The Last Englishmen Page 7

  That was the thing, he now realized, as he sat at dusk in his dak bungalow in the Son Valley. Margaret had said he shouldn’t think he was doing the brave thing by returning to India. But it had never been a question of courage. The effort to break away had simply been too great. Yet given the prospect of an imminent renewal of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement, the security of his job might prove an equal illusion, he thought.

  It was useless to belabor the pleasures of camp life or imagine he’d find a wife in Calcutta. He could no more apply Margaret’s theoretical directions to change his ingrained responses than he could speak German. How could talk convert weaknesses into strengths? And if he had truly wanted to climb Everest, why had he limited his furlough to easy rambles in the English countryside and picnics with Wystan in the Harz Mountains? Why had he left the Alps a day after he arrived?

  He knew Wystan wanted to be a great poet and had bent his entire being to that. John could never bring himself to read his brother’s poems too closely as he tended to see himself in all of them, as if his brother knew him better than he knew himself. He also dreaded seeing his own thoughts more fully expressed. Recalling the wild disorder of his brother’s ugly fourth-floor lodgings in Berlin, John wondered how much strength of mind was required to persevere in such a place. He would doubtless have whiled away the time cleaning his nails, pausing every so often to glance at his watch to see how much longer until tea. Also, evenings with Wystan were always lively. His own social life in India was meager. He was tortured by contradictory impulses: either to cling to people or reject them altogether. Though in some ways he was quite vain, when he compared himself with other men, he harbored intense feelings of inferiority. He was always surprised when others sought him out. Feeling himself a fraud, he treated such overtures with skepticism.

  As for love, he really only loved himself.

  One afternoon in Berlin after his brother had gone out, John went through his papers in search of a clue as to what he did in his room alone all morning. On Wystan’s return to the flat, he’d blurted out a question.

  “I suppose you think a lot, don’t you?” As soon as he said it he realized how ridiculous he sounded.

  Wystan had him convinced that finding the right woman was the key to their cure. Toward the end of their stay in the Harz Mountains Wystan had told him that the Viennese Jew whom John had met in Berlin four months before was almost certainly in love with him. Feeling time was running out and recalling how attractive she was, John had sent her a letter proposing marriage. Her reply arrived while he was out. Wystan had seen it, smiling when he did, John supposed, and doubtless thinking him foolish to act so precipitously. On the cusp of returning to Berlin to marry her, he changed his mind.

  So what was the idea to which he could commit himself? This had been Margaret’s parting question at the Gare du Nord, the question that now kept him awake and staring into the dark. Was it Everest? A wife? A life in India? Perhaps Margaret was right about his hypochondria, but that didn’t alter the fact that he often felt as if he were under a strain so unbearable he felt he’d crack wide open. And what of his anemia, his arrhythmia, and the pain in his back? These were not figments of his imagination. Even his hands looked unnaturally drawn. He performed his daily routines mechanically, bone tired. Cause and effect, symptom and anxious response, can of course be self-perpetuating. But what was the original cause?

  Margaret had told him of a cousin she’d once been fond of who had married a man in the Indian Army. This cousin had been put out when the Paris railway porters didn’t appear to recognize the better class of people when they saw them, that is, herself.

  “If that is what passes for society in India it must be pretty lonely. I don’t suppose there’s any danger of your getting like that,” Margaret had said.

  But there was a danger. He had often wondered if Englishmen were truly superior to Indians. Had the Indian been provided with a proper education, he might well go higher than the average Englishman. Perhaps the men of the East India Company had been exceptional, but those in India now, to a man, were second rate. Living on capital.

  Simla, Viceroy’s Summer Residence,

  August 1929

  If John meant “living on capital” as a metaphor, the finance member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council had a more literal understanding. Sir George Ernest Schuster was, with Alfred Spender, uncle to the Spender children. He also oversaw the Schuster fortune that sustained them all. Whether in his London club, his spread of offices in Delhi, or his A Class Simla bungalow, he cut a splendid figure. Petitioners found him exceedingly gracious.

  But he gave up nothing.

  Sir George did not opine that one petitioner’s request—that Bengal be exempted from duties on salt—was impossible. He was as indifferent to the impact of the price of salt on the Bengali peasant as he was to the political cost of refusing to budge.

  Ostriches must be equally composed when their heads are planted in the ground, his petitioner, a subdivisional district officer, reflected bitterly. Before departing Calcutta he had had an injection to ward off a plague running rampant in his district, leaving him with a low-grade fever. This fever, combined with his fear of being shown up for the unkempt, malaria-ridden, district hack that he was, might well have blinded him to the overarching reality Uncle George kept foremost in his mind: Capital.

  In his former life, Uncle George had been a banker. It was through banking investments and currency regulation that England maintained her hold on the resources and business enterprises of India. Nearing the end of 1929, that investment came to seven hundred million pounds sterling. No one needed to tell George Schuster that English interests could direct the Government of India’s financial and exchange policies only if peace was preserved.

