The Four White Days | Page 2

day
struggled in. The fine snow still tinkled against glass and brick. By nine
o'clock hundreds of telephone wires were broken. The snow and the
force of the wind had torn them away bodily. As far as could be
ascertained at present the same thing had happened to the telegraphic
lines. At eleven o'clock nothing beyond local letters had been delivered,
and the postal authorities notified that no telegrams could be
guaranteed in any direction outside the radius. There was nothing from
the Continent at all.
Still, there appeared to be no great cause for alarm. The snow must
cease presently. There was absolutely no business doing in the City,

seeing that three-fourths of the suburban residents had not managed to
reach London by two o'clock. An hour later it became generally known
that no main line train had been scheduled at a single London terminus
since midday.
Deep cuttings and tunnels were alike rendered impassable by drifted
snow.
But the snow would cease presently; it could not go on like this. Yet
when dusk fell it was still coming down in the same grey whirling
powder.
That night London was as a city of the dead. Except where the force of
the gale had swept bare patches, the drifts were high--so high in some
cases that they reached to the first floor windows. A half-hearted
attempt had been made to clear the roadways earlier in the day, but
only two or three main roads running north and south, and east and
west were at all passable.
Meanwhile the gripping frost never abated a jot. The thermometer
stood steadily at 15O below freezing even in the forenoon; the ordinary
tweed clothing of the average Briton was sorry stuff to keep out a wind
like that. But for the piercing draught the condition of things might
have been tolerable. London had experienced colder weather so far as
degrees went, but never anything that battered and gripped like this.
And still the fine white powder fell.
After dark, the passage from one main road to another was a real peril.
Belated stragglers fought their way along their own streets without the
slightest idea of locality, the dazzle of the snow was absolutely blinding.
In sheltered corners the authorities had set up blazing fires for the
safety of the police and public. Hardly a vehicle had been seen in the
streets for hours.
At the end of the first four and twenty hours the mean fall of snow had
been four feet. Narrow streets were piled up with the white powder.
Most of the thoroughfares on the south side of the Strand were mere
grey ramparts. Here and there people could be seen looking anxiously

out of upper windows and beckoning for assistance. Such was the
spectacle that London presented at daybreak on the second day.
It was not till nearly midday of the 26th of January that the downfall
ceased. For thirty six hours the gale had hurled its force mercilessly
over London. There had been nothing like it in the memory of man,
nothing like it on record. The thin wrack of cloud cleared and the sun
shone down on the brilliant scene.
A strange, still, weird London. A white deserted city with a hardy
pedestrian here and there, who looked curiously out of place in a town
where one expects to see the usual toiling millions. And yet the few
people who were about did not seem to fit into the picture. The crunch
of their feet on the crisp snow was an offence, the muffled hoarseness
of their voices jarred.
London woke uneasily with a sense of coming disaster. By midday the
continuous frost rendered the snow quite firm enough for traffic. The
curious sight of people climbing out of their bedroom windows and
sliding down snow mountains into the streets excited no wonder. As to
the work-a-day side of things that was absolutely forgotten. For the
nonce Londoners were transformed into Laplanders, whose first and
foremost idea was food and warmth.
So far as could be ascertained the belt of the blizzard had come from
the East in a straight line some thirty miles wide. Beyond St. Albans
there was very little snow, the same remark applying to the South from
Redhill. But London itself lay in the centre of a grip of Arctic,
ice-bound country; and was almost as inaccessible to the outside world
as the North Pole itself.
There was practically no motive power beyond that of the underground
railways, and most of the lighting standards had been damaged by the
gale; last calamity of all, the frost affected the gas so that evening saw
London practically in darkness.
But the great want of many thousands was fuel. Coal was there at the
wharfs, but getting it to