Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, barocco apostle’s face with an expression of inquiry.

I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech, for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.—­“Oh, it’s you who wrote a letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”

I had written to him from Lowestoft.  I can’t remember a single word of that letter now.  It was my very first composition in the English language.  And he had understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers.  But he gathered that this was not my object.  I did not desire to be apprenticed.  Was that the case?

It was.  He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a gentleman.  But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able Seaman if possible.  Is that it?”

It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this.  There was an Act of Parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors.  “An Act-of-Parliament.  A law,” he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while I looked at him in consternation.

I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against an Act of Parliament!  What a hopeless adventure!  However, the barocco apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit.  Yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen; and in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine.  For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant Shipping Act of the Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me.  For many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling.  It isn’t such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament.  And I am glad to say that its seventies have never been applied to me.

In the year 1878, the year of “Peace with Honour,” I had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station, to surrender myself to its care.  And now, in the year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendships secured.  It was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle.

All unaware of the War Angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing.