I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.

But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us, beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of all three.

In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom—a parochial illusion of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light and dark—what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark—not many days, but just one day and that always midday.

At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky—specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it—our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune—if, that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.

And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.

As I reached this depressing conclusion—not a novel or original one, but always a rather cheerless one—a sort of orphaned feeling stole over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!” counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.

The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the DauphinÉ coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains—by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.

All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor, tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.

Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.” It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:

Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.

Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked through the shadow into the deeps.

But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.

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