A Book of Railway Journeys Page 10

  We gathered sleepily at 7.5 a.m. in the hall of the Ritz: the revolving glass door was clamped open and a man in a striped apron was shaking an india-rubber mat out on to the Place Vendome: the luggage had already preceded us, the typists were sitting in the third motor rather pinched and blue: we waited for Lord Curzon. At 7.16 a.m. he appeared from the lift escorted by Mr. Ellis. He climbed slowly into the motor, falling back on to the cushions with a sigh of pain: he beckoned to me: “I shall want my foot-rest.” I dashed back into the hotel to search for Arketall. Mr. Ellis was standing by the staircase, and as I approached him I could hear someone pattering above me down the stairs: at the last turning there was a bump and a sudden exclamation, and Arketall shot round and down the staircase like a bob-sleigh, landing beside me with his feet in the air and the foot-rest raised above him. “Crakey,” he remarked. We had by then only eleven minutes in which to reach the Gare de Lyon. The three motors swayed and dashed along the boulevards like fire-escapes to an incessant noise of Claxons. Then very slowly, processionally, sleepily we walked up through the station towards the platform. M. Poincaré in a black silk cap with a peak was waiting, a little irritably I thought, beside the train. There was a saloon for the French Delegation, a saloon for the British Delegation, and separating them a satin-wood drawing-room carriage and a dining-car. The large white clocks marked 7.29 as we entered the train. At 7.30 we slid out into the grey morning past a stiff line of saluting police and railway officials. Arketall was standing beside me: “Ay left me ’at behind,” he remarked in sudden dismay. I had a picture of that disgraceful bowler lying upwards on the stair carpet of the Ritz: “Tiens,” they would exclaim, “le chapeau de Lord Curzon.” “You can get another,” I answered, “at Lausanne.” Miss Petticue came up to me holding a bowler. “They threw this into our motor as we were leaving the Ritz.” I handed it in silence to Arketall.

  The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, leaves London for Paris, November 1922. Lord Curzon in the train, Arketall in the centre of the picture, Harold Nicolson third from the left and Lady Curzon beside him.

  For the greater part of that twelve-hour journey we sat in the drawing-room carriage discussing with our French colleagues the procedure of the impending conference: from time to time a Frenchman would rise and retire to the back of the train to consult M. Poincaré: from time to time Allen Leeper or I would make our way to the front of the train to consult Lord Curzon: outside his door Arketall sat on a spring bracket-seat which let down on to the corridor: he would stand up when we came, and the seat would fly up smack against the wood-work: Arketall looked shaken and unwell. Lord Curzon in his coupé carriage reclined in a dove-coloured armchair with his leg stretched out on the foot-rest. On the table beside him were at least thirty envelopes stamped and addressed: he did not appear to relish our interruptions.

