The Voice in the Fog - Page 1/93

Fog.

A London fog, solid, substantial, yellow as an old dog's tooth or a

jaundiced eye. You could not look through it, nor yet gaze up and down

it, nor over it; and you only thought you saw it. The eye became

impotent, untrustworthy; all senses lay fallow except that of touch;

the skin alone conveyed to you with promptness and no incertitude that

this thing had substance. You could feel it; you could open and shut

your hands and sense it on your palms, and it penetrated your clothes

and beaded your spectacles and rings and bracelets and shoe-buckles.

It was nightmare, bereft of its pillows, grown somnambulistic; and

London became the antechamber to Hades, lackeyed by idle dreams and

peopled by mistakes.

There is something about this species of fog unlike any other in the

world. It sticks. You will find certain English cousins of yours, as

far away from London as Hong-Kong, who are still wrapt up snugly in it.

Happy he afflicted with strabismus, for only he can see his nose before

his face. In the daytime you become a fish, to wriggle over the

ocean's floor amid strange flora and fauna, such as ash-cans and

lamp-posts and venders' carts and cab-horses and sandwich-men. But at

night you are neither fish, bird nor beast.

The night was May thirteenth; never mind the year; the date should

suffice: and a Walpurgis night, if you please, without any Mendelssohn

to interpret it.

That happy line of Milton's--"Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan

and his peers"--fell upon London like Elijah's mantle. Confusion and

his cohort of synonyms (why not?) raged up and down thoroughfare and

side-street and alley, east and west, danced before palace and tenement

alike: all to the vast amusement of the gods, to the mild annoyance of

the half-gods (in Mayfair), and to the complete rout of all mortals

a-foot or a-cab. Imagine: militant suffragettes trying to set fire to

the prime minister's mansion, Siegfried being sung at the opera, and

a yellow London fog!

The press about Covent Garden was a mathematical problem over which

Euclid would have shed bitter tears and hastily retired to his arbors

and citron tables. Thirty years previous (to the thirteenth of May,

not Euclid) some benighted beggar invented the Chinese puzzle; and

tonight, many a frantic policeman would have preferred it, sitting with

the scullery maid and the pantry near by. Simple matter to shift about

little blocks of wood with the tip of one's finger; but cabs and

carriages and automobiles, each driver anxious to get out ahead of his

neighbor!--not to mention the shouting and the din and discord of horns

and whistles and sirens and rumbling engines!