As if it were yesterday, I remembered the faded apartment in Harlem, my protests of undying devotion, the words that now seemed written in remorseless flame:
“If anything should happen to him, if by any chance we should find ourselves free, send for me, and I’ll come to you, even though the world lie between us. By my life, by my honour, I swear it.”
Had I really uttered that awful rot? Oh, what a fool I’d been! But it was too late now. I must make the best of it. Never yet have I gone back on my word (though I have put some very poetic constructions on it). But here there was no chance of evasion. She would certainly expect me to marry her. Farewell, ambitious dreams of struggle and privation! Farewell, O glorious independent poverty! Farewell, my schemes and dreams! Bohemia, adventure, all!—and for what? For an elderly woman for whom I did not care a rap, a faded woman with a ready-made family to boot. Truly life is one confounded scrape after another.
That night I dreamed of the terrible twins. I was a pirate ship, Ronnie, the captain, stood on my chest, while Lonnie, a naval lieutenant, tried to board me. Then they invented a new game, based on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It was tremendously exciting. They both got quite worked up over it. So did I—only more so. I was the horse. I awoke, bathed in perspiration, and hissing through my clenched teeth: “Never! Never!”
But really it seemed as if I must do something; so next day I began three different letters to Mrs. Fitz. I was sorely distracted. My work was suffering. There was the unfinished manuscript of The Microbe staring reproachfully at me. Then to crown all, just as I was sitting down in the early evening with grim determination to finish the letter, suddenly I was assailed by a Craving.
Indulgent Reader, up till now I have concealed it, but I must confess at last. I have one besetting weakness, a weakness that amounts to a vice. I am ashamed of it. Often I have tried to wean myself of it; often cursed the heredity that imposed it on me. Opium? Morphine? Cocaine? Nothing so fashionable. Absinthe? Brandy? Gin? Nothing so normal. Alas! let me whisper it in your ear: I am a Chewing Gum Fiend!
So feeling in my pocket for the stuff, and finding none, I straightway began to crave it as never before. Then, knowing there would be no peace for me, I left my letter and started desperately forth into that fog stifled city.
And that fog was now a FOG. It irked the lungs, and made the eye-balls tingle. Each street lamp was a sulphurous blur, each radiant shop-window a furtive blotch of light. It seemed something solid, something you could cut into slices, and serve between bread—a very Camembert cheese of a fog.
So into this woolly obscurity I plunged, and like a Mackinaw blanket it entangled me about. Bleary boxes of light the tramways crawled along. There were tootings of taxis, curses of cabbies, clanging of bells. The streets were lanes of mystery, the passers weird shadows; the shop-windows seemed to be made of horn instead of glass. Then the green and red lights of a chemist’s semaphored me, seemingly from a great distance, but really from just a few feet away. So there I bought six packets of chewing gum, and started home.
But at this point I found the fog fuzzier than ever. I stumbled and fumbled, and wondered and blundered, till presently I found myself standing before the great doors of a theatre. For the moment I was too discouraged to go further, and the performance was about to begin. Ha! that was an idea! I would enter. Then I groaned in spirit, for I saw that the theatre was Drury Lane. Sensational melodrama! Ah, no! Better the cold and cruel street. But the fog was inexorable. Three times did I try to break through it; three times did it hurl me back on the melodramatic mercies of Drury Lane.