by Rebecca West
She knitted a row or two of a jumper, and laid it by to say, ‘It’s time Dad retired. We’ve lived long enough abroad. We were twenty years and more out in South America. Both the children were born out there. Then we came back, and we had taken a house in Scotland, and they asked Dad to come out and have a look at this mine. They’d got the concession, you see, and they couldn’t find the right way of tackling it. So Dad came out and he saw that they had to go after the ore in a roundabout way, that they’d never get it by going any of the ways that looked direct. And then it fascinated Dad, the whole problem of the place, all the labour being different sorts of people and all wanting to cut each other’s throats. So I had to sell the furniture I’d just bought and the house, and come out here. And it’s been a great piece of work for him. But now it’s time both of us went home. We need a rest.’ She ran a knitting needle reflectively through her hair.
‘It’s difficult, you know, retiring now. Because there aren’t the middle-aged men to take over the responsible jobs. There’s plenty of good youngsters, but not men of forty to fifty. They’re the ones that got killed in the war. So it’s a temptation to the old ones to wait on till the youngsters get a bit older. And Dad’s got together a nice crowd here. He’s got the right spirit. You see it’s difficult here, they’ve got to be good in the mines and good with the people. There has to be a clear understanding about that in this sort of country. Dad always says to everybody who comes out here to the mines, “Now, you’ve got to be polite to the Yugoslavs, for it’s their country, and we’re only guests here.” But some of them don’t take the hint, particularly if they’ve been nobodies at home. They look to lord it over the Slavs here then. Sooner or later we get to hear of it if they do. The Yugoslavs only report it if one of our people is rude to an officer. The Army is sacred to them, you know. I do believe it’s more sacred than the Church is at home for we don’t think it’s so terrible to laugh at a minister. But anyway it comes out one way or another. I caught a common wee body making a face after I had taken a doctor’s wife from Belgrade round the bridge club when she thought I’d turned my back, and we watched the husband and found he was just the same. So they found themselves in the train for London before they knew where they were.’
She drew her hand across her forehead and down till her chin was cupped in it and then sighed into the palm, looking downward: the most Scots of gestures. ‘But it’s terrible here in some ways! The way they treat the women! And the law’s behind them, mind you!’ She shuddered, and told a story of a cultivated Bosnian woman, a graduate of Belgrade and Vienna universities, who had come to the mines to work as a chemist, had married a Serbian mining engineer, and been left a widow after some years; and had found herself visited by his peasant family, who seized all her furniture and every penny of the dead man’s savings, as the inheritance laws of the country permitted them to do, and made the startling demand that she should return with them and marry his brother. She spoke as one who had savoured the full horror of the subjection of women, as it is when it is actually practised and not merely dreamed about in a voluptuous reverie: a plundering, a mutilation, an insult to the womb and life, an invocation to mud and death. It was evident that, like all people who have lived long in exile, she sometimes felt that everything peculiar to the strange place where she found herself was a spreading sore, bubo of a plague that will infect and kill if there is not instant flight to the aseptic. But she was disciplined. She knew what shadowed her for the mere shadow that it was. After she had shuddered she instantly grew stable. She turned her head, which was lioness-massive, towards the green and red hills, the willowed stream in the valleys, and said she loved them all.
At half-past four we were to go down the hill to the tennis courts; for it was a saint’s day that was a public holiday, and the whole mining staff was to be there, because a famous professional player had come down for the day from Belgrade. First we had to perform some of those trivial domestic rites which are delicious to women like myself, who have had to work at a specialized task all their lives. Mrs Mac’s knitting had to be rolled up and her work-basket set in order. She moved with a slowness that was a sign of richness; cream does not pour quickly. We had to persuade the Aberdeen terrier to be shut in the house lest he should follow us. It seemed that the creature who had been sitting at my feet so gravely all afternoon, putting himself in just the right position to be scratched under the left ear, was the victim of an intemperate passion for balls. It was like hearing that a good sound Hegelian philosopher was given to drink. ‘Well, we’ll away!’ sighed Mrs Mac. We passed down a path through an orchard, round a curve to the tennis ground. It was superbly placed. Beyond the courts rose the peaked hill crowned with ruins, creamy with wild flowers that grew strong among the bushes.
The game had already begun, and it had fallen, as games between professionals and true amateurs are apt to do, into the pattern of a dance. The Serb professional sent the ball first into the left-hand corner of the court, and the English amateur returned it; then the Serb professional sent it into the right-hand corner of the court, and the English amateur returned it. Then the ball fell just over the net, and stayed there. Though the professional had not to exert himself to impose this pattern on the game he was nevertheless still working out a problem: how to economize his expenditure of effort to the minimum degree. He had succeeded so far that he never needed to hurry, he was always moving slowly to where the ball was going to be. It would have been entertaining to watch him had not the spectators been as remarkable on precisely the same count of graceful economy. An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practised continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock. But the people round this tennis court were calm and true in their attention. Their eyes and chins smiled neatly from left to right and from right to left, no further than was necessary to follow the ball, and their lips were quiet mouths, their fingers quiet hands, their bodies closely furled.
