Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  ‘Neither this nor any of the mines we own in Yugoslavia is being worked for the first time. First the Greeks worked them, and then the Romans; then in the Middle Ages the Serbs brought in the Saxons to work them. Then under the Turks the work stopped, stopped dead, for five centuries, until we started it again. And the funny thing is that you can tell each period by its style, without looking at its age. The Greeks had great fancy, they seem to have been wonderful at guessing where the stuff was likely to be and finding the most ingenious way of getting at it. But their construction was only fairish. The Romans don’t seem to have had such good ideas but they were grand on construction. They always made a lovely job of the building. And the Saxons just came along nicely, without adding anything, but following on well. And we’re using a lot of it just as it was. I never go by the stone seat where the Roman sentinel sat, without giving it a pat, and wondering too. For just by that seat there’s a bit of construction that none of us can understand. There’s a long piece of tunnelling, too small for even a child to crawl through, running from one full-sized gallery to another, and no way of getting from one to the other that I can see. We’ve all puzzled our heads over it, and not one of us can work out an explanation. But sometimes that happens, you find workings in old mines that are incomprehensible to the finest engineers.’ It was disconcerting, this emergence of mystery, constant character of human activities, in anything so concrete as mining.

  There was an offer to take us up to the mine next day, which I accepted so eagerly that the Gospodin Mac brought forward his immensely thick eyebrows and made his terms plain. ‘I said up to the mine, not down the mine, mind you.’ My husband and I smiled at one another, for I have a terror of going below the earth, which has kept me out of London and New York subways for twenty years; but I said, ‘Is it so dangerous, then?’ But it was not a matter of danger; it was the men’s feelings that had to be considered. ‘They believe that if women come down the mine there is bound to be an accident. Now will you explain me that? They had just that same belief out in the mines where we were in South America, and they have it in mines all over the world. But elsewhere than here you have miners whose families have been working below surface for generations and who have worked in different countries. It’s natural they should have developed their superstitions and then pooled them with the miners of these other countries. But the people here haven’t worked in a mine for five hundred years; in fact I don’t think these people have ever worked in mines, because under the Serbian Empire it was Saxons and Saxons only who were miners. The foreign miners who taught these chaps their mining work can’t have given them these ideas, for they couldn’t speak Serbian enough for general conversation, indeed they have to teach them largely by the look-see method. Well, how does it happen that miners here now hold, and hold passionately, as if they had held them for generations, exactly the same superstitions that miners hold all over the world? I wish somebody would explain me that.’ His daughter said, ‘And there’s no use arguing with them over this superstition, for whenever Dad’s insisted on letting a woman go down the mine there’s been an accident just afterwards.’ ‘A serious one?’ The Gospodin Mac shrugged his shoulders. We paused, confronted for a moment by the suspicion that the universe was idiotic; or that man was idiotic, made idiotic to the point of suicide, which would make his unconscious self pull down a prop and let blackness devour him, rather than that his libel on the female of his kind should be proved untrue.

  The women talked too, always well, always of known things. They spoke of the people in the town. Yes, there were still some Turkish families who had not gone back to Turkey, who were indeed too wealthy to abandon their interests here. There was one family which Mrs Mac knew quite well, who still kept a nice house outside the town. There were some fine sons, but they were all at odds, all pulled apart because they wanted to fit in with Yugoslavian life but had their family pride and tradition keeping them to Mohammedanism, which made them aliens in their own country. One had recently consented to obey his parents and marry the daughter of a merchant in Bitolj, in order to cement some business alliance. ‘But the boys here get used to seeing the girls that work in our offices down at the mill,’ said Mrs Mac, ‘and right smart they are; indeed, I think the White Russians almost overdo it.’ The girl from Bitolj did not satisfy these standards, and it was the habit of the young husband to get drunk every now and then and go with his wife to some public place and twitch off her veil and cry, ‘Look at the dreary piece I’ve been given!’ But he always woke up afterwards a good Turk, and suffered agonies of repentance for his outbreak, so he had the worst of both worlds.

