Whether or not the character of Englishmen in general is based on chalk, it is undeniably present in the systems of our jockeys and trainers. Living for the most part on Downs, drinking a good deal of water, and concerned with the joints of horses, they are almost professionally calcareous, and at times distinguished by bony noses and chins.
The chin of Greenwater, the retired jockey in charge of Val Dartie’s stable, projected, as if in years of race-riding it had been bent on prolonging the efforts of his mounts and catching the judge’s eye. His thin, commanding nose dominated a mask of brown skin and bone, his narrow brown eyes glowed slightly, his dark hair was smooth and brushed back; he was five feet seven inches in height, and long seasons, during which he had been afraid to eat, had laid a look of austerity over such natural liveliness, as may be observed in-say—a water-wagtail. A married man with two children, he was endeared to his family by the taciturnity of one who had been intimate with horses for thirty-five years. In his leisure hours he played the piccolo. No one in England was more reliable.
Val, who had picked him up on his retirement from the pig-skin in 1921, thought him an even better judge of men than of horses, incapable of trusting them further than he could see them, and that not very far. Just now it was particularly necessary to trust no one, for there was in the stable a two-year-old colt, Rondavel, by Kaffir out of Sleeping Dove, of whom so much was expected, that nothing whatever had been said about him. On the Monday of Ascot week Val was the more surprised, then, to hear his trainer remark:
“Mr. Dartie, there was a son of a gun watching the gallop this morning.”
“The deuce there was!”
“Someone’s been talking. When they come watching a little stable like this—something’s up. If you take my advice, you’ll send the colt to Ascot and let him run his chance on Thursday—won’t do him any harm to smell a racecourse. We can ease him after, and bring him again for Goodwood.”
Aware of his trainer’s conviction that the English race-horse, no less than the English man, liked a light preparation nowadays, Val answered:
“Afraid of overdoing him?”
“Well, he’s fit now, and that’s a fact. I had Sinnet shake him up this morning, and he just left ’em all standing. Fit to run for his life, he is; wish you’d been there.”
“Oho!” said Val, unlatching the door of the box. “Well, my beauty?”
The Sleeping Dove colt turned his head, regarding his owner with a certain lustrous philosophy. A dark grey, with one white heel and a star, he stood glistening from his morning toilet. A good one! The straight hocks and ranginess of St. Simon crosses in his background! Scope, and a rare shoulder for coming down a hill. Not exactly what you’d call a ‘picture’—his lines didn’t quite ‘flow,’ but great character. Intelligent as a dog, and game as an otter! Val looked back at his trainer’s intent face.
“All right, Greenwater. I’ll tell the missus—we’ll go in force. Who can you get to ride at such short notice?”
“Young Lamb.”
“Ah!” said Val, with a grin; “you’ve got it all cut and dried, I see.”
Only on his way back to the house did he recollect a possible ‘hole in the ballot’ of secrecy… Three days after the General Strike collapsed, before Holly and young Jon and his wife had returned, he had been smoking a second pipe over his accounts, when the maid had announced:
“A gentleman to see you, sir.”
“What name?”
“Stainford, sir.”
Checking the impulse to say, “And you left him in the hall!” Val passed hurriedly into that part of the house.
His old college pal was contemplating a piece of plate over the stone hearth.
“Hallo!” said Val.
His unemotional visitor turned round.
Less threadbare than in Green Street, as if something had restored his credit, his face had the same crow’s-footed, contemptuous calm.
“Ah, Dartie!” he said. “Joe Lightson, the bookie, told me you had a stable down here. I thought I’d look you up on my way to Brighton. How has your Sleeping Dove yearling turned out?”
“So-so,” said Val.
“When are you going to run him? I thought, perhaps, you’d like me to work your commission. I could do it much better than the professionals.”
Really, the fellow’s impudence was sublime!
“Thanks very much; but I hardly bet at all.”
“Is that possible? I say, Dartie, I didn’t mean to bother you again, but if you could let me have a ‘pony,’ it would be a great boon.”
“Sorry, but I don’t keep ‘ponies’ about me down here.”
“A cheque—”
Cheque—not if he knew it!
“No,” said Val firmly. “Have a drink?”
“Thanks very much!”
Pouring out the drink at the sideboard in the dining-room, with one eye on the stilly figure of his guest, Val took a resolution.
“Look here, Stainford—” he began, then his heart failed him. “How did you get here?”
“By car, from Horsham. And that reminds me. I haven’t a sou with me to pay for it.”
Val winced. There was something ineffably wretched about the whole thing.
“Well,” he said, “here’s a fiver, if that’s any use to you; but really I’m not game for any more.” And, with a sudden outburst, he added: “I’ve never forgotten, you know, that I once lent you all I had at Oxford when I was deuced hard pressed myself, and you never paid it back, though you came into shekels that very term.”
The well-shaped hand closed on the fiver; a bitter smile opened the thin lips.
“Oxford! Another life! Well, good-bye, Dartie—I’ll get on; and thanks! Hope you’ll have a good season.”
He did not hold out his hand. Val watched his back, languid and slim, till it was out of sight…
Yes! That memory explained it! Stainford must have picked up some gossip in the village—not likely that they would let a ‘Sleeping Dove’ lie! It didn’t much matter; since Holly would hardly let him bet at all. But Greenwater must look sharp after the colt. Plenty of straight men racing; but a lot of blackguards hanging about the sport. Queer how horses collected blackguards—most beautiful creatures God ever made! But beauty was like that—look at the blackguards hanging round pretty women! Well, he must let Holly know. They could stay, as usual, at old Warmson’s Inn, on the river; from there it was only a fifteen-mile drive to the course…
The ‘Pouter Pigeon’ stood back a little from the river Thames, on the Berkshire side, above an old-fashioned garden of roses, stocks, gillyflowers, poppies, phlox drummondi, and sweet-williams. In the warm June weather the scents from that garden and from sweetbriar round the windows drifted into an old brick house painted cream-colour. Late Victorian service in Park Lane under James Forsyte, confirmed by a later marriage with Emily’s maid Fifine, had induced in Warmson, indeed, such complete knowledge of what was what, that no river inn had greater attractions for those whose taste had survived modernity. Spotless linen, double beds warmed with copper pans, even in summer; cider, homemade from a large orchard, and matured in rum casks—the inn was a veritable feather-bed to all the senses. Prints of “Mariage a la Mode,” “Rake’s Progress,” “The Nightshirt Steeplechase,” “Run with the Quorn,” and large functional groupings of Victorian celebrities with their names attached to blank faces on a key chart, decorated the walls. Its sanitation and its port were excellent. Pot-pourri lay in every bedroom, old pewter round the coffee room, clean napkins at every meal. And a poor welcome was assured to earwigs, spiders, and the wrong sort of guest… Warmson, one of those self-contained men who spread when they take inns, pervaded the house, with a red face set in small, grey whiskers, like a sun of just sufficient warmth.
To young Anne Forsyte all was “just too lovely.” Never in her short life, confined to a large country, had she come across such defiant cosiness—the lush peace of the river, the songs of birds, the scents of flowers, the rustic arbour, the drifting lazy sky, now blue, now white, the friendly fat spaniel, and the feeling that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow would for ever be the same as yesterday.
“It’s a poem, Jon.”
“Slightly comic. When everything’s slightly comic, you don’t tire.”
“I’d certainly never tire of this.”
“We don’t grow tragedy in England, Anne.”
“Why?”
“Well, tragedy’s extreme; and we don’t like extremes. Tragedy’s dry and England’s damp.”
She was leaning her elbows on the wall at the bottom of the garden, and, turning her chin a little in her hand, she looked round and up at him.
“Fleur Mont’s father lives on the river, doesn’t he? Is that far from here?”
“Mapledurham? I should think about ten miles.”
“I wonder if we shall see her at Ascot. I think she’s lovely.”
“Yes,” said Jon.
“I wonder you didn’t fall in love with her, Jon.”
“We were kids when I knew her.”
“I think she fell in love with you.”
“Why?”
“By the way she looks at you… She isn’t in love with Mr. Mont; she just likes him.”
“Oh!” said Jon.
Since in the coppice at Robin Hill Fleur had said “Jon!” in so strange a voice, he had known queer moments. There was that in him which could have caught her, balanced there on the log with her hands on his shoulders, and gone straight back into the past with her. There was that in him which abhorred the notion. There was that in him which sat apart and made a song about them both, and that in him which said: Get to work and drop all these silly feelings! He was, in fact, confused. The past, it seemed, did not die, as he had thought, but lived on beside the present, and sometimes, perhaps, became the future. Did one live for what one had not got? There was a wrinkling in his soul, and feverish draughts crept about within him. The whole thing was on his conscience—for if Jon had anything, he had a conscience.
“When we get our place,” he said, “we’ll have all these old-fashioned flowers. They’re much the sweetest!”
“Ah! Yes, do let’s get a home, Jon. Only are you sure you want one? Wouldn’t you like to travel and write poetry?”
“It’s not a job. Besides, my verse isn’t good enough. You want the mood of Hatteras J. Hopkins:
“I wish you weren’t modest, Jon.”
“It’s not modesty, Anne; it’s a sense of the comic.”
“Couldn’t we get a swim before dinner? It would be fine.”
“I don’t know what the regulations are here.”
“Let’s bathe first and find out afterwards.”
“All right. You go and change. I’ll get this gate open.”
A fish splashed, a long white cloud brushed the poplar tops beyond the water. Just such an evening, six years ago, he had walked the towing-path with Fleur, had separated from her, waited to see her look back and wave her hand. He could see her still—that special grace, which gave her movements a lingering solidity within the memory. And now—it was Anne! And Anne in water was a dream!…
Above the ‘Pouter Pigeon’ the sky was darkening; cars in their garages were still; no boats passed, only the water moved, and the river wind talked vaguely in the rushes and among the leaves. All within was cosy. On their backs lay Warmson and his Fifine, singing a little through their noses. By a bedside light Holly read ‘The Worst Journey in the World,’ and beside her Val dreamed that he was trying to stroke a horse’s nose, shortening under his hand to the size of a leopard’s. And Anne slept with her eyes hidden against Jon’s shoulder, and Jon lay staring at the crannies through which the moonlight eddied.
And in his stable at Ascot the son of Sleeping Dove, from home for the first time, pondered on the mutability of equine affairs, closing and opening his eyes, and breathing without sound in the strawy dark, above the black cat he had brought to bear him company.
To Winifred Dartie the debut of her son’s Sleeping Dove colt on Ascot Cup Day seemed an occasion for the gathering of such members of her family as were permitted to go racing by the primary caution in their blood; but it was almost a shock to her when Fleur telephoned: “Father’s coming; he’s never been to Ascot, and doesn’t know that he wants to go.”
“Oh!” she said, “then you’ll have to have two of my Enclosure tickets. Jack can fend for himself. But what about Michael?”
“Michael can’t come; he’s deep in slums—got a new slogan: ‘Broader gutters!’”
“He’s so good,” said Winifred. “Let’s go down early enough to lunch before racing, dear. I think we’d better drive.”
“Father’s car is up—we’ll call for you.”
“Delightful!” said Winifred. “Has your father got a grey top hat? No? Oh! But he simply must wear one; they’re all the go this year. Don’t say anything, just get him one. He wears seven-and-three-quarters; and dear, tell them to heat the hat and squash it in at the sides—otherwise they’re always too round for him. And he needn’t bring any money to speak of; Jack will do all our betting for us.”
Fleur thought that it was not likely father would have a bet; he had said he just wanted to see what the thing was like.
“He’s so funny about betting,” said Winifred, “like your grandfather.”
Not that it had been altogether funny in the case of James, who had been called on to pay the racing debts of Montague Dartie three times over.
With Soames and Winifred on the back seats, Fleur and Imogen on the front seats, and Jack Cardigan alongside Riggs, they took a circuitous road by way of Harrow to avoid the traffic, and emerged into it just at the point where for the first time it became thick. Soames, who had placed his grey top hat on his knee, put it on, and said:
“Just like Riggs!”
“Oh, no, Uncle!” said Imogen. “It’s Jack’s doing. When he’s got to go through Eton, he always like to go through Harrow first.”
“Oh! Ah!” said Soames. “He was there. I should like Kit’s name put down.”
“How nice!” said Imogen: “Our boys would still be there when he goes. You look so well in that hat, Uncle.”
Soames took it off again.
“White elephant,” he said. “Can’t think what made Fleur get me the thing!”
“My dear,” said Winifred, “it’ll last you for years. Jack’s had his ever since the war. The great thing is to prevent the moth getting into it, between seasons. What a lot of cars! I do think it’s wonderful that so many people should have the money in these days.”
The sight of so much money flowing down from town would have been more exhilarating to Soames if he had not been wondering where on earth they all got it. With the coal trade at a standstill, and factories closing down all over the place, this display of wealth and fashion, however reassuring, seemed to him almost indecent.
Jack Cardigan, from his front seat, had begun explaining a thing he called the ‘tote.’ It seemed to be a machine that did your betting for you. Jack Cardigan was a funny fellow; he made a life’s business of sport; there wasn’t another country that could have produced him! And, leaning forward, Soames said to Fleur: “You’ve not got a draught there?” She had been very silent all the way, and he knew why. Ten to one if young Jon Forsyte wouldn’t be at Ascot! Twice over at Mapledurham he had noticed letters addressed by her to:
“Mrs. Val Dartie, Wansdon, Sussex.”
She had seemed to him very fidgety or very listless all that fortnight. Once, when he had been talking to her about Kit’s future, she had said: “I don’t think it matters, Dad, whatever one proposes—he’ll dispose; parents don’t count now: look at me!”
And he had looked at her, and left it at that.
He was still contemplating the back of her head when they drew into an enclosure and he was forced to expose his hat to the public gaze. What a crowd! Here, on the far side of the course, were rows of people all jammed together, who, so far as he could tell, would see nothing, and be damp one way or another throughout the afternoon. If that was pleasure! He followed the others across the course, in front of the Grand Stand. So those were ‘the bookies’! Funny lot, with ‘their names painted clearly on each,’ so that people could tell them apart; just as well, for they all seemed to him the same, with large necks and red faces, or scraggy necks and lean faces, one of each kind in every firm, like a couple of music-hall comedians. And, every now and then, in the pre-racing hush, one of them gave a sort of circular howl and looked hungrily at space. Funny fellows! Soames was glad to pass into the Royal Enclosure where bookmakers did not seem to be admitted. Numbers of grey top hats here! This was the place—he had heard—to see pretty women. He was looking for them when Winifred pressed his arm.
“Look, Soames—the Royal Procession!”
Thus required to gape at those horse-drawn carriages at which everybody else would be gaping, Soames averted his eyes, and became conscious that Winifred and he were alone!
“What’s become of the others?” he said.
“Gone to the paddock, I expect.”
“What for?”
“To look at the horses, dear.”
Soames had forgotten the horses.
“Fancy driving up like that, at this time of day!” he muttered.
“I think it’s so amusing!” said Winifred. “Shall we go to the paddock, too?”
Soames, who had not intended to lose sight of his daughter, followed her towards whatever the paddock might be.
It was one of those days when nobody could tell whether it was going to rain, so that he was disappointed by the dresses, and the women’s looks. He saw nothing to equal his daughter, and was about to make a disparaging remark, when a voice behind him said:
“Look, Jon! There’s Fleur Mont!”
Placing his foot on Winifred’s, Soames stood still. There, and wearing a grey top hat, too, was that young chap between his wife and his sister. A memory of tea at Robin Hill, with his cousin Jolyon, that boy’s father, twenty-seven years ago, assailed Soames—and of how Holly and Val had come in and sat looking at him as if he were a new kind of bird. There they went, those three, into a ring of people who were staring at nothing so far as he could see. And there, close to them, were those other three, Jack Cardigan, Fleur, and Imogen.
“My dear,” said Winifred, “you DID tread on my toe.”
“I didn’t mean to,” muttered Soames. “Come over to the other side—there’s more room.”
It seemed horses were being led round; but it was at his daughter that Soames wanted to gaze from behind Winifred’s shoulder. She had not yet seen the young man, but was evidently looking for him—her eyes were hardly ever on the horses—no great wonder in that, perhaps, for they all seemed alike to Soames, shining and snakey, quiet as sheep, with boys holding on to their heads. Ah! A stab went through his chest, for she had suddenly come to life; and, as suddenly, seemed to hide her resurrection even from herself! How still she stood—ever so still, gazing at that young fellow talking to his wife.
“That’s the favourite, Soames. At least, Jack said he would be. What do you think of him?”
“Much like the others—got four legs.”
Winifred laughed. Soames was so amusing!
“Jack’s moving; if we’re going to have a bet, I think we’d better go back, dear. I know what I fancy.”
“I don’t fancy anything,” said Soames. “Weak-minded, I call it; as if they could tell one horse from another!”
“Oh! but you’d be surprised,” said Winifred; “you must get Jack to—”
“No, thank you.”
He had seen Fleur move and join those three. But faithful to his resolve to show no sign, he walked glumly back into the Enclosure. What a monstrous noise they were making now in the ring next door! And what a pack of people in that great Stand! Up there, on the top of it, he could see what looked like half-a-dozen lunatics frantically gesticulating—some kind of signalling, he supposed. Suddenly, beyond the railings at the bottom of the lawn, a flash of colour passed. Horses—one, two, three; a dozen or more—all labelled with numbers, and with little bright men sitting on their necks like monkeys. Down they went—and soon they’d come back, he supposed; and a lot of money would change hands. And then they’d do it again, and the money would change back. And what satisfaction they all got out of it, he didn’t know! There were men who went on like that all their lives he believed—thousands of them: must be lots of time and money to waste in the country! What was it Timothy had said: “Consols are going up!” They hadn’t; on the contrary, they were down a point, at least, and would go lower before the Coal Strike was over. Jack Cardigan’s voice said in his ear:
“What are you going to back, Uncle Soames?”
“How should I know?”
“You must back something, to give you an interest.”
“Put something on for Fleur, and leave me alone,” said Soames; “I’m too old to begin.”
And, opening the handle of his racing stick, he sat down on it. “Going to rain,” he added, gloomily. He sat there alone; Winifred and Imogen had joined Fleur down by the rails with Holly and her party—Fleur and that young man side by side. And he remembered how, when Bosinney had been hanging round Irene, he, as now, had made no sign, hoping against hope that by ignoring the depths beneath him he could walk upon the waters. Treacherously they had given way then and engulfed him; would they again—would they again? His lip twitched; and he put out his hand. A little drizzle fell on the back of it.
“They’re off!”
Thank goodness—the racket had ceased! Funny change from din to hush. The whole thing funny—a lot of grown-up children! Somebody called out shrilly at the top of his voice—there was a laugh—then noise began swelling from the stand; heads were craning round him. “The favourite wins!” “Not he!” More noise; a thudding—a flashing past of colour! And Soames thought: ‘Well, that’s over!’ Perhaps everything was like that really. A hush—a din—a flashing past—a hush! All like a race, a spectacle—only you couldn’t see it! A venture and a paying-up! And beneath his new hat he passed his hand down over one flat cheek, and then the other. A paying-up! He didn’t care who paid up, so long as it wasn’t Fleur! But there it was—some debts could not be paid by proxy! What on earth was Nature about when she made the human heart!
The afternoon wore on, and he saw nothing of his daughter. It was as if she suspected his design of watching over her. There was the “horse of the century” running in the Gold Cup, and he positively mustn’t miss that—they said. So again Soames was led to the ring where the horses were moving round.
“That the animal?” he said, pointing to a tall mare, whom, by reason of two white ankles, he was able to distinguish from the others. Nobody answered him, and he perceived that he was separated from Winifred and the Cardigans by three persons, all looking at him with a certain curiosity.
“Here he comes!” said one of them. Soames turned his head. Oh! So THIS was the horse of the century, was it? – this bay fellow—same colour as the pair they used to drive in the Park Lane barouche. His father always had bays, because old Jolyon had browns, and Nicholas blacks, and Swithin greys, and Roger—he didn’t remember what Roger used to have—something a bit eccentric—piebalds, he shouldn’t wonder. Sometimes they would talk about horses, or, rather, about what they had given for them; Swithin had been a judge, or so he said—Soames had never believed it, he had never believed in Swithin at all. But he could perfectly well remember George being run away with by his pony in the Row, and pitched into a flowerbed—no one had ever been able to explain how; just like George, with his taste for the grotesque! He himself had never taken any interest in horses! Irene, of course, had loved riding—she would! She had never had any after she married him… A voice said:
“Well, what do you think of him, Uncle Soames?”
Val, with his confounded grin; Jack Cardigan, too, and a thin, brown-faced man with a nose and chin. Soames said guardedly:
“Nice enough nag.”
If they thought they were going to get a rise out of him!
“Think he’ll stay, Val? It’s the deuce of a journey.”
“He’ll stay all right.”
“Got nothing to beat,” said the thin brown man.
“The Frenchman, Greenwater.”
“No class, Captain Cardigan. He’s not all the horse they think him, but he can’t lose today.”
“Well, I hope to God he beats the Frenchman; we want a Cup or two left in the country.”
Something responded within Soames’ breast. If it was against a Frenchman, he would do his best to help.
“Put me five pounds on him,” he said, suddenly, to Jack Cardigan.
“Good for you, Uncle Soames. He’ll start about evens. See his head and his forehand and the way he’s let down—lots of heart room. Not quite so good behind the saddle, but a great horse, I think.”
“Which is the Frenchman?” asked Soames. “That! Oh! Ah! I don’t like HIM. I want to see this race.”
Jack Cardigan gripped his arm—the fellow’s fingers were like iron.
“You come along with me!” he said. Soames went, was put up higher than he had been yet, given Imogen’s glasses—a present from himself—and left there. He was surprised to find how well and far he could see. What a lot of cars, and what a lot of people! ‘The national pastime’—didn’t they call it! Here came the horses walking past, each led by a man. Well! they were pretty creatures, no doubt! An English horse against a French horse—that gave the thing some meaning. He was glad Annette was still with her mother in France, otherwise she’d have been here with him. Now they were cantering past. Soames made a real effort to tell one from the other, but except for their numbers, they were so confoundedly alike. “No,” he said to himself, “I’ll just watch those two, and that tall horse”—its name had appealed to him, Pons Asinorum. Rather painfully he got the colours of the three by heart and fixed his glasses on the wheeling group out there at the starting point. As soon as they were off, however, all he could see was that one horse was in front of the others. Why had he gone to the trouble of learning the colours? On and on and on he watched them, worried because he could make nothing of it, and everybody else seemed making a good deal. Now they were rounding into the straight. “The favourite’s coming up!” “Look at the Frenchman!” Soames could see the colours now. Those two! His hand shook a little and he dropped his glasses. Here they came—a regular ding-dong! Dash it—he wasn’t—England wasn’t! Yes, by George! No! Yes! Entirely without approval his heart was beating painfully. ‘Absurd!’ he thought. ‘The Frenchman!’ “No! the favourite wins! He wins!” Almost opposite, the horse was shooting out. Good horse! Hooray! England for ever! Soames covered his mouth just in time to prevent the words escaping. Somebody said something to him. He paid no attention; and, carefully putting Imogen’s glasses into their case, took off his grey hat and looked into it. There was nothing there except a faint discoloration of the buff leather where he had perspired.
The toilet of the two-year-olds was proceeding in the more unfrequented portions of the paddock. “Come and see Rondavel saddled, Jon,” said Fleur.
And, when he looked back, she laughed.
“No, you’ve got Anne all day and all night. Come with me for a change.”
On the far side of the paddock the son of Sleeping Dove was holding high his intelligent head, and his bit was being gently jiggled, while Greenwater with his own hands adjusted the saddle.
“A race-horse has about the best time of anything on earth,” she heard Jon say. “Look at his eyes—wise, bright, not bored. Draft horses have a cynical, long-suffering look—racehorses never. He likes his job; that keeps him spirity.”
“Don’t talk like a pamphlet, Jon. Did you expect to see me here?”
“Yes.”
“And it didn’t keep you away? How brave!”
“Must you say that sort of thing?”
“What then? You notice, Jon, that a racehorse never stands over at the knee; the reason is, of course, that he isn’t old enough. By the way, there’s one thing that spoils your raptures about them. They’re not free agents.”
“Is anyone?”
How set and obstinate his face!
“Let’s see him walk round.”
They joined Val, who said gloomily:
“D’you want to have anything on?”
“Do YOU, Jon?” said Fleur.
“Yes; a tenner.”
“So will I then. Twenty pounds between us, Val.”
Val signed.
“Look at him! Ever see a two-year-old more self-contained? I tell you that youngster’s going far. And I’m confined to a miserable ‘pony’! Damn!”
He left them and spoke to Greenwater.
“More self-contained,” said Fleur. “Not a modern quality, is it, Jon?”
“Perhaps, underneath.”
“Oh! You’ve been in the backwoods too long. Francis, too, was wonderfully primitive; so, I suppose, is Anne. You should have tried New York, judging by their literature.”
“I don’t judge by literature; I don’t believe there’s any relation between it and life.”
“Let’s hope not, anyway. Where shall we see the race from?”
“The enclosure rails. It’s the finish I care about. I don’t see Anne.”
Fleur closed her lips suddenly on the words: “Damn Anne.”
“We can’t wait for them,” she said. “The rails soon fill up.”
On the rails they were almost opposite the winning post, and they stood there silent, in a queer sort of enmity—it seemed to Fleur.
“Here they come!”
Too quickly and too close to be properly taken in, the two-year-olds came cantering past.
“Rondavel goes well,” said Jon. “And I like that brown.”
Fleur noted them languidly, too conscious of being alone with him—really alone, blocked off by strangers from any knowing eye. To savour that loneliness of so few minutes was tasking all her faculties. She slipped her hand through his arm, and forced her voice.
“I’m awfully worked up, Jon. He simply must win.”
Did he know that in focussing his glasses he left her hand uncaged?
“I can’t make them out from here.” Then his arm recaged her hand against his side. Did he know? What did he know?
“They’re off!”
Fleur pressed closer.
Silence—din—shouting of this name—that name! But pressure against him was all it meant to Fleur. Past they came, a flourishing flash of colour; but she saw nothing of it, for her eyes were closed.
“By Gosh!” she heard him say: “He’s won.”
“Oh, Jon!”
“I wonder what price we got?”
Fleur looked at him, a spot of red in each pale cheek, and her eyes very clear.
“Price? Did you really mean that, Jon?”
And, though he was behind her, following to the paddock she knew from the way his eyes were fixed on her, that he had not meant it.
They found their party reunited all but Soames. Jack Cardigan was explaining that the price obtained was unaccountably short, since there was no stable money on to speak of; somebody must have known something; he seemed to think that this was extremely reprehensible.
“I suppose Uncle Soames hasn’t been going for the gloves,” he said. “Nobody’s seen him since the Gold Cup. Wouldn’t it be ripping if we found he’s kicked over and had a ‘monkey’ on?”
Fleur said uneasily:
“I expect Father got tired and went to the car. We’d better go too, Auntie, and get away before the crowd.”
She turned to Anne. “When shall we see you again?” She saw the girl look at Jon, and heard him say glumly:
“Oh! sometime.”
“Yes, we’ll fix something up. Good-bye, my dear! Good-bye, Jon! Tell Val I’m very glad.” And, with a farewell nod, she led the way. Of a sort of rage in her heart she gave no sign, preparing normality for her father’s eyes.
Soames, indeed, was in the car. Excitement over the Gold Cup—so contrary to his principles—had caused him to sit down in the Stand. And there he had remained during the next two races, idly watching the throng below, and the horses going down fast and coming back faster. There, quietly, in the isolation suited to his spirit, he could, if not enjoy, at least browse on a scene strikingly unfamiliar to him. The national pastime—he knew that everybody had ‘a bit on’ something now-a-days. For one person who ever went racing there were twenty—it seemed—who didn’t, and yet knew at least enough to lose their money. You couldn’t buy a paper, or have your hair cut, without being conscious of that. All over London, and the South, the Midlands and the North, in all classes, they were at it, supporting horses with their bobs and dollars and sovereigns. Most of them—he believed—had never seen a race horse in their lives—hardly a horse of any sort; racing was a sort of religion, he supposed, and now that they were going to tax it, an orthodox religion. Some primeval nonconformity in the blood of Soames shuddered a little. He had no sympathy, of course, with those leather-lunged chaps down there under their queer hats and their umbrellas, but the feeling that they were now made free of heaven—or at least of that synonym of heaven the modern State—ruffled him. It was almost as if England were facing realities at last—Very dangerous! They would be licensing prostitution next! To tax what were called vices was to admit that they were part of human nature. And though, like a Forsyte, he had long known them to be so, to admit it was, he felt, too French. To acknowledge the limitations of human nature was a sort of defeatism; when you once began that, you didn’t know where you’d stop. Still, from all he could see, the tax would bring in a pretty penny—and pennies were badly needed; so, he didn’t know, he wasn’t sure. He wouldn’t have done it himself, but he wasn’t prepared to turn out the Government for having done it. They had recognised, too, no doubt, as he did, that gambling was the greatest make-weight there was against revolution; so long as a man could bet he had always a chance of getting something for nothing, and that desire was the real driving force behind any attempt to turn things upside down. Besides you had to move with the times uphill or downhill, and it was difficult to tell one from the other. The great thing was to avoid extremes.
From this measured reflection he was abruptly transferred to feelings unmeasured. Fleur and that young fellow were walking across the lawn of the Enclosure! From under the brim of his grey hat he watched them painfully, reluctantly admitting that they made as pretty a couple as any there. They came to a stand on the rails—not talking; and to Soames, who, when moved, was exceptionally taciturn, this seemed a bad sign. Were things really going wrong, then—was passion forming within its still cocoon to fly on butterfly wings for its brief hour? What was going on within the silence of those two? The horses were passing now; and the grey, they said, was his own nephew’s? Why did the fellow have horses? He had known how it would be when Fleur said she was going to Ascot. He regretted now having come. No, he didn’t! Better to know what there was to be known. In the press of people to the rails he could no longer see more than the young man’s grey hat, and the black-and-white covering of his daughter’s head. For a minute the race diverted him: might as well see Val’s horse well beaten. They said he thought a lot of it; and Soames thought the less of its chance for that. Here they came, all in a bunch—thundering great troop, and that grey—a handy colour, you couldn’t miss it. – Why, he was winning! Hang it—he had won!
“H’m!” he said, aloud: “that’s my nephew’s horse!”
Since nobody replied, he hoped they hadn’t heard; and back went his eyes to the Enclosure rails. Those two were coming away silently—Fleur a little in front. Perhaps—perhaps, after all, they didn’t get on, now! Must hope for the best. By George, but he felt tired! He would go to the car, and wait.
And there in the dusk of it he was sitting when they came, full of bubble and squeak—something very little-headed about people when they’d won money. For they had all won money, it seemed!
“And you didn’t back him, Uncle Soames?”
“I was thinking of other things,” said Soames, gazing at his daughter.
“We thought you were responsible for the shockin’ bad price.”
“Why!” said Soames, gloomily. “Did you expect me to bet against him?”
Jack Cardigan threw back his head and laughed.
“I don’t see anything funny,” muttered Soames.
“Nor do I, Jack,” said Fleur. “Why should Father know anything about racing?”
“I beg your pardon, sir, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“God forbid!” said Soames. “No, but it’s rather queer. D’you remember that chap Stainford, who sneaked the Mater’s snuff-box?”
“I do.”
“Well it seems he paid Val a visit at Wansdon, and Val thinks he picked up the idea that Rondavel was a real good one. There was a chap watching the gallop last Monday. That’s what decided them to run the colt today. They were going to wait for Goodwood. Too late, though; somebody’s made a pot over him. We only got fours.”
It was all Greek to Soames, except that the languid ruffian Stainford had somehow been responsible a SECOND time for bringing about a meeting between Fleur and Jon; for he knew from Winifred that Val and his menage had gone to stay at Green Street during the Strike on purpose to see Stainford. He wished to goodness he had called a policeman that day, and had the fellow shut up.
They were a long time getting out of the traffic—owing to the perversity of “that chap Riggs,” and did not reach South Square till seven o’clock. They were greeted by the news that Kit had a temperature. Mr. Mont was with him. Fleur flew up. Having washed off his day, Soames settled himself in the ‘parlour’ to wait uneasily for their report. Fleur used to have temperatures, and not infrequently they led to something. If Kit’s didn’t lead to anything serious, it might be good for her—keeping her thoughts at home. He lay back in his chair opposite the Fragonard—a delicate thing, but with no soul in it, like all the works of that period—wondering why Fleur had changed the style of this room from Chinese to Louis Quinze. Just for the sake of change, he supposed. These young people had no continuity; some microbe in the blood—of the ‘idle rich,’ and the ‘idle poor,’ and everybody else, so far as he could see. Nobody could be got to stay anywhere—not even in their graves, judging by all those seances. If only people would attend quietly to their business, even to that of being dead! They had such an appetite for living, that they had no life. A beam of sunlight, smoky with dust-motes, came slanting in on to the wall before him—pretty thing, a beam of sunlight, but a terrible lot of dust, even in a room spick-and-spandy as this. And to think that a thing smaller than one of those dust-motes could give a child a temperature. He hoped to goodness Kit had nothing catching. And his mind went over the illnesses of childhood—mumps, measles, chicken-pox, whooping-cough. Fleur had caught them all, but never scarlet fever. And Soames began to fidget. Surely Kit was too young to have got scarlet fever. But nurses were so careless—you never knew! And suddenly he began to wish for Annette. What was she doing out in France all this time? She was useful in illness; had some very good prescriptions. He WOULD say that for the French—their doctors were clever when you could get them to take an interest. The stuff they had given him for his lumbago at Deauville had been first-rate. And after his visit the little doctor chap had said: “I come for the money tomorrow!” or so it had sounded. It seemed he had meant: “I come in the morning tomorrow.” They never could speak anything but their own confounded language, and looked aggrieved when you couldn’t speak it yourself.
They had kept him a long time there without news before Michael came in.
“Well?”
“Well, sir, it looks uncommonly like measles.”
“H’m! Now, how on earth did he get that?”
“Nurse has no idea; but Kit’s awfully sociable. If there’s another child in sight, he goes for him.”
“That’s bad,” said Soames. “You’ve got slums at the back here.”
“Ah!” said Michael: “Slums to the right of us, slums to the left of us, slums to the front of us—how can you wonder?”
Soames stared. “They’re not notifiable,” he said, “thank goodness!”
“Slums?”
“No. Measles.” If he had a dread, it was a notifiable disease, with the authorities poking their noses in, and having up the drains as likely as not. “How’s the little chap feeling?”
“Very sorry for himself.”
“In my opinion,” said Soames, “there’s a great deal more in fleas than they think. That dog of his may have picked up a measley flea. I wonder the doctor’s don’t turn their attention to fleas.”
“I wonder they don’t turn their attention to slums,” said Michael; “that’s where the fleas come from.”
Again Soames stared. Had his son-inlaw got slums in his bonnet now? His manifestations of public spirit were very disturbing. Perhaps he’d been going round those places, and brought the flea in himself, or some infection or other.
“Have you sent for the doctor?”
“Yes; he’ll be here any minute.”
“Is he any good, or just the ordinary cock-and-bull type?”
“The same man we had for Fleur.”
“Oh! Ah! I remember—too much manner, but shrewd. Doctors!”
There was silence in the polished room, while they waited for the bell to ring; and Soames brooded. Should he tell Michael about the afternoon? His mouth opened once, but nothing came out. Over and over again his son-inlaw had surprised him by the view he took of things. And he only stared at Michael, who was gazing out of the window—queer face the young fellow had; plain, and yet attractive, with those pointed ears and eyebrows running up on the outside—wasn’t always thinking of himself like good-looking young men seemed to be. Good-looking men were always selfish; got spoiled, he supposed. He would give a penny for the young fellow’s thoughts.
“Here he is!” said Michael, jumping up.
Soames was alone again. How long alone, he didn’t know, for he was tired, and, in spite of his concern, he dozed. The opening of the door roused him in time to assume anxiety before Fleur spoke.
“It’s almost certainly measles, Dad.”
“Oh!” said Soames, blankly. “What about nursing?”
“Nurse and I, of course.”
“That’ll mean you can’t get about.”
“And aren’t you glad?” her face seemed to say. How she read his thoughts!
God knew he wasn’t glad of anything that troubled her—and yet!
“Poor little chap!” he said, evasively: “Your mother must come back. I must try and find him something that’ll take his attention off.”
“Don’t trouble, Dad; he’s too feverish, poor darling. Dinner’s ready. I’m having mine upstairs.”
Soames rose and went up to her.
“Don’t you be worrying,” he said. “All children—”
Fleur put her arm out.
“Not too near, Dad. No, I won’t worry.”
“Give him my love,” said Soames. “He won’t care for it.”
Fleur looked at him. Her lips smiled a very little. Her eyelids winked twice. Then she turned and went out, and Soames thought:
‘She—poor little thing! I’m no use!’ It was of her, not of his grandson, that he thought.
The Meads of St. Augustine had, no doubt, once on a time been flowery, and burgesses had walked there of a Sunday, plucking summer nosegays. If there were a flower now, it would be found on the altar of the Reverend Hilary’s church, or on Mrs. Hilary’s dining-table. The rest of a numerous population had heard of these unnatural products, and, indeed, seeing them occasionally in baskets, would utter the words: “Aoh! Look at the luv-ly flahers!”
When Michael visited his uncle, according to promise, on Ascot Cup Day, he was ushered hurriedly into the presence of twenty little Augustinians on the point of being taken in a covered motor van for a fortnight among flowers in a state of nature. His Aunt May was standing among them. She was a tall woman with bright brown shingled hair going grey, and the slightly rapt expression of one listening to music. Her smile was very sweet, and this, with the puzzled twitch of her delicate eyebrows, as who should say placidly: “What next, I wonder?” endeared her to everyone. She had emerged from a Rectory in Huntingdonshire, in the early years of the century, and had married Hilary at the age of twenty. He had kept her busy ever since. Her boys and girls were all at school now, so that in term time she had merely some hundreds of Augustinians for a family. Hilary was wont to say: “May’s a wonder. Now that she’s had her hair off, she’s got so much time on her hands that we’re thinking of keeping guinea-pigs. If she’d only let me grow a beard, we could really get a move on.”
She greeted Michael with a nod and a twitch.
“Young London, my dear,” she said, privately, “just off to Leatherhead. Rather sweet, aren’t they?”
Michael, indeed, was surprised by the solidity and neatness of the twenty young Augustinians. Judging by the streets from which they came and the mothers who were there to see them off, their families had evidently gone ‘all out’ to get them in condition for Leatherhead.
He stood grinning amiably, while they were ushered out on the glowing pavement between the unrestrained appreciation of their mothers and sisters. Into the van, open only at the rear, they were piled, with four young ladies to look after them.
“Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” murmured Michael.
His aunt laughed.
“Yes, poor little dears, won’t they be hot! But aren’t they good?” She lowered her voice. “And d’you know what they’ll say when they come back after their fortnight? ‘Oh! yes, we liked it all very much, thank you, but it was rather slow. We like the streets better.’ Every year it’s the same.”
