But there one sits in a breakfast car on the Great Western. The train shakes terribly. The waiters are quick and soft and attentive, but the food isn’t very good, and one feels as if one were some sort of ghost being waited on by men who have long ago gone to sleep, and are serving one in their sleep. The place feels tight: one would like to smash something. Outside, a tight little landscape goes by, just unbelievable, with sunshine like thin water, a horizon half a mile away,and everything crowded forward into one’s face till one gasps for space and breath, and tries to jerk one’s head back, as one does when someone pushes his face right under one’s hat-brim. Too horribly close!
Inside, we eat kippers and bacon. The place is full. The other people,mostly men, all keep themselves modified and muted, as if they didn’t want their aura to stray beyond the four legs of their chair. Inside this charmed circle of their self-constraint they seem to sit and smile with pleasant English faces. And, of course, they are all trying to be a bit “grander” than they really are: to give the impression that they have more servants in the kitchen than they really have, and so on. That is part of the English na·veté. If they have two servants, they want to give the impression of four: not less than four.
Essentially, however, and apart from being “grand”, each one of them sits complacent inside a crystal bubble, smiling and eating and sprinking sugar on porridge, and then half-furtively glancing through the transparency of their bubble, to see if there is anything outside. They will never allow anything outside: except, of course, other bubbles of varying “grandness”.
In the small things of life, the Englishman is the only perfectly civilised being. But God save me from such civilisation. God in heaven deliver me. The trick lies in tensely withholding oneself, tensely withholding one’s aura, till it forms a perfect and transparent little globe around one. At the centre of this little globe sits the Englishman, his own little god unto himself, terribly complacent, and at the same time, terribly self-deprecating. He seems to say: My dear man, I know I am no more than what I am. I wouldn’t trespass on what you are, not for worlds. Oh, not for worlds! Because when all’s said and done, what you are means nothing to me. I am god inside my own crystal world, the strictly limited domain of myself, which after all no-one can deny is my own. I am only god within the bubble of my own self-contained being, dear sir; but there, god I am, so how could I possibly desire to trespass. I only urge that all other people shall be as self-contained and as little inclined to trespass. And they may be gods inside their own bubbles if they like.
