I don’t know whether it was the result of rest or of the Yogi’s meditation, but I felt very much better, and a little later I went into the hall where he sits by day and sleeps by night. It is a long bare room fifty feet long, I should think, and about half as broad. There are windows all round it, but the overhanging roof dims the light. The Yogi sat on a low dais on a tiger skin and in front of him was a small brazier in which incense was burning. Its scent was agreeable to the nostrils. Now and again a disciple came forward and lit another stick. The faithful sat on the floor. Some were reading; others meditated. Presently two strangers came in with a basket of fruit, prostrated themselves before the Yogi and presented their offering. He accepted it with a slight inclination of the head and motioned to a disciple to take it away; he spoke kindly for a little to the strangers and then with another little inclination of the head signified to them that they were to withdraw. They prostrated themselves again and went and sat among the rest of the faithful. Then the Yogi became abstracted in meditation, a little shiver seemed to pass through all who were there, and I tiptoed out of the hall.
I heard later that my fainting had given rise to fantastic rumours. The news of it was carried not only to various parts of India, but even reached America. It was ascribed by some to the awe that overcame me at the prospect of going into the presence of the holy man. Others said that his influence, acting on me before ever I saw him, had caused me to be rapt for several minutes into the infinite. When I was asked about it I was content to smile and shrug my shoulders. In point of fact that was neither the first nor the last time I have fainted. Doctors tell me it is due to an irritability of the solar plexus which presses my diaphragm against my heart and that one day the pressure will continue a little too long. One feels unwell for a few minutes and then one knows nothing more till one regains consciousness—if one does.
Madura. The temple at night. There is always a noise in India. People talk all day long at the top of their voices, but in the temple they talk more loudly than ever. The row is terrific. People pray and recite litanies, they call to one another, vociferously discuss, quarrel or greet one another. There is nothing that suggests reverence and yet there is a vehement overwhelming sense of the divine that sends cold shivers down your spine. In some strange way the gods there seem to be near and living.
The throng is dense, men, women and children. The men are stripped to the waist, and their foreheads, and often their arms and chests, are thickly smeared with the white ash of burnt cow-dung. Many of them in the day-time, while going about their ordinary affairs, wear European clothes, but here they have discarded Western dress, Western civilisation and Western ways of thought. Here in the temple is the native India that knows nothing of the West. You see them making obeisance at one shrine or another and sometimes lying full length on the ground, face downwards in the ritual attitude of prostration.
You pass through long halls, the roof supported by sculptured columns, and at the foot of each column is seated a religious mendicant. Some are old and bearded, some terribly emaciated, some are young, brawny and hirsute. Each has in front of him a bowl for offerings or a small mat on which the faithful now and again throw a copper coin. Some are clad in red, some are almost naked. Some look at you vacantly as you pass, some are reading, silently or aloud, and take no notice of the streaming throng. Sitting on the floor, outside the adytum, is a group of priests, the fore part of their skulls shaven, the hair at the back tied in a knot, rather stout, their hairless brown chests and their fleshy arms streaked with white ash. One, a scholar and a noted holy man, in a red turban, with bracelets on his arms, and a coloured dhoty, with a grey beard and an authoritative manner, comes followed by two or three pupils, utters a prayer at a shrine, and then, with the dignity of a man who is respected, the way cleared for him by his pupils, strides into the holy of holies.
The temple is lit by naked electric bulbs that hang from the ceiling and throw a harsh light on the sculpture, but where they do not penetrate render the darkness more mysterious. The impression you take away with you, notwithstanding that vast, noisy throng, or maybe because of it, is of something secret and terrible.
When I was leaving India people asked me which of all the sights I had seen had most impressed me. I answered as they expected me to answer. But it wasn’t the Taj Mahal, the ghats of Benares, the temple at Madura or the mountains of Travancore that had most moved me; it was the peasant, terribly emaciated, with nothing to cover his nakedness but a rag round his middle the colour of the sun-baked earth he tilled, the peasant shivering in the cold of dawn, sweating in the heat of noon, working still as the sun set red over the parched fields, the starveling peasant toiling without cease in the north, in the south, in the east, in the west, toiling all over the vastness of India, toiling as he had toiled from father to son back, back for three thousand years when the Aryans had first descended upon the country, toiling for a scant subsistence, his only hope to keep body and soul together. That was the sight that had given me the most poignant emotion in India.
Wellington is supposed to have said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. It may be that the historians of the future will say that India was lost in the public schools of England.
1939
Lens. The table d’hôte. A long table at which sat a number of youngish men respectably dressed in dark clothes, but who gave you the impression that they hadn’t had a bath for some time. They were school teachers, insurance clerks, shop-assistants and what not. Most of them read the evening paper while they dined. They ate their food greedily, a lot of bread, and drank vin ordinaire. They talked little. Suddenly a man came in. “Voilà Jules,” they cried, and seemed to wake up. Jules brought gaiety. He was a thin man of thirty, with a pointed red face and a comic look; you could well see him as a clown at the circus. His fun consisted in throwing bread pellets at all and sundry, and when he hit anybody, the person hit cried: un obus qui tombe du ciel.
