The Forsyte saga - Complete
It is now to George Forsyte that the mind must turn for light on
the events of that fog-engulfed afternoon.
The wittiest and most sportsmanlike of the Forsytes had passed
the day reading a novel in the paternal mansion at Princes’
Gardens. Since a recent crisis in his financial affairs he had
been kept on parole by Roger, and compelled to reside “at home.”
Towards five o’clock he went out, and took train at South
Kensington Station (for everyone to-day went Underground). His
intention was to dine, and pass the evening playing billiards at
the Red Pottle—that unique hostel, neither club, hotel, nor good
gilt restaurant.
He got out at Charing Cross, choosing it in preference to his
more usual St. James’s Park, that he might reach Jermyn Street by
better lighted ways.
On the platform his eyes—for in combination with a composed and
fashionable appearance, George had sharp eyes, and was always on
the look-out for fillips to his sardonic humour—his eyes were
attracted by a man, who, leaping from a first-class compartment,
staggered rather than walked towards the exit.
“So ho, my bird!” said George to himself; “why, it’s “the
Buccaneer!”” and he put his big figure on the trail. Nothing
afforded him greater amusement than a drunken man.
Bosinney, who wore a slouch hat, stopped in front of him, spun
around, and rushed back towards the carriage he had just left. He
was too late. A porter caught him by the coat; the train was
already moving on.
George’s practised glance caught sight of the face of a lady clad
in a grey fur coat at the carriage window. It was Mrs. Soames—and
George felt that this was interesting!
And now he followed Bosinney more closely than ever—up the
stairs, past the ticket collector into the street. In that
progress, however, his feelings underwent a change; no longer
merely curious and amused, he felt sorry for the poor fellow he
was shadowing. “The Buccaneer” was not drunk, but seemed to be
acting under the stress of violent emotion; he was talking to
himself, and all that George could catch were the words “Oh,
God!” Nor did he appear to know what he was doing, or where
going; but stared, hesitated, moved like a man out of his mind;
and from being merely a joker in search of amusement, George felt
that he must see the poor chap through.
He had “taken the knock”—“taken the knock!” And he wondered what
on earth Mrs. Soames had been saying, what on earth she had been
telling him in the railway carriage. She had looked bad enough
herself! It made George sorry to think of her travelling on with
her trouble all alone.
He followed close behind Bosinney’s elbow—tall, burly figure,
saying nothing, dodging warily—and shadowed him out into the fog.
There was something here beyond a jest! He kept his head
admirably, in spite of some excitement, for in addition to
compassion, the instincts of the chase were roused within him.
Bosinney walked right out into the thoroughfare—a vast muffled
blackness, where a man could not see six paces before him; where,
all around, voices or whistles mocked the sense of direction; and
sudden shapes came rolling slow upon them; and now and then a
light showed like a dim island in an infinite dark sea.
And fast into this perilous gulf of night walked Bosinney, and
fast after him walked George. If the fellow meant to put his
“twopenny” under a ’bus, he would stop it if he could! Across the
street and back the hunted creature strode, not groping as other
men were groping in that gloom, but driven forward as though the
faithful George behind wielded a knout; and this chase after a
haunted man began to have for George the strangest fascination.
But it was now that the affair developed in a way which ever
afterwards caused it to remain green in his mind. Brought to a
stand-still in the fog, he heard words which threw a sudden light
on these proceedings. What Mrs. Soames had said to Bosinney in
the train was now no longer dark. George understood from those
mutterings that Soames had exercised his rights over an estranged
and unwilling wife in the greatest—the supreme act of property.
His fancy wandered in the fields of this situation; it impressed
him; he guessed something of the anguish, the sexual confusion
and horror in Bosinney’s heart. And he thought: “Yes, it’s a bit
thick! I don’t wonder the poor fellow is half-cracked!”
He had run his quarry to earth on a bench under one of the lions
in Trafalgar Square, a monster sphynx astray like themselves in
that gulf of darkness. Here, rigid and silent, sat Bosinney, and
George, in whose patience was a touch of strange brotherliness,
took his stand behind. He was not lacking in a certain delicacy—a
sense of form—that did not permit him to intrude upon this
tragedy, and he waited, quiet as the lion above, his fur collar
hitched above his ears concealing the fleshy redness of his
cheeks, concealing all but his eyes with their sardonic,
compassionate stare. And men kept passing back from business on
the way to their clubs—men whose figures shrouded in cocoons of
fog came into view like spectres, and like spectres vanished.
Then even in his compassion George’s Quilpish humour broke forth
in a sudden longing to pluck these spectres by the sleeve, and
say:
“Hi, you Johnnies! You don’t often see a show like this! Here’s a
poor devil whose mistress has just been telling him a pretty
little story of her husband; walk up, walk up! He’s taken the
knock, you see.”
