PEOPLE AND THINGS
By HAROLD NICOLSON
I FLEW to France the other day in a mood of melancholy.
It was a wet and wind-swept morning and the wide wings of the aeroplane glistened with scudding rain. Below them, through the sleet, slid the orange woods of England, and thereafter an iron-coloured sea was streaked with bars of foam. As we approached the French coast the sky lightened ; a pale gleam of sunshine touched the cabin windows with a wet finger ; and then suddenly we swung into a lake of blue sky and below us shone a little Norman harbour which I have known and loved for many years.
My melancholy did not leave me. The past loomed as an aching memory, and the future as an aching apprehension. I looked down sadly upon the coloured forests, upon the clear straight roads, upon the towns and villages clustering round their mairie and their church. " In every one of those houses," I thought, " is some heart torn with anxiety or weighed down by depression."
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