“Then, what’s the use of sending them, Aunt May?”
“It does them good physically; they look sturdy enough, but they aren’t really strong. Besides, it seems so dreadful they should never see the country. Of course we country-bred folk, Michael, never can realise what London streets are to children—very nearly Heaven, you know.”
The motor van moved to an accompaniment of fluttered handkerchiefs and shrill cheering.
“The mothers love them to go,” said his aunt; “it’s kind of distinguished. Well, that’s that! What would you like to see next? The street we’ve just bought, to gut and re-gut? Hilary’ll be there with the architect.”
“Who owned the street?” asked Michael.
“He lived in Capri. I don’t suppose he ever saw it. He died the other day, and we got it rather reasonably, considering how central we are, here. Sites are valuable.”
“Have you paid for it?”
“Oh! no.” Her eyebrows twitched. “Postdated a cheque on Providence.”
“Good Lord!”
“We had to have the street. It was such a chance. We’ve paid the deposit, and we’ve got till September to get the rest.”
“How much?” said Michael.
“Thirty-two thousand.”
Michael gasped.
“Oh! We shall get it, dear, Hilary’s wonderful in that way. Here’s the street.”
It was a curving street of which, to Michael, slowly passing, each house seemed more dilapidated than the last. Grimy and defaced, with peeling plaster, broken rails and windows, and a look of having been abandoned to its fate—like some half-burnt-out ship—it hit the senses and the heart with its forlornness.
“What sort of people live here, Aunt May?”
“All sorts—three or four families to each house. Covent Garden workers, hawkers, girls in factories, out-of-works—every kind. The unmentionable insect abounds, Michael. The girls are wonderful—they keep their clothes in paper bags. Many of them turn out quite neat. If they didn’t, of course, they’d get the sack, poor dears.”
“But is it possible,” said Michael, “that people can WANT to go on living here?”
His aunt’s brows became intricate.
“It isn’t a question of want, my dear. It’s a simple economic proposition. Where else can they live so cheaply? It’s more than that, even; where else can they go at all, if they’re turned out? The Authorities demolished a street not long ago up there, and built that great block of workmen’s flats; but the rents were prohibitive to the people who had been living in the street, and they simply melted away to other slums. Besides, you know, they don’t like those barracky flats, and I don’t wonder. They’d much rather have a little house, if they can; or the floor of a house if they can’t. Or even a room. That’s in the English nature, and it will be till they design workmen’s dwellings better. The English like to live low down: I suppose because they always have. Oh! Here’s Hilary!”
Hilary Charwell, in a dark grey Norfolk suit, a turn-down collar open at the neck, and no hat, was standing in the doorway of a house, talking to another spare man with a thin, and, to Michael, very pleasant face.
“Well, Michael, my boy, what think you of Slant Street? Each one of these houses is going to be gutted and made as bright as a new pin.”
“How long will they keep bright, Uncle Hilary?”
“Oh! That’s all right,” said Hilary, “judging by our experiments so far. Give ’em a chance, and the people are only too glad to keep their houses clean. It’s wonderful what they do, as it is. Come in and see, but don’t touch the walls. May, you stay and talk to James. An Irish lady in here; we haven’t many. Can I come in, Mrs. Corrigan?”
“Sure an’ ye can. Plased to see your rivirence, though ut’s not tidy I am this mornin’.”
A broad woman, with grizzled black hair and brawny arms, had paused in whatever she was doing to a room inconceivably crowded and encrusted. Three people evidently slept in the big bed, and one in a cot; cooking seemed to go on at the ordinary small black hearth, over which, on a mantel-board, were the social trophies of a lifetime. Some clothes were hung on a line. The patched and greasy walls had no pictures.
“My nephew, Mr. Michael Mont, Mrs. Corrigan; he’s a Member of Parliament.”
The lady put her arms akimbo.
“Indeed, an’ is he, then?”
It was said with an infinite indulgence that went to Michael’s heart. “An’ is ut true your rivirence has bought the street? An’ what would ye be doing with ut? Ye won’t be afther turning us out, I’m thinking.”
“Not for the world, Mrs. Corrigan.”
“Well, an’ I knew that. I said to them: ‘It’s cleaning our insides he’ll maybe doing, but he’ll never be afther putting us out.’”
“When the turn of this house comes, Mrs. Corrigan—I hope before very long—we’ll find you good lodgings till you can come back here to new walls and floors and ceilings, a good range, no more bugs, and proper washing arrangements.”
“Well, an’ wouldn’t that be the day I’d like to see!”
“You’ll see it fast enough. Look Michael, if I put my finger through there, the genuine article will stalk forth! It’s you that can’t knock holes in your walls, Mrs. Corrigan.”
“An’ that’s the truth o’ God,” replied Mrs. Corrigan. “The last time Corrigan knocked a peg in, ’twas terrible—the life there was in there!”
“Well, Mrs. Corrigan, I’m delighted to see you looking so well. Good morning, and tell Corrigan if his donkey wants a rest any time, there’ll be room in our paddock. Will you be going hopping this year?”
“We will that,” replied Mrs. Corrigan. “Good-day to you rivirence; good-day, sorr!”
On the bare, decrepit landing Hilary Charwell said: “Salt of the earth, Michael. But imagine living in that atmosphere! Luckily, they’re all ‘snoof’.”
“What?” said Michael, taking deep breaths of the somewhat less complicated air.
“It’s a portmanteau syllable for ‘Got no sense of smell to speak of.’ And wanted, too. One says ‘deaf,’ ‘blind,’ ‘dumb’—why not ‘snoof’?”
“Excellent! How long do you reckon it’ll take you to convert this street, Uncle Hilary?”
“About three years.”
“And how are you going to get the money?”
“Win, wangle and scrounge it. In here there are three girls who serve in ‘Fetter and Poplin’s.’ They’re all out, of course. Neat, isn’t it? See their paper bags?”
“I say, Uncle, would you blame a girl for doing anything to get out of a house like this?”
“No,” said the Reverend Hilary, “I would not, and that’s the truth o’ God.”
“That’s why I love you, Uncle Hilary. You restore my faith in the Church.”
“My dear boy,” said Hilary, “the old Reformation was nothing to what’s been going on in the Church lately. You wait and see! Though I confess a little wholesome Disestablishment would do us all no harm. Come and have lunch, and we’ll talk about my slum conversion scheme. We’ll bring James along.”
“You see,” he resumed, when they were seated in the Vicarage dining-room, “there must be any amount of people who would be glad enough to lay out a small proportion of their wealth at two per cent., with the prospect of a rise to four as time went on, if they were certain that it meant the elimination of the slums. We’ve experimented and we find that we can put slum houses into proper living condition for their existing population at a mere fraction over the old rents, and pay two per cent, on our outlay. If we can do that here, it can be done in all slum centres, by private Slum Conversion Societies such as ours, working on the principle of not displacing the existing slum population. But what’s wanted, of course, is money—a General Slum Conversion fund—Bonds at two per cent., with bonuses, repayable in twenty years, from which the Societies could draw funds as they need them for buying and converting slum property.”
“How will you repay the Bonds in twenty years?”
“Oh! Like the Government—by issuing more.”
“But,” said Michael, “the local Authorities have very wide powers, and much more chance of getting the money.”
Hilary shook his head.
“Wide powers, yes; but they’re slow, Michael—the snail is a fast animal compared with them; besides, they only displace, because the rents they charge are too high. Also it’s not in the English character, my dear. Somehow we don’t like being ‘done for’ by officials, or being answerable to them. There’s lots of room, of course, for slum area treatment by Borough Councils, and they do lots of good work, but by themselves, they’ll never scotch the evil. You want the human touch; you want a sense of humour, and faith; and that’s a matter for private effort in every town where there are slums.”
“And who’s going to start this general fund?” asked Michael, gazing at his aunt’s eyebrows, which had begun to twitch.
“Well,” said Hilary, twinkling, “I thought that might be where you came in. That’s why I asked you down today, in fact.”
“The deuce!” said Michael almost leaping above the Irish stew on his plate.
“Exactly!” said his uncle; “but couldn’t you get together a Committee of both Houses to issue an appeal? From the work we’ve done James can give you exact figures. They could see for themselves what’s happened here. Surely, Michael, there must be ten just men who could be got to move in a matter like this—”
“‘Ten Apostles’,” said Michael, faintly.
“Well, but there’s no real need to bring Christ in-nothing remote or sentimental; you could approach them from any angle. Old Sir Timothy Fanfield, for example, would love to have a ‘go’ at slum landlordism. Then we’ve electrified all the kitchens so far, and mean to go on doing it—so you could get old Shropshire on that. Besides, there’s no need to confine the Committee to the two Houses—Sir Thomas Morsell, or, I should think, any of the big doctors, would come in; you could pinch a brace of bankers with Quaker blood in them; and there are always plenty of retired Governor Generals with their tongues out. Then if you could rope in a member of the Royal Family to head it—the trick would be done.”
“Poor Michael!” said his aunt’s soft voice: “Let him finish his stew, Hilary.”
But Michael had dropped his fork for good; he saw another kind of stew before him.
“The General Slum Conversion Fund,” went on Hilary, “affiliating every Slum Conversion Society in being or to be, so long as it conforms to the principle of not displacing the present inhabitant. Don’t you see what a pull that gives us over the inhabitants? – we start them straight, and we jolly well see that they don’t let their houses down again.”
“But can you?” said Michael.
“Ah! you’ve heard stories of baths being used for coal and vegetables, and all that. Take it from me, they’re exaggerated, Michael. Anyway, that’s where we private workers come in with a big advantage over municipal authorities. They have to drive, we try to lead.”
“Let me hot up your stew, dear?” said his aunt.
Michael refused. He perceived that it would need no hotting up! Another crusade! His Uncle Hilary had always fascinated him with his crusading blood—at the time of the Crusades the name had been Keroual, and, now spelt Charwell, was pronounced Cherwell, in accordance with the sound English custom of worrying foreigners.
“I’m not approaching you, Michael, with the inducement that you should make your name at this, because, after all, you’re a gent!”
“Thank you!” murmured Michael; “always glad of a kind word.”
“No. I’m suggesting that you ought to do something, considering your luck in life.”
“I quite agree,” said Michael, humbly. “The question seems to be: Is this the something?”
“It is, undoubtedly,” said his uncle, waving a salt-spoon on which was engraved the Charwell crest. “What else can it be?”
“Did you never hear of Foggartism, Uncle Hilary?”
“No; what’s that?”
“My aunt!” said Michael.
“Some blanc-mange, dear?”
“Not you, Aunt May! But did you really never hear of it, Uncle Hilary?”
“Foggartism? Is it that fog-abating scheme one reads about?”
“It is not,” said Michael. “Of course, you’re sunk in misery and sin here. Still, it’s almost too thick. YOU’VE heard of it, Aunt May?”
His aunt’s eyebrows became intricate again.
“I think,” she said, “I do remember hearing someone say it was balderdash!”
Michael groaned: “And you, Mr. James?”
“It’s to do with the currency, isn’t it?”
“And here,” said Michael, “we have three intelligent, public-spirited persons, who’ve never heard of Foggartism—and I’ve heard of nothing else for over a year.”
“Well,” said Hilary, “had you heard of my slum-conversion scheme?”
“Certainly not.”
“I think,” said his aunt, “it would be an excellent thing if you’d smoke while I make the coffee. Now I do remember, Michael: Your mother did say to me that she wished you would get over it. I’d forgotten the name. It had to do with taking town-children away from their parents.”
“Partly,” said Michael, with gloom.
“You have to remember, dear, that the poorer people are, the more they cling to their children.”
“Vicarious joy in life,” put in Hilary.
“And the poorer children are, the more they cling to their gutters, as I was telling you.”
Michael buried his hands in his pockets.
“There is no good in me,” he said, stonily. “You’ve pitched on a stumer, Uncle Hilary.”
Both Hilary and his wife got up very quickly, and each put a hand on his shoulder.
“My dear boy!” said his aunt.
“God bless you!” said Hilary: “Have a ‘gasper.’”
“All right,” said Michael, grinning, “it’s wholesome.”
Whether or not it was the “gasper” that was wholesome, he took and lighted it from his uncle’s.
“What is the most pitiable sight in the world, Aunt May—I mean, next to seeing two people dance the Charleston?”
“The most pitiable sight?” said his aunt, dreamily. “Oh! I think—a rich man listening to a bad gramophone.”
“Wrong!” said Michael. “The most pitiable sight in the world is a politician barking up the right tree. Behold him!”
“Look out, May! Your machine’s boiling. She makes very good coffee, Michael—nothing like it for the grumps. Have some, and then James and I will show you the houses we’ve converted. James—come with me a moment.”
“Noted for his pertinacity,” muttered Michael, as they disappeared.
“Not only noted, Michael—dreaded.”
“Well, I would rather be Uncle Hilary than anybody I know.”
“He IS rather a dear,” murmured his aunt. “Coffee?”
“What does he really believe, Aunt May?”
“Well, he hardly has time for that.”
“Ah! that’s the new hope of the Church. All the rest is just as much an attempt to improve on mathematics as Einstein’s theory. Orthodox religion was devised for the cloister, Aunt May, and there aren’t any cloisters left.”
“Religion,” said his aunt, dreamily, “used to burn a good many people, Michael, not in cloisters.”
“Quite so, when it emerged from cloisters, religion used to be red-hot politics; then it became caste feeling, and now it’s a cross—word puzzle—You don’t solve THEM with your emotions.”
His aunt smiled.
“You have a dreadful way of putting things, my dear.”
“In our ‘suckles,’ Aunt May, we do nothing but put things—it destroys all motive power. But about this slum business: do you really advise me to have ‘a go’?”
“Not if you want a quiet life.”
“I don’t know that I do. I did, after the war; but not now. But, you see, I’ve tried Foggartism and everybody’s too sane to look at it. I really can’t afford to back another loser. Do you think there’s a chance of getting a national move on?”
“Only a sporting chance, dear.”
“Would you take it up then, if you were me?”
“My dear, I’m prejudiced—Hilary’s heart is so set on it; but it does seem to me that there’s no other cause I’d so gladly fail in. Well, not that exactly; but there really is nothing so important as giving our town dwellers decent living conditions.”
“It’s rather like going over to the enemy,” muttered Michael. “Our future oughtn’t to be so bound up in the towns.”
“It WILL be, whatever’s done. ‘A bird in the hand,’ and such a big bird, Michael. Ah! Here’s Hilary!”
Hilary and his architect took Michael forth again into the Meads. The afternoon had turned drizzly, and the dismal character of that flowerless quarter was more than ever apparent. Up street, down street, Hilary extolled the virtues of his parishoners. They drank, but not nearly so much as was natural in the circumstances; they were dirty, but he would be dirtier under their conditions. They didn’t come to church—who on earth would expect them to? They assaulted their wives to an almost negligible extent; were extraordinarily good, and extremely unwise, to their children. They had the most marvellous faculty for living on what was not a living wage. They helped each other far better than those who could afford to; never saved a bean, having no beans to save, and took no thought for a morrow which might be worse than today. Institutions they abominated. They were no more moral than was natural in their overcrowded state. Of philosophy they had plenty, of religion none that he could speak of. Their amusements were cinemas, streets, gaspers, public houses, and Sunday papers. They liked a tune, and would dance if afforded a chance. They had their own brand of honesty, which required special study. Unhappy? Not precisely, having given up a future state in this life or in that—realists to their encrusted fingernails. English? Well, nearly all, and mostly London-born. A few country folk had come in young, and would never go out old.
“You’d like them, Michael; nobody who really knows them can help liking them. And now, my dear fellow, good-bye, and think it over. The hope of England lies in you young men. God bless you!”
And with these words in his ears, Michael went home, to find his little son sickening for measles.
The diagnosis of Kit’s malady was soon verified, and Fleur went into purdah.
Soames’ efforts to distract his grandson arrived almost every day. One had the ears of a rabbit, with the expression of a dog, another the tail of a mule detachable from the body of a lion, the third made a noise like many bees; the fourth, though designed for a waistcoat, could be pulled out tall. The procuring of these rarities, together with the choicest mandarine oranges, muscatel grapes, and honey that was not merely “warranted” pure, occupied his mornings in town. He was staying at Green Street, whereto the news, judiciously wired, had brought Annette. Soames, who was not yet entirely resigned to a spiritual life, was genuinely glad to see her. But after one night, he felt he could spare her to Fleur. It would be a relief to feel that she had her mother with her. Perhaps by the end of her seclusion that young fellow would be out of her reach again. A domestic crisis like this might even put him out of her head. Soames was not philosopher enough to gauge inround the significance of his daughter’s yearnings. To one born in 1855 love was a purely individual passion, or if it wasn’t, ought to be. It did not occur to him that Fleur’s longing for Jon might also symbolise the craving in her blood for life, the whole of life, and nothing but life; that Jon had represented her first serious defeat in the struggle for the fulness of perfection; a defeat that might yet be wiped out. The modern soul, in the intricate turmoil of its sophistication, was to Soames a book which, if not sealed, had its pages still uncut. ‘Crying for the moon’ had become a principle when he was already much too old for principles. Recognition of the limits of human life and happiness was in his blood, and had certainly been fostered by his experience. Without, exactly, defining existence as “making the best of a bad job,” he would have contended that though, when you had almost everything, you had better ask for more, you must not fash yourself if you did not get it. The virus of a time-worn religion which had made the really irreligious old Forsytes say their prayers to the death, in a muddled belief that they would get something for them after death, still worked inhibitively in the blood of their prayerless offspring, Soames; so that, although fairly certain that he would get nothing after death, he still believed that he would not get everything before death. He lagged, in fact, behind the beliefs of a new century in whose “make-up” resignation played no part—a century which either believed, with spiritualism, that there were plenty of chances to get things after death, or that, since one died for good and all, one must see to it that one had everything before death. Resignation! Soames would have denied, of course, that he believed in any such thing; and certainly he thought nothing too good for his daughter! And yet, somehow, he felt in his bones that there WAS a limit, and Fleur did not—this little distinction, established by the difference in their epochs, accounted for his inability to follow so much of her restive search.
Even in the nursery, grieved and discomforted by the feverish miseries of her little son, Fleur continued that search. Sitting beside his cot, while he tossed and murmured and said he was “so ‘ot,” her spirit tossed and murmured and said so, too. Except that, by the doctor’s orders, bathed and in changed garments, she went for an hour’s walk each day, keeping to herself, she was entirely out of the world, so that the heart from which she suffered had no anodyne but that of watching and ministering to Kit. Michael was “ever so sweet” to her; and the fact that she wanted another in his place could never have been guessed from her manner. Her resolution to give nothing away was as firm as ever, but it was a real relief not to encounter the gimletting affection of her father’s eye. She wrote to no one; but she received from Jon a little letter of condolence.
“Wansdon.
“June 22.
“DEAR FLEUR,
“We are so awfully sorry to hear of Kit’s illness. It must be wretched for you. We do hope the poor little chap is over the painful part by now. I remember my measles as two beastly days, and then lots of things that felt nice and soothing all the way down. But I expect he’s too young to be conscious of anything much except being thoroughly uncomfy.
“Rondavel, they say, is all the better for his race. It was jolly seeing it together.
“Good-bye, dear Fleur; with all sympathy,
Your affectionate friend,
“JON.”
She kept it—as she had kept his old letters—but not, like them, about her; there had come to be a dim, round mark on the “affectionate friend” which looked as if it might have dropped from an eye; besides, Michael was liable to see her in any stage of costume. So she kept it in her jewel box, whereof she alone had the key.
