The next day was full of strange suspense; it was coloured throughout
with that quality of strangeness which puts a new light on all quotidian
occupations and exposes their fundamental unimportance. Edwin arose to
the fact that a thick grey fog was wrapping the town. When he returned
home to breakfast at nine the fog was certainly more opaque than it had
been an hour earlier. The steam-cars passed like phantoms, with a
continuous clanging of bells. He breakfasted under gas--and alone.
Maggie was invisible, or only to be seen momentarily, flying across the
domestic horizon. She gave out that she was very busy in the attics,
cleaning those shockingly neglected rooms. "Please, sir," said the
servant, "Miss Clayhanger says she's been across to Mr Orgreave's, and
Master George is about the same." Maggie would not come and tell him
herself. On the previous evening he had not seen her after the
reception of the news about the Vicar. She had gone upstairs when he
came back from the post office. Beyond doubt, she was too disturbed,
emotionally, to be able to face him with her customary tranquillity.
She was getting over the shock with brush and duster up in the attics.
He was glad that she had not attempted to be as usual. The ordeal of
attempting to be as usual would have tried him perhaps as severely as
her.
He went forth again into the fog in a high state of agitation,
constricted with sympathetic distress on Maggie's account, apprehensive
for the boy, and painfully expectant of the end of the day. The whole
day slipped away so, hour after monotonous hour, while people talked
about influenza and about distinguished patients, and doctors hurried
from house to house, and the fog itself seemed to be the visible mantle
of the disease. And the end of the day brought nothing to Edwin save an
acuter expectancy. George varied; on the whole he was worse; not much
worse, but worse. Dr Stirling saw him twice. No message arrived from
Hilda, nor did she come in person. Maggie watched George for five hours
in the late afternoon and evening, while Janet rested.
At eight o'clock, when there was no further hope of a telegram from
Hilda, everybody pretended to concur in the view that Hilda, knowing her
boy better than anybody else, and having already seen him through an
attack of influenza, had not been unduly alarmed by the telegraphic news
of his temperature, and was content to write. She might probably be
arranging to come on the morrow. After all, George's temperature had
reached 104 in the previous attack. Then there was the fog. The fog
would account for anything.
Nevertheless, nobody was really satisfied by these explanations of
Hilda's silence and absence. In every heart lay the secret and sinister
thought of the queerness and the incalculableness of Hilda.
Edwin called several times on the Orgreaves. He finally left their
house about ten o'clock, with some difficulty tracing his way home from
gas lamp to gas lamp through the fog. Mr Orgreave himself had escorted
him with a lantern round the wilderness of the lawn to the gates. "We
shall have a letter in the morning," Mr Orgreave had said. "Bound to!"
Edwin had replied. And they had both superiorly puffed away into the
fog the absurd misgivings of women.
Knowing that he was in no condition to sleep, Edwin mended the
drawing-room fire, and settled down on the sofa to read. But he could
no more read than sleep. He seemed to lie on the sofa for hours while
his thoughts jigged with fatiguing monotony in his head. He was
extraordinarily wakeful and alive, every sense painfully sharpened. At
last he decided to go to bed. In his bedroom he gazed idly out at the
blank density of the fog. And then his heart leapt as his eye
distinguished a moving glimmer below in the garden of the Orgreaves. He
threw up the window in a tumult of anticipation. The air was absolutely
still. Then he heard a voice say, "Good night." It was undoubtedly Dr
Stirling's voice. The Scotch accent was unmistakable. Was the boy
worse? Not necessarily, for the doctor had said that he might look in
again `last thing,' if chance favoured. And the Scotch significance of
`last thing' was notoriously comprehensive; it might include regions
beyond midnight. Then Edwin heard another voice: "Thanks ever so much!"
At first it puzzled him. He knew it, and yet! Could it be the
Sunday's voice? Assuredly it was not the voice of Mr Orgreave, nor of
any one living in the house. It reminded him of the Sunday's voice.
He went out of his bedroom, striking a match, and going downstairs lit
the gas in the hall, which he had just extinguished. Then he put on a
cap, found a candlestick in the kitchen, unbolted the garden door as
quietly as he could, and passed into the garden. The flame of the
candle stood upright in the fog. He blundered along to the dividing
wall, placed the candle on the top of it, and managed to climb over.
Leaving the candle on the wall to guide his return, he approached the
house, which showed gleams at several windows, and rang the bell. And
in fact it was Charlie Orgreave himself who opened the door. And a
lantern, stuck carelessly on the edge of a chair, was still burning in
the hall.
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