  ‘Most of the Moslems we have working for us are Albanians,’ said the Gospodin Mac, ‘and everybody likes the Albanians.’ That is universally said: the enmity the Turks fostered between the Albanians and all the other Slav races is being allayed simply by Albanian charm. They began to talk of their old gardener, an Albanian Moslem, whom they had loved dearly, and who was now desperately ill of an internal disease. ‘I doubt his wife’s any great help to him,’ said Mrs Mac. ‘It’s a funny thing, these Moslem women aren’t so domesticated as you would think. They say they don’t take any pleasure in cooking, and that if they’re by themselves they just live on black coffee, drinking it all the day through. I don’t think they know how to make their men comfortable. But the people round here were in a terrible state until the mine started. Lots of them had no notion of cooking. They’d bake a kind of unleavened bread in the ashes and that’s all they’d do; and in the time when the gourds are in they’d mix up some gourds and dough and bake it into the most awful mash you ever saw, just like the dog’s dinner. Meat they’d never see from one year to another, so they just lived on this mess.’

  It is written in the history books that three hundred years after Kossovo the Serbs of this district tried to find a remedy for their misery by emigration. They had never been subdued and had spent those intervening centuries in perpetual revolt, but after they had aided the Austrians in their attacks on the Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century and had seen the Westerners, with all their advantages, fail, they lost heart. Then came the time that is written of again and again, when the Patriarch Arsenius III accepted the Austrian Emperor Leopold’s offer to receive hospitably all Serbians migrating into his territory, and he marched at the head of thirty-seven thousand Serbian families across the waste lands of the Slavs into Hungary in 1690. That is what is set out in the history books. But of course it is not the whole truth. Nothing is written of the people who did not join in the trek, for of course not all of them did. When Caulaincourt passed across Russia at the side of Napoleon they found that none of the towns which had been evacuated were quite empty. In each of them were ‘Quelques malheureux de la dernière classe du peuple,’ ‘quelques vieils hommes et femmes de la dernière classe.’ It would be so here. There would be some people who would not join in the emigration because their extreme misfortune made them unacceptable even by their own unfortunate community: the old, the sick, the criminal, women without men, victims of odd obligations, those on whom the enemy had some hold. They stayed behind, and the generations after them forgot. Forgot everything, even how to cook. So what they ate looked like the dog’s dinner. History came up in its real colours, blown on by this woman’s breath.

  We said good-night and stood in the porch under the Dorothy Perkins roses waiting for Dragutin. In the valley below a dog howled, and howled again: a bore of a dog that had never been told about climax. ‘Confound that dog,’ said Gospodin Mac, ‘that’s the one that keeps me from sleeping. We must see about that tomorrow; this is the third night that it’s been giving us a concert.’ ‘It’s the German’s dog,’ said his daughter. ‘Do you have many Germans working here?’ asked my husband. ‘Only the one that takes care of the rope-way,’ said the Gospodin Mac. ‘Well, if you have to have a rope-way, you have to have Germans,’ said my husband. ‘I don’t think I like that, the way that all the decent funicul
ars in the world are made by a German company.’ ‘I don’t like it myself,’ said the Gospodin Mac, ‘but we console ourselves with thinking that they won’t make a funicular except with English steel rope.’ His happy knowledge of material objects made me think of two lines of a poem taught me in my childhood, which had always till now seemed ironic:

  ‘The world is so full of a number of things,

  I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.’

