Nothing is more pleasant than to see suddenly endowed with motion a
thing stagnant by nature. The hat that on the head of the man in the
street is nothing to us, how much it is if it be animated by a gust of
wind! There is no churl that does not rejoice with it in its strength,
and in the swiftness and cunning that baffle its pursuer, who, he too,
when the chase is over, bears it no ill will at all for its escapade. I
know families that have sat for hours, for hours after bedtime, mute, in
a dim light, pressing a table with their finger-tips, and ever bringing
to bear the full force of their minds on it, in the unconquerable hope
that it would move. Conversely, nothing is more dismal than to see set
in permanent rigidness a thing whose aspect is linked for us with
the idea of great mobility. Even the blithest of us and least easily
depressed would make a long detour to avoid a stuffed squirrel or a case
of pinned butterflies. And you can well imagine with what a sinking of
the heart I beheld, this morning, on a road near the coast of Norfolk, a
railway-car without wheels.
Without wheels though it was, it had motion--of a kind; of a kind worse
than actual stagnation. Mounted on a very long steam-lorry that
groaned and panted, it very slowly passed me. I noted that two of its
compartments were marked FIRST, the rest THIRD. And in some of them, I
noted, you might smoke. But of this opportunity you were not availing
yourself. All the compartments, the cheap and the dear alike, were
vacant. They were transporting air only--and this (I conceived)
abominable. The sun slanted fiercely down on the old iron roof, the old
wooden walls, the dingy shut windows. The fume and grime of a thousand
familiar tunnels, of year after year of journeys by night, journeys by
day, from time immemorial, seemed to have invested the whole structure
with a character that shrank from the sun’s scrutiny and from the
nearness of sea and fields. Fuliginous, monstrous, slowly, shamefully,
the thing went by--to what final goal?--in the lovely weather.
There attended it, besides the driver of the lorry, a straggling retinue
of half-a-dozen men on foot--handy-looking mechanics, very dusty.
I should have liked to question one or another of these as to their
mission. But I was afraid to do so. There is an art of talking
acceptably to people who do not regard themselves as members of one’s
own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is to
forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so wildly
cordial for fear of seeming to ‘condescend,’ nor be more than a trifle
saturnine, either, for the same motive. Or am I wrong? The whole thing
is a mystery to me. All I know is that if I had asked those mechanics
what they were doing with that railway car they would have seemed to
suspect me of meaning that it was my property and that they had
stolen it. Or perhaps they would have seemed merely to resent my idle
curiosity. If so, why not? When I walk abroad with a sheaf of manuscript
in my hand, mechanics do not stop me to ask ‘What’s that? What’s it
about? Who’s going to publish it?’ Nor is this because, times having
changed so, they are afraid of seeming to condescend. They always did
mind their own business. And now that their own business is so much more
lucrative than mine they still follow that golden rule.
I stood gazing back at the procession till it disappeared round a
bend of the road. Its bequest of dust and smoke was quickly spent by a
prodigal young breeze. Landscape and seascape were reindued with their
full amenities. Ruskin would have been pleased. So indeed was I; but
that railway-car (in which, it romantically struck me, I myself might
once, might frequently, have travelled) was still upmost in my brooding
mind. To what manner of wretched end was it destined? No end would
have seemed bad enough for it to Ruskin. But I was born late enough to
acquiesce in railways and in all that pertains to them. And now, since
the success of motor-cars (those far greater, because unrestricted,
bores), railways have taken on for me some such charm as the memory
of the posting coaches had for the greybeards of my boyhood, some such
charm as aeroplanes may in the fulness of time foist down for us on
motor-cars. ‘But I rove,’ like Sir Thomas More. And I seem to think that
a cheap literary allusion will make you excuse that vice. To resume my
breathless narrative I decided that I would slowly follow the tracks of
the lorry.
