MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE often asserted that, even if I were a rich man. I should not wish to keep a motor-car in London. There arc several reasons for this disinclination. Either I should have to drive the machine myself or else I should employ a chauffeur to do so. In the former event, I should pass through several states of anxiety, provoked by traffic perils, one-way streets and parking problems. In the latter event. I should either perpetually lose the chauffeur when he parked the car in obscure alleys or I should be consumed with guilt to feel that I was keeping him up late at night. How far more agreeable to be detached as a sea-gull and to be able, when the idea occurs to one, to rise suddenly from one's resting-place and to float lonelily away. Yet these are not the only reasons why I prefer public to private means of locomotion. Were it not for constant time pressure. I do not think that I should ever take a taxi. Much as I admire the London taxis, much as I appreciate the charm of those that drive them, much as I relish their amazing capacity for deft manoeuvre, I do not really enjoy myself when I am sitting in a taxi alone. One cannot read a book ; one cannot with any real interest or pleasure look out of the window, since the objects and the pedestrians pass too quickly : one is thrown back on the sessions of silent thought, nor are these invariably sweet. I should enjoy buses if I were gifted with greater patience ; as it is. I am irritated by their constant meaningless stoppages, by the creeping motion they adopt when they edge round corners, and by the fact that they invariably deposit me some hundred yards or so beyond the place where I want to get out. Moreover, I find it difficult to read in buses, and I resent the fact that my fellow-passengers only show me their backs. I rejoice therefore that I was born into the age of Tubes.
* * * * I can recall the days when the London Underground was a sulphureous catacomb, belching through its rare apertures huge p'arcels of Vesuvian smoke. There were no coaches in those days, but only little cramped compartments, divided into first, second and third class, and smelling like the inside of an un- cleaned chimney. Then came the glittering days of King Edward VII and the excitement of the Twopenny Tube that ran in all its splendour along Oxford Street and even to Bayswater. We were proud of our Twopenny Tube, as proud even as are the Muscovites of their onyx underground. We did not foresee in those days the even more resplendent glories to come ; we did not foresee the time when the electric train would slide out among the hawthorns of the Home Counties or plunge below the Thames with no hint in its movement or carriage that it had suddenly become submarine ; we did not foresee that new suburbs, flaunting fine modernist stations, would spring up around this network ; we did not foresee escalators, trick lighting, or stainless steel ; we did not foresee Mr. Frank Pick. The Underground to me has now become an unfailing source of delight. If I have to read, then I can read with comparative ease. If I have no urgent need to read, then I can sit there in comfort, put on my long-distance glasses, and stare my fellow- passengers in the face. What greater enjoyment can there be than to recline comfortably, being carried without effort on one's own part to a desired destination, and to watch the features of one's fellow-human beings as they twitch or snuffle or scowl. (Truly for me the Tube is "Gold and white with many a light, And a single rose-red star."
* * * * The pleasure that I extract from staring at other people and speculating. upon their characters and habits is neither morbid or impertinent. It is based upon a perfectly healthy interest In private faces seen in public places. It amuses me to reflect, when I cross Trafalgar Square, that the other people crossing that open space possess all manner of intimacies that they know about and I do not. Watching a massed audience in the Albert Hall, all facing the same sort of way, all sitting in the same sort of attitude, all holding their heads and hands in similar postures, I am pleased to think beyond this uniformity and to reflect that in their temperaments, lusts and habits they are all diverse. Moreover, while they present to the public world a facial expres- sion more or less representative of their own personalities, there are other expressions that they must adopt at other moments when they are alone. And whereas, as they open their handbags or pull out a cigarette-case, they are performing public actions, there are other private actions or possessions which are significant to them alone. Each one of those thousand arrayed in front of me has a tube or tin of tooth-paste, a rack or pot in which to place his or her toothbrush, a box perhaps that houses dis- carded razor-blades. These objects are at any moment present to their minds ; a sudden thought and the picture presents itself ; they know the little cavity in the upper tooth ; and all this con- trast between the public and the private, the known and the unknown, is for me a matter of immense curiosity. I like to look at the faces of my kind and to make up stories about them. These stories are sometimes drab, sometimes sentimental, some- times riotous. But they are agreeable stories none the less, and the Tube is the best place in which to make them up.
Hitherto I have possessed a sound workable confidence in my own capacity for deducing character from faces and hands. I admit that I should find it difficult to define exactly what special moulding of the areas around the eyes and mouth lead me to deduce that a fellow-passenger is of a jealous disposition, com- bines extreme discretion with a love of money, is lecherous but unhappy, prefers Racine to Sartre, was bullied at Repton, has a Swedish mother, enjoys crossword puzzles, did not do as well in the war as his tutor expected, is about to leave the Communist Party, or has a deep respect for the memory of Colonel T. E. Lawrence. Always, in one's passage between Leicester Square and South Kensington, one must allow for some marginal errors of diagnosis. But on the whole, until now, I have had the impression that the stories I told myself about my fellow- passengers must on the whole be true. Evidently I under- estimated the margin of error. I have been reading this week an essay on Physiognomies written more than two thousand years ago. It shows me that my own deductions from physical types must be subjective, topical or purely relative. The author of this essay, who was some peripatetic of the school of Theophrastus, makes the disturbing statement that you cannot judge a man's profession from his face. I always thought until now that I could spot a lawyer, an actor or a diplomatist at a glance. My peri- patetic judges mostly by the quality of the skin and hair. People with soft hair are cowardly ; people whose flesh is firm arc lacking in perception ; people who hays bags round the eyes suffer from mock modesty ; people who gamble or like dancing have short arms ; people who are plump above the waist have good memories ; people who have curled-up toes are " shame- less " ; people who have fat thighs are too talkative ; people who have loose collar-bones are hyper-sensitive ; people who have thick extremities to the nostrils are lazy ; those with snub noses are salacious ; and so on and so on.
Now these principles of Physiognomies are wholly different from those. hitherto adopted by Lombroso and myself. Some of the statements of my peripatetic are demonstrably incorrect. "Those," he writes, "who have a bright-red complexion are apt to be insane." Since my own complexion is as gay as the little rosettes one puts on the rear mudguards of bicycles, I can assure the peripatetic that he has made a mistake. But at least he has given me a whole new stale of measurement with which to assess the natures of my fellow-travellers in the Tube.
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