Page:The Book of the Homeless (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916).djvu/158

 war. I don't mean to say I ignored the possibility. I simply did not think of it. And it made no difference; for, if I 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 of before the war, flaunting its enormous glare as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky—received us 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 night life of 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 taxicabs 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-six years ago, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the same building, but the same spot. At eighteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I had