I think that sooner or later we had arrived at or departed from all the
great stations, but I will not make so sure of St. Pancras. I am afraid
that I was, more strictly speaking, only at a small church hard by, of
so marked a ritualistic temperament that it had pictures in it, and gave
me an illusion of Italy, though I was explicitly there because of an
American origin in the baptism of Junius Brutus Booth. I am sorry I do
not remember the name of that little church, but it stood among autumn
flowers, in the heart of a still, sunny morning, where the reader will
easily find it. Of Victoria station I am many times certain, for it was
from it that we at last left London, and that at the time of an earlier
sojourn we arrived in a fog of a type which stamped our sense of
the world's metropolis with a completeness which it had hitherto
disappointingly wanted.
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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