Nothing
pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction.
pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction.
Orwell
A young Eurasian
jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the
stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the
grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of
the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we
put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still
straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,
with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his
muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet
printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by
each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the
mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This
man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were
working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming —
all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the
drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw
the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned —
reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing,
hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap,
one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and
overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with
planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The
hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his
machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the
two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to
the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and
fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the
gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It
was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! ”, not urgent and fearful like a
prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the
sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram! ”
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass.
The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram! ” never
faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the
ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had
gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at
the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of
life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that
abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift
motion with his stick. “Chalo! ” he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the
rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of
the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a comer
of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed
straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated,
slightly. “HE’S all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows,
and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He
glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,
thank God. ”
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of
having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the
condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The
convicts, under the command of warders anned with lathis, were already receiving their
breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two
warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly
scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was
done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone
began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a
knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard
his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly
take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the
boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style. ”
Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed
off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always
so — oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the
gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable! ”
“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.
“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars
of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six
warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear
fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us! ” But no, he
would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome! ”
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent
grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite
genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it. ”
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs! ”
exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began
laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all
had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a
hundred yards away.
BOOKSHOP MEMORIES (1936)
When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one,
as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop
had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers
knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers
of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still,
and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were
commonest of all.
Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere
but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants
a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who
read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy.
Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was
about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two
well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the
decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several
times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders
large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our
shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary,
for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered
books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They
would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over
and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of
them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner
about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to
come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they
themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite
certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops,
because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time
without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a
glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very
often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he
asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them,
I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order
them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real
money.
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand
typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a
strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently,
fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also
sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the
Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them
myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their
horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are
highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity. ) We did a good
deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are
rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would
sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems
manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we
spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are
tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to
see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the
Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.
But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library
of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those
libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence,
remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers
generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used
to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.
Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we
were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library
subscribers were a fair cross-section of London’s reading public. It is therefore worth
noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was —
Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick
Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell’s novels, of course,
are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might
expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that
men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they
avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel — the ordinary,
good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the nonn of the English novel — seems to
exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective
stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my
knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the
same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read
every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever
in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author’s names, but he could tell by merely
glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.
In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing
that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of
favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the
ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-
century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s OLD! ’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is
always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens
is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he
is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar
and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was
found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is
very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the
publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of
short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly
always starts by saying ‘I don’t want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a
German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain
that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to
‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe,
though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short
stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most
novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, VIDE D. H. Lawrence,
whose short stories are as popular as his novels.
Would I like to be a bookseller DE METIER? On the whole — in spite of my employer’s
kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able
to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is
not a difficult trade to leam, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything
about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don’t. You can get their measure by having
a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don’t see an ad. for
Boswell’s DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one for THE MILL ON THE
FLOSS by T. S. Eliot. ) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized
beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent
bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the
hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a
seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is
an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too
warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books
give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of
a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.
But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I
was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives
him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and
hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight
and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old.
Nothing
pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction.
There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind
of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of
forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading —
in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the
odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the
Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.
Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly
sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read
and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me
no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead
bluebottles.
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in
my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional
police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was
very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the
bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police
officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a
nimble Bunnan tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman)
looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than
once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the
insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young
Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town
and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly
than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey,
cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been
Bogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I
could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think
out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I
did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great
deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I
was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited
little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of
the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA
SAECULORUM, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.
Feelings like these are the nonnal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian
official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny
incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature
of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning
the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone
and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do
something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old . 44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful IN
TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s
doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must. ” It
had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but
on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person
who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the
wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the
elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Bunnese population had no weapons
and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut,
killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the
municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned
the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began
questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any
definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear
enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had
gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost
made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little
distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this
instant! ” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut,
violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking
their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not
to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was
an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many
minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the comer
of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench
a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and
head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the
teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the
way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish. ) The
friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins
a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile
some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below,
only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of
the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were
all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different
now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English
crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of
shooting the elephant — I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary — and
it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking
and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not
yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant
was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest
notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against
his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I
ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant — it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery — and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander
harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the
least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure
that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road
for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was
going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to
perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their
two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I
stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of
the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing
in front of the unanned native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in
reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces
behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own
freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend
his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the
“natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot
the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got
to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite
things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my
heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The
crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one
long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against
his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me
that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing
animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always
seems worse to kill a LARGE animal. ) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be
considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only
be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I
turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and
asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no
notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-
five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no
notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew
that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was
soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed
him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I
was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind.
