Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train.
I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that.
I am never seized with a sudden idea for a masterpiece,
nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise.
My thoughts are just pleasantly reflective. I
think of all the good deeds I have done, and (when
these give out) of all the good deeds I am going to
do. I look out of the window and say lazily to
myself, “How jolly to live there”; and
a little farther on, “How jolly not to live
there.” I see a cow, and I wonder what it
is like to be a cow, and I wonder whether the cow
wonders what it is to be like me; and perhaps, by
this time, we have passed on to a sheep, and I wonder
if it is more fun being a sheep. My mind wanders
on in a way which would annoy Pelman a good deal,
but it wanders on quite happily, and the “clankety-clank”
of the train adds a very soothing accompaniment.
So soothing, indeed, that at any moment I can close
my eyes and pass into a pleasant state of sleep.
But this entertainment which my train provides for
me is doubly entertaining if it be but the overture
to greater delights. If some magic property which
the train possesses—whether it be the motion
or the clankety-clank—makes me happy even
when I am only thinking about a cow, is it any wonder
that I am happy in thinking about the delightful new
life to which I am travelling? We are going to
the Riviera, but I have had no time as yet in which
to meditate properly upon that delightful fact.
I have been too busy saving up for it, doing work
in advance for it, buying cloth for it. Between
London and Dover I have been worrying, perhaps, about
the crossing; between Dover and Calais my worries
have come to a head; but when I step into the train
at Calais, then at last I can give myself up with a
whole mind to the contemplation of the happy future.
So long as the train does not stop, so long as nobody
goes in or out of my carriage, I care not how many
hours the journey takes. I have enough happy thoughts
to fill them.
All this, as I said, is not at all Pelman’s
idea of success in life; one should be counting cows
instead of thinking of them; although presumably a
train journey would seem in any case a waste of time
to The Man Who Succeeds. But to those of us to
whom it is no more a waste of time than any other
pleasant form of entertainment, the train-service
to which we have had to submit lately has been doubly
distressing. The bliss of travelling from London
to Manchester was torn from us and we were given purgatory
instead. Things are a little better now in England;
if one chooses the right day one can still come sometimes
upon the old happiness. But not yet on the Continent.
In the happy days before the war the journey out was
almost the best part of Switzerland on the Riviera.
I must wait until those days come back again.
