The fringe of villas, each primly asleep in its starlit garden, which borders the island and divides the hopfields from the Atlantic, is much wider than it used to be. But in the fields time has stood still.. . . Now, one has left the sea and the storm and the reef, and already one is forgetting that the island is an island.. . . Warmth gradually creeps up from the hot-water bottles to one’s heart and eyes, and sleep comes as the train scurries into the empire.... A loud reverberation, and one wakes up in a vast cavern, dimly lit, and sparsely peopled by a few brass-buttoned beings that have the air of dwarfs under its high, invisible roof. They give it a name, and call it Charing Cross, and one remembers that, since one last saw it, it fell down and demolished a theatre. Everything is shuttered in the cavern. Nothing to eat or to drink, or to read, but shutters. And shutters are so cold, and caverns so draughty.
“Where can I get something to eat?” one demands.
“Eat, sir?” A staggered pause, and the porter looks at one as if one were Oliver Twist. “There’s the hotels, sir,” he says, finally.
Yet one has not come by a special, unique train, unexpected and startling. No! That train knocks at the inner door of the empire every morning in every month in every year at the same hour, and it is always met by shutters. And the empire, by the fact of its accredited representatives in brass buttons and socialistic ties, is always taken aback by the desire of the peaceful invader to eat.
One wanders out into the frozen silence. Gas lamps patiently burning over acres of beautiful creosoted wood! A dead cab or so! A policeman! Shutters everywhere: Nothing else. No change here.
This is the changeless, ineffable Strand at Charing Cross, sacred as the Ganges. One cannot see a single new building. Yet they say London has been rebuilt.
The door of the hotel is locked. And the night watchman opens with the same air of astonishment as the Punch and Judy man when one asked for milk, and the railway porter when one asked for food. Every morning at that hour the train stops within fifty yards of the hotel door, and pitches out into London persons who have been up all night; and London blandly continues to be amazed at their arrival. A good English fellow, the watchman—almost certainly the elder brother of the train-guard.
“I want a room and some breakfast.”