Against the Wind Read online

  I returned to England on a month’s leave in December 1923. That is as good a time as any to take stock. The bankers in London said that I had become more mature. I privately ridiculed their opinion, and ascribed it to the fact that I was now dressing darkly like a respectable businessman. However, they were obviously right since I should never have dared, a year earlier, to suspect them of shallow thinking.

  At any rate, I was now ready to begin the advance along the axis expected of me. Though I had still no sense of personal discipline, the wild preliminary gallop on the sensual animal had tired him into a more pleasurable trot. I was also on the edge of realising that my world was bounded by the Black Sea, not the Channel. I was still years away from the ability to talk—assuming we had a common language—as effortlessly to a foreigner as to an Englishman, but I no longer measured him or his way of living by their resemblance to the familiar. Like so much in my life, this tentative cosmopolitanism arrived by way of my belly rather than my brain. Homesick though I was for my own country, I could not help observing that I should need a very unlikely salary in London to enable me to keep up my standard of living—a sordid foundation for fraternal sympathy, yet more firmly to be built on than the vaguer liberalisms of the professed internationalist.

  I returned to Bucharest more willingly than I expected. Somewhere in January Switzerland—it might have been Buchs—the Arlberg Express stopped between two formidable walls of ice through which tunnels had been cut to give access to the station. I got out to stretch my legs and have a drink. While I was thus arcticly engaged, the unseen train started. I heard it and, with the ears of the spirit, the sceptical remarks of the manager when I was not back at my post on the appointed day. I foresaw my baggage and passport lost for ever. By the time I had raced down the platform and through the nearest hole, the tail of the train was fifty yards away and gathering speed. It skidded on ice, and I was able, just, to grab the rail and step of the luggage van, where I remained shivering through tunnels until the train reached Austria and stopped. My body, though I tried it hard, was resistant, and would do anything that I could reasonably ask of it except play games.

  My fellow apprentice was now married, and battling to reduce himself to a more Kensingtonian daintiness of living. His favourite fiction that nothing but the best was good enough for him looked a little more like snobbery, a little less like ambition to distil the essences of the moon. Hero worship was the thinner for that, and friendship the stronger. He was unendingly kind to me, lending me comfort or money whenever I badly needed either. In reckoning his sins no seraphic manager could ever refuse him an overdraft, for he was always ready to pay in to his account that tremendous credit, tolerance. Had I landed myself in a really scandalous mess, which only by the grace of God I never did, it would have been he who extracted me and kept silent.

  I was now coming under the influence of much older men, who were all capable of enjoying a riotous night as much as I, and did not offer it the compliments either of addiction or of remorse. French, Belgians, British and Austrians, many of them had made their career in Russian oil, so that the emotions and vitalities of the Tsarist Empire became familiar to me from the talk of my own sex as well as that of those delicious and melancholy women who migrated to Bucharest when the British Army of Occupation left Istanbul.

  There was the Belgian Minister who told me, apropos of I know not what Byronic extravagance, to go away and read Anatole France—for whom my affection has never varied, though now I consider him less a teacher of how to think than of what to laugh at. He, too, it was—the Belgian Minister, I mean—who made a most profound remark which I myself have repeated to young aspiring cosmopolitans. Intending to visit Paris, which I had never seen, on one of my leaves, I asked him where to stay and where to eat. He replied that to me, in the pattern of my life, Paris was bound to become a second home, that I had no need to visit it and should go to some town which I was unlikely ever to see again.

  A useful antidote was Lionel Ludlow, who had fought in the Matabele Rebellion, known Rhodes and passed from gold-mining in South Africa to Roumanian oil. Like any good Empire Builder, he placed for me the life of dinners and card-leaving in its true proportions. Above all was Fred Thompson who descended upon us from Price, Waterhouse in Paris, often with a considerable team of accountants, to audit oil companies and finally opened an office in Bucharest. He was something less than ten years older than myself—a man with a genius for friendship, so loving all Europeans and Americans who honestly presented themselves to him that his only protection was irony. From him I would take rebuke, advice and ridicule—and still happily invite them, for he alone of them all remains an intimate friend.

