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!