Chapter I

The Dawn of A To-morrow

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

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.

The clock struck nine as he did so, consequently he knew the
hour. The lodging-house slavey had aroused him by coming to light
the fire. She had set her candle on the hearth and done her work as
stealthily as possible, but he had been disturbed, though he had made
a desperate effort to struggle back into sleep. That was no use--no
use. He was awake and he was in the midst of it all again. Without
the sense of luxurious comfort he opened his eyes and turned upon his
back, throwing out his arms flatly, so that he lay as in the form of
a cross, in heavy weariness and anguish. For months he had awakened
each morning after such a night and had so lain like a crucified
thing.

As he watched the painful flickering of the damp and smoking
wood and coal he remembered this and thought that there had been a
lifetime of such awakenings, not knowing that the morbidness of a
fagged brain blotted out the memory of more normal days and told him
fantastic lies which were but a hundredth part truth. He could see
only the hundredth part truth, and it assumed proportions so huge
that he could see nothing else. In such a state the human brain is
an infernal machine and its workings can only be conquered if the
mortal thing which lives with it--day and night, night and day--has
learned to separate its controllable from its seemingly
uncontrollable atoms, and can silence its clamor on its way to
madness.

Antony Dart had not learned this thing and the clamor had had
its hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his
mental and physical condition. He had heard these names
often--applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the
strain of his own, and had left them as it had left him-- jaded,
joyless, breaking things. Some of them had been broken and had died
or were dragging out bruised and tormented days in their own homes or
in mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and
rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. They had
worked as he had worked, they had been stricken with the delirium of
accumulation--accumulation-- as he had been. They had been caught in
the rush and swirl of the great maelstrom, and had been borne round
and round in it, until having grasped every coveted thing tossing
upon its circling waters, they themselves had been flung upon the
shore with both hands full, the rocks about them strewn with rich
possessions, while they lay prostrate and gazed at all life had
brought with dull, hopeless, anguished eyes. He knew --if the worst
came to the worst-- what would be said of him, because he had heard
it said of others. "He worked too hard--he worked too hard." He was
sick of hearing it. What was wrong with the world-- what was wrong
with man, as Man --if work could break him like this? If one
believed in Deity, the living creature It breathed into being must be
a perfect thing--not one to be wearied, sickened, tortured by the
life Its breathing had created. A mere man would disdain to build a
thing so poor and incomplete. A mere human engineer who constructed
an engine whose workings were perpetually at fault--which went wrong
when called upon to do the labor it was made for--who would not scoff
at it and cast it aside as a piece of worthless bungling?

"Something is wrong," he mut- tered, lying flat upon his cross
and staring at the yellow haze which had crept through crannies in
window- sashes into the room. "Someone is wrong. Is it I--or
You?"

His thin lips drew themselves back against his teeth in a
mirthless smile which was like a grin.

"Yes," he said. "I am pretty far gone. I am beginning to talk
to myself about God. Bryan did it just before he was taken to Dr.
Hewletts' place and cut his throat."

He had not led a specially evil life; he had not broken laws,
but the subject of Deity was not one which his scheme of existence
had included. When it had haunted him of late he had felt it an
untoward and morbid sign. The thing had drawn him--drawn him; he had
complained against it, he had argued, sometimes he knew--shuddering--
that he had raved. Something had seemed to stand aside and watch his
being and his thinking. Something which filled the universe had
seemed to wait, and to have waited through all the eternal ages, to
see what he--one man--would do. At times a great appalled wonder had
swept over him at his realization that he had never known or thought
of it before. It had been there always--through all the ages that
had passed. And sometimes-- once or twice--the thought had in some
unspeakable, untranslatable way brought him a moment's calm.

But at other times he had said to himself--with a shivering soul
cowering within him--that this was only part of it all and was a
beginning, perhaps, of religious monomania.

During the last week he had known what he was going to do-- he
had made up his mind. This abject horror through which others had
let themselves be dragged to madness or death he would not endure.
The end should come quickly, and no one should be smitten aghast by
seeing or knowing how it came. In the crowded shabbier streets of
London there were lodging-houses where one, by taking precautions,
could end his life in such a manner as would blot him out of any
world where such a man as himself had been known. A pistol, properly
managed, would obliterate resemblance to any human thing. Months ago
through chance talk he had heard how it could be done--and done
quickly. He could leave a misleading letter. He had planned what it
should be-- the story it should tell of a disheartened mediocre
venturer of his poor all returning bankrupt and humiliated from
Australia, ending existence in such pennilessness that the parish
must give him a pauper's grave. What did it matter where a man lay,
so that he slept--slept-- slept? Surely with one's brains scattered
one would sleep soundly anywhere.