  One year previously, after learning that the commission set up to determine whether India was ready for further measures of self-government did not include even one Indian, Gandhi had returned to the political field. He gave His Majesty’s Government one year to grant India dominion status. If this did not happen, he would once again call for a boycott of British goods. With no movement toward an agreement, unrest had increased. The deadline was only months away.

  Uncle George understood better than anyone the inextricable ties between the Indian market for British manufactured goods, the fortunes of his Liberal Party, and Britain’s industrial health. And, frankly speaking, the imposition of tariff walls at the end of the last war had put British industry in a death spiral. He didn’t care to speculate on what would happen if extremists, and by that he meant the Indian National Congress, prevailed. Uncle George had had a close encounter with one such extremist, sustaining injuries when two bombs were thrown into the Central Legislative Assembly chamber in Delhi.

  If Gandhi followed through on his threat to renew mass civil disobedience, India’s prospects for financial autonomy would be finished, he announced. But this was disingenuous; Uncle George knew full well that no autonomy was possible while London banks maintained a monopoly on capital. He also knew that if peace was bought with an offer of dominion status, a clash between Lancashire and India was inevitable. It will be a test of our sincerity, Sir George liked to say, for England to consider the national aspirations of India before the immediate welfare of the English mill worker.

  By then the collapse of the stock market had taken the possibility of sincerity down with it. In January 1930 the Undersecretary of State for India said that if India was granted commonwealth status, it wouldn’t be a dominion on par with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In reply, the Indian National Congress officially stopped pressing for dominion status. In concert with his mentor Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the new Congress president, turned Congress decisively to the left.

  “The British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually.” Purna Swaraj—full and com
plete independence for India—was declared and a new campaign of civil disobedience was launched.

  On March 12, 1930, at 6:30 a.m., Gandhi and seventy-eight hand-picked volunteers began their march to the sea from Sabarmati ashram. Twenty-two days later Gandhi, swaddled in a shawl and grasping a walking stick, reached the Arabian Sea at Dandi, where he picked up a handful of salt. This act was deemed illegal because collecting salt subverted the excise duty Britain imposed on it. The photograph was seen around the world. Jawaharlal Nehru, president of Congress, was arrested that day. Gandhi was arrested a month later. Motilal Nehru, made acting president of Congress to replace his son, was arrested in June. All would be released on January 26, 1931, on the first anniversary of their announcement of India’s independence. Motilal died a week later.

  Son River Valley, Mirzapur District,

  December 2, 1929

  After impotence John Auden’s biggest fear was insanity. When the molten heat of the jungle bore down on him like an immense weight, what began as irritation and impatience grew into something uglier. With great effort, he would rein himself back from a venomous rage with the discipline of fieldwork. If he failed to do this, the familiar crescendo would begin in his head. First came self-pity.

  He would never be loved or understood.

  Then came his fears. The bazaar. The coolie at the train station with his thin, quivering, betel-stained lips. The religious fanatic. The jungle. Worst of all was the sniggering outside his tent. Were his men laughing at him? His fears grew larger, riding on the perpetual pain in his gut. He was being poisoned. A few drops from the bottle of hydrochloric acid from his kit in the supper pot would be sufficient.

  Finally, the rupture: a terrifying vision of himself screaming, tearing up maps and notebooks, putting gun to forehead, and pulling the trigger.

  Writing all this down one evening eased some of the pressure. The compulsions of his inner life remained as mysterious to him as the subterranean forces that raised the Himalaya. In these moments of rage and despair, he was overcome with longing for someone who would not condemn him as harshly as he condemned himself, someone to free him from loneliness, someone in whom to dissolve those unremitting carnal desires that tortured his every waking thought. Would he ever find the right woman?

  Stopped once more at the familiar impasse, he turned his attention to the men with whom he shared his days, men without whom he would truly be lost. He recalled how they had led him back through the forest to the camp they had prepared, stepping aside so he could enter first. The Ranigunj tribals had had a similar delicacy. They took care not to stare at him, freeing him from the self-consciousness he felt in the company of his countrymen. He was grateful. He wanted to be some sort of father to them. It would be painful to let them down. With such thoughts in his head, he was finally able to sleep.

  As John Auden waited for tea in the shadow of the Kaimur escarpment the next morning, it occurred to him that the demarcation of the Upper and Lower Vindhyas was too simple. A fourfold classification, comprising the largely marine rock formation of the Semri and the riverine rock of the Kaimur, Rewa, and Bhander, would be more accurate.

  Like the questions arising from the Krol Belt, it was an academic distinction. Still, he liked the way his work dovetailed with the work of other Englishmen, men who once sat in the same wilderness and asked the same questions. At some point he would posit a framework that would stand until another man came along and, noticing a new outcrop, shifted the frame to accommodate the questions it raised. This would hold only until a new anomaly was noticed or a new tool was devised that would enable some future geologist to peer more closely, more deeply into the earth beneath his feet.

  “Arre chalo!” he called out.

  “Chalo aage,” his bearer replied.

  “Chalo aage,” echoed his chaprasi. And they were off.

