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.