  What they saw in me, those kindly watchers over my youth, I can only imagine by observing those qualities which now attract me in men thirty years younger than myself. I was so eager to learn anything of life and of peoples which could be taught me, so uninhibitedly ready to enjoy myself. I must often have been affected or a bore or gauche, but I was never uninterested. Those who had daughters considered me eligible, but no doubt shook their heads over a too Latin irresponsibility. They underrated me. My irresponsibility may have had a surface familiar to Continental fathers, but it was Anglo-Saxon in its depth.

  During the four years which I passed as a modest bank clerk in working hours, and in my free time as a young man of some fashion, there was little interaction between myself and my Roumanian environment. I remained a mere tourist. By that I mean a visitor who observes, but feels no close emotional intimacy with the observed.

  A man may understand, intellectually, the history and culture of an alien land, its continuity with his own and its branchings-off; he may admire its arts, its architecture and its food and drink; seduced by climate or beauty of landscape he may even be prepared to spend all his idleness upon the terraces of some little town. But until he knows that he would be far from complaining if fate compelled him both to live and to earn his living there, with only casual visits to his own country and such others as he may love, then he is still a tourist. So I can draw only what there was to see, and very little of myself. Yet a mere travel sketch is forgivable when no more tickets will ever be sold to Ruritania.

  The vast majority of the male population still wore their shirts outside their trousers, and confirmed Napoleon’s aphorism that those who did so were the only honest men. Peasant costume was worn as a matter of course, without need of encouragement from folk-lore societies and nationalists. Even the industrial worker wore it, with lambskin cap on head and linen shirt nearly to the knees outside the tight, coarse-woollen trousers. On Sundays and holidays the dresses of both men and women flowered with fantastic panels of embroidery. The twentieth century showed only in the shoes which appeared to be cut from old inner-tubes—or perhaps folded from rubber sheet cut to the approximate size—and were held on by criss-crossed thongs in the manner of Viking or Saxon.

  The poverty of the town peasant was brutal. The villager at least could eat, his staple diet being maize porridge, and could build when he married, at the cheap cost of his own labour and that of a few gipsies, a one-storied cottage of whitewashed mud in a painted timber frame, aesthetically pleasing, weatherproof and clean—apart, that is, from the breeding fleas left behind by the gipsies. They were all hospitable, of conventional morality, drinkers in cheerful Latin measure rather than Slav fury, and with a shade of cruelty inevitably borrowed from the Russian and Turkish armies which too frequently had liberated their women, their horses and their crops.

  The class which wore tailor’s trousers and tucked shirts in them seemed to me to lack any social conscience; but I may well be unfair, for I was observing the country in a state of transition between the patriarchal and the industrial. In liberal legislation Roumania was far ahead of Hungary or Poland. The great estates were broken up immediately after the war, and the boyar or landowner was only allowed to keep for himself the equivalent of a good English farm. His son
s in the army or the civil service or politics were trying to support families on monthly sums which lasted me, a single man, about five not specially extravagant days. They could not afford a too punctilious honesty. Fifteen years later, when I was again in Bucharest, corruption in public life had improved to the pleasant and manageable standards of, say, a Central American Republic.

  Nearly all commerce was in the hands of the Jews, and there was no other middle class to be a buffer between the half-emancipated peasant and his former landlord. At the best the boyar among peasants had the attitude of a too-dignified officer at a party for other ranks; at the worst he was threatening, loud and rude. Even I, fresh to a peasant country and conservatively supposing that the Roumanians knew how to handle their own labour best, found the unconscious antagonism displeasing. To a Spaniard, accustomed to courtesy between man and man whatever the difference of education or income, it would have seemed outrageous.

