Face down on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque,
and just before he fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people
shall we ever really like the French? Will they ever really like
us!' He himself had always liked the French, feeling at home with
their wit, their taste, their cooking. Irene and he had paid many
visits to France before the War, when Jon had been at his private
school. His romance with her had begun in Paris—his last and most
enduring romance. But the French—no Englishman could like them
who could not see them in some sort with the detached aesthetic
eye! And with that melancholy conclusion he had nodded off.
When he woke he saw Jon standing between him and the window. The
boy had evidently come in from the garden and was waiting for him
to wake. Jolyon smiled, still half asleep. How nice the chap
looked—sensitive, affectionate, straight! Then his heart gave a
nasty jump; and a quaking sensation overcame him. Jon! That
confession! He controlled himself with an effort. “Why, Jon,
where did you spring from?”
Jon bent over and kissed his forehead.
Only then he noticed the look on the boy's face.
“I came home to tell you something, Dad.”
With all his might Jolyon tried to get the better of the jumping,
gurgling sensations within his chest.
“Well, sit down, old man. Have you seen your mother?”
“No.” The boy's flushed look gave place to pallor; he sat down on
the arm of the old chair, as, in old days, Jolyon himself used to
sit beside his own father, installed in its recesses. Right up to
the time of the rupture in their relations he had been wont to
perch there—had he now reached such a moment with his own son?
All his life he had hated scenes like poison, avoided rows, gone
on his own way quietly and let others go on theirs. But now—it
seemed—at the very end of things, he had a scene before him more
painful than any he had avoided. He drew a visor down over his
emotion, and waited for his son to speak.
“Father,” said Jon slowly, “Fleur and I are engaged.”
'Exactly!' thought Jolyon, breathing with difficulty.
“I know that you and Mother don't like the idea. Fleur says that
Mother was engaged to her father before you married her. Of
course I don't know what happened, but it must be ages ago. I'm
devoted to her, Dad, and she says she is to me.”
Jolyon uttered a queer sound, half laugh, half groan.
“You are nineteen, Jon, and I am seventy-two. How are we to
understand each other in a matter like this, eh?”
“You love Mother, Dad; you must know what we feel. It isn't fair
to us to let old things spoil our happiness, is it?”
Brought face to face with his confession, Jolyon resolved to do
without it if by any means he could. He laid his hand on the
boy's arm.
“Look, Jon! I might put you off with talk about your both being
too young and not knowing your own minds, and all that, but you
wouldn't listen, besides, it doesn't meet the case—Youth,
unfortunately, cures itself. You talk lightly about 'old things
like that,' knowing nothing—as you say truly—of what happened.
Now, have I ever given you reason to doubt my love for you, or my
word?”
At a less anxious moment he might have been amused by the
conflict his words aroused—the boy's eager clasp, to reassure him
on these points, the dread on his face of what that reassurance
would bring forth; but he could only feel grateful for the
squeeze.
“Very well, you can believe what I tell you. If you don't give up
this love affair, you will make Mother wretched to the end of her
days. Believe me, my dear, the past, whatever it was, can't be
buried—it can't indeed.”
Jon got off the arm of the chair.
'The girl'—thought Jolyon—'there she goes—starting up before
him—life itself—eager, pretty, loving!'
“I can't, Father; how can I—just because you say that? Of course,
I can't!”
“Jon, if you knew the story you would give this up without
hesitation; you would have to! Can't you believe me?”
“How can you tell what I should think? Father, I love her better
than anything in the world.”
Jolyon's face twitched, and he said with painful slowness:
“Better than your mother, Jon?”
From the boy's face, and his clenched fists Jolyon realised the
stress and struggle he was going through.
“I don't know,” he burst out, “I don't know! But to give Fleur up
for nothing—for something I don't understand, for something that
I don't believe can really matter half so much, will make me—make
me....”
“Make you feel us unjust, put a barrier—yes. But that's better
than going on with this.”
“I can't. Fleur loves me, and I love her. You want me to trust
you; why don't you trust me, Father? We wouldn't want to know
anything—we wouldn't let it make any difference. It'll only make
us both love you and Mother all the more.”
Jolyon put his hand into his breast pocket, but brought it out
again empty, and sat, clucking his tongue against his teeth.
“Think what your mother's been to you, Jon! She has nothing but
you; I shan't last much longer.”
“Why not? It isn't fair to—Why not?”
“Well,” said Jolyon, rather coldly, “because the doctors tell me
I shan't; that's all.”
“Oh, Dad!” cried Jon, and burst into tears.
This downbreak of his son, whom he had not seen cry since he was
ten, moved Jolyon terribly. He recognised to the full how
fearfully soft the boy's heart was, how much he would suffer in
this business, and in life generally. And he reached out his hand
helplessly—not wishing, indeed not daring to get up.
“Dear man,” he said, “don't—or you'll make me!”
Jon smothered down his paroxysm, and stood with face averted,
very still.
'What now?' thought Jolyon. 'What can I say to move him?'
“By the way, don't speak of that to Mother,” he said; “she has
enough to frighten her with this affair of yours. I know how you
feel. But, Jon, you know her and me well enough to be sure we
wouldn't wish to spoil your happiness lightly. Why, my dear boy,
we don't care for anything but your happiness—at least, with me
it's just yours and Mother's and with her just yours. It's all
the future for you both that's at stake.”
Jon turned. His face was deadly pale; his eyes, deep in his head,
seemed to burn.
“What is it? What is it? Don't keep me like this!”
Jolyon, who knew that he was beaten, thrust his hand again into
his breast pocket, and sat for a full minute, breathing with
difficulty, his eyes closed. The thought passed through his mind:
'I've had a good long innings—some pretty bitter moments—this is
the worst!' Then he brought his hand out with the letter, and
said with a sort of fatigue: “Well, Jon, if you hadn't come
to-day, I was going to send you this. I wanted to spare you—I
wanted to spare your mother and myself, but I see it's no good.
Read it, and I think I'll go into the garden.” He reached forward
to get up.
Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, “No, I'll go”; and
was gone.
Jolyon sank back in his chair. A blue-bottle chose that moment to
come buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely,
better than nothing.... Where had the boy gone to read his
letter? The wretched letter—the wretched story! A cruel
business—cruel to her—to Soames—to those two children—to
himself!... His heart thumped and pained him. Life—its loves—its
work—its beauty—its aching, and—its end! A good time; a fine time
in spite of all; until—you regretted that you had ever been born.
Life—it wore you down, yet did not make you want to die—that was
the cunning evil! Mistake to have a heart! Again the blue-bottle
came buzzing—bringing in all the heat and hum and scent of
summer—yes, even the scent—as of ripe fruits, dried grasses,
sappy shrubs, and the vanilla breath of cows. And out there
somewhere in the fragrance Jon would be reading that letter,
turning and twisting its pages in his trouble, his bewilderment
and trouble—breaking his heart about it! The thought made Jolyon
acutely miserable. Jon was such a tender-hearted chap,
affectionate to his bones, and conscientious, too—it was so
unfair, so damned unfair! He remembered Irene saying to him once:
“Never was any one born more loving and lovable than Jon.” Poor
little Jon! His world gone up the spout, all of a summer
afternoon! Youth took things so hard! And stirred, tormented by
that vision of Youth taking things hard, Jolyon got out of his
chair, and went to the window. The boy was nowhere visible. And
he passed out. If one could take any help to him now—one must!
He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden—no
Jon! Nor where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to
swell and colour. He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral,
into the meadow. Where had the boy got to? Had he rushed down to
the coppice—his old hunting-ground? Jolyon crossed the rows of
hay. They would cock it on Monday and be carrying the day after,
if rain held off. Often they had crossed this field together—hand
in hand, when Jon was a little chap. Dash it! The golden age was
over by the time one was ten! He came to the pond, where flies
and gnats were dancing over a bright reedy surface; and on into
the coppice. It was cool there, fragrant of larches. Still no
Jon! He called. No answer! On the log seat he sat down, nervous,
anxious, forgetting his own physical sensations. He had been
wrong to let the boy get away with that letter; he ought to have
kept him under his eye from the start! Greatly troubled, he got
up to retrace his steps. At the farm-buildings he called again,
and looked into the dark cow-house. There in the cool, and the
scent of vanilla and ammonia, away from flies, the three
Alderneys were chewing the quiet cud; just milked, waiting for
evening, to be turned out again into the lower field. One turned
a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon could see the slobber on its
grey lower lip. He saw everything with passionate clearness, in
the agitation of his nerves—all that in his time he had adored
and tried to paint—wonder of light and shade and colour. No
wonder the legend put Christ into a manger—what more devotional
than the eyes and moon-white horns of a chewing cow in the warm
dusk! He called again. No answer! And he hurried away out of the
coppice, past the pond, up the hill. Oddly ironical—now he came
to think of it—if Jon had taken the gruel of his discovery down
in the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those old days
had made the plunge of acknowledging their love. Where he
himself, on the log seat the Sunday morning he came back from
Paris, had realised to the full that Irene had become the world
to him. That would have been the place for Irony to tear the veil
from before the eyes of Irene's boy! But he was not here! Where
had he got to? One must find the poor chap!
A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all
the beauty of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening
shadows, of the blue, and the white clouds, the scent of the hay,
and the cooing of the pigeons; and the flower shapes standing
tall. He came to the rosery, and the beauty of the roses in that
sudden sunlight seemed to him unearthly. “Rose, you Spaniard!”
Wonderful three words! There she had stood by that bush of dark
red roses; had stood to read and decide that Jon must know it
all! He knew all now! Had she chosen wrong? He bent and sniffed a
rose, its petals brushed his nose and trembling lips; nothing so
soft as a rose-leaf's velvet, except her neck—Irene! On across
the lawn he went, up the slope, to the oak-tree. Its top alone
was glistening, for the sudden sun was away over the house; the
lower shade was thick, blessedly cool—he was greatly overheated.
He paused a minute with his hand on the rope of the swing—Jolly,
Holly—Jon! The old swing! And suddenly, he felt horribly—deadly
ill. 'I've over done it!' he thought: 'by Jove! I've overdone
it—after all!' He staggered up toward the terrace, dragged
himself up the steps, and fell against the wall of the house. He
leaned there gasping, his face buried in the honey-suckle that he
and she had taken such trouble with that it might sweeten the air
which drifted in. Its fragrance mingled with awful pain. 'My
love!' he thought; 'the boy!' And with a great effort he tottered
in through the long window, and sank into old Jolyon's chair. The
book was there, a pencil in it; he caught it up, scribbled a word
on the open page.... His hand dropped.... So it was like this—was
it?...
There was a great wrench; and darkness....
III.—IRENE
When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along
the terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and
confusion. Leaning against the creepered wall he tore open the
letter. It was long—very long! This added to his fear, and he
began reading. When he came to the words: “It was Fleur's father
that she married,” everything seemed to spin before him. He was
close to a window, and entering by it, he passed, through
music-room and hall, up to his bedroom. Dipping his face in cold
water, he sat on his bed, and went on reading, dropping each
finished page on the bed beside him. His father's writing was
easy to read—he knew it so well, though he had never had a letter
from him one quarter so long. He read with a dull
feeling—imagination only half at work. He best grasped, on that
first reading, the pain his father must have had in writing such
a letter. He let the last sheet fall, and in a sort of mental,
moral helplessness began to read the first again. It all seemed
to him disgusting—dead and disgusting. Then, suddenly, a hot wave
of horrified emotion tingled through him. He buried his face in
his hands. His mother! Fleur's father! He took up the letter
again, and read on mechanically. And again came the feeling that
it was all dead and disgusting; his own love so different! This
letter said his mother—and her father! An awful letter!
Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their
property? Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up
before him—red, stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry
faces; violent faces; hundreds, thousands of them! How could he
know what men who had such faces thought and did? He held his
head in his hands and groaned. His mother! He caught up the
letter and read on again: “horror and aversion-alive in her
to-day.... your children.... grandchildren.... of a man who once
owned your mother as a man might own a slave....” He got up from
his bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his
love and Fleur's, was true, or his father could never have
written it. 'Why didn't they tell me the first thing,' he
thought, 'the day I first saw Fleur? They knew I'd seen her. They
were afraid, and—now—I've—got it!' Overcome by misery too acute
for thought or reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the room
and sat down on the floor. He sat there, like some unhappy little
animal. There was comfort in dusk, and the floor—as if he were
back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all over
it. He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped
round his knees, for how long he did not know. He was wrenched
from his blank wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from
his mother's room. The blinds were down over the windows of his
room, shut up in his absence, and from where he sat he could only
hear a rustle, her footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw
her standing before his dressing-table. She had something in her
hand. He hardly breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go
away. He saw her touch things on the table as if they had some
virtue in them, then face the window-grey from head to foot like
a ghost. The least turn of her head, and she must see him! Her
lips moved: “Oh! Jon!” She was speaking to herself; the tone of
her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her hand a little
photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at it—very
small. He knew it—one of himself as a tiny boy, which she always
kept in her bag. His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had
heard it, she turned her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave,
and the movement of her hands pressing the photograph against her
breast, he said:
“Yes, it's me.”
