I MEET SCOTLAND YARD
81
"What's the matter," a friend shouted. "Did you forget something?"
" I forgot my umbrella," I called back.
On the dock they showed me some newspaper clippings. The
Boston
Herald
wrote "They found a letter addressed to David Herbert Lawrence,
whose writings and paintings have attracted the attention of the London
police." I knew I was back in America! A wireless story to the
New
York Times
cbncluded, "Apparently he was one of many who were turned
back as " undesirable aliens" in the fortnight preceding the royal wedding."
I thought of the dream
I
had had , the England of the novels ·and
history books I had come to see. Suddenly I realized how futile had been
this pilgrimage to yesterday. Yesterday was dead; it was a myth. There
was no returning. Today's headlines about the India Bill and armaments
and the shard of a civilization in Wales and the North country, that was
real, that was England. A country knowing that death was certain,
placing young men at all ports and all terminals glancing furtively at a
little red book hidden under the table, that was the image, the end of
a thousand years.
