And what a thing it was to have solid paving-stones under one's feet
again. There were naphtha flares in the fog, dingy folk in muddy ways,
and houses that kept to one place. There was a public-house, too.
Outside that place I remembered the taste of everlasting fried fish, and
condensed milk in weak tea; and so entered, and corrected the
recollection with a glass of port--several glasses, to make sure of
it--and that great hunk of plum-cake which I had occasionally seen in a
dream. Besides, this was Christmas Eve.




XI. An Old Lloyd's Register

With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile era
that had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I was
inside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander. He was
unravelling for me the shining complexity of his "box of tricks," as he
called his ship. He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master of
the brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he
illustrated his scientific monologue with stories of his own
experiences in the Heligoland Bight. These, to me, were like the
bedevilments of those dreams from which we groan to awake, but cannot.
The curious doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him,
would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinct
race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the
monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now. That made an
acute difference. This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but
actuality. And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was
like the men of that group on the _Queen Mary_ who were similarly