She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to
him, her hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the
sheets of the letter which had slipped to the floor. She saw
them, and her hands grasped the edge of the bed. She sat very
upright, her dark eyes fixed on him. At last she spoke.
“Well, Jon, you know, I see.”
“Yes.”
“You've seen Father?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, till she said:
“Oh! my darling!”
“It's all right.” The emotions in him were so, violent and so
mixed that he dared not move—resentment, despair, and yet a
strange yearning for the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don't know.”
There was another long silence, then she got up. She stood a
moment, very still, made a little movement with her hand, and
said: “My darling boy, my most darling boy, don't think of
me—think of yourself,” and, passing round the foot of the bed,
went back into her room.
Jon turned—curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog—into
the corner made by the two walls.
He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him.
It came from the terrace below. He got up, scared. Again came the
cry: “Jon!” His mother was calling! He ran out and down the
stairs, through the empty dining-room into the study. She was
kneeling before the old armchair, and his father was lying back
quite white, his head on his breast, one of his hands resting on
an open book, with a pencil clutched in it—more strangely still
than anything he had ever seen. She looked round wildly, and
said:
“Oh! Jon—he's dead—he's dead!”
Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair,
where he had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead.
Icy cold! How could—how could Dad be dead, when only an hour
ago—! His mother's arms were round the knees; pressing her breast
against them. “Why—why wasn't I with him?” he heard her whisper.
Then he saw the tottering word “Irene” pencilled on the open
page, and broke down himself. It was his first sight of human
death, and its unutterable stillness blotted from him all other
emotion; all else, then, was but preliminary to this! All love
and life, and joy, anxiety, and sorrow, all movement, light and
beauty, but a beginning to this terrible white stillness. It made
a dreadful mark on him; all seemed suddenly little, futile,
short. He mastered himself at last, got up, and raised her.
“Mother! don't cry—Mother!”
Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his
mother was lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed,
covered with a white sheet. He stood for a long time gazing at
that face which had never looked angry—always whimsical, and
kind. “To be kind and keep your end up—there's nothing else in
it,” he had once heard his father say. How wonderfully Dad had
acted up to that philosophy! He understood now that his father
had known for a long time past that this would come
suddenly—known, and not said a word. He gazed with an awed and
passionate reverence. The loneliness of it—just to spare his
mother and himself! His own trouble seemed small while he was
looking at that face. The word scribbled on the page! The
farewell word! Now his mother had no one but himself! He went up
close to the dead face—not changed at all, and yet completely
changed. He had heard his father say once that he did not believe
in consciousness surviving death, or that if it did it might be
just survival till the natural age limit of the body had been
reached—the natural term of its inherent vitality; so that if the
body were broken by accident, excess, violent disease,
consciousness might still persist till, in the course of Nature
uninterfered with, it would naturally have faded out. It had
struck him because he had never heard any one else suggest it.
When the heart failed like this—surely it was not quite natural!
Perhaps his father's consciousness was in the room with him.
Above the bed hung a picture of his father's father. Perhaps his
consciousness, too, was still alive; and his brother's—his
half-brother, who had died in the Transvaal. Were they all
gathered round this bed? Jon kissed the forehead, and stole back
to his own room. The door between it and his mother's was ajar;
she had evidently been in—everything was ready for him, even some
biscuits and hot milk, and the letter no longer on the floor. He
ate and drank, watching the last light fade. He did not try to
see into the future—just stared at the dark branches of the
oak-tree, level with his window, and felt as if life had stopped.
Once in the night, turning in his heavy sleep, he was conscious
of something white and still, beside his bed, and started up.
His mother's voice said:
“It's only I, Jon dear!” Her hand pressed his forehead gently
back; her white figure disappeared.
Alone! He fell heavily asleep again, and dreamed he saw his
mother's name crawling on his bed.
IV.—SOAMES COGITATES
The announcement in The Times of his cousin Jolyon's death
affected Soames quite simply. So that chap was gone! There had
never been a time in their two lives when love had not been lost
between them. That quick-blooded sentiment hatred had run its
course long since in Soames' heart, and he had refused to allow
any recrudescence, but he considered this early decease a piece
of poetic justice. For twenty years the fellow had enjoyed the
reversion of his wife and house, and—he was dead! The obituary
notice, which appeared a little later, paid Jolyon—he thought—too
much attention. It spoke of that “diligent and agreeable painter
whose work we have come to look on as typical of the best
late-Victorian water-colour art.” Soames, who had almost
mechanically preferred Mole, Morpin, and Caswell Baye, and had
always sniffed quite audibly when he came to one of his cousin's
on the line, turned The Times with a crackle.
He had to go up to Town that morning on Forsyte affairs, and was
fully conscious of Gradman's glance sidelong over his spectacles.
The old clerk had about him an aura of regretful congratulation.
He smelled, as it were, of old days. One could almost hear him
thinking: “Mr. Jolyon, ye-es—just my age, and gone—dear, dear! I
dare say she feels it. She was a nice-lookin' woman. Flesh is
flesh! They've given 'im a notice in the papers. Fancy!” His
atmosphere in fact caused Soames to handle certain leases and
conversions with exceptional swiftness.
“About that settlement on Miss Fleur, Mr. Soames?”
“I've thought better of that,” answered Soames shortly.
“Ah! I'm glad of that. I thought you were a little hasty. The
times do change.”
How this death would affect Fleur had begun to trouble Soames. He
was not certain that she knew of it—she seldom looked at the
paper, never at the births, marriages, and deaths.
He pressed matters on, and made his way to Green Street for
lunch. Winifred was almost doleful. Jack Cardigan had broken a
splashboard, so far as one could make out, and would not be “fit”
for some time. She could not get used to the idea.
“Did Profond ever get off?” he said suddenly.
“He got off,” replied Winifred, “but where—I don't know.”
Yes, there it was—impossible to tell anything! Not that he wanted
to know. Letters from Annette were coming from Dieppe, where she
and her mother were staying.
“You saw that fellow's death, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Winifred. “I'm sorry for—for his children. He was
very amiable.” Soames uttered a rather queer sound. A suspicion
of the old deep truth—that men were judged in this world rather
by what they were than by what they did—crept and knocked
resentfully at the back doors of his mind.
“I know there was a superstition to that effect,” he muttered.
“One must do him justice now he's dead.”
“I should like to have done him justice before,” said Soames;
“but I never had the chance. Have you got a 'Baronetage' here?”
“Yes; in that bottom row.”
Soames took out a fat red book, and ran over the leaves.
“Mont-Sir Lawrence, 9th Bt., cr. 1620, e. s. of Geoffrey, 8th
Bt., and Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt., of Muskham
Hall, Shrops: marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq.,
of Condaford Grange, co. Oxon; 1 son, heir Michael Conway, b.
1895, 2 daurs. Residence: Lippinghall Manor, Folwell, Bucks.
Clubs: Snooks'. Coffee House: Aeroplane. See Bidicott.”
“H'm!” he said. “Did you ever know a publisher?”
“Uncle Timothy.”
“Alive, I mean.”
“Monty knew one at his Club. He brought him here to dinner once.
Monty was always thinking of writing a book, you know, about how
to make money on the turf. He tried to interest that man.”
“Well?”
“He put him on to a horse—for the Two Thousand. We didn't see him
again. He was rather smart, if I remember.”
“Did it win?”
“No; it ran last, I think. You know Monty really was quite clever
in his way.”
“Was he?” said Soames. “Can you see any connection between a
sucking baronet and publishing?”
“People do all sorts of things nowadays,” replied Winifred. “The
great stunt seems not to be idle—so different from our time. To
do nothing was the thing then. But I suppose it'll come again.”
“This young Mont that I'm speaking of is very sweet on Fleur. If
it would put an end to that other affair I might encourage it.”
“Has he got style?” asked Winifred.
“He's no beauty; pleasant enough, with some scattered brains.
There's a good deal of land, I believe. He seems genuinely
attached. But I don't know.”
“No,” murmured Winifred; “it's—very difficult. I always found it
best to do nothing. It is such a bore about Jack; now we shan't
get away till after Bank Holiday. Well, the people are always
amusing, I shall go into the Park and watch them.”
“If I were you,” said Soames, “I should have a country cottage,
and be out of the way of holidays and strikes when you want.”
“The country bores me,” answered Winifred, “and I found the
railway strike quite exciting.”
Winifred had always been noted for sang-froid.
Soames took his leave. All the way down to Reading he debated
whether he should tell Fleur of that boy's father's death. It did
not alter the situation except that he would be independent now,
and only have his mother's opposition to encounter. He would come
into a lot of money, no doubt, and perhaps the house—the house
built for Irene and himself—the house whose architect had wrought
his domestic ruin. His daughter—mistress of that house! That
would be poetic justice! Soames uttered a little mirthless laugh.
He had designed that house to re-establish his failing union,
meant it for the seat of his descendants, if he could have
induced Irene to give him one! Her son and Fleur! Their children
would be, in some sort, offspring of the union between himself
and her!
The theatricality in that thought was repulsive to his sober
sense. And yet—it would be the easiest and wealthiest way out of
the impasse, now that Jolyon was gone. The juncture of two
Forsyte fortunes had a kind of conservative charm. And
she—Irene-would be linked to him once more. Nonsense! Absurd! He
put the notion from his head.
On arriving home he heard the click of billiard-balls, and
through the window saw young Mont sprawling over the table.
Fleur, with her cue akimbo, was watching with a smile. How pretty
she looked! No wonder that young fellow was out of his mind about
her. A title—land! There was little enough in land, these days;
perhaps less in a title. The old Forsytes had always had a kind
of contempt for titles, rather remote and artificial things—not
worth the money they cost, and having to do with the Court. They
had all had that feeling in differing measure—Soames remembered.
Swithin, indeed, in his most expansive days had once attended a
Levee. He had come away saying he shouldn't go again—“all that
small fry.” It was suspected that he had looked too big in
knee-breeches. Soames remembered how his own mother had wished to
be presented because of the fashionable nature of the
performance, and how his father had put his foot down with
unwonted decision. What did she want with that peacocking—wasting
time and money; there was nothing in it!
The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the
chief power in the State, a feeling that their own world was good
enough and a little better than any other because it was their
world, had kept the old Forsytes singularly free of “flummery,”
as Nicholas had been wont to call it when he had the gout.
Soames' generation, more self-conscious and ironical, had been
saved by a sense of Swithin in knee-breeches. While the third and
the fourth generation, as it seemed to him, laughed at
everything.
However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a
title and estate—a thing one couldn't help. He entered quietly,
as Mont missed his shot. He noted the young man's eyes, fixed on
Fleur bending over in her turn; and the adoration in them almost
touched him.
She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand,
and shook her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
“I shall never do it.”
“'Nothing venture.'”
“All right.” The cue struck, the ball rolled. “There!”
“Bad luck! Never mind!”
Then they saw him, and Soames said:
“I'll mark for you.”
He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and
tired, furtively studying those two young faces. When the game
was over Mont came up to him.
“I've started in, sir. Rum game, business, isn't it? I suppose
you saw a lot of human nature as a solicitor.”
“I did.”
“Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the
wrong tack in offering less than they can afford to give; they
ought to offer more, and work backward.”
Soames raised his eyebrows.
“Suppose the more is accepted?”
“That doesn't matter a little bit,” said Mont; “it's much more
paying to abate a price than to increase it. For instance, say we
offer an author good terms—he naturally takes them. Then we go
into it, find we can't publish at a decent profit and tell him
so. He's got confidence in us because we've been generous to him,
and he comes down like a lamb, and bears us no malice. But if we
offer him poor terms at the start, he doesn't take them, so we
have to advance them to get him, and he thinks us damned screws
into the bargain.
“Try buying pictures on that system,” said Soames; “an offer
accepted is a contract—haven't you learned that?”
Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the
window.
“No,” he said, “I wish I had. Then there's another thing. Always
let a man off a bargain if he wants to be let off.”
“As advertisement?” said Soames dryly.
“Of course it is; but I meant on principle.”
“Does your firm work on those lines?”
“Not yet,” said Mont, “but it'll come.”
“And they will go.”
“No, really, sir. I'm making any number of observations, and they
all confirm my theory. Human nature is consistently underrated in
business, people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure
and profit by that. Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and
open, but that's easy if you feel it. The more human and generous
you are the better chance you've got in business.”
Soames rose.
“Are you a partner?”
“Not for six months, yet.”
“The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire.”
Mont laughed.
“You'll see,” he said. “There's going to be a big change. The
possessive principle has got its shutters up.”
“What?” said Soames.
“The house is to let! Good-bye, sir; I'm off now.”
Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the
squeeze it received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as
he passed out. Then she came from the window, trailing her finger
along the mahogany edge of the billiard-table. Watching her,
Soames knew that she was going to ask him something. Her finger
felt round the last pocket, and she looked up.
“Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?”
Soames shook his head.
“You haven't seen, then?” he said. “His father died just a week
ago to-day.”
“Oh!”
In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to
apprehend what this would mean.
“Poor Jon! Why didn't you tell me, Father?”
“I never know!” said Soames slowly; “you don't confide in me.”
“I would, if you'd help me, dear.”
“Perhaps I shall.”
Fleur clasped her hands. “Oh! darling—when one wants a thing
fearfully, one doesn't think of other people. Don't be angry with
me.”
Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
“I'm cogitating,” he said. What on earth had made him use a word
like that! “Has young Mont been bothering you again?”
Fleur smiled. “Oh! Michael! He's always bothering; but he's such
a good sort—I don't mind him.”
“Well,” said Soames, “I'm tired; I shall go and have a nap before
dinner.”
He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there,
and closed his eyes. A terrible responsibility this girl of
his—whose mother was—ah! what was she? A terrible responsibility!
Help her—how could he help her? He could not alter the fact that
he was her father. Or that Irene—! What was it young Mont had
said—some nonsense about the possessive instinct—shutters up—To
let? Silly!
The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river
and roses, closed on his senses, drowsing them.
V.—THE FIXED IDEA
“The fixed idea,” which has outrun more constables than any other
form of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than
when it takes the avid guise of love. To hedges and ditches, and
doors, to humans without ideas fixed or otherwise, to
perambulators and the contents sucking their fixed ideas, even to
the other sufferers from this fast malady—the fixed idea of love
pays no attention. It runs with eyes turned inward to its own
light, oblivious of all other stars. Those with the fixed ideas
that human happiness depends on their art, on vivisecting dogs,
on hating foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers,
on making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours from
being divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church
dogma, paradox and superiority to everybody else, with other
forms of ego-mania—all are unstable compared with him or her
whose fixed idea is the possession of some her or him. And though
Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the scattered life of a
little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and whose business is
pleasure, she was—as Winifred would have said in the latest
fashion of speech—“honest to God” indifferent to it all. She
wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies above
the river or the Green Park when she went to Town. She even kept
Jon's letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which
in days when corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and
chests so out of fashion, there could, perhaps, have been no
greater proof of the fixity of her idea.
After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and
received his answer three days later on her return from a river
picnic. It was his first letter since their meeting at June's.
She opened it with misgiving, and read it with dismay.
“Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past. I won't
tell it you—I think you knew when we met at June's. She says you
did. If you did, Fleur, you ought to have told me. I expect you
only heard your father's side of it. I have heard my mother's.
It's dreadful. Now that she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt
her more. Of course, I long for you all day, but I don't believe
now that we shall ever come together—there's something too strong
pulling us apart.”
So! Her deception had found her out. But Jon—she felt—had
forgiven that. It was what he said of his mother which caused the
guttering in her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
Her first impulse was to reply—her second, not to reply. These
impulses were constantly renewed in the days which followed,
while desperation grew within her. She was not her father's child
for nothing. The tenacity which had at once made and undone
Soames was her backbone, too, frilled and embroidered by French
grace and quickness. Instinctively she conjugated the verb “to
have” always with the pronoun “I.” She concealed, however, all
signs of her growing desperation, and pursued such river
pleasures as the winds and rain of a disagreeable July permitted,
as if she had no care in the world; nor did any “sucking baronet”
ever neglect the business of a publisher more consistently than
her attendant spirit, Michael Mont.
To Soames she was a puzzle. He was almost deceived by this
careless gaiety. Almost—because he did not fail to mark her eyes
often fixed on nothing, and the film of light shining from her
bedroom window late at night. What was she thinking and brooding
over into small hours when she ought to have been asleep? But he
dared not ask what was in her mind; and, since that one little
talk in the billiard-room, she said nothing to him.
In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred
invited them to lunch and to go afterward to “a most amusing
little play, 'The Beggar's Opera'” and would they bring a man to
make four? Soames, whose attitude toward theatres was to go to
nothing, accepted, because Fleur's attitude was to go to
everything. They motored up, taking Michael Mont, who, being in
his seventh heaven, was found by Winifred “very amusing.” “The
Beggar's Opera” puzzled Soames. The people were very unpleasant,
the whole thing very cynical. Winifred was “intrigued”—by the
dresses. The music, too, did not displease her. At the Opera, the
night before, she had arrived too early for the Russian Ballet,
and found the stage occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or
apoplectic from terror lest by some dreadful inadvertence they
might drop into a tune. Michael Mont was enraptured with the
whole thing. And all three wondered what Fleur was thinking of
it. But Fleur was not thinking of it. Her fixed idea stood on the
stage and sang with Polly Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced with
Jenny Diver, postured with Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and
cuddled with Macheath. Her lips might smile, her hands applaud,
but the comic old masterpiece made no more impression on her than
if it had been pathetic, like a modern “Revue.” When they
embarked in the car to return, she ached because Jon was not
sitting next her instead of Michael Mont. When, at some jolt, the
young man's arm touched hers as if by accident, she only thought:
'If that were Jon's arm!' When his cheerful voice, tempered by
her proximity, murmured above the sound of the car's progress,
she smiled and answered, thinking: 'If that were Jon's voice!'
and when once he said, “Fleur, you look a perfect angel in that
dress!” she answered, “Oh, do you like it?” thinking, 'If only
Jon could see it!'
During this drive she took a resolution. She would go to Robin
Hill and see him—alone; she would take the car, without word
beforehand to him or to her father. It was nine days since his
letter, and she could wait no longer. On Monday she would go! The
decision made her well disposed toward young Mont. With something
to look forward to she could afford to tolerate and respond. He
might stay to dinner; propose to her as usual; dance with her,
press her hand, sigh—do what he liked. He was only a nuisance
when he interfered with her fixed idea. She was even sorry for
him so far as it was possible to be sorry for anybody but herself
just now. At dinner he seemed to talk more wildly than usual
about what he called “the death of the close borough”—she paid
little attention, but her father seemed paying a good deal, with
the smile on his face which meant opposition, if not anger.
“The younger generation doesn't think as you do, sir; does it,
Fleur?”
Fleur shrugged her shoulders—the younger generation was just Jon,
and she did not know what he was thinking.
“Young people will think as I do when they're my age, Mr. Mont.
Human nature doesn't change.”
“I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the
times. The pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that's
going out.”
“Indeed! To mind one's own business is not a form of thought, Mr.
Mont, it's an instinct.”
Yes, when Jon was the business!
“But what is one's business, sir? That's the point. Everybody's
business is going to be one's business. Isn't it, Fleur?”
Fleur only smiled.
“If not,” added young Mont, “there'll be blood.”
“People have talked like that from time immemorial”
“But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?”
“I should say increasing among those who have none.”
“Well, look at me! I'm heir to an entailed estate. I don't want
the thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow.”
“You're not married, and you don't know what you're talking
about.”
Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.
“Do you really mean that marriage—?” he began.
“Society is built on marriage,” came from between her father's
close lips; “marriage and its consequences. Do you want to do
away with it?”
Young Mont made a distracted gesture. Silence brooded over the
dinner table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest—a
pheasant proper—under the electric light in an alabaster globe.
And outside, the river evening darkened, charged with heavy
moisture and sweet scents.
'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'
VI.—DESPERATE
The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and
empty to the only Jolyon Forsyte left. The necessary forms and
ceremonies—the reading of the Will, valuation of the estate,
distribution of the legacies—were enacted over the head, as it
were, of one not yet of age. Jolyon was cremated. By his special
wish no one attended that ceremony, or wore black for him. The
succession of his property, controlled to some extent by old
Jolyon's Will, left his widow in possession of Robin Hill, with
two thousand five hundred pounds a year for life. Apart from this
the two Wills worked together in some complicated way to insure
that each of Jolyon's three children should have an equal share
in their grandfather's and father's property in the future as in
the present, save only that Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have
control of his capital when he was twenty-one, while June and
Holly would only have the spirit of theirs, in order that their
children might have the body after them. If they had no children,
it would all come to Jon if he outlived them; and since June was
fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was considered in Lincoln's Inn
Fields that but for the cruelty of income tax, young Jon would be
as warm a man as his grandfather when he died. All this was
nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother. It was June who
did everything needful for one who had left his affairs in
perfect order. When she had gone, and those two were alone again
in the great house, alone with death drawing them together, and
love driving them apart, Jon passed very painful days secretly
disgusted and disappointed with himself. His mother would look at
him with such a patient sadness which yet had in it an
instinctive pride, as if she were reserving her defence. If she
smiled he was angry that his answering smile should be so
grudging and unnatural. He did not judge or condemn her; that was
all too remote—indeed, the idea of doing so had never come to
him. No! he was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have
what he wanted because of her. There was one alleviation—much to
do in connection with his father's career, which could not be
safely entrusted to June, though she had offered to undertake it.
Both Jon and his mother had felt that if she took his portfolios,
unexhibited drawings and unfinished matter, away with her, the
work would encounter such icy blasts from Paul Post and other
frequenters of her studio, that it would soon be frozen out even
of her warm heart. On its old-fashioned plane and of its kind the
work was good, and they could not bear the thought of its
subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the
least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on
preparation for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to
have a curiously increased respect for his father. The quiet
tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into
something really individual was disclosed by these researches.
There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth
in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep,
or reached very high—but such as the work was, it was thorough,
conscientious, and complete. And, remembering his father's utter
absence of “side” or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with
which he had always spoken of his own efforts, ever calling
himself “an amateur,” Jon could not help feeling that he had
never really known his father. To take himself seriously, yet
never that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle.
There was something in this which appealed to the boy, and made
him heartily endorse his mother's comment: “He had true
refinement; he couldn't help thinking of others, whatever he did.
And when he took a resolution which went counter, he did it with
the minimum of defiance—not like the Age, is it? Twice in his
life he had to go against everything; and yet it never made him
bitter.” Jon saw tears running down her face, which she at once
turned away from him. She was so quiet about her loss that
sometimes he had thought she didn't feel it much. Now, as he
looked at her, he felt how far he fell short of the reserve power
and dignity in both his father and his mother. And, stealing up
to her, he put his arm round her waist. She kissed him swiftly,
but with a sort of passion, and went out of the room.
The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once
been Holly's schoolroom, devoted to her silkworms, dried
lavender, music, and other forms of instruction. Now, at the end
of July, despite its northern and eastern aspects, a warm and
slumberous air came in between the long-faded lilac linen
curtains. To redeem a little the departed glory, as of a field
that is golden and gone, clinging to a room which its master has
left, Irene had placed on the paint-stained table a bowl of red
roses. This, and Jolyon's favourite cat, who still clung to the
deserted habitat, were the pleasant spots in that dishevelled,
sad workroom. Jon, at the north window, sniffing air mysteriously
scented with warm strawberries, heard a car drive up. The lawyers
again about some nonsense! Why did that scent so make one ache?
And where did it come from—there were no strawberry beds on this
side of the house. Instinctively he took a crumpled sheet of
paper from his pocket, and wrote down some broken words. A warmth
began spreading in his chest; he rubbed the palms of his hands
together. Presently he had jotted this:
“If I could make a little song A little song to soothe my heart!
I'd make it all of little things The plash of water, rub of
wings, The puffing-off of dandies crown, The hiss of raindrop
spilling down, The purr of cat, the trill of bird, And ev'ry
whispering I've heard From willy wind in leaves and grass, And
all the distant drones that pass. A song as tender and as light
As flower, or butterfly in flight; And when I saw it opening, I'd
let it fly and sing!”
He was still muttering it over to himself at the window, when he
heard his name called, and, turning round, saw Fleur. At that
amazing apparition, he made at first no movement and no sound,
while her clear vivid glance ravished his heart. Then he went
forward to the table, saying, “How nice of you to come!” and saw
her flinch as if he had thrown something at her.
“I asked for you,” she said, “and they showed me up here. But I
can go away again.”
Jon clutched the paint-stained table. Her face and figure in its
frilly frock photographed itself with such startling vividness
upon his eyes, that if she had sunk through the floor he must
still have seen her.
“I know I told you a lie, Jon. But I told it out of love.”
“Yes, oh! yes! That's nothing!”
“I didn't answer your letter. What was the use—there wasn't
anything to answer. I wanted to see you instead.” She held out
both her hands, and Jon grasped them across the table. He tried
to say something, but all his attention was given to trying not
to hurt her hands. His own felt so hard and hers so soft. She
said almost defiantly:
“That old story—was it so very dreadful?”
“Yes.” In his voice, too, there was a note of defiance.
She dragged her hands away. “I didn't think in these days boys
were tied to their mothers' apron-strings.”
Jon's chin went up as if he had been struck.
“Oh! I didn't mean it, Jon. What a horrible thing to say!”
