The Window-Gazer | Page 4

keg--and shivered. No one had
told him that there might be fog and he had not happened to think of it
for himself. Still, fog in a coast city at that time of the year was not an
unreasonable happening and the professor was a reasonable man. It
wasn't the fog he blamed so much as the swiftness of its arrival. Fifteen
minutes ago the world had been an ordinary world. He had walked
about in it freely, if somewhat irritably, following certain vague
directions of the hotel clerk as to the finding of Johnston's wharf. He
had found Johnston's wharf; extracted it neatly from a very wilderness
of wharves, a feat upon which Mr. Johnston, making boats in a shed at

the end of it, had complimented him highly.
"There's terrible few as finds me just off," said Mr. Johnston. "Hours it
takes 'em sometimes, sometimes days." It was clear that he was
restrained from adding "weeks" only by a natural modesty.
At the time, this emphasizing of the wharf's seclusion had seemed
extravagant, but now the professor wasn't so sure. For the wharf had
again mysteriously lost itself. And Mr. Johnston had lost himself, and
the city and the streets of it, and the sea and its ships were all lost--there
was nothing left anywhere save a keg (of nails) and Professor Benis
Hamilton Spence sitting upon it. Around him was nothing but a living,
pulsing whiteness, which pushed momentarily nearer.
It was interesting. But it was really very cold. The professor, who had
suffered much from sciatica owing to an injury of the left leg,
remembered that he had been told by his medical man never to allow
himself to shiver; and here he was, shivering violently without so much
as asking his own leave. And the fog crept closer. He put out his hands
to push it back--and immediately his hands were lost too. "Really,"
murmured the professor, "this is most interesting!" Nevertheless, he
reclaimed his hands and placed them firmly in his coat pockets.
He began to wish that he had stayed with Mr. Johnston in the boat shed,
pending the arrival of the launch which, so certain letters in his pocket
informed him, would leave Johnston's wharf at 5 o'clock, or
there-abouts, Mondays and Fridays. Mr. Johnston had felt very
uncertain about this. "Though she does happen along off and on," he
said optimistically, "and she might come today. Not," he added with
commendable caution, "that I'd call old Doc. Farr's boat a 'launch'
myself."
"What," asked Professor Spence, "would you call her yourself?"
"Don't know as I can just hit on a name," said Mr. Johnston. "Doesn't
come natural to me to be free with language."
It had been pleasant enough on the wharf at first and certainly it had

been worth something to see the fog come in. Its incredible advance,
wave upon wave of massed and silent whiteness, had held him
spellbound. While he had thought it still far off, it was upon him--
around him, behind him, everywhere!
But perhaps it would go as quickly as it had come.
He had heard that this is sometimes a characteristic of fog. Fortunately
he had already selected a keg upon which to sit, so with a patient
fatalism, product of a brief but lurid career in Flemish trenches, he
resigned himself to wait. The keg was dry, that was something, and if
he spread the newspaper in his pocket over the most sciatic part of the
shrapneled leg he might escape with nothing more than twinges.
How beautiful it was--this salt shroud from the sea! How it eddied and
funneled and whorled, now massing thick like frosted glass, now
thinning to a web of tissue. Suddenly, while he watched, a lane broke
through. He saw clearly the piles at the wharf's end, a glimpse of dark
water, and, between him and it, a figure huddled in a cloak--a female
figure, also sitting upon an upturned keg. Then the magic mist closed in
again.
"How the deuce did she get there?" the professor asked himself crossly.
"She wasn't there before the fog came." He remembered having noticed
that keg while choosing his own and there had been no woman sitting
on it then. "Anyway," he reflected, "I don't know her and I won't have
to speak to her." The thought warmed him so that he almost forgot to
shiver. From which you may gather that Professor Spence was a
bachelor, comparatively young; that he was of a retiring disposition and
the object of considerable unsolicited attention in his own home town.
He arose cautiously from the keg of nails. It might he well to return to
the boatshed, even at the risk of falling into the Inlet. But he had not
proceeded very far before,