  The night wind blew through the women’s thin dresses, and I murmured apologetically, ‘That chauffeur is a very long time in coming.’ Then we heard through the darkness the voice of Dragutin making his farewells to the butler and the cook at the kitchen door, slow and deep-chested and rhetorical, and he came striding along with primitive but superb panache: so might a subject of Stephen Dushan’s have borne himself, sure that at any moment now he might receive the horse and armour which would make him a noble. With a new breadth of style, he drove us down the hillside, where naked lights over gateways carved out of the blackness a white cell of garden that would be for ever England as far as Carter’s seeds could help it, along the dark highway, through the sleeping town, to the hotel, which was oddly at this late hour a square of light. The café was still half full of people. It had the same air as all places where Slavs sit up at night: it was as if time had precipitated itself in the artificial light and hung there suspended, brooding before it again committed itself to the curious course of life. ‘You are up late,’ my husband said to the proprietor. He answered, ‘It is the White Russians from the mines, they never want to go to bed.’ And indeed it could be seen that it was so, for these people had the Russian quality which, not the same as merit, nor even beauty, makes them a point of departure for the imagination, that special quality which makes any actor or actress with Terry or Barrymore blood light up a stage, whether he or she can act or not. ‘I do not complain,’ said the proprietor, ‘it means money. We had no money till the mines opened, but now it comes in, more and more every day. God be thanked!’ he said.

  We were in a town drenched with a rising tide, but the tide had not yet risen so far as one might suppose. That we learned next morning as we went about making purchases before they came to take us up to the mines. This was an island: parts of it were even now incommunicado, not having had whispered to them the words we all know. We realized this when a photographer from whom we had bought some films halted us at the show-case outside his shop, saying, ‘Look! Of these I am unusually proud!’ He spoke of several pictures representing a middle-aged woman, wearing the full trousers and embroidered jacket of an odalisque, and offering the spectator a cup of coffee with a leer which indicated that it was a symbol for the joys of the harem. The portraits were in fact not unattractive. It is true that she was plump as an elephant, but she was so beautiful that the resemblance only served to explain what it is that male elephants feel about female elephants. ‘Very nice,’ said my husband, ‘who is she?’ ‘The wife of the general in command of our garrison,’ said the photographer. It was as if a show-case in Aldershot High Street should be filled with portraits of the wife of the general in command of the district, clad in the coquetry and localized plumage of Mistinguett.

  But we spoke no more of her, for my husband had caught sight of another photograph, set just below these portraits, which were so exuberant in the literal sense of the word. It strangely contrasted with them. Four astonished mourners presented to the street a lidless coffin, in which there lay a bearded man with closed eyes, death collecting visibly in the hollows of his cheeks. About the coffin stood some children, wild-eyed with grief, and a woman putting her hand to a forehead blank with distraction. ‘My God, who was that?’ my husband asked. ‘It is our late Mayor,’ said the photographer. ‘He was a very good man.’ ‘Was he assassinated, or was it an accident?’ asked my husband. ‘Who? The Mayor?’ said the photographer. ‘No, no, it was remarkable how everybody liked him. He died of something wrong with his stomach.’ ‘Then what is this scene?’ ‘It is just his funeral.’ ‘But look!’ I said, pulling at my husband’s sleeve, for I had found yet a third indication of a life different from ours. It was the photograph of a young black-haired man wearing the kind of face which Slavs assume when they intend to look romantic, which all Russian ballet-dancers use when they are teetering for balance: it resembles a sad spoon. The portrait showed his nude torso to the waist; and between his mammary glands, which were a shocking waste, a chain suspended that most innocent exemplar of jewellery, a heart-shaped pendant with a seed pearl in its centre. ‘Who is this young man?’ asked my husband. ‘He is a lieutenant in the garrison here,’ replied the photographer, wholly without embarrassment. ‘He is a funny fellow, always coming to be photographed, always in fancy dress, sometimes in woman’s clothes.’ ‘Are there many such young men here?’ asked my husband. ‘He is the only one,’ said the photographer.

