Sándor Márai

...

Once again we will survey the domain of the west which is, apparently, on its last legs, survey it carefully, moving very slowly. Does not Spengler write that one of the signs of an atrophied civilisation is its feeling that time itself is in crisis, "time-panic" he calls it, and is he not brilliant to bring together the signs of "panic"? He points to the Ancient Greeks who had no great belief in calendars, their time-sense being undeveloped and favourable to art, thinking only in looser terms, such as the four-year round of Olympic Games, and to Thucydides who was so far unaware of time and history that he could declare that before his time "nothing happened that was remarkable or worthy of mention"! That shows how far the Greeks held time in contempt. It shows how far any culture that is alive holds time in contempt: cultures that are alive float, are unselfconscious and feel no 'urgency'; despite living in a country rich in stone and marble, the Greeks of the post-Mycenian era went back to building with wood, carving wooden Doric columns, the spirit of the 'Antique' regarding anything built with time in mind, anything to do with 'time' at all, as hostile to its interests. Cultures that are alive float in time, according to Spengler: cultures that have ossified into civilisations think in ever smaller units of time and, recording the moment, they panic! So says Spengler. That is why we intend to travel slowly, aimlessly, dawdling through the Gardens of the Declining West: we don't want to panic. That which is visible, or to be more precise, that which leaps to our attention keen to be noticed, we shall study closely, but we will be happy to miss the great sights of Europe in order to concentrate on the secondary products of the first rank at greater ease, with greater thoroughness. The time, I think, is gone when we should ride on the wind like some whirling dervish. In any case, I intend to buy some warm clothes for the trip.
We shall have to lock up the apartment, and on this night before our departure it will not hurt to take a last look round the walls since anything might happen in our absence-burst pipes, earthquakes, world wars-and we can't be certain, not even in a journey involving such trivial well-trodden byways, that everything will be as we left it on our return. The humblest journey nowadays is subject to all kinds of risk... True, it isn't even certain that we will return the way we have planned or when we planned, after six weeks to be precise. Because that is all it is, a ridiculously short time, an end-of-summer six-week jaunt, that's all we have available in terms of time and space: it's faintly ridiculous even talking about it... Nevertheless I have a suspicion I will talk about it because that is my nature: I am doomed to talk. I don't believe in 'great' or 'small' experiences; I don't believe that travelling by rocket to the moon is intrinsically more interesting than travelling westward by third-class carriage for six weeks. The moment is the one true eternal point of interest, the moment that presents our earth to us! It is that moment I shall strive, through words and magic spells, to bring to permanence. And on Sunday morning-I warn the reader for the last time, most emphatically, and I warn him as a friend because this is the last moment that we can take leave of each other- we shall be standing at the Keleti, the Eastern Terminal, by the Paris Express, with a frightening amount of luggage, shivering, cold, in the night-before-the-execution mood that is the prevailing mood before all long journeys, sleepy and cigarettecoughing, among porters wondering how to get all the luggage required for such an undertaking into the luggage van. Acquaintances arrive. There is a great fuss. Where are we going? Only to see our western neighbours, we might answer a little nervously, not without a hint of boastfulness. The thing is I haven't actually travelled for two years. I am rusty, every part of my vocabulary is creaking. I want to make a survey of the West, I explain, because, apparently, "Europe is in decline"; and I can't spend time in all this to-ing and fro-ing explaining to the porter that I don't fancy sitting on my typewriter all the way to London. What a to-do! What petty incidents! And now we are on our way: here is Gellérthegy, the Danube, the station at Kelenföld. No turning back now. We take with us everything that is ours, as the wise old saying goes, leaving at home everything that anchors us, that drags us back, our dreams, our language, our secrets: all that stays at home. Go on, I say to myself: take to the road one last time.
