To begin with, apparently there
is nobody at the station whose business it is to show you to your
train or to examine your ticket before you have found your train
for yourself. There is no mad scurrying about at the moment of
departure, no bleating of directions through megaphones. Unchaperoned
you move along a long platform under a grimy shed, where trains
are standing with their carriage doors hospitably ajar, and
unassisted you find your own train and your own carriage, and
enter therein.
Sharp on the minute an unseen hand - at least I never saw it - slams
the doors and coyly - you might almost say secretively - the train
moves out of the terminal. It moves smoothly and practically
without jarring sounds. There is no shrieking of steel against
steel. It is as though the rails were made of rubber and the
wheel-flanges were faced with noise-proof felt. No conductor comes
to punch your ticket, no brakeman to bellow the stops, no train
butcher bleating the gabbled invoice of his gumdrops, bananas and
other best-sellers.
Glory be! It is all so peaceful and soothing; as peaceful and as
soothing as the land through which you are gliding when once you
have left behind smoky London and its interminable environs; for
now you are in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred
years ago and since then has not been altered in any material
aspect whatsoever. Every blade of grass is in its right place;
every wayside shrub seemingly has been restrained and trained to
grow in exactly the right and the proper way. Streaming by your
car window goes a tastefully arranged succession of the thatched
cottages, the huddled little towns, the meandering brooks, the
ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high-hedged estates
of the landed gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and
robust children in the doorways - just as you have always seen them
in the picture books. There are fields that are velvet lawns, and
lawns that are carpets of green cut-plush. England is the only
country I know of that lives up - exactly and precisely - to its
storybook descriptions and its storybook illustrations.
Eventually you come to your stopping point; at least you have
reason to believe it may be your stopping point. As well as you
may judge by the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even
the top of the station, the place is either a beef extract or a
washing compound. Nor may you count on any travelers who may be
sharing your compartment with you to set you right by a timely
word or two. Your fellow passengers may pity you for your ignorance
and your perplexity, but they would not speak; they could not, not
having been introduced.
