Harold Macgrath

The Voice in the Fog Harold Macgrath

A London fog, solid, substantial, yellow as an old dog's tooth or a jaundiced eye. You couldnot 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 skinalone conveyed to you with promptness and no incertitude that this thing had substance. Youcould feel it; you could open and shut your hands and sense it on your palms, and it penetratedyour clothes and beaded your spectacles and rings and bracelets and shoe-buckles. It wasnightmare, bereft of its pillows, grown somnambulistic; and London became the antechamber toHades, 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 willfind certain English cousins of yours, as far away from London as Hong-Kong, who are stillwrapt up snugly in it. Happy he afflicted with strabismus, for only he can see his nose before hisface. In the daytime you become a fish, to wriggle over the ocean's floor amid strange flora andfauna, such as ash-cans and lamp-posts and venders' carts and cab-horses and sandwich-men. Butat night you are neither fish, bird nor beast. The night was May thirteenth; never mind the year; the date should suffice: and a Walpurgisnight, if you please, without any Mendelssohn to interpret it. That happy line of Milton's-"Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers"-fellupon London like Elijah's mantle. Confusion and his cohort of synonyms (why not?) raged upand down thoroughfare and side-street and alley, east and west, danced before palace andtenement alike: all to the vast amusement of the gods, to the mild annoyance of the half-gods (inMayfair), and to the complete rout of all mortals a-foot or a-cab. Imagine: militant suffragettestrying to set fire to the prime minister's mansion, Siegfried being sung at the opera, and a yellowLondon fog!The press about Covent Garden was a mathematical problem over which Euclid would haveshed bitter tears and hastily retired to his arbors and citron tables.