Leonard Woolf

“ I expect nineteen millions of the Tamils and Telegus never saw a white man from one year's end to the other, or if they did, they caught a glimpse of me under a sun helmet riding through their village on a fleabitten grey Indian mare. Well, Providence had so designed it that there was a stretch of coast in that district which was a barren wilderness of sand and scrubby thorn jungle—and nothing else—for three hundred miles; no towns, no villages, no water, just sand and trees for three hundred miles. ”

“ The boats swarmed with shadows running about, gesticulating, staggering under sacks of oysters, dropping one after the other over the boats' sides into the sea. The sea was full of them and soon the shore too, Arabs, negroes, Tamils, bowed under the weight of the sacks. They came up dripping from the sea. They burst with a roar into the enclosure: they flung down their sacks of oysters with a crash. The place was full of swaying struggling forms: of men calling to one another in their different tongues: of the smell of the sea. ”

“ He was very keen to begin, he wanted to see life all round, up and down, inside and out; he told me so as we looked out on the palm trees and the glimpse of the red road beyond and the unending stream of brown men and women upon it.
I began to show him life in the East. I took him to the clubs; the club where they play tennis and gossip, the club where they play Bridge and gossip, the club where they just sit in long chairs and gossip. I introduced him to scores of men who asked him to have a drink, and to scores of women who asked him whether he liked Colombo. ”

“ He saw men die—he hadn't seen that in his Board School—die of plague or cholera, like flies, all over the place, under the trees, in the boats, outside the little door of his own little hut. And he saw flies, too, millions, billions of them all day long buzzing, crawling over everything, his hands, his little fresh face, his food. And he smelt the smell of millions of decaying oysters all day long and all night long for six weeks. ”

“ THE TWO BRAHMANS
A TALE TOLD BY MOONLIGHT
Many people did not like Jessop. He had rather a brutal manner sometimes of telling brutal things—the truth, he called it. "They don't like it," he once said to me in a rare moment of confidence. "But why the devil shouldn't they? They pretend these sorts of things, battle, murder, and sudden death, are so real—more real than white kid gloves and omnibuses and rose leaves—and yet when you give them the real thing, they curl up like school girls. ”

“ We had what we called a camp, in the wilderness, remember, on the hot sand down there by the sea: it sprang up in a night, a town, a big town of thirty or forty thousand people, a little India, Asia almost, even a bit of Africa. They came from all districts: Tamils, Telegus, fat Chetties, Parsees, Bombay merchants, Sinhalese from Ceylon, the Arabs and their negroes, Somalis probably, who used to be their slaves. It was an immense gamble; everyone bought oysters for the chance of the prizes in them: it would have taken fifty white men to superintend that camp properly ”

“ THE TWO BRAHMANS
Yalpanam is a very large town in the north of Ceylon; but nobody who suddenly found himself in it would believe this. Only in two or three streets is there any bustle or stir of people. It is like a gigantic village that for centuries has slept and grown, and sleeps and grows, under a forest of cocoanut trees and the fierce sun. ”

“ So Chittampalam sat in his compound thinking for many days how to avoid paying a man to dig a new well: and meanwhile the taste of the water from the old well became more and more unpleasant. At last it became impossible even for Chittampalam's wife to drink the water; there was only one way out of it; a new well must be dug and he could not bring himself to pay for the digging: he must dig the well himself. So every night for a week Chittampalam went down to the darkest corner of his compound and dug a well and carried earth on his head and thereby polluted his caste. ”

“ Can you picture that enclosure to yourself down on the sandy shore with its great fence of rough poles cut in the jungle, lighted by a few flares, torches dipped in cocoanut oil: and the white man tied to a pole raving, writhing in the flickering light which just showed too Robson's white scared little face? And in the intervals of taking over oysters and settling disputes between Arabs and Somalis and Tamils and Moormen, I sat at the table writing a report (which had to go by runner next morning) on a proposal to introduce the teaching of French in 'English schools' in towns. ”

“ Suppose one who was not a fisher and was well on in years wished to fish—for a vow or even for play—could such a one learn to cast the net?"
The old fisherman screwed up his wrinkled face and looked up at Chellaya doubtfully.
"Lord," he said, "I cannot tell. For how could such a thing be? To the fisher his net, as the saying is. Such things are learnt when one is young, as one learns to walk."
Chellaya looked out over the old man's head to the lagoon. Another fisherman was stealing along in the water ready for the cast. Ah, swish out flew the net. ”

“ It's the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami for Reynolds. But it wasn't what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more than anything which got on his nerves.
She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. ”

“ A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. ”

“ It isn't animal—that's the point—or vegetable or mineral. Not one man in ten thousand feels it and not one woman in twenty thousand. How can they? It's a feeling, a passion immense, steady, enduring. But not one person in twenty thousand ever feels anything at all for more than a second, and then it's only a feeble ripple on the smooth surface of their unconsciousness.
"O yes, we've all been in love. We can all remember the kisses we gave and the kisses given to us in the moonlight. But that's the body. The body's damnably exacting. ”