  It was still the age of the horse and the railway. Foreigners and the wealthy had cars, but their use was limited. Beneath the rare patches of flat surface the roads of spring concealed mud pools which would swallow a car to the door handles. In summer the passing of a peasant cart raised a pillar of dust so impenetrable that a driver could only enter it at peril of head-on collision with the unseen. In winter the January blizzards shrieked down from Arctic Russia over the Black Sea, and the first considerable obstructions in the path of the horizontally driven snow were the city of Bucharest and the shrinking bodies of its inhabitants. When the wind dropped there were no more cars. The city was silent and pleasantly frozen—a fairy-tale frost, not at all of Russian or Canadian implacability—and the cab-drivers belled their horses and substituted runners for wheels.

  The drivers were eunuchs. They belonged to an ultra-pious sect of the Russian Old Believers which held that a man was so far condemned to the lusts of the flesh that he might have one child; thereafter duty to his immortal soul demanded that he should place himself beyond temptation. Somewhere in Moldavia these wrinkled, hairless, yellowish men had a village and cultivable lands, but the traditional employment was cab-driving. There were, of course, other drivers, peasants uprooted though not sterile, whose cabs and horses showed their lack of any pride in the trade. The semicircle of smart victorias in summer and sleighs in winter which waited for hire outside the royal palace was all owned and driven by eunuchs.

  Men and women, the Roumanians were ingenious seekers after gaiety. The summer nights were no more willingly wasted in sleep by Bucharest society than by its former peasants whose music was as wild, whose dancing was better and whose fairs took the place of cabarets. The greatest fair of all, the Moş, was held in the early autumn outside Bucharest, still surviving from the days when little could be bought in the village shop. It was a market for labour, animals and manufactured goods, where the peasant could purchase whatever he needed for the profit of what he sold and exchange lice and news with his fellows from other provinces; where the Jew and the gipsy dexterously increased their handfuls of dirty paper money, and Bessarabian horse-dealers, gallant in black and scarlet, rode with their troupes scornfully through the crowd, the golden dust of their passage settling slowly until blasted up again by the heat of the still evening and the brazen mouths of the barkers and the bands.

  The traveller in time had a chance to see once more the seventeenth-century Bartholomew Fair—apart from mid-Victorian steam roundabouts and shooting galleries in which dignified figures of iron, top- or straw-hatted, performed their natural functions when squarely hit. Monsters, dwarfs, mermaids and abortions were uninhibited, and more proper to the decent obscurity of surgical and veterinary museums than to the straw or the divan of dirty rugs upon which they wriggled when poked by the proud proprietors. There was some kind of drinking booth for every twenty yards of alley. The more cleanly had the usual gipsy band of cymbalon and strings; the cheaper made do with peasants blowing on brass or on leather instruments, including serpents and sackbuts, of astonishing antiquity. Even playing in unison the performers were hopelessly out of tune with each other, but the discords, unless you drank beneath the very mouths of the battered instruments, were unnoticeable since every band was determined to drown its neighbour.

  This roaring cacophony delighted me for whole evenings; yet today I doubt if I could bear it for half an hour. That is due, I think, to a profound difference of civilisation rather than to age. After the footfalls of Bucharest and the soft silence of the Wallachian plain, where the only sounds were of frogs and running water, of domestic animals and distant voices, a gorgeous human row was welcome; but when the ears protest, though unconsciously, all day and much of the night against the rolling of traffic and the last-trump blare of aircraft, there is no human desire which more noise can possibly fulfil.

  The Roumanians were far too civilised—till the rise of the fascist Iron Guard—to be always waving and saluting flags. They were cosmopolitan by tradition, drawing their culture from the Eastern and their language from the Western Roman Empires, and had little in common with the Balkan States south of the Danube. The prosperous Serb or Bulgar of the nineteenth century was still fixing his eye upon the eccentricities of the Turkish pasha while his counterpart in Roumania already had it genially turned on Paris.

