A Writer's Notebook (82 page)

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.

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.