these are gone, and
I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space.
We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to
talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom
and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the
Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions,
glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass--pass. The river
passes--London passes, England passes...

III

This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear
in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspects
of my story.

It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless
swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows.
But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion
something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the
most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of it....
How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and so
immaterial. It is something that calls upon such men as I with an
irresistible appeal.

I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer,
stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests. Sometimes I call
this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we
draw by pain and effort ont of the heart of life, that we disentangle
and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in
social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a
hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we
make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and
nations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its contribution I do
not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme. It is,
a something, a quality, an element, one may find now in colours, now in
norms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with each
year one lives and feels, and generation by generation and age by age,
but the how and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind....

Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove, lonely
above the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the weltering circle
of the sea.

Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of
warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them
hull-down, and presently they were mere su