THE WAY TO AFRICA 11

The huge Liverpool hotel had been designed with-
out aesthetic taste but with the right ideas about com-
fort and a genuine idea of magnificence. It could
probably house as many passengers as an Atlantic
liner; passengers, because no one goes to Liverpool
for pleasure, to the little cramped square and the low
sky-signs which can almost be touched with the hand,
where all the bars and the cinemas close at ten. But
there was a character hidden in this hotel; it wasn't
chic, it wasn't bright, it wasn't international; there
remained somewhere hidden, among its long muffled
corridors, beneath the huge clifE-like fall of its walls,
the idea of an English inn; one didn't mind asking
for muffins or a pint of bitter, while the boats hooted
in the Mersey and the luggage littered the hall; there
was quite probably a boots. Anyway enough re-
mained for me to understand the surprise of Henry
James when he landed in England, "that England
should be as English as, for my entertainment, she
took the trouble to be."

The natural native seediness had not been lost in
the glitter of chromium plate; the muffin had
been overwhelmingly, perhaps rather nauseatingly,
enlarged. If the hotel were silly, it was only because
magnificence is almost always a little silly. The mag-
nificent gesture seldom quite comes off. When on
rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide,
one gets a sense of the theatre or the films, it is "too
good to be true". I find myself always torn between
two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than
it is and the belief that when it appears better it
is really worse. But in the huge lounge at Liverpool,
like the lounge of a country inn fifty times magnified,