Sun or Snow
Victoria Station is every morning the scene of a daily romance—the departure of the Continental boat expresses. When the fog comes and the rain and the driving sleet, and every Londoner loathes London just a little, I can extract a certain pale kind of pleasure by buying a penny platform ticket and watching other people start off to the snow or the sun.
I can never decide whether the act of extracting enjoyment from other people's luck is the lowest or the highest form of fun. There is always a sting in the tail of it.
* * *
When you love travel, and have lost count of the number of times the chocolate-coloured Pullmans have whirled you through Kent to the edge of the sea and on to far places, this morning assembly of travellers shakes you to the heart. You know what is in store for them. You follow them down to Dover; you see them in the swift Channel boat; you hear the blue-bloused porters of Calais crying "Soixante-dix, m'sieu. I meet you at ze douane!" You visualize the idiotic fight in the French Customs; you see the long Paris Rapide waiting with steam up, the wrinkled old Frenchwomen in white caps and knitted black shawls who sell fruit, and you hear the funny little penny whistle like a child's trumpet that sends this great train racketing and thundering through France, or Basle and Switzerland, or Marseilles, and then—oh, marvellous far places in Africa!
Which is more wonderful? To awaken at the Swiss frontier with snow muffling a cotton-wool world of chasms and peaks, or to awaken in the sunlight of Southern France to a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean?
* * *
That wide, hedgeless plain with its silver-grey olive trees, its red-roofed houses, and its vignettes of rustic activity; little men in fields walking behind the plough, at stable doors bringing out a solemn, ragged mule, give me that. And give me, too, the ever-recurring joy of the uncomfortable swinging French wagon restaurant full of various people: Englishmen who look so comically English as soon as they cross the Channel, Frenchmen whose black spade beards cascade over white table-napkins which they tuck into their collars before they devour their food with Gallic avidity, and the good-looking Parisienne with her carmine mouth and her finicky, much-manicured hands breaking bread and salting meat while her big, emotional eyes sweep over and beyond the bald heads of appraising British husbands.
"Liqueur, m'sieu?"
The man with the tray of little bright bottles staggers up and, notable sight, the elderly virgin of some distant vicarage sips an unusual brandy. Marvellous France!
So, knowing all this so well, I watched the boat train crowds with the keenest enjoyment the other morning. There were girls who would be tumbling about in the snow before many days were gone, or sitting in the palish summer of the Riviera in white, pleated skirts. There went the hardened traveller with the well-worn rucksacks and the skis, the excited, flushed traveller making a first journey, and—lucky fellow—a man with a white pith helmet over his arm.
Nothing is more awkward to pack than a pith helmet. Even socks and shaving tackle will not sit comfortably in it. When carried with an air it advertises the fact that you are not a mere Swiss fan or a poor Riviera lizard, but an honest-to-goodness traveller, possibly even an explorer. In the Channel boat people will look at you as you bear this symbol of the sun on your arm. You will stand out above all others. Perhaps in the bar some one will say:
"Going far?" and you can flick the ash of your cigarette carelessly and say:
"No; only to Timbuctoo!"
A great thing is a sun helmet!
Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses which she will accumulate in Paris. There was a pale woman who had obviously been ordered South. Her husband stood beside the Pullman door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand. Yes; there are such husbands!
All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually filled. At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole.
* * *
Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health and pleasure. A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris.
As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship....