had thought of it, it could
only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated
mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual
certitude--obviously unattainable by the man in the street--could have
stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an
irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.

London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a
monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--with its best Venice-like
aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen
of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city
towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the
glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion House
went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of
sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its millions
streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous
line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an
endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping
them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of
the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour
of the boat-trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack
of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these
places. The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great
flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs
of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing
in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly
appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of
my existence. For this was the station at which, thirty-seven years
before, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the same building,
but the same spot. At nineteen years of age, after a period of probation
and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a
North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft--my first long railway
journey in England--to "sign on" for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water
ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city
with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and
unexplo