  CHAPTER 5

  Triangles

  Oxford University, Oxford,

  May 3, 1926

  While Alfred Spender was arguing with Gandhi at Sabarmati ashram, the Secretary of State for India in London was directing the vice-chancellor of Oxford University to extract a written promise from the two students who had presumed to debate the question of India’s freedom with Indians to cease all such talk or be sent down forthwith. The Oxford Union passed a vote of condemnation. The English students’ right to express their political views had been violated. After much canvassing, the vote was reversed. As the Indian students in question were Bengalis, both debates received wide coverage in the Calcutta papers. But the hullabaloo at Oxford was soon quickly forgotten once the general strike of 1926 got under way.

  At the war’s end Great Britain’s coal miners, forced to work eleven shifts a fortnight in crumbling shafts with terrible ventilation, had seen their wages cut drastically. When it seemed that further cuts were in the works, they had nothing more to lose; their families were starving. Coal was their leverage. Though the British Navy had by then transitioned to oil, for over a century English coal had powered the empire. Steamships required coal. Industry required coal. Locomotives required coal. Backed by the prime minister, the mine owners refused to parley, so the Trades Union Congress called for a nationwide strike.

  Though Michael Spender had nearly come to “intellectual blows” with Stephen over becoming a strikebreaker, there was never a doubt in his mind that he would answer the government’s call for engine drivers. Driving a locomotive wasn’t in the least like driving a mail truck or double-decker, he explained to a friend from university. At full throttle, the boiler pressure of the Pendennis Castle engine reached two hundred and twenty pounds to the square inch. Michael’s only concern was that he might be unable to stop the train when it arrived at the station.

  By the second day of the strike there were riots near the East London docks of West Ham and Canning Town. The next day warships began patrolling the Mersey, Tyne, and Plymouth Rivers. By then Michael had his train. “Am not I a man of crisis?” he trumpeted. Approaching Nottingham, he’d had to increase his speed to fifty miles per hour, only to slow again on the climb up through Harrow. Fifty bogies rattled and jostled behind him all the way. He ran one twenty-seven-hour watch, arriving twelve hours late into Marylebone, exhausted but relieved, with dripping crates of fish in the hold. The tense atmosphere up north, the possibility of violent reprisals, underscored the gravity of the moment.

  By the fifth day steelworks and factories began to close for lack of coal and the chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, published the first issue of the British Gazette. England would starve, he thundered. By day eight the military had cordoned off the entire docks complex, cavalrymen and foot battalions joining convoys of armored cars escorting food shipments. Oxbridge undergraduates offloaded vessels before sullen dockworkers. Others, like Wystan Auden and his friend Louis MacNeice, supported the miners.

  Then, after only nine days, the general strike was abruptly called off.

  Still dazed by the glow cast by the firebox and the motion of a train jogging through the dark, Michael returned to Oxford, imagining he now knew the workingman’s daily grind. It was only then that he realized that none of the mayhem the Gazette had foretold ever materialized. Churchill’s threat of a military crackdown, his statement that trade unions had no right to air their grievances was, he now saw, outrageous. Even the Conservative baronet who’d long sparred with his father admitted to Michael that perhaps the danger to the nation had been overdone. Researching an article for Cherwell, the Oxford student paper, Michael learned that during the strike’s final days the government had commandeered the BBC’s nightly programming. His father would have said the Gazette was peddling propaganda, but by the time the strike began, Harold Spender had been in his grave a fortnight.

  Harold’s death on Alfred Spender’s return from India had briefly delayed him from resolving his argument with Gandhi to his own satisfaction. His brother’s will had left the orphaned Spender children in the hands of their grandmother, the tightfist
ed but softhearted Hilda Schuster. But Granny never made a move without consulting Alfred. As the eldest, Michael was expected to shoulder some responsibility when he reached the age of majority. Until then, Alfred undertook to provide guidance, not being blessed with children of his own.

  When Alfred finally sat down to write his India book, he found instructive parallels between the clash of labor and capital in England and the standoff in India. Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement had been something like a general strike, he noted, though of course it went on not for nine days but two years and wreaked a great deal more havoc. And just as the workingman complained of the “Oxford manner” of the gentleman members of Parliament, so did Indians resent the ridicule and contempt heaped on them by the officials of the Indian Civil Service. Alfred was going to sort all this out.

  Like the color bar in South Africa, he began, the notion of swadeshi was conceived in a spirit of racial hatred. Gandhi believed Europeans and natives could not intermingle without destroying each other’s way of life. However earnestly Gandhi might renounce violence and express religious tolerance, an outright fanaticism underlay his perpetual talk of spinning and self-sufficiency. Once every single product of English manufacture was outlawed, Gandhi would surely cast every last Englishman out of India. And just as the general strike intended to overthrow the government, so a renewal of the Non-Cooperation Movement would lead to the unthinkable: the end of the British Raj.

  The Changing East laid out Alfred’s solution. The nineteenth-century officials who once ruled India were able guardians for the simple inhabitants of an unchanging East. But once the natives became fond of modern conveniences, their needs changed. Progress depended not on a return to preindustrial economies based on human labor, such as those that had once existed in late eighteenth-century England, but on a passionate embrace of enlightened, science-assisted, coal-driven development. Men of science were the remedy.