  So the foreign capitalist was not hated, though nearly all industry was dominated by him. We were so obviously enjoying ourselves; and the Roumanians, who always appreciated any picturesque escapade, leaped to forgive us whenever in the extravagance of wine we held ourselves above the law. There was an occasion when a banker and The Times correspondent, tempted at dawn by the incongruity of a park of municipal garbage trolleys outside the cathedral, set them all loose upon the promising slope which led with processional dignity down to the River Dâmbovitsa. But that was as nothing compared to the doings of the Texan oil-drillers in Ploeşti. Their exploits, their women and their astonishing ability to shoot out lights without scoring on the café customers have passed into Roumanian folk-lore.

  I never visited the oil-fields in those still pioneering days, though I knew the heads of the bigger companies and had only to ask. It was not lack of curiosity. My free days were so few and precious that I did not wish to waste them on anything but the duck and the Danube marshes in spring and autumn, and the high Carpathians in summer and at Christmas. So the oil towns of Ploeşti and Câmpina were for me only railway stations on the way to the mountains.

  I had, however, one swift and improbable visit to a little field near Bacau, spending a night on the floor of the manager’s house and two in the train. General Henley, one of those much older men who befriended me and for whom I had an almost filial love, had invested in a concession where the oil was so near the surface that he and his Roumanian partner considered tunnelling rather than drilling to it, and the excavation of an underground reservoir. That this was possible could be seen from the local peasant wells. They had a diameter of a yard or so, and were lined with wickerwork. When enough oil had seeped into the bottom of the well, the proprietor lowered a man who bailed it out with a bucket.

  Henley was in some danger of being evicted from the concession by his Roumanian partner. I do not remember—if indeed I ever understood—the rights and wrongs of the case; but the general was a contemporary and friend of Hilaire Belloc and of exactly that robust and genial character which Belloc admired. He decided that possession was nine-tenths of the law and that the local manager, who was playing the partner’s game, must be thrown out.

  He, his Roumanian lawyer and I suddenly descended upon the field and threw him out. The lawyer then assembled the workers, who had not been paid, and addressed them. Henley and I stood by, he at least looking benevolent and patrician. Meanwhile the manager had alerted the gendarmerie, and in the subsequent procès verbal, to which he swore, I was described as appearing with a pistol barely concealed in my pocket and the grim face of an abandoned criminal. I fear there was some truth in it. But, fortunately for my st
anding as a banker, country justice was in the hands of inexperienced magistrates on starvation salaries, and the procès verbal was torn up.

  On our way to the field we had stopped for a conspiratorial interview with the money-lender at the nearest big village. It was a village of Jews. Till then I had had the common western European illusion of Jewish prosperity, except among recent immigrants in the reception areas of great cities. That all around the Russian frontiers, from Lithuania through Poland to Roumania, they lived like the peasants in equal poverty and with less security was a new conception, destined to become more and more familiar to me. It gave me a sympathy for Zionism which was deeply emotional, whereas that of most other Englishmen who have any is intellectual or semi-religious. There on the edge of the Jewish Pale I was again in a period of transition. The pogroms which had horrified liberal Europe by rape and murder were over. The mass extermination was still to come. Of those frustrated innocents, some desperate to escape, some finding refuge in the complication and recomplication of the divine words so that they should surrender the intention of the divine will, very few remain.

  In order to fetch the wages of the workers I had next morning to ride down to this Jewish village. By a horseman’s standards I cannot ride at all. I merely use the animal as convenient transport, sitting securely and correctly so long as it does not discover my complete ignorance. That oil-field’s horse had the Roumanian genius for finding the weak points of the foreigner, and summed me up with a swiftness which would have been indecent in a well-trained hack.

  Arriving at a forest track with a slope of one in three where the spring sun had not yet melted the ice, he squatted on his quarters in the position of a circus horse receiving a lump of sugar, and transformed himself into a bobsleigh. How he cornered I do not know; but he was obviously revelling in his skill and would have been running well up on the top of the banking if there had been any. The village banker restored my equanimity by mulled wine, and I remounted with a bag of money over my shoulder feeling that on the whole I was still a romantic figure. But that animal had my measure. He visited every flimsy building on the main street, generally entering the front door backwards. Mothers and children fled screaming, for this was worse than any descent of Cossacks. They at least knew how to control their horses.