For this is no longer an easy, youthful setting forth. It is not like seeing the world as a young man, going on an unlimited hike to nowhere in particular. I am no longer 'free': I am not bound by people, property or promises and yet I am bound more mysteriously, more indissolubly than those bound to their homes by family, fortune and need. There is enough bread everywhere, as much of it today as there was yesterday, and not just here; but I no longer yearn for the bread of other places. I don't covet anything foreign or long for anything that might take me away from this mysterious, intimately familiar tiny patch of earth to whose temper I have adjusted all my nerves, feelings and thoughts. I doubt whether I have any particular 'task', I certainly have no 'vocation', but if I am interested in anything, it is in my home, it is here I must develop, print, enlarge and perfect such images as I have of life. There is something here that concerns me directly. And yet I have remained, miraculously, a stranger to it at home. I live between two worlds neither of which wholly accepts me, to neither of which do I have direct access. What can I do? I should just get used to it. But this landscape-these Transdanubian hills, the willow-lined embankments of the Danube, the gentleness of the landscape, the sadness of the hills, the idyll of an island in midstream of the Danube-remains inexpressibly precious to me. There is nothing I hate more than patriotic nostalgia; nothing I reject more firmly than the belch of patriotism in its cups, the kind that appropriates and patents a suspiciously loud feeling for some spot on earth. The ties I am talking about are, yes, diffident, possibly the most diffident of all imaginable feelings. Best not speak about them at all. But what can I do when the sense of place is a part of me? If a river to me means precisely this river, a wood means this wood only: this alone is the one true cow calf, the one true willow bank? What to do with the fact that, after considerable winding ways, I become so restless when we reach the post-Trianon border town of Komárom, that I have to go to the window and feel unable to accept the state of affairs: I stare at the town now split into two and I cannot accept it. That which, for me, was history yesterday is personal today. I am aware of the arguments and counter-arguments, I can practically repeat them by heart, as a schoolboy learns the 'right' answers by heart: I know I am 'a foreigner' here and I remain here, not asking pardon, asking for nothing from anyone. But every time we arrive at Komárom I grow nervous. That's the way it has been for years. Yes, we have been through all that now, it's over; now we can travel on, carriages swaying without our old light-hearted selves, carefully, suspiciously, westward once again...

*

So here we are in Switzerland: in three hours we will be through it and past the French border. At Zürich a young woman joins us, very talkative, everyone must be informed of everyone's affairs, so by the time we arrive at Muhlhouse we too know everything. The train spends a long time in Basle. The French officials are very interested, one customs man being particularly interested in cigars: if people worked half as hard at economics as they did at seeking cigars among my underpants the financial crisis in Europe would be quickly solved. Germany-so I read-owes French industry and commerce some five hundred million francs from the last year but the customs man at Basle has given his conscientious all to the effort of discovering my secret cigars as though it might be possible to balance the French budget by means of some lucky, perfectly conducted, dawn cigar raid. That's where we have got to, between stratospheric flight and the poems of Paul Valéry, twenty years after the Great War. I watch his endeavours in good humour. I would like to help him. But since there is nothing contraband in my luggage- whatever illegal substances he thinks or suspects I am carrying in my travel baggage, not even he, the European customs man, has yet succeeded in discovering. Struggle on, my good man! I think in mellow mood. Pry away, turn everything upside down. That's your job. There are thirty European borders, each with thirty sets of customs officials and thirty opportunities for misunderstanding. It will be hard. Customs will complain! This is how ideas have been smuggled across Europe's borders in the hidden pockets of the spirit by centuries of writers. Keep looking, I think.
