During tea he felt himself absurdly self-conscious, but nobody seemed to
notice his condition. The whole family went to chapel. The letter lay
in his pocket, and he might easily have slipped away to the post-office
with it, but he had had no opportunity to possess himself of a stamp.
There was no need to send the letter through the post. He might get up
early and put it among the morning's letters. He had decided, however,
that it must arrive formally by the postman, and he would not alter his
decision. Hence, after chapel, he took a match, and, creeping into the
shop, procured a crimson stamp from his father's desk. Then he went
forth, by the back way, alone into the streets. The adventure was not
so hazardous as it seemed and as it felt. Darius was incurious by
nature, though he had brief fevers of curiosity. Thus the life of the
children was a demoralising mixture of rigid discipline and freedom.
They were permitted nothing, but, as the years passed, they might take
nearly anything. There was small chance of Darius discovering his son's
excursion.
In crossing the road from chapel Edwin had opined to his father that the
frost was breaking. He was now sure of it. The mud, no longer brittle,
yielded to pressure, and there was a trace of dampness in the
interstices of the pavement bricks. A thin raw mist was visible in huge
spheres round the street lamps. The sky was dark. The few people whom
he encountered seemed to be out upon mysterious errands, seemed to
emerge strangely from one gloom and strangely to vanish into another.
In the blind, black facades of the streets the public-houses blazed
invitingly with gas; they alone were alive in the weekly death of the
town; and they gleamed everywhere, at every corner; the town appeared to
consist chiefly of public-houses. He dropped the letter into the box in
the market-place; he heard it fall. His heart beat. The deed was now
irrevocable. He wondered what Monday held for him. The quiescent
melancholy of the town invaded his spirit, and mingled with his own
remorseful sorrow for the unstrenuous past, and his apprehensive
solicitude about the future. It was not unpleasant, this brooding
sadness, half-despondency and half-hope. A man and a woman, arm-in-arm,
went by him as he stood unconscious of his conspicuousness under the
gas-lamp that lit the post-office. They laughed the smothered laugh of
intimacy to see a tall boy standing alone there, with no overcoat,
gazing at naught. Edwin turned to go home. It occurred to him that
nearly all the people he met were couples, arm-in-arm. And he suddenly
thought of Florence, the clog-dancer. He had scarcely thought of her
for months. The complexity of the interests of life, and the
interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave
vacuity.