There were present most of the men who worked at the mines and mills at other than manual labour, and two sorts of women: their wives, and the women who were themselves working here, as secretaries and scientific workers and household administrators. Sight could not tell one the difference between the two sorts. They were alike curled and shining about the head, for here, as everywhere in Yugoslavia which has seen the glint of money, the women are at least as well coiffed as they are in Vienna, and their clothes were discreet yet gay. Many were beautiful. There was one White Russian, always to be remembered: an office worker, whose face was clear-cut and cold yet tender, whose figure was armoured with elegance yet fluid with a grace wilder than ordinary motion. There was a Montenegrin girl, handsome as a hero, born to live under black heights crowned with snow, under skies where eagles circle. There were Englishwomen, to go with gardens. But even these highly individualized women were, like the men who sat with them, rubbed down by the pressure of a common purpose to what was not uniformity so much as unanimity. The mine shaped them. They worked in the interest of the maintenance of themselves and their kind, as peasants do, though modern industry was their medium; and they had joined to their educated brilliance the sacred grimness of the peasant that will not be vanquished by his environment. Here, certainly, Yugoslavia might take the gifts of the West without fearing that they were poisoned, and might learn a formula for prosperity that would let it exploit its economic resources without danger to its human resources.
The slanting sunshine of late afternoon emphasized with bright light and black shadows the sugar-loaf sharpness of the peaked hill above us, the fishbone fineness of the ruins on its summit. Some cattle wandered up there among the burning bushes, incandescent like pious beasts that had received their reward here on earth and been transfigured; it could be seen that some purple flowers as well as white grew among the long grasses. There stood a
t my side the Gospodin Mac: he and my husband had just arrived, hot but contented, from their tour of the miracles in the mill. ‘I see you’re having a good look at our castle,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that’s where Stephen Dushan strangled his father, Stephen Dechanski.’ I exclaimed, ‘But I thought that happened at Zvechan, not at Trepcha.’ He answered, ‘But this is not Trepcha. Trepcha is the valley-head where the mine is, down here we are at Zvechan.’ I said, ‘I wish I could go up and look at it,’ but the woman beside me objected, ‘There is nothing to be seen now, only some broken walls. And you could not go up in those shoes, there are snakes up there.’
That there should be snakes in the castle of Zvechan was most fitting. The event which had come to pass on that cone had not been compact; it had dragged along its deadly length. There were the years when Stephen Dechanski and his father Milutin had hated one another, when the son had, like a hunted beast, imitated the stillness of a stone, that he might not be struck dead. There were the years when Stephen Dechanski might have lived according to his nature, Milutin being dead, but instead provoked a repetition of his earlier peril by the offence he offered to a son, of whom nothing was more certain than that he was the most dangerous of all his stock. Again he imitated the stillness of a stone, but not in order that he might escape destruction. Here on this bronze crest he had lain quiet in order to be the doomed mark of the sweeping sword, wielded by an executioner whom he had begotten by his flesh and instructed by his policy. Destiny is another name for humanity’s half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought. They listen to the evil counsel of the grey falcon. They let their throats be cut as if they were black lambs. The mystery of Kossovo was behind this hill. It is behind all our lives.
It was behind this community. It was childish to suppose that these people of the mine could offer a formula for the future well-being of the South Slavs; or even for themselves. It was not childish to regard them and their effect on their surroundings as wholly admirable. But this was only a clearing in the jungle hewn by pioneers whom some peculiar genetic excellence, some inspiring oddity of environment, had made superior to their fellows. These people could not save South-Eastern Europe, because they could not save England: which, indeed, would certainly not save them, if their existence was at stake. These people stood for life; it is impossible to maintain that a large part of England does not stand for death. The men and women of Trepcha were not of the highest social or economic importance in their origins. None, I imagine, had had a duke for a father or was heir to a million. They came from homes where there was upheld a tradition of comfort and fine manners, but where there was no chance to enjoy either unless each generation worked. They therefore knew better than those above them, as a paid athlete earning his keep by daily performance realizes more intensely than any amateur that he must not poison his strength by alcohol or unwholesome food, that it is good for a man to be temperate and precise and to respect the quality of others. But the people who determine the fate of England have not learned that lesson; for we are still governed by our great houses.
There is no sense in a house of extravagant size, unless it is the seat of a small court such as all forces in European history have combined to eliminate, or the home of a devotee inspired by passionate charity to feed and house all comers. Yet the pride of those who occupy such ‘places’ is quantitative. They exult in the number and magnitude of their rooms, the extent of their gardens and glass-houses and stables, the troops of their servants and grooms and gardeners. It is rarely the harmonious proportions of their homes that please them, and there indeed lies their true destruction. For they have lost their taste, which left them during the nineteenth century, and has scarcely been recovered save by those separated from their own class by some barrier such as exceptional gifts, physical weakness, or homosexuality. The proof is written on their walls by their family portraits; beside their Holbeins and Van Dycks, their Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses and Lawrences, hang their Dicksees and Millais’ and Herkomers, Sargents and Laszlos and Birleys. The eye has lost its acuteness because the well-being of the whole organism does not depend on sight or any other of its senses. These people would eat well, if they were blind and deaf and dumb, because the Industrial Revolution and colonial expansion had in the past combined to drop food into their mouths.
