"And so once more I came to London, a wanderer, noting what had been built and what pulled down. London! Never for a single day will they let it alone. It is like some vast cellular organism asprawl on the Thames mud, forever heaving and sweating and rotting and growing. A fungus, a sponge, sucking in the produce of continents, sending out the wealth of empires. I used to stand on London Bridge and watch the steamers loading and discharging from the grimy overhanging warehouses. A busman's holiday, you say. But there didn't seem anything else to do while I was waiting for a ship. I found my old British Museum Reading Room pass among my papers at home and I used it one day to look in upon my bygone haunts. It gave me a shock to see some of the same old grey-haired men and women reading out of the same silly old tomes. Yes! I was almost ready to swear one old girl was at the same page as I left her years before. And the suggestions in the manuscript complaint book! Good Lord! I glanced at it as I wandered round, for it had often amused me in the past to see the weird and wonderful volumes the authorities were asked to procure. And here I found some crazy soul had demanded the first volume of the Chinese Zetetic Society's proceedings. Another complained of a lack of text-books treating of secret societies in the Tenth Century. And the world was going round outside all the time! I looked at them, these men and women—their shoulders humped as they scratched with their absurd quill-pens, their faces pallid with the light reflected from the pages. Some few, as though to show what a farce the whole business could be, had got out a perfect library of books, bastions of them, and lay back in their chairs, snoring. I couldn't bear it. I had to get out. The air was stifling me after the open sea, so I left that subsidized lunatic asylum and took the steamboat up the river to Hammersmith. It was spring, late spring, and there was a whisper in the air that meant, if I read it rightly, love and romance and youth. It was all round me as I walked out to Ealing. It was in the orchards as I rode on that old horse-omnibus that used to run between Ealing and Brentford. And next day I left the hotel and went out to where we used to live, on the Northern Heights, Gentility's last ditch before they succumbed to the onward rush of the street car and the realty agent! Spring was whispering there too, creepers were growing over new villas, new streets were scored across our old cricket and tennis ground by the church, an old tavern had been rebuilt in the very latest Mile-End-Road style. Our old house had a motor garage built on one side of it, a green-roofed shack. Many of our neighbours had For Sale boards over their gates. Some had gone. A couple of brick pillars with stone pineapples on top of them had been put up at the entrance to a farm on the other side of the railway and a board said it was the site of Ashbolton Park, a high class residential estate. Some residents, I observed, were making a stand. One old lady, who had lived all her life on the Great North Road, and who was resolved to die there, had built a brick wall right round her little estate, a brick wall with a high, narrow iron gate in the middle, through which you could see the sullen Georgian house crouching at the back, like a surly old bear. Must have been a joyous household. I looked for my old sweetheart's home. It was there, but strangers lived in it. A servant I spoke to on her way to the post told me they had been moved to Chislehurst some time. The last ditch! In a way I felt it, this crumbling and withering of the old order, the order of which my parents had vainly tried to become companions. For it was typical of England. I felt it most when I walked out on the Great North Road through Barnet and saw the huge notice-boards up over the walls of princely domains, telling me how this desirable property and that magnificent country seat was to be sold at auction at Tokenhouse Yard on such and such a date. It was hitting the seats of the mighty, you might say, this insidious growth and crumble and decay. Nothing could stand against it. The strong, stark virtues, the high courage and honour and fine courtesy, the patronage of arts and letters and religion which was the spirit of that old order, were all gone, and now the very shell and imitation of it was going, and we must prepare for the new people and their new ways. A new world. Only the road, the Great North Roman Road, seemed never to alter. A few inches more metalling, perhaps, another generation of menders, and so on. The traffic, of course, was different, for the traffic is the world. Indeed, when you stop and reflect, you will see that a great road like this one I was walking on that warm spring day, is a pulsing artery. London, that immense heart, with its systole and diastole, its ebb and flow and putrefying growth, lay beating behind me. Ahead lay that grey, brooding North, that vast coal-field whose output had made us masters of the world. Take it how you will, you must have roads. That is America's need to day—roads. Without roads no art, no literature, no real progress. No canals or railroads will do. Canals are too slow, railroads too fast. It is true they have brought trade and prosperity to the Great North West and the Great South West and the Great Middle West and all the other wests; but you cannot build up a great civilization on railroads. You must have roads, with pilgrims, or hoboes if you like, and artists and poets on foot, and taverns and talk. Railroads are the tentacles of plutocracy. Roads are democratic things.
