The fog tiptoes into the streets. It walks like a great cat through the
air and slowly devours the city.
The office buildings vanish, leaving behind thin pencil lines and smoke
blurs. The pavements become isolated, low-roofed corridors. Overhead the
electric signs whisper enigmatically and the window lights dissolve.
The fog thickens till the city disappears. High up, where the mists thin
into a dark, sulphurous glow, roof bubbles float. The great cat's work is
done. It stands balancing itself on the heads of people and arches its
back against the vanished buildings.
* * * * *
I walk along thinking about the way the streets look and arranging
adjectives in my mind. In the heavy mist people appear detached. They no
longer seem to belong to a pursuit in common. Usually the busy part of the
city is like the exposed mechanism of some monstrous clock. And people
scurry about losing themselves in cogs and springs and levers.
But now the monstrous clock is almost hidden. The stores and offices and
factories that form the mechanism of this clock are buried behind the fog.
The cat has eaten them up. Hidden within the mist the cogs still turn and
the springs unwind. But for the moment they seem non-existent. And the
people drifting hurriedly by in the fog seem as if they were not going and
coming from stores, offices and factories. As if they were solitaries
hunting something in the labyrinths of the fog.
Yes, we are all lost and wandering in the thick mists. We have no
destinations. The city is without outlines. And the drift of figures is a
meaningless thing. Figures that are going nowhere and coming from nowhere.
A swarm of supernumeraries who are not in the play. Who saunter, dash,
scurry, hesitate in search of a part in the play.
This is a curious illusion. I stop and listen to music. Overhead a piano
is playing and a voice singing. A song-boosting shop above Monroe and
State streets. A ballad of the cheap cabarets. Yet, because it is music,
it has a mystery in it.
The fog pictures grow charming. There is an idea in them now. People are
detached little decorations etched upon a mist. The cat has eaten up the
monstrous clock and people have rid themselves of their routine, which was
to tumble and scurry among its cogs and levers. They are done with life,
with buying and selling and with the perpetual errand. And they have
become a swarm of little ornaments. Men and women denuded of the city.
Their outlines posture quaintly in the mist. Their little faces say, "The
clock is gone. There is nothing any more to make us alive. So we have
become our unconnected selves."
* * * * *
Beside me in the fog a man stands next to a tall paper rack. I remember
that this is the rack where the out-of-town papers are on sale. The papers
are rolled up and thrust like rows of little white dolls in the rack. I
wonder that this should be a newspaper stand. It looks like almost
anything else in the fog.
A pretty girl emerges from the background of fog. She talks to the man
next to the rack.
"Have you a Des Moines newspaper?" she asks.
The man is very businesslike. He fishes out a newspaper and sells it. At
the sight of its headlines the girl's eyes light up. It is as if she had
met a very close friend. She will walk along feeling comforted now.
Chicago is a stranger. Its fog-hidden buildings and streets are strangers
and its crowds criss-crossing everywhere are worse than strangers. But now
she has Des Moines under her arm. Des Moines is a companion that will make
the fog seem less lonely. Later she will sit down in a hotel room and read
of what has happened in Des Moines buildings and Des Moines streets. These
will seem like real happenings, whereas the happenings that the Chicago
papers print seem like unrealities.
This is Dearborn Street now. Dark and cozy. People are no longer
decorations but intimate friends. When it is light and one can see the
cogs of the monstrous clock go round and the springs unwind one thinks of
people as a part of this mechanism. And so people grow vague in one's mind
and unhuman or only half-human.
But now that the mechanism is gone, people stand out with an insistent
humanness. People sitting on lunch-counter stools, leaning over coffee
cups. People standing behind store counters. People buying cigars and
people walking in and out of office buildings. They are very friendly.
Their tired faces smile, or at least look somewhat amused and interested.
They are interested in the fog and in the fact that one cannot see three
feet ahead. And their faces say to each other, "Here we are, all alike.
The city is only a make-believe. It can go away but we still remain. We
are much more important than the big buildings."
* * * * *
I hear an odd tapping sound on the pavement. It is faint but growing
nearer. In another moment a man tapping on the pavement with a cane
passes. A blind man. And I think of a plot for a fiction story. If a
terrible murder were committed in a marvelous fog that hid everything the
chief of police would summon a blind man. And the blind man could track
the murderer down in the fog because he alone would be able to move in the
thick, obliterating mists. And so the blind man, with his cane tapping,
tapping over the pavements and able by long practice to move without
sight, would slowly close in on the murderer hemmed in by darkness.
A newsboy cries from the depth of nowhere: "Paper here. Trains crash in
fog. Paper."
* * * * *
A friend and I sat in an office. He has been dictating letters, but he
stops and stares out of the window. His eyes grow speculative. He says:
"Wouldn't it be odd if it were always like this? I think I'd like it
better, wouldn't you? But I suppose they'd invent lights able to penetrate
mist and the town would be as garish as ever in a few years. But I like
the fog because it slows things up. Things are too damn fast to suit me. I
like 'em slow. Like they used to be a century ago."
We talk and my friend becomes reminiscent on the subject of stage coaches
and prairie schooners and the days before there were railroads,
telephones, electricity and crowds. He has never known such a time, but
from what he has read and imagined about it--yes, it would be better.
* * * * *
When I come out it is mid-afternoon. The fog has gone. The city has popped
back and sprawls triumphantly into space. For a moment it seems as if the
city had sprung up in an hour. Then its sturdy walls and business windows
begin to mock at the memory of the fog in my mind. "Fogs do not devour
us," they say. "We are the ones who do the devouring. We devour fogs and
people and days." Marvelous buildings.
Overhead the sky floats like a gray and white balloon, as if it were a toy
belonging to the city.