She went on and on. At last the friend told her that it was late and she must let her husband go to sleep.
“I’m absolutely exhausted,” she cried. “Such a journey. I had to sit up all night. It was horrible.”
She went to the bedside to kiss the sick man. He turned his face away.
He was a shipping clerk. He went to work at fourteen and for twenty-two years worked in the same firm. At the age of twenty-eight he married a wife who after a year or two had an illness which left her a permanent invalid. He was a devoted husband. He began to steal the insurance stamps, not so much because he wanted the money, though it enabled him to get little delicacies for his wife, but because it amused him to think that he was not the respectable, reliable clerk his employers thought him. Then his thefts were discovered, and knowing that he would be discharged and perhaps sent to prison and there would be no one to look after his wife, he killed her. When she was dead he put a pillow under her head and an eiderdown over her body. Then he took her pet dog to a vet’s to have it painlessly destroyed, for he couldn’t bear to kill it himself. He went to a police station and gave himself up.
T. He was a tall man, thin without being cadaverous, and he walked with a slight stoop. I suppose he was between forty-five and fifty, for his curling hair, though abundant, was very grey, and his clean-shaven, neat face was much lined. It had little colour. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He was unobtrusive. He spoke in a low voice, seldom unless he was spoken to, and though he never said an intelligent thing he never said a foolish one. He was a trusted man in one of the most important corporations in America, and it was his trustworthiness that chiefly attracted your attention. It was plain that he was not a very clever fellow, but certainly he was a very honest one. He was sober in his habits. He had a wife whom he was attached to and two children of whom he was agreeably proud. You could have safely wagered that he had never in his life done anything which he had reason to regret. He was satisfied with the firm he worked for, satisfied with his position in it, which was honourable without being conspicuous, satisfied with the house he lived in, the city he worked in and the train service that took him daily to his occupation. He was an extremely capable employee. He was a rivet in a huge machine and was content to be a rivet. The great levers, the vast revolving wheels, the gigantic cylinders never suggested to him that it was possible to be anything but a rivet. He was a man extraordinary only in that he was ordinary to such a supreme degree.
It was at a house-party. The post had just come in. Her hostess gave her a letter and she recognised her lover’s writing. She opened it and began to read it. Suddenly she was aware that her husband was standing behind her and reading the letter over her shoulder. She read to the end and then handed it to her hostess.
“He seems very much in love,” she said, “but if I were you I wouldn’t let him write to you in that way.”
If you have a little more money than other people you must expect them to exploit you and sponge upon you; but it is exasperating that they should take you for such a fool that you don’t know what they’re about, and if they get away with it, it’s only because you let them.
Ernest P. He was a young Frenchman, of good family, very brilliant and expected by his family to have a distinguished career. He was to go into the diplomatic service. At twenty he fell madly in love with a girl eight years older than himself; but she married a more suitable person. It broke him up. To the consternation of his family he threw up the studies which would enable him to pass the necessary examinations and took to social service in the slums of Paris. He became deeply religious (his family were free-thinkers) and immersed himself in the literature of mysticism. There were troubles in Morocco at the time, and he joined a dangerous expedition and was killed. All this had a shattering effect on the woman he loved, on his mother and his friends. They were deeply disturbed. They felt that here among them had lived one in whom there was something of a saint. His sweetness, his goodness, his piety, his nobility of soul made them ashamed—and afraid.
I thought there was a moving story to be written on these bare facts, and I was interested in the influence the life and death of this poor boy had on those who had been in contact with him; but it was too difficult for me to cope with and I never wrote it.
People will sometimes forgive you the good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you.
The writer must be playful and serious at the same time.
In the foam at the wake of the ship the phosphorescence, little gleams of light, was like the sardonic winking of the eyes of the dead that lie at the bottom of the sea.
Sunset. The sun was setting strangely behind an archway of heavy clouds, and below the arch the sky, pale green and gold, shone like the entrance way into magic, mystic realms. It reminded you of Watteau’s Embarquement pour Cythère. It offered the imagination hope and unknown joy. Then the sun sank below the horizon and the arch crumbled away; and now the clouds, dark against the lurid afterglow, were like the ruins of a great city, ruins of palaces and temples and vast buildings. The hope and confidence of a few minutes were shattered like the pillars of Gaza and despair settled on the heart.
The Shilling Shocker. Their authors have little honour among men and yet they are benefactors of their kind. They are conscious of the small esteem in which the world holds them and they refer to their works deprecatingly, with a shrug and a smile. They hasten to disarm your scorn by assuring you that they are not dupes. They are timid of praise. They are afraid to believe that you are serious. And yet they are deserving of praise. There are times when your mind is not attuned to good literature; there are times when your brain is weary, but restless; times when the classics bore you, when you are harassed or unhappy; there are railway journeys; there is sickness: then what can be more comfortable than a good shocker? You plunge into murders, robbery, treacheries and blackmail, imprisonments and hairbreadth escapes, opium dens, thieves’ kitchens, artists’ studios, sumptuous hotels; you foregather with forgers, crooks, gunmen, detectives, adventuresses, stool pigeons, convicts, persecuted heroines and falsely accused heroes. Standards of excellence are not the same here as in other forms of art. Improbability is no bar to your enjoyment, economy of invention is a defect, graces of style are out of place, humour is damning. It is fatal if a smile should ever force its way to your unwilling lips: you must read with a high, with an intense and with a pitiless seriousness. You turn the pages with a nervous hand. The hours race by. You have defeated time. And then you have the ingratitude to throw aside the book with a sneer and look down upon its author. It is graceless.
