5
" It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely animal: some were foxy and some were wolflike; and others had the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from the unhealthy life the led and the poor food they ate. Their features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them, and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure. The were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them, and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats. Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was the worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him.
He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the bitter coldness of the night. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , Of Human Bondage
11
" Black snowflakes creep down from the sky, advancing slowly, methodically. All the money in the world, which my father seems to have, can’t keep the demons from chasing me ⎯ Aishling Morrighan Delaney, a.k.a. princess of Clan Delaney. Everything is messed up. I’m wearing the “Happy Birthday” sash across my chest that my best friend, Claire, had always insisted I wear for my special day, but this is not that day. My twentieth birthday was over a month ago, on October 31, the night of Samhain, the Celtic New Year’s Eve.This is December 7th, and the Ten Colds Moon is rising. My fate stalks me. Doesn’t look like I’m going to make it to my belated birthday party. I lean into my horse, Kheelan, as he tears across the bracken and bramble moor, and beyond through the amethyst fields of devil’s bit, for a moment outrunning the faerie’s freak show. The spiky shrubs of the moor bite my legs as we attempt to outrun the Fates and the black snow that comes like a gathering sandstorm, trailing me. This princess thing in Ireland can get a girl killed fast, or maybe it’s just me. I am the faerie slayer of the seventh order and the 28th generation, the prophesied Gael Siridean, the Searcher. As such, my head is crowned with a supernatural bounty, and the price is high…The thread of my life frays rapidly, as does the hem of this black velvet medieval-style dress I borrowed from my best friend, Claire. She’s throwing me a themed party this year. If I make it out of this alive tonight, she’s going to kill me for ruining her dress and causing her more worry. Maybe she’ll grant me mercy when she takes in my drenched, haggard appearance with thistle strewn throughout my hair and dark eyeliner no doubt leaving claw marks down my cheeks. I can’t tell her what really happened here tonight. I can’t tell anyone. "
14
" LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. "
― Charles Dickens , Bleak House
