English Journey [antikvár]

chapter one TO SOUTHAMPTON I WILL BEGIN, I SAID, WHERE A MAN MIGHT WELL FIRST land, at Southampton. There was a motor-coach going to Southampton—there seems to be a m.otor-coach going anywhere in this island—and I caught it. I caught it with the minimum of clothes, a portable typewriter, the usual paraphernalia of pipes, note-books, rubbers, paper-fasteners, razor-blades, pencils, Muirhead's Blue Guide to England, Stamp and Beaver's Geographic and Economic Survey, and, for reading in bed, the tiny thin-paper edition of the Oxford Book of English Prose. This was the first motor-coach I had ever travelled in, and I was astonished at its speed and comfort. I never wish to go any faster. And as for comfort, I doubt if even the most expensive private motors—those gigantic, three-thousand-pound mxachines— are as determinedly and ruthlessly com.fortable as these new motor-coaches. They are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality. This is hov/ the ancient Persian mon-archs would have travelled, had they known the trick of it. If I favoured violent revolution, the sudden overthrowing and destruction of a sneering favoured class, I should be bitterly opposed to the wide use of these vehicles. They offer luxury to all but the most poverty-stricken. They have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor travellers. No longer can the wealthy go splashing past in their private conveyances, driving the humble pedestrian against the wall, leaving him to shake his fist and curse the proud pampered crew. The children of these fist-shakers now go thundering by in their own huge coaches and loll in velvet as they go. Perhaps it is significant that you get the same sort of over-done comfort, the same sinking away into a deep