He finds nothing. The young Swiss woman used to live in Munich, her father was a haberdasher, but the Nazis took a slice off the profits of businesses owned by foreigners so they dragged themselves, family, possessions, German bills and all, back to Switzerland. She is not particularly pretty but there is a dawn freshness about her, she smells of soap, she is well informed! And right now, at six in the morning, just before they get to Muhlhouse, she tells all, she spills the beans on the Third Reich, and there's not much she doesn't know. She herself is Aryan on both her father and mother's side, she informs us uninvited and a little too loudly; it is as if she had received a ticket, a box-ticket what is more, for the grand performance, the great debate. She speaks of emigration, the poor thing-I listen to her warily, with sympathy. Yes, it must have been really painful, possibly tragic, having to leave Munich. And she an Aryan!... this naive indignation is particularly emphasised in the Swiss woman's story, since we are to understand that had it been otherwise, if she had happened to have been a non-Aryan, our travelling companion would have understood the German authorities. What should I answer? She is on her way to Paris, she says mysteriously, and immediately begins to apply make-up. She looks for eye-liners, little pots, a stick of carmine red in her cardboard pouch, she powders her nose, applies some red powder to her cheeks, she spits into a tiny box containing black cake and metallic glaze, stirs it to a paste with a little toothbrush and applies it without embarrassment to her lashes. She attends to this spot of worldly, faintly demi-mondaine feminisation only now, a few minutes after crossing the Swiss border into the France of the Moulin Rouge and the novels of Maurice Dekobra-because there is such a France, strange to say, in the imagination of a Swiss woman who has but a few minutes ago escaped the censure of her prim local bourgeoisie and immediately throws all her naive energy into fulfilling the perceived requirements of a womanof- the-world... Back home in that small town somewhere near Zurich-am I right?-you are not allowed to wear mascara, I think somewhat severely. But the French women who get on at Belfort smell of garlic rather than d'Orsay, solid Alsatian women without lipstick or powder, wearing only cheap department store chic, civilly reserved in their manner and looks and-thank heavens!-silent rather than chatty, as Central Europeans tend to be. Yes indeed, this is an example of western sang froid. Suddenly all of us keep our secrets to ourselves. The Swiss woman too falls silent as if by magic. A few kilometres back she was chattering of both intimate and commonplace matters, cursing the clumsiness of the Swiss Germans, the sluttish heartlessness of the French, the good-for-nothing Italians with their constant singing and every variety of the Swiss family, all this with considerable nerve and great relish. But she is silent now. We have arrived in the West. We have obligations. She is going to Paris, her cheeks powdered... why? That's a secret, a secret, a secret. She is behaving as if setting out on an adventure and I could swear she is only going out to buy some thread. Keep your secret, I think.
After Belfort the train suddenly begins to race-hey, slow down, there's no great hurry yet! But for these people travelling between Basle and Paris it is always a matter of the utmost urgency. We are averaging 122 kilometres per hour down six-hundred miles of track, everything in the carriage creaking and clanking, the castles and towers of Alsace with their surrounding orchards glimpsed only for a moment, with that constant drubbing and vibration under us; for five hours now we must be in the hands of the almighty, hastening on the devil's chariot. This is what Spengler meant. The Spenglerian panic. Time atomised. I become aware that the winner of the Tour de Suisse is travelling in the next carriage-I have no idea who the hero is or what act of heroism he has committed: he probably succeeded in reaching a finishing point quicker than anyone else, on a bicycle perhaps, or in a car-all hail the victor! A lot of people are curious and walk past the window of the compartment where their fleet-footed, nobly muscled, laurelled contemporary is travelling, presumably to fresh victories and new races-contemporary? No, competitor, I think enviously. I don't take a look at him, not even a glance, not I. Stuff yourselves with laurels! I think and mutter. Beanpole! Lung-lout! The world belongs to you! I can't deny I am jealous. There is a tangible excitement among the passengers, people are constantly leaping from their seats