In fancy he saw them gaping round the tortured lover; and grinned
as he thought of some respectable, newly-married spectre enabled
by the state of his own affections to catch an inkling of what
was going on within Bosinney; he fancied he could see his mouth
getting wider and wider, and the fog going down and down. For in
George was all that contempt of the middle-class—especially of
the married middle-class—peculiar to the wild and sportsmanlike
spirits in its ranks.
But he began to be bored. Waiting was not what he had bargained
for.
“After all,” he thought, “the poor chap will get over it; not the
first time such a thing has happened in this little city!” But
now his quarry again began muttering words of violent hate and
anger. And following a sudden impulse George touched him on the
shoulder.
Bosinney spun round.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
George could have stood it well enough in the light of the gas
lamps, in the light of that everyday world of which he was so
hardy a connoisseur; but in this fog, where all was gloomy and
unreal, where nothing had that matter-of-fact value associated by
Forsytes with earth, he was a victim to strange qualms, and as he
tried to stare back into the eyes of this maniac, he thought:
“If I see a bobby, I’ll hand him over; he’s not fit to be at
large.”
But waiting for no answer, Bosinney strode off into the fog, and
George followed, keeping perhaps a little further off, yet more
than ever set on tracking him down.
“He can’t go on long like this,” he thought. “It’s God’s own
miracle he’s not been run over already.” He brooded no more on
policemen, a sportsman’s sacred fire alive again within him.
Into a denser gloom than ever Bosinney held on at a furious pace;
but his pursuer perceived more method in his madness—he was
clearly making his way westwards.
“He’s really going for Soames!” thought George. The idea was
attractive. It would be a sporting end to such a chase. He had
always disliked his cousin.
The shaft of a passing cab brushed against his shoulder and made
him leap aside. He did not intend to be killed for the Buccaneer,
or anyone. Yet, with hereditary tenacity, he stuck to the trail
through vapour that blotted out everything but the shadow of the
hunted man and the dim moon of the nearest lamp.
Then suddenly, with the instinct of a town-stroller, George knew
himself to be in Piccadilly. Here he could find his way
blindfold; and freed from the strain of geographical uncertainty,
his mind returned to Bosinney’s trouble.
Down the long avenue of his man-about-town experience, bursting,
as it were, through a smirch of doubtful amours, there stalked to
him a memory of his youth. A memory, poignant still, that brought
the scent of hay, the gleam of moonlight, a summer magic, into
the reek and blackness of this London fog—the memory of a night
when in the darkest shadow of a lawn he had overheard from a
woman’s lips that he was not her sole possessor. And for a moment
George walked no longer in black Piccadilly, but lay again, with
hell in his heart, and his face to the sweet-smelling, dewy
grass, in the long shadow of poplars that hid the moon.
A longing seized him to throw his arm round the Buccaneer, and
say, “Come, old boy. Time cures all. Let’s go and drink it off!”
But a voice yelled at him, and he started back. A cab rolled out
of blackness, and into blackness disappeared. And suddenly George
perceived that he had lost Bosinney. He ran forward and back,
felt his heart clutched by a sickening fear, the dark fear which
lives in the wings of the fog. Perspiration started out on his
brow. He stood quite still, listening with all his might.
“And then,” as he confided to Dartie the same evening in the
course of a game of billiards at the Red Pottle, “I lost him.”
Dartie twirled complacently at his dark moustache. He had just
put together a neat break of twenty-three,—failing at a “Jenny.”
“And who was _she?_” he asked.
George looked slowly at the “man of the world’s” fattish, sallow
face, and a little grim smile lurked about the curves of his
cheeks and his heavy-lidded eyes.
“No, no, my fine fellow,” he thought, “I’m not going to tell
_you_.” For though he mixed with Dartie a good deal, he thought
him a bit of a cad.
“Oh, some little love-lady or other,” he said, and chalked his
cue.
“A love-lady!” exclaimed Dartie—he used a more figurative
expression. “I made sure it was our friend Soa....”
“Did you?” said George curtly. “Then damme you’ve made an error.”
He missed his shot. He was careful not to allude to the subject
again till, towards eleven o’clock, having, in his poetic
phraseology, “looked upon the drink when it was yellow,” he drew
aside the blind, and gazed out into the street. The murky
blackness of the fog was but faintly broken by the lamps of the
“Red Pottle,” and no shape of mortal man or thing was in sight.
“I can’t help thinking of that poor Buccaneer,” he said. “He may
be wandering out there now in that fog. If he’s not a corpse,” he
added with strange dejection.
“Corpse!” said Dartie, in whom the recollection of his defeat at
Richmond flared up. “_He’s_ all right. Ten to one if he wasn’t
tight!”