boxes, buried under floors, old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers,
people thrust suddenly out of trains, happy lovers shot, vitrioled and
so forth by rivals. I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in
foully drawn pictures of "police raids" on this and that. Interspersed
with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the urban John Bull, had
his fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella, or the kindly empty faces
of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared, visiting this, opening
that, getting married, getting offspring, lying in state, doing
everything but anything, a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race
apart.

I have never revisited Chatham; the impression it has left on my mind is
one of squalid compression, unlit by any gleam of a maturer charity.
All its effects arranged themselves as antithetical to the Bladesover
effects. They confirmed and intensified all that Bladesover suggested.
Bladesover declared itself to be the land, to be essentially England; I
have already told how its airy spaciousness, its wide dignity, seemed to
thrust village, church, and vicarage into corners, into a secondary and
conditional significance. Here one gathered the corollary of that. Since
the whole wide country of Kent was made up of contiguous Bladesovers
and for the gentlefolk, the surplus of population, all who were not
good tenants nor good labourers, Church of England, submissive and
respectful, were necessarily thrust together, jostled out of sight, to
fester as they might in this place that had the colours and even the
smells of a well-packed dustbin. They should be grateful even for that;
that, one felt, was the theory of it all.

And I loafed about this wilderness of crowded dinginess, with young,
receptive, wide-open eyes, and through the blessing (or curse) of some
fairy godmother of mine, asking and asking again: "But after all, WHY--"