and peering down corridors, whispering, peeking in, taking shy stock of the famous figure there in the compartment. He is the eternal enemy, this madcap, this butcher's apprentice aiming to break some 'record'. There are journalists travelling with him, I hear, jotting down his every word. The jealous antipathy with which I regard my fellow traveller is not exactly ennobling or gracious and it would be good to be able to overcome it. But it is precisely this kind of man, the kind that manages somehow to win some tour, either on two wheels or on foot, in the water or on the turf of a green playing field, that I can no longer abide. It is only very rarely, in a cinema, that I encounter them, on a newsreel bawling out the result of an American baseball game or a test match at cricket: some twenty or thirty troglodytes standing in a green field with forty thousand people in the background rumbling or screaming their heads off. This is all commerce now, big business in fact, a kind of stud farm nothing to do with 'sport', that is to say with training, the interplay of body and spirit and the old Olympic ideal. It's an unsettling sort of business. I like physical discipline and self-control but what has the harmony of the body to do with productions involving such sad, stressed, desperate people? So I grind my teeth. And as concerns the record, we are all, willy-nilly, competing for that, along with our fellow traveller on this godforsaken train, the hero of the Tour de Suisse; the same desire propels us at a hundred and twenty-two kilometres per hour forward into time as fires the illustrious butcher's apprentice in the next compartment; the same unstoppable rhythm, all of us running races in every possible direction with no prospect of stopping. While we are in this train moving at a hundred and twenty-two kilometres an hour, a crazy racing car has been following us on the highway ever since Muhlhouse, occasionally overtaking the Paris Express, while above us the flight from Vienna to London is making its own headway at between two hundred and fifty and three hundred kilometres per hour and, on the sea, various ships proceed at blue riband speed: there's no climbing down now. And tomorrow, in the stratosphere, in thin air, something will be travelling at five hundred or a thousand kilometres an hour from Europe to America-why not? Human muscle can no longer stop the engine. A hundred, a hundred million engines ticking everywhere, on the earth, in the water, in the air; it is thirty or forty years now since this sickness of speed imposed its rhythms on us; distance is no more, there are no more obstacles-there can't be, never again, can there? Never, not even in the days of the diligence, was country so far from country, human being from human being, as when Sir Malcolm Campbell piloted his racing car and broke the record at four hundred kilometres an hour. A hundred and twenty-two kilometres an hour: who can comprehend this, who can grasp it? And our train isn't even aiming for a record, it is just the normal speed for the Basle to Paris Express! Am I wrong in thinking that the faces of my fellow travellers on this perfectly ordinary train bear traces of horror and scepticism? This businessman opposite was only just now organising his case of samples, shaking his head, nervously examining the second hand on his pocket-watch. Silent and horrified we are juddering towards a common, banal fate. We can no longer simply step off that which moves. And to what advantage? Once upon a time the merchant would have carried his wares from person to person, organising caravans, bearing the soul of the West to the East and returning to the West again with his freight of Eastern dreams and hashish. The traveller was an explorer once: the journey from Prague to Vienna was an epoch-making adventure; the traveller was urged to give an account of his experiences, the whole project representing the development of a more intimate relationship between people. Today it is an estrangement, an hour-by-hour distancing to the tune of one hundred and twenty-two kilometres. What does the cut-price tourist see of Paris and London in his seven-day round-trip? Hotel rooms and public buildings: there isn't even enough time to register the smile on a stranger's face... I have no great hopes of speed. I am a courier who does not know what message he is carrying or why. At Troyes I break the lamp in the compartment which is just as well since it is as if someone had struck me on the head so I might emerge from my bitter reflections. It always requires some accident to bring out the courteous and generous side of me: Fate never tolerates someone behaving contrary to their nature.
The old woman I wanted to help as she was struggling and stretching to stuff her heavy luggage into the luggage rack immediately denied any association with me since everyone could see that it was I with my sudden movement who broke the lamp. Oh yes, everyone saw it, all the Alsatian old women. I won't deny it. Serves me right for trying to be courteous. Every time I have lifted a finger beyond my normal role of good-natured observer of my fellow man it has been a disaster. The lamp I have succeeded in breaking was brand new, as was every item in the furnishings of the carriage. There go two hundred francs, I think. It has already cost me one hundred francs to buy a ticket for this human drama that I am now resolved to enjoy. I sit among them like a leper. We have tidied away the broken glass, the conductor will be along any moment and then it will be up to me whether I confess my crime or remain in silent denial all the way to Paris... They wouldn't betray me, my fellow travellers, certainly not! But they are waiting for me to confess. They don't look at me, burying their heads in magazines, all anticipating my fall. Finally the inspector arrives! I call him into the compartment and produce the incriminating evidence. But what follows is so French it was worth the experience. The inspector gazes at the splinters, scratches his ear, mumbles something and goes away. Nor does he ever return. He avoids our carriage like the plague. Once we are in Paris! I think, but he doesn't appear in Paris either. Clearly he must hate scribbling notes and submitting reports and can't be bothered to sweep the broken glass away. A French inspector... an Austrian inspector would have stopped the train and set up an impromptu, improvised commission of inquiry; it would have been a fury of Central European scribbling, an orgy of seductive report submitting, then the forms, the signatures, the stamps: but all the energy of tracking down, information gathering and administering of fines that an inspector back home would have applied to such a crime is unknown in these parts. A lamp has been broken? So what? The state is rich enough, the train company has in any case insured all its fittings, someone or other will surely pay for the damage... oh la la! I know this voice. I take a deep breath. It seems we are almost there, at home.

*

Ihesitate a moment in the stairwell, which is exactly like those I see in American movies involving millionaire heroes with palaces whose halls are all marble, columns and copper ornaments, just as unlikely, full of just as much soulless, pompous grandiosity distributed along corridors and in reception rooms, enough to make the traveller shudder to think he has a contemporary stake in such a 'style'! A group of young men-Italians- walk towards me. On their ties they sport the local emblem of the fascio. They speak loudly, excited, in good temper. All I can make out in their shouting are the words war and started, and I have to stop in my tracks to avoid being swept away by them they are so pleased and in such a hurry; then they disappear among the columns of bar on the next floor. Their raucous good humour is still audible on the floor below in the silent empty hall. I have to stop because suddenly I understand. I hadn't understood quite so clearly all those months and years ago when I was reading the papers. I glance absent-mindedly at my watch and note that it is five in the afternoon on the first of September... I have now grasped the two words in a way I had never grasped them before. They are right: it has begun. What? Mr Rickett's oil business? The Italian-Abyssinian War? Or the war, the one we have long secretly thought about, the one that started twenty years ago and never properly finished, the one that was suspended for a while, then continued by other means, using other weapons, then conferred about, after which we re-armed, and now a bunch of excited young men have finally pronounced the word, establishing the fact that "it has started." What? Well, that which simply had to happen sometime. For twenty years now, asleep or awake, I have been thinking about it; every thought of the present or the future has been haunted by the prospect of that which has now "started". It is what all Europe has been speculating about for the last twenty years. Poets in their verses, chemical factories in their test-tubes and retorts, philosophers in their studies: twenty years waiting for it to strike. Suddenly now it is visible, tangible. Am I looking at the moment through a magnifying glass? I don't think so. It is not the Italy-Abyssinia affair that has begun, or not just that-Italians and Abyssinians will set about killing each other but then there will be some peace, some truce, some bargaining, perhaps even a trade-off. But once people have started something they have to finish it: twenty years since we started and we have still not finished, nor will we finish yet, not for a long time. There are two Europes here living next door to each other, with two different aims, two different sets of convictions, and it is beyond human will now to ensure that the two Europes should not set about each other. Which of them has 'justice' on its side? But once it is no longer a matter of justice... Thirty neighbouring states, allied or at odds with each other in this part of the world, with borders and excise duties, with conflicting beliefs; thirty insular, secretive states puffing like asthmatics, making a 'peace' that is sometimes more cruel than a war... no wonder it has all started up again! This is neither politics nor commerce now, not diplomacy, not merely the satanic shadow of 'wicked capitalism' or the product of other such childish nightmares. The fact is that out of these thirty states, out of these two Europes, we have to construct something by a form of agreement, establishing some new system of production that we can call a mutually agreed name, a united Europe, otherwise we perish. It is a process that "started" not at five o'clock on the first of the month but much earlier, one that has now seized its moment. The 'peace' that has been in quarantine these last fifteen years might have been no more than an opportunity to learn a few battle hymns and sharpen a few knives. There is something in life at which the reader of a newspaper browsing his way through the various columns at home or anywhere in Europe will remark vaguely bitterly, "Things can't go on like this"-one day a decree, the next day an agreement, the following day an attack, the whole engine creaking and swaying: obviously things can't go on "like this". Now, suddenly, I understand. The young Italians up in the bar, they too "understand". And now I understand that it is not simply an issue between the two versions of Europe-yes, here they are, next to each other, the fascist and democratic versions, in such a state of economic, political, and ideological tension that was bound at some stage to become intolerable-but that, beyond this, something has "started" that may be mortally dangerous, but might equally be life-giving: birth at a critical moment. Europe, that geographical obsession, must finally give flesh-and-blood birth to itself, that is what I understand. Up to now I only knew it. And with the raucous voices of the young Italians still in my ears I go out into the steamy humid street.
This street, this city, this world, from the Rhine through to the Pyrenees, from the Mediterranean through to Spitzbergen is the 'other' Europe. I stop on the corner and look around. There is plenty to look at. I feel like Rip van Winkle, full of doubt: the place has changed almost unrecognisably. Not on the outside, obviously. Valéry, who lives only a few streets away, called the thought of Europe a myth. I came here first thirteen years ago but today's Paris, today's West, seems to me, in its general mien, in its convictions, its mood, its obligations and agreements, only the faint shadow of a memory. The change I detect now, while the sensation of it is still fresh, feels like an assault, as if something had bodily touched me. The city wears different garments. Paris has changed more dramatically, in a more startling fashion, in the last decade and a half than it had in the years between the Napoleonic Wars and, yes, from the invention of the train through to the twenties. To think of that familiar year, nineteen-twenty, now, on this street corner in Paris, is like trying to focus some undefined, faded historical period! There is not one political agreement, not one international treaty that seems, at this distance of a decade and half, to be unaltered and still valid: Versailles, Locarno, Genoa, Stresa, all the textbook names live only in memory, like the Golden Bull. There is a change in the way men and women dress: there's a tarty cabbie-type seen round the streets, there are no vehicles from the historical past rolling by, omnibuses and trams have disappeared, to be replaced by high narrow motorbuses rushing and honking, and everywhere the tank-like monsters of the electric line shove past, one followed by another; old cafés, restaurants and apartment houses have changed beyond recognition, with new houses going up in new peculiar styles-everything brand new, everything freshly painted, everything transitional, built to last mere moments. What has happened? Everything speeds and shudders. Paris has changed more, inside and out, in the last decade and a half than between eighteen twenty and nineteen twenty. Werner Sombart has calculated that the population of Europe has grown from one hundred and sixty million to four hundred and eighty million in a hundred years. And now, about noon on a weekday, the streets of Paris are packed with crowds of unimaginable size-crowds everywhere, in the street, in the restaurants, before stores, in cinemas, as if preparing for something. Ortega y Gasset thinks they are preparing for revolution, "the revolt of the masses". The New Style you see in houses, in fashion, in technical innovations, is the style of the masses, crude, conformist and screamingly utilitarian: it is the style of a public that is aware of its power, a loud and conscious power that dares to proclaim its coarseness to the world. The masses demand to speak. Not only in politics, not only in assemblies. And it is not just their human rights they are clamouring for-they claim the privileges due their barbarity; they want to establish the reign of tastelessness: they dare to be coarse. That is one of the meanings of change.