For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense,
as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of
“natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if
anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught,
trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that
happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down
on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as
of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats.
They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing
with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot
to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the
elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several
inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a
shot goes home — but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that
instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a
mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but
every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely
old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him
down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five seconds, I dare
say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired
again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with
desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head
drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony
of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in
falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he
seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me,
with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that
the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very
rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat.
I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my
two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood
welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when
the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very
slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet
could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It
seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless
to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured
shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression.
The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him
half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was
told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant.
The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally
I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner
fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was
right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie,
because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I
was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me
a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others
grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
DOWN THE MINE (1937) (FROM “THE ROAD TO WIGAN
PIER”)
Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes
until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that
make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of
the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs
the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy
is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth
watching, if you get the chance and are willing to take the trouble.
When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when the
‘fillers’ are at work. This is not easy, because when the mine is working visitors are a
nuisance and are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible to come
away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost
peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with
coal dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At those times the
place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one
imagines in hell are if there — heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all,
unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there
except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the
clouds of coal dust.
When you have finally got there — and getting there is a in itself: I will explain that in a
moment — you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black
wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by
the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the
gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than
a yard. The first impression of all, ovennastering everything else for a while, is the
frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot
see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can
see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five
yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left
shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of
feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal
races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It
bears it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun,
and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.
It is impossible to watch the ‘fillers’ at work without feelling a pang of envy for their
toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of
an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are
also doing, it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain
kneeling all the while — they could hardly rise from their knees without hitting the
ceiling — and you can easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this means.
Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are standing up, because you can use your
knee and thigh to drive the shovel along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown
upon your arm and belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make things
easier. There is the heat — it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating — and the coal dust
that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending
rattle of the conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a
machine gun.
jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the
stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the
grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of
the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we
put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still
straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,
with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his
muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet
printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by
each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the
mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This
man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were
working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming —
all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the
drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw
the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned —
reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing,
hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap,
one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and
overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with
planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The
hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his
machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the
two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to
the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and
fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the
gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It
was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! ”, not urgent and fearful like a
prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the
sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram! ”
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass.
The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram! ” never
faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the
ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had
gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at
the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of
life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that
abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift
motion with his stick. “Chalo! ” he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the
rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of
the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a comer
of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed
straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated,
slightly. “HE’S all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows,
and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He
glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,
thank God. ”
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of
having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the
condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The
convicts, under the command of warders anned with lathis, were already receiving their
breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two
warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly
scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was
done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone
began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a
knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard
his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly
take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the
boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style. ”
Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed
off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always
so — oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the
gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable! ”
“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.
“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars
of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six
warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear
fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us! ” But no, he
would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome! ”
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent
grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite
genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it. ”
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs! ”
exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began
laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all
had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a
hundred yards away.
BOOKSHOP MEMORIES (1936)
When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one,
as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop
had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers
knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers
of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still,
and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were
commonest of all.
Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere
but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants
a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who
read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy.
Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was
about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two
well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the
decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several
times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders
large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our
shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary,
for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered
books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They
would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over
and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of
them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner
about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to
come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they
themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite
certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops,
because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time
without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a
glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very
often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he
asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them,
I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order
them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real
money.
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand
typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a
strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently,
fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also
sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the
Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them
myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their
horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are
highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity. ) We did a good
deal of business in children’s books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are
rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would
sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems
manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we
spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are
tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to
see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the
Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.
But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library
of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those
libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence,
remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers
generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used
to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.
Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we
were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library
subscribers were a fair cross-section of London’s reading public. It is therefore worth
noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was —
Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick
Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell’s novels, of course,
are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might
expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that
men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they
avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel — the ordinary,
good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the nonn of the English novel — seems to
exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective
stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my
knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the
same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read
every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever
in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author’s names, but he could tell by merely
glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.