  Towards evening the lights were lit in that satin-wood saloon. We sat there, M. Barrère, General Weygand, Admiral Lacaze, Sir William Tyrrell, Laroche, Massigli, Allen Leeper and myself. The discussion had by then become desultory: from time to time a station would leap up at us from the gathering dusk, flick past the train in a sudden rectangle of illuminated but unfocussed shapes, be lost again in the brooding glimmer of the Côtes d’Or. We stopped at Pontarlier and telephoned to M. Mussolini. He answered from Locarno. He wanted us to dine with him that night at Vevey. We pattered up and down the platform conveying messages from M. Poincaré to Lord Curzon, from Lord Curzon to M. Poincaré. It was agreed that they would both proceed to Vevey, and then the train slid onwards down upon Lausanne. Lord Curzon in his dove-coloured arm-chair was slightly petulant. He was all for dining with M. Mussolini but would have preferred another night. “And why Vevey?” he said. “Why indeed?” I echoed. Lord Curzon sighed deeply and went on writing, writing. I left him and stood in the corridor. Arketall had pulled up the blind, and as the train jigged off to the left over some points a row of distant lights swung round to us, low lying, coruscating, white and hard. “Evian,” I said to Arketall. “Ho indeed,” he answered. Ten minutes later, the train came to rest in the station of Lausanne: there was a pause and silence: the arc-lamps on the platform threw white shapes across the corridor, dimming our own lights, which but a few minutes before had seemed so garish against the darkness. I returned to Lord Curzon’s compartment. “I think,” he said, “that you and Leeper had better get out here. It is quite unnecessary for you to come on to Vevey.” “Oh, but, sir...” I protested. “Quite unnecessary,” he repeated. I usually enjoyed an argument with Lord Curzon, but there was something in his voice which indicated that any argument at that moment would be misplaced. I went and told Leeper: we both seized our despatch boxes and climbed down on to the platform. Bill Bentinck, who had been sent on two days before to complete arrangements, came up to us, immaculate, adolescent and so reliable. “There are four motors,” he said, “and a lorry for the luggage.” “The Marquis isn’t coming,” I informed him, “he and M. Poincare are going on to Vevey to dine with Mussolini. They won’t get back here till midnight.” “Oh Lud,” he exclaimed, “and there’s a vast crowd outside and the Mayor of Lausanne.” “Lud,” I echoed, and at that the slim presidential train began to slide past us towards the night and Mussolini. It was only then that I noticed that the platform was empty from excess rather than from lack of public interest: behind the barrier, behind a double row of police, stretched the expectant citizens of the Swiss Confederation. On the wide bare desert of the platform stood Leeper in a little brown hat, myself in a little black hat, and Arketall in his recovered bowler: Miss Petticue: Miss Bridges: pitilessly the glare of forty arc-lamps beat down upon our isolation and inadequacy. We walked (with dignity I feel) towards the barrier: at our approach the magnesium wire flashed up into its own smoke and there was a stir of excitement in the crowd: somebody cheered: Arketall raised his bowler in acknowledgment: the cheers were repeated: he held his bowler raised at exactly the correct angle above his head: the Mayor advanced towards him. I intervened at that moment and explained the situation. The Mayor turned from me, a little curtly perhaps, and said something to the police inspector. The wide lane which had been kept open for us ceased suddenly to be a lane and became a crowd leaving a station: we left with it. In a few minutes we were hooting our way under the railway bridge and down to Ouchy....

  HAROLD NICOLSON,

  Some People

  Night train to Spain

  I am in Spain at last. For years I have promised myself this adventure—for in spite of the railway it is an adventure still, in a way that a journey through Italy, where almost every other person one sees is a foreigner, has ceased to be for ever—and at last I am here in the land of Spain. The journey from Paris was a nightmare hideous and full of horrors: the continual noise of the train, the groans and attitudes of the sleepers, the shrieking as of lost souls that came now and again out of the darkness, the heat of the long night spent with seven strangers, the inevitable contact with that grotesque, weary, fetid humanity, in so small a space, for so long a time—the brutality of all that. For to me sleepless, in all the reticence of consciousness, the gesture, the rhetoric of that animal in humanity set free by sleep, its inarticulate noises and struggles, its indifference to human dignity, its brutal obliteration of everything in man but the flesh, were a kind of vision, in which I saw all the achievements of the years swept away in a moment, and primitive man, filthy and covered with sweat, unconscious of anything but weariness, seeking his lair at nightfall with the beasts with whom he shared the world. Gradually the carriage came to be a prison; for there was no corridor in which I might have found an escape from the rancid stench of life that had long since loaded the air with debris which now seemed to be falling upon me, crushing me beneath its foulness where I lay surrounded by darkness, astonished and aghast at the terms on which we must accept life.

  Before me, in the sickly light of the partly covered lamp, a man of some fifty years, fat and disgusting, crouched in the attitude of a wild beast, hi
s mouth open, snoring, while the saliva dripped over the sensual, pathetic lips. Every now and then as the train swayed a grotesque shadow leaped upon his face, flabby and swollen with all the excesses that sleep had recalled and made so visible, dragging it into the horrible contortions of a madman. There were three women in the compartment; one in the farthest corner with colourless, thin hair, still young, her face in the deepest shadow, was asleep, I make no doubt, since her body seemed to have collapsed within itself, so that she seemed a sort of cripple or dwarf misshapen and hideous. Another, her arms dropped over her knees, seemed as though she were in despair; while the third from time to time suckled her child. Of the rest of my companions I took no notice—in every sort of attitude they lay at the mercy of the train, subject to the grotesque dances of the lamplight, unconscious of the frightful brutality that we suffered, slaves as we are to our own inventions. Three times I opened the window; but each time some one stirred, rushed back from the delights of oblivion, and half awake, half asleep, thrust himself in front of me and shut out the sweetness of the night. And once, as I stood up to open it a little way just for a moment, she who held her child so tightly under her bowed shoulders looked up at me quickly, piteously I thought, and covered her shapeless treasure with the cape of her cloak. And I, not to add to my torture, fell back into my seat, helpless to deliver myself from the body of that death. So night passed slowly, slowly, and at last the summer stars, so large, so few, began to pale, and I saw the faint grey lines of dawn far, far away across the world.

  EDWARD HUTTON,

  The Cities of Spain (1906)

  Courier’s train

  Once I worked as a clerk in an office and I grew thinner and my suits fell to bits and I watched the seagulls out of the window. The months passed and I knew I had taken the wrong road. “You’re not paid to watch seagulls,” said the manager. In my spare time I went to Victoria station and bought cups of tea and watched the trains. The ceiling of the station shook with the thunder of wheels, and men with fur collars and attaché cases disappeared in clouds of steam. There was a faint imported smell of sea, a catch in the throat, a volley of shouts, and an explosion of children like fireworks. The Golden Arrow drew in. Out came the eternal over-wrapped exiles from operas and roulette, pampered ghosts from Anglo-French hotels, lovers, swindlers, actresses, impostors, believers, bores and magicians. But all that mattered to me was the gold and blue of the places they had been to, the singing names, like Leman, Maggiore, Garda, Ischia, Ibiza.

  Eventually I joined a travel agency. I almost lived in trains, pushing hordes of people round monuments, cramming them into cathedrals, and winkling them out of gondolas. Once, on the Paris-Vallorbe run, my train split in two. Half my clients disappeared down a gradient. The runaway carriages reappeared half an hour later at Vallorbe station and were greeted by hysterical shouts, as though they had come back from Siberia. But the train didn’t pull up. It puffed off busily in the general direction of Italy, and I found it quite impossible to control the pandemonium on the station platform. Even I, the courier, wasn’t aware that this divided train was returning to another platform. I lived in a world of smoke, station buffets, Customs offices and rattling corridors; the antiseptic rush through the Simplon tunnel; the gleaming run beside the lake of Geneva; carriages of priests, soldiers, Chianti and garlic between Pisa and Rome; and the eternal stolid caravanserai of British clients getting constipated from pasta and ruins. I was still a prisoner entangled in a web of questions, complaints and prejudices. But through the carriage window, past the vacuum flask and the knitting needles, I could see the running rainbow feet of beauty.

  Returning from market: a local train in France

  (Third Class by Honoré Daumier, 1862)

  After a time I began to weary of trains and to long for London. But I could not escape. The demon which had haunted me in the office and dragged me to Victoria Station to gape at the expresses would not release me. It was my living. Sleeping past Lyons, breakfast at the frontier, loving past Stresa, eating past the Apennines. Eventually I broke up a highly organized tour of Italy by running off with one of the clients, was sacked by the agency and took up writing.

  A summer and a winter passed and London lay on my stomach like a lobster supper. I was making no money. The current was turned off, and I dreamed of the Continental railroads like swallows whose wings flutter in their sleep. Somewhere, someone was waving to me. “You should be here!” Again I haunted Victoria Station. Then I paid a visit to another travel agency. “I am a railway expert,” I said. “Can you speak Spanish?” asked the manager. “Certainly,” I replied. “We are experimenting with a place called Sitges in the north of Spain. We would like you to take about fifty clients there from London. Would you be prepared to do that?” “Yes,” I said. “Be careful with them,” said the manager. “Some of them are old ladies and not used to travel. You start in a fortnight, and if you call in tomorrow I will give you the list.”

  We went on the Newhaven–Dieppe–Paris route, and left for Port Bou from the Gare de’Austerlitz. So far it was an uneventful journey, except that four of the old ladies recognized me from my last Italian tour, and I could see them rustling up and down the corridors with scandal. The next morning we steamed into Cerbère, and I was smoked out of my carriage with questions. Do we change here? Is this Spain? Is Franco here? Shall we change our money? Can we use the lavatories in this station or would they arrest us? Can we get coffee? Tea? Aspirins?

  Before I need answer all the questions the train slid through a tunnel and we arrived in Port Bou, Spain. Directly we got down on to the platform it was obvious that all the officials hated us on sight. Many of them were armed to the teeth. We were driven into a gloomy barrack-like Customs shed, our suitcases were wrenched open and the contents scattered right and left. One of my old ladies burst into tears. Have you any drugs, firearms, or pornographic literature? an official was asking her.

  There were six ticket-windows operated by six dour, sadistic railway employees. When you presented a form to be stamped each one said “Wrong window.” Finally, at the risk of being shot, I got out on to the Port Bou–Barcelona platform and made inquiries about my agency reservations. A very old man in a peaked cap with RAILWAY SERVICES written on it pointed at a carriage. “They are there,” he said. The carriage was bursting with people. “But I have fifty clients,” I shouted. The old man looked at me with terrible patient sadness. “That which has to be...” he said and crept away.

  Finally we arranged ourselves on the train. I stood next a plump Spaniard in the corridor who was looking out of the window at the embittered tourists flapping about the platform like intolerably harassed poultry. “In an odd way it pays,” he said, offering me a cigarette. “All of you foreigners, after this ghastly experience at the frontier, are expecting the worst from us. But when you find how friendly we are, and how much we hate our railways, it will seem all the better. Where are you going to?” “I am taking fifty English people to Sitges.” “Be prepared for the worst,” said the Spaniard, “and beware of the tunnels.” He gave me details of the journey.

  We reached Barcelona in the afternoon. Three of my old ladies had fainted, and there were ten cases of diarrhoea. (“You should have told us about the water.”) There were two trains to Sitges. One said “Very Fast” and the other “Highly Rapid.” I chose the Highly Rapid and chased my party into two or three amazingly empty carriages. There was another train which I had not noticed. It was called “Supremely Quick.” This left almost immediately. We waited in our train, starving, for about an hour, while it gradually filled up. When it was obviously crammed it left for the next Barcelona station, Paseo de Gracia.

  Here was a waiting cargo of fresh passengers. Women lay on the floor like threshed wheat, suckling babies. Aerated-water sellers climbed through a trellis of arms and legs and half the station got on to the train to say goodbye. At the next station the beggars were waiting, followed by the lottery sellers carrying dolls and bags of sweets.


  An hour later, remembering what the Spaniard at Port Bou had advised me, I squeezed my way through the train and warned all my party to take down their luggage and put it on to the outside platform. “The train only stops for a minute at Sitges,” I told them. In the middle of this operation we entered the first tunnel. The carriages filled with smoke and the lottery sellers, coughing with rage, stumbled over their dolls, aerated water rolled over the floor and pickpockets got to work. In all, there were nine tunnels and they were very long and the train was slow. Finally we came into the light, and the town of Sitges, white as ice-cream, glimmered into view.

  We poured out of the carriages, the fists of the lottery sellers pistoning through the windows, grappling with a cascade of luggage. Suddenly, with horror, I remembered I had placed some old ladies on the front carriage. I could see no sign of them. I ran forward to the platform behind the engine.

  They were there. Five of them. Their faces were quite black. From one desperate feathered hat I could distinctly see a little spiral of smoke ascend, like the aftermath of Red Indian massacre. “This is Sitges,” I said in a small voice. But they just looked at me.

  And the train, with no warning, as much as to show it was a train, made off towards Valencia.

  I am back at Victoria Station again. Meet me at Platform Eight.

  ANTHONY CARSON,

  from PUNCH 2 June 1954

  A mystery in Lapland

  It was 10 P.M. and, in the drowsy warmth of the train from Stockholm, 44-year-old Mrs Karin Edholm sleepily opened her eyes as the train began to slow down.

  She must be nearing home at last. The 700-mile journey to Murjek, in Lapland near the Arctic Circle, had taken hours. Then the train suddenly jolted to a stop. “Is this Murjek?” she asked a fellow passenger. He nodded and, grabbing her hand-bag, Mrs Edholm hastily opened the compartment door, stepped out and found herself falling.