UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
To Go On Pilgrimages
By STEWART SANDERSON (University of Edinburgh) /N the spring a young man's fancy . . . And yet it is not thoughts of love to which one turns ; not, at any rate, the love of fair women, of Hipparchia or Thais, Cleopatra or Deirdre of the Sorrows. One is not as young as all that—nor yet as old ; literature is hardly enough. No, the roots go deeper, thrusting their way downwards through strata where attitudes and emotions blend in rich confusion till they tap something genuine, something whioh really feeds one's fancy in the spring. It is not the love of fair women that disturbs us, but the love of fair countries ; Scandinavia lying crisp against the wind, Spain burgeoning into almond-blossom and warmth, Greece ablaze with hyacinth and lily. Somewhere between March and April the wanderlust is on us again.
This itch that comes over us in the spring is genuine enough in spite of all the literature that aggravates it. Memories of the cruellest month may become inextricably mixed with Charles of Orleans' lyric, and that with the Saxon seafarer telling how the cuckoo's cry whets his appetite to visit strange lands ; but these overtones are incidental, sophistications of something essentially primitive. The roots stretch down until they reach man emerging in the spring from his sheltering cave and going forth to find his food in the open. The cave-man lurking within us peeps out from time to time, as the wild dog peeps out from the spaniel treading round on the hearth-rug before he lies down to sleep. One day in early spring, when the whole earth stirs under pale sunshine, the fever takes us.
And then, of course, time has its revenge. We cannot, like primitive man, walk out of our homes on the instant. There is work to be done ; there are engagements to fulfil, duties to per- form. Man has become a social, if not indeed a socialist, animal, and the centuries of sophistication claim their debt. Appoint- ment-books, statutory holidays, currency regulations, passports— the obstacles are piled high, as high as the fever which mounts with the posters in the travel-agents' windows, the snatch of a song from Radio Paris, the letter from some friend abroad. Even a stretch of road curving round a well-known hill will suddenly acquire the significance of Browning's hand's-breadth of moor. shining out from all the rest because of some real or imagined resemblance to a road in Tuscany or the Dordogne. Day by day the fever rises, even after we have made arrangements for this year's pilgrimage—not to be undertaken, alas, till the summer ; and in the meantime we do what we can to calm it by reflecting on our previous journey, made in the summer of last year.
It was a tense summer, permeated with a sense of autumn. The atmosphere held a hint of decay. Everything one saw, new or familiar, had a strange vividness as of something seen for the first and only time, to be snapshot by the memory in case it should never. be seen again. When I left England the war in Korea had just started ; when I came home the U.N. forces were fighting grimly in their southern toe-hold. In Nice they seemed surprisingly unconcerned. On the quatorze folk-dancers moved like pageant figures through the gardens round the Theatre de la Verdure. They wore the traditional costumes of their pays, the black hats and red sashes of Alsace, the violet dresses of Limousin. Late into the night they danced to the strains of the vielle and the accordeon, and the Italians from Bargello danced round the shiny motor-cars on the promenade while kilted Scots in uneasy groups fingered their bagpipes. In the warm-scented night one forgot the previous day's conversa- tion at the café table, myself frowning over the paper, M. exclaiming: "Les choses de Rorie ne nous regardent pas," J: bolt-upright in indignation.
" Et Its choses de Undo-Chine?" I asked. M. sighed and shrugged his shoulders. " Ah ca!" One came to know that shrug only too well. On the quatorze these things were lost in the sun-drenched picnic under the pines at La Trayas and later in the crowd gaping at each new burst of fireworks as the red and green feu de Bengale rolled over the château, and also in the gaiety of the costumed dancers under the palms ; yet when I walked back to my hotel I saw a young =man standing in shadow by the door of the Communist Party office, and I knew that he had not been making merry. That sort of sophistication one could well do without. How safe were those coloured costumes?
In Italy it was perhaps worse. One stifling day when Florence shimmered in the oven-heat I met G. coming out of his bank. His despatch-case was stuffed with thousand-franc notes with which he hoped to buy his way across France to the Channel. He had been in touch with friends who were engaged in political and diplomatic journalism. If it was not in Yugoslavia it would be in Austria. and if not in Austria then in Germany. And if not that summer then next.
Later that evening I sat with friends in a little trattoria on the Monte San Miniato. Looking over the tufted cypresses that seem to ape quattrocento painting, one found it hard to believe that this might not last for ever. Florence lay below pearled with light. Under the great crumbling palaces men chatted their trivialities ; in the piazza a jazz-band blared outside a cafe ; here on the Pian dei Guinan half-a-dozen of us idled over a flask of chianti. Time might almost have stopped, not during a moment of Florence's stormy and violent history, but on one of those peaceful nights when Guelph and Ghibelline were forgotten and the good Pietro Leopoldo reigned in his people's hearts. And then a party of Americans came in. They were noisy and slightly drunk. They were doing Europe in a hurry because next year it would be too late. It was no good raising my eyes to the velvet sky and tutting: "Gli Americani." My friends knew why that year's army manoeuvres were being carried out in red Emilia.
And so this sense of living on the edge of things was with us all the summer. In the Maremma fishing-port the retired British captain wondered if he would be able to get his family out in time. The skipper of the trawler wondered if he would be able to get to Malta. The American wondered if he would be recalled for the Korean War or perhaps for the European. G. said he would try to get to England because England could not be invaded ; his sister said she would go to their farm because there at least one would eat. I felt slightly uncomfortable about my firm blue passport and what it stood fqr. One had no right to be so fortunate.
Taking leave of friends is never easy ; so much can happen before one meets again. A sudden chill stabbed the late after- noon as J. and I stood for the last time on the château ramparts and watched the shadow climb in swift unhappy symbolism over the hill, blotting out the shapes of the square buildings above the port of Nice. The chill persisted wheri we went down to the boulevard and walked home in the swift southern dusk. At the corner I heard a voice singing from inside a bar, intoning a sad little tune that had echoed in my ears all summer. " What's that called ? " I asked.
" Feuilles mortes." J. replied. " Autumn leaves."
But now the winter has come and almost gone, and our worst fears are fled. Eisenhower is in Europe, Cucchi has resigned from the Italian Communist Party, and neutralism seems to be on the wane ; France even feels able to allow herself the luxury of dispensing with her governments once more. One would like to go across and have a look at it all. Perhaps this year it Will be better ; perhaps when we return with our souvenirs we shall feel we can still go back for more.
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