1. I
THERE are always two ways of
looking at a thing, frequently
there are six or seven; but two ways
of looking at a London fog are quite
enough. When it is thick and yellow
in the streets and stings a man's
throat and lungs as he breathes it, an
awakening in the early morning is
either an unearthly and grewsome,
or a mysteriously enclosing, secluding,
and comfortable thing. If one
awakens in a healthy body, and with
a clear brain rested by normal sleep
and retaining memories of a normally
agreeable yesterday, one may lie watching
the housemaid building the fire;
and after she has swept the hearth
and put things in order, lie watching
the flames of the blazing and crackling
wood catch the coals and set them
blazing also, and dancing merrily and
filling corners with a glow; and in so
lying and realizing that leaping light
and warmth and a soft bed are good
things, one may turn over on one's
back, stretching arms and legs
luxuriously, drawing deep breaths and
smiling at a knowledge of the fog
outside which makes half-past eight
o'clock on a December morning as
dark as twelve o'clock on a December
night. Under such conditions
the soft, thick, yellow gloom has its
picturesque and even humorous aspect.
One feels enclosed by it at once
fantastically and cosily, and is inclined
to revel in imaginings of the picture
outside, its Rembrandt lights and
orange yellows, the halos about the
street-lamps, the illumination of shop-windows, the flare of torches stuck
up over coster barrows and coffee-stands, the shadows on the faces of
the men and women selling and buying
beside them. Refreshed by sleep
and comfort and surrounded by light,
warmth, and good cheer, it is easy to
face the day, to confront going out
into the fog and feeling a sort of
pleasure in its mysteries. This is one
way of looking at it, but only one.
The other way is marked by enormous
differences.
A man — he had given his name
to the people of the house as Antony
Dart — awakened in a third-story
bedroom in a lodging-house in a poor
street in London, and as his consciousness
returned to him, its slow and
reluctant movings confronted the
second point of view — marked by
enormous differences. He had not
slept two consecutive hours through
the night, and when he had slept he
had been tormented by dreary dreams,
which were more full of misery because
of their elusive vagueness, which
kept his tortured brain on a wearying
strain of effort to reach some definite
understanding of them. Yet when
he awakened the consciousness of
being again alive was an awful thing.
If the dreams could have faded into
blankness and all have passed with
the passing of the night, how he
could have thanked whatever gods
there be! Only not to awake —
only not to awake! But he had
awakened.
The clock struck nine as he did
so, consequently he knew the hour.
The lodging-house slavey had aroused
him by coming to light the fire. She
had set her candle on the hearth and
done her work as stealthily as possible,
but he had been disturbed,
though he had made a desperate effort
to struggle back into sleep. That
was no use — no use. He was awake
and he was in the midst of it all again.
Without the sense of luxurious comfort
he opened his eyes and turned
upon his back, throwing out his arms
flatly, so that he lay as in the form
of a cross, in heavy weariness and
anguish. For months he had awakened
each morning after such a night
and had so lain like a crucified thing.
As he watched the painful flickering
of the damp and smoking wood and
coal he remembered this and thought
that there had been a lifetime of such
awakenings, not knowing that the
morbidness of a fagged brain blotted
out the memory of more normal days
and told him fantastic lies which were
but a hundredth part truth. He could
see only the hundredth part truth, and
it assumed proportions so huge that
he could see nothing else. In such
a state the human brain is an infernal
machine and its workings can only be
conquered if the mortal thing which
lives with it — day and night, night
and day — has learned to separate its
controllable from its seemingly
uncontrollable atoms, and can silence
its clamor on its way to madness.