Swiftly she came close to him. “Jon, dear; I didn't mean it.”
“All right.”
She had put her two hands on his shoulder, and her forehead down
on them; the brim of her hat touched his neck, and he felt it
quivering. But, in a sort of paralysis, he made no response. She
let go of his shoulder and drew away.
“Well, I'll go, if you don't want me. But I never thought you'd
have given me up.”
“I haven't,” cried Jon, coming suddenly to life. “I can't. I'll
try again.”
Her eyes gleamed, she swayed toward him. “Jon—I love you! Don't
give me up! If you do, I don't know what—I feel so desperate.
What does it matter—all that past—compared with this?”
She clung to him. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. But
while he kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down
on the floor of his bedroom—his father's white dead face—his
mother kneeling before it. Fleur's whispered, “Make her! Promise!
Oh! Jon, try!” seemed childish in his ear. He felt curiously old.
“I promise!” he muttered. “Only, you don't understand.”
“She wants to spoil our lives, just because—”
“Yes, of what?”
Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer. Her
arms tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even
while he yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the
letter. Fleur did not know, she did not understand—she misjudged
his mother; she came from the enemy's camp! So lovely, and he
loved her so—yet, even in her embrace, he could not help the
memory of Holly's words: “I think she has a 'having' nature,” and
his mother's “My darling boy, don't think of me—think of
yourself!”
When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on
his eyes, her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon
leaned in the window, listening to the car bearing her away.
Still the scent as of warm strawberries, still the little summer
sounds that should make his song; still all the promise of youth
and happiness in sighing, floating, fluttering July—and his heart
torn; yearning strong in him; hope high in him yet with its eyes
cast down, as if ashamed. The miserable task before him! If Fleur
was desperate, so was he—watching the poplars swaying, the white
clouds passing, the sunlight on the grass.
He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner,
till his mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling
that she knew what he was waiting to say. She kissed him and went
up-stairs, and still he lingered, watching the moonlight and the
moths, and that unreality of colouring which steals along and
stains a summer night. And he would have given anything to be
back again in the past—barely three months back; or away forward,
years, in the future. The present with this dark cruelty of a
decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible. He realised
now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had at
first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ
producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt
there were two camps, his mother's and his—Fleur's and her
father's. It might be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and
enmity, but dead things were poisonous till time had cleaned them
away. Even his love felt tainted, less illusioned, more of the
earth, and with a treacherous lurking doubt lest Fleur, like her
father, might want to own; not articulate, just a stealing haunt,
horribly unworthy, which crept in and about the ardour of his
memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the vividness and
grace of that charmed face and figure—a doubt, not real enough to
convince him of its presence, just real enough to deflower a
perfect faith. And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was
essential. He still had Youth's eagerness to give with both
hands, to take with neither—to give lovingly to one who had his
own impulsive generosity. Surely she had! He got up from the
window-seat and roamed in the big grey ghostly room, whose walls
were hung with silvered canvas. This house his father said in
that death-bed letter—had been built for his mother to live
in—with Fleur's father! He put out his hand in the half-dark, as
if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead. He clenched, trying to
feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze them,
and reassure him that he—he was on his father's side. Tears,
prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot. He went back
to the window. It was warmer, not so eerie, more comforting
outside, where the moon hung golden, three days off full; the
freedom of the night was comforting. If only Fleur and he had met
on some desert island without a past—and Nature for their house!
Jon had still his high regard for desert islands, where
breadfruit grew, and the water was blue above the coral. The
night was deep, was free—there was enticement in it; a lure, a
promise, a refuge from entanglement, and love! Milksop tied to
his mother's...! His cheeks burned. He shut the window, drew
curtains over it, switched off the lighted sconce, and went
up-stairs.
The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother,
still in her evening gown, was standing at the window. She turned
and said:
“Sit down, Jon; let's talk.” She sat down on the window-seat, Jon
on his bed. She had her profile turned to him, and the beauty and
grace of her figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose, the
neck, the strange and as it were remote refinement of her, moved
him. His mother never belonged to her surroundings. She came into
them from somewhere—as it were! What was she going to say to him,
who had in his heart such things to say to her?
“I know Fleur came to-day. I'm not surprised.” It was as though
she had added: “She is her father's daughter!” And Jon's heart
hardened. Irene went on quietly:
“I have Father's letter. I picked it up that night and kept it.
Would you like it back, dear?”
Jon shook his head.
“I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you. It didn't
quite do justice to my criminality.”
“Mother!” burst from Jon's lips.
“He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's
father without love I did a dreadful thing. An unhappy marriage,
Jon, can play such havoc with other lives besides one's own. You
are fearfully young, my darling, and fearfully loving. Do you
think you can possibly be happy with this girl?”
Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
“Yes; oh! yes—if you could be.”
Irene smiled.
“Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love. If
yours were another case like mine, Jon—where the deepest things
are stifled; the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!”
“Why should it, Mother? You think she must be like her father,
but she's not. I've seen him.”
Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something
wavered; there was such irony and experience in that smile.
“You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker.”
That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again! He said
with vehemence:
“She isn't—she isn't. It's only because I can't bear to make you
unhappy, Mother, now that Father—” He thrust his fists against
his forehead.
Irene got up.
“I told you that night, dear, not to mind me. I meant it. Think
of yourself and your own happiness! I can stand what's left—I've
brought it on myself.”
Again the word “Mother!” burst from Jon's lips.
She came over to him and put her hands over his.
“Do you feel your head, darling?”
Jon shook it. What he felt was in his chest—a sort of tearing
asunder of the tissue there, by the two loves.
“I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do. You
won't lose anything.” She smoothed his hair gently, and walked
away.
He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay,
stifling his breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
VII.—EMBASSY
Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been
out in the car since two. Three hours! Where had she gone? Up to
London without a word to him? He had never become quite
reconciled with cars. He had embraced them in principle—like the
born empiricist, or Forsyte, that he was—adopting each symptom of
progress as it came along with: “Well, we couldn't do without
them now.” But in fact he found them tearing, great, smelly
things. Obliged by Annette to have one—a Rollhard with pearl-grey
cushions, electric light, little mirrors, trays for the ashes of
cigarettes, flower vases—all smelling of petrol and
stephanotis—he regarded it much as he used to regard his
brother-in-law, Montague Dartie. The thing typified all that was
fast, insecure, and subcutaneously oily in modern life. As modern
life became faster, looser, younger, Soames was becoming older,
slower, tighter, more and more in thought and language like his
father James before him. He was almost aware of it himself. Pace
and progress pleased him less and less; there was an ostentation,
too, about a car which he considered provocative in the
prevailing mood of Labour. On one occasion that fellow Sims had
driven over the only vested interest of a working man. Soames had
not forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many people
would have stopped to put up with it. He had been sorry for the
dog, and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that
ruffian hadn't been so outrageous. With four hours fast becoming
five, and still no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had
experienced in person and by proxy balled within him, and sinking
sensations troubled the pit of his stomach. At seven he
telephoned to Winifred by trunk call. No! Fleur had not been to
Green Street. Then where was she? Visions of his beloved daughter
rolled up in her pretty frills, all blood and dust-stained, in
some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him. He went to her room
and spied among her things. She had taken nothing—no
dressing-case, no Jewellery. And this, a relief in one sense,
increased his fears of an accident. Terrible to be helpless when
his loved one was missing, especially when he couldn't bear fuss
or publicity of any kind! What should he do if she were not back
by nightfall?
At a quarter to eight he heard the car. A great weight lifted
from off his heart; he hurried down. She was getting out—pale and
tired-looking, but nothing wrong. He met her in the hall.
“You've frightened me. Where have you been?”
“To Robin Hill. I'm sorry, dear. I had to go; I'll tell you
afterward.” And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
Soames waited in the drawing-room. To Robin Hill! What did that
portend?
It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner—consecrated to
the susceptibilities of the butler. The agony of nerves Soames
had been through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his
power to condemn what she had done, or resist what she was going
to do; he waited in a relaxed stupor for her revelation. Life was
a queer business. There he was at sixty-five and no more in
command of things than if he had not spent forty years in
building up security-always something one couldn't get on terms
with! In the pocket of his dinner-jacket was a letter from
Annette. She was coming back in a fortnight. He knew nothing of
what she had been doing out there. And he was glad that he did
not. Her absence had been a relief. Out of sight was out of mind!
And now she was coming back. Another worry! And the Bolderby Old
Crome was gone—Dumetrius had got it—all because that anonymous
letter had put it out of his thoughts. He furtively remarked the
strained look on his daughter's face, as if she too were gazing
at a picture that she couldn't buy. He almost wished the War
back. Worries didn't seem, then, quite so worrying. From the
caress in her voice, the look on her face, he became certain that
she wanted something from him, uncertain whether it would be wise
of him to give it her. He pushed his savoury away uneaten, and
even joined her in a cigarette.
After dinner she set the electric piano-player going. And he
augured the worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his
knee, and put her hand on his.
“Darling, be nice to me. I had to see Jon—he wrote to me. He's
going to try what he can do with his mother. But I've been
thinking. It's really in your hands, Father. If you'd persuade
her that it doesn't mean renewing the past in any way! That I
shall stay yours, and Jon will stay hers; that you need never see
him or her, and she need never see you or me! Only you could
persuade her, dear, because only you could promise. One can't
promise for other people. Surely it wouldn't be too awkward for
you to see her just this once now that Jon's father is dead?”
“Too awkward?” Soames repeated. “The whole thing's preposterous.”
“You know,” said Fleur, without looking up, “you wouldn't mind
seeing her, really.”
Soames was silent. Her words had expressed a truth too deep for
him to admit. She slipped her fingers between his own—hot, slim,
eager, they clung there. This child of his would corkscrew her
way into a brick wall!
“What am I to do if you won't, Father?” she said very softly.
“I'll do anything for your happiness,” said Soanies; “but this
isn't for your happiness.”
“Oh! it is; it is!”
“It'll only stir things up,” he said grimly.
“But they are stirred up. The thing is to quiet them. To make her
feel that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with
yours or hers. You can do it, Father, I know you can.”
“You know a great deal, then,” was Soames' glum answer.
“If you will, Jon and I will wait a year—two years if you like.”
“It seems to me,” murmured Soames, “that you care nothing about
what I feel.”
Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.
“I do, darling. But you wouldn't like me to be awfully
miserable.”
How she wheedled to get her ends! And trying with all his might
to think she really cared for him—he was not sure—not sure. All
she cared for was this boy! Why should he help her to get this
boy, who was killing her affection for himself? Why should he? By
the laws of the Forsytes it was foolish! There was nothing to be
had out of it—nothing! To give her to that boy! To pass her into
the enemy's camp, under the influence of the woman who had
injured him so deeply! Slowly—inevitably—he would lose this
flower of his life! And suddenly he was conscious that his hand
was wet. His heart gave a little painful jump. He couldn't bear
her to cry. He put his other hand quickly over hers, and a tear
dropped on that, too. He couldn't go on like this! “Well, well,”
he said, “I'll think it over, and do what I can. Come, come!” If
she must have it for her happiness—she must; he couldn't refuse
to help her. And lest she should begin to thank him he got out of
his chair and went up to the piano-player—making that noise! It
ran down, as he reached it, with a faint buzz. That musical box
of his nursery days: “The Harmonious Blacksmith,” “Glorious
Port”—the thing had always made him miserable when his mother set
it going on Sunday afternoons. Here it was again—the same thing,
only larger, more expensive, and now it played “The Wild, Wild
Women,” and “The Policeman's Holiday,” and he was no longer in
black velvet with a sky blue collar. 'Profond's right,' he
thought, 'there's nothing in it! We're all progressing to the
grave!' And with that surprising mental comment he walked out.
He did not see Fleur again that night. But, at breakfast, her
eyes followed him about with an appeal he could not escape—not
that he intended to try. No! He had made up his mind to the
nerve-racking business. He would go to Robin Hill—to that house
of memories. Pleasant memory—the last! Of going down to keep that
boy's father and Irene apart by threatening divorce. He had often
thought, since, that it had clinched their union. And, now, he
was going to clinch the union of that boy with his girl. 'I don't
know what I've done,' he thought, 'to have such things thrust on
me!' He went up by train and down by train, and from the station
walked by the long rising lane, still very much as he remembered
it over thirty years ago. Funny—so near London! Some one
evidently was holding on to the land there. This speculation
soothed him, moving between the high hedges slowly, so as not to
get overheated, though the day was chill enough. After all was
said and done there was something real about land, it didn't
shift. Land, and good pictures! The values might fluctuate a bit,
but on the whole they were always going up—worth holding on to,
in a world where there was such a lot of unreality, cheap
building, changing fashions, such a “Here to-day and gone
to-morrow” spirit. The French were right, perhaps, with their
peasant proprietorship, though he had no opinion of the French.
