In Homes Unblest (1919)
Nothing is more pleasant than to see suddenly endowed with motion a
thing stagnant by nature. The hat that on the head of the man in the
street is nothing to us, how much it is if it be animated by a gust of
wind! There is no churl that does not rejoice with it in its strength,
and in the swiftness and cunning that baffle its pursuer, who, he too,
when the chase is over, bears it no ill will at all for its escapade.
I know families that have sat for hours, for hours after bedtime,
mute, in a dim light, pressing a table with their finger-tips, and
ever bringing to bear the full force of their minds on it, in the
unconquerable hope that it would move. Conversely, nothing is more
dismal than to see set in permanent rigidness a thing whose aspect is
linked for us with the idea of great mobility. Even the blithest of us
and least easily depressed would make a long detour to avoid a stuffed
squirrel or a case of pinned butterflies. And you can well imagine
with what a sinking of the heart I beheld, this morning, on a road
near the coast of Norfolk, a railway-car without wheels.
Without wheels though it was, it had motion--of a kind; of a kind
worse than actual stagnation. Mounted on a very long steam-lorry that
groaned and panted, it very slowly passed me. I noted that two of its
compartments were marked FIRST, the rest THIRD. And in some of them, I
noted, you might smoke. But of this opportunity you were not availing
yourself. All the compartments, the cheap and the dear alike, were
vacant. They were transporting air only--and this (I conceived)
abominable. The sun slanted fiercely down on the old iron roof, the
old wooden walls, the dingy shut windows. The fume and grime of a
thousand familiar tunnels, of year after year of journeys by night,
journeys by day, from time immemorial, seemed to have invested the
whole structure with a character that shrank from the sun's scrutiny
and from the nearness of sea and fields. Fuliginous, monstrous,
slowly, shamefully, the thing went by--to what final goal?--in the
lovely weather.
There attended it, besides the driver of the lorry, a straggling
retinue of half-a-dozen men on foot--handy-looking mechanics, very
dusty. I should have liked to question one or another of these as to
their mission. But I was afraid to do so. There is an art of talking
acceptably to people who do not regard themselves as members of one's
own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is
to forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so
wildly cordial for fear of seeming to `condescend,' nor be more than a
trifle saturnine, either, for the same motive. Or am I wrong? The
whole thing is a mystery to me. All I know is that if I had asked
those mechanics what they were doing with that railway car they would
have seemed to suspect me of meaning that it was my property and that
they had stolen it. Or perhaps they would have seemed merely to resent
my idle curiosity. If so, why not? When I walk abroad with a sheaf of
manuscript in my hand, mechanics do not stop me to ask `What's that?
What's it about? Who's going to publish it?' Nor is this because,
times having changed so, they are afraid of seeming to condescend.
They always did mind their own business. And now that their own
business is so much more lucrative than mine they still follow that
golden rule.
I stood gazing back at the procession till it disappeared round a bend
of the road. Its bequest of dust and smoke was quickly spent by a
prodigal young breeze. Landscape and seascape were reindued with their
full amenities. Ruskin would have been pleased. So indeed was I; but
that railway-car (in which, it romantically struck me, I myself might
once, might frequently, have travelled) was still upmost in my
brooding mind. To what manner of wretched end was it destined? No end
would have seemed bad enough for it to Ruskin. But I was born late
enough to acquiesce in railways and in all that pertains to them. And
now, since the success of motor-cars (those far greater, because
unrestricted, bores), railways have taken on for me some such charm as
the memory of the posting coaches had for the greybeards of my
boyhood, some such charm as aeroplanes may in the fulness of time
foist down for us on motor-cars. `But I rove,' like Sir Thomas More.
And I seem to think that a cheap literary allusion will make you
excuse that vice. To resume my breathless narrative I decided that I
would slowly follow the tracks of the lorry.
