by Rebecca West
By daylight the Gospodin Mac’s wind-bitten fragility looked even frailer than on the night before, his strength more apostolic in its meek sternness. We walked out of the office with him and the drivers of some passing ox-carts turned their heads to look at us, strangers partaking in the local glory. Each of them was enough to ravish the heart of woman, for they wore the Lika cap. This is the most attractive form of headgear ever designed for men. It is a round black cap with a red edge to it, and a bunch of fine black braid falling to the left shoulder where it gives any man an air of gallantry and amusing faithlessness. By itself it would explain why Lord Byron loved the Near East. ‘But Lika is far away,’ I said. It is on the Karst, on the limestone behind the Dalmatian coast, to be reached from Kossovo only through Montenegro or by by-ways in the Bosnian hills. ‘We are full of those chaps,’ said Gospodin Mac, ‘the Government sends batches of them down here to work for us, from the villages up there on the mountains, where they can never make a decent living, because there’s literally no land, just pocketfuls of earth in the rock. We have all sorts of people here, you know. It’s a fine mix-up of races and religions. We have the Catholic Croats from Croatia, Catholic Croats from Dalmatia, the local Orthodox Serbs who were here when we came, the Orthodox Serbs from Serbia who are quite different, some Orthodox Serbs from Montenegro, who are quite different again, the local Albanians, who are some of them Moslems and some of them Catholic and a few of them Orthodox, some White Russians in the offices and in the mill, and us Scotch and English and Americans. Yes, they get on well now. At first it wasn’t good. Sometimes it was very bad indeed. We had a Croat foreman who engaged the hands, and there was a devil of a row about him with the Serbs, they swore he was favouring the Croats. But he was a good man, and I thought there was nothing in it, and I wouldn’t fire him. So one day the poor fellow was sitting in his office and a Serb workman who had had too much to drink came in and shot him dead. It was a terrible business. But we caught the murderer, though he had gone up into the hills, and he was sent down for a long sentence, and that got us all on a stage further. They saw that the old days were over, and that you didn’t pay for a life with a life, but with a life in a prison. That they don’t like so much, and they began to see things differently.’ ‘Had the Croat foreman been favouring the Croats?’ I asked, and when he did not answer but talked of something else, I asked him again at his first pause: I never learned better when I was a child, though they often tried to teach me. ‘We have a Croat now in much the same position, and no man could be fairer,’ was his answer, and I fell behind, staring in the dust while the two men talked mineral technicalities. ‘I thought there was nothing in it.... We have a Croat now who ...’ I saw him sitting alone in an office, turning over a dead man’s papers, growing suddenly white and pinched round the nostrils as he recognized some obstacle to order which had taken the mean advantage of being ideological and not metallurgical, of not being amenable to treatment on sound mining principles.
A winding road took us up a steep hill through a garden city of white houses and pink roofs, set about with orchards. It was exactly like such places in the West and totally different. With us they mean an attempt to mitigate a victory of darkness over decent earth; but here it meant that the decent earth had for the first time in centuries known other than darkness. With us industrial workers appear as victims of a social system that has prevented them from enjoying the relatively agreeable existence of a free peasant or an artisan, and has condemned them to a standard of comfort far below that enjoyed by other classes who do easier work or none at all. That view was moonshine here. For five centuries no way of living had been within reach of these people which could be considered as a preferable alternative; this was not so in Macedonia and not so in Serbia, but it was true of this particular area. For five centuries there had been no class in this community which enjoyed such a high standard of comfort, and there still is none; the functionaries and Army officers are far more pinched for means. In the porches of these little houses women were sitting as the blessed in Paradise, with the reinforced satisfaction of those who have known a previous inferiority. Their children, playing among the flowers, turned on us eyes that, whether black or that profound yet light Slav blue, seemed to lack something and be the better for it; and we realized how many of the children we had seen lately had been solemnized by the knowledge of hunger and peril. ‘Running water in every house,’ murmured the Gospodin Mac, ‘and they keep them like new pins.’ We passed through this ordinary yet authentic Eden, and came to a canteen where the unmarried workers eat their midday meal. There cooks stood smiling with the special pride of those who practise mysteries not only beneficent but novel, beside cauldrons where bean soup bubbled brown and sooty black, and lamb chops simmered in gravy peat-red with paprika. I know of at least one English public school where the food is not so good. There was no mistake about it, here mechanical civilization was enticing. This modern industrial unit pleased like a paper transparency held against light, for the double reason that it was a superb specimen of its kind, and that there was behind it the vacuum of Turkish misrule.