One's bit of land! Something solid in it! He had heard peasant
proprietors described as a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont
call his father a pigheaded Morning Poster—disrespectful young
devil. Well, there were worse things than being pig-headed or
reading the Morning Post. There was Profond and his tribe, and
all these Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed politicians and 'wild,
wild women'. A lot of worse things! And suddenly Soames became
conscious of feeling weak, and hot, and shaky. Sheer nerves at
the meeting before him! As Aunt Juley might have said—quoting
“Superior Dosset”—his nerves were “in a proper fautigue.” He
could see the house now among its trees, the house he had watched
being built, intending it for himself and this woman, who, by
such strange fate, had lived in it with another after all! He
began to think of Dumetrius, Local Loans, and other forms of
investment. He could not afford to meet her with his nerves all
shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgment for her on earth
as it was in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified, meeting
lawless beauty, incarnate. His dignity demanded impassivity
during this embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she
had behaved herself, would have been brother and sister. That
wretched tune, “The Wild, Wild Women,” kept running in his head,
perversely, for tunes did not run there as a rule. Passing the
poplars in front of the house, he thought: 'How they've grown; I
had them planted!' A maid answered his ring.
“Will you say—Mr. Forsyte, on a very special matter.”
If she realised who he was, quite probably she would not see him.
'By George!' he thought, hardening as the tug came. 'It's a
topsy-turvy affair!'
The maid came back. “Would the gentleman state his business,
please?”
“Say it concerns Mr. Jon,” said Soames.
And once more he was alone in that hall with the pool of
grey-white marble designed by her first lover. Ah! she had been a
bad lot—had loved two men, and not himself! He must remember that
when he came face to face with her once more. And suddenly he saw
her in the opening chink between the long heavy purple curtains,
swaying, as if in hesitation; the old perfect poise and line, the
old startled dark-eyed gravity, the old calm defensive voice:
“Will you come in, please?”
He passed through that opening. As in the picture-gallery and the
confectioner's shop, she seemed to him still beautiful. And this
was the first time—the very first—since he married her
seven-and-thirty years ago, that he was speaking to her without
the legal right to call her his. She was not wearing black—one of
that fellow's radical notions, he supposed.
“I apologise for coming,” he said glumly; “but this business must
be settled one way or the other.”
“Won't you sit down?”
“No, thank you.”
Anger at his false position, impatience of ceremony between them,
mastered him, and words came tumbling out:
“It's an infernal mischance; I've done my best to discourage it.
I consider my daughter crazy, but I've got into the habit of
indulging her; that's why I'm here. I suppose you're fond of your
son.”
“Devotedly.”
“Well?”
“It rests with him.”
He had a sense of being met and baffled. Always—always she had
baffled him, even in those old first married days.
“It's a mad notion,” he said.
“It is.”
“If you had only—! Well—they might have been—” he did not finish
that sentence “brother and sister and all this saved,” but he saw
her shudder as if he had, and stung by the sight he crossed over
to the window. Out there the trees had not grown—they couldn't,
they were old!
“So far as I'm concerned,” he said, “you may make your mind easy.
I desire to see neither you nor your son if this marriage comes
about. Young people in these days are—are unaccountable. But I
can't bear to see my daughter unhappy. What am I to say to her
when I go back?”
“Please say to her as I said to you, that it rests with Jon.”
“You don't oppose it?”
“With all my heart; not with my lips.”
Soames stood, biting his finger.
“I remember an evening—” he said suddenly; and was silent. What
was there—what was there in this woman that would not fit into
the four corners of his hate or condemnation? “Where is he—your
son?”
“Up in his father's studio, I think.”
“Perhaps you'd have him down.”
He watched her ring the bell, he watched the maid come in.
“Please tell Mr. Jon that I want him.”
“If it rests with him,” said Soames hurriedly, when the maid was
gone, “I suppose I may take it for granted that this unnatural
marriage will take place; in that case there'll be formalities.
Whom do I deal with—Herring's?”
Irene nodded.
“You don't propose to live with them?”
Irene shook her head.
“What happens to this house?”
“It will be as Jon wishes.”
“This house,” said Soames suddenly: “I had hopes when I began it.
If they live in it—their children! They say there's such a thing
as Nemesis. Do you believe in it?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! You do!”
He had come back from the window, and was standing close to her,
who, in the curve of her grand piano, was, as it were, embayed.
“I'm not likely to see you again,” he said slowly. “Will you
shake hands”—his lip quivered, the words came out jerkily—“and
let the past die.” He held out his hand. Her pale face grew
paler, her eyes so dark, rested immovably on his, her hands
remained clasped in front of her. He heard a sound and turned.
That boy was standing in the opening of the curtains. Very queer
he looked, hardly recognisable as the young fellow he had seen in
the Gallery off Cork Street—very queer; much older, no youth in
the face at all—haggard, rigid, his hair ruffled, his eyes deep
in his head. Soames made an effort, and said with a lift of his
lip, not quite a smile nor quite a sneer:
“Well, young man! I'm here for my daughter; it rests with you, it
seems—this matter. Your mother leaves it in your hands.”
The boy continued staring at his mother's face, and made no
answer.
“For my daughter's sake I've brought myself to come,” said
Soames. “What am I to say to her when I go back?”
Still looking at his mother, the boy said, quietly:
“Tell Fleur that it's no good, please; I must do as my father
wished before he died.”
“Jon!”
“It's all right, Mother.”
In a kind of stupefaction Soames looked from one to the other;
then, taking up hat and umbrella which he had put down on a
chair, he walked toward the curtains. The boy stood aside for him
to go by. He passed through and heard the grate of the rings as
the curtains were drawn behind him. The sound liberated something
in his chest.
'So that's that!' he thought, and passed out of the front door.
VIII.—THE DARK TUNE
As Soames walked away from the house at Robin Hill the sun broke
through the grey of that chill afternoon, in smoky radiance. So
absorbed in landscape painting that he seldom looked seriously
for effects of Nature out of doors—he was struck by that moody
effulgence—it mourned with a triumph suited to his own feeling.
Victory in defeat. His embassy had come to naught. But he was rid
of those people, had regained his daughter at the expense of—her
happiness. What would Fleur say to him? Would she believe he had
done his best? And under that sunlight faring on the elms,
hazels, hollies of the lane and those unexploited fields, Soames
felt dread. She would be terribly upset! He must appeal to her
pride. That boy had given her up, declared part and lot with the
woman who so long ago had given her father up! Soames clenched
his hands. Given him up, and why? What had been wrong with him?
And once more he felt the malaise of one who contemplates himself
as seen by another—like a dog who chances on his refection in a
mirror and is intrigued and anxious at the unseizable thing.
Not in a hurry to get home, he dined in town at the Connoisseurs.
While eating a pear it suddenly occurred to him that, if he had
not gone down to Robin Hill, the boy might not have so decided.
He remembered the expression on his face while his mother was
refusing the hand he had held out. A strange, an awkward thought!
Had Fleur cooked her own goose by trying to make too sure?
He reached home at half-past nine. While the car was passing in
at one drive gate he heard the grinding sputter of a motor-cycle
passing out by the other. Young Mont, no doubt, so Fleur had not
been lonely. But he went in with a sinking heart. In the
cream-panelled drawing-room she was sitting with her elbows on
her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands, in front of a white
camellia plant which filled the fireplace. That glance at her
before she saw him renewed his dread. What was she seeing among
those white camellias?
“Well, Father!”
Soames shook his head. His tongue failed him. This was murderous
work! He saw her eyes dilate, her lips quivering.
“What? What? Quick, Father!”
“My dear,” said Soames, “I—I did my best, but—” And again he
shook his head.
Fleur ran to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
“She?”
“No,” muttered Soames; “he. I was to tell you that it was no use;
he must do what his father wished before he died.” He caught her
by the waist. “Come, child, don't let them hurt you. They're not
worth your little finger.”
Fleur tore herself from his grasp.
“You didn't you—couldn't have tried. You—you betrayed me,
Father!”
Bitterly wounded, Soames gazed at her passionate figure writhing
there in front of him.
“You didn't try—you didn't—I was a fool! I won't believe he
could—he ever could! Only yesterday he—! Oh! why did I ask you?”
“Yes,” said Soames, quietly, “why did you? I swallowed my
feelings; I did my best for you, against my judgment—and this is
my reward. Good-night!”
With every nerve in his body twitching he went toward the door.
Fleur darted after him.
“He gives me up? You mean that? Father!”
Soames turned and forced himself to answer:
“Yes.”
“Oh!” cried Fleur. “What did you—what could you have done in
those old days?”
The breathless sense of really monstrous injustice cut the power
of speech in Soames' throat. What had he done! What had they done
to him!
And with quite unconscious dignity he put his hand on his breast,
and looked at her.
“It's a shame!” cried Fleur passionately.
Soames went out. He mounted, slow and icy, to his picture
gallery, and paced among his treasures. Outrageous! Oh!
Outrageous! She was spoiled! Ah! and who had spoiled her? He
stood still before the Goya copy. Accustomed to her own way in
everything. Flower of his life! And now that she couldn't have
it! He turned to the window for some air. Daylight was dying, the
moon rising, gold behind the poplars! What sound was that? Why!
That piano thing! A dark tune, with a thrum and a throb! She had
set it going—what comfort could she get from that? His eyes
caught movement down there beyond the lawn, under the trellis of
rambler roses and young acacia-trees, where the moonlight fell.
There she was, roaming up and down. His heart gave a little
sickening jump. What would she do under this blow? How could he
tell? What did he know of her—he had only loved her all his
life—looked on her as the apple of his eye! He knew nothing—had
no notion. There she was—and that dark tune—and the river
gleaming in the moonlight!
'I must go out,' he thought.
He hastened down to the drawing-room, lighted just as he had left
it, with the piano thrumming out that waltz, or fox-trot, or
whatever they called it in these days, and passed through on to
the verandah.
Where could he watch, without her seeing him? And he stole down
through the fruit garden to the boat-house. He was between her
and the river now, and his heart felt lighter. She was his
daughter, and Annette's—she wouldn't do anything foolish; but
there it was—he didn't know! From the boat house window he could
see the last acacia and the spin of her skirt when she turned in
her restless march. That tune had run down at last—thank
goodness! He crossed the floor and looked through the farther
window at the water slow-flowing past the lilies. It made little
bubbles against them, bright where a moon-streak fell. He
remembered suddenly that early morning when he had slept on the
house-boat after his father died, and she had just been
born—nearly nineteen years ago! Even now he recalled the
unaccustomed world when he woke up, the strange feeling it had
given him. That day the second passion of his life began—for this
girl of his, roaming under the acacias. What a comfort she had
been to him! And all the soreness and sense of outrage left him.
If he could make her happy again, he didn't care! An owl flew,
queeking, queeking; a bat flitted by; the moonlight brightened
and broadened on the water. How long was she going to roam about
like this! He went back to the window, and suddenly saw her
coming down to the bank. She stood quite close, on the
landing-stage. And Soames watched, clenching his hands. Should he
speak to her? His excitement was intense. The stillness of her
figure, its youth, its absorption in despair, in longing,
in—itself. He would always remember it, moonlit like that; and
the faint sweet reek of the river and the shivering of the willow
leaves. She had everything in the world that he could give her,
except the one thing that she could not have because of him! The
perversity of things hurt him at that moment, as might a
fish-bone in his throat.
Then, with an infinite relief, he saw her turn back toward the
house. What could he give her to make amends? Pearls, travel,
horses, other young men—anything she wanted—that he might lose
the memory of her young figure lonely by the water! There! She
had set that tune going again! Why—it was a mania! Dark,
thrumming, faint, travelling from the house. It was as though she
had said: “If I can't have something to keep me going, I shall
die of this!” Soames dimly understood. Well, if it helped her,
let her keep it thrumming on all night! And, mousing back through
the fruit garden, he regained the verandah. Though he meant to go
in and speak to her now, he still hesitated, not knowing what to
say, trying hard to recall how it felt to be thwarted in love. He
ought to know, ought to remember—and he could not! Gone—all real
recollection; except that it had hurt him horribly. In this
blankness he stood passing his handkerchief over hands and lips,
which were very dry. By craning his head he could just see Fleur,
standing with her back to that piano still grinding out its tune,
her arms tight crossed on her breast, a lighted cigarette between
her lips, whose smoke half veiled her face. The expression on it
was strange to Soames, the eyes shone and stared, and every
feature was alive with a sort of wretched scorn and anger. Once
or twice he had seen Annette look like that—the face was too
vivid, too naked, not his daughter's at that moment. And he dared
not go in, realising the futility of any attempt at consolation.
He sat down in the shadow of the ingle-nook.
Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him! Nemesis! That old
unhappy marriage! And in God's name-why? How was he to know, when
he wanted Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that
she would never love him? The tune died and was renewed, and died
again, and still Soames sat in the shadow, waiting for he knew
not what. The fag of Fleur's cigarette, flung through the window,
fell on the grass; he watched it glowing, burning itself out. The
moon had freed herself above the poplars, and poured her
unreality on the garden. Comfortless light, mysterious,
withdrawn—like the beauty of that woman who had never loved
him—dappling the nemesias and the stocks with a vesture not of
earth. Flowers! And his flower so unhappy! Ah! Why could one not
put happiness into Local Loans, gild its edges, insure it against
going down?
Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window.
All was silent and dark in there. Had she gone up? He rose, and,
tiptoeing, peered in. It seemed so! He entered. The verandah kept
the moonlight out; and at first he could see nothing but the
outlines of furniture blacker than the darkness. He groped toward
the farther window to shut it. His foot struck a chair, and he
heard a gasp. There she was, curled and crushed into the corner
of the sofa! His hand hovered. Did she want his consolation? He
stood, gazing at that ball of crushed frills and hair and
graceful youth, trying to burrow its way out of sorrow. How leave
her there? At last he touched her hair, and said:
“Come, darling, better go to bed. I'll make it up to you,
somehow.” How fatuous! But what could he have said?
IX.—UNDER THE OAK-TREE
When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood
without speaking, till he said suddenly:
“I ought to have seen him out.”
But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went
upstairs to his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.
The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had
once been married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him
ever since she left him the night before. It had put the
finishing touch of reality. To marry Fleur would be to hit his
mother in the face; to betray his dead father! It was no good!
Jon had the least resentful of natures. He bore his parents no
grudge in this hour of his distress. For one so young there was a
rather strange power in him of seeing things in some sort of
proportion. It was worse for Fleur, worse for his mother even,
than it was for him. Harder than to give up was to be given up,
or to be the cause of some one you loved giving up for you. He
must not, would not behave grudgingly! While he stood watching
the tardy sunlight, he had again that sudden vision of the world
which had come to him the night before. Sea on sea, country on
country, millions on millions of people, all with their own
lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering—all with things they
had to give up, and separate struggles for existence. Even though
he might be willing to give up all else for the one thing he
couldn't have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered
much in so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad.
He pictured the people who had nothing—the millions who had given
up life in the War, the millions whom the War had left with life
and little else; the hungry children he had read of, the
shattered men; people in prison, every kind of unfortunate.
And—they did not help him much. If one had to miss a meal, what
comfort in the knowledge that many others had to miss it too?
There was more distraction in the thought of getting away out
into this vast world of which he knew nothing yet. He could not
go on staying here, walled in and sheltered, with everything so
slick and comfortable, and nothing to do but brood and think what
might have been. He could not go back to Wansdon, and the
memories of Fleur. If he saw her again he could not trust
himself; and if he stayed here or went back there, he would
surely see her. While they were within reach of each other that
must happen. To go far away and quickly was the only thing to do.
But, however much he loved his mother, he did not want to go away
with her. Then feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind
desperately to propose that they should go to Italy. For two
hours in that melancholy room he tried to master himself, then
dressed solemnly for dinner.
His mother had done the same. They ate little, at some length,
and talked of his father's catalogue. The show was arranged for
October, and beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.
After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a
little, talked a little, till they were standing silent at last
beneath the oak-tree. Ruled by the thought: 'If I show anything,
I show all,' Jon put his arm through hers and said quite
casually:
“Mother, let's go to Italy.”
Irene pressed his arm, and said as casually:
“It would be very nice; but I've been thinking you ought to see
and do more than you would if I were with you.”
“But then you'd be alone.”
“I was once alone for more than twelve years. Besides, I should
like to be here for the opening of Father's show.”
Jon's grip tightened round her arm; he was not deceived.
“You couldn't stay here all by yourself; it's too big.”
“Not here, perhaps. In London, and I might go to Paris, after the
show opens. You ought to have a year at least, Jon, and see the
world.”
“Yes, I'd like to see the world and rough it. But I don't want to
leave you all alone.”
“My dear, I owe you that at least. If it's for your good, it'll
be for mine. Why not start tomorrow? You've got your passport.”
“Yes; if I'm going it had better be at once. Only—Mother—if—if I
wanted to stay out somewhere—America or anywhere, would you mind
coming presently?”
“Wherever and whenever you send for me. But don't send until you
really want me.”
Jon drew a deep breath.
“I feel England's choky.”
They stood a few minutes longer under the oak-tree—looking out to
where the grand stand at Epsom was veiled in evening. The
branches kept the moonlight from them, so that it only fell
everywhere else—over the fields and far away, and on the windows
of the creepered house behind, which soon would be to let.
X.—FLEUR'S WEDDING
The October paragraphs describing the wedding of Fleur Forsyte to
Michael Mont hardly conveyed the symbolic significance of this
event. In the union of the great-granddaughter of “Superior
Dosset” with the heir of a ninth baronet was the outward and
visible sign of that merger of class in class which buttresses
the political stability of a realm. The time had come when the
Forsytes might resign their natural resentment against a
“flummery” not theirs by birth, and accept it as the still more
natural due of their possessive instincts. Besides, they had to
mount to make room for all those so much more newly rich. In that
quiet but tasteful ceremony in Hanover Square, and afterward
among the furniture in Green Street, it had been impossible for
those not in the know to distinguish the Forsyte troop from the
Mont contingent—so far away was “Superior Dosset” now. Was there,
in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his moustache,
his accent, or the shine on his top-hat, a pin to choose between
Soames and the ninth baronet himself? Was not Fleur as
self-possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the
likeliest Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present? If anything,
the Forsytes had it in dress and looks and manners. They had
become “upper class” and now their name would be formally
recorded in the Stud Book, their money joined to land. Whether
this was a little late in the day, and those rewards of the
possessive instinct, lands and money, destined for the
melting-pot—was still a question so moot that it was not mooted.
After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up. Timothy, the
last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater
Road—so Francie had reported. It was whispered, too, that this
young Mont was a sort of socialist—strangely wise of him, and in
the nature of insurance, considering the days they lived in.
There was no uneasiness on that score. The landed classes
produced that sort of amiable foolishness at times, turned to
safe uses and confined to theory. As George remarked to his
sister Francie: “They'll soon be having puppies—that'll give him
pause.”
The church with white flowers and something blue in the middle of
the East window looked extremely chaste, as though endeavouring
to counteract the somewhat lurid phraseology of a Service
calculated to keep the thoughts of all on puppies. Forsytes,
Haymans, Tweetymans, sat in the left aisle; Monts, Charwells;
Muskhams in the right; while a sprinkling of Fleur's
fellow-sufferers at school, and of Mont's fellow-sufferers in,
the War, gaped indiscriminately from either side, and three
maiden ladies, who had dropped in on their way from Skyward's
brought up the rear, together with two Mont retainers and Fleur's
old nurse. In the unsettled state of the country as full a house
as could be expected.
Mrs. Val Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row,
squeezed his hand more than once during the performance. To her,
who knew the plot of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment
was well-nigh painful. 'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she
thought—Jon, out in British Columbia. She had received a letter
from him only that morning which had made her smile and say:
“Jon's in British Columbia, Val, because he wants to be in
California. He thinks it's too nice there.”
“Oh!” said Val, “so he's beginning to see a joke again.”
“He's bought some land and sent for his mother.”
“What on earth will she do out there?”
“All she cares about is Jon. Do you still think it a happy
release?”
Val's shrewd eyes narrowed to grey pin-points between their dark
lashes.
“Fleur wouldn't have suited him a bit. She's not bred right.”
“Poor little Fleur!” sighed Holly. Ah! it was strange—this
marriage. The young man, Mont, had caught her on the rebound, of
course, in the reckless mood of one whose ship has just gone
down. Such a plunge could not but be—as Val put it—an outside
chance. There was little to be told from the back view of her
young cousin's veil, and Holly's eyes reviewed the general aspect
of this Christian wedding. She, who had made a love-match which
had been successful, had a horror of unhappy marriages. This
might not be one in the end—but it was clearly a toss-up; and to
consecrate a toss-up in this fashion with manufactured unction
before a crowd of fashionable free-thinkers—for who thought
otherwise than freely, or not at all, when they were “dolled”
up—seemed to her as near a sin as one could find in an age which
had abolished them. Her eyes wandered from the prelate in his
robes (a Charwell-the Forsytes had not as yet produced a prelate)
to Val, beside her, thinking—she was certain—of the Mayfly filly
at fifteen to one for the Cambridgeshire. They passed on and
caught the profile of the ninth baronet, in counterfeitment of
the kneeling process. She could just see the neat ruck above his
knees where he had pulled his trousers up, and thought: 'Val's
forgotten to pull up his!' Her eyes passed to the pew in front of
her, where Winifred's substantial form was gowned with passion,
and on again to Soames and Annette kneeling side by side. A
little smile came on her lips—Prosper Profond, back from the
South Seas of the Channel, would be kneeling too, about six rows
behind. Yes! This was a funny “small” business, however it turned
out; still it was in a proper church and would be in the proper
papers to-morrow morning.
They had begun a hymn; she could hear the ninth baronet across
the aisle, singing of the hosts of Midian. Her little finger
touched Val's thumb—they were holding the same hymn-book—and a
tiny thrill passed through her, preserved—from twenty years ago.
He stooped and whispered:
“I say, d'you remember the rat?” The rat at their wedding in Cape
Colony, which had cleaned its whiskers behind the table at the
Registrar's! And between her little and third forgers she
squeezed his thumb hard.
The hymn was over, the prelate had begun to deliver his
discourse. He told them of the dangerous times they lived in, and
the awful conduct of the House of Lords in connection with
divorce. They were all soldiers—he said—in the trenches under the
poisonous gas of the Prince of Darkness, and must be manful. The
purpose of marriage was children, not mere sinful happiness.
An imp danced in Holly's eyes—Val's eyelashes were meeting.
Whatever happened; he must not snore. Her finger and thumb closed
on his thigh till he stirred uneasily.
The discourse was over, the danger past. They were signing in the
vestry; and general relaxation had set in.
A voice behind her said:
“Will she stay the course?”
“Who's that?” she whispered.
“Old George Forsyte!”
Holly demurely scrutinized one of whom she had often heard. Fresh
from South Africa, and ignorant of her kith and kin, she never
saw one without an almost childish curiosity. He was very big,
and very dapper; his eyes gave her a funny feeling of having no
particular clothes.
“They're off!” she heard him say.
They came, stepping from the chancel. Holly looked first in young
Mont's face. His lips and ears were twitching, his eyes, shifting
from his feet to the hand within his arm, stared suddenly before
them as if to face a firing party. He gave Holly the feeling that
he was spiritually intoxicated. But Fleur! Ah! That was
different. The girl was perfectly composed, prettier than ever,
in her white robes and veil over her banged dark chestnut hair;
her eyelids hovered demure over her dark hazel eyes. Outwardly,
she seemed all there. But inwardly, where was she? As those two
passed, Fleur raised her eyelids—the restless glint of those
clear whites remained on Holly's vision as might the flutter of
caged bird's wings.
In Green Street Winifred stood to receive, just a little less
composed than usual. Soames' request for the use of her house had
come on her at a deeply psychological moment. Under the influence
of a remark of Prosper Profond, she had begun to exchange her
Empire for Expressionistic furniture. There were the most amusing
arrangements, with violet, green, and orange blobs and scriggles,
to be had at Mealard's. Another month and the change would have
been complete. Just now, the very “intriguing” recruits she had
enlisted, did not march too well with the old guard. It was as if
her regiment were half in khaki, half in scarlet and bearskins.
But her strong and comfortable character made the best of it in a
drawing-room which typified, perhaps, more perfectly than she
imagined, the semi-bolshevized imperialism of her country. After
all, this was a day of merger, and you couldn't have too much of
it! Her eyes travelled indulgently among her guests. Soames had
gripped the back of a buhl chair; young Mont was behind that
“awfully amusing” screen, which no one as yet had been able to
explain to her. The ninth baronet had shied violently at a round
scarlet table, inlaid under glass with blue Australian butteries'
wings, and was clinging to her Louis-Quinze cabinet; Francie
Forsyte had seized the new mantel-board, finely carved with
little purple grotesques on an ebony ground; George, over by the
old spinet, was holding a little sky-blue book as if about to
enter bets; Prosper Profond was twiddling the knob of the open
door, black with peacock-blue panels; and Annette's hands, close
by, were grasping her own waist; two Muskhams clung to the
balcony among the plants, as if feeling ill; Lady Mont, thin and
brave-looking, had taken up her long-handled glasses and was
gazing at the central light shade, of ivory and orange dashed
with deep magenta, as if the heavens had opened. Everybody, in
fact, seemed holding on to something. Only Fleur, still in her
bridal dress, was detached from all support, flinging her words
and glances to left and right.
The room was full of the bubble and the squeak of conversation.
