A friend of mine found himself the other day on the platform of a
country station in the south of Scotland near the sea-coast. A
middle-aged couple were the only people visible, and they sat
together on the single form provided for waiting passengers. They
did not speak, but just sat and gazed at the rails, at the opposite
platform, at the fields beyond, at the clouds above, at anything, in
fact, within the range of vision. My friend went and sat beside them
to wait for his train. Presently another person, a woman, appeared,
and advancing to the other two, addressed them. She wondered what
train the couple were waiting for. Was their holiday over?
"Oh no," said the woman. "We've another week yet."
"Then maybe ye're waiting for a friend?" speired the other.
"No," replied the woman. "We're juist sitting. We like to come here
in the evening and see the trains come in and out. It's a change,
and it makes us think of home. Eh," she said, with a sudden fervour
that spoke of inward agonies, "you do miss your home comforts on a
holiday."
I fancy this excellent woman, sitting on the platform to watch the
trains go homewards, and yearning for the day to come when she will
take a seat in one of them, disclosed a secret which many of us
share, but few of us have the courage to confess. She was bored by
her holiday. It was her annual Purgatory, her time of exile by the
alien waters of Babylon. There she sat while the commonplaces of her
home life, her comfortable bed, the mysteries of her larder, the
gossip of her neighbours, the dusting of the front parlour, the
trials of shopping, her good man's going and returning, the mending
of the children's stockings, and all the little
somethings-and-nothings that made up her daily round, assumed a
glamour and a pathos that familiarity had deadened. She had to go
away from home to discover it again. She had to get out of her rut
in order to find that she could not be happy anywhere else. Then she
could say with Touchstone, "So this is the forest of Arden: well,
when I was at home I was in a better place."
It does not follow that her holiday was a failure. It was a most
successful holiday. The main purpose of a holiday is to make us
home-sick. We go to the forest of Arden in order that we may be
reconciled to No. 14, Beulah Avenue, Peckham. We sit and throw
stones on the beach in the sunshine until we get sick of doing
nothing in particular, and dream of the 8.32 from Tooting as the
children of Israel dreamed of the fat pastures of Canaan. We climb
the Jungfrau and explore the solitudes of the glaciers so that we can
recover the rapture of Clapham Common and the felicities of Hampstead
Heath. We endure the dreary formalities of hotel life and the petty
larcenies of the boarding-house in order that we may enjoy with
renewed zest the ease and liberties of our own fireside.
In short, we go on a holiday for the pleasure of coming back. The
humiliating truth is, of course, providentially concealed from us.
If it were not, we should stay at home and never see it afresh
through the pleasant medium of distance and separation. But no
experience of past disillusions dims the glow of the holiday emotion.
I have no doubt that the couple on the platform set out from Auld
Reekie with the delight of children let out from school. We all know
the feeling. "Behold ... Beyond ..." cried young Ruskin when the
distant vision of the snowy battlements of the Oberland first burst
on his astonished eyes. "Behold ... Beyond," we cry as we pile up
the luggage and start on the happy pilgrimage. And the emotion is
worth having, even though we know it will end in a sigh of relief
when we reach No. 14, Beulah Avenue again and sink into the familiar
arm-chair and mow the bit of lawn that has grown shaggy in our
absence, and exchange reminiscences with No. 13 over the fence, and
feel the pleasant web of habit enveloping us once more.
It is when the holiday is over that we begin to enjoy it. Then we
come, as Gissing says, under the law that wills that the day must die
before we can enjoy to the full its light and odour. We are never,
by the perversity of our nature, quite so happy as we think we were
after the event had become a memory, and no doubt by next spring the
couple who sat on the station platform watching the homeward-bound
trains with longing eyes will recall the gay holiday they had without
a suspicion that they welcomed the end of it as children welcome
release from school. The illusion will only mean that they are a
little sick of home again, and that they need the violent medicine of
a holiday to make them home-sick once more.