Rhenish-Westphalia he will be assured that London is already as deserted as Bruges. His eyes will have told him that that is not the case to-day. But, set there in the hideous heart of the German competition he so much dreads, confronted by the blackened landscape, by miles of gray slag mounds, by horizons obscured with rusty cinder heaps, by heaps of sand, by heaps of rust, by clouds of green, of red, of purple, or of black smoke, by dirt of the foulest and labour of the obviously grimmest, he will not be certain of the day-after-to-morrow of London. He will almost certainly not know that, in the marshes round Purfleet, he has factories larger, more modern, better capitalised, more solvent, and a landscape more blackened and more grim.
The Westphalian will say: "Oh yes, it is all over", and before the Londoner's mental picture of his little bit of the city and suburbs there will rise up a view of the stained and deserted façades of a London like Bruges, with swarms of pauper children tumbling over the doorsteps, and an old gray horse cropping the grass between the flagstones of Threadneedle Street. He will not in the least know what reserves of wealth or of energy his London may have.
VII
Above all his London, his intimate London, will be the little bits of it that witnessed the great moments, the poignant moods of his life; it will be what happened to be the backgrounds of his more intense emotions.
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