Nobody could hear anything that anybody said; which seemed of
little consequence, since no one waited for anything so slow as
an answer. Modern conversation seemed to Winifred so different
from the days of her prime, when a drawl was all the vogue. Still
it was “amusing,” which, of course, was all that mattered. Even
the Forsytes were talking with extreme rapidity—Fleur and
Christopher, and Imogen, and young Nicholas's youngest, Patrick.
Soames, of course, was silent; but George, by the spinet, kept up
a running commentary, and Francie, by her mantel-shelf. Winifred
drew nearer to the ninth baronet. He seemed to promise a certain
repose; his nose was fine and drooped a little, his grey
moustaches too; and she said, drawling through her smile:
“It's rather nice, isn't it?”
His reply shot out of his smile like a snipped bread pellet
“D'you remember, in Frazer, the tribe that buries the bride up to
the waist?”
He spoke as fast as anybody! He had dark lively little eyes, too,
all crinkled round like a Catholic priest's. Winifred felt
suddenly he might say things she would regret.
“They're always so amusing—weddings,” she murmured, and moved on
to Soames. He was curiously still, and Winifred saw at once what
was dictating his immobility. To his right was George Forsyte, to
his left Annette and Prosper Profond. He could not move without
either seeing those two together, or the reflection of them in
George Forsyte's japing eyes. He was quite right not to be taking
notice.
“They say Timothy's sinking;” he said glumly.
“Where will you put him, Soames?”
“Highgate.” He counted on his fingers. “It'll make twelve of them
there, including wives. How do you think Fleur looks?”
“Remarkably well.”
Soames nodded. He had never seen her look prettier, yet he could
not rid himself of the impression that this business was
unnatural—remembering still that crushed figure burrowing into
the corner of the sofa. From that night to this day he had
received from her no confidences. He knew from his chauffeur that
she had made one more attempt on Robin Hill and drawn blank—an
empty house, no one at home. He knew that she had received a
letter, but not what was in it, except that it had made her hide
herself and cry. He had remarked that she looked at him sometimes
when she thought he wasn't noticing, as if she were wondering
still what he had done—forsooth—to make those people hate him so.
Well, there it was! Annette had come back, and things had worn on
through the summer—very miserable, till suddenly Fleur had said
she was going to marry young Mont. She had shown him a little
more affection when she told him that. And he had yielded—what
was the good of opposing it? God knew that he had never wished to
thwart her in anything! And the young man seemed quite delirious
about her. No doubt she was in a reckless mood, and she was
young, absurdly young. But if he opposed her, he didn't know what
she would do; for all he could tell she might want to take up a
profession, become a doctor or solicitor, some nonsense. She had
no aptitude for painting, writing, music, in his view the
legitimate occupations of unmarried women, if they must do
something in these days. On the whole, she was safer married, for
he could see too well how feverish and restless she was at home.
Annette, too, had been in favour of it—Annette, from behind the
veil of his refusal to know what she was about, if she was about
anything. Annette had said: “Let her marry this young man. He is
a nice boy—not so highty-flighty as he seems.” Where she got her
expressions, he didn't know—but her opinion soothed his doubts.
His wife, whatever her conduct, had clear eyes and an almost
depressing amount of common sense. He had settled fifty thousand
on Fleur, taking care that there was no cross settlement in case
it didn't turn out well. Could it turn out well? She had not got
over that other boy—he knew. They were to go to Spain for the
honeymoon. He would be even lonelier when she was gone. But
later, perhaps, she would forget, and turn to him again!
Winifred's voice broke on his reverie.
“Why! Of all wonders-June!”
There, in a djibbah—what things she wore!—with her hair straying
from under a fillet, Soames saw his cousin, and Fleur going
forward to greet her. The two passed from their view out on to
the stairway.
“Really,” said Winifred, “she does the most impossible things!
Fancy her coming!”
“What made you ask her?” muttered Soames.
“Because I thought she wouldn't accept, of course.”
Winifred had forgotten that behind conduct lies the main trend of
character; or, in other words, omitted to remember that Fleur was
now a “lame duck.”
On receiving her invitation, June had first thought, 'I wouldn't
go near them for the world!' and then, one morning, had awakened
from a dream of Fleur waving to her from a boat with a wild
unhappy gesture. And she had changed her mind.
When Fleur came forward and said to her, “Do come up while I'm
changing my dress,” she had followed up the stairs. The girl led
the way into Imogen's old bedroom, set ready for her toilet.
June sat down on the bed, thin and upright, like a little spirit
in the sear and yellow. Fleur locked the door.
The girl stood before her divested of her wedding dress. What a
pretty thing she was!
“I suppose you think me a fool,” she said, with quivering lips,
“when it was to have been Jon. But what does it matter? Michael
wants me, and I don't care. It'll get me away from home.” Diving
her hand into the frills on her breast, she brought out a letter.
“Jon wrote me this.”
June read: “Lake Okanagen, British Columbia. I'm not coming back
to England. Bless you always. Jon.”
“She's made safe, you see,” said Fleur.
June handed back the letter.
“That's not fair to Irene,” she said, “she always told Jon he
could do as he wished.”
Fleur smiled bitterly. “Tell me, didn't she spoil your life too?”
June looked up. “Nobody can spoil a life, my dear. That's
nonsense. Things happen, but we bob up.”
With a sort of terror she saw the girl sink on her knees and bury
her face in the djibbah. A strangled sob mounted to June's ears.
“It's all right—all right,” she murmured, “Don't! There, there!”
But the point of the girl's chin was pressed ever closer into her
thigh, and the sound was dreadful of her sobbing.
Well, well! It had to come. She would feel better afterward! June
stroked the short hair of that shapely head; and all the
scattered mother-sense in her focussed itself and passed through
the tips of her fingers into the girl's brain.
“Don't sit down under it, my dear,” she said at last. “We can't
control life, but we can fight it. Make the best of things. I've
had to. I held on, like you; and I cried, as you're crying now.
And look at me!”
Fleur raised her head; a sob merged suddenly into a little choked
laugh. In truth it was a thin and rather wild and wasted spirit
she was looking at, but it had brave eyes.
“All right!” she said. “I'm sorry. I shall forget him, I suppose,
if I fly fast and far enough.”
And, scrambling to her feet, she went over to the wash-stand.
June watched her removing with cold water the traces of emotion.
Save for a little becoming pinkness there was nothing left when
she stood before the mirror. June got off the bed and took a
pin-cushion in her hand. To put two pins into the wrong places
was all the vent she found for sympathy.
“Give me a kiss,” she said when Fleur was ready, and dug her chin
into the girl's warm cheek.
“I want a whiff,” said Fleur; “don't wait.”
June left her, sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her
lips and her eyes half closed, and went down-stairs. In the
doorway of the drawing-room stood Soames as if unquiet at his
daughter's tardiness. June tossed her head and passed down on to
the half-landing. Her cousin Francie was standing there.
“Look!” said June, pointing with her chin at Soames. “That man's
fatal!”
“How do you mean,” said Francie, “fatal?”
June did not answer her. “I shan't wait to see them off,” she
said. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” said Francie, and her eyes, of a Celtic grey,
goggled. That old feud! Really, it was quite romantic!
Soames, moving to the well of the staircase, saw June go, and
drew a breath of satisfaction. Why didn't Fleur come? They would
miss their train. That train would bear her away from him, yet he
could not help fidgeting at the thought that they would lose it.
And then she did come, running down in her tan-coloured frock and
black velvet cap, and passed him into the drawing-room. He saw
her kiss her mother, her aunt, Val's wife, Imogen, and then come
forth, quick and pretty as ever. How would she treat him at this
last moment of her girlhood? He couldn't hope for much!
Her lips pressed the middle of his cheek.
“Daddy!” she said, and was past and gone! Daddy! She hadn't
called him that for years. He drew a long breath and followed
slowly down. There was all the folly with that confetti stuff and
the rest of it to go through with yet. But he would like just to
catch her smile, if she leaned out, though they would hit her in
the eye with the shoe, if they didn't take care. Young Mont's
voice said fervently in his ear:
“Good-bye, sir; and thank you! I'm so fearfully bucked.”
“Good-bye,” he said; “don't miss your train.”
He stood on the bottom step but three, whence he could see above
the heads—the silly hats and heads. They were in the car now; and
there was that stuff, showering, and there went the shoe. A flood
of something welled up in Soames, and—he didn't know—he couldn't
see!
XI.—THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
When they came to prepare that terrific symbol Timothy
Forsyte—the one pure individualist left, the only man who hadn't
heard of the Great War—they found him wonderful—not even death
had undermined his soundness.
To Smither and Cook that preparation came like final evidence of
what they had never believed possible—the end of the old Forsyte
family on earth. Poor Mr. Timothy must now take a harp and sing
in the company of Miss Forsyte, Mrs. Julia, Miss Hester; with Mr.
Jolyon, Mr. Swithin, Mr. James, Mr. Roger, and Mr. Nicholas of
the party. Whether Mrs. Hayman would be there was more doubtful,
seeing that she had been cremated. Secretly Cook thought that Mr.
Timothy would be upset—he had always been so set against barrel
organs. How many times had she not said: “Drat the thing! There
it is again! Smither, you'd better run up and see what you can
do.” And in her heart she would so have enjoyed the tunes, if she
hadn't known that Mr. Timothy would ring the bell in a minute and
say: “Here, take him a halfpenny and tell him to move on.” Often
they had been obliged to add threepence of their own before the
man would go—Timothy had ever underrated the value of emotion.
Luckily he had taken the organs for blue-bottles in his last
years, which had been a comfort, and they had been able to enjoy
the tunes. But a harp! Cook wondered. It was a change! And Mr.
Timothy had never liked change. But she did not speak of this to
Smither, who did so take a line of her own in regard to heaven
that it quite put one about sometimes.
She cried while Timothy was being prepared, and they all had
sherry afterward out of the yearly Christmas bottle, which would
not be needed now. Ah! dear! She had been there five-and-forty
years and Smither three-and-forty! And now they would be going to
a tiny house in Tooting, to live on their savings and what Miss
Hester had so kindly left them—for to take fresh service after
the glorious past—No! But they would like just to see Mr. Soames
again, and Mrs. Dartie, and Miss Francie, and Miss Euphemia. And
even if they had to take their own cab, they felt they must go to
the funeral. For six years Mr. Timothy had been their baby,
getting younger and younger every day, till at last he had been
too young to live.
They spent the regulation hours of waiting in polishing and
dusting, in catching the one mouse left, and asphyxiating the
last beetle so as to leave it nice, discussing with each other
what they would buy at the sale. Miss Ann's workbox; Miss Juley's
(that is Mrs. Julia's) seaweed album; the fire-screen Miss Hester
had crewelled; and Mr. Timothy's hair—little golden curls, glued
into a black frame. Oh! they must have those—only the price of
things had gone up so!
It fell to Soames to issue invitations for the funeral. He had
them drawn up by Gradman in his office—only blood relations, and
no flowers. Six carriages were ordered. The Will would be read
afterward at the house.
He arrived at eleven o'clock to see that all was ready. At a
quarter past old Gradman came in black gloves and crape on his
hat. He and Soames stood in the drawing-room waiting. At
half-past eleven the carriages drew up in a long row. But no one
else appeared. Gradman said:
“It surprises me, Mr. Soames. I posted them myself.”
“I don't know,” said Soames; “he'd lost touch with the family.”
Soames had often noticed in old days how much more neighbourly
his family were to the dead than to the living. But, now, the way
they had flocked to Fleur's wedding and abstained from Timothy's
funeral, seemed to show some vital change. There might, of
course, be another reason; for Soames felt that if he had not
known the contents of Timothy's Will, he might have stayed away
himself through delicacy. Timothy had left a lot of money, with
nobody in particular to leave it to. They mightn't like to seem
to expect something.
At twelve o'clock the procession left the door; Timothy alone in
the first carriage under glass. Then Soames alone; then Gradman
alone; then Cook and Smither together. They started at a walk,
but were soon trotting under a bright sky. At the entrance to
Highgate Cemetery they were delayed by service in the Chapel.
Soames would have liked to stay outside in the sunshine. He
didn't believe a word of it; on the other hand, it was a form of
insurance which could not safely be neglected, in case there
might be something in it after all.
They walked up two and two—he and Gradman, Cook and Smither—to
the family vault. It was not very distinguished for the funeral
of the last old Forsyte.
He took Gradman into his carriage on the way back to the
Bayswater Road with a certain glow in his heart. He had a
surprise in pickle for the old chap who had served the Forsytes
four-and-fifty years-a treat that was entirely his doing. How
well he remembered saying to Timothy the day—after Aunt Hester's
funeral: “Well; Uncle Timothy, there's Gradman. He's taken a lot
of trouble for the family. What do you say to leaving him five
thousand?” and his surprise, seeing the difficulty there had been
in getting Timothy to leave anything, when Timothy had nodded.
And now the old chap would be as pleased as Punch, for Mrs.