Having lost their taste, they lost their souls. For they could no longer base their standards on quality, and so developed their pride in quantity. But a quantity of possessions, on the scale that they have learned to enjoy them, can only be the massed result of past achievements. They cannot have any relation to present achievement. Therefore these people turn away from life. The best of them escape into concentration on the craft knowledge of certain pursuits, such as horsemanship and shooting and fishing, which does not give them the general good sense that often follows from the practice of a craft, because of the insane emotional exaltation engendered by their sense of superiority to those who, by reason of intellectual preoccupations or economic insufficiency, are unwilling to exchange all other interests for these exercises. It cannot be conceived, if the proposition is examined coldly, that a conservative society, which behaves as if hunting were as sacred as the practice of religion, does not make each of its members a fool for life. Those who preserve enough mental vigour to make their mark in public life sit on the benches of Parliament with a majesty related to some other period in our history; and their contact with the present is the reading of memoranda prepared by experts, whom they are apt to distrust because of their different social origins. They have certain principles to which they are ponderously loyal; they protect mass accumulations of past effort and deny the claims of the present. They would not lift a finger to defend the Gospodin Mac and his officers. They would not understand the beauty and ingenuity of their work at Trepcha, because it was not hunting and shooting, because it was modern. They would become moderately excited about it as a source of dividends, but they would let international politics take a direction perilous to the maintenance of the mine, because they were still in the nineteenth century and could not believe that English authority was not absolute the whole world over, and English capital inviolably safe. This governing class meant death for England, however well scattered Englishmen might serve life; and therefore English example could not mean salvation for Yugoslavia.
I said to the Gospodin Mac, ‘Are the Foreign Office and the Legation people interested in you?’ He answered, ‘Not in the least. Though I’ve often thought they might be. After all we’re an important British influence in the Balkans. But they’ve never even told me what to do in case of war. I should ask them more insistently, I suppose. But you know what these diplomats are, they’re bored with you, and you get bored with them.’ There is nothing more to the discredit of the great house than the tendency of its children to fret for their homes in the Foreign Legations. Social extremes meet in exile. The average English diplomat en poste anywhere but the great familiar capitals, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, or Vienna, reacts exactly like a young woman who has given up duty at the haberdashery counter to marry a young man in a Continental branch of a bacon firm. There is the same frenzied interest in clothes, and the same resentful indifference to the exotic surroundings. This is not an aristocratic attitude, but the great house no longer produces aristocrats but only the privileged.
Their privileges are enormous, and they afford ill examples for the ambitions of other classes. Their wealth fascinates and impresses the rest of society because it is inherited. To be fortunate from the womb, to be so fortunate that we can outstrip the curse of Adam all the way from the cradle to the grave, this is the fate we would have chosen for ourselves in our childhood; and therefore it is what we would desire for our children, since when we think of them we are all childish. We look at the great house, with its obvious fou
ndation of secular wealth, and we regard it as evidence that our hopes can be gratified; and thus thrift, that most innocent of virtues, which is rediscovered every time a child puts by a sweet for tomorrow, is enlarged and degraded into that swollen monster of insensate expectation, the desire to invest savings in return for enormous and eternal dividends.
We have no basis for our hopes in practice or theory. The wealth that sustains the great house was usually made by ancestors who had the luck to seize land or mineral rights or a monopoly of trade in the days before society had learned to protect itself from exploitation, or to discover some means of cheapening articles for which there is a widespread and permanent demand. The first form of luck cannot be enjoyed in the present stabilized world, and the second occurs more and more rarely in our highly competitive industrial system. Nor can it be believed that ordinary savings are so scarce that borrowers need pay a very high and perpetual rate of interest on them. But the whole of our economic structure is based on that pretence, and a millstone of greed is tied round the neck of every industrial enterprise, calculated to be just as heavy as its power can bear without collapse. Even here at Trepcha the dividends that were paid out to the shareholders must have been a handicap on the mine’s social value. It was true that a million pounds had been put into the mine before it yielded its ore, but the price which is paid for all such advances is altogether excessive. Much went to the distant dividend-drawer, who cared not a hoot for the miners or for Yugoslavia but he, poor dog, helpless as anyone else in this chaotic world, was facing enormous political risks, and might presently draw no dividends at all. International finance is not so Machiavellian as the simpler forms of Socialist and Fascist propaganda pretend. Its fault is probably that it pulls too few strings rather than too many, and it can no longer be counted as among the major causes of war. But it is like a learned but deaf and prejudiced judge sitting on the bench as a trial raising tremendous issues of personal destiny and juristic principle. Sometimes it hears and is wise. Sometimes it babbles.