He had come to the house the night before, dressed shabbily with
the pitiable respectability of a defeated man. He had entered
droopingly with bent shoulders and hopeless hang of head. In his own
sphere he was a man who held himself well. He had let fall a few
dispirited sentences when he had engaged his back room from the woman
of the house, and she had recognized him as one of the luckless. In
fact, she had hesitated a moment before his unreliable look until he
had taken out money from his pocket and paid his rent for a week in
advance. She would have that at least for her trouble, he had said
to himself. He should not occupy the room after to-morrow. In his
own home some days would pass before his household began to make
inquiries. He had told his servants that he was going over to Paris
for a change. He would be safe and deep in his pauper's grave a week
before they asked each other why they did not hear from him. All was
in order. One of the mocking agonies was that living was done for.
He had ceased to live. Work, pleasure, sun, moon, and stars had lost
their meaning. He stood and looked at the most radiant loveliness of
land and sky and sea and felt nothing. Success brought greater
wealth each day without stirring a pulse of pleasure, even in
triumph. There was nothing left but the awful days and awful nights
to which he knew physicians could give their scientific name, but had
no healing for. He had gone far enough. He would go no farther.
To-morrow it would have been over long hours. And there would have
been no public declaiming over the humiliating pitifulness of his
end. And what did it matter?

How thick the fog was outside-- thick enough for a man to lose
himself in it. The yellow mist which had crept in under the doors
and through the crevices of the window- sashes gave a ghostly look to
the room--a ghastly, abnormal look, he said to himself. The fire was
smouldering instead of blazing. But what did it matter? He was
going out. He had not bought the pistol last night--like a fool.
Somehow his brain had been so tired and crowded that he had
forgotten.

"Forgotten." He mentally repeated the word as he got out of
bed. By this time to-morrow he should have forgotten everything.
This time to-morrow. His mind repeated that also, as he began to
dress himself. Where should he be? Should he be anywhere? Suppose
he awakened again--to something as bad as this? How did a man get
out of his body? After the crash and shock what happened? Did one
find oneself standing beside the Thing and looking down at it? It
would not be a good thing to stand and look down on--even for that
which had deserted it. But having torn oneself loose from it and its
devilish aches and pains, one would not care --one would see how
little it all mattered. Anything else must be better than this--the
thing for which there was a scientific name but no healing. He had
taken all the drugs, he had obeyed all the medical orders, and here
he was after that last hell of a night--dressing himself in a back
bedroom of a cheap lodging-house to go out and buy a pistol in this
damned fog.

He laughed at the last phrase of his thought, the laugh which
was a mirthless grin.

"I am thinking of it as if I was afraid of taking cold," he
said. "And to-morrow--!"

There would be no To-morrow. To-morrows were at an end. No
more nights--no more days--no more morrows.

He finished dressing, putting on his discriminatingly chosen
shabby- genteel clothes with a care for the effect he intended them
to produce. The collar and cuffs of his shirt were frayed and
yellow, and he fastened his collar with a pin and tied his worn
necktie carelessly. His overcoat was beginning to wear a greenish
shade and look threadbare, so was his hat. When his toilet was
complete he looked at himself in the cracked and hazy glass, bending
forward to scrutinize his unshaven face under the shadow of the dingy
hat.

"It is all right," he muttered. "It is not far to the pawnshop
where I saw it."

The stillness of the room as he turned to go out was uncanny.
As it was a back room, there was no street below from which could
arise sounds of passing vehicles, and the thickness of the fog
muffled such sound as might have floated from the front. He stopped
half-way to the door, not knowing why, and listened. To what--for
what? The silence seemed to spread through all the house--out into
the streets-- through all London--through all the world, and he to
stand in the midst of it, a man on the way to Death--with no
To-morrow.

What did it mean? It seemed to mean something. The world
withdrawn--life withdrawn--sound withdrawn--breath withdrawn. He
stood and waited. Perhaps this was one of the symptoms of the morbid
thing for which there was that name. If so he had better get away
quickly and have it over, lest he be found wandering about not
knowing--not knowing. But now he knew--the Silence. He waited
--waited and tried to hear, as if something was calling him--calling
without sound. It returned to him --the thought of That which had
waited through all the ages to see what he--one man--would do. He
had never exactly pitied himself before--he did not know that he
pitied himself now, but he was a man going to his death, and a light,
cold sweat broke out on him and it seemed as if it was not he who did
it, but some other--he flung out his arms and cried aloud words he
had not known he was going to speak.

"Lord! Lord! What shall I do to be saved?"

But the Silence gave no answer. It was the Silence still.

And after standing a few moments panting, his arms fell and his
head dropped, and turning the handle of the door, he went out to buy
the pistol.