MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IKNOW of few pleasures in life more satisfying than that of visiting places which one has read abcz_it in books. Whether it be Syracuse or Philadelphia, Ujiji or Nether Stowey, one always finds that the picture formed in the imagination is both modified and enhanced by the reality. To extract their full value from such experiences two things are necessary. One must have soaked one- self in the literature of the period, so that one's mind is as a sponge, filled in every pore with the thought and voices of those who, -so long ago, inhabited these sites. And the sites themselves in the interval must not have been changed beyond all recognition. It is little use visiting Cheyne Row unless one has read the Carlyle papers and unless their innumerable detail is still vivid in the memory ; but to those who are thus equipped the little house still retains the flavour of Jane Carlyle's domestic acerbities and the very boards of the staircase echo with her plaints. It is little use, again, being steeped in the knowledge of Byron's Genoa period only to find that the Casa Saltizzo has ceased to be a country villa but has become a suburban residence, below the windows of which the trams scream and clang. There are some• places, however, which have retained their focus and their atmosphere throughout the centuries. We can lean upon the parapet of the bridge at Pisa and see unchanged the ochre frontages at which Shelley gazed. The atmosphere of Somersby rectory has remained almost unaltered from the days when Arthur Hallam and Miss Tennyson read Petrarch together upon the lawn. Dove Cottage is much the same. And from the upper room at Hauteville House one can look upon much the same com- binations of town and sea as those upon which Hugo gazed with angry eyes. I have been visiting this week certain sites and houses in Switzerland with which the characters in a book I am writing were intimately identified. Some of these houses have been so altered that they have lost all meaning and association ; in the court- yards of others the fountain still plays exactly the same tune.
* * * * The excitement which I derived from this experience was modified, and almost clouded, by the ordeals of modern travel and by the mist of strained expectancy which hangs over Europe. I admit that two hundred years ago a journey from Calais to Geneva must have led to even greater exhaustion. Those heavy travelling carriages, swung high upon their springs, must have rocked and lurched along the cobbles with the movement of a rowing boat in a choppy sea ; and we know from many diaries that travel-sickness was a frequent discomfort. In addition to this, axles were always breaking, wheels were always becoming stuck in the mud, ostlers were often rude and incompetent, and inns when reached at last were either squalid or over full. But our ancestors, when they rumbled across Europe, had at least two advantages which are now denied us. On reaching their destination they retired to bed for two whole days ; they did not expect, and were -not expected, to emerge from their swaying berlins as fit members of society ; they were washed and put away until they had recovered from the voyage. And, above all perhaps, they did not have to stand in queues. I am not one of those who waste their time in lamenting the rich and easy past ; I r .efer to indulge in hopes of a fairer and less selfish future ; but I confess that this queue system seems to be a rash or herpes which is defacing the visage of our civilisation. My heart goes out to those house- wives whose every morning is rendered hideous by having to stand in queues ; I blaze with civic wrath when I observe the privileged or the asocial cutting queues ; but I admit that of all forms of human endeavour that of queue-standing seems to me the most obnoxious.
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It is not only that I am an impatient man with a temperamental loathing of having to stand and wait. It is not merely that I am an individualist in some things, and that I tend to attribute these unexplained delays to the lethargy and lack of consideration of minor officials. It is worse than that. From an objective analysis of my own experience I have come to the conclusion that at my christen-
ing some wicked fairy laid a curse upon me. "This boy," she said, "will be unlucky in queues." Those who stand behind me are certainly queue-lucky, since they have in front of them a man who does not incommode them with an enormous rucksack on the out- side of which are strapped water-bottles and enamel basins, but who, with passport or landing ticket neatly outstretched, passes quickly by. But I, whatever precautions I may take, always find myself behind the one person in the whole queue who causes the greatest delay. There is the woman who, on reaching the barrier, will suddenly become aware that it is her passport which the man requires. The suitcase which she holds in her right hand is dumped quickly upon my toes ; from the recesses of the dressing-case which she holds in her left hand she extracts—panting slightly—a reticule ; from the inside of the reticule, after much frantic fumbling, a wallet is produced ; and finally with a gesture of triumph she hands the passport-collector her ticket from Dover to Victoria. My ill-fortune with Customs officials is also singular ; I have for years noticed that these officials when they reach my place in the row throw me a brief glance of weariness and then begin again at the other end of the line. And when at last they reach my place in the tired phalanx it is always the man next to me whose imports of rayon stockings and watches entail prolonged accountancy. The wicked fairy chuckles behind my back.
Mr. Bevin at Bournemouth stated that the aim of his foreign policy was to create conditions such as would enable any man to take a ticket at Victoria and without further worry to travel to any foreign country that he wished. This remark was treated as a jocular aside. It was in fact a profound definition of policy. Since if I could indeed travel from London to Tomsk armed only with a railway ticket, it would mean that political security, economic stability and international confidence had at last been achieved. I doubt whether in the lifetime of even the youngest of us these most desirable conditions will be established. When one travels abroad today one has the impression, as I said, of tense expectancy. Never in the last hundred and fifty years has there been so deep and wide- spread a sense of insecurity. In Switzerland, of course, the first impression is one of a safe and prosperous land, immune to our own difficulties and dangers. The refreshment trolleys on the platforms are heavy with chocolates, bananas and cream cakes ; the shop windows are packed with commodities (many of them—I am glad to say—of British manufacture) which we are unable to buy at home. But this first impression is not of long duration. In the streets, in the shops, and in the banks the Swiss make no effort to disguise their apprehensions. "How is all this to end? " they ask one, "How is it to end?" And who among us would venture with any con- fidence to provide a firm or hopeful answer to so direct a question? We hover indeed between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.
The Swiss with whom I spoke, however (and they were of every type), did not seem to have abandoned themselves to despair. Even if one discounts their natural courtesy towards an Englishman, one could not but be impressed and stimulated by the trust which they repose in this country. The confidence which they place in 'our powers of endurance—a confidence which for them is personified by Mr. Churchill—leads them to believe that we shall be able to point the middle way between the materialism of the United States and the totalitarianism of Russia. They believe that we, with our gift for self-imposed discipline, will be able within the next three years to recover much of our economic stability, and to show by our example that the words Social Democracy are something more than a mere phrase. Our handling of the Indian problem has made an impression greater than our mishandling of the Exodus.' Are they mistaken in these hopes and beliefs? I do not think O.
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