*

We are living opposite Regent's Park in an end-of-century London house that is as understated as all the other houses round here; its modesty and good manners preclude it from differing: a gentleman does not go about in evening dress when his neighbours are wearing the common grey of the everyday street. Is it a fine house? For a whole month I don't dare look around. I faintly suspect that its outer appearance is ugly, a typical Victorian building, a mixture of minor hunting lodge and compound hut. It's an English house. It is embellished with shrubs and flowerbeds, with a front garden leading to the gate, a flagstone porch by the flowers with long wisps of grass, like the whiskers of a goat, rising in the cracks: these scrupulous wisps of grass are a proper part of the English front garden. A few days later I am in Denham, in the wings of a set they are building for a René Clair film, a scene intended to resemble the entrance to a Scottish castle; here too are flagstones, this time of papier-mâché, and here are busy, conscientious men inserting long wisps of grass between them... Those wisps of grass between stones in the front gardens of the English bourgeoisie are the product not of nature but of human design. This too is tradition of a sort. The house comprises three floors, each floor three rooms. The kitchen is down in the basement along with the pantry and an elegant refectory for the servants; the sitting rooms and the dining room are on the ground floor; the upper two floors are for the bedrooms and the guest room; and the servants' quarters are up in the loft. There is an electric-powered lift in the house opening onto the common hall of the bedroom level but there is no room that opens directly into another room, there being instead a narrow corridor and the little hall to separate them, so it is impossible to burst in sudden fury through someone else's door, there is always a little space, a passageway wide enough for a single person between them. That is the English for you, that narrow passageway between rooms. There is an instinctive ban, even in private houses, against rubbing shoulders with someone else. There is always this distance between room and room, between one person and another: guests and family live under a common roof in unremarked isolation. The house is silent, deeply silent. And the street is just as silent, silenced by an invisible volume control. There is only the mewling of a cat, some exotic immigrant of a cat: it cannot be an English cat, not under any circumstances. It's not part of the house. The residents deeply regret the presence of the cat and will occasionally hunt for it, concerned that the cat might disturb me. It is pointless for me to assure them that back home I am used to unpleasantly louder, less sensitive cats, that I am fully inured against such and that no amount of noise or aggression is likely to disturb me. Despite all that they later catch the cat and call the RSPCA who come for it and take the discourteous, unremitting creature away, chloroformed, in a box. So now, without a cat in the house, silence rules supreme, there are absolutely no unwelcome, unbidden noises to disturb me. The street too is silent, the wide street, one side of which is protected by the low decorated iron railings of Regent's Park. All day long hordes of buses and cars proceed along this busy road but here even the buses are quiet, the cars don't sound their horns, I don't even hear the barking of a dog. Yes, this is silence. This is England.