It was as touching as the glow of contentment in the eyes of the foreign immigrants in the United States during the good old days before 1929, who were entranced to find themselves where there was an abundance of food, no matter what the weather might be, warm and cheap clothing, comfortable footwear, water-tight housing, and, not easily to be acquired but within the possibility of acquirement as never in Polish Galicia or Portugal, radios, refrigerators, and automobiles. They had not realized that in this new industralized world there are seasons other than those determined by the course of the sun, which are both crueller and longer; and that the urban versions of blizzard and drought are more terrible because they must be suffered in an absolute destitution, unknown to communities where each owns or has the right of access to at least a strip of land, and where all are joined by ties of blood or friendship cultivated through generations. The process had been slower in our own country, but I had seen its last lamentable phase. The English manufacturers of the nineteenth century had appeared as redeemers to the downtrodden agricultural labourers who were dying rather than living under a land system which would have shocked the Balkans, and who found food and warmth such as they had never known in the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire and the Midlands; but they have no such reputations among the vast unhappy army of the unemployed. My instinct therefore was to warn the miners who were coming in at the door, grinning with happy appetite, ‘Do not be deceived. Whom you suppose to be your benefactor is in fact your enemy, and will enslave you and take from your children what you never lost even under the Turk, the right to work.’
They would have answered, ‘What, we are to count as an enemy one who gave us food for our bellies and clothes for our back, and a reasonable chance of dying in our beds? If you ask that, then you can never have known hunger and cold and fear.’ And they would have been right. It is a monstrous piece of bogus liberalism to deny that industrialism has done much for the highest interests of humanity by raising the standard of living. It is as foolish as to deny the harm it has done them by not raising it enough, by poisoning the skies and fields with cheap cities, and taking away the will of its employees by keeping them in political and economic subjection. I was at fault in assuming that because English and American industry had proved unable to maintain its workers as it had at first promised, that must be so in Yugoslavia. The slow decline of prosperity in England was due to the shrinkage of markets, caused largely by the increasing capacity of the Orient to produce its own requirements, to the defects of the upper-class education which put all industrial undertakings with the promise of stability into the hands of heirs incapable of adapting themselves to altered conditions, and to overconservative banking. The quick decline of prosperity in America was due to industrialists who had lost sight of the existing limitations of consumption, and to reckless banking. In both England and America the ultimate blame lay, of course,
deeper than this: in the insistence of the richer classes in keeping too large a proportion of the profits of industry, and all its control, in their own hands. This meant that it was exploited for the benefit of their immediate needs and not with regard to its perpetuation. That deepest factor of all was present in the Yugoslavian situation. These miners were working for the share-holders, whose interests came first. But the mine had been started after the war, when European aspirations had become more modest, by Anglo-American financiers of the more stable sort, who had never suffered from the gambling fever that swept Wall Street and the Middle West. It was probably under cautious and disillusioned management, and was certainly staffed by men who had no hopes of rising to permanent grandeur in a Scotch baronial mansion with twenty-five bedrooms, all kept up by grinding the faces of the poor. It might well be that the industrial unit would last so long as there was metal to be fetched out of the ground, prudently and patiently.
Was there, one wondered, unity among these workers? Were the English and Americans, who formed the high command of the mines, as it were, sensible of the necessity to make this enterprise an instrument of life instead of death? That depended on what mining engineers were like, which was a matter wholly veiled from me. I knew that the one beside me was fully aware of the issues within his control.
The Gospodin Mac was pointing to a hillside that showed the particular charm of Serbian scenery, the upland lawn among woodlands, proper place for nymphs to dance, and he was saying, ‘That’s our land too. And I was sorry to buy it, though it’s as well for us to have as much land as we can round here. There was a piece down on the other side of the valley that we couldn’t snap up in time, and some blackguards started a red-light district there that’s the source of almost all the trouble we have with the men. But this land up here I was sorry to buy, because the Albanian who owned it hadn’t wanted to move out of it, and he was a really decent old man. He came to me and he said, “Here you’d better have my land. It’s no use to me any more. My women can’t walk about unveiled on the place, and we can’t live the same sort of life we used to before you came. So give me some money for it and we’ll go down and live in the town.” And mind you, I think the family had been there for ever. We gave him two thousand pounds for the place and every step of the transaction was a pleasure, he was so honest and polite, and he knew perfectly well we were being fair with him, and he would have cut off his hand rather than not be fair with us. I often grieve that we should have put an end to the way he and his family were living, for it was producing fine people. Every now and again he comes in for advice, because he trusts us, but I don’t know that there’s much of his two thousand left. It’s not easy to find investments in this country that give as good return as land, and it’s not easy to live a life in a little town that’s as good as life in your own place up in the hills. There’s no sense trying to fool oneself, not every change is for the better.’ That is the sort of ancient wisdom modern man must have.
He added, ‘But anyway I’ve a soft spot for the Albanians. We all like them. And it’s not just because they knuckle down to us. They’ve got plenty of spirit. They’re good trade unionists. When we had a wages dispute some time ago the Albanians stood firmer than anybody, and I admired them for it. Afterwards the Government sent a commission down to inquire into the causes of the strike, and they hinted to me they thought it a pity we employed so many Albanians, but I wasn’t having any. I said straight out we employed them because we found them decent, hard-working fellows, and we’d go on employing them. But that’s something that’s getting better. The Serb administrators all get to like the Albanians and less and less make a distinction between them and their own people. This country’s getting over its past nicely.’ We paused to take breath on a steep turn in the road, and looked down on the workmen’s canteen. My husband asked me, ‘Did you see the two men who just went into the building? No? Well, I thought one of them was Dragutin.’ ‘It could not have been,’ I said confidently, ‘he is taking Constantine somewhere up into the mountains.’ At the thought of Constantine both of us felt guilty, as if we had failed in charity by being happy away from him, with this whole and untroubled man.
