The wide, swift river and the tall buildings on both banks, the Liver Building, the Cunard offices, and the huge constructions, mysterious in purpose, which sprang up like indestructible molehills when the Mersey Tunnel forced its way from shore to shore, provided a scale, lacking in an open seascape, by which to set off the smallness of the vessel. Before him the urgent, dangerous-looking stream could be seen suddenly to end and be replaced by the empty ocean: a question mark in the mind. New Brighton Tower, much larger, apparently, then any southern equivalent, stood at the end of the river like the upright of a gateway the other side of which was concealed from Carfax by the superstructure of the boat. In that building, he seemed to remember, Granville Bantock had contended with popular audiences and the dead weight of past misery which drips like Mersey rain upon the mind of all artists. Carfax was not the man to live on the beach like Whitman (the very weather of Liverpool discouraged such a thought), or even like Gauguin (the manner of whose death could please no one) on a warm island, but he suspected that his own not unsuccessful career in the Foreign Office had already so sobered and discoloured his imagination that his music and painting, products now of ‘spare time’ only, would be unlikely to catch that great joy of emancipation which alone, he asserted, made life and art worthy of attention.
