Couple after couple, from every gate, they streamed along the paths and
over the burnt grass, and one after another, silently out of the lighted
spaces, stole into the shelter of the feathery trees, where, blotted
against some trunk, or under the shadow of shrubs, they were lost to all
but themselves in the heart of the soft darkness.
To fresh-comers along the paths, these forerunners formed but part of
that passionate dusk, whence only a strange murmur, like the confused
beating of hearts, came forth. But when that murmur reached each couple
in the lamp-light their voices wavered, and ceased; their arms enlaced,
their eyes began seeking, searching, probing the blackness. Suddenly,
as though drawn by invisible hands, they, too, stepped over the railing,
and, silent as shadows, were gone from the light.
The stillness, enclosed in the far, inexorable roar of the town, was
alive with the myriad passions, hopes, and loves of multitudes of
struggling human atoms; for in spite of the disapproval of that great
body of Forsytes, the Municipal Council--to whom Love had long been
considered, next to the Sewage Question, the gravest danger to the
community--a process was going on that night in the Park, and in a
hundred other parks, without which the thousand factories, churches,
shops, taxes, and drains, of which they were custodians, were as
arteries without blood, a man without a heart.
The instincts of self-forgetfulness, of passion, and of love, hiding
under the trees, away from the trustees of their remorseless enemy,
the 'sense of property,' were holding a stealthy revel, and Soames,
returning from Bayswater for he had been alone to dine at Timothy's
walking home along the water, with his mind upon that coming lawsuit,
had the blood driven from his heart by a low laugh and the sound of
kisses. He thought of writing to the Times the next morning, to draw
the attention of the Editor to the condition of our parks. He did not,
however, for he had a horror of seeing his name in print.
But starved as he was, the whispered sounds in the stillness, the
half-seen forms in the dark, acted on him like some morbid stimulant. He
left the path along the water and stole under the trees, along the deep
shadow of little plantations, where the boughs of chestnut trees hung
their great leaves low, and there was blacker refuge, shaping his course
in circles which had for their object a stealthy inspection of chairs
side by side, against tree-trunks, of enlaced lovers, who stirred at his
approach.
Now he stood still on the rise overlooking the Serpentine, where, in
full lamp-light, black against the silver water, sat a couple who never
moved, the woman's face buried on the man's neck--a single form, like a
carved emblem of passion, silent and unashamed.