Tomorrow

Tomorrow is not a stable date but a moving horizon: the next day is promised, then displaced, while the present repeatedly turns into someone else’s tomorrow. The word recurs in theatrical, legal, and dreamlike contexts, making futurity both an expectation and an evasion.

A Future That Keeps Moving

A performance is announced for the following day, but the announcement immediately unravels the ordinary calendar. The speaker recalls hearing that someone would come here tomorrow, then insists that it is never here that one is today; yesterday belongs to another place, and it is always tomorrow in the other person’s place. Time is geographically and grammatically out of joint: the future arrives as a present elsewhere, while the promised encounter remains perpetually ahead.

The passage’s playful sequence of yesterday, today, and tomorrow does not resolve into a clear chronology. Instead, it circles through “yestoday,” “morrow,” and the “tother’s place,” turning the date into a relation between people and locations. The announcement of a show therefore becomes a compact model of a world in which every telling is already belated and every arrival can be deferred.

Tomorrow as Deferred Judgment

In the tangled account of Honuphrius, Anita, and their surrounding accusations, Michael tells Anita that he will reserve her case for the ordinary Guglielmus tomorrow, even if she practises a pious fraud during affrication. The promised hearing offers no immediate resolution: it is postponed into a future day, and the matter remains entangled with competing claims, sexual coercion, and uncertainty over what Anita should do.

This legal tomorrow is less a calendar marker than a suspension of judgment. The passage piles qualifications and warnings around the anticipated decision, so that referral to an ordinary authority does not end the dispute. The future is invoked as a possible point of reckoning while the present remains governed by threat and unresolved obligation.

A Settlement Projected Forward

During the trial over the crossed cheque, Coppinger’s doll proposes to reunite herself in partnership with Monsignore Pepigi “tomorrow perforce,” under the new style of Will Breakfast and Sparrem. Her plan turns the next day into a projected contractual future: a new partnership is to follow the court proceedings and the proposed settlement.

The proposal is ruled out on appeal. The judgment declares the pact legally void on the ground that no property can exist in a corpse, leaving the promised arrangement without force. Tomorrow thus marks not only postponement but a future that may be announced with confidence and then cancelled by a reversal in the present.

Temporal Motif and Narrative Effect

Across these passages, Tomorrow takes different forms: an endlessly displaced meeting, a deferred legal hearing, and a business arrangement that fails before it can begin. Each instance places an expected event just beyond the present, but none guarantees fulfillment. The recurring word joins the book’s unstable chronology to its repeated transformations of promise, decision, and consequence.

The motif’s force comes from its contrasts. A performance is supposedly due the next day, yet the text makes “here” impossible to fix; Anita’s case is reserved for tomorrow, yet the immediate circumstances remain unsettled; the proposed partnership is assigned to tomorrow, yet a court reverses it. The next day is therefore both an organizing promise and an instrument of delay: it keeps events in motion without securing a final arrival.