  At our hotel a car waited to take us up to the mines and Constantine sat dunking a roll in his coffee. ‘Good-morning!’ we called, and he answered us civilly, but with a look of condemnation checked only by the painful exercise of courtesy. It was apparent that we were committing the same crime as those who are not sea-sick when others are. ‘Will you be ready soon?’ we asked. His forehead contracted in agony. It was apparent that we spoke too loud. ‘Ready for what?’ he asked. ‘To go up to the mines,’ I said, ‘it will all be very interesting, and you’ll like the manager, he is a most wonderful person.’ Constantine laughed silently into the distance. It was apparent that we had shown gross insensitiveness. ‘No, I do not think I would like the manager,’ he said. ‘I have read of such people in Dickens, and I think we are of quite different sorts.’ ‘Oh! Come on!’ we pleaded, but he raised his eyebrows and pulled his mouth down and looked down at the tablecloth, slowly shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘where men claw at the sides of the noble mountains, for the sake of money, mere money, there I would be quite out of place. But you go,’ he said kindly, ‘you go. I shall not blame you. We cannot all feel the same repugnances. Go up there and be happy. And I will get Dragutin to drive me to some place where the mountains have not been violated. And there I will be at peace, and I will remember that I am a poet, and I will be very happy. Happier than I think you could understand.’ We murmured and left him, not because we were angered by him, for we were not. Both of us loved him, and he was at this moment most piteous, for his floridity was purplish and the whites of his eyes were dun. But it was as physically exhausting to talk to him when he was fixed in this preverse attitude as it would be to talk to a contortionist whose mouth spoke out of the shadow under his crooked knee.

  The chauffeur who had come to take us to the mines was the personal chauffeur of the Gospodin Mac; and it appeared that there are some who are heroes to their valets. ‘Does he hope we will repeat all this to his employer?’ my husband wondered; but answered himself, ‘No, he is too noble a creature and anyway he conceives his relationship with the Gospodin Mac as already ideal.’ We went out of the town and received proof that we were indeed in the South, where the land burns in summertime like the human skin; a bridge joined brown land to brown land, and in a brown river there swam brown youths. In a valley where still browner babies kicked and squealed among bulrushes in a shallow stream, there marched over the mountainside the pylons of a rope-way, with here and there a carrier riding down from the mines to. the mill. Thereafter there was a group of gay new houses up on the hills, and the chauffeur halted us. ‘Our workmen live there,’ he said, and we responded that they were very beautiful; and so they were, they had the same lyrical quality as some modern French industrial garden cities, such as those on the Seine near Caudebec where the hydroplanes are made. ‘Some of the houses you will see later on are built by the company, and they are magnificent,’ continued the chauffeur, ‘but these are built by the workmen themselves, and they are fine enough. They also have the wonderful thing that the Gospodin Mac has brought to our country. They also have the septic tank.’ He turned
towards us passionately. ‘Is it not a most wonderful thing, the septic tank? All this filth that gushes out’—his arms drew on the sky an image of the impurity that floods the universe, not to be beaten back by the spirit, only to be conquered by the talisman of the Gospodin Mac—‘turned into water, clear water!’ His hands fluttered, saluting salvation. ‘Many centuries after my master is dead,’ he cried, ‘he will be honoured because he brought us the septic tank.’ The primal idea of sanitation surprised us by its angelic appearance. Yet the memory of the obscure apartment at Prishtina, with the age-old coat of slime on its floor, made it not so surprising.

  I would never have known the mine-head for what it was. It looked like a railway station, standing under a scar in the wooded hills at the valley-head, with a goods tram loaded with lumps of ore, the colour of ageing and desperate silver, puffing away from it. In what looked like a waiting-room, and was a kind of office, we found two young Englishmen wearing overalls and carrying electric torches, who paused to tell us before they went off to take baths that they had just been down the mine with the Gospodin Mac, and that he had come up first and would be with us as soon as he had bathed and dressed. They were admirable young men, neatly shaped by their profession, like well-sharpened pencils. Not theirs the long points of the artists and scientists, which are as like as not to break and necessitate a fresh use of the knife; not theirs the bluntness of those who know no craft. They were just right. As they went I looked at the map of the mine that was hanging on the wall and said, ‘I cannot understand the name of this place—Stan Trg. Trg I know to be market, but what is Stan? It does not seem like a Serbian word at all.’ ‘Neither it is,’ said one of the Englishmen, ‘it is simply a mistake. Somebody copied the name wrongly when the mine was started, and nobody about the place knew enough Serbian to correct it. But it ought to be Stari.’ They left us marvelling at the impersonality of the governing demon of mining, which goes into a country of which it knows nothing, not so much of its language as the word which means ‘old,’ and digs down into its vitals for its secret wealth.