Yellow Fog

Rain

It was a cold, grey day in early April.  I was seated in the sitting room, listlessly watching the rivulets of rain as they made their way down the paned glass.  It was the sort of day that made one feel as though all the promise of spring was deceit, and all hope for the betterment of mankind was nought but folly.  It was the sort of day that stirred the deeper fibres of my nature, for the unadulterated honesty with which the world revealed itself in dreary boredom to be indeed a vale of tears, spoke to me and called me to engage in an open and frank discussion with my ego that was rare enough to be pleasant.

"Torquil," I said to myself, as one is wont to say in these sorts of internal monologues, "You are an undeserving cad.  Nothing you have done has been for the betterment of another, and if you were to plummet unceremoniously from this second story window and dash your brains out upon that unsuspecting paper boy below, the mourning that would proceed on your account would be shorter than Foxton's Derby in a quarter-mile circuit."

Having nothing with which to answer myself, I let a sort of shamefaced silence follow in my brain.  It was true, of course.  Whatever else my many faults might be, I was not the sort to take to falsehoods, least of all to myself.  The trouble was, though my inner voice had declaimed the state of affairs quite honestly, the fact remained that I didn't really care.

My mother, being of a delicate nature, had taken her first look at me and promptly expired.  My father, though he was of a more sturdy temperament and survived till my eleventh birthday, had nonetheless  drowned on an unfortunate trip returning from the continent.  I was, therefore, quite alone in the world, and the selection of relatives I had been forced to reside with in the intervening years had followed a predictable pattern graduating from sycophantic devotion to despising dismissal when they learned I was not to be persuaded into parting with my considerable inheritance.

What friends I had spent my leisure with were lamentably beneath me.  I wondered now, in this moment of clarity, whether I had selected them to be so, and if such companions elevated my opinion of myself.  It was possible, I supposed.

There had been women--a love affair here and there--but always I found myself some excuse to break it off barely before it reached the point where it would have resulted in a scandal.  Not because I valued popular opinion so very much, but because a scandal would be more of an inconvenience than anything.

As a result, I was thirty-two, wealthy, and quite alone in the world.  Despite the admonitions of my better self, I liked it this way.

I knew, however, that the longer I sat and stared out the window, the more my conscience would move upon me, and the more I would be persuaded to some kind of reform that I would thoroughly dislike, and, moreover, would only last a week at the outside.  Activity was the cure to this melancholia, and so I donned my coat and prepared to take what would no doubt be a very wet walk.

The streets of London were clear of the upper classes; anyone who had need to be out in this downpour and could afford to hire a hansom had certainly done so.  Cab after cab hurried past me, the drivers hunched up as though in some kind of delusion that they might fit between the raindrops.  Water pooled and puddled in the streets, making walking a hazard, but I was reckless.  I didn't fear the damp--I had a strong constitution.  Moreover, I was animated and alive, my muscles reacting to the rain and cold with the contrariness of their nature.  I walked past Covent Garden and Drury Lane, having no object in mind, no destination but the continuation of my journey.

After a few hours of this, I found myself beginning to be hungry, and I stopped in to a small pastry shop for a cup of tea and a bite to eat.  The atmosphere was as drab and dull as the outside weather, and I was served tea by a mousy-haired girl with a nose that badly needed to be wiped.  The other patrons of the establishment seemed to be mostly laborers and shop assistants.  Sitting not too far from me was a girl, scarcely more than an urchin, remarkable only for the excessive amount of red hair on her head and dirt on her face.  She eyed me with a sour expression as I paid for my meal and donned my coat again, for whatever protection it could prove against the rain.

For it was still pouring outside; in fact, the storm had grown.  What had started out as a peaceful, light drizzle was now pounding down in sheets and torrents between the stacked tenements, towering like lopsided piles of packages that might topple at any moment and crush those who stood, like myself, in the street.  I must have become wrapped up in my thoughts as I walked, because I had no recollection of entering such a seedy neighborhood.  Perhaps, I hastened to assure myself, I was only disoriented from the rain, which made all things fair seem foul.  In any case, walking back was out of the question, so I besought me some higher ground, some corner from which I might hail a taxi and return to the comfortable, firelit room which I had been so hasty as to abandon earlier that day.

It was as I had come to this decision and had taken a step towards a promising-looking street that I felt a prick in the small of my back.  Although I had led a privileged life prior to this point, I was not so naive as to not know what a knife felt like.  Consequently, I immediately halted, and waited to see what my assailant desired of me.