A Writer's Notebook (79 page)

It is a moving, a wonderfully thrilling spectacle; the bustle, the noise, the coming and going give a sense of a seething vitality; and those still figures of the men in contemplation by contrast seem more silent, more still, more aloof from human intercourse.

The sun rises higher in the heaven and the grey light which had bathed the scene grows golden, and colour clothes it with a motley radiance.

He was a sturdy little man, who walked with a jaunty perkiness, with a round bald head, bright blue eyes, with a lot of wrinkles round them, and a cheerful expression. He was the Government engineer. He built roads, dams, bridges. His bungalow faced the river. The drawing-room was furnished with comfortable arm-chairs and a carved Indian table in the middle; on the walls were fussy carvings in wood of mythological scenes, heads of animals he had shot, and framed photographs. There was a little strip of garden between the veranda and the river, and one tree grew in it that struck me by its beauty. Its leaves were not dense, so that you saw the branches very plainly and they made an exquisite pattern against the sky. I remarked on its loveliness, but the engineer had evidently never noticed it; I think he thought it rather funny of me to speak about it.

We were talking of shooting and he mentioned that he had
once killed a monkey. “I'll never shoot another,” he said. “I was making a road and all the coolies struck, there were six hundred of them; the foreman was ill and they were afraid he was going to die; they'd made up their minds to go away and leave the work. I did everything I could to get them to stay, and at last they said they would if I'd kill a monkey so that they could have the blood in its heart, because they could cure the foreman with it. Well, I couldn't have the work stopped, so I took my gun and walked along the road. There were generally a good many monkeys playing about, black-faced ones, and after a time I saw one. I aimed and fired, but I only wounded it. It ran up to me for protection, crying, crying just like a child.”

“Did the foreman recover?” I asked.

“Well, in point of fact he did. Anyhow I got the road finished.”

Van H. He is a man of about sixty, a big fellow with a big stomach, a large fleshy face and a large nose, a grey beard and grey hair. His eyes are blue. He speaks willingly, correctly, but with somewhat of an accent. His voice is loud and he has a jovial manner. He can never have been good-looking as a young man and now, in his shabby, careless clothes, with all that fat, though a man of some presence from his size, he has no dignity, nor is he striking or impressive. He has been in the East for over thirty years. He went out first to Java. He is a considerable linguist, a Sanscrit scholar; he is widely read in the religions of the East and in the philosophy of Greece. Here, not unnaturally, he is chiefly interested in Heraclitus and on his shelves is all the extant literature concerned with him. The flat is filled with books. On the walls are Tibetan banners and here and there pieces of Tibetan brass. He lived for a longish time in Tibet. He is a man who likes his food and enjoys his glass of beer. Under the influence of Leadbitter he became a theosophist, went to India and was for some years
librarian at Adyar, but then quarrelled with Mrs. Besant. When I asked him what he thought of the notion of Mahatmas he said that he thought the evidence in proof of their existence and of their non-existence was about fifty per cent on one side and fifty per cent on the other. Though he has long since lost his belief in theosophy, he has still a great admiration for Leadbitter and believes that he had supernatural powers. I think he has now a real faith in Buddhism.

When in Java as a young man he engaged a servant. He travelled with him for nine months and then the boy told him his story. He was a descendant of one of the Javanese sultans, married, with a child; his wife and child died and, heart-broken, he retired into the jungle to lead the life of a Sadhu. He eventually joined a company of charcoal-burners and lived with them for several months. At last they said to him that this was no life for the descendant of a prince and persuaded him to go and see a strange man. This was a tea planter, a Javanese, of about forty, who was generally believed to be, not a reincarnation of a celebrated rebel who had vanished into obscurity on defeat (as Nana Sahib did), but the man himself, still alive after more than a hundred years. This man had told him to go to Batavia, where he would find a white man whom for the nine months he would be there he was to serve. He told him on what day he would arrive. The fact that all this turned out exactly as the tea planter had foretold interested van H. and he went to see him. He found an ordinary-looking man, who was greatly revered by the people, but who would say nothing about himself; he would neither confirm nor deny that he was the ancient hero he was thought to be. When van H. asked him what had made him say the exact things that had made the servant come to Batavia and take a place with him, the answer was: “There is a knowledge that comes from the head and there is a knowledge that comes from the heart. I looked in my heart and told what I saw there.”