Gradman, he knew, had a weak heart, and their son had lost a leg
in the War. It was extraordinarily gratifying to Soames to have
left him five thousand pounds of Timothy's money. They sat down
together in the little drawing-room, whose walls—like a vision of
heaven—were sky-blue and gold with every picture-frame
unnaturally bright, and every speck of dust removed from every
piece of furniture, to read that little masterpiece—the Will of
Timothy. With his back to the light in Aunt Hester's chair,
Soames faced Gradman with his face to the light, on Aunt Ann's
sofa; and, crossing his legs, began:
“This is the last Will and Testament of me Timothy Forsyte of The
Bower Bayswater Road, London I appoint my nephew Soames Forsyte
of The Shelter Mapleduram and Thomas Gradman of 159 Folly Road
Highgate (hereinafter called my Trustees) to be the trustees and
executors of this my Will To the said Soames Forsyte I leave the
sum of one thousand pounds free of legacy duty and to the said
Thomas Gradman I leave the sum of five thousand pounds free of
legacy duty.”
Soames paused. Old Gradman was leaning forward, convulsively
gripping a stout black knee with each of his thick hands; his
mouth had fallen open so that the gold fillings of three teeth
gleamed; his eyes were blinking, two tears rolled slowly out of
them. Soames read hastily on.
“All the rest of my property of whatsoever description I bequeath
to my Trustees upon Trust to convert and hold the same upon the
following trusts namely To pay thereout all my debts funeral
expenses and outgoings of any kind in connection with my Will and
to hold the residue thereof in trust for that male lineal
descendant of my father Jolyon Forsyte by his marriage with Ann
Pierce who after the decease of all lineal descendants whether
male or female of my said father by his said marriage in being at
the time of my death shall last attain the age of twenty-one
years absolutely it being my desire that my property shall be
nursed to the extreme limit permitted by the laws of England for
the benefit of such male lineal descendant as aforesaid.”
Soames read the investment and attestation clauses, and, ceasing,
looked at Gradman. The old fellow was wiping his brow with a
large handkerchief, whose brilliant colour supplied a sudden
festive tinge to the proceedings.
“My word, Mr. Soames!” he said, and it was clear that the lawyer
in him had utterly wiped out the man: “My word! Why, there are
two babies now, and some quite young children—if one of them
lives to be eighty—it's not a great age—and add twenty-one—that's
a hundred years; and Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty
thousand pound net if he's worth a penny. Compound interest at
five per cent. doubles you in fourteen years. In fourteen years
three hundred thousand-six hundred thousand in
twenty-eight—twelve hundred thousand in forty-two—twenty-four
hundred thousand in fifty-six—four million eight hundred thousand
in seventy—nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four—Why,
in a hundred years it'll be twenty million! And we shan't live to
use it! It is a Will!”
Soames said dryly: “Anything may happen. The State might take the
lot; they're capable of anything in these days.”
“And carry five,” said Gradman to himself. “I forgot—Mr.
Timothy's in Consols; we shan't get more than two per cent. with
this income tax. To be on the safe side, say eight millions.
Still, that's a pretty penny.”
Soames rose and handed him the Will. “You're going into the City.
Take care of that, and do what's necessary. Advertise; but there
are no debts. When's the sale?”
“Tuesday week,” said Gradman. “Life or lives in bein' and
twenty-one years afterward—it's a long way off. But I'm glad he's
left it in the family....”
The sale—not at Jobson's, in view of the Victorian nature of the
effects—was far more freely attended than the funeral, though not
by Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give
them their heart's desires. Winifred was present, Euphemia, and
Francie, and Eustace had come in his car. The miniatures,
Barbizons, and J. R. drawings had been bought in by Soames; and
relics of no marketable value were set aside in an off-room for
members of the family who cared to have mementoes. These were the
only restrictions upon bidding characterised by an almost tragic
languor. Not one piece of furniture, no picture or porcelain
figure appealed to modern taste. The humming birds had fallen
like autumn leaves when taken from where they had not hummed for
sixty years. It was painful to Soames to see the chairs his aunts
had sat on, the little grand piano they had practically never
played, the books whose outsides they had gazed at, the china
they had dusted, the curtains they had drawn, the hearth-rug
which had warmed their feet; above all, the beds they had lain
and died in—sold to little dealers, and the housewives of Fulham.
And yet—what could one do? Buy them and stick them in a
lumber-room? No; they had to go the way of all flesh and
furniture, and be worn out. But when they put up Aunt Ann's sofa
and were going to knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried
out, suddenly: “Five pounds!” The sensation was considerable, and
the sofa his.
When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those
Victorian ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October
sunshine feeling as if cosiness had died out of the world, and
the board “To Let” was up, indeed. Revolutions on the horizon;
Fleur in Spain; no comfort in Annette; no Timothy's on the
Bayswater Road. In the irritable desolation of his soul he went
into the Goupenor Gallery. That chap Jolyon's watercolours were
on view there. He went in to look down his nose at them—it might
give him some faint satisfaction. The news had trickled through
from June to Val's wife, from her to Val, from Val to his mother,
from her to Soames, that the house—the fatal house at Robin
Hill—was for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British
Columbia, or some such place. For one wild moment the thought had
come to Soames: 'Why shouldn't I buy it back? I meant it for my!'
No sooner come than gone. Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many
humiliating memories for himself and Fleur. She would never live
there after what had happened. No, the place must go its way to
some peer or profiteer. It had been a bone of contention from the
first, the shell of the feud; and with the woman gone, it was an
empty shell. “For Sale or To Let.” With his mind's eye he could
see that board raised high above the ivied wall which he had
built.
He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery.
There was certainly a body of work! And now that the fellow was
dead it did not seem so trivial. The drawings were pleasing
enough, with quite a sense of atmosphere, and something
individual in the brush work. 'His father and my father; he and
I; his child and mine!' thought Soames. So it had gone on! And
all about that woman! Softened by the events of the past week,
affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came
nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth—passing
the understanding of a Forsyte pure—that the body of Beauty has a
spiritual essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks
not of self. After all, he was near that truth in his devotion to
his daughter; perhaps that made him understand a little how he
had missed the prize. And there, among the drawings of his
kinsman, who had attained to that which he had found beyond his
reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance which surprised
him. But he did not buy a drawing.
Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer
air he met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent
from his mind when he went into the Gallery—Irene, herself,
coming in. So she had not gone yet, and was still paying farewell
visits to that fellow's remains! He subdued the little
involuntary leap of his subconsciousness, the mechanical reaction
of his senses to the charm of this once-owned woman, and passed
her with averted eyes. But when he had gone by he could not for
the life of him help looking back. This, then, was finality—the
heat and stress of his life, the madness and the longing thereof,
the only defeat he had known, would be over when she faded from
his view this time; even such memories had their own queer aching
value.
She, too, was looking back. Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand,
her lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak. It was
the turn of Soames to make no answer to that smile and that
little farewell wave; he went out into the fashionable street
quivering from head to foot. He knew what she had meant to say:
“Now that I am going for ever out of the reach of you and
yours—forgive me; I wish you well.” That was the meaning; last
sign of that terrible reality—passing morality, duty, common
sense—her aversion from him who had owned her body, but had never
touched her spirit or her heart. It hurt; yes—more than if she
had kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a
taxi-cab to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white
forest to the Forsyte vault. Close to the cedar, above catacombs
and columbaria, tall, ugly, and individual, it looked like an
apex of the competitive system. He could remember a discussion
wherein Swithin had advocated the addition to its face of the
pheasant proper. The proposal had been rejected in favour of a
wreath in stone, above the stark words: “The family vault of
Jolyon Forsyte: 1850.” It was in good order. All trace of the
recent interment had been removed, and its sober grey gloomed
reposefully in the sunshine. The whole family lay there now,
except old Jolyon's wife, who had gone back under a contract to
her own family vault in Suffolk; old Jolyon himself lying at
Robin Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that none knew where
she might be. Soames gazed at it with satisfaction—massive,
needing little attention; and this was important, for he was well
aware that no one would attend to it when he himself was gone,
and he would have to be looking out for lodgings soon. He might
have twenty years before him, but one never knew. Twenty years
without an aunt or uncle, with a wife of whom one had better not
know anything, with a daughter gone from home. His mood inclined
to melancholy and retrospection.
This cemetery was full, they said—of people with extraordinary
names, buried in extraordinary taste. Still, they had a fine view
up here, right over London. Annette had once given him a story to
read by that Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern,
where all the skeletons emerged from their graves one night, and
all the pious inscriptions on the stones were altered to
descriptions of their sins. Not a true story at all. He didn't
know about the French, but there was not much real harm in
English people except their teeth and their taste, which was
certainly deplorable. “The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850.”
A lot of people had been buried here since then—a lot of English
life crumbled to mould and dust! The boom of an airplane passing
under the gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift his eyes. The
deuce of a lot of expansion had gone on. But it all came back to
a cemetery—to a name and a date on a tomb. And he thought with a
curious pride that he and his family had done little or nothing
to help this feverish expansion. Good solid middlemen, they had
gone to work with dignity to manage and possess. “Superior
Dosset,” indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted in a
doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them
all had soiled his hands by creating anything—unless you counted
Val Dartie and his horse-breeding. Collectors, solicitors,
barristers, merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land
agents, even soldiers—there they had been! The country had
expanded, as it were, in spite of them. They had checked,
controlled, defended, and taken advantage of the process and when
you considered how “Superior Dosset” had begun life with next to
nothing, and his lineal descendants already owned what old
Gradman estimated at between a million and a million and a half,
it was not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as if the family
bolt was shot, their possessive instinct dying out. They seemed
unable to make money—this fourth generation; they were going into
art, literature, farming, or the army; or just living on what was
left them—they had no push and no tenacity. They would die out if
they didn't take care.
Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze. The air
up here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the
feeling that mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the
crosses and the urns, the angels, the “immortelles,” the flowers,
gaudy or withering; and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed
so different from anything else up there that he was obliged to
walk the few necessary yards and look at it. A sober corner, with
a massive queer-shaped cross of grey rough-hewn granite, guarded
by four dark yew-trees. The spot was free from the pressure of
the other graves, having a little box-hedged garden on the far
side, and in front a goldening birch-tree. This oasis in the
desert of conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of
Soames, and he sat down there in the sunshine. Through those
trembling gold birch leaves he gazed out at London, and yielded
to the waves of memory. He thought of Irene in Montpellier
Square, when her hair was rusty-golden and her white shoulders
his—Irene, the prize of his love-passion, resistant to his
ownership. He saw Bosinney's body lying in that white mortuary,
and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with the eyes of a
dying bird. Again he thought of her by the little green Niobe in
the Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him. His fancy took him
on beside his drifting river on the November day when Fleur was
to be born, took him to the dead leaves floating on the
green-tinged water and the snake-headed weed for ever swaying and
nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered. And on again to the window
opened to the cold starry night above Hyde Park, with his father
lying dead. His fancy darted to that picture of “the future
town,” to that boy's and Fleur's first meeting; to the bluish
trail of Prosper Profond's cigar, and Fleur in the window
pointing down to where the fellow prowled. To the sight of Irene
and that dead fellow sitting side by side in the stand at Lord's.
To her and that boy at Robin Hill. To the sofa, where Fleur lay
crushed up in the corner; to her lips pressed into his cheek, and
her farewell “Daddy.” And suddenly he saw again Irene's
grey-gloved hand waving its last gesture of release.
He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the
scut of his possessive instinct, warming himself even with its
failures.
“To Let”—the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his
soul, his investments, and his woman, without check or question.
And now the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman
had herself, and God knew who had his soul. “To Let”—that sane
and simple creed!
The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new
forms only when their destructive flood should have passed its
full. He sat there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts
resolutely set on the past—as a man might ride into a wild night
with his face to the tail of his galloping horse. Athwart the
Victorian dykes the waters were rolling on property, manners, and
morals, on melody and the old forms of art—waters bringing to his
mouth a salt taste as of blood, lapping to the foot of this
Highgate Hill where Victorianism lay buried. And sitting there,
high up on its most individual spot, Soames—like a figure of
Investment—refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he would
not fight them—there was in him too much primeval wisdom, of Man
the possessive animal. They would quiet down when they had
fulfilled their tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when
the creations and the properties of others were sufficiently
broken and defected—they would lapse and ebb, and fresh forms
would rise based on an instinct older than the fever of
change—the instinct of Home.
“Je m'en fiche,” said Prosper Profond. Soames did not say “Je
m'en fiche”—it was French, and the fellow was a thorn in his
side—but deep down he knew that change was only the interval of
death between two forms of life, destruction necessary to make
room for fresher property. What though the board was up, and
cosiness to let?—some one would come along and take it again some
day.
And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there—the
melancholy craving in his heart—because the sun was like
enchantment on his face and on the clouds and on the golden birch
leaves, and the wind's rustle was so gentle, and the yewtree
green so dark, and the sickle of a moon pale in the sky.
He might wish and wish and never get it—the beauty and the loving
in the world!
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