The Voice in the Fog

The Voice in the Fog, by Harold
MacGrath,

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Title: The Voice in the Fog
Author: Harold MacGrath

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THE VOICE IN THE FOG
by
HAROLD MACGRATH
Author of The Man on the Box, Hearts and Masks, The Million Dollar
Mystery, etc.
With Illustrations by A. B. Wenzell
New York Grosset & Dunlap Publishers The Bobbs-Merrill Company
1915

[Frontispiece: Kitty Killigrew]

TO
CAV. GIOVANNI PICCININI
IN MEMORY OF MANY HAPPY FLORENTINE DAYS

THE VOICE IN THE FOG
CHAPTER I
Fog.

A London fog, solid, substantial, yellow as an old dog's tooth or a
jaundiced eye. You could not look through it, nor yet gaze up and down
it, nor over it; and you only thought you saw it. The eye became
impotent, untrustworthy; all senses lay fallow except that of touch; the
skin alone conveyed to you with promptness and no incertitude that this
thing had substance. You could feel it; you could open and shut your
hands and sense it on your palms, and it penetrated your clothes and
beaded your spectacles and rings and bracelets and shoe-buckles. It was
nightmare, bereft of its pillows, grown somnambulistic; and London
became the antechamber to Hades, lackeyed by idle dreams and
peopled by mistakes.
There is something about this species of fog unlike any other in the
world. It sticks. You will find certain English cousins of yours, as far
away from London as Hong-Kong, who are still wrapt up snugly in it.
Happy he afflicted with strabismus, for only he can see his nose before
his face. In the daytime you become a fish, to wriggle over the ocean's
floor amid strange flora and fauna, such as ash-cans and lamp-posts and
venders' carts and cab-horses and sandwich-men. But at night you are
neither fish, bird nor beast.
The night was May thirteenth; never mind the year; the date should
suffice: and a Walpurgis night, if you please, without any Mendelssohn
to interpret it.
That happy line of Milton's--"Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan
and his peers"--fell upon London like Elijah's mantle. Confusion and
his cohort of synonyms (why not?) raged up and down thoroughfare
and side-street and alley, east and west, danced before palace and
tenement alike: all to the vast amusement of the gods, to the mild
annoyance of the half-gods (in Mayfair), and to the complete rout of all
mortals a-foot or a-cab. Imagine: militant suffragettes trying to set fire
to the prime minister's mansion, Siegfried being sung at the opera, and
a yellow London fog!
The press about Covent Garden was a mathematical problem over
which Euclid would have shed bitter tears and hastily retired to his
arbors and citron tables. Thirty years previous (to the thirteenth of May,

not Euclid) some benighted beggar invented the Chinese puzzle; and
tonight, many a frantic policeman would have preferred it, sitting with
the scullery maid and the pantry near by. Simple matter to shift about
little blocks of wood with the tip of one's finger; but cabs and carriages
and automobiles, each driver anxious to get out ahead of his
neighbor!--not to mention the shouting and the din and discord of horns
and whistles and sirens and rumbling engines!
"It's hard luck," said Crawford, sympathetically. "It will be half an hour
before they get this tangle straightened out."
"I shouldn't mind, Jim, if it weren't for Kitty," replied his wife. "I am
worried about her."
"Well, I simply could not drag her into this coupé and get into hers
myself. She's a heady little lady, if you want to know. As it is, she'll get
back to the hotel quicker than we shall. Her cab is five up. If you wish,
I'll take a look in and see if she's all right."
"Please do;" and she smiled at him, lovely, enchanting.
"You're the most beautiful woman in all this world!"
"Am I?"
Click! The light went out. There was a smothered laugh; and when the
light flared up again, the aigrette in her copper-beech hair was all
askew.
"If anybody saw us!"--secretly pleased and delighted, as any woman
would have been who possessed