“To-morrow,” said Bellamy. “Let us say to-morrow. You don’t want a thing like this hanging over you. We’ll meet here and lunch and compare notes—if you’re free to do so, which is doubtful, for I see a holy chaos opening out before you.”
“To-morrow!” I said. “And, be what it may, I would not change my position for yours.”
I went home that night under a gathering weight of care. To my wife and daughters I said nothing, though they noticed and commented upon my unusual taciturnity. In truth, the more I thought of the programme in store for me, the less I liked it; while Bellamy, on the contrary, so far as I could see, despite my big words at parting from him, had only to be slightly more brutal and aggressive than usual to come well out of his ordeal. I slept ill and woke depressed. The weather was ominous in itself. I looked out of my dressing-room window and quoted from the classics:
“She is not rosy-fingered, but swoll’n black;
Her face is like a water turned to blood,
And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threatened night ere noon of day!”
which shows, by-the-by, that Ben Jonson knew a London fog when he saw it, though chemists pretend that the vile phenomenon wasn’t familiar to the Elizabethans.
My breakfast proved a farce, and having wished my dear ones a dreary “good morning,” I crept out into a bilious, fuliginous atmosphere, through which black smuts fell in legions upon the numbed desolation of South Kensington. Only the urban cat stalked here and there, rejoicing, as it seemed, in prolonged night. My chronic cough began at the first gulp of this atrocious atmosphere, and changing my mind about walking to the District Railway Station, I turned, sought my cab-whistle, and summoned a hansom. It came presently, clinking and tinkling out of nothingness—a chariot with watery eyes of flame; a goblin coach to carry me away through the mask of the fog, from home, from wife and children, into the vast unknown of man’s advice.
The cabman began it—a surly, grasping brute who, upon taking my shilling, commented, and added something about the weather.