“ Things here feel so different; you seem so far from life, with windows and blinds and curtains always in between, and then nothing ever happens, you never wait for things to happen, never watch things happening here. You are always doing things somehow—Lord knows what they are—according I suppose to systems, views, opinions. But out there you live so near to life, every morning you smell damp earth if you splash too much in your tin bath. And things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and you—you don't do things, you watch with the three hundred millions. ”

“ No man ought to have been happier, though his wife was too talkative and had a sharp tongue. And for 45 years Chellaya lived happily the life which all good Brahmans should live. Every morning he ate his rice cakes and took his bath at the well in his compound and went to the temple of Siva. There he talked until midday to his wife's brother and his daughter's husband's father about Nallatampi, their neighbour, who was on bad terms with them, about the price of rice, and about a piece of land which he had been thinking of buying for the last five years. ”

“ You'd think being progressive we'd dredge for them or send down divers in diving dresses. But we don't, not in India. They've been fishing up the oysters and the pearls there ever since the beginning of time, naked brown men diving feet first out of long wooden boats into the blue sea and sweeping the oysters off the bottom of the sea into baskets slung to their sides. ”

“ Nothing can condone violence, the taking of human life, it's savagery, terrible, terrible."
"They don't put it down with a strong enough hand," the stock-jobber was saying almost fiercely. "There's too much Liberalism in the East, too much namby-pambyism. It's all right here, of course, but it's not suited to the East. They want a strong hand. ”

“ But I read the papers, I've read books too, mind you, about India. I know what's going on. One knows enough—enough—data: East and West and the difference: I can form an opinion—I've a right to it even if I've never heard of Ramis what d'you call it. You've lived there and you can't see the wood for the trees. We see it because we're out of it—see it at a distance."
"Perhaps," said the Archdeacon "there's a little misunderstanding. The discussion—if I may say so—is getting a little heated—unnecessarily, I think. We hold our views. This gentleman has lived in the country. He holds others. ”

“ If you get two thousand Arabs, Tamils, Negroes, and Moormen, each with a bag or two of oysters, into an enclosure a hundred and fifty yards by a hundred and fifty yards, and you only have thirty timid native 'subordinates' and twelve native policemen to control them—well, somehow or other he found a difficulty in applying his system of reasoning to them. ”

“ I'm middle-aged. I've seen men, thousands of them, all over the world, known them too, made it my business to know them, it interests me, a hobby like collecting stamps. And I've only known two cases of real love.
"And neither of them had anything to do with kisses and moonlight. Why should they? When it comes, it comes in strange ways and places, like most real things perversely and unreasonably. I suppose scientifically it's all right—it's what the mathematician calls the law of chances. ”

“ And instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting—yes that's it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn't tired or bewildered or ignorant any more ”

“ As Chellaya grew older he became more and more convinced that the only pleasure in life was to be a fisher and to catch fish. This troubled him not a little, for the Fisher caste is a low caste and no Brahman had ever caught a fish. It would be utter pollution and losing of caste to him. One day however when he went down to sit in his accustomed place by the side of the lagoon, he found a fisherman sitting on the sand there mending his net. ”

“ One does one's work,—forty eight hours at a stretch doesn't leave one much time or inclination for thinking,—waiting for things to happen. If you can prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp, or getting cholera or plague or small-pox, and if one can manage to get one night's sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied ”

“ In this hut there lived a man called Chellaya who was by caste a Brahman, and in the compound next to Chellaya's lived another Brahman, called Chittampalam; and in all the other 50 or 60 compounds around them lived other Brahmans. They belonged to the highest of all castes in Yalpanam: and they could not eat food with or touch or marry into any other caste, nor could they carry earth on their heads or work at any trade, without being defiled or losing caste. ”

“ Chittampalam has a very beautiful daughter and Chellaya has one son unmarried. Now this son saw Chittampalam's daughter by accident through the fence of the compound, and he went to his father and said:
"They say that our neighbour's daughter will have a big dowry; should we not make a proposal of marriage?" ”

“ The next time that the two met, Chellaya made the proposal and Chittampalam accepted it and then they went back to Chellaya's compound to discuss the question of dowry. As is usual in such cases the father of the girl wants the dowry to be small and the father of the boy wants it to be large, and all sorts of reasons are given on both sides why it should be small or large, and the argument begins to grow warm. ”

“ You feel the whole earth waking up or going to sleep in a great arch of sky; you feel small, not very powerful. But who ever felt the sun set or rise in London or Torquay either? It doesn't: you just turn on or turn off the electric light.
White was very bad that night. When he recovered from being knocked down by the rifle, I had to tie him down to the bed. And then Robson broke down—nerves, you know. I had to go back to the enclosure and I wanted him to stay and look after White in the hut—it wasn't safe to leave him alone even tied down with cord to the camp bed. ”

“ But we weren't go-ahead, progressive, the Government always put difficulties in his way. They made 'the native' their stalking-horse against European enterprise. He would work for the good of the native, he'd treat him firmly but kindly—especially, I thought, the native women, for his teeth were sharp and pointed and there were spaces between each, and there was something about his chin and jaw—you know the type, I expect.
As the fishing went on we had less time to talk. We had to work. The divers go out in the fleet of three hundred or four hundred boats every night and dive until midday. ”