Atdtda22: [42.1ii] A proper winter fog, 609

[Paul Nightingale]

[609.28] "... a proper winter fog, which went on thickening ..."

A visiting American's contemporary impression:

It had been a dull evening on the way up from Dover, but not uncommonly dull
for an evening of the English November, and we did not notice that we had
emerged from the train into an intensified obscurity. In the corridors of
the station-hotel hung wreaths of what a confident spirit of our party
declared to be smoke, in expression of the alarming conviction that the
house was on fire. Nobody but ourselves seemed troubled by the smoke,
however, and with a prompt recurrence to the reading which makes the
American an intimate of the English circumstance though he has never
personally known it, we realized that what seemed smoke must be a very
marked phase of London fog. It did not perceptibly thicken in-doors that
night, but the next day no day dawned, nor, for that matter, the day after
the next. All the same the town was invisibly astir everywhere in a world
which hesitated at moments between total and partial blindness. The usual
motives
and incentives were at work in the business of men, more like the mental
operations of sleep than of waking.

>From the height of an upper window one could look down and feel the city's
efforts to break the mesh of its weird captivity, with an invisible stir in
all directions, as of groping. Of course, life had to go on, upon such terms
as it could, and if you descended from your window that showed nothing, and
went into the street, and joined the groping, you could make out something
of its objects. With a cabman who knew his way, as a pilot knows his way on
a river in a black night, you could depart and even arrive. In the course of
your journey you would find the thoroughfare thick with hesitating or
arrested traffic. At one place you would be aware of a dull, red light,
brightening into a veiled glare, and you would have come upon a group of
horses, detached from several omnibuses, and standing head to head till they
might hopefully be put to and driven on again. The same light, with the
torches carried by boys, would reveal trucks and carts stopped, or slowly
creeping forward. Cab-horses between the blotches of flame made by the
cab-lamps were craning their necks forward, or twitching them from side to
side. Through the press foot passengers found their way across the street,
and imaginably in the dark that swallowed up the sidewalks, they were going
and coming on errands that could brook no stay. The wonder was that they
could know which way they were going, or how they could expect to reach any
given point.

Where the buildings were densest the fog was thinnest, and there it was a
greenish yellow, like water when you open your eyes and look at it far below
the surface. Where the houses fell away, and you found yourself in a square,
or with a park on one side, the vapor thickened into blackness and seemed to
swell, a turbid tide, overhead and underfoot. It hurt your straining eyes,
and got into your throat, and burned it like a sullen steam. If your cab
stopped, miraculously enough, at the address given, you got out incredulous
and fearful of abandonment. When you emerged again, and found your cab
waiting, you mutely mounted to your place and resumed your strange quality
of something in a dream.

From: William Dean Howells, London Films, Harper & Brothers, 1905, 236-238.


Cf. Tancredi's description of the fog in Venice (587).


[609.30-32] "The first pale husbands of the evening stood waiting for
suburban trains never meant to arrive at any destination on the rail map
..."


Cf. earlier in the chapter (42.1i): "... a chipped mug of pale, uneventful
tea ..." (605).