Since he was a philosopher by profession I asked him to explain something that I had never been able to understand. I asked him whether the statement that two and two make four means anything. I couldn’t see that four was anything but a convenient synonym for two and two. If you look out violent in Roget you will see that there are something like fifty synonyms for it; they have different associations and some by the number of their syllables, the collocation of their letters or the difference of their sound may be more suitable for use in a particular sentence than others, but they all mean the same thing. Roughly, of course, for no synonym is quite precise; and four may be a synonym not only for two and two, but for three and one and for one and one and one and one. My philosopher said he thought the statement that two and two make four had a definite meaning, but he didn’t seem able to tell me exactly what it was; and when I asked him whether mathematics was ultimately anything more than an immensely elaborate Roget’s Thesaurus he changed the conversation.
1936
St. Laurent de Maroni. The director is a short stout man with large shining eyes, in a clean white uniform, with the cross of the Legion of Honour on his tunic. He has exuberant gestures and speaks with a strong accent of the Midi. He is a jolly, vulgar, ignorant man; but kindly and tolerant. He got his job by political influence. His salary is sixty thousand francs a year, but there are probably large perks. He likes t
he job because he can live cheaply and save money. He looks forward to retiring in ten years and building himself a house on the Riviera.
His wife is plump and rather pretty, but run to seed; her mother has a bureau de tabac at Cette; she and her husband were amis d’enfance. She wears almost always the same dress of blue foulard with white spots. It brings out the colour of her blue eyes. She is ingenuous, inclined to be flirtatious, but proud of, and in love with, her fat husband.
The commandant of the camp is a tall man, a Parisian, fair rather than dark, earnest, shy and very well-mannered. He is deeply interested in penology and reads a great deal. He has the notion that much can be done by appealing to the better nature of the convicts. He looks for amendment in them.
An old surveillant at St. Jean. Short thick white hair and a heavy white moustache. A lined sun-burned face. He is against capital punishment, for he thinks no one has the right to take another’s life. He tells a story of how a doctor had arranged with a man who was to be guillotined to blink three times if he could after his head was cut off, and says that he saw him blink twice.
When a man is sentenced to death the sentence has to be confirmed by the minister in Paris. No execution takes place on Sunday. If two or more are to be guillotined at the same time the least guilty is executed first so that he should not suffer the added horror of seeing his mates die. The convict does not know that he will be executed till the warder comes in with the words: Have courage, etc. When there are executions the other convicts are depressed and nervous, and they go about their work sullen and silent.
When the head has fallen the executioner takes it up by the ears and shows it to the bystanders, saying: Au nom du peuple français justice est faite. At the side of the guillotine is a large wicker basket covered with some black material and into this the body is put. The knife falls with lightning speed and the blood spurts over the executioner. He is given a set of new clothes after each execution.
The director’s house. A large white frame house, with official furniture, a chandelier in the middle of each room, and stiff, uncomfortable chairs in the drawing-room. It faces the sea and has a large veranda which is used as a parlour. The garden, with its bougainvillæa, crotons, cassias, papaias and flame of the forest, has the bedraggled look of a garden in the banlieue belonging to a retired tradesman.
The punishment cells. They are long and narrow and they contain a wooden pallet for a bed, a stool and a small table fixed to the wall. They are hot, and lit only by an opening over the heavy door. The convicts sentenced to solitary confinement are locked in and let out for an hour morning and evening. The cells at the end of the corridor are pitch black, for the light only comes in by the door at the entrance to the passage.
Most of the convicts live in dormitories of fifty or sixty beds, but there are a certain number of cells either above the dormitories on the first floor or in a separate courtyard, and these are given to well-behaved prisoners who ask for them. Sometimes, however, they dislike being alone and ask to be put back into the dormitories. In each of these cells there is a hammock and a small table on which the convict keeps his bits and pieces, a shaving-mop, a razor, a hair brush and a photograph or two. On the walls they tack illustrations from the picture papers.
The convicts. They are dressed in striped pink and white pyjamas and wear a round straw hat and shoes with wooden soles and leather-tops, but no socks. Their hair is cut short and cut very badly. Their food consists of grey bread, two good-sized loaves a day, soup made of bones and meat, potatoes and cabbage-tops, beef, a ration of cheese if they are well-behaved, and a ration of wine. They make their cigarettes out of little blue packets of coarse tobacco. They sit about on the verandas or stoeps of the house, chatting and smoking, or wander, some alone, some in charge of a warder, and work desultorily. They are emaciated notwithstanding their abundant food, they suffer from fever and hook-worm, and they have staring eyes. They don’t look quite sane. Rum is the great luxury and they all have knives.
