Thank heaven! I have caught it.... I am in a corner seat, the compartment
is not crowded, the train is about to start, and for an hour and a half,
while we rattle towards that haven of solitude on the hill that I have
written of aforetime, I can read, or think, or smoke, or sleep, or talk, or
write as I choose. I think I will write, for I am in the humour for
writing. Do you know what it is to be in the humour for writing--to feel
that there is a head of steam somewhere that must blow off? It isn't so
much that you have something you want to say as that you must say
something. And, after all, what does the subject matter? Any peg will do to
hang your hat on. The hat is the thing. That saying of Rameau fits the idea
to perfection. Some one was asking that great composer if he did not find
difficulty in selecting a subject. "Difficulty? A subject?" said Rameau.
"Not at all. One subject is as good as another. Here, bring me the _Dutch
Gazette_."
That is how I feel now, as the lights of London fade in our wake and the
fresh air of the country blows in at the window. Subject? Difficulty? Here
bring me the _Dutch Gazette_. But while any subject would serve there is
one of particular interest to me at this moment. It came into my mind as I
ran along the platform just now. It is the really important subject of
catching trains. There are some people who make nothing of catching trains.
They can catch trains with as miraculous an ease as Cinquevalli catches
half-a-dozen billiard-balls. I believe they could catch trains in their
sleep. They are never too early and never too late. They leave home or
office with a quiet certainty of doing the thing that is simply stupefying.
Whether they walk, or take a bus, or call a taxi, it is the same: they do
not hurry, they do not worry, and when they find they are in time and that
there's plenty of room they manifest no surprise.
I have in mind a man with whom I once went walking among the mountains on
the French-Italian border. He was enormously particular about trains and
arrangements the day or the week before we needed them, and he was
wonderfully efficient at the job. But as the time approached for catching a
train he became exasperatingly calm and leisured. He began to take his time
over everything and to concern himself with the arrangements of the next
day or the next week, as though he had forgotten all about the train that
was imminent, or was careless whether he caught it or not. And when at last
he had got to the train, he began to remember things. He would stroll off
to get a time-table or to buy a book, or to look at the engine--especially
to look at the engine. And the nearer the minute for starting the more
absorbed he became in the mechanism of the thing, and the more animated was
his explanation of the relative merits of the P.L.M. engine and the
North-Western engine. He was always given up as lost, and yet always
stepped in as the train was on the move, his manner aggravatingly
unruffled, his talk pursuing the quiet tenor of his thought about engines
or about what we should do the week after next.
Now I am different. I have been catching trains all my life, and all my
life I have been afraid I shouldn't catch them. Familiarity with the habits
of trains cannot get rid of a secret conviction that their aim is to give
me the slip if it can be done. No faith in my own watch can affect my
doubts as to the reliability of the watch of the guard or the station clock
or whatever deceitful signal the engine-driver obeys. Moreover, I am
oppressed with the possibilities of delay on the road to the station. They
crowd in on me like the ghosts into the tent of King Richard. There may be
a block in the streets, the bus may break down, the taxi-driver may be
drunk or not know the way, or think I don't know the way, and take me round
and round the squares as Tony Lumpkin drove his mother round and round the
pond, or--in fact, anything may happen, and it is never until I am safely
inside (as I am now) that I feel really happy.
Now, of course this is a very absurd weakness. I ought to be ashamed to
confess it. I am ashamed to confess it. And that is the advantage of
writing under a pen name. You can confess anything you like, and nobody
thinks any the worse of you. You ease your own conscience, have a gaol
delivery of your failings--look them, so to speak, straight in the face,
and pass sentence on them--and still enjoy the luxury of not being found
out. You have all the advantages of a conviction without the nuisance of
the penalty. Decidedly, this writing under a pen name is a great easement
of the soul.
It reminds me of an occasion on which I was climbing with a famous rock
climber. I do not mind confessing (over my pen name) that I am not good on
rocks. My companion on the rope kept addressing me at critical moments by
the name of Saunders. My name, I rejoice to say, is not Saunders, and he
knew it was not Saunders, but he had to call me something, and in the
excitement of the moment could think of nothing but Saunders. Whenever I
was slow in finding a handhold or foothold, there would come a stentorian
instruction to Saunders to feel to the right or the left, or higher up or
lower down. And I remember that I found it a great comfort to know that it
was not I who was so slow, but that fellow Saunders. I seemed to see him as
a laborious, futile person who would have been better employed at home
looking after his hens. And so in these articles, I seem again to be
impersonating the ineffable Saunders, of whom I feel at liberty to speak
plainly. I see before me a long vista of self-revelations, the real title
of which ought to be "The Showing Up of Saunders."
But to return to the subject. This train-fever is, of course, only a
symptom. It proceeds from that apprehensiveness of mind that is so common
and incurable an affliction. The complaint has been very well satirised by
one who suffered from it. "I have had many and severe troubles in my life,"
he said, "_but most of them never happened_." That is it. We people who
worry about the trains and similar things live in a world of imaginative
disaster. The heavens are always going to fall on us. We look ahead, like
Christian, and see the lions waiting to devour us, and when we find they
are only poor imitation lions, our timorous imagination is not set at rest,
but invents other lions to scare us out of our wits.
And yet intellectually we know that these apprehensions are worthless.
Experience has taught us that it is not the things we fear that come to
pass, but the things of which we do not dream. The bolt comes from the
blue. We take elaborate pains to guard our face, and get a thump in the
small of the back. We propose to send the fire-engine to Ulster, and turn
to see Europe in flames. Cowper put the case against all "fearful saints"
(and sinners) when he said:
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and will break
With blessings on your head.
It is the clouds you don't dread that swamp you. Cowper knew, for he too
was an apprehensive mortal, and it is only the apprehensive mortal who
really knows the full folly of his apprehensiveness.
Now, save once, I have never lost a train in my life. The exception was at
Calais when the Brussels express did, in defiance of the time-table, really
give me and others the slip, carrying with it my bag containing my clothes
and the notes of a most illuminating lecture. I chased that bag all through
Northern France and Belgium, inquiring at wayside stations, wiring to
junctions, hunting among the mountains of luggage at Lille.
It was at Lille that---But the train is slowing down. There is the slope of
the hillside, black against the night sky, and among the trees I see the
glimmer of a light beckoning me as the lonely lamp in Greenhead Ghyll used
to beckon Wordsworth's Michael. The night is full of stars, the landscape
glistens with a late frost: it will be a jolly two miles' tramp to that
beacon on the hill.