A young officer on a P. and O. on the way home was seen on deck busily reading books on the Taj Mahal. He was asked why and he answered: “Well, I was stationed at Agra for four years and I never saw it, but I know that when I get home everyone'll ask me about it, so I thought I'd better mug it all up before I got there.”

Taj Mahal. Notwithstanding my expectations and all the pictures I had seen of it, when I got my first and proper view of it, the view from the terrace of the gateway, I was overcome by its beauty. I recognised that this was the authentic thrill of art and tried to examine it in myself while it was still vivid. I can understand that when people say something takes their breath away it is not an idle metaphor. I really did feel shortness of breath. I had a queer, delightful feeling in my heart, as though it were dilated. I felt surprise and joy and, I think, a sense of liberation; but I had just been reading the Samkhya philosophy in which art is regarded as a temporary liberation of the same sort as that absolute liberation in which all Indian religion ends, so it may be that this was no more than a reminiscence that I transferred to my actual feeling.

I cannot enjoy the same ecstasy over a beautiful thing twice over, and next day when I went to the Taj again, at the same hour, it was only with my mind that I enjoyed the same sight. On the other hand I got something else. As the sun was setting I wandered into the Mosque. I was quite alone. As I looked from one end along the chambers into which it is divided I had an eerie, mysterious sense of its emptiness and silence. I was a trifle scared. I can only put what I felt into words that make no sense: I seemed to hear the noiseless footfall of the infinite.

Sundaram. It is terribly difficult to describe an Indian. Perhaps because you know so little about his antecedents and
environment, perhaps because you know so few Indians, relatively, so that you cannot compare your impressions of one with another; or perhaps it is because their personalities are fluid, as it were, without marked idiosyncrasies; or it may be, of course, that they only show you what they want to, or what they think will please and interest you. Sundaram was a Madrassi, a thick-set, plumpish man, of the middle height for a European, not very dark in colour; he was dressed in a dhoty, a white shirt and a Ghandi cap. He had a short, thick nose and a rather large mouth with fleshy lips. An engaging, ready smile. I had a notion that he was a little pleased to talk of all the very grand people he had known, but that seemed his only vanity. He was most kind. He was a puritan and he told me he had never been in a theatre or a cinema in his life. He had poetic sensibility; landscape and rivers, flowers, the sky by day and the sky by night were a delight to him. He had no logical sense and no interest in discussion. He had accepted his beliefs from the heritage of India and directly from his Guru and was glad to discourse about them at length, but was not concerned with their reasonableness. He did not mind if his ideas contradicted one another. He took his ground on feeling and intuition. In these he had implicit trust. He carried out rigorously all the precepts concerning food, bathing, meditation and so on of the orthodox Hindu. He nourished himself chiefly on milk, fruit and nuts. He told me that once when he was occupied on a serious piece of intellectual work he had lived on milk alone for six months and had kept silence. He talked of renunciation, of the Absolute and of the God that is in all of us—God is everything, we are all God—with intense sincerity. He had at his fingers' ends a number of convenient metaphors, the metaphors that have been current in India for centuries, and used them effectively; it was clear that to him they were an adequate means of reasoning. A beautiful image about the Ganges had for him all the force of a syllogism. He was evidently devoted to his wife and children and proud of them. The children were beautifully mannered. He
gets up at five every morning and meditates. He considers this the most propitious hour. I saw him with some of the students of the university. He was extremely nice to them, but not with the slightly cloying affectionateness that you sometimes see in missionaries with their converts; he was natural and human.