I supposed that these were leading me to some great scrapping-place
filled with the remains of other railway-cars foully scrapped for some
fell industrial purpose. But this was a bad guess. The tracks led me
at last through a lane and thence into sight of a little bay, on whose
waters were perceptible the deck heads of sundry human beings, and on
its sands the full-lengths of sundry other human beings in bath-robes,
reading novels or merely basking. There was nowhere any sign of
industrialism. More than ever was I intrigued as to the fate of the
old railway-car that I had been stalking. It and its lorry had halted
on the flat grassy land that fringed the sands. This land was
dominated by a crescent of queer little garish tenements, the like of
which I had never seen, nor would wish to see again. They did not
stand on the ground, but on stakes of wood and shafts of brick, six
feet or so above the ground's level, and were led up to by flights of
wooden steps that tried not to look like ladders. They displeased me
much. They had little railed platforms round them, and things hanging
out to dry on the railings; and their walls vied unneighbourly with
one another in lawless colour-schemes. One tenement was salmon-pink
with wide bands of scarlet, another sky-blue with a key-pattern in
orange, and so on around the whole little horrid array. And I deduced,
from certain upstanding stakes and shafts at the nearer end of the
crescent, that the horror was not complete yet. A suspicion dawned in
me, and became, while I gazed again at the crescent's facades, a
glaring certainty; in the light of which I saw that I had been wrong
about the old railway-car. Defunct, it was not to die. It was to have
a new function.
I had once heard that disused railway-cars were convertible into sea-
side cottages. But the news had not fired my imagination nor protruded
in my memory. To-day, as an eye-witness of the accomplished fact, I
was impressed, sharply enough, and I went nearer to the crescent,
drawn by a sort of dreadful fascination. I found that the cottages all
had names. One cottage was Mermaid's Rock; another (which had
fluttering window-curtains of Stuart tartan), Spray o' the Sea;
another, The Nest; another, Brinynook; and yet another had been named,
with less fitness, but in an ampler and to me more interesting spirit,
Petworth. I looked from them to the not-yet-converted railway-car. It
had a wonderful dignity. In its austere and monumental way, it was
very beautiful. It was a noble work of man, and Nature smiled on it. I
wondered with what colours it was to be bejezebelled, and what name--
Bolton Abbey?--Glad Eye?--Gay Wee Gehenna?--it would have to bear, and
what manner of man or woman was going to rent it.
It was on this last point that I mused especially. The housing problem
is hard, doubtless; but nobody, my mind protested as I surveyed the
crescent, nobody is driven to so desperate a solution of it as this!
There are tents, there are caves, there are hollow trees...and there
are people who prefer--this! Yes, `this' is a positive taste, not a
necessity at all. I swept the bay with a searching eye; but heads on
the surface of water tell nothing to the sociologist, and in bath-
robes even full-lengths on the sand give him no clue. Three or four of
the full-lengths had risen and strolled up to the lorry, around which
the mechanics were engaged in some dispute of a technical nature. I
hoped the full-lengths would have something to say too. But they said
nothing. This I set down to sheer perversity. I was more than three
miles from the place where I am sojourning, and the hour for luncheon
was nearly due. I left the bay without having been able to determine
the character, the kind, of its denizens.
I take it there is a strong tincture of Bohemianism in them. Mr.
Desmond MacCarthy, of whose judgment I am always trustful, has said
that the hallmark of Bohemianism is a tendency to use things for
purposes to which they are not adapted. You are a Bohemian, says Mr.
MacCarthy, if you would gladly use a razor for buttering your toast at
breakfast, and you aren't if you wouldn't. I think he would agree that
the choice of a home is a surer index than any fleeting action,
however strange, and that really the best-certified Bohemians are they
who choose to reside in railway-cars on stilts. But--why particularly
railway-cars? That is a difficult question. A possible answer is that
the Bohemian, as tending always to nomady, feels that the least
uncongenial way of settling down is to stow himself into a thing
fashioned for darting hither and thither. Yet no, this answer won't
do. It is ruled out by the law I laid down in my first paragraph.
There's nothing sadder to eye or heart than a very mobile thing made
immovable.
No house, especially if you are by way of being nomadic, can be so ill
to live in as one that in its heyday went gadding all over the place.
And, on the other hand, what house more eligible than one that can
gad? I myself am not restless, and am fond of comfort: I should not
care to live in a caravan. But I have always liked the idea of a
caravan. And if you, alas, O reader, are a dweller in a railway-car, I
commend the idea to you. Take it, with my apologies for any words of
mine that may have nettled you. Put it into practice. Think of the
white road and the shifting hedgerows, and the counties that you will
soon lose count of. And think what a blessing it will be for you to
know that your house is not the one in which the Merstham Tunnel
murder was committed.
-THE END-
Max Beerbohm's essay: In Homes Unblest (1919)
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