It was a wintry afternoon when the doctor came. Frost clung stealthily
round the grimy black trees, outlining their naked boughs with meagre
lines of white sewn with smuts. Above the frost hung the fog as if in
charge of the town, a despondent and gloomy sentinel. During the morning
the sun had lain in the fog like a faint blood-red jewel in a thick and
awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a
distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied
with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy
watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking
the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest
protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had
been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did
come, but no one was much the wiser. The lamps had been alight all day,
and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever,
could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have
appreciably increased its density. In the darkness the cold gathered,
and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,--of desolate,
solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like
liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools
thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the
grimy earth in places that children named gardens.
Pages:
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509