The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

Soames used the underground again in going home.

The fog was worse than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the

still, thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their

reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned

with the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow

of lamp-light that seemed to drown in vapour before it reached the

pavement, cabs loomed dim-shaped ever and again, and discharged

citizens, bolting like rabbits to their burrows.

And these shadowy figures, wrapped each in his own little shroud of

fog, took no notice of each other. In the great warren, each rabbit for

himself, especially those clothed in the more expensive fur, who, afraid

of carriages on foggy days, are driven underground.

One figure, however, not far from Soames, waited at the station door.

Some buccaneer or lover, of whom each Forsyte thought: 'Poor devil!

looks as if he were having a bad time!' Their kind hearts beat a stroke

faster for that poor, waiting, anxious lover in the fog; but they

hurried by, well knowing that they had neither time nor money to spare

for any suffering but their own.

Only a policeman, patrolling slowly and at intervals, took an interest

in that waiting figure, the brim of whose slouch hat half hid a face

reddened by the cold, all thin, and haggard, over which a hand stole now

and again to smooth away anxiety, or renew the resolution that kept

him waiting there. But the waiting lover (if lover he were) was used

to policemen's scrutiny, or too absorbed in his anxiety, for he never

flinched. A hardened case, accustomed to long trysts, to anxiety, and

fog, and cold, if only his mistress came at last. Foolish lover! Fogs

last until the spring; there is also snow and rain, no comfort anywhere;

gnawing fear if you bring her out, gnawing fear if you bid her stay at

home!

"Serve him right; he should arrange his affairs better!"

So any respectable Forsyte. Yet, if that sounder citizen could have

listened at the waiting lover's heart, out there in the fog and the

cold, he would have said again: "Yes, poor devil he's having a bad

time!"

Soames got into his cab, and, with the glass down, crept along Sloane

Street, and so along the Brompton Road, and home. He reached his house

at five.

His wife was not in. She had gone out a quarter of an hour before. Out

at such a time of night, into this terrible fog! What was the meaning of

that?

He sat by the dining-room fire, with the door open, disturbed to the

soul, trying to read the evening paper. A book was no good--in daily

papers alone was any narcotic to such worry as his. From the customary

events recorded in the journal he drew some comfort. 'Suicide of

an actress'--'Grave indisposition of a Statesman' (that chronic

sufferer)--'Divorce of an army officer'--'Fire in a colliery'--he read

them all. They helped him a little--prescribed by the greatest of all

doctors, our natural taste.