Antony Dart had not learned this
thing and the clamor had had its
hideous way with him. Physicians
would have given a name to his
mental and physical condition. He
had heard these names often — applied
to men the strain of whose lives had
been like the strain of his own, and
had left them as it had left him —
jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some
of them had been broken and had
died or were dragging out bruised and
tormented days in their own homes
or in mad-houses. He always shuddered
when he heard their names,
and rebelled with sick fear against
the mere mention of them. They
had worked as he had worked, they
had been stricken with the delirium
of accumulation — accumulation —
as he had been. They had been
caught in the rush and swirl of the
great maelstrom, and had been borne
round and round in it, until having
grasped every coveted thing tossing
upon its circling waters, they
themselves had been flung upon the shore
with both hands full, the rocks about
them strewn with rich possessions,
while they lay prostrate and gazed
at all life had brought with dull,
hopeless, anguished eyes. He knew
— if the worst came to the worst —
what would be said of him, because
he had heard it said of others. "He
worked too hard — he worked too
hard." He was sick of hearing it.
What was wrong with the world —
what was wrong with man, as Man
— if work could break him like this?
If one believed in Deity, the living
creature It breathed into being must
be a perfect thing — not one to be
wearied, sickened, tortured by the
life Its breathing had created. A
mere man would disdain to build
a thing so poor and incomplete.
A mere human engineer who constructed
an engine whose workings
were perpetually at fault — which
went wrong when called upon to
do the labor it was made for — who
would not scoff at it and cast it aside
as a piece of worthless bungling?
"Something is wrong," he muttered,
lying flat upon his cross and
staring at the yellow haze which
had crept through crannies in window-sashes into the room. "Someone
is wrong. Is it I — or You?"
His thin lips drew themselves
back against his teeth in a mirthless
smile which was like a grin.
"Yes," he said. "I am pretty
far gone. I am beginning to talk to
myself about God. Bryan did it just
before he was taken to Dr. Hewletts'
place and cut his throat."
He had not led a specially evil
life; he had not broken laws, but
the subject of Deity was not one
which his scheme of existence had
included. When it had haunted
him of late he had felt it an untoward
and morbid sign. The thing
had drawn him — drawn him; he
had complained against it, he had
argued, sometimes he knew — shuddering —
that he had raved. Something
had seemed to stand aside and
watch his being and his thinking.
Something which filled the universe
had seemed to wait, and to have
waited through all the eternal ages,
to see what he — one man — would
do. At times a great appalled wonder
had swept over him at his realization
that he had never known or
thought of it before. It had been
there always — through all the ages
that had passed. And sometimes —
once or twice — the thought had in
some unspeakable, untranslatable way
brought him a moment's calm.
But at other times he had said to
himself — with a shivering soul cowering
within him — that this was only
part of it all and was a beginning,
perhaps, of religious monomania.
During the last week he had
known what he was going to do —
he had made up his mind. This
abject horror through which others
had let themselves be dragged to
madness or death he would not
endure. The end should come quickly,
and no one should be smitten aghast
by seeing or knowing how it came.
In the crowded shabbier streets of
London there were lodging-houses
where one, by taking precautions,
could end his life in such a manner
as would blot him out of any world
where such a man as himself had been
known. A pistol, properly managed,
would obliterate resemblance to any
human thing. Months ago through
chance talk he had heard how it
could be done — and done quickly.
He could leave a misleading letter.
He had planned what it should be —
the story it should tell of a
disheartened mediocre venturer of his
poor all returning bankrupt and
humiliated from Australia, ending
existence in such pennilessness that
the parish must give him a pauper's
grave. What did it matter where a
man lay, so that he slept — slept —
slept? Surely with one's brains
scattered one would sleep soundly
anywhere.
He had come to the house the
night before, dressed shabbily with
the pitiable respectability of a
defeated man. He had entered
droopingly with bent shoulders and
hopeless hang of head. In his own
sphere he was a man who held himself
well. He had let fall a few
dispirited sentences when he had
engaged his back room from the
woman of the house, and she had
recognized him as one of the luckless.
In fact, she had hesitated a
moment before his unreliable look
until he had taken out money from
his pocket and paid his rent for a
week in advance. She would have
that at least for her trouble, he had
said to himself. He should not occupy
the room after to-morrow. In
his own home some days would pass
before his household began to make
inquiries. He had told his servants
that he was going over to Paris for a
change. He would be safe and deep
in his pauper's grave a week before
they asked each other why they did
not hear from him. All was in
order. One of the mocking agonies
was that living was done for. He
had ceased to live. Work, pleasure,
sun, moon, and stars had lost their
meaning. He stood and looked at
the most radiant loveliness of land
and sky and sea and felt nothing.