I supposed that these were leading me to some great scrapping-place
filled with the remains of other railway-cars foully scrapped for some
fell industrial purpose. But this was a bad guess. The tracks led me
at last through a lane and thence into sight of a little bay, on whose
waters were perceptible the deck heads of sundry human beings, and on
its sands the full-lengths of sundry other human beings in bath-robes,
reading novels or merely basking. There was nowhere any sign of
industrialism. More than ever was I intrigued as to the fate of the old
railway-car that I had been stalking. It and its lorry had halted on the
flat grassy land that fringed the sands. This land was dominated by a
crescent of queer little garish tenements, the like of which I had never
seen, nor would wish to see again. They did not stand on the ground, but
on stakes of wood and shafts of brick, six feet or so above the ground’s
level, and were led up to by flights of wooden steps that tried not
to look like ladders. They displeased me much. They had little railed
platforms round them, and things hanging out to dry on the railings;
and their walls vied unneighbourly with one another in lawless
colour-schemes. One tenement was salmon-pink with wide bands of scarlet,
another sky-blue with a key-pattern in orange, and so on around the
whole little horrid array. And I deduced, from certain upstanding stakes
and shafts at the nearer end of the crescent, that the horror was not
complete yet. A suspicion dawned in me, and became, while I gazed again
at the crescent’s facades, a glaring certainty; in the light of which I
saw that I had been wrong about the old railway-car. Defunct, it was not
to die. It was to have a new function.
I had once heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into
sea-side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor
protruded in my memory. To-day, as an eye-witness of the accomplished
fact, I was impressed, sharply enough, and I went nearer to the
crescent, drawn by a sort of dreadful fascination. I found that the
cottages all had names. One cottage was Mermaid’s Rock; another (which
had fluttering window-curtains of Stuart tartan), Spray o’ the Sea;
another, The Nest; another, Brinynook; and yet another had been named,
with less fitness, but in an ampler and to me more interesting spirit,
Petworth. I looked from them to the not-yet-converted railway-car. It
had a wonderful dignity. In its austere and monumental way, it was
very beautiful. It was a noble work of man, and Nature smiled on it. I
wondered with what colours it was to be bejezebelled, and what
name--Bolton Abbey?--Glad Eye?--Gay Wee Gehenna?--it would have to bear,
and what manner of man or woman was going to rent it.
It was on this last point that I mused especially. The housing problem
is hard, doubtless; but nobody, my mind protested as I surveyed the
crescent, nobody is driven to so desperate a solution of it as this!
There are tents, there are caves, there are hollow trees...and there
are people who prefer--this! Yes, ‘this’ is a positive taste, not a
necessity at all. I swept the bay with a searching eye; but heads on
the surface of water tell nothing to the sociologist, and in bath-robes
even full-lengths on the sand give him no clue. Three or four of the
full-lengths had risen and strolled up to the lorry, around which the
mechanics were engaged in some dispute of a technical nature. I hoped
the full-lengths would have something to say too. But they said nothing.
This I set down to sheer perversity. I was more than three miles from
the place where I am sojourning, and the hour for luncheon was nearly
due. I left the bay without having been able to determine the character,
the kind, of its denizens.
I take it there is a strong tincture of Bohemianism in them. Mr. Desmond
MacCarthy, of whose judgment I am always trustful, has said that the
hallmark of Bohemianism is a tendency to use things for purposes to
which they are not adapted. You are a Bohemian, says Mr. MacCarthy, if
you would gladly use a razor for buttering your toast at breakfast, and
you aren’t if you wouldn’t. I think he would agree that the choice of
a home is a surer index than any fleeting action, however strange, and
that really the best-certified Bohemians are they who choose to reside
in railway-cars on stilts. But--why particularly railway-cars? That is
a difficult question. A possible answer is that the Bohemian, as tending
always to nomady, feels that the least uncongenial way of settling
down is to stow himself into a thing fashioned for darting hither and
thither. Yet no, this answer won’t do. It is ruled out by the law I laid
down in my first paragraph. There’s nothing sadder to eye or heart than
a very mobile thing made immovable.
No house, especially if you are by way of being nomadic, can be so ill
to live in as one that in its heyday went gadding all over the place.
And, on the other hand, what house more eligible than one that can gad?
I myself am not restless, and am fond of comfort: I should not care to
live in a caravan. But I have always liked the idea of a caravan. And if
you, alas, O reader, are a dweller in a railway-car, I commend the idea
to you. Take it, with my apologies for any words of mine that may have
nettled you. Put it into practice. Think of the white road and the
shifting hedgerows, and the counties that you will soon lose count of.
And think what a blessing it will be for you to know that your house is
not the one in which the Merstham Tunnel murder was committed.