Children alone love it. They press their small faces to window-panes
and watch the lights like little unripe oranges going by in the murk.
A taxicab becomes something ogreish; a steam-lorry is a dragon
spitting flame and grunting on its evil way. Men who sell things in
the streets become more than ever deliciously horrible and
blood-curdling; they never arrive normally; they loom; they appear,
delightfully freezing the blood, howling their wares like the lonely
wolf in a picture book.
I go out into the fog and enter an incredible underworld. The fog
has turned London into a place of ghosts. At one moment a man with a
red nose and a moustache like a small scrubbing-brush appears with
the startling suddenness of an apparition. There must be millions of
such men with exactly similar moustaches, but this one is segregated
from the herd. He seems unique in his isolation. I am quite
prepared to believe he is the only one of that type in the world. I
want to examine him as a learned man examines an insect on a pin. He
seems a rare and interesting specimen. I want to cry "Stop! Let me
appreciate you!" But no; in a flash he goes, fades--disappears!
There comes a girl, pale and beautiful--much more beautiful than she
would be on a fine day, because the eyes are focussed on her alone!
She has the allurement of a dream, or a girl in a poem.
What is this in Oxford Street? Two motor-cars locked together.
Fifty grim, muffled ghosts stand round watching and blowing their
noses. On any day but a foggy day it would be a mere nothing: an
excuse for a policeman to lick his pencil and write in a book.
To-day it is a struggle of prehistoric monsters in a death-grip. So
must two clumsy, effete beasts of the Ice Age have fought locked in
each other's scaly arms.
"Hi, there, put a bit of beef behind it.... Come on, mate---heave!"
Deep, angry voices come from the grey nothingness. A girl ghost says:
"Oh, isn't it awful? My eyes smart like anything."
Two big yellow eyes bear down on the scene. Men ghosts jump about in
the road. They shout, they wave a red light, the monster with the
two blazing eyes swerves, there is a vision of a red-faced man in a
peaked cap and his gloved hands on a steering wheel:
"Keep your rear lights on, can't you! You ought to be in the
cemetery.... that's where you ought to be and that's where you'll
blinkin' well end!"
He passes on with his message.
* * *
In Finsbury Square a crowd of ghosts watch ten devils. Men are
putting down asphalt. To-day they are not men: they are fiends
pushing flaming cauldrons about. The roadway is a mass of tiny,
licking, orange-coloured flames. The devils take long rakes, and the
little flames leap and jump and fall over and between the prongs of
the rakes like fluid. Red-hot wheeled trolleys, with a blasting
flame, beneath them are dragged backwards and forwards over the
roadway, heating it, licking at it, and roaring like furnaces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account