THE DAWN OF A TO-MORROW

I

There are always two ways of looking at a thing, frequently there are
six or seven; but two ways of looking at a London fog are quite enough.
When it is thick and yellow in the streets and stings a man's throat and
lungs as he breathes it, an awakening in the early morning is either an
unearthly and grewsome, or a mysteriously enclosing, secluding, and
comfortable thing. If one awakens in a healthy body, and with a clear
brain rested by normal sleep and retaining memories of a normally
agreeable yesterday, one may lie watching the housemaid building the
fire; and after she has swept the hearth and put things in order, lie
watching the flames of the blazing and crackling wood catch the coals
and set them blazing also, and dancing merrily and filling corners with
a glow; and in so lying and realizing that leaping light and warmth and
a soft bed are good things, one may turn over on one's back, stretching
arms and legs luxuriously, drawing deep breaths and smiling at a
knowledge of the fog outside which makes half-past eight o'clock on a
December morning as dark as twelve o'clock on a December night. Under
such conditions the soft, thick, yellow gloom has its picturesque and
even humorous aspect. One feels enclosed by it at once fantastically
and cosily, and is inclined to revel in imaginings of the picture
outside, its Rembrandt lights and orange yellows, the halos about the
street-lamps, the illumination of shop-windows, the flare of torches
stuck up over coster barrows and coffee-stands, the shadows on the faces
of the men and women selling and buying beside them. Refreshed by sleep
and comfort and surrounded by light, warmth, and good cheer, it is easy
to face the day, to confront going out into the fog and feeling a sort
of pleasure in its mysteries. This is one way of looking at it, but
only one.

The other way is marked by enormous differences.

A man--he had given his name to the people of the house as Antony Dart--
awakened in a third-story bedroom in a lodging-house in a poor street in
London, and as his consciousness returned to him, its slow and reluctant
movings confronted the second point of view--marked by enormous
differences. He had not slept two consecutive hours through the night,
and when he had slept he had been tormented by dreary dreams, which were
more full of misery because of their elusive vagueness, which kept his
tortured brain on a wearying strain of effort to reach some definite
understanding of them. Yet when he awakened the consciousness of being
again alive was an awful thing. If the dreams could have faded into
blankness and all have passed with the passing of the night, how he
could have thanked whatever gods there be! Only not to awake--only not
to awake! But he had awakened.