hat we call its triviality is really the
tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like
ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My
experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not
fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents (what there were
of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere of the landscape, which
were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly, and they
were as I shall now describe.

.....

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing outside
the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. And
for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or the
emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon
me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the
road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not know
if other people are made like me in this matter; but to me it is always
dreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings into
life a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not want
anything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful, a thing for
contemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome
than I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man's
life is a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail man
refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in letters
of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then the
immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that
something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But
this is a digressive way of stating what I have said already--that
the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that the
monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous
train, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town of
Oxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came
upon me out of the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years
afterwards I should, in an article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about Sir
George Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well
that he went to Cambridge.

As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless. The
fields that should have been green were as gre