In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing
that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of
favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the
ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-
century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that’s OLD! ’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is
always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens
is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he
is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar
and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was
found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is
very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the
publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of
short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly
always starts by saying ‘I don’t want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a
German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain
that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to
‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe,
though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short
stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most
novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, VIDE D. H. Lawrence,
whose short stories are as popular as his novels.
Would I like to be a bookseller DE METIER? On the whole — in spite of my employer’s
kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able
to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is
not a difficult trade to leam, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything
about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don’t. You can get their measure by having
a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don’t see an ad. for
Boswell’s DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one for THE MILL ON THE
FLOSS by T. S. Eliot. ) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized
beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent
bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the
hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a
seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is
an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too
warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books
give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of
a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.
But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I
was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives
him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and
hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight
and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old.
Nothing
pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction.
There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind
of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of
forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading —
in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the
odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the
Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.
Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly
sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read
and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me
no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead
bluebottles.
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in
my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional
police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was
very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the
bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police
officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a
nimble Bunnan tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman)
looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than
once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the
insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young
Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town
and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at
Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly
than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey,
cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been
Bogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I
could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think
out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I
did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great
deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I
was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited
little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of
the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA
SAECULORUM, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.
Feelings like these are the nonnal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian
official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny
incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature
of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning
the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone
and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do
something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old . 44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful IN
TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s
doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must. ” It
had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but
on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person
who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the
wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the
elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Bunnese population had no weapons
and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut,
killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the
municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned
the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began
questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any
definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear
enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had
gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost
made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little
distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this
instant! ” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut,
violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking
their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not
to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was
an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many
minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the comer
of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the
earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench
a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and
head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the
teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the
way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish. ) The
friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins
a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile
some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below,
only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of
the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were
all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different
now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English
crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of
shooting the elephant — I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary — and
it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking
and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not
yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant
was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest
notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against
his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I
ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant — it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery — and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander
harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the
least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure
that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road
for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was
going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to
perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their
two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I
stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of
the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing
in front of the unanned native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in
reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces
behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own
freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend
his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the
“natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot
the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got
to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite
things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my
heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The
crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one
long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against
his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me
that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing
animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always
seems worse to kill a LARGE animal. ) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be
considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only
be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I
turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and
asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no
notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-
five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no
notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew
that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was
soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed
him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I
was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind.
For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense,
as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of
“natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if
anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught,
trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that
happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down
on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as
of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats.
They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing
with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot
to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the
elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several
inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a
shot goes home — but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that
instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a
mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but
every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely
old, as though the frighfful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him
down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five seconds, I dare
say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired
again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with
desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head
drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony
of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in
falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he
seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me,
with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that
the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very
rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat.
I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my
two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood
welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when
the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very
slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet
could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It
seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless
to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured
shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression.
The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him
half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was
told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant.
The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally
I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner
fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was
right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie,
because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I
was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me
a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others
grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
DOWN THE MINE (1937) (FROM “THE ROAD TO WIGAN
PIER”)
Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes
until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that
make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of
the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs
the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy
is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth
watching, if you get the chance and are willing to take the trouble.
When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when the
‘fillers’ are at work. This is not easy, because when the mine is working visitors are a
nuisance and are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it is possible to come
away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for instance, a mine seems almost
peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines are roaring and the air is black with
coal dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At those times the
place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one
imagines in hell are if there — heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all,
unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there
except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the
clouds of coal dust.
When you have finally got there — and getting there is a in itself: I will explain that in a
moment — you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black
wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by
the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the
gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than
a yard. The first impression of all, ovennastering everything else for a while, is the
frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot
see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can
see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five
yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left
shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of
feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal
races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It
bears it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun,
and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.
It is impossible to watch the ‘fillers’ at work without feelling a pang of envy for their
toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the standard of
an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities of coal, they are
also doing, it in a position that doubles or trebles the work. They have got to remain
kneeling all the while — they could hardly rise from their knees without hitting the
ceiling — and you can easily see by trying it what a tremendous effort this means.
Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are standing up, because you can use your
knee and thigh to drive the shovel along; kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown
upon your arm and belly muscles. And the other conditions do not exactly make things
easier. There is the heat — it varies, but in some mines it is suffocating — and the coal dust
that stuffs up your throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending
rattle of the conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a
machine gun.