She read a good deal to Kit in those days, but still more to herself, conscious that of late she had fallen behind the forward march of literature, and seeking for distraction in an attempt to be up-to-date, rather than in the lives of characters too lively to be alive. They had so much soul, and that so contortionate, that she could not even keep her attention on them long enough to discover why they were not alive. Michael brought her book after book, with the words, “This is supposed to be clever,” or “Here’s the last Nazing,” or “Our old friend Calvin again—not quite so near the ham-bone this time, but as near as makes no matter.” And she would sit with them on her lap and feel gradually that she knew enough to be able to say: “Oh! yes, I’ve read ‘The Gorgons’—it’s marvellously Proustian.” Or “‘Love—the Chameleon’? – well, it’s better than her ‘Green Cave,’ but not up to ‘Souls in the Nude.’” Or, “You MUST read ‘The Whirligig,’ my dear—it gets quite marvellously nowhere.”
She held some converse with Annette, but of the guarded character, suitable between mothers and daughters after a certain age; directed, in fact, towards elucidating problems not unconnected with garb. The future—according to Annette—was dark. Were skirts to be longer or shorter by the autumn? If shorter, she herself would pay no attention; it might be all very well for Fleur, but she had reached the limit herself—at her age she would NOT go above the knee. As to the size of hats—again there was no definite indication. The most distinguished cocotte in Paris was said to be in favour of larger hats, but forces were working in the dark against her—motoring and Madame de Michel–Ange “qui est toute pour la vieille cloche.” Fleur wanted to know whether she had heard anything fresh about shingling. Annette, who was not yet shingled, but whose neck for a long time had trembled on the block, confessed herself “desesperee.” Everything now depended on the Basque cap. If women took to them, shingling would stay; if not, hair might come in again. In any case the new tint would be pure gold; “Et ca sera impossible. Ton pere aurait une apoplexie. En tout cas, cherie, je crains que je suis condamnee aux cheveux longs, jusqu’au jugement dernier. Eh bien, peutetre, on me donnera une bonne petite marque a cause de cela.”
“If you want to shingle, Mother, I should. It’s just father’s conservatism—he doesn’t really know what he likes. It would be a new sensation for him.”
Annette grimaced. “Ma chere; je n’en sais rien, ton pere est capable de tout.”
The man “capable of anything” came every afternoon for half an hour, and would remain seated before the Fragonard, catechising Michael or Annette, and then say, rather suddenly:
“Well, give my love to Fleur; I’m glad the little chap’s better!” Or, “That pain he’s got will be wind, I expect. But I should have what’s-his-name see to it. Give my love to Fleur.” And in the hall he would stand a moment by the coat-sarcophagus, listening. Then, adjusting his hat, he would murmur what sounded like: “Well, there it is!” or: “She doesn’t get enough air,” and go out.
And from the nursery window Fleur would see him, departing at his glum and measured gait, with a compunctious relief. Poor old Dad! Not his fault that he symbolised for her just now the glum and measured paces of domestic virtue. Soames’ hope, indeed, that enforced domesticity might cure her, was not being borne out. After the first two or three anxious days, while Kit’s temperature was still high, it worked to opposite ends. Her feeling for Jon, in which now was an element of sexual passion, lacking before her marriage, grew, as all such feelings grow, without air and exercise for the body and interest for the mind. It flourished like a plant transferred into a hot-house. The sense of having been defrauded fermented in her soul. Were they never to eat of the golden apple—she and Jon? Was it to hang there, always out of reach—amid dark, lustrous leaves, quite unlike an apple-tree’s? She took out her old water-colour box—long now since it had seen the light—and coloured a fantastic tree with large golden fruits.
Michael caught her at it.
“That’s jolly good,” he said. “You ought to keep up your water-colours, old thing.”
Rigid, as if listening for something behind the words, Fleur answered: “Sheer idleness!”
“What’s the fruit?”
Fleur laughed.
“Exactly! But this is the soul of a fruit-tree, Michael—not its body!”
“I might have known,” said Michael, ruefully. “Anyway, may I have it for my study when it’s done? It’s got real feeling.”
Fleur felt a queer gratitude. “Shall I label it ‘The Uneatable Fruit’?”
“Certainly not—it looks highly luscious; you’d have to eat it over a basin, like a mango.”
Fleur laughed again.
“Steward!” she said. And, to Michael bending down to kiss her, she inclined her cheek. At least he should guess nothing of her feelings. And, indeed, the French blood in her never ran cold at one of whom she was fond but did not love; the bitter spice which tinctured the blood of most of the Forsytes preserved the jest of her position. She was still the not unhappy wife of a good comrade and best of fellows, who, whatever she did herself, would never do anything ungenerous or mean. Fastidious recoilings from unloved husbands of which she read in old-fashioned novels, and of which she knew her father’s first wife had been so guilty, seemed to her rather ludicrous. Promiscuity was in the air; a fidelity of the spirit so logical that it extended to the motions of the body, was paleolithic, or at least Victorian and ‘middle-class.’ Fulness of life could never be reached on those lines. And yet the frank paganism, advocated by certain masters of French and English literature, was also debarred from Fleur, by its austerely logical habit of going the whole hog. There wasn’t enough necessary virus in her blood, no sex mania about Fleur; indeed, hereunto, that obsession had hardly come her way at all. But now—new was the feeling, as well as old, that she had for Jon; and the days went by in scheming how, when she was free again, she could see him and hear his voice and touch him as she had touched him by the enclosure rails while the horses went flashing by.
In the meantime Michael was not so unconscious as she thought, for when two people live together, and one of them is still in love, he senses change as a springbok will scent drought. Memories of that lunch, and of his visit to June, were still unpleasantly green. In his public life—that excellent anodyne for its private counterpart—he sought distraction, and made up his mind to go ‘all out’ for his Uncle Hilary’s slum-conversion scheme. Having amassed the needed literature, he began considering to whom he should go first, well aware that public bodies are centrifugal. Round what fine figure of a public man should he form his committee? Sir Timothy Fanfield and the Marquess of Shropshire would come in usefully enough later, but, though well known for their hobbies, they ‘cut no ice’ with the general public. A certain magnetism was needed. There was none in any banker he could think of, less in any lawyer or cleric, and no reforming soldier could be otherwise than discredited, until he had carried his reforms, by which time he would be dead. He would have liked an admiral, but they were all out of reach. Retired Prime Ministers were in too lively request, besides being tarred with the brush of Party; and literary idols would be too old, too busy with themselves, too lazy, or too erratic. There remained doctors, business men, governor generals, dukes, and newspaper proprietors. It was at this point that he consulted his father.
Sir Lawrence, who had also been coming to South Square almost daily during Kit’s illness, focussed the problem with his eyeglass, and said nothing for quite two minutes.
“What do you mean by magnetism, Michael? The rays of a setting or of a rising sun?”
“Both, if possible, Dad.”
“Difficult,” said his progenitor, “difficult. One thing’s certain—you can’t afford cleverness.”
“How?”
“The public have suffered from it too much. Besides, we don’t really like it in this country, Michael. Character, my dear, character!”
Michael groaned.
“Yes, I know,” said Sir Lawrence, “awfully out of date with you young folk.” Then, raising his loose eyebrow abruptly so that his eyeglass fell on to the problem, he added: “Eureka! Wilfred Bentworth! The very man—last of the squires—reforming the slums. It’s what you’d call a stunt.”
“Old Bentworth?” repeated Michael, dubiously.
“He’s only my age—sixty-eight, and got nothing to do with politics.”
“But isn’t he stupid?”
“There speaks your modern! Rather broad in the beam, and looking a little like a butler with a moustache, but—stupid? No. Refused a peerage three times. Think of the effect of that on the public!”
“Wilfred Bentworth? I should never have thought of him—always looked on him as the professional honest man,” murmured Michael.
“But he IS honest!”
“Yes, but when he speaks, he always alludes to it.”
“That’s true,” said Sir Lawerence, “but one must have a defect. He’s got twenty thousand acres, and knows all about fatting stock. He’s on a railway board; he’s the figurehead of his county’s cricket, and chairman of a big hospital. Everybody knows him. He has Royalty to shoot; goes back to Saxon times; and is the nearest thing to John Bull left. In any other country he’d frighten the life out of any scheme, but in England—well, if you can get him, Michael, your job’s half done.”
Michael looked quizzically at his parent. Did Bart quite understand the England of today? His mind roved hurriedly over the fields of public life. By George! He did!
“How shall I approach him, Dad? Will you come on the committee yourself? You know him; and we could go together.”
“If you’d really like to have me,” said Sir Lawrence, almost wistfully, “I will. It’s time I did some work again.”
“Splendid! I think I see your point about Bentworth. Beyond suspicion—has too much already to have anything to gain, and isn’t clever enough to take in anyone if he wanted to.”
Sir Lawrence nodded. “Add his appearance; that counts tremendously in a people that have given up the land as a bad job. We still love to think of beef. It accounts for a good many of our modern leaderships. A people that’s got away from its base, and is drifting after it knows not what, wants beam, beef, beer—or at least port—in its leaders. There’s something pathetic about that, Michael. What’s today—Thursday? This’ll be Bentworth’s board day. Shall we strike while the iron’s hot? We’ll very likely catch him at Burton’s.”
“Good!” said Michael, and they set forth.
“This club,” murmured Sir Lawrence, as they were going up the steps of Burton’s Club, “is confined to travellers, and I don’t suppose Bentworth’s ever travelled a yard. That shows how respected he is. No, I’m wronging him. I remember he commanded his yeomanry in the Boer War. ‘The Squire’ in the Club, Smileman?”
“Yes, Sir Lawrence; just come in.”
The “last of the squires” was, indeed, in front of the tape. His rosy face, with clipped white moustache, and hard, little, white whiskers, was held as if the news had come to him, not he to the news. Banks might inflate and Governments fall, wars break out and strikes collapse, but there would be no bending of that considerable waist, no flickering in the steady blue stare from under eyebrows a little raised at their outer ends. Rather bald, and clipped in what hair was left, never did man look more perfectly shaved; and the moustache ending exactly where the lips ended, gave an extreme firmness to the general good humour of an open-air face.
Looking from him to his own father—thin, quick, twisting, dark, as full of whims as a bog is of snipe—Michael was impressed. A whim, to Wilfred Bentworth, would be strange fowl indeed! ‘However he’s managed to keep out of politics,’ thought Michael, ‘I can’t conceive.’
“‘Squire’—my son—a sucking statesman. We’ve come to ask you to lead a forlorn hope. Don’t smile! You’re ‘for it,’ as they say in this Bonzoid age. We propose to shelter ourselves behind you in the breach.”
“Eh! What? Sit down! What’s all this?”
“It’s a matter of the slums, ‘if you know what I mean,’ as the lady said. But go ahead, Michael!”
Michael went ahead. Having developed his uncle’s thesis and cited certain figures, he embroidered them with as much picturesque detail as he could remember, feeling rather like a fly attacking the flanks of an ox and watching his tail.
“When you drive a nail into the walls, sir,” he ended, “things come out.”
“Good God!” said the squire suddenly. “Good God!”
“One doubts the good, there,” put in Sir Lawrence.
The squire stared.
“Irreverent beggar,” he said. “I don’t know Charwell; they say he’s cracked.”
“Hardly that,” murmured Sir Lawrence; “merely unusual, like most members of really old families.”
The early English specimen in the chair before him twinkled.
“The Charwells, you know,” went on Sir Lawrence, “were hoary when that rascally lawyer, the first Mont, founded us under James the First.”
“Oh!” said the squire. “Are you one of HIS precious creations? I didn’t know.”
“You’re not familiar with the slums, sir?” said Michael, feeling that they must not wander in the mazes of descent.
“What! No. Ought to be, I suppose. Poor devils!”
“It’s not so much,” said Michael, cunningly, “the humanitarian side, as the deterioration of stock, which is so serious.”
“M’m?” said the squire. “Do you know anything about stock-breeding?”
Michael shook his head.
“Well, you can take it from me that it’s nearly all heredity. You could fat a slum population, but you can’t change their character!”
“I don’t think there’s anything very wrong with their character,” said Michael. “The children are predominantly fair, which means, I suppose, that they’ve still got the Anglo–Saxon qualities.”
He saw his father cock an eye. “Quite the diplomat!” he seemed saying.
“Whom have you got in mind for this committee?” asked the squire, abruptly.
“My father,” said Michael; “and we’d thought of the Marquess of Shropshire—”
“Very long in the tooth.”
“But very spry,” said Sir Lawrence. “Still game to electrify the world.”
“Who else?”
“Sir Timothy Fanfield—”
“That fire-eating old buffer! Yes?”
“Sir Thomas Morsell—”
“M’m!”
Michael hurried on: “Or any other medical man you thought better of, sir.”
“There are none. Are you sure about the bugs?”
“Absolutely!”
“Well, I should have to see Charwell. I’m told he can gammon the hind-leg off a donkey.”
“Hilary’s a good fellow,” put in Sir Lawrence; “a really good fellow, ‘squire.’”
“Well, Mont, if I take to him, I’ll come in. I don’t like vermin.”
“A great national movement, sir,” began Michael, “and nobody—”
The squire shook his head.
“Don’t make any mistake,” he said. “May get a few pounds, perhaps—get rid of a few bugs; but national movements—no such things in this country.”…
“Stout fellow,” said Sir Lawrence when they were going down the steps again; “never been enthusiastic in his life. He’ll make a splendid chairman. I think we’ve got him, Michael. You played your bugs well. We’d better try the Marquess next. Even a duke will serve under Bentworth, they know he’s of older family than themselves, and there’s something about him.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Well, he isn’t thinking about himself; he never gets into the air; and he doesn’t give a damn for anyone or anything.”
“There must be something more than that,” said Michael.
“Well, there is. The fact is, he thinks as England really thinks, and not as it thinks it thinks.”
“By Jove!” said Michael. “‘Some’ diagnosis! Shall we dine, sir?”
“Yes, let’s go to the Parthenaeum! When they made me a member there, I used to think I should never go in, but d’you know, I use it quite a lot. It’s more like the East than anything else in London. A Yogi could ask for nothing better. I go in and I sit in a trance until it’s time for me to come out again. There isn’t a sound; nobody comes near me. There’s no vulgar material comfort. The prevailing colour is that of the Ganges. And there’s more inaccessible wisdom in the place than you could find anywhere else in the West. We’ll have the club dinner. It’s calculated to moderate all transports. Lunch, of course, you can’t get if you’ve a friend with you. One must draw the line somewhere at hospitality.”
“Now,” he resumed, when they had finished moderating their transports, “let’s go and see the Marquess! I haven’t set eyes on the old boy since that Marjorie Ferrar affair. We’ll hope he hasn’t got gout.”…
In Curzon Street, they found that the Marquess had finished dinner and gone back to his study.
“Don’t wake him if he’s asleep,” said Sir Lawrence.
“The Marquess is never asleep, Sir Lawrence.”
He was writing when they were ushered in, and stopped to peer at them round the corner of his bureau.
“Ah, young Mont!” he said. “How pleasant!” Then paused rather abruptly. “Nothing to do with my grand-daughter, I trust?”
“Far from it, Marquess. We just want your help in a public work on behalf of the humble. It’s a slum proposition, as the Yanks say.”
The Marquess shook his head.
“I don’t like interfering with the humble; the humbler people are, the more one ought to consider their feelings.”
“We’re absolutely with you there, sir; but let my son explain.”
“Sit down, then.” And the Marquess rose, placed his foot on his chair, and leaning his elbow on his knee, inclined his head to one side. For the second time that evening Michael plunged into explanation.
“Bentworth?” said the Marquess. “His shorthorns are good; a solid fellow, but behind the times.”
“That’s why we want you, Marquess.”
“My dear young Mont, I’m too old.”
“It’s precisely because you’re so young that we came to you.”
“Frankly, sir,” said Michael, “we thought you’d like to be on the committee of appeal, because in my uncle’s policy there’s electrification of the kitchens; we must have someone who’s an authority on that and can keep it to the fore.”
“Ah!” said the Marquess. “Hilary Charwell—I once heard him preach in St. Paul’s—most amusing! What do the slum-dwellers say to electrification?”
“Nothing till it’s done, of course, but once it’s done, it’s everything to them, sir.”
“H’m!” said the Marquess. “H’m! It would appear that there are no flies on your uncle.”
“We hope,” pursued Michael, “that, with electrification, there will soon be no flies on anything else.”
The Marquess nodded. “It’s the right end of the stick. I’ll think of it. My trouble is that I’ve no money; and I don’t like appealing to others without putting down something substantial myself.”
The two Monts looked at each other; the excuse was patent, and they had not foreseen it.
“I suppose,” went on the Marquess, “you don’t know anyone who would buy some lace—point de Venise, the real stuff? Or,” he added, “I’ve a Morland—”
“Have you, sir?” cried Michael. “My father-inlaw was saying only the other day that he wanted a Morland.”
“Has he a good home for it?” said the Marquess, rather wistfully. “It’s a white pony.”
“Oh, yes, sir; he’s a real collector.”
“Any chance of its going to the nation, in time?”
“Quite a good chance, I think.”
“Well, perhaps he’d come and look at it. It’s never changed hands so far. If he would give me the market price, whatever that may be, it might solve the problem.”
“That’s frightfully good of you, sir.”
“Not at all,” said the Marquess. “I believe in electricity, and I detest smoke; this seems a movement in the right direction. It’s a Mr. Forsyte, I think. There was a case—my granddaughter; but that’s a past matter. I trust you’re friends again?”
“Yes, sir; I saw her about a fortnight ago, and it was quite O.K.”
“Nothing lasts with you modern young people,” said the Marquess; “the younger generation seems to have forgotten the war already. Is that good, I wonder? What do YOU say, Mont?”
“‘Tout casse, tout passe,’ Marquess.”
“Oh! I don’t complain,” said the Marquess; “rather the contrary. By the way—on this committee you’ll want a new man with plenty of money.”
“Can you suggest one, sir?”
“My next-door neighbour—a man called Montross—I think his real name is shorter—might possibly serve. He’s made millions, I believe, out of the elastic band—had some patent for making them last only just long enough. I see him sometimes gazing longingly at me—I don’t use them, you know. Perhaps if you mention my name. He has a wife, and no title at present. I should imagine he might be looking for a public work.”
“He sounds,” said Sir Lawrence, “the very man. Do you think we might venture now?”
“Try!” said the Marquess, “try. A domestic character, I’m told. It’s no use doing things by halves; an immense amount of money will be wanted if we are to electrify any considerable number of kitchens. A man who would help substantially towards that would earn his knighthood much better than most people.”
“I agree,” said Sir Lawrence; “a real public service. I suppose we mustn’t dangle the knighthood?”
The Marquess shook the head that was resting on his hand.
“In these days—no,” he said. “Just the names of his colleagues. We can hardly hope that he’ll take an interest in the thing for itself.”
“Well, thank you ever so much, sir. We’ll let you know whether Wilfred Bentworth will take the chair, and how we progress generally.”
The Marquess took his foot down and inclined his head at Michael.
“I like to see young politicians interesting themselves in the future of England, because, in fact, no amount of politics will prevent her having one. By the way, have you had your own kitchen electrified?”
“My wife and I are thinking of it, sir.”
“Don’t think!” said the Marquess. “Have it done!”
“We certainly shall, now.”
“We must strike while the strike is on,” said the Marquess. “If there is anything shorter than the public’s memory, I am not aware of it.”
“Phew!” said Sir Lawrence, on the next doorstep; “the old boy’s spryer than ever. I take it we may assume that the name here was originally Moss. If so, the question is: ‘Have we the wits for this job?’”
And, in some doubt, they scrutinised the mansion before them.
“We had better be perfectly straightforward,” said Michael. “Dwell on the slums, mention the names we hope to get, and leave the rest to him.”
“I think,” said his father, “we had better say ‘got,’ not ‘hope to get.’”
“The moment we mention the names, Dad, he’ll know we’re after his dibs.”
“He’ll know that in any case, my boy.”
“I suppose there’s no doubt about the dibs?”
“Montross, Ltd.! They’re not confined to elastic bands.”
“I should like to make a perfectly plain appeal to his generosity, Dad. There’s a lot of generosity in that blood, you know.”
“We can’t stand just here, Michael, discussing the make-up of the chosen. Ring the bell!”
Michael rang.
“Mr. Montross at home? Thank you. Will you give him these cards, and ask if we might see him for a moment?”
The room into which they were ushered was evidently accustomed to this sort of thing, for, while there was nothing that anyone could take away, there were chairs in which it was possible to be quite comfortable, and some valuable but large pictures and busts.
Sir Lawrence was examining a bust, and Michael a picture, when the door was opened, and a voice said: “Yes, gentlemen?”
Mr. Montross was of short stature, and somewhat like a thin walrus who had once been dark but had gone grey; his features were slightly aquiline, he had melancholy brown eyes, and big drooping grizzly moustaches and eyebrows.
“We were advised to come to you, sir,” began Michael at once, “by your neighbour, the Marquess of Shropshire. We’re trying to form a committee to issue an appeal for a national fund to convert the slums.” And for the third time he plunged into detail.
“And why do you come to ME, gentlemen?” said Mr. Montross, when he had finished.
Michael subdued a stammer.
“Because of your wealth, sir,” he said, simply.
“Good!” said Mr. Montross. “You see, I began in the slums, Mr. Mont—is it? – yes, Mr. Mont—I began there—I know a lot about those people, you know. I thought perhaps you came to me because of that.”
“Splendid, sir,” said Michael, “but of course we hadn’t an idea.”
“Well, those people are born without a future.”
“That’s just what we’re out to rectify, sir.”
“Take them away from their streets and put them in a new country, then—perhaps; but leave them to their streets—” Mr. Montross shook his head. “I know them, you see, Mr. Mont; if these people thought about the future, they could not go on living. And if you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.”
“How about yourself?” said Sir Lawrence. Mr. Montross turned his gaze from Michael to the cards in his hand, then raised his melancholy eyes.
“Sir Lawrence Mont, isn’t it? – I am a Jew—that is different. A Jew will rise from any beginnings, if he is a real Jew. The reason the Polish and the Russian Jews do not rise so easily you can see from their faces—they have too much Slav or Mongol blood. The pure Jew like me rises.”
Sir Lawrence and Michael exchanged a glance. “We like this fellow,” it seemed to say.
“I was a poor boy in a bad slum,” went on Mr. Montross, intercepting the glance, “and I am now—well, a millionaire; but I have not become that, you know, by throwing away my money. I like to help people that will help themselves.”
“Then,” said Michael, with a sigh, “there’s nothing in this scheme that appeals to you, sir?”
“I will ask my wife,” answered Mr. Montross, also with a sigh. “Good-night, gentlemen. Let me write to you.”
The two Monts moved slowly towards Mount Street in the last of the twilight.
“Well?” said Michael.
Sir Lawrence cocked his eyebrow.
“An honest man,” he said; “it’s fortunate for us he has a wife.”
“You mean—?”
“The potential Lady Montross will bring him in. There was no other reason why he should ask her. That makes four, and Sir Timothy’s a ‘sitter’; slum landlords are his betes noires. We only want three more. A bishop one can always get, but I’ve forgotten which it is for the moment; we MUST have a big doctor, and we ought to have a banker, but perhaps your uncle, Lionel Charwell, will do; he knows all about the shady side of finance in the courts, and we could make Alison work for us. And now, my dear, good-night! I don’t know when I’ve felt more tired.”
They parted at the corner, and Michael walked towards Westminster. He passed under the spikes of Buckingham Palace Gardens, and along the stables leading to Victoria Street. All this part had some very nice slums, though of late he knew the authorities had been ‘going for them.’ He passed an area where they had ‘gone’ for them to the extent of pulling down a congery of old houses. Michael stared up at the remnants of walls mosaicked by the unstripped wall papers. What had happened to the tribe outdriven from these ruins; whereto had they taken the tragic lives of which they made such cheerful comedy? He came to the broad river of Victoria Street and crossed it, and, taking a route that he knew was to be avoided, he was soon where women encrusted with age sat on doorsteps for a breath of air, and little alleys led off to unplumbed depths. Michael plumbed them in fancy, not in fact. He stood quite a while at the end of one, trying to imagine what it must be like to live there. Not succeeding, he walked briskly on, and turned into his own square, and to his own habitat with its bay-treed tubs, its Danish roof, and almost hopeless cleanliness. And he suffered from the feeling which besets those who are sensitive about their luck.
‘Fleur would say,’ he thought, perching on the coat-sarcophagus, for he, too, was tired, ‘that those people having no aesthetic sense and no tradition to wash up to, are at least as happy as we are. She’d say that they get as much pleasure out of living from hand to mouth (and not too much mouth), as we do from baths, jazz, poetry and cocktails; and she’s generally right.’ Only, what a confession of defeat! If that were really so, to what end were they all dancing? If life with bugs and flies were as good as life without bugs and flies, why Keating’s powder and all the other aspirations of the poets? Blake’s New Jerusalem was, surely, based on Keating, and Keating was based on a sensitive skin. To say, then, that civilisation was skin-deep, wasn’t cynical at all. People possibly had souls, but they certainly had skins, and progress was real only if thought of in terms of skin!
So ran the thoughts of Michael, perched on the coat-sarcophagus; and meditating on Fleur’s skin, so clear and smooth, he went upstairs.
She had just had her final bath, and was standing at her bedroom window. Thinking of—what? The moon over the square?
“Poor prisoner!” he said, and put his arm round her.
“What a queer sound the town makes at night, Michael. And, if you think, it’s made up of the seven million separate sounds of people going their own separate ways.”
“And yet—the whole lot are going one way.”
“We’re not going any way,” said Fleur, “there’s only pace.”
“There must be direction, my child, underneath.”
“Oh! Of course, change.”
“For better or worse; but that’s direction in itself.”
“Perhaps only to the edge, and over we go.”
“Gadarene swine!”
“Well, why not?”
“I admit,” said Michael unhappily, “it’s all hair-triggerish; but there’s always common-sense.”
“Common-sense—in face of passions!”
Michael slackened his embrace. “I thought you were always on the side of common-sense. Passion? The passion to have? Or the passion to know?”
“Both,” said Fleur. “That’s the present age, and I’m a child of it. You’re not, you know, Michael.”
“Query!” said Michael, letting go of her waist. “But if you want to have or know anything in particular, Fleur, I’d like to be told.”
There was a moment of stillness, before he felt her arm slipping through his, and her lips against his ear.
“Only the moon, my dear. Let’s go to bed.”
On the very day that Fleur was freed from her nursing she received a visit from the last person in her thoughts. If she had not altogether forgotten the existence of one indelibly associated with her wedding-day, she had never expected to see her again. To hear the words: “Miss June Forsyte, ma’am,” and find her in front of the Fragonard, was like experiencing a very slight earthquake.
The silvery little figure had turned at her entrance, extending a hand clad in a fabric glove.
“It’s a flimsy school, that,” she said, pointing her chin at the Fragonard; “but I like your room. Harold Blade’s pictures would look splendid here. Do you know his work?”
Fleur shook her head.
“Oh! I should have thought any—” The little lady stopped, as if she had seen a brink.
“Won’t you sit down?” said Fleur. “Have you still got your gallery off Cork Street?”
“That? Oh, no! It was a hopeless place. I sold it for half what my father gave for it.”
“And what became of that Polo–American—Boris Strumo something—you were so interested in?”
“He! Oh! Gone to pieces utterly. Married, and does purely commercial work. He gets big prices for his things—no good at all. So Jon and his wife—” Again she stopped, and Fleur tried to see the edge from which she had saved her foot.
“Yes,” she said, looking steadily into June’s eyes, which were moving from side to side, “Jon seems to have abandoned America for good. I can’t see his wife being happy over here.”
“Ah!” said June. “Holly told me you went to America, yourself. Did you see Jon over there?”
“Not quite.”
“Did you like America?”
“It’s very stimulating.”
June sniffed.
“Do they buy pictures? I mean, do you think there’d be a chance for Harold Blade’s work there?”
“Without knowing the work—”
“Of course, I forgot; it seems so impossible that you don’t know it.”
She leaned towards Fleur and her eyes shone.
“I do so want you to sit to him, you know; he’d make such a wonderful picture of you. Your father simply must arrange that. With your position in Society, Fleur, especially after that case last year,”—Fleur winced, if imperceptibly—“it would be the making of poor Harold. He’s such a genius,” she added, frowning; “you MUST come and see his work.”
“I should like to,” said Fleur. “Have you seen Jon yet?”
“No. They’re coming on Friday. I hope I shall like her. As a rule, I like all foreigners, except the Americans and the French. I mean—with exceptions, of course.”
“Naturally,” said Fleur. “What time are you generally in?”
“Every afternoon between five and seven are Harold’s hours for going out—he has my studio, you know. I can show you his work better without him; he’s so touchy—all real geniuses are. I want him to paint Jon’s wife, too. He’s extraordinary with women.”
“In that case, I think you should let Jon see him and his work first.”
June’s eyes stared up at her for a moment, and flew off to the Fragonard.
“When will your father come?” she asked.
“Perhaps it would be best for me to come first.”
“Soames naturally likes the wrong thing,” said June, thoughtfully; “but if you tell him you want to be painted—he’s sure to—he always spoils you—”
Fleur smiled.
“Well, I’ll come. Perhaps not this week.” And, in thought, she added: ‘And perhaps, yes—Friday.’
June rose. “I like your house, and your husband. Where is he?”
“Michael? Slumming, probably; he’s in the thick of a scheme for their conversion.”
“How splendid! Can I see your boy?”
“I’m afraid he’s only just over measles.”
June sighed. “It does seem long since I had measles. I remember Jon’s measles so well; I got him his first adventure books.” Suddenly she looked up at Fleur: “Do you like his wife? I think it’s ridiculous his being married so young. I tell Harold he must never marry; it’s the end of adventure.” Her eyes moved from side to side, as if she were adding: “Or the beginning, and I’ve never had it.” And suddenly she held out both hands.
“I shall expect you. I don’t know whether he’ll like your hair!”
Fleur smiled.
“I’m afraid I can’t grow it for him. Oh! Here’s my father coming in!” She had seen Soames pass the window.
“I don’t know that I want to see him unless it’s necessary,” said June.
“I expect he’ll feel exactly the same. If you just go out, he won’t pay any attention.”
“Oh!” said June, and out she went.
Through the window Fleur watched her moving as if she had not time to touch the ground.
A moment later Soames came in.
“What’s that woman want here?” he said. “She’s a stormy petrel.”
“Nothing much, dear; she has a new painter, whom she’s trying to boost.”
“Another of her lame ducks! She’s been famous for them all her life—ever since—” He stopped short of Bosinney’s name. “She’d never go anywhere without wanting something,” he added. “Did she get it?”
“Not more than I did, dear!”
Soames was silent, feeling vaguely that he had been near the proverb, “The kettle and the pot.” What was the use, indeed, of going anywhere unless you wanted something? It was one of the cardinal principles of life.
“I went to see that Morland,” he said; “it’s genuine enough. In fact, I bought it.” And he sank into a reverie…
Acquainted by Michael with the fact that the Marquess of Shropshire had a Morland he wanted to sell, he had said at once: “I don’t know that I want to buy one.”
“I thought you did, sir, from what you were saying the other day. It’s a white pony.”
“That, of course,” said Soames. “What does he want for it?”
“The market price, I believe.”
“There isn’t such a thing. Is it genuine?”
“It’s never changed hands, he says.” Soames brooded aloud. “The Marquess of Shropshire—that’s that red haired baggage’s grandfather, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but perfectly docile. He’d like you to see it, he said.”
“I daresay,” said Soames, and no more at the moment…
“Where’s this Morland?” he asked a few days later.
“At Shropshire House—in Curzon Street, sir.”
“Oh! Ah! Well, I’ll have a look at it.”
Having lunched at Green Street, where he was still staying, he walked round the necessary corners, and sent in his card, on which he had pencilled the words: “My son-inlaw, Michael Mont, says you would like me to see your Morland.”
The butler came back, and, opening a door, said:
“In here, sir. The Morland is over the sideboard.”
In that big dining-room, where even large furniture looked small, the Morland looked smaller, between two still-lifes of a Dutch size and nature. It had a simple scheme—white pony in stable, pigeon picking up some grains, small boy on upturned basket eating apple. A glance told Soames that it was genuine, and had not even been restored—the chiaroscuro was considerable. He stood, back to the light, looking at it attentively. Morland was not so sought after as he used to be; on the other hand, his pictures were distinctive and of a handy size. If one had not much space left, and wanted that period represented, he was perhaps the most repaying after Constable—good Old Cromes being so infernally rare. A Morland was a Morland, as a Millet was a Millet; and would never be anything else. Like all collectors in an experimental epoch, Soames was continually being faced with the advisability of buying not only what was what, but what would remain what. Such modern painters as were painting modern stuff, would, in his opinion, be dead as door-nails before he himself was; besides, however much he tried, he did not like the stuff. Such modern painters, like most of the academicians, as were painting ancient stuff, were careful fellows, no doubt, but who could say whether any of them would live? No! The only safe thing was to buy the dead, and only the dead who were going to live, at that. In this way—for Soames was not alone in his conclusions—the early decease of most living painters was ensured. They were already, indeed, saying that hardly one of them could sell a picture for love or money.
He was looking at the pony through his curved thumb and forefinger when he heard a slight sound; and, turning, saw a short old man in a tweed suit, apparently looking at him in precisely the same way.
Dropping his hand, and deciding not to say “His Grace,” or whatever it was, Soames muttered:
“I was looking at the tail—some good painting in that.”
The Marquess had also dropped his hand, and was consulting the card between his other thumb and forefinger.
“Mr. Forsyte? Yes. My grandfather bought it from the painter. There’s a note on the back. I don’t want to part with it, but these are lean days. Would you like to see the back?”
“Yes,” said Soames; “I always look at their backs.”
“Sometimes,” said the Marquess, detaching the Morland with difficulty, “the best part of the picture.”
Soames smiled down the further side of his mouth; he did not wish the old fellow to receive a false impression that he was ‘kowtowing,’ or anything of that sort.
“Something in the hereditary principle, Mr. Forsyte,” the Marquess went on, with his head on one side, “when it comes to the sale of heirlooms.”
“Oh! I can see it’s genuine,” said Soames, “without looking at the back.”
“Then, if you do want to buy, we can have a simple transaction between gentlemen. You know all about values, I hear.”
Soames put his head to the other side, and looked at the back of the picture. The old fellow’s words were so disarming, that for the life of him he could not tell whether or not to be disarmed.
“‘George Morland to Lord George Ferrar,’” he read, “‘for value received—L80. 1797.’”
“He came into the title later,” said the Marquess. “I’m glad Morland got his money—great rips, our grandfathers, Mr. Forsyte; days of great rips, those.”
Subtly flattered by the thought that “Superior Dosset” was a great rip, Soames expanded slightly.
“Great rip, Morland,” he said. “But there were real painters then, people could buy with confidence—they can’t now.”
“I’m not sure,” said the Marquess, “I’m not sure. The electrification of art may be a necessary process. We’re all in a movement, Mr. Forsyte.”
“Yes,” said Soames, glumly; “but we can’t go on at this rate—it’s not natural. We shall be standing-pat again before long.”
“I wonder. We must keep our minds open, mustn’t we?”
“The pace doesn’t matter so much,” said Soames, astonished at himself, “so long as it leads somewhere.”
The Marquess resigned the picture to the sideboard, and putting his foot up on a chair, leaned his elbow on his knee.
“Did your son-inlaw tell you for what I wanted the money? He has a scheme for electrifying slum kitchens. After all, we ARE cleaner and more humane than our grandfathers, Mr. Forsyte. Now, what do you think would be a fair price?”
“Why not get Dumetrius’ opinion?”
“The Haymarket man? Is his opinion better than yours?”
“That I can’t say,” said Soames, honestly. “But if you mentioned my name, he’d value the picture for five guineas, and might make you an offer himself.”
“I don’t think I should care for it to be known that I was selling pictures.”
“Well,” said Soames, “I don’t want you to get less than perhaps you could. But if I told Dumetrius to buy me a Morland, five hundred would be my limit. Suppose I give you six.”
The Marquess tilted up his beard. “That would be too generous, perhaps. Shall we say five-fifty?”
Soames shook his head.
“We won’t haggle,” he said. “Six. You can have the cheque now, and I’ll take it away. It will hang in my gallery at Mapledurham.”
The Marquess took his foot down, and sighed.
“Really, I’m very much obliged to you. I’m delighted to think it will go to a good home.”
“If you care to come and see it at any time—” Soames checked himself. An old fellow with one foot in the House of Lords and one in the grave, and no difference between them, to speak of—as if he’d want to come!
“That would be delightful,” said the Marquess, with his eyes wandering, as Soames had suspected they would. “Have you your own electric plant there?”
“Yes,” and Soames took out his cheque-book. “May I have a taxi called? If you hang the still-lifes a little closer together, this won’t be missed.”
With that doubtful phrase in their ears, they exchanged goods, and Soames, with the Morland, returned to Green Street in a cab. He wondered a little on the way whether or not the Marquess had ‘done’ him, by talking about a transaction between gentlemen. Agreeable old chap in his way, but quick as a bird, looking through his thumb and finger like that!…
And now, in his daughter’s ‘parlour’ he said: “What’s this about Michael electrifying slum kitchens?”
Fleur smiled, and Soames did not approve of its irony.
“Michael’s over head and ears.”
“In debt?”
“Oh, no! Committed himself to a slum scheme, just as he did to Foggartism. I hardly see him.”
Soames made a sound within himself. Young Jon Forsyte lurked now behind all his thoughts of her. Did she really resent Michael’s absorption in public life, or was it pretence—an excuse for having a private life of her own?
“The slums want attending to, no doubt,” he said. “He must have something to do.”
Fleur shrugged.
“Michael’s too good to live.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Soames; “but he’s—er—rather trustful.”
“That’s not your failing, is it, Dad? You don’t trust ME a bit.”
“Not trust you!” floundered Soames. “Why not?”
“Exactly!”
Soames sought refuge in the Fragonard. Sharp! She had seen into him!
“I suppose June wants me to buy a picture,” he said.
“She wants you to have me painted.”
“Does she? What’s the name of her lame duck?”
“Blade, I think.”
“Never heard of him!”
“Well, I expect you will.”
“Yes,” muttered Soames; “she’s like a limpet. It’s in the blood.”
“The Forsyte blood? You and I, then, too, dear.”
Soames turned from the Fragonard and looked her straight in the eyes.
“Yes; you and I, too.”
“Isn’t that nice?” said Fleur.
In doubting Fleur’s show of resentment at Michael’s new “stunt,” Soames was near the mark. She did not resent it at all. It kept his attention off herself, it kept him from taking up birth control, for which she felt the country was not yet quite prepared, and it had a popular appeal denied to Foggartism. The slums were under one’s nose, and what was under the nose could be brought to the attention even of party politics. Being a town proposition, slums would concern six-sevenths of the vote. Foggartism, based on the country life necessary to national stamina and the growth of food within and overseas, concerned the whole population, but only appealed to one-seventh of the vote. And Fleur, nothing if not a realist, had long grasped the fact that the main business of politicians was to be, and to remain, elected. The vote was a magnet of the first order, and unconsciously swayed every political judgment and aspiration; or, if not, it ought to, for was it not the touchstone of democracy? In the committee, too, which Michael was forming, she saw, incidentally, the best social step within her reach.
“If they want a meeting-place,” she had said, “why not here?”
“Splendid!” answered Michael. “Handy for the House and clubs. Thank you, old thing!”
Fleur had added honestly:
“Oh, I shall be quite glad. As soon as I take Kit to the sea, you can start. Norah Curfew’s letting me her cottage at Loring for three weeks.” She did not add: “And it’s only five miles from Wansdon.”
On the Friday, after lunch, she telephoned to June:
“I’m going to the sea on Monday—I COULD come this afternoon, but I think you said Jon was coming. Is he? Because if so—”
“He’s coming at 4.30, but he’s got to catch a train back at six-twenty.”
“His wife, too?”
“No. He’s just coming to see Harold’s work.”
“Oh! – well—I think I’d better come on Sunday, then.”
“Yes, Sunday will be all right; then Harold will see you. He never goes out on Sunday. He hates the look of it so.”
Putting down the receiver, Fleur took up the time-table. Yes, there was the train! What a coincidence if she happened to take it to make a preliminary inspection of Norah Curfew’s cottage! Not even June, surely, would mention their talk on the ‘phone.
At lunch she did not tell Michael she was going—he might want to come, too, or at least to see her off. She knew he would be at ‘the House’ in the afternoon, she would just leave a note to say that she had gone to make sure the cottage would be in order for Monday. And after lunch she bent over and kissed him between the eyes, without any sense of betrayal. A sight of Jon was due to her after these dreary weeks! Any sight of Jon was always due to her who had been defrauded of him. And, as the afternoon drew on, and she put her night things into her dressing-case, a red spot became fixed in each cheek, and she wandered swiftly, her hands restive, her spirit homeless. Having had tea, and left the note giving her address—an hotel at Nettlefold—she went early to Victoria Station. There, having tipped the guard to secure emptiness, she left her bag in a corner seat and took up her stand by the book-stall, where Jon must pass with his ticket. And, while she stood there, examining the fiction of the day, all her faculties were busy with reality. Among the shows and shadows of existence, an hour and a half of real life lay before her. Who could blame her for filching it back from a filching Providence? And if anybody could, she didn’t care! The hands of the station clock moved on, and Fleur gazed at this novel after that, all of them full of young women in awkward situations, and vaguely wondered whether they were more awkward than her own. Three minutes to the time! Wasn’t he coming after all? Had that wretched June kept him for the night? At last in despair she caught up a tome called “Violin Obbligato,” which at least would be modern, and paid for it. And then, as she was receiving her change, she saw him hastening. Turning, she passed through the wicket, walking quickly, knowing that he was walking more quickly. She let him see her first.
“Fleur!”
“Jon! Where are you going?”
“To Wansdon.”
“Oh! And I’m going to Nettlefold, to see a cottage at Loring for my baby. Here’s my bag, in here—quick! We’re off!”
The door was banged to, and she held out both her hands.
“Isn’t this queer, and jolly?”
Jon held the hands, and dropped them rather suddenly.
“I’ve just been to see June. She’s just the same—bless her!”
“Yes, she came round to me the other day; wants me to be painted by her present pet.”
“You might do worse. I said he should paint Anne.”
“Really? Is he good enough for HER?”
And she was sorry; she hadn’t meant to begin like that! Still—must begin somehow—must employ lips which might otherwise go lighting on his eyes, his hair, HIS lips! And she rushed into words: Kit’s measles, Michael’s committee, “Violin Obbligato,” and the Proustian School; Val’s horses, Jon’s poetry, the smell of England—so important to a poet—anything, everything, in a sort of madcap medley.
“You see, Jon, I must talk; I’ve been in prison for a month.” And all the time she felt that she was wasting minutes that might have been spent with lips silent and heart against his, if the heart, as they said, really extended to the centre of the body. And all the time, too, the proboscis of her spirit was scenting, searching for the honey and the saffron of his spirit. Was there any for her, or was it all kept for that wretched American girl he had left behind him, and to whom—alas! – he was returning? But Jon gave her no sign. Unlike the old impulsive Jon, he had learned secrecy. By a whim of memory, whose ways are so inscrutable, she remembered being taken, as a very little girl, to Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road to her great-aunt Hester—an old still figure in black Victorian lace and jet, and a Victorian chair, with a stilly languid voice, saying to her father: “Oh, yes, my dear; your Uncle Jolyon, before he married, was very much in love with our great friend Alice Read; but she was consumptive, you know, and of course he felt he couldn’t marry her—it wouldn’t have been prudent, he felt, because of children. And then she died, and he married Edith Moor.” Funny how that had stuck in her ten-year-old mind! And she stared at Jon. Old Jolyon—as they called him in the family—had been his grandfather. She had seen his photograph in Holly’s album—a domed head, a white moustache, eyes deep-set under the brows, like Jon’s. “It wouldn’t have been prudent!” How Victorian! Was Jon, too, Victorian? She felt as if she would never know what Jon was. And she became suddenly cautious. A single step too far, or too soon, and he might be gone from her again for good! He was not—no, he was not modern! For all she knew, there might be something absolute, not relative, in his “make-up,” and to Fleur the absolute was strange, almost terrifying. But she had not spent six years in social servitude without learning to adjust herself swiftly to the playing of a new part. She spoke in a calmer tone, almost a drawl; her eyes became cool and quizzical. What did Jon think about the education of boys—before he knew where he was, of course, he would be having one himself? It hurt her to say that, and, while saying it, she searched his face; but it told her nothing.
“We’ve put Kit down for Winchester. Do you believe in the Public Schools, Jon? Or do you think they’re out of date?”
“Yes; and a good thing, too.”
“How?”
“I mean I should send him there.”
“I see,” said Fleur. “Do you know, Jon, you really have changed. You wouldn’t have said that, I believe, six years ago.”
“Perhaps not. Being out of England makes you believe in dams. Ideas can’t be left to swop around in the blue. In England they’re not, and that’s the beauty of it.”
“I don’t care what happens to ideas,” said Fleur, “but I don’t like stupidity. The Public Schools—”
“Oh, no; not really. Certain things get cut and dried there, of course; but then, they ought to.”
Fleur leaned forward, and with faint malice said: “Have you become a moralist, my dear?”
Jon answered glumly:
“Why, no—no more than reason!”
“Do you remember our walk by the river?”
“I told you before—I remember everything.”
Fleur restrained her hand from a heart which had given a jump.
“We nearly quarrelled because I said I hated people for their stupid cruelties, and wanted them to stew in their own juice.”
“Yes; and I said I pitied them. Well?”
“Repression is stupid, you know, Jon.” And, by instinct, added: “That’s why I doubt the Public Schools. They teach it.”
“They’re useful socially, Fleur,” and his eyes twinkled.
Fleur pursed her lips. She did not mind. But she would make him sorry for that; because his compunction would be a trump card in her hand.
“I know perfectly well,” she said, “that I’m a snob—I was called so publicly.”
“What!”
“Oh, yes; there was a case about it.”
“Who dared?”
“Oh! my dear, that’s ancient history. But of course you knew—Francis Wilmot must have—”
Jon made a horrified gesture.
“Fleur, you never thought I—”
“Oh, but, of course! Why not?” A trump, indeed!
Jon seized her hand.
“Fleur, say you knew I didn’t—”
Fleur shrugged her shoulders. “My dear, you have lived too long among the primitives. Over here we stab each other daily, and no harm done.”
He dropped her hand, and she looked at him from beneath her lids.
“I was only teasing, Jon. It’s good for primitives to have their legs pulled. Parlons d’autre chose. Have you found your place, to grow things, yet?”
“Practically.”
“Where?”
“About four miles from Wansdon, on the south side of the Downs—Green Hill Farm. Fruit—a lot of glass; and some arable.”
“Why, it must be close to where I’m going with Kit. That’s on the sea and only five miles from Wansdon. No, Jon; don’t be alarmed. We shall only be there three weeks at most.”
“Alarmed! It’s very jolly. We shall see you there. Perhaps we shall meet at Goodwood anyway.”
“I’ve been thinking—” Fleur paused, and again she stole a look. “We CAN be steady friends, Jon, can’t we?”
Jon answered, without looking up. “I hope so.”
If his face had cleared, and his voice had been hearty, how different—how much slower—would have been the beating of her heart!
“Then that’s all right,” she murmured. “I’ve been wanting to say that to you ever since Ascot. Here we are, and here we shall be—and anything else would be silly, wouldn’t it? This is not the romantic age.”
“H’m!”
“What do you mean by that unpleasant noise?”
“I always think it’s rot to talk about ages being this or that. Human feelings remain the same.”
“Do you really think they do? The sort of life we live affects them. Nothing’s worth more than a year or two, Jon. I found that out. But I forgot—you hate cynicism. Tell me about Anne. Is she still liking England?”
“Loving it. You see, she’s pure Southern, and the South’s old still, too, in a way—or some of it is. What she likes here is the grass, the birds, and the villages. She doesn’t feel homesick. And, of course, she loves the riding.”
“I suppose she’s picking up English fast?”
And to his stare she made her face quite candid.
“I should like you to like her,” he said, wistfully.
“Oh! of course I shall, when I know her.”
But a fierce little wave of contempt passed up from her heart. What did he think she was made of? Like her! A girl who lay in his arms, who would be the mother of his children. Like her! And she began to talk about the preservation of Box Hill. And all the rest of the way till Jon got out at Pulborough, she was more wary than a cat—casual and friendly, with clear candid eyes, and a little tremble up at him when she said:
“Au revoir, then, at Goodwood, if not before! This HAS been a jolly accident!”
But on the way to her hotel, driving in a station fly through air that smelled of oysters, she folded her lips between her teeth, and her eyes were damp beneath her frowning brows.
But Jon, who had over five miles to walk, started with the words of the old English song beating a silent tattoo within him:
“How happy could I be with either,
Were t’other dear charmer away!”
To such confusion had he come, contrary to intention, but in accordance with the impulses of a loyal disposition. Fleur had been his first love, Anne his second. But Anne was his wife, and Fleur the wife of another. A man could not be in love with two women at once, so he was tempted to conclude that he was not in love with either. Why, then, the queer sensations of his circulatory system? Was popular belief in error? A French, or Old–English way of looking at his situation, did not occur to him. He had married Anne, he loved Anne—she was a darling! There it ended! Why, then, walking along a grassy strip beside the road, did he think almost exclusively of Fleur? However cynical, or casual, or just friendly she might seem, she no more deceived him than she at heart wished to. He knew she had her old feeling for him, just as he knew he had it, or some of it, for her. But then he had feeling for another, too. Jon was not more of a fool than other men, nor was he more self-deceiving. Like other men before him, he intended to face what was, and to do what he believed to be right; or, rather, not to do what he believed to be wrong. Nor had he any doubt as to what was wrong. His trouble was more simple. It consisted of not having a control of his thoughts and feelings greater than that with which any man has hitherto been endowed. After all, it had not been his fault that he had once been wholly in love with Fleur, nor that she had been wholly in love with him; not his fault that he had met her again, nor that she was still in love with him. Nor again was it his fault that he was in love with his native land and tired of being out of it.
It was not his fault that he had fallen in love a second time or married the object of his affections. Nor, so far as he could see, was it his fault that the sight and the sound and the scent and the touch of Fleur had revived some of his former feelings. He was none the less disgusted at his double-heartedness; and he walked now fast, now slow, while the sun shifted over and struck on a neck always sensitive since his touch of the sun in Granada. Presently, he stopped and leaned over a gate. He had not been long enough back in England to have got over its beauty on a fine day. He was always stopping and leaning over gates, or in other ways, as Val called it, mooning!
Though it was already the first day of the Eton and Harrow Match, which his father had been wont to attend so religiously, hay harvest was barely over, and the scent of stacked hay still in the air. The Downs lay before him to the south, lighted along their northern slopes. Red Sussex cattle were standing under some trees close to the gate, dribbling and slowly swishing their tails. And away over there he could see others lingering along the hill-side. Peace lay thick on the land. The corn in that next field had an unearthly tinge, neither green nor gold, under the slanting sunlight. And in the restful beauty of the evening Jon could well perceive the destructiveness of love—an emotion so sweet, restless, and thrilling, that it drained Nature of its colour and peace, made those who suffered from it bores to their fellows and useless to the life of everyday. To work—and behold Nature in her moods! Why couldn’t he get away to that, away from women? Why—like Holly’s story of the holiday slum girl, whose family came to see her off by train—why couldn’t he just get away and say: “Thank Gawd! I’m shut o’ that lot!”
The midges were biting, and he walked on. Should he tell Anne that he had come down with Fleur? Not to tell her was to stress the importance of the incident; but to tell her was somehow disagreeable to him. And then he came on Anne herself, without a hat, sitting on a gate, her hands in the pockets of her jumper. Very lissome and straight she looked.
“Lift me down, Jon!”
He lifted her down in a prolonged manner. And, almost instantly, said:
“Whom do you think I travelled with? Fleur Mont. We ran up against each other at Victoria. She’s taking her boy to Loring next week, to convalesce him.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m in love with you, Jon.” She tilted her chin, so that her straight and shapely nose looked a little more sudden.
“I don’t see—” began Jon.
“You see she’s another. I saw that at Ascot. I reckon I’m old-fashioned, Jon.”
“That’s all right, so am I.”
She turned her eyes on him, eyes not quite civilised, nor quite American, and put her arm round his waist.
“Rondavel’s off his feed. Greenwater’s very upset about it.”
“‘Very,’ Anne.”
“Well, you can’t pronounce ‘very’ as I pronounce it, any more than I can as you do.”
“Sorry. But you told me to remind you. It’s silly, though: why shouldn’t you speak your own lingo?”
“Because I want to speak like you.”
“Want, then, not waunt.”
“Damn!”
“All right, darling. But isn’t your lingo just as good?”
Anne disengaged her arm.
“No, you don’t think that. You’re awfully glad to be through with the American accent—you ARE, Jon.”
“It’s natural to like one’s own country’s best.”
“Well, I do want—there! – to speak English. I’m English by law, now, and by descent, all but one French great-grandmother. If we have children, they’ll be English, and we’re going to live in England. Shall you take Greenhill Farm?”
“Yes. And I’m not going to play at things any more. I’ve played twice, and this time I’m going all out.”
“You weren’t playing in North Carolina.”
“Not exactly. But this is different. It didn’t matter there. – What are peaches, anyway? It does here—it matters a lot. I mean to make it pay.”
“Bully!” said Anne: “I mean—er—splendid. But I never believed you’d say that.”
“Paying the only proof. I’m going in for tomatoes, onions, asparagus, and figs; and I mean to work the arable for all it’s worth; and if I can get any more land, I will.”
“Jon! What energy!” And she caught hold of his chin.
“All right!” said Jon, grimly. “You watch out, and see if I don’t mean it.”
“And you’ll leave the house to me? I’ll make it just too lovely!”
“That’s a bargain.”
“Kiss me, then.”
With her lips parted and her eyes looking into his, with just that suspicion of a squint which made them so enticing, Jon thought: ‘It’s quite simple. The other thing’s absurd. Why, of course!’ He kissed her forehead and lips, but, even while he did so, he seemed to see Fleur trembling up at him, and to hear her words: “Au revoir! It WAS a jolly accident!”
“Let’s go and have a look at Rondavel,” he said.
In his box, when those two went in, the grey colt stood by the far wall, idly contemplating a carrot in the hand of Greenwater.
“Clean off!” said the latter over his shoulder: “It’s goodbye to Goodwood! The colt’s sick.”
What had Fleur said: “Au revoir at Goodwood, if not before!”
“Perhaps it’s just a megrim, Greenwater,” said Anne.
“No, Ma’am; the horse has got a temperature. Well, we’ll win the Middle Park Plate with him yet!”
Jon passed his hand over the colt’s quarter: “Poor old son! Funny! You can tell he’s not fit by the feel of his coat!”
“You can that,” replied Greenwater: “But where’s he got it from? There isn’t a sick horse that I know of anywhere about. If there’s anything in the world more perverse than horses! – We didn’t train him for Ascot, and he goes and wins. We meant him for Goodwood, and he’s gone amiss. Mr. Dartie wants me to give him some South African stuff I never heard of.”
“They have a lot of horse sickness out there,” said Jon.
“See,” said the trainer, stretching his hand up to the colt’s ears; “no kick in him at all! Looks like blackberry sickness out of season. I’d give a good deal to know how he picked it up.”
The two young people left him standing by the colt’s dejected head, his dark, hawk-like face thrust forward, as if trying to read the sensations within his favourite.
That night, Jon went up, bemused by Val’s opinions on Communism, the Labour Party, the qualities inherent in the off-spring of “Sleeping Dove,” with a dissertation on a horse-sickness in South Africa. He entered a dim bedroom. A white figure was standing at the window. It turned when he came near and flung its arms round him.
“Jon, you mustn’t stop loving me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because men do. Besides, it’s not the fashion to be faithful.”
“Bosh!” said Jon, gently; “it’s just as much the fashion as it ever was.”
“I’m glad we shan’t be going to Goodwood. I’m afraid of her. She’s so clever.”
“Fleur?”
“You WERE in love with her, Jon; I feel it in my bones. I wish you’d told me.”
Jon leaned beside her in the window.
“Why?” he said, dully.
She did not answer. They stood side by side in the breathless warmth, moths passed their faces, a night-jar churred in the silence, and now and then, from the stables, came the stamp of a sleepless horse. Suddenly Anne stretched out her hand:
“Over there—somewhere—she’s awake, and wanting you. I’m not happy, Jon.”
“Don’t be morbid, darling!”
“But I’m NOT happy, Jon.”
Like a great child—slim within his arm, her cheek pressed to his, her dark earlock tickling his neck! And suddenly her lips came round to his, vehement.
“Love me!”
But when she was asleep, Jon lay wakeful. Moonlight had crept in and there was a ghost in the room—a ghost in a Goya dress, twirling, holding out its skirts, beckoning with its eyes, and with its lips seeming to whisper: “Me, too! Me, too!”
And, raising himself on his elbow, he looked resolutely at the dark head beside him. No! There was—there should be nothing but that in the room! Reality—reality!
On the following Monday at breakfast Val said to Holly: Listen to this!
“DEAR DARTIE, –
“I think I can do you a good turn. I have some information that concerns your ‘Sleeping Dove’ colt and your stable generally, worth a great deal more than the fifty pounds which I hope you may feel inclined to pay for it. Are you coming up to town this week-end? If so, can I see you at the Brummell? Or I could come to Green Street if you prefer it. It’s really rather vital.
“Sincerely yours,
“AUBREY STAINFORD.”
“That fellow again!”
“Pay no attention, Val.”
“I don’t know,” said Val, glumly. “Some gang or other are taking altogether too much interest in the colt. Greenwater’s very uneasy. I’d better get to the bottom of it, if I can.”
“Consult your uncle, then, first. He’s still at your mother’s.”
Val made a wry face.
“Yes,” said Holly, “but he’ll know what you can do and what you can’t. You really mustn’t deal single-handed with people like that.”
“All right, then. There’s hanky-panky in the wind, I’m sure. Somebody knew all about the colt at Ascot.”
He took the morning train and arrived at his mother’s at lunch time. She and Annette were lunching-out, but Soames, who was lunching-in, crossed a cold hand with his nephew’s.
“Have you still got that young man and his wife staying with you?”
“Yes,” said Val.
“Isn’t he ever going to do anything?”
On being told that Jon was about to do something, Soames grunted.
“Farm—in England? What’s he want to do that for? He’ll only throw his money away. Much better go back to America, or some other new country. Why doesn’t he try South Africa? His half-brother died out there.”
“He won’t leave England again, Uncle Soames—seems to have developed quite a feeling for the old country.”
Soames masticated.
“Amateurs,” he said, “all the young Forsytes. How much has he got a year?”
“The same as Holly and her half-sister—only about two thousand, so long as his mother’s alive.”
Soames looked into his wineglass and took from it an infinitesimal piece of cork. His mother! She was in Paris again, he was told. SHE must have three thousand a year, now, at least. He remembered when she had nothing but a beggarly fifty pounds a year, and that fifty pounds too much, putting the thought of independence into her head. In Paris again! The Bois de Boulogne, that Green Niobe—all drinking water, he remembered it still, and the scene between them, there…
“What have YOU come up for?” he said to Val.
“This, Uncle Soames.”
Soames fixed on his nose the glasses he had just begun to need for reading purposes, read the letter, and returned it to his nephew.
“I’ve known impudence in my time, but this chap—!”
“What do you recommend me to do?”
“Pitch it into the waste-paper basket.”
Val shook his head.
“Stainford dropped in on me one day at Wansdon. I told him nothing; but you remember we couldn’t get more than fours at Ascot, and it was Rondavel’s first outing. And now the colt’s sick just before Goodwood; there’s a screw loose somewhere.”
“What do you think of doing, then?”
“I thought I’d see him, and that perhaps you’d like to be present, to keep me from making a fool of myself.”
“There’s something in that,” said Soames. “This fellow’s the coolest ruffian I ever came across.”
“He’s pedigree stock, Uncle Soames. Blood will tell.”
“H’m!” muttered Soames. “Well, have him here, if you must see him, but clear the room first and tell Smither to put away the umbrellas.”
Having seen Fleur and his grandson off to the sea that morning, he felt flat, especially as, since her departure, he had gathered from the map of Sussex that she would be quite near to Wansdon and the young man who was always now at the back of his thoughts. The notion of a return match with “this ruffian” Stainford, was, therefore, in the nature of a distraction. And, as soon as the messenger was gone, he took a chair whence he could see the street. On second thoughts he had not spoken about the umbrellas—it was not quite dignified; but he had counted them. The day was warm and rainy, and, through the open window of that ground-floor dining-room, the air of Green Street came in, wetted and a little charged with the scent of servants’ dinners.
“Here he is,” he said, suddenly, “languid beggar!”
Val crossed from the sideboard and stood behind his Uncle’s chair. Soames moved uneasily. This fellow and his nephew had been at College together, and had—goodness knew what other vices in common.
“By Jove!” he heard Val mutter: “He does look ill.”
The “languid beggar” wore the same dark suit and hat, and the same slow elegance that Soames had first noted on him; a raised eyebrow and the half-lidded eyes despised as ever the bitter crow’s-footed exhaustion on his face. And that indefinable look of a damned soul, lost to all but its contempt for emotion, awakened within Soames, just as it had before, the queerest little quirk of sympathy.
“He’d better have a drink,” he said.
Val moved back to the sideboard.
They heard the bell, voices in the hall; then Smither appeared, red, breathless, deprecatory.
“Will you see that gentleman, sir, who took the you know what, sir?”
“Show him in, Smither.”
Val turned towards the door. Soames remained seated.
The “languid beggar” entered, nodded to Val, and raised his eyebrows at Soames, who said:
“How d’you do, Mr. Stainford?”
“Mr. Forsyte, I think?”
“Whisky or brandy, Stainford?”
“Brandy, thanks.”
“Smoke, won’t you? You wanted to see me. My uncle here is my solicitor.”
Soames saw Stainford smile. It was as if he had said: “Really! How wonderful these people are!” He lighted the proffered cigar, and there was silence.
“Well?” said Val, at last.
“I’m sorry your ‘Sleeping Dove’ colt’s gone amiss, Dartie.”
“How did you know that?”
“Exactly! But before I tell you, d’you mind giving me fifty pounds and your word that my name’s not mentioned.”
Soames and his nephew stared in silence. At last Val said:
“What guarantee have I that your information’s worth fifty pounds, or even five?”
“The fact that I knew your colt had gone amiss.”
However ignorant of the turf, Soames could see that the fellow had scored.
“You mean you know where the leakage is?”
Stainford nodded.
“We were College pals,” said Val. “What would you expect me to do if I knew that about a stable of yours?”
“My dear Dartie, there’s no analogy. You’re a man of means, I’m not.”
Trite expressions were knocking against Soames’ palate. He swallowed them. What use in talking to a chap like this!
“Fifty pounds is a lot,” said Val. “Is your information of real value?”
“Yes—on my word of honour.”
Soames sniffed audibly.
“If I buy this leakage from you,” said Val, “can you guarantee that it won’t break out, in another direction?”
“Highly improbable that two pipes will leak in your stable.”
“I find it hard to believe there’s one.”
“Well, there is.”
Soames saw his nephew move up to the table and begin counting over a roll of notes.
“Tell me what you know, first, and I’ll give them to you if on the face of it your information’s probable. I won’t mention your name.”
Soames saw the languid eyebrows lift.
“I’m not so distrustful as you, Dartie. Get rid of a boy called Sinnet—that’s where your stable leaks.”
“Sinnet?” said Val; “My best boy? What proof have you?”
Stainford took out a dirty piece of writing paper and held it up. Val read aloud:
“‘The grey colt’s amiss all right—he’ll be no good for Goodwood.’ All right?” he repeated: “Does that mean he engineered it?”
Stainford shrugged his shoulders.
“Can I have this bit of paper?” said Val.
“If you’ll promise not to show it to him.”
Val nodded and took the paper.
“Do you know his writing?” asked Soames: “All this is very fishy.”
“Not yet,” said Val, and to Soames’ horror, put the notes into the outstretched hand. The little sigh the fellow gave was distinctly audible. Val said suddenly:
“Did you get at him the day you came down to see me?”
Stainford smiled faintly, shrugged his shoulders again and turned to the door. “Good-bye, Dartie,” he said.
Soames’ mouth fell open. The return match was over! The fellow had gone!
“Here!” he said. “Don’t let him go like that. It’s monstrous.”
“Dam’ funny!” said Val suddenly, and began to laugh. “Oh! dam’ funny!”
“Funny!” muttered Soames. “I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”
“Never mind, Uncle Soames. He’s taken fifty of the best of me, but it was worth it. Sinnet, my best boy!”
Soames continued to mutter:
“To corrupt one of your men, and get you to pay him for it. It’s the limit.”
“That’s what tickles me, Uncle Soames. Well, I’ll go back to Wansdon now, and get rid of that young blackguard.”
“I shouldn’t have any scruple, if I were you, in telling him exactly how you got the knowledge.”
“Well, I don’t know. Stainford’s on his beam ends. I’m not a moralist, but I think I’ll keep my word to him.”
For a moment Soames said nothing; then, with a sidelong glance at his nephew:
“Well, perhaps. But he ought to be locked up.”
With those words he walked into the hall and counted the umbrellas. Their number was undiminished, and taking one of them, he went out. He felt in need of air. With the exception of that Elderson affair, he had encountered little flagrant dishonesty in his time, and that only in connection with the lower classes. One could forgive a poor devil of a tramp, or even a clerk or domestic servant. They had temptations, and no particular traditions to live up to. But what was coming to the world, if you couldn’t rely on gentlemen in a simple matter like honesty! Every day one read cases, and for every one that came into Court one might be sure there were a dozen that didn’t! And when you added all the hanky-panky in the City, all the dubious commissions, bribery of the police, sale of honours—though he believed that had been put a stop to—all the dicky-dealing over contracts, it was enough to make one’s hair stand on end. They might sneer at the past, and no doubt there was more temptation in the present, but something simple and straightforward seemed to have perished out of life. By hook or by crook people had to get their ends, would no longer wait for their ends to come to them. Everybody was in such a hurry to make good, or rather bad! Get money at all costs-look at the quack remedies they sold and the books they published now-a-days, without caring for truth or decency or anything. And the advertisements! Good Lord!
In the gloom of these reflections he had come to Westminster. He might as well call in at South Square and see if Fleur had telephoned her arrival at the sea! In the hall eight hats of differing shape and colour lay on the coat-sarcophagus. What the deuce was going on? A sound of voices came from the dining-room, then the peculiar drone of somebody making a speech. Some meeting or other of Michael’s, and the measles only just out of the house!
“What’s going on here?” he said to Coaker.
“Something to do with the slums, sir. I believe; they’re converting of them, I heard Mr. Mont say.”
“Don’t put my hat with those,” said Soames; “have you had any message from your mistress?”
“Yes, sir. They had a good journey. The little dog was sick, I believe. He will have his own way.”
“Well,” said Soames, “I’ll go up and wait in the study.”
On getting there, he noticed a water-colour drawing on the bureau: a tree with large dark green leaves and globular golden fruit, against a silvery sort of background—peculiar thing, amateurish, but somehow arresting. Underneath, he recognized his daughter’s handwriting:
“The Golden Apple: F.M. 1926.”
Really he had no idea that she could use water-colour as well as that! She was a clever little thing! And he put the drawing up on end where he could see it better! Apple? Passion-fruit, he would have said, of an exaggerated size. Thoroughly uneatable—they had a glow like lanterns. Forbidden fruit! Eve might have given them to Adam. Was this thing symbolic? Did it fancifully reveal her thoughts? And in front of it he fell into sombre mood, which was broken by the opening of the door. Michael had entered.
“Hallo, sir!”
“Hallo!” replied Soames: “What’s this thing?”
In an Age governed almost exclusively by Committees, Michael knew fairly well what Committees were governed by. A Committee must not meet too soon after food, for then the Committeemen would sleep; nor too soon before food, because then the Committeemen would be excitable. The Committeemen should be allowed to say what they liked, without direction, until each was tired of hearing the others say it. But there must be some one present, preferably the Chairman, who said little, thought more, and could be relied on to be awake when that moment was reached, whereupon a middle policy voiced by him to exhausted receivers, would probably be adopted.
Having secured his bishop, and Sir Godfrey Bedwin, who specialised in chests, and failed with his Uncle Lionel Charwell, who had scented the work destined for Lady Alison his wife, Michael convened the first meeting for three o’clock in South Square on the day of Fleur’s departure for the sea. Hilary was present, and a young woman, to take them down. Surprise came early. They all attended, and fell into conversation around the Spanish table. It was plain to Michael that the bishop and Sir Timothy Fanfield had expectations of the Chair; and he kicked his father under the table, fearing that one of them might propose the other in the hope of the other proposing the one. Sir Lawrence then murmured:
“My dear, that’s my shin.”
“I know,” muttered Michael; “shall we get on with it?”
Dropping his eyeglass, Sir Lawrence said:
“Exactly! Gentlemen, I propose that the Squire takes the Chair. Will you second that, Marquess?”
The Marquess nodded.
The blow was well received, and the Squire proceeded to the head of the table. He began as follows:—
“I won’t beat about the bush. You all know as much about it as I do, which is precious little. The whole thing is the idea of Mr. Hilary Charwell here, so I’ll ask him to explain it to us. The slums are C3 breeders, and verminous into the bargain, and anything we can do to abate this nuisance, I, for one, should be happy to do. Will you give tongue, Mr. Charwell?”
Hilary dropped at once into a warm, witty and thorough exposition of his views, dwelling particularly on the human character of a problem “hitherto,” he said, “almost exclusively confined to Borough Councils, Bigotry and Blue Books.” That he had made an impression was instantly demonstrated by the buzz of voices. The Squire, who was sitting with his head up and his heels down, his knees apart and his elbows close to his sides, muttered:
“Let it rip! Can we smoke, Mont?” And, refusing the cigars and cigarettes proffered by Michael, he filled a pipe, and smoked in silence for several minutes.
“Then we’re all agreed,” he said, suddenly, “that what we want to do is to form this Fund.”
No one having as yet expressed any such opinion, this was the more readily assented to.
“In that case, we’d better get down to it and draw up our appeal.” And, pointing his pipe at Sir Lawrence, he added:
“You’ve got the gift of the gab with a pen, Mont; suppose you and the bishop and Charwell here go into another room and knock us out a draft. Pitch it strong, but no waterworks.”
When the designated three had withdrawn, conversation broke out again. Michael could hear the Squire and Sir Godfrey Bedwin talking of distemper, and the Marquess discussing with Mr. Montross the electrification of the latter’s kitchen. Sir Timothy Fanfield was staring at the Goya. He was a tall, lean man of about seventy, with a thin, hooked nose, brown face, and large white moustaches, who had been in the Household Cavalry and come out of it.
A little afraid of his verdict on the Goya, Michael said hastily:
“Well, Sir Timothy, the coal strike doesn’t end.”
“No; they ought to be shot. I’m all for the working man; but I’d shoot his leaders tomorrow.”
“What about the mine-owners?” queried Michael.
“I’d shoot their leaders, too. We shall never have industrial peace till we shoot somebody. Fact is, we didn’t shoot half enough people during the war. Conshies and Communists and Profiteers—I’d have had ’em all against a wall.”
“I’m very glad you came on our Committee, sir,” Michael murmured; “we want someone with strong views.”
“Ah!” said Sir Timothy, and pointing his chin towards the end of the table, he lowered his voice. “Between ourselves—bit too moderate, the Squire. You want to take these scoundrels by the throat. I knew a chap that owned half a slum and had the face to ask me to subscribe to a Missionary Fund in China. I told the fellow he ought to be shot. Impudent beggar—he didn’t like it.”
“No?” said Michael; and at this moment the young woman pulled his sleeve. Was she to take anything down?
Not at present—Michael thought.
Sir Timothy was again staring at the Goya.
“Family portrait?” he said.
“No,” said Michael; it’s a Goya.”
“Deuce it is! Goy is Jewish for Christian. Female Christian—what?”
“No, sir. Name of the Spanish painter.”
“No idea there were any except Murillo and Velasquez—never see anything like THEM now-a-days. These modern painters, you know, ought to be tortured. I say,” and again he lowered his voice, “bishop! – what! – they’re always running some hare of their own—Anti–Birth-Control, or Missions of sorts. We want to cut this C3 population off at the root. Stop ’em having babies by hook or crook; and then shoot a slum landlord or two—deal with both ends. But they’ll jib at it, you’ll see. D’you know anything about ants?”
“Only that they’re busy,” said Michael.
“I’ve made a study of ’em. Come down to my place in Hampshire, and I’ll show you my slides—most interestin’ insects in the world.” He lowered his voice again:
“Who’s that talkin’ to the old Marquess? What! The rubber man? Jew, isn’t he? What axe is HE grinding? The composition of this Committee’s wrong, Mr. Mont. Old Shropshire’s a charmin’ old man, but—” Sir Timothy touched his forehead—“mad as a March hare about electricity. You’ve got a doctor, too. They’re too mealy-mouthed. What you want is a Committee that’ll go for those scoundrels. Tea? Never drink it. Chap who invented tea ought to have been strung up.”
At this moment the Sub–Committee re-entering the room, Michael rose, not without relief.
“Hallo!” he heard the Squire say: “you’ve been pretty slippy.”
The look of modest worth which passed over the faces of the Sub–Committee did not altogether deceive Michael, who knew that his Uncle had brought the draft appeal in his coat pocket. It was now handed up, and the Squire, putting on some horn-rimmed spectacles, began reading it aloud, as if it were an entry of hounds, or the rules of a race meeting. Michael could not help feeling that what it lost it gained—the Squire and emphasis were somehow incompatible. When he had finished reading, the Squire said:
“We can discuss it now, clause by clause. But time’s getting on, gentlemen. Personally, I think it about fills the bill. What do you say, Marquess?”
The Marquess leaned forward and took his beard in his hand.
“An admirable draft, with one exception. Not sufficient stress is laid on electrification of the kitchens. Sir Godfrey will bear me out. You can’t expect these poor people to keep their houses clean unless you can get rid of the smoke and the smells and the flies.”
“Well, we can put in something more about that, if you’ll give us the wording, Marquess.”
The Marquess began to write. Michael saw Sir Timothy twirl his moustaches.
“I’M not satisfied,” he began abruptly. “I want something that’ll make slum landlords sit up. We’re here to twist their tails. The appeal’s too mild.”
“M-m!” said the Squire; “What do you suggest, Fanfield?”
Sir Timothy read from his shirt cuff.
“‘We record our conviction that anyone who owns slum property ought to be shot. These gentlemen—’”
“THAT won’t do,” said the Squire.
“Why not?”
“All sorts of respectable people own slum property—Widows, Syndicates, Dukes, goodness-knows-who! We can’t go calling them gentlemen, and sayin’ they ought to be shot. It won’t DO.”
The bishop leaned forward:
“Might we rather word it like this? ‘The signatories much regret that those persons who own slum property are not more alive to their responsibilities to the community at large.’”
“Good Lord!” burst from Sir Timothy.
“I think we might pitch it stronger than that, Bishop,” said Sir Lawrence: “But we ought to have a lawyer here, to tell us exactly how far we can go.”
Michael turned to the Chairman:
“I’ve got one in the house, sir. My father-inlaw—I saw him come in just now. I daresay he’d advise us.”
“Old Forsyte!” said Sir Lawrence. “The very man! We ought to have him on the Committee, Squire. He’s well up in the law of libel.”
“Ah!” said the Marquess: “Mr. Forsyte! By all means—a steady head.”
“Let’s co-opt him, then,” said the Squire; “a lawyer’s always useful.”
Michael went out.
Having drawn the Fragonard blank, he went up to his study, and was greeted by Soames’ “What’s this?”
“Pretty good, sir, don’t you think? It’s Fleur’s—got feeling.”
“Yes,” muttered Soames; “too much, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“You saw the hats in the hall, no doubt. My Slum Conversion Committee are just drafting their appeal, and they’d be most frightfully obliged to you, sir, as a lawyer, if you’d come down and cast your eye over one or two of the allusions to slum landlords. They want to go just far enough, you know. In fact, if it wouldn’t bore you terribly, they’d like to co-opt you on the Committee.”
“Would they?” said Soames: “And who are THEY?”
Michael ran over the names.
Soames drew up a nostril. “Lot of titles! Is this a wild-cat thing?”
“Oh! no, sir. Our wish to have you on is a guarantee against that. Besides, our Chairman, Wilfred Bentworth, has refused a title three times.”
“Well,” said Soames, “I don’t know. I’ll come and have a look at them.”
“That’s very good of you. I think you’ll find them thoroughly respectable,” and he preceded Soames downstairs.
“This is quite out of my line,” said Soames on the threshold. He was greeted with a number of little silent bows and nods. It was his impression that they’d been having a scrap.
“Mr. – Mr. Forsyte,” said what he supposed was this Bentworth, “we want you as a lawyer to come on this Committee and keep us—er—straight—check our fire-eaters, like Fanfield there, if you know what I mean;” and he looked over his tortoiseshell spectacles at Sir Timothy. “Just cast your eye over this, will you be so good?” He passed a sheet of paper to Soames, who had sat down on a chair slipped under him by the young woman. Soames began to read:
“‘While we suppose that there may be circumstances which justify the possession of slum property, we never-the-less regret profoundly the apparent indifference of most slum owners to this great national evil. With the hearty cooperation of slum property owners, much might be done which at present cannot be done. We do not wish to hold them up to the execration of anyone, but we want them to realise that they must at least co-operate in getting rid of this blot on our civilisation.’”
