The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott

anything that will help to alter things in any way.
    The reactions of sorrow and anger are by no means partisan. I feel them for and on behalf of people quite unknown to me, the young men for instance who are out here as soldiers, young Englishmen who as we all know have absolutely no idea about India except that it is a long way from home and full of strange, dark-skinned people. In many case soldiers like this have found themselves acting as you call it in aid of the civil power. Their principal feeling must have been one of bewilderment that changed swiftly to deep and burning resentment, because all they would understand was that the country they have come all this way to defend apparently didn’t want them and was bent on getting rid of them. There was the terrible affair of the two Canadian Air Force officers who were literally torn to pieces by people from a village that had been bombed and who thought these men had flown the aeroplanes in question. Even if they were, the situation as I see and feel it is not changed. It is one that involves us all, as does the bombing, the entire scene and history of this lamentable business. In our own province I have been especially distressed by the two incidents involving English women, the attack on the Mission School Superintendent near Tanpur, and the rape of Miss Manners in the Bibighar Gardens in Mayapore. In this latter case I do indeed feel a personal involvement over and above any other. I knew, of course, Miss Manners’s uncle, Sir Henry Manners, from the time in the early thirties when he governed the province and I sat by his invitation on several of the committees he set up in an attempt to break down some of the barriers between Government and people.
    Manners was a Governor of great skill – tolerant, sympathetic, admirable in every way. His term of office in Government House was one of hope for us, a bright spot on a rather gloomy horizon. What enemies he made were reactionary English and extremist Indians. Perhaps without the opportunity he gave me, to make whatever mark I did make on those committees, my own party would not have given me the greater opportunity that led to office. You will understand then the weight of my personal distress at the news of the criminal assault on the niece of a man like that. It is an incident that seems all too understandably to haveadded fuel to the fires of violence in Mayapore, and perhaps in the rest of the province. The first reports I read, which did not disclose Miss Manners’s name – referring to her merely as a young Englishwoman, victim of sexual assault by six Indian youths who had all been promptly arrested – struck me possibly as exaggerations because the reports were hysterical in pitch, and of course I hoped that they were not true. But it seems they were, at least in regard to the fact that the girl was attacked, and criminally used; and the eventual disclosure of her name and her connection with the late Sir Henry Manners came as a considerable personal shock.
    I have since, however, become puzzled and vaguely disturbed by what I can gather of the consequences of this affair, and the piece in the Statesman yesterday, referring to the rape of Miss Manners (although mercifully omitting her name again – a first step towards some sort of privacy for the poor creature) does bear out my own feelings that some quite extraordinary veil has been drawn over the whole unfortunate business, but a veil that does not satisfy the lawyer in me. I had been reading the papers daily in expectation of further news about the six men who according to the early reports were arrested. Now, according to the Statesman , it seems that these six men were not charged with rape. The Statesman refers to a very brief paragraph in the Mayapore Gazette of one week ago which gave the names of two or three men recently imprisoned under the Defence of India rules, without trial of course. According to the Statesman , these men were among the