MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IF fiscal conditions permitted. I should in every two months spend one long week-end abroad. The suddenness of such displacement, the actual jog and jerk of travel, are as good for the liver as a morning ride in the park. The short time- exposure necessitated by these rapid visits permits the shutter of alertness to open for a few seconds only, before falling back into the groove of habit ; but in those seconds a clear-cut light is received. The pleasures of recapturing old associations or form- ing fresh impressions are enhanced by the speed of passage. There is no time for lethargy with her moth wings to soften the sharpness of impression ; no time for new ruts of routine to form ; the sponge-bag does not dry upon the hook. It is important, however, that these snap-shot journeys should be undertaken by sea or land and not by air. Air-transport is suited only for long distances, when the aching boredom of this method of conveyance can be mitigated by the thought that one has completed in ten hours a journey that should have lasted for ten days. I do not myself find that thought very enlivening, any more than I experience tingling delight at the realisation that I can telephone, whereas my grandfather could not. Hurry in itself is not one of the major aims of human endeavour ; it is merely one of the effective methods of saving time. Nor can any person who has ever experienced the delights of travel find pleasure in being inserted into a metal cylinder, propelled unconsciously across vast spaces, and then decanted with a slight pop upon some distant aerodrome ; no person of even average human perception should relish being handled like the invoices and coins that are hurtled backwards and forwards across some emporiums in pneumatic tubes. Quick journeys only provide the maximum value if undertaken in trains.
* * * Never so long as I live and my brain retains even one per cent.
of its activity shall I cease to be filled with wonder at the supreme moment of sleeping-car experience: the moment when one hooks the blind from its small stud, allows it to creep up the window, and lies back to see a wholly new landscape sliding past one's angle of vision. 'Those who share with me the ecstasy of this sudden experience will understand better than others when I say that short sharp journeys to the Continent provide a stimulus more intense than the ordinary prolonged visit. One may have driven the night before through wet and shining streets to the Gare de Lyon, observing how the crowds on the boulevards will cluster under dripping café awnings, wait- ing for the storm to pass. One may have heard the rain clattering upon the glass roof of the station and observed the wet leather capes of the policemen escorting the mail trolleys towards the train. As night descends, the large panes of the corridor windows are slashed diagonally by lit streaks of water ; the train shakes and rumbles onwards through the dripping night. And next morning, when one wakes, when that wonderful encounter occurs with the blind and its small stud, there suddenly is a rushing landscape, lit with a light such as (were the quotation not so wearied) one might describe as upusual on sea or land. For surely that first fall of sunshine upon the Provence landscape is among the most miraculous of unnatural phenomena, appearing to be as artificial as the rose-madder glow that illuminates the small panorama boxes in the windows of travel agencies. Black and wet was the world but a few hours before ; and now pink, golden and blue. Yet within a morning these colours will have lost their magic : by the same afternoon one will glance at the Mediterranean scene without surprise.
* * * * Quickness of contrast, I repeat. is the thing to jerk the liver. One day in Paris, three days in the south, will make the whole world glisten afresh: prolong the week-end into a fortnight, and the dew dries upon the leaf. Last week, for instance, I spent twenty dark wet hours in Paris and three cloudless days and nights beside the Mediterranean. 1 found that these successive changes of climate and atmosphere enabled my mind for the moment to lose something of its suet quality. I am not saying that the hours I passed in Paris were the most exciting that I have ever experienced in that capital of civilisation. It rained confirm. ously ; there hung a yellow fog upon the city of light ; the chestnut trees were fading and dripped. The more ancient of my French friends did not appear to me, to be in a mood of exuberant optimism. They looked forward with apprehension to the impending elections, observing sadly that every alternative seemed bad. If the Gaullists increased their representation, grave trouble might result ; if the Communists secured a heavy vote, they could claim some key ministries and then all manner of purifications and infiltrations would result ; yet if, as seemed more probable, the elections resulted in something like the present balance of parties, then France would again be exposed to a succession of weak governments, unable to check inflation and incapable of bringing the war in Indo-China to a quick successful end. It would be so easy, these old men murmured, for things to get much worse: so difficult, so terribly difficult, for them to be rendered much better. I felt that they were glad to reflect that they were old enough to have witnessed the triumphs of the Third Republic and too old to survivegthe decadence of its successors.
There the next morning was the Mediterranean, sparkling with gaiety and strength. Its beaches were peopled by young men and maidens, burnt to the hue of dark chocolate, their teeth flashing white as they threw to each other enormous woollen balls, or affixed across their eyes those large sea-goggles, armed with which and a harpoon they pursue the monsters of the deep. I did not address these adolescents while they basked or battled, having the taste to recognise that it would have been even more unseemly if the elders had actually spoken to Susanna. But in the evenings, seated above the little harbour on the terrace of an inn, looking down at the masts of the small yachts swaying slowly against the stars, I was able to enter into conversation with some of the younger generation and to ask them what they thought about the future of Europe and that of France. The only point on which they appeared to possess any unanimity was their insistence that nobody really cared about the impend• ing elections, that the politicians had ruined France in any case and that it was unfortunate that I, an Englishman, should pay the slightest attention to anything that was said to me by the " old defeatists of the Palais Bourbon." If another war came, then France might again be occupied, but the Resistance this time would be even 'better organised and more effective. I should remember, they said, that, however much Frenchmen may suspect each other, France herself was immortal. " That is a lovely phrase," I said to them. " But only a phrase."
* * * • * Are such contrasts wholly misleading ? Am I unduly im- pressed, as I was impressed at Algiers in 1943, by the aston- ishing resilience of French young men ? Do their perhaps ignorant jactitations, their gay vauntings when speaking to a foreigner, possess no weight at all in comparison to the gloomy laments of my own contemporaries ? Wet fog in one place ; in the other glistening muscle. Had I remained longer, I should assuredly have decided that the pessimism of the aged was more firmly based than the exuberance of the young. But I did not remain longer. I returned in the heavy train to Calais. On my way north I read an excellent article in the Figaro by M. Georges Duhamel. He -was discussing the fluctuations of taste and opinion. He recalled that what he had once admired as "an nouveau " was now derided as style ;nitro." Let us all. he said, keep a small Nike Apteros in our hearts.
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