter Mayapore but actually seem to have left it untouched . . .” (91).  He has taken possession of Daphne Manners’ old room (92-93) the better to imagine her, reenact what she was and felt. 

"Scott employs a circular, partly repetitious writing style in The Raj Quartet.  His Stranger-Traveller-Writer, returning to India in 1964 after an eighteen-year absence, as Scott himself did, 'with lepidopteristic intention to pin down the truth about Miss Crane, Miss Manners, and young Kumar' [Jewel 100], interviews those people still alive in 1964 who had some acquaintance with the Bibighar case, the sorry affair stemming from the rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens during the Quit India riots of August 1942.  He is unable to interview even one of the three characters central to the affair--Daphne Manners, Hari Kumar, or District Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick - but must rely on diaries, letters, journals, and depositions, which he presents as evidence for us to ponder. . . . Scott uses the narrative method to allow us to compare corresponding or conflicting views of the same character or event, in part because he is writing about the painful limitations of human perceptions, the tragic failure of communication between men and nations (and between parts of ourselves). Besides permitting each novel its self-containment, the method creates an amazing verisimilitude - the sense of an entire world with its own dynamic - and allows us to apprehend the bridges of contact and the unfortunate gaps between them.  The technique is most dramatically successful with strongly contrasting views of the same event, such a Brigadier-General Reid vs. District Commission White on the Mayapore riots or the Bibighar disaster [see Part Six] . . . " (Weinbaum 99-100). 

[He then reproduces the two letters that Daphne wrote to “Auntie Ethel” (Lady Manners), so that Daphne’s voice now speaks through her letters:]

Letter #1, dated 26 Feb. 1942 (pp. 93-99), written one week after Daphne left her aunt in Rawalpindi to come and live with Lili Chatterjee at MacGregor House in Mayapore.

Daphne Manners describes her trip, her first impressions of Mayapore and MacGregor House, her admiration for Lili Chatterjee, her disapproval of white British racist and class prejudice, her coming to like Deputy Commissioner Robin White and Connie White, her interview for a wartime job at the Mayapore General Hospital, her memories of driving an ambulance in London during the Blitz, the war that has killed her father and her brother David, an impending party Lili plans to give at which she is to meet the District Superintendent of Police [Ronald Merrick].  Daphne concludes that she “is loving” India but “finding it strange all over again” (99). 

Letter #2, dated 17 July 1942 (pp. 99-107), written just after Daphne has sent a photograph of herself—Auntie Ethel’s requested birthday present:

Daphne describes the rains, the wet season having set in in Mayapore.  She is now being escorted “to and from the hospital in Mr. Merrick’s car” most days (99) to the MacGregor House “isolated on the outskirts of the cantonment” most days, because Merrick insists that she might otherwise come to harm amid rising tensions caused by “all this Congress-inspired anti-British feeling boiling up again” (100).  Daphne notes that she likes Ronald Merrick better than she used to, although she resents his “official tone” and warning “against what he called my association with Mr. Kumar, which he said had set people talking . . .” (100).  Daphne then discloses that Merrick has asked her to marry him (102), and describes in detail the dinner at which he does so (100-104).  At home that night, she first senses the feeling that the MacGregor House is haunted (104).  Daphne also confesses that her second month in India last year in ‘Pindi [Rawalpindi], she hated India and wanted to go home to England: “I hated everything, hated because I was afraid of it.  It was all so alien” (104).  A recurrence of that aversion came her second week in the MacGregor House, but Daphne declares “I’m over it now.  I love it all” (105).  Daphne confesses with some shame that she has started going to the club, though she originally vowed not to because of its racist exclusion of Indians—even Lili Chatterjee (105-106).  She understands the white British hostility against herself, but still must admit the need at times “simply to be there among my own kind” (106).  She closes by saying that “One day I must tell you about Hari Kumar,” as well as “a curious woman called Sister Ludmila,” and notes that she hopes “to visit the local Hindu temple with Mr. Kumar” tomorrow (107). 

[NARRATION: Lili Chatterjee’s narration resumes, pp. 107-112:]
Lili returns to Miss Crane and her assessment of Miss Crane’s reasons for taking Gandhi’s picture down, of her madness and her courage (107-108).  Then she speaks of Daphne’s letters and what she did not know at the time, but wished she had known—though she’s not sure she could have changed anything.  Daphne “had to make her own marvelous mistakes” (108), and Lili points out some key differences between Daphne and Edwina Crane.  Lili and the stranger sit on the stone steps—“Those are the steps, you know”—half expecting to see again the girl “who has run all the way in the darkness from the Bibighar” (108) [CF pp. 68-69].
This leads Lili into a detailed recollection of that night, August 9, 1942:
Ronald Merrick’s visit searching for Daphne, his disclosure to Lili that he had proposed to Daphne (who never told Lili), Lili’s late realization that Merrick's interest in the situation is very dangerous—for Daphne and for Hari Kumar—and her premonition “that some kind of disaster was inevitable” (111).
[Exposition:] From Lili, we begin to learn something of Hari Kumar’s history (110) and Daphne’s growing love for him, as well as more about Sister Ludmila (112), and Anna Klaus is introduced (110, 112).
[NARRATION: Lili’s narrative circles back to the stone steps with which it began ( 112, 108):]
Lili describes the shocking sight of Daphne that night, fallen and hurt on her hands and knees on the steps, “exhausted from running,” crying out, “Oh, Auntie.” (112). 

[NARRATION: Unnamed Narrator, referring to himself as “the stranger” (112), closes Part Two:]
He recounts the story he has heard of the circumstances of Miss Crane’s death—“farther away in time than in distance” (113)—her “act of becoming suttee (which Lady Chatterjee describes as sannyasa without the traveling),” and her old servant Joseph’s grieved cry, “Oh, Madam, Madam,” which the narrator likens to Miss Manners’ cry, “Oh Auntie” (113). 
[THEME & NARRATIVE PURPOSE:]
“In such a fashion human beings call for explanations of the things that happen to them and in such a way scenes and characters are set for exploration, like toys set out for children intent on pursing their grim but necessary games” (113).

Works Cited

Scott, Paul.  The Jewel in the Crown. [First published 1966.] The Raj Quartet  Vol. 1.  Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998.  [Page numbers given above, unless indicated otherwise, refer to this edition of Jewel in the Crown.]

Scott, Paul.   "Method: The Mystery and the Mechanics (1967)."   My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75.  Ed. Shelley C. Reece.  London: Heinemann, 1986.  51-69. 

Scott, Paul.  "Notes for Talk and Reading at Stamford Grammar School (1975)."  My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75.  Ed. Shelley C. Reece.  London: Heinemann, 1986.  165-170.

Weinbaum, Francine S.  Paul Scott: A Critical Study.  Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992.