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.