But this man was a genius: the unique exception that not only fails to prove the rule, but leaves it in doubt what the rule may be. Nor could one judge anything from Gospodin Mac’s predecessor, Mr Cunningham, whom we found higher up in the road, a broad grizzled Scotsman standing in his garden with a monk, both intent on a beehive. It seemed that bee-keeping was his hobby, and he spent much of his time teaching people of the district to make and use modern hives instead of the primitive sort which have to be broken every time a comb is removed; and this was of special interest to the poorer monasteries, which could not afford to buy sugar. When the monk had left us we walked among Mr Cunningham’s flowers, which were magically not desiccated by the South, which grew as if the earth were cooled by the Highland air that had nourished his accent. I said to him, ‘What columbines! They look like living things that might fly away at any minute,’ and he answered, ‘Ay, you know they call them the fairy flowers.’ His Scottish r’s roared past me like the March wind in Princes Street. ‘Fehrrry flowerrrs....’ Presently Mr Cunningham said, ‘I’ll be telling Sasha to send a bottle of absinthe up to the mess for our cocktails, if the company is as partial to it as I am,’ and he called to the house, ‘Sasha! Sasha!’ He explained to us, ‘Sasha’s our factotum here; he’s a great character. Lord knows what would happen to us all if Sasha wasn’t here to look after us.’ When Sasha came out into the garden this conversation followed the pattern so often to be remarked in countries where people of a mechanized Western race live among people of a more primitive race whom they have dominated. The Scotsman opened the conversation in the peremptory tones of a nurse speaking to a child, and the Serb answered like a child who accepts the authority of a nurse, but made a further remark in which he in his turn spoke like the nurse, and was answered by the Scotsman as if he were the child. It is thus that an English officer in India talks with his Hindu batman, it is thus that a Southerner talks with his coloured butler, it is thus that a Canadian holiday-maker talks with his Indian guide, should they be intelligent people. Only stupidity fails to recognize that each of the parties in such a relationship has command of a store of information almost wholly forbidden to the other; so that each, in the other’s sphere, is helpless and astray unless his host is generous. That recognition was fully present in the Scotsman’s voice. His climate-toughened shrewdness made him sensitive to the problems of his profession, the nature of ore and its hiding-places under the earth. It made him wise also about bees, flowers, and men, and not to be deflected from his wisdom by vanity. He could not have borne to sacrifice his just perception of Sasha in order to exaggerate his sense of superiority to Sasha. Such men favour the growth of civilization.
But the ordinary run of mining engineers might not be of the same breed as their leaders. There was this inveterate disposition to care only for their hard inorganic quarry, and to leave the state of living men which was the mine’s matrix unnoticed and uncomprehended, which had been responsible for the naming of a Serbian mine with the gibberish of ‘Stan Trg,’ which had been a characteristic of those who had worked here before them, in the days anterior to the Turkish night. On a plateau by this hillside road stood the ruins of a chapel where the Saxon miners, brought here by the medieval Serbian kings, had worshipped according to their faith. Those Saxons were not Serbs, nor Saxons either, but simply miners. They formed a state within the state. The Serbian laws did not bind them; they were subject to the code, which was not borrowed from Saxony, but was simply and purely of the mines. It was not, as might have been suspected, a permit to laxity, extorted by those who rendered essential services to an expanding state; it was a juristic provision for the miner’s mystery, to use that admirable English word meaning all information relating to the theory and practice of a craft, which we borrowed from the Old French mestier, and by carelessness
amounting to genius confused in spelling with the word we derive from the Greek for occult. It made that craft an iron-bound dedication: a man found damaging a mine was hung by a rope downwards in the pitshaft, and the rope was cut. For their Catholic worship these separate people had taken a church such as was built by the natives of this soil, a Byzantine church planned for the Orthodox rite, and had brought a German artist to paint it with frescoes. Centuries after, now that its vaults were broken and its frescoes washed pale by rain and sun, it was apparent that something had happened which had left this not a true growth of the genius of the land. These were true internationalists, disregarding the nation’s peculiar soul.
So, too, were the young men we met in the mess at the top of the road. They were mining engineers, without any doubt. Other things they might be, sons and lovers, husbands and fathers, saints and sinners, philosophers and natural men; but each of them, picked up between divine finger and thumb, and asked by the thunder who he was, would have answered, ‘I am a mining engineer.’ Their preoccupation with their calling was so great that it excluded any dangerously excessive intensification of itself. A mining engineer must keep fit; he must not be irritable and he must be able to bear up under physical strain. Therefore they played tennis, they read a bit, they took photographs, they learned languages; and they faced life with smooth brows and not a paunch among them. And they presented, as a shining tiled wall, this detachment from the life around them