Success brought greater wealth each
day without stirring a pulse of
pleasure, even in triumph. There
was nothing left but the awful days
and awful nights to which he knew
physicians could give their scientific
name, but had no healing for. He
had gone far enough. He would go
no farther. To-morrow it would
have been over long hours. And
there would have been no public
declaiming over the humiliating
pitifulness of his end. And what did it
matter?
How thick the fog was outside —
thick enough for a man to lose himself
in it. The yellow mist which
had crept in under the doors and
through the crevices of the window-sashes gave a ghostly look to the
room — a ghastly, abnormal look, he
said to himself. The fire was
smouldering instead of blazing. But
what did it matter? He was going
out. He had not bought the pistol
last night — like a fool. Somehow
his brain had been so tired and
crowded that he had forgotten.
"Forgotten." He mentally
repeated the word as he got out of bed.
By this time to-morrow he should
have forgotten everything. *This
time to-morrow. His mind repeated
that also, as he began to dress
himself. Where should he be? Should
he be anywhere? Suppose he
awakened again — to something as
bad as this? How did a man get
out of his body? After the crash
and shock what happened? Did one
find oneself standing beside the Thing
and looking down at it? It would
not be a good thing to stand and
look down on — even for that which
had deserted it. But having torn
oneself loose from it and its devilish
aches and pains, one would not care
— one would see how little it all
mattered. Anything else must be
better than this — the thing for
which there was a scientific name
but no healing. He had taken all
the drugs, he had obeyed all the
medical orders, and here he was after
that last hell of a night — dressing
himself in a back bedroom of a
cheap lodging-house to go out and
buy a pistol in this damned fog.
He laughed at the last phrase of
his thought, the laugh which was a
mirthless grin.
"I am thinking of it as if I was
afraid of taking cold," he said.
"And to-morrow — !"
There would be no To-morrow.
To-morrows were at an end. No
more nights — no more days — no
more morrows.
He finished dressing, putting on
his discriminatingly chosen shabby-genteel clothes with a care for the
effect he intended them to produce.
The collar and cuffs of his shirt were
frayed and yellow, and he fastened his
collar with a pin and tied his worn
necktie carelessly. His overcoat was
beginning to wear a greenish shade
and look threadbare, so was his hat.
When his toilet was complete he
looked at himself in the cracked and
hazy glass, bending forward to
scrutinize his unshaven face under the
shadow of the dingy hat.
"It is all right," he muttered.
"It is not far to the pawnshop
where I saw it."
The stillness of the room as he
turned to go out was uncanny. As
it was a back room, there was no
street below from which could arise
sounds of passing vehicles, and the
thickness of the fog muffled such
sound as might have floated from the
front. He stopped half-way to the
door, not knowing why, and listened.
To what — for what? The silence
seemed to spread through all the
house — out into the streets —
through all London — through all
the world, and he to stand in the
midst of it, a man on the way to
Death — with no To-morrow.
What did it mean? It seemed to
mean something. The world
withdrawn — life withdrawn — sound
withdrawn — breath withdrawn. He
stood and waited. Perhaps this
was one of the symptoms of the
morbid thing for which there was
that name. If so he had better get
away quickly and have it over, lest
he be found wandering about not
knowing — not knowing. But now
he knew — the Silence. He waited
— waited and tried to hear, as if
something was calling him — calling
without sound. It returned to him
— the thought of That which had
waited through all the ages to see
what he — one man — would do.
He had never exactly pitied himself
before — he did not know that he
pitied himself now, but he was a
man going to his death, and a light,
cold sweat broke out on him and
it seemed as if it was not he who
did it, but some other — he flung
out his arms and cried aloud words
he had not known he was going to
speak.
"Lord! Lord! What shall I do
to be saved?"
But the Silence gave no answer.
It was the Silence still.
And after standing a few moments
panting, his arms fell and his head
dropped, and turning the handle of
the door, he went out to buy the
pistol.