No warder dares go into a dormitory at night, after lock-up, or he wouldn’t come out alive.
The gateway of the prison is open all day long and they saunter in and out at liberty.
The porte-clefs, under-warders, almost officials, are well-behaved convicts; and they live in separate quarters and wear felt hats instead of straw. They are not liked by the others, and not seldom get themselves killed.
The executioner, a convict, has two mongrel dogs trained to guard him, and they prowl about the compound at night. He has his own little house near the director’s. The other convicts don’t speak to him and his food is fetched from the prison kitchen by his assistant. He spends his leisure strolling in the public garden and fishing, and he sells his fish to the Director’s wife.
The guillotine is in a small room within the prison, but it is reached by a separate door from the outside. To make sure that it will work well a banana stem is used for practice because it is of the same thickness as a man’s neck. From the time a man is strapped up to the time his head is off, it takes only thirty seconds. The executioner gets a hundred francs for each execution.
The previous executioner disappeared and they thought he had run away. He was found three weeks later hanging to a tree with knife thrusts in his body, and he was only found because a flock of vultures, urubus they are called, were seen clustering round a tree. He had known the convicts were out to kill him and had asked to be sent to Cayenne or back to France. They had caught him and after stabbing him to death had carried him into the jungle.
The relégués, habitual criminals, are sent to St. Jean not exactly under sentence, but to be kept there for the protection of society. They catch butterflies and beetles which they mount in boxes and sell, or make ornaments out of buffalo horn. In one part of the camp there is a newspaper kiosk, just like a kiosk in a small French station, with books for hire and papers a month old neatly set out. Over it is written Le crédit est mort. In another part is a small theatre with a stage and rough scenery painted by the relégués.
The sea is shark-infested, and they say with a laugh that the sharks are the best jailers.
I spent today inquiring into the motives of the murders which had caused the convicts to be sentenced to what is virtually life-long imprisonment, and I was surprised to discover that though on the surface it looked as though they had killed from love, jealousy, hatred, in revenge for some wrong or merely in a fit of passion, when I asked a little further it was borne in upon me that not far below the surface the motive was pecuniary. In one way or another money was at the bottom of every murder I inquired into but one. The exception was a young lad, a shepherd, who had raped a little girl and when she cried out, afraid people would hear, he had strangled her. He is only eighteen now.
Martinique. In 1902 Mt. Pelée erupted and overwhelmed the town of St. Pierre. Forty thousand people lost their lives. There had been some volcanic activity shortly before and an eruption north of St. Pierre in which a number of people were killed. Then a few days later without warning a mass of fire, like a flaming whirlpool, swept over St. Pierre and destroyed the ships in the harbour. A fall of molten lava and ashes followed the flames, accompanied by dense gases which asphyxiated those who had so far escaped. All who could fled from the town, whole families together, and strangely enough the gases swept over them irregularly so that a group in front escaped and a group behind, whereas a group between them was overcome and perished.
I asked my friends what effect the catastrophe had on those who were saved. I wanted to know whether the fearful danger and the miraculous escape had had a spiritual or a moral effect on them, whether it changed their lives afterwards, whether their faith was strengthened or weakened, whether they became better men or worse. Everyone gave me the same answer. It had no effect on them at all. Most of them were ruined, but after they had recovered from the shock they took up their lives as best they could and as though nothing had happened. They were neither more nor less devout, neither better nor worse.
I suppose it is because there is a resilience in man, a power of forgetfulness, or perhaps merely an obtuseness, that he has been able to survive the countless horrors that have encompassed him since first he came into existence.
West Indies. A girl came out as governess to the children of some English people settled on the island, and after a while she was asked in marriage by a planter. On the face of it, it was a good match for her; he was well-off, a very good fellow and well-liked. He was slightly coloured, and on this account was not a member of the club; but in his outlook, his habits, his manner he was as white as any white man. The girl was as much in love with him as he was with her, but her employers urged her not to be in a hurry and persuaded her to go home to England for six months so that she might make certain of her own mind. She came back at the end of this period and the pair were married, but on the understanding that they should have no children. The planter was a good husband, a passionate lover and a pleasant companion, and she was completely happy. Then he contracted typhoid. He was very ill, and the girl nursed him with the help of his old black nannie. She had a queer feeling that something was happening to him that she couldn’t account for; he seemed to collapse morally rather than physically. He seemed to be infected with the superstitions which she knew prevailed among the coloured people. One day he refused to see the English doctor. “The only one who can cure me is old nannie,” he said irritably. When she expostulated he told her roughly to shut up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” That night they turned her out of the room and the nurse went in with three old men, all black, and one of them carried a white cock under his arm. She stood outside the door and heard strange incantations, and then a sort of flutter, it might have been of wings, and she realised that they were killing the white cock. When the coloured people came out of the room and she could go in again she saw that the sick man’s forehead and cheeks and chin, his breast, hands and feet had been smeared with blood. She knew then that for all his clear honey-coloured skin, his wavy red hair, at heart her husband was a negro. Two or three davs later she discovered she was pregnant.
A Writer's Notebook Page 27
