MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ANYONE who had been passing down Regent Street at 3.25 p.m. on the last two Fridays might have observed me standing in a queue outside a shop. Had they been people who are interested in the finer shades of human character, they would have noticed upon my pink-plump face an expression of patience. It was not what is known as angelic patience, nor was it either selfless or resigned : a more acute observer might have con- strued it, not as patience at all, but as impatience manfully controlled. Each of us has his besetting sin, and I am glad to think that I possess a whole kennel of besetting sins, some of them hug: and prancing, like Great Danes, others smug and soft and squat, like Pekinese. But among my pack of besetting sins there is a little fox-terrier called "Impatience," or more usually "Jumps," who rushes in and out of the other dogs giving short sharp yaps. It is the constant companionship, throughout the walks of life, of this affectionate little animal which renders me unsuited to queues. Other men, other women, may be queue-minded, but I am not. gn fact I doubt the comforting talcs which one is sometimes told, to the effect that there are women who actually enjoy queues, finding in them occasions for pleasurable social intercourse. I am consumed (sometimes) with guilt when I compare my fortunate lot with that of those brave women who stand for hours on the pavement with their shopping-baskets in their hands. It makes me understand why the British Housewife, who in my youth was a still undifferentiated figure, should, as the result of two World Wars, have become a tutelary deity, dominating in her chryselephantine panoply the cities which she guards. "With reverence, great Pallas, I salute thee "; but that does not mean that I could ever care for queues.
The queue in which I waited on the first of my two Fridays was a cultured queue. At the head of this static procession I observed a woman of extreme elegance with real pearls about her neck; at the tail of the procession was an eminent physician, exquisitely arrayed and rich in experience and honours. We were waiting, at the door of a jeweller's shop, to enter, two by two, the exhibition of the works of Carl Faberge. I watched the dial of a clock along the street : 3.25 jerked into 3.30 and 3.30 into 3.35. From time to time the door of the shop would open and two satisfied visitors would squeeze out in order to allow two gcpectant visitors to squeeze in. My colleagues in the queue would, at this inter- change, take two sedate steps forward. I became aware, after ten minutes had passed, that Jumps, who until then had behaved with perfect passivity, was starting to twitch. I soothed him with muttered objurgations and a caressing movement of the finger behind his right ear. At the moment, however, a woman (she may have been the owner of the shop, or his sister-in-law, or a vendor of programmes) cut the queue and Jumps began to yap. I glanced to the head of the queue ; the elegant lady with the pearls had, greatly favoured, by then squeezed in ; the distinguished physician behind me was setting an example to the rest of us of impassive distinction. Awed by so fine a standard, Jumps ceased to yap, or rather reduced his yaps to the lower level of a restrained but recurrent hiccup. And then, when the clock reached 3.50, the com- missionaire, who hitherto had remained strong and silent, announced that it was little use our waiting any longer. As I plunged back into the traffic of Regent Street I reflected that I now knew the meaning of a word which, until then, I had suspected and disliked. "This," I said to myself, "is what they all mean when they talk about frustration." Yet, although life may be short, art is long: so I decided that I should again enjoy that queue in the succeeding week.
When, however, at 3.25 p.m. on the following Friday I approached that sector of Regent Street, I observed to my dismay that the pavement was blocked by a queue more formidable than that which I had endured seven days before. On close inspection I discovered that this mass of humanity was not in fact a queue, but a double row of onlookers neatly ranged on each side of the entrance. "The exhibition," the commissionaire informed me, "is closed till 4.15. We arc expecting Royalty." Jumps, being a creature of deep monarchical reverence, was not at all irritated by this pronouncement ; on the contrary, he was impressed ; we walked away together in silence, reflecting upon the mutability of human fortune, the renewed applicability of that horrid word " frustration " and the charm of a stratified society. No longer (since I am determined not to try a third time) could I hope to see again the assembled artifices of Carl Faberge; the pleasures of hope were replaced by the pleasures of memory. I recalled that small well-lighted shop beyond the wide arch which led from the square of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. The snow in the roadway was the colour of sand ; the snow which edged the deep red pediments and lintels of the Winter Palace was dazzling white. The feet of the horses in the roadway made a rapid muffled sound ; the feet of the pedestrians upon the pavement flopped and slopped in snow-boots or galoshes. One thus pushed the door and entered the warm and brilliant shop of Carl Faberge.
The first impression was that of numerous soup-tureens and epergnes ranged upon the shelves. The former were squat and heavy, and their bases were decorated with fat blobs of silver suggestive of salt-water vegetation. The latter were intricate, many-branched and light, and their stems and filigree were distorted into the water-lily motif of art nouveau. They were ugly objects and made one sad. In the show-cases around the shop were all manner of boxes, cigarette cases, ink-stands, blotting books and eggs. Many of these things had been composed of hard-stones bearing lovely Yellow Book names : —obsidian, chalcedony, chrysoprase, lapis, jasper, onyx, jade and porphyry. Others were encased in that delicate enamel for which Carl Faberge was so justly famed. Beautiful they looked in their neat white boxes, and it was only sad experience that taught one that, if taken out of their boxes, they were apt to chip or fleck and lose their translucent loveliness. The cigarette-cases did not take my fancy. The grandest of them were made of different-coloured gold, heavily fluted and having thumb-pieces of emerald or moon-stone. They hung heavily in the pocket, making one feel as if one had taken a hammer and two secateurs out to dine. I was reproved for not admiring the cigarette-cases ; I was told that I must revere the hinges. I admit that no hinges ever looked less like hinges than the wonderful contraptions which Monsieur Faberge's artificers contrived ; yet, being a modernist in such affairs, I prefer hinges to look like hinges and not like something, however ingeniously, else. I was told that I must admire the quaint little animals carved from hard-stones and enriched with jewel eyes. Now and then, I confess, one was astounded by the skill with which the craftsmen had used the natural configuration of the material to twist it into unnatural shapes. Some- times even they would achieve an object as perfect, within its limited scope, as the ornaments of Catherine II in the adjoining Hermitage. But I remain unmoved by an agate bull-dog with tourmaline eyes.
I had hoped that, if forty years later I had been permitted to visit the Faberge exhibition in Regent Street, these untutored prejudices might have disappeared. I must now study the vast work of Mr. Bainbridge to discover whether what I once took for con- summate artifice may not after all be art. Since I recognise that my young distaste for these objects was coloured, and perhaps caused, by the growing pains of social conscience. These costly trinkets appeared to me as symbols of the horrid disparities of Tsarist Russia. Inside that warm and brilliant shop the silly enamelled eggs would be laid out upon a black velvet napkin ; outside the rime gathered slowly on the coachman's beard. How crude, how ignorant, how sentimental, I must have been when young!
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