The silence is only disturbed on the evening of our arrival by a dubious unfamiliar din, a sign that foreigners have arrived in town, barbarians unused to the English way of doing things and who, moreover, have overfilled the bathtub. No one whose ancestors have not lived here since Tudor times can understand the deeper significance of the agonisingly trivial. Neither do we understand it in the first few moments of our arrival. I have a certain awareness of it because some years ago in South Kensington a policeman knocked on the door and warned me to bathe more discreetly. A noise echoes in the yard and suddenly I remember: it is the English secret, that glug of water one can never again forget. My lady travelling companion is bathing somewhere upstairs while I am discussing the fate of Central Europe and other Danubiana with the residents on the ground floor: she is bathing because she is intelligent; she can fill the time with meaningful practical activity. "The secret of the English!" we all cry out at once, all of us afraid, both guest and hosts. And we dash upstairs. Shall I tell you? Foreigners would not understand in any case. I don't understand it myself. Despite living here for years the residents are themselves foreign, so they don't understand it either. This English secret, one of a number of complex secrets, is that the water from the overflow of the English bath does not empty into a common waste pipe but into an entirely mysterious conduit that is built into the wall that has its outlet directly into the street. Why? No one knows. No answer is available. If the foreign visitor overfills the bathtub the excess water runs down into the street and the policeman can immediately tell that there are aliens encamped on the island. This inexplicable drain protrudes from the wall of every English house: later I saw for myself that entirely new houses are built the same way. No doubt there is a law governing it. While we are gathered at the bathroom door admonishing the barbaric foreigner I am suddenly overcome by a recurring sense of wonder, the wonder that always assails me whenever I find myself in London, that nothing I have learned or believed is as valid as I once thought. One has to relearn everything. It is not enough for those wishing to take up residence to accept the state of affairs: whoever finds himself here will bend or break but will not leave without a scratch. It is not enough to dissimulate, to pretend, to nod slyly and politely indicating that you accept everything: the people, their habitations, their social arrangements, their ways of dressing, their formalities; not enough to stand conspicuously, with studied nonchalance, for the National Anthem at the cinema; not enough to conform on the outside while retaining your doubts, not enough to remain a silently watchful, foreign observer. Whoever wants to live here must yield up his secrets and hand himself over heart and soul. Careful! they can tell! They are not interested in the overtly tamed, are contemptuous of any member of the bleating herd looking startled but ambling behind the leading sheep, slyly grazing in the opulent meadow. What they want is for you to accept them, indeed more, that you should believe in them entirely, not just in their laws, in the rules of behaviour that govern the various forms of life here, but in the spirit too, the spirit out of which the law was wrought. They don't want you to kowtow to them; what they demand is that you trust them and respect their beliefs. You have to surrender everything if you want to live here, let go your doubts, abandon your opinions and all associated ideas, forget your continental cunning and various accomplishments-it is only in the privacy of your room that you are free to plot, to be shifty and treacherous, only there are you allowed to be an enthusiast, to be a devotee, to desire or loathe; that is how they do it, that is how it runs through their nerves, that is what they have settled on, and subsequently sealed with a royal seal and proclaimed with a fanfare of silver trumpets! It is the only way! I know of no London career that has been built on the continental model. Their talent for gathering information, a talent as mysterious and instinctive as that of jungle animals, as of gathering birds of prey, can scent an alien continental device; they will detect it and do not tolerate it. No-one who wishes to live here and prosper can breakfast on coffee and croissants, speak badly of sport, not even under his breath, be indifferent to animals and plants, enter a lift without removing his hat or express an unfavourable opinion of the hats worn by Her Majesty, Queen Mary, or of the three ostrich feathers once worn by aristocratic English girls at court. You will take tea at breakfast, with bacon or fried fish; on Sunday you must fly a kite or play cricket; you must be excited about Wimbledon fortnight and must acclaim the English for their sophisticated sense of humour. And you must believe in Empire. And in... but right now, just at this very moment when the water is running out of the upper waste pipe into the street, I can't think of the other things I have to believe in. The point is to believe. No ifs or buts. Your underhand schemes can be indulged too, provided they bear the stamp of royal approval. I suspect even murder in the course of robbery may be committed only according to certain traditional rules-it is no accident that de Quincy wrote a book titled Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. You must believe... for once they sense this convoluted complicity, these workings of faith, in you, you may do anything you please. You can be a communist and deny the existence of God, you may indulge your spleen and allow your selfish pleasures full rein. Here even an unbeliever is one who is capable of belief.
The night is silent and deep, it is only the roar of the occasional lion that wakes me around midnight. Elsewhere I am woken by the hooting of car horns or the clatter of trams. Nothing surprises me in London. "Can you hear the lions?" I ask half asleep. My travelling companion is astonished. That sound is unmistakably the bitter, proud roaring of a lion at night. "What sort of lion?" she asks, as she has never been to London before. I am very sleepy. "The British lion," I answer and fall asleep.