They were all on friendly terms with the waiter, whom they tutoyé’d, and who tutoyéd them. A little girl, the daughter of the patron, sat on a bench knitting a foolard and they chaffed her not unkindly; you got the sensation that they looked forward to the time when they could make a pass at her.
The miners’ village. Rows of little two-storey houses of red brick, with roofs of red tiles and large windows. Each one has at the back its bit of garden in which the miner grows vegetables and flowers. A house has four rooms, a parlour in front, which is hardly ever used, with a thick flowered lace curtain at the window, a kitchen behind and two bedrooms above. In the parlour there is a round table covered with a cloth, three or four straight-backed chairs, and on the walls enlarged photographs of the family. The family life is lived in the kitchen. A gun hangs on the wall and pictures of film favourites. A stove, a radio, a table covered with oil-cloth, and oilcloth on the floor. A string is stretched across to hang the washing on. A smell of cooking. The radio goes from morning till night, Tito Rossi, the Lambeth Walk, dance tunes. On washing-day a huge cauldron stands on the stove.
When visitors come in they are offered a drink of rum. The conversation turns on money and the cost of things, who has married whom and what such a one is doing.
The miner comes downstairs in the morning and has his breakfast of coffee and rum. He goes over to the sink and washes his hands and face. He is dressed, all but his boots and coat, and these his wife hands him.
L.’s sister. A tall thin dark-haired woman, with fine features and fine eyes. She has lost two or three teeth. She is thirty-two, but looks fifty; she is haggard and her skin is dry and lined. She wears a black skirt and blouse and a blue apron. The four children are dirty, poorly dressed in odds and ends that their mother has made for them out of old clothes. One little girl has ear-ache and wears a scarf tied round her head. L.’s brother-in-law. He’s thirty-five, but looks much older. He has a squarish, irregular, weather-beaten face, but a good-natured and amiable though rather obstinate, look. He
speaks seldom, and then slowly, in a pleasant voice. He is more at home with patois than with French. He has large, grimy hands and looks strong. His grey eyes have a soft, rather pathetic look accentuated by the coal dust on the lashes which no washing can remove.
The foreman. A merry soul, with a loud voice and a sort of fat Flemish joviality. He loves his comforts, his coffee and rum and his glass of wine. His wife is a large stout woman with untidy greying hair, a red face and a cheerful expression. She enjoys her food and for Christmas they had a real blowout. She tells you how much the chicken cost and goes over the meal with gusto. They sat talking, listening to the radio and singing till four in the morning.
They have two sons. They didn’t want the elder to become a miner and so made him a carpenter, but during his first week he had his right hand cut off by a circular saw, and now (a spectacled youth) he has some job in the mine. The younger son went down the mine without more ado.
Boys used to start at twelve, but now not till they are fourteen, and they work eight hours a day in three shifts at sorting out the stone from the coal. It is passed along on a moving pan and a little group of them side by side hurry to pick out the chips as the pan goes by. They look odd with tight-fitting caps on their heads and their blue overalls, their faces as black as their clothes, and the whites of their eyes shining.
A man hasn’t the knowledge to become a skilled miner till he is thirty, and by forty-five he has lost the best of his strength, so that he has to do lighter work, for which he gets less money. At fifty-five he gets his pension, three thousand francs for himself and the same for his wife, but seldom lives to enjoy it for more than a year or two. He speaks of dying between fifty-five and sixty quite calmly, as something that is in the natural order of things.
He gets his house at a nominal rent of eight to ten francs a month and four hundred kilos of coal a month. He works five days a week for sixty francs a day and a supplement of twenty-five per cent, but if he is asked to work overtime and refuses he loses his supplement.
Medical attention is free, but he complains that the doctors neglect him; if they are busy they don’t come till the day after they are called, and medical supplies are inadequate.
The miners are friendly, kindly, helpful people. They know that their work depends on the work of others and so a natural good fellowship exists between them. Some of them live an hour or more away from the mine and come in on their bikes. They are attached to their ugly little village and even if they can get a house near the mine won’t leave it.
Besides the skilled miners who get out the coal, make the passages and do the tunnelling, there are the unskilled workmen who look after the electricity, drive the trucks that bring the coal from where it has been loaded to the lifts, and push the loaded trucks into the lift. The truck has to be uncoupled, pushed by hand along the curved rail and got into the lift. A man will push twelve hundred trucks into the lift in the course of a shift. It is hard work and he is paid twenty francs a day. Before the last strike he was only paid fourteen.
The lift is very shaky. It travels at a great rate, rattling fearfully, up and down. When it reaches the bottom the empty truck has to be pushed out again.
Chez Angélique. A smallish square room with a bar at the back of it and a lot of bottles on shelves. There are two or three square tables with a bench against the wall and chairs in front, and in the middle of the room a round table. Several miners are sitting at it and with them a heavily-built soldier in uniform on leave. One man is doing tricks with a piece of wool, a childish trick which thrills them, and they buy rounds of drinks on it. They are all friendly and cordial. At another table four men are playing cards. They talk little, mostly about the work and the price of things.
