Victoria Station is every morning the scene of a daily romance--the
departure of the Continental boat expresses. When the fog comes and
the rain and the driving sleet, and every Londoner loathes London
just a little, I can extract a certain pale kind of pleasure by
buying a penny platform ticket and watching other people start off to
the snow or the sun.
I can never decide whether the act of extracting enjoyment from other
people's luck is the lowest or the highest form of fun. There is
always a sting in the tail of it.
* * *
When you love travel, and have lost count of the number of times the
chocolate-coloured Pullmans have whirled you through Kent to the edge
of the sea and on to far places, this morning assembly of travellers
shakes you to the heart. You know what is in store for them. You
follow them down to Dover; you see them in the swift Channel boat;
you hear the blue-bloused porters of Calais crying "Soixante-dix,
m'sieu. I meet you at ze douane!" You visualize the idiotic fight
in the French Customs; you see the long Paris Rapide waiting with
steam up, the wrinkled old Frenchwomen in white caps and knitted
black shawls who sell fruit, and you hear the funny little penny
whistle like a child's trumpet that sends this great train racketing
and thundering through France, or Basle and Switzerland, or
Marseilles, and then--oh, marvellous far places in Africa!
Which is more wonderful? To awaken at the Swiss frontier with snow
muffling a cotton-wool world of chasms and peaks, or to awaken in the
sunlight of Southern France to a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean?
* * *
That wide, hedgeless plain with its silver-grey olive trees, its
red-roofed houses, and its vignettes of rustic activity; little men
in fields walking behind the plough, at stable doors bringing out a
solemn, ragged mule, give me that. And give me, too, the
ever-recurring joy of the uncomfortable swinging French _wagon
restaurant_ full of various people: Englishmen who look so comically
English as soon as they cross the Channel, Frenchmen whose black
spade beards cascade over white table-napkins which they tuck into
their collars before they devour their food with Gallic avidity, and
the good-looking Parisienne with her carmine mouth and her finicky,
much-manicured hands breaking bread and salting meat while her big,
emotional eyes sweep over and beyond the bald heads of appraising
British husbands.
"Liqueur, m'sieu?"
The man with the tray of little bright bottles staggers up and,
notable sight, the elderly virgin of some distant vicarage sips an
unusual brandy. Marvellous France!
So, knowing all this so well, I watched the boat train crowds with
the keenest enjoyment the other morning. There were girls who would
be tumbling about in the snow before many days were gone, or sitting
in the palish summer of the Riviera in white, pleated skirts. There
went the hardened traveller with the well-worn rucksacks and the
skis, the excited, flushed traveller making a first journey,
and--lucky fellow--a man with a white pith helmet over his arm.
Nothing is more awkward to pack than a pith helmet. Even socks and
shaving tackle will not sit comfortably in it. When carried with an
air it advertises the fact that you are not a mere Swiss fan or a
poor Riviera lizard, but an honest-to-goodness traveller, possibly
even an explorer. In the Channel boat people will look at you as you
bear this symbol of the sun on your arm. You will stand out above
all others. Perhaps in the bar some one will say:
"Going far?" and you can flick the ash of your cigarette carelessly
and say:
"No; only to Timbuctoo!"
A great thing is a sun helmet!
Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks
full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses
which she will accumulate in Paris. There was a pale woman who had
obviously been ordered South. Her husband stood beside the Pullman
door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just
before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet
in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her
eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand. Yes; there
are such husbands!
All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually
filled. At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a
weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel
crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu
wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole.
* * *
Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express
slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health
and pleasure. A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail
coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted
by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed
on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris.
As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels
seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white
roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship....