CHAPTER 1

In a fit of utter dejection, I stopped in the middle of the long cinder path, and looked miserably around me. It was, perhaps without exception, the ugliest landscape upon which I had ever gazed–a flat and swampy region, ignored, apparently, by the agriculturist and scorned by even the most optimistic of builders. There were evidences here and there of calamitous speculative enterprise–a deserted brickyard, overrun with weedy grass, a one-storied factory which showed no signs of ever having been occupied, and every window of which was broken. For the most part, however, the land was a wilderness, with here and there an isolated and squalid-looking cottage. The fields, the grass of which seemed to lack any shade of colour or breath of vitality, were separated by dykes in which black, unwholesome water stood stagnant. A few cows seemed oppressed by ruminating gloom. There were no trees, no birds save occasional flocks of inflying seagulls, great patches of sedgy, irreclaimable land, stretching to the river banks. In the far distance, upon the other side of the unseen waterway, were factory chimneys, gaunt and stark, looming through the misty sky. For sound, in this dreary waste, there was only the screech of a passing locomotive from the branch line by which I had completed my journey the distant hooting of a steamer, or the melancholy call of ‘the drifting gulls. There came upon me, as I lingered there, a strong inclination to turn around, retrace my steps to the station, with its draughty shed for a booking office, sit down upon that solitary, decrepit bench, and, abandoning my enterprise, wait for the train which would take me back to the warmth and humanity of a great city. Then my hand stole into my trousers pocket, the coins jingled through my fingers–ninepence-halfpenny, and an oblong piece of cardboard-my return third-class ticket to London. I remembered that this completed the total of my worldly possessions, and off I started again down that hideous cinder track, facing what had seemed to me, from the first moment it had loomed up before me, the ‘grimmest, the ugliest, the most fearsome building I had ever seen or conceived.

It reminded me of one of those unnatural nightmares, the earliest sign of incipient lunacy, when one’s brain fails, and the ordinary buildings of some fancied city suddenly ass