The family lives in a room behind the bar. There is a sick Pole in bed and half a dozen people are crowded round him. The air is foul.
The Poles look very different from the French. They have square heads and thick-set bodies and even through the black of the coal their skins seem white. They are on good terms with the French, but keep a good deal to themselves. They eat very sparingly, more so than the French, and put by money to send home to buy a farm with. They drink chiefly on public holidays and at marriages, when they have a great party and spend all they have. Then they economise for months to make up. They speak French haltingly, with a marked accent.
A bath is a serious business. The water is heated in the copper used for the household washing and in this the miner takes his bath. Young miners proud to show that they go down the mine walk about unwashed. When they are single they take a room, or a bed in a room, in a widow’s house or in someone’s who hasn’t a large family. They go into Lens to go to the brothel, either by motor-bus or on their bike.
The tunnels are a little higher than an ordinary man’s height. They are very long, lit coldly by naked bulbs, and a bitter wind blows down them. It is strange to walk along them and meet never a soul. They turn and twist, and one leads out of another, and you wonder how anyone can find his way; but the foreman told me he could do so blindfold.
It is wonderfully mysterious when you come suddenly upon a little group at work. You creep through a hole in the wall of the tunnel and scramble or crawl along a narrow passage, sometimes on all fours, till you come to where they are continuing the tunnel or actually mining the coal. The drill is so heavy that it needs two men to lift it and the din it makes is infernal.
The light is dim, and the miners, stripped to the waist, with caps on to protect their heads, look hardly human.
Half-way through the day’s shift they get half an hour off for lunch. They sit down on the coal dust and eat the food they have brought with them in a canister, a great lump of bread, buttered or with a stick of sausage inside it, and drink weak coffee out of a metal bottle.
The day’s food. In the morning black coffee, bread and butter. At noon, when at home, soup, steak or veal, the vegetables that have gone to make the soup, and potatoes. They drink beer which is often made at home and is almost nonalcoholic; it has a peculiar taste that you have to get used to. At supper, coffee again and bread-and-butter, and if flush, a slice of ham.
In none of the houses is there any sign of comfort, nor does there seem any desire for it. They are content with their wages and all they ask is that things should remain as they are. Work, food, sleep, the radio: these are their lives.
The manager warned me that a visitor thinks the work much harder than it really is. Habit makes it, if not easy, at least tolerable. He is a young man, short, clean-shaven, dapper, with a prettyish wife with a long nose, in a red dress, and two children. He is enthusiastic about the business and seems intelligent, sympathetic and well-read. His wife’s father, procureur général at Amiens, is staying with them, a smallish, elderly man, with a grey square beard. He is a fluent talker and tells you with great conviction what everyone has been saying for the last hundred years as though it were a considered opinion he has arrived at after intensive reflection. A thoroughly honest, worthy, narrow and boring man.
Murder on the Riviera. Jack M. was in bed with pneumonia when a telegram arrived telling him that his mother, Mrs. Albert M., who had been living in a hotel at San Rafael, had been murdered. Since he could not move, his wife flew out in his place. Of course she was shocked, but at the same time could not but feel a blessed sense of relief. Her mother-in-law had made life almost intolerable to her. She found fault with Mary because she liked to go to parties and dances, because she spent good money on her clothes; she disapproved of the way she ran her house and brought up her children. What made it worse was that Jack admired and adored his mother. In his eyes she could do no wrong. Mary could never have stood the strain but for Mrs. Albert’s habit of spending every winter at San Rafael.
The plane put her down at Cannes, where an English lawyer, to whom Jack M. had wired, met her. As they drove to San Rafael he gave her the facts.
“You’ll have to know them sometime. The local papers are full of the case.”
>
Mrs. Albert had been found dead in her bed, strangled, and her money and her pearls had been stolen. She was stark naked.
“You know, the Riviera sometimes has an unfortunate effect on these lonely middle-aged women who come here from England and America.”
Mrs. Albert was well-known at San Rafael. She was in the habit of frequenting bars and cafés where they danced, and it was with the lowest of the riff-raff that she hob-nobbed. She was a generous old girl always ready to stand drinks, and though they laughed at her they liked her. Two or three times a week she would take one of the roughs back to her hotel and he was always sure of a thousand francs in the morning. It was evidently one of her lovers who had killed her.
Mary listened to the story with consternation and yet with exultation. Now she would be able to get even with the woman who had tormented her for years. It would be a wonderful revenge to tell Jack that this pattern of all the virtues whom he had held up as a model for her to follow was just an old rip.
“Do they know who did it?” she asked.
“No, it might be any one of a dozen. She was pretty promiscuous.”
“It’ll be a blow to my husband.”
“Need he ever know? They’d be glad to hush the whole thing up here and let it go for burglary and murder. A nasty scandal wouldn’t do any good to a wintering-place like San Rafael.”
“Why should it be hushed up?”
A Writer's Notebook Page 31
