universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know--that
adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord
of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like
song. He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four
dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead
day.
The morning was wintry and dim, not misty, but darkened with that
shadow of cloud or snow which steeps everything in a green or copper
twilight. The light there is on such a day seems not so much to come
from the clear heavens as to be a phosphorescence clinging to the
shapes themselves. The load of heaven and the clouds is like a load of
waters, and the men move like fishes, feeling that they are on the
floor of a sea. Everything in a London street completes the fantasy;
the carriages and cabs themselves resemble deep-sea creatures with
eyes of flame. He had been startled at first to meet two dragons. Now
he found he was among deep-sea dragons possessing the deep sea.
The two young men in front were like the small young man himself,
well-dressed. The lines of their frock-coats and silk hats had that
luxuriant severity which makes the modern fop, hideous as he is, a
favourite exercise of the modern draughtsman; that element which Mr.
Max Beerbohm has admirably expressed in speaking of "certain
congruities of dark cloth and the rigid perfection of linen."
They walked with the gait of an affected snail, and they spoke at the
longest intervals, dropping a sentence at about every sixth lamp-post.
They crawled on past the lamp-posts; their mien was so immovable that
a fanciful description might almost say, that the lamp-posts crawled
past the men, as in a dream. Then the small man suddenly ran after
them and said--
"I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere
where they cut your hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but
it keeps on growing again."
One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist.
"Why, here is a little place," cried the small man, with a sort of
imbecile cheerfulness, as the bright bulging window of a fashionable
toilet-saloon glowed abruptly out of the foggy twilight. "Do you know,
I often find hair-dressers when I walk about London. I'll lunch with
you at Cicconani's. You know, I'm awfully fond of hair-dressers'
shops. They're miles better than those nasty butchers'." And he
disappeared into the doo
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