The peddler looked puzzled. “Me? Do you mean the fog? What’s that to do with me?” He had accepted a coin, and now he eyed it on his palm and graciously spat upon it before putting it in his pocket. He sidled to the door, and from there he said: “Gov’nor, I’ll tell you something. Do you know what we’re told?...” But the oracle was not revealed, for the fellow turned as though he knew of an interrupter outside, closed the door respectfully, and was gone.
The eye of the bookman wandered to the bridge again. Where did it go to now? That was a rum fellow who had just gone. Had he really seen a light which could shine clear through the fog and confusion of the earth? But what was the good of trying to see such a light because another man said it was there? Besides, to distinguish between shell shock and God wanted a bit of doing nowadays. Damn that bridge! Why wasn’t it blotted out altogether? What was the good of half of it? It used to go to France. Now it projected over a bottomless gulf of time, and was lost midway. It was broken. Where were the fellows who once crossed it? Now they could never get back. It ought not to be looked at. One’s thoughts got on to it, fell into the emptiness beyond, and were lost. Yet it was hard to keep the eyes from it. The printer’s proofs were the same dust and ashes as ever. No light or humor in them except the places where the compositor had happily blundered. And there the blessed relic still floated in the outer fog, an instant road for vagrant thoughts. And odd visitors, like poets with messages from a world not this or from no world at all, or like the armless man with his seasonable message to love one another, kept blowing in with the cold draught when the careless door was ajar. Perhaps a ghostly traffic moved on that spectral relic. That bridge should be either abolished or adventured upon again. What was the good of sitting and staring at it, while fiction not fit for dogs accumulated against the wall behind? Life was standing still.
At that very instant some of the fiction shot fanwise abruptly over the floor. Was the editor back in the next room? Literary editors might be at the dead end of things, but was life? He went to interview his chief.
But the great man—all editors are that, naturally—was not at his desk. He stood at the window, looking out, though not as if he saw anything there worth having. He turned to his assistant, and began to unwind his muffler.
“Well?”
“Not at all,” said the editor, cheerfully, “by no means. We blow out the lamp of our vestal, and the chaste darling is to be sold as a slave.”
They stood regarding each other.
“What about us?”
The editor smiled and poked his finger at the bridge in the fog. “We get a move on. Out into the snow, my child, out into the snow.”