"I was thinking very much on these lines that day and I was in the little hollow just beyond the Kingmaker's obelisk. The sun had gone down behind Mill Hill and the evening was full of blue shadows, full of the odour of smoke and sap, full of mysteriously comfortable silences. For a few moments that particular rod, pole or perch of the great road was empty save for me and a lamplighter on a bicycle, who was coming towards me, riding one hand, his torch over his shoulder, a sort of elderly Mercury illuminating an empty world. On the left the great trees stood up close to the road, great shafts, the children of those who had stood there when the legions came up out of the Thames valley and marched north into the jungle. On the right the meadows rolled away eastward towards Enfield and Cheshunt and Broxbourne, meadow and copse and cornland. The lamplighter passed me with a soft buzz and click of sprocket wheels, and looking back at him idly, I caught the sound of the church-clock at Barnet striking the hour. The chime focussed my thoughts on the great peace of the land. Here at any rate, I thought, man has topped the rise. He has accomplished all he set out to do and the result is peace and happiness. I was sentimentalizing, no doubt, for I have never been able to live in the country. But as I stood there, looking back, the spell was broken. I heard a roar of a horn, one of those ear-shattering inventions that paralyze one's faculties, a grinding of gears and a slither of rubber tyres, and then the yell of a human voice. As I turned to jump I was nearly blinded by two enormous headlights. And the voice that had yelled, a half-familiar voice, shouted, 'What the blazes do you go to sleep in the middle of the bally road for, eh?' I couldn't see anything at all until I had reached the grass at the side of the road, when I made out a long automobile standing askew across the road and panting. There was a low, semicircular seat with a man in it behind a large steering wheel, a seat so slanted that its occupant was practically recumbent. He had ear-flaps and monstrous goggles. I had a momentary mental picture of him as some Roman staff-officer rushing back to the base in his chariot. He had an imperious air as he glared at me and backed his machine with one hand to straighten it. I found my voice. I said, 'I have as much right to the road as you.' 'What?' he said, in a high note. 'To stand in the middle and block the traffic. What are you? An escaped lunatic? Have you made your will, hey?' 'Oh,' I retorted, 'If you've bought the road, or the earth, I'll get off it, of course. I should have said you were the escaped lunatic going along at that pace.' He laughed, a high, reedy cackle that seemed familiar, rose stiffly out of his place and stepped down as though he had cramp. 'Ouch!' he said, bending and straightening to unlimber himself. 'Where are we, hey? Barnet? Taking an evening stroll after the office?' And he took off his goggles and I saw my young brother's bright dark eyes and high-bridged nose and sarcastic mouth. He shouted with laughter, went off again into his reedy cry, and screamed, ''Pon my soul, it's Charley! Well, I'm ... Where in the wide, wide world did you spring from? Revisiting the glimpses of the moon? Good heavens!' And he gripped my shoulder.
"That was how we met in after years. He was at his ease at once. I was bewildered. 'By Jove, I nearly did for you that time. Nobody but a madman would stand in the middle of the Great North Road to admire the scenery, old chap. It's suicide. An amateur would have had you in mince-meat.' He stooped to examine his brake. 'Charred, by Jove! And I expect some of the gears are stripped too. Get in.'
"'Get in!' I said in astonishment. 'What for?'
"'Why, come up to town and have dinner with me, of course,' he laughed. 'The Prodigal Son. Which of us two is the Prodigal, Charley? 'Pon my soul, I believe you are. You've been wandering all over the world, I believe. I went to the funeral—you know.' I nodded. 'And the old chap said you were in some frightful hole or other. Well, let me get in and you can sit on the step. I'll take you up to my digs.'
"And that is what he did do, at a speed I could scarcely realize save by the wind that roared past my ears. We dropped down Barnet Hill like a bullet, we rushed through the gloaming with those blinding white beams cleaving the quiet gloom ahead of us and throwing preternaturally sharp shadows that reeled into oblivion like drunken goblins. It seemed to me, after my quiet meditative stroll, a monstrous invasion. We would flash round a curve with a whoop of the horn, and those pitiless rays would suddenly reveal in stark loneliness a man and a girl, clasped in each other's arms. Or they would loom up ahead, walking and lovemaking, and the sound of the horn would strike them to attitudes of paralyzed fear. Once we overtook a party in a trap, jogging pleasantly homeward, and we left them holding for their lives and the horse rearing with terror. I was holding on for my own dear life, for that matter. My brother lay back in his seat and carried on a loud monologue directed at me. He said he had to go to Southampton that night on urgent business, but must dine first. Was going to motor. This was a Stromboli, hundred horse-power racing machine. He was agent for Stromboli's. Had sold a lot of cars at twelve hundred guineas each. Had been up in Scotland staying at a country-house. And so on. I listened, but had nothing to say. He had no interest in my affairs, and every word he said showed me we were nothing and could be nothing to each other. And yet it had so happened that he had been to our mother's funeral, he had played the proper part while I was away on the ocean, a wanderer and a prodigal. He even had, as I saw later, a band of crape on his arm, which somehow I had forgotten to wear. He made me feel insignificant and hopelessly inferior. And suddenly, as I clung there, another thought sprang up in my mind, the possibility that I might even now be on the way to a meeting with Gladys again. Not that I had any rational reason to dread such a meeting. Indeed, it was she who had left me and gone to him. But I did dread it all the same. I knew it would find me tongue-tied and foolish. I could not rise to it and do myself justice. I am, I suppose, too self-conscious and shy.
"And soon we roared into lights and asphalt pavements and the heavy traffic. We crossed Marylebone Road and flew down Baker Street. Even I, ignorant as I was, had to admire the way my brother manœuvred his huge machine round the buses and cabs. It was skill, sheer skill, with a dash of luck that was very like genius. We were in Piccadilly soon after and then, turning into a quiet street, we stopped and the engine stopped too. A man in livery came running down from the house and I followed my brother up the steps into a richly furnished hall, with Sheraton chairs and Persian rugs and oriental vases. Frank took several letters and a telegram from a green-baize board with pink tape bands cutting it into a diamond-pattern, and beckoned me to follow him upstairs. I did so, and we went into what he had called his 'digs.'
"You must understand, of course, that I am no judge of the way the rich live. I can say truthfully that my tastes are simple. If I had millions I really don't know that I should buy very much. Most probably I should be a miser as regards my own personal expenses. But for all that I could see that my brother's apartment was extraordinarily rich in its appointments. There were so many details you could not imitate cheaply. A man could sit in those rooms, and eat in those rooms and go to bed there and feel that he was rich. He might even feel happy, for they were not only rich and convenient, but comfortable. I was left in a deep leather chair by a wood fire burning in a bronze grate, in a room with chocolate-distempered walls hung with prints in black frames and one or two water-colours in white frames. I looked across at a small cabinet of books just above a writing table covered with many implements in bronze and ivory. For a moment I was reminded of those model rooms in department stores. I suppose that was unfair, but my sea-training had taught me that many tools generally mean a bad workman. Somehow, the moment the rich man blunders into any department of the world's labour, his wealth shows at a disadvantage. And gold pens and silver inkpots and jade paper-weights are as incongruous as ivory-handled sledge-hammers and rose-wood jack-planes, when you come to think of it.
"And if I were to judge such ways of living by that one experience, I should say that a man would eventually lose his sense of interior values. All these beautiful, useful and convenient things would assist him to greater achievement and finer virtue, but it would not be the same achievement and virtue that would emerge if he had stayed down in the arena and lodged with the gladiators in the back-streets. It couldn't be. Perhaps the men who could get the most out of wealthy environment are those like my brother, who simply care nothing for achievement or virtue as such, who live unconsciously for themselves and never have any sense of interior values, as I call them, at all. Their lives are like an exquisite design of nymphs and fauns and satyrs on an Etruscan jar—beautiful, rounded, complete. And inside the jar is nothing but a handful of rubbish....
"So I reflected as I sat in that deep chair and watched the wood-fire burning in the bronze grate. A silent man in a black suit came in and put a decanter and siphon at my elbow and went out again. Suddenly a phrase I had heard at sea came back to me, sharp and resonant. I was talking to old Fred Tateham, the mate, one day, he who had had a collision and lost his command, and he had been telling me his plans for his younger boy. He was going to put him in his brother's office. 'You know,' said he, 'I've a very successful brother.' I forget what this successful brother had succeeded in—some genteel profession like accountancy or attorney. It struck me as amusing at the time, a man boasting of the possession of a successful brother, just as he might proclaim his pride in a clever child or a fine garden or a good terrier. And now the phrase came back as one I could use myself. I had 'a very successful brother.' To confirm this whimsical notion, the successful brother entered the room in evening dress, with a band of crape on the arm and a black tie. He was irreproachable as he stood on the rug snapping black amber buttons into his cuffs and settling his shirt-front. He was so irreproachable that I lost my feeling of discomfort and inferiority in his presence. He leaned his head on the carved stone frame of the fire-place and stared at the flames thoughtfully.