He read it twice, holding the end of his nose between his thumb and finger; then said: “‘We don’t wish to hold them up to the execration of anyone.’ If you don’t, you don’t; then why say so? The word ‘execration’! H’m!”
“Exactly!” said the Chairman: “Most valuable to have you on the Committee, Mr. – Forsyte.”
“Not at all,” said Soames, staring round him: “I don’t know that I’m coming on.”
“Look here, sir!” And Soames saw a fellow who looked like a General in a story-book, leaning towards him: “D’you mean to say we can’t use a mild word like ‘execration,’ when we know they ought to be shot?”
Soames gave a pale smile: if there was a thing he couldn’t stand, it was militarism.
“You can use it if you like,” he said, “but not with me or any other man of judgment on the Committee.”
At his words at least four members of the Committee burst into speech. Had he said anything too strong?
“We’ll pass that without those words, then,” said the Chairman. “Now for your clause about the kitchens, Marquess. That’s important.”
The Marquess began reading; Soames looked at him almost with benevolence. They had hit it off very well over the Morland. No one objected to the addition, and it was adopted.
“That’s that, then. I don’t think there’s anything more. I want to get off.”
“A minute, Mr. Chairman.” Soames saw that the words were issuing from behind a walrus-like moustache. “I know more of these people than any of you here. I started life in the slums, and I want to tell you something. Suppose you get some money, suppose you convert some streets, will you convert those people? No, gentlemen; you won’t.”
“Their children, Mr. Montross, their children,” said a man whom Soames recognized as one of those who had married Michael to his daughter.
“I’m not against the appeal, Mr. Charwell, but I’m a self-made man and a realist, and I know what we’re up against. I’m going to put some money into this, gentlemen, but I want you to know that I do so with my eyes open.”
Soames saw the eyes, melancholy and brown, fixed on himself, and had a longing to say: “You bet!” But, looking at Sir Lawrence, he saw that “old Mont” had the longing, too, and closed his lips firmly.
“Capital!” said the Chairman. “Well, Mr. Forsyte, are you joining us?”
Soames looked round the table.
“I’ll go into the matter,” he said, “and let you know.”
Almost instantly the Committee broke towards their hats, and he was left opposite the Goya with the Marquess.
“A Goya, Mr. Forsyte, I think, and a good one. Am I mistaken, or didn’t it once belong to Burlingford?”
“Yes,” said Soames, astonished. “I bought it when Lord Burlingford sold his pictures in 1910.”
“I thought so. Poor Burlingford! He got very rattled, I remember over the House of Lords. But, you see, they’ve done nothing since. How English it all was!”
“They’re a dilatory lot,” murmured Soames, whose political recollections were of the vaguest.
“Fortunately, perhaps,” said the Marquess; “there is so much leisure for repentance.”
“I can show you another picture or two, here, if you care for them,” said Soames.
“Do,” said the Marquess; and Soames led him across the hall, now evacuated by the hats.
“Watteau, Fragonard, Pater, Chardin,” said Soames.
The Marquess was gazing from picture to picture with his head a little on one side.
“Delightful!” he said. “What a pleasant, and what a worthless age that was! After all, the French are the only people that can make vice attractive, except perhaps the Japanese, before they were spoiled. Tell me, Mr. Forsyte, do you know any Englishman who has done it?”
Soames, who had never studied the question and was hampered by not knowing whether he wanted an Englishman to do it, was hesitating when the Marquess added:
“And yet no such domestic people as the French.”
“My wife’s French,” said Soames, looking round his nose.
“Indeed!” said the Marquess: “How pleasant!”
Soames was again about to answer, when the Marquess continued:
“To see them go out on Sundays—the whole family, with their bread and cheese, their sausage and wine! A truly remarkable people!”
“I prefer ourselves,” said Soames, bluntly. “Less ornamental, perhaps, but—” he stopped short of his country’s virtues.
“The first of my family, Mr. Forsyte, was undoubtedly a Frenchman—not even a Norman Frenchman. There’s a tradition that he was engaged to keep William Rufus’s hair red, when it was on the turn. They gave him lands, so he must have been successful. We’ve had a red streak in the family ever since. My granddaughter—” He regarded Soames with a bird-like eye—“But she and your daughter hardly got on, I remember.”
“No,” said Soames, grimly, “they hardly got on.”
“I’m told they’ve made it up.”
“I don’t think so,” said Soames; “but that’s ancient history.”
In the stress of his present uneasiness he could have wished it were modern.
“Well, Mr. Forsyte, I’m delighted to have seen these pictures. Your son-inlaw tells me he’s going to electrify the kitchen here. Believe me, there’s nothing more conducive to a quiet stomach than a cook who never gets heated. Do tell Mrs. Forsyte that!”
“I will,” said Soames; “but the French are conservative.”
“Lamentably so,” replied the Marquess, holding out his hand: “Good-bye to you!”
“Good-bye!” said Soames, and remained at the window, gazing after the old man’s short, quick figure in its grey-green tweeds, with a feeling of having been slightly electrified.
Fleur sat under a groyne at Loring. There were few things with which she had less patience than the sea. It was not in her blood. The sea, with its reputation for never being in the same mood, blue, wet, unceasing, had for her a distressing sameness. And, though she sat with her face to it she turned to it the back of her mind. She had been there a week without seeing Jon again. They knew where she was, yet only Holly had been over; and her quick instinct apprehended the cause—Anne must have become aware of her. And now, as Holly had told her, there was no longer even Goodwood to look forward to. Everywhere she was baulked and with all her heart she resented it! She was indeed in a wretched state of indecision. If she had known precisely the end she wished to attain, she could have possessed her soul; but she knew it not. Even the care of Kit was no longer important. He was robust again, and employed, all day, with spade and bucket.
‘I can’t stand it,’ she thought; ‘I shall go up to town. Michael will be glad of me.’
She went up after an early lunch, reading in the train a book of reminiscences which took away the reputations of various dead persons. Quite in the mode, it distracted her thoughts more than she had hoped from its title; and her spirits rose as the scent of oysters died out of the air. She had letters from her father and Michael in her bag, and got them out to read again.
“DEAR HEART” (ran Michael’s—yes, she supposed she WAS still his dear heart)—
“I hope this finds you and Kit as it leaves me ‘at the present time of speaking.’ But I miss you horribly as usual, and intend to descend on you before long, unless you descend on me first. I don’t know if you saw our appeal in the papers on Monday. People are already beginning to take bonds. The committee weighed in well for a send-off. The walrus put down five thousand of the best, the Marquess sent your father’s Morland cheque for six hundred, and your Dad and Bart each gave two-fifty. The Squire gave five hundred; Bedwin and Sir Timothy a hundred apiece, and the Bishop gave us twenty and his blessing. So we opened with six thousand eight hundred and twenty from the committee alone—none so dusty. I believe the thing will go. The appeal has been re-printed, and is going out to everyone who ever gives to anything; and amongst other propaganda, we’ve got the Polytheum to promise to show a slum film if we can get one made. My Uncle Hilary is very bucked. It was funny to see your Dad—he was a long time making up his mind, and he actually went down to look at the Meads. He came back saying—he didn’t know, it was a tumble-down neighbourhood, he didn’t think it could be done for five hundred a house. I had my uncle to him that evening, and he knocked under to Hilary’s charm. But next morning he was very grumpy—said his name would be in the papers as signing the appeal, and seemed to think it would do him harm. ‘They’ll think I’ve taken leave of my senses,’ was his way of putting it. However, there he is, on the committee, and he’ll get used to it in time. They’re a rum team, and but for the bugs I don’t think they’d hold together. We had another meeting today. Old Blythe’s nose is properly out of joint; he says I’ve gone back on him and Foggartism. I haven’t, of course—but, dash it, one must have something real to do!
“All my love to you and Kit.
“MICHAEL.”
“I’ve got your drawing framed and hung above my bureau, and very jolly it looks. Your Dad was quite struck. M.”
Above his bureau—“The golden apple!” How ironical! Poor Michael—if he knew—!
Her father’s letter was short—she had never had a long one from him.
“MY DEAR CHILD,
“Your mother has gone back to ‘The Shelter,’ but I am staying on at Green Street about this thing of Michael’s. I don’t know, I’m sure, whether there’s anything in it; there’s a lot of gammon talked about the slums; still, for a parson, I find his Uncle Hilary an amiable fellow, and there are some goodish names on the committee. We shall see.
“I had no idea you had kept up your water-colours. The drawing has considerable merit, though the subject is not clear to me. The fruit looks too soft and rich for apples. Still, I suppose you know what you were driving at. I am glad the news of Kit is so good, and that you are feeling the better for the sea air.
“Ever your affectionate father,
“S. F.”
Knew what she was driving at! If only she did! And if only her father didn’t! That was the doubt in her mind when she tore up the letter and scattered it on Surrey through the window. He watched her like a lynx—like a lover; and she did not want to be watched just now.
She had no luggage, and at Victoria took a cab for Chiswick. June would at least know something about those two; whether they were still at Wansdon, or where they were.
How well she remembered the little house from the one visit she had paid to it—in the days when she and Jon—!
June was in the hall, on the point of going out.
“Oh! It’s you!” she said. “You didn’t come that Sunday!”
“No, I had too much to do before I went away.”
“Jon and Anne are staying here now. Harold is painting a beautiful thing of her. It’ll be quite unique. She’s a nice little thing, I think,” (she was several inches taller than June, according to Fleur’s recollection) “and pretty. I’m just going out to get him something he specially wants, but I shan’t be a quarter of an hour. If you’ll wait in the meal room till I come back, I’ll take you up, and then he’ll see you. He’s the only man who’s doing real work just now.”
“It’s so nice that there’s one,” said Fleur.
“Here’s an album of reproductions of his pictures”—and June opened a large book on a small dining-table. “Isn’t that lovely? But all his work has such quality. You look through it, and I’ll come back.” And, with a little squeeze of Fleur’s shoulder, she fled.
Fleur did not look through the album, she looked through the window and round the room. How she remembered it, and that round, dim mirror of very old glass wherein she had seen herself while she waited for Jon. And the stormy little scene they had been through together in this room too small for storms, seven years ago! Jon staying here! Her heart beat, and she stared at herself again in that dim mirror. Surely she was no worse to look at than she had been then! Nay! She was better! Her face had a stamp on it now, line on the roundness of youth! Couldn’t she let him know that she was here? Couldn’t she see him somehow just for a minute alone! That little one-eyed fanatic—for so in her thoughts Fleur looked on June—would be back directly. And quick mind took quick decision. If Jon were in, she would find him! Touching her hair at the sides, the pearls round her neck, and flicking an almost powderless puff over her nose, she went out into the hall and listened. No sound! And slowly she began mounting the stairs. In his bedroom he would be, or in the studio—there was no other covert. On the first landing, bedroom to right of her, bedroom to left of her, bathroom in front of her, the doors open. Blank! – and blank in her heart! The studio was all there was above. And there—as well as Jon, would be the painter and that girl, his wife. Was it worth it? She took two steps down, and then retraced them. Yes! It was. Slowly, very silently, she went. The studio door was open, for she could hear the quick, familiar shuffle of a painter to his canvas and away again. She closed her eyes a moment, and then again went up. On the landing, close to the open door, she stood still. No need to go further. For, in the room directly opposite to her, was a long, broad mirror, and in it—unseen herself—she could see. Jon was sitting on the end of a low divan with an unsmoked pipe in his hand, staring straight before him. On the dais that girl was standing, dressed in white; her hands held a long-stemmed lily whose flower reached to within an inch of her chin. Oh! she was pretty—pretty and brown, with those dark eyes and that dark hair framing her face. But Jon’s expression—deepset on the mask of his visage as the eyes in his head! She had seen lion cubs look like that, seeing nothing close to them, seeing—what? – in the distance. That girl’s eyes, what was it Holly had called them? – “best type of water-nymph’s”—slid round and looked at him, and at once his eyes left the distance and smiled back. Fleur turned then, hurried down the stairs, and out of the house. Wait for June—hear her rhapsodise—be introduced to the painter—have to control her face in front of that girl? No! Mounting to the top of her ‘bus, she saw June skimming round a corner, and thought with malicious pleasure of her disappointment—when one had been hurt, one wanted to hurt somebody. The ‘bus carried her away down the King’s Road, Hammersmith, sweating in the westering sunlight, away into the big town with its myriad lives and interests, untouchable, indifferent as Fate.
At Kensington Gardens she descended. If she could get her legs to ache, perhaps her heart would not. And she walked fast between the flowers and the nursemaids, the old ladies and the old gentlemen. But her legs were strong, and Hyde Park Corner came too soon for all but one old gentleman who had tried to keep pace with her because, at his age, it did him good to be attracted. She crossed to the Green Park and held on. And she despised herself while she walked. She despised herself. She—to whom the heart was such vieux jeu; who had learned, as she thought, to control or outspeed emotions!
She reached home, and it was empty—Michael not in. She went upstairs, ordered herself some Turkish coffee, got into a hot bath, and lay there smoking cigarettes. She experienced some alleviation. Among her friends the recipe had long been recognized. When she could steep herself no more, she put on a wrapper and went to Michael’s study. There was her “Golden Apple”—very nicely framed. The fruit looked to her extraordinarily uneatable at that moment. The smile in Jon’s eyes, answering that girl’s smile! Another woman’s leavings! The fruit was not worth eating. Sour apples—sour apples! Even the white monkey would refuse fruit like that. And for some minutes she stood staring instead, at the eyes of the ape in that Chinese painting—those almost human eyes that yet were not human because their owner had no sense of continuity. A modern painter could not have painted eyes like that. The Chinese artist of all those centuries ago had continuity and tradition in his blood; he had seen the creature’s restlessness at a sharper angle than people could see it now, and stamped it there for ever.
And Fleur—charming in her jade-green wrapper—tucked a corner of her lip behind a tooth, and went back to her room to finish dressing. She put on her prettiest frock. If she could not have the wish of her heart—the wish that she felt would give her calm and continuity—let her at least have pleasure, speed, distraction, grasp it with both hands, eat it with full lips. And she sat down before her glass to make herself as perfect as she could. She manicured her hands, titivated her hair, scented her eyebrows, smoothed her lips, put on no rouge, and the merest dusting of powder, save where the seaside sun had stained her neck.
Michael found her still seated there—a modern masterpiece—almost too perfect to touch.
“Fleur!” he said, and nothing more; but any more would have spoiled it.
“I thought I deserved a night out. Dress quickly, Michael, and let’s dine somewhere amusing, and do a theatre and a club afterwards. You needn’t go to the House this evening, need you?”
He had meant to go, but there was in her voice what would have stopped him from affairs even more serious.
Inhaling her, he said:
“Delicious! I’ve been in the slums. Shan’t be a jiffy, darling!” and he fled.
During the jiffy she thought of him and how good he was; and while she thought, she saw the eyes and the hair and the smile of Jon.
The “somewhere amusing” was a little restaurant full of theatrical folk. Fleur and Michael knew many of them, and they came up, as they passed out of their theatres, and said:
“How delightful to see you!” and looked as if they meant it—so strange! But then, theatre folk were like that! They looked things so easily. And they kept saying: “Have you seen our show? Oh! You must. It’s just too frightful!” or, “It’s a marvellous play!” And then, over the other shoulder they would see somebody else, and call out: “Ha! How delightful to see you!” There was no boring continuity about them. Fleur drank a cocktail and two glasses of champagne. She went out with her cheeks slightly flushed. “Dat Lubly Lady” had been in progress over half-an-hour before they reached her; but this did not seem to matter, for what they saw conveyed to them no more than what they had not seen. The house was very full, and people were saying that the thing would “run for years.” It had a tune which had taken the town by storm, a male dancer whose legs could form the most acute angles, and no continuity whatever. Michael and Fleur went out humming the tune, and took a taxi to the dancing club to which they belonged because it was the thing, rather than because they ever went there. It was a select club, and contained among its members a Cabinet Minister who had considered it his duty. They found a Charleston in progress, seven couples wobbling weak knees at each other in various corners of the room.
“Gawd!” said Michael. “I do think it’s the limit of vacuity. What’s its attraction?”
“Vacuity, my dear. This is a vacuous age—didn’t you know?”
“Is there no limit?”
“A limit,” said Fleur, “is what you can’t go beyond; one can always become more vacuous.”
The words were nothing, for, after all, cynicism was in fashion, but the tone made Michael shiver; he felt in it a personal ring. Did she, then, feel her life so vacuous; and, if so, why?
“They say,” said Fleur, “there’s another American dance coming, called ‘The White Beam,’ that’s got even less in it.”
“Not possible,” muttered Michael; “for congenital idiocy this’ll never be surpassed. Look at those two!”
The two in question were wobbling towards them with their knees flexed as if their souls had slipped down into them; their eyes regarded Fleur and Michael with no more expression than could have been found in four first-class marbles. A strange earnestness radiated from them below the waist, but above that line they seemed to have passed away. The music stopped, and each of the seven couples stopped also and began to clap their hands, holding them low, as though afraid of disturbing the vacuity attained above.
“I refuse to believe it,” said Michael, suddenly.
“What?”
“That this represents our Age—no beauty, no joy, no skill, not even devil—just look a fool and wobble your knees.”
“You can’t do it, you see.”
“D’you mean you can?”
“Of course,” said Fleur; “one must keep up with things.”
“Well, for the land’s sake, don’t let me see you.”
At this moment the seven couples stopped clapping their hands—the band had broken into a tune to which the knee could not be flexed. Michael and Fleur began to dance. They danced together, two fox-trots and a waltz, then left.
“After all,” said Fleur, in the taxi, “dancing makes you forget yourself. That was the beauty of the canteen. Find me another job, Michael; I can bring Kit back in about a week.”
“How about joint secretaryship with me of our Slum Conversion Fund? You’d be invaluable to get up balls, bazaars, and matinees.”
“I wouldn’t mind. I suppose they’re worth converting.”
“Well, I think so. You don’t know Hilary; I must get him and Aunt May to lunch; after that you can judge for yourself.”
He slipped his hand under her bare arm, and added: “Fleur, you’re not quite tired of me, are you?”
The tone of his voice, humble and a little anxious, touched her, and she pressed his hand with her arm.
“I should never be tired of you, Michael.”
“You mean you’d never have a feeling so definite towards me.”
It was exactly what she had meant, and she hastened to deny it.
“No, dear boy; I mean I know a good thing, and even a good person, when I’ve got it.”
Michael sighed, and, taking up her hand, put it to his lips.
“I wish,” cried Fleur, “one wasn’t so complex. You’re lucky to be single-hearted. It’s the greatest gift. Only, don’t ever become serious, Michael. That’d be a misfortune.”
“No, after all, comedy’s the real thing.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Fleur, as the taxi stopped. “Delicious night!”
And Michael, having paid the driver, looked at her lighted up in the open doorway. Delicious night! Yes—for him.
The announcement by Michael on the following Monday that Fleur would be bringing Kit home the next morning, caused Soames to say:
“I’d like to have a look at that part of the world. I’ll take the car down this afternoon and drive them up tomorrow. Don’t say anything to Fleur. I’ll let her know when I get down to Nettlefold. There’s an hotel there, I’m told.”
“Quite a good one,” said Michael. “But it’ll be full for Goodwood.”
“I’ll telephone. They must find a room for me.”
He did, and they found for him a room which somebody else lost. He started about five—Riggs having informed him that it was a two-and-a-half hours’ drive. The day had been somewhat English in character, but by the time he reached Dorking had become fine enough to enjoy. He had seen little of the England that lay beyond the straight line between his river home and Westminster, for many years; and this late afternoon, less preoccupied than usual, he was able to give it a somewhat detached consideration. It was certainly a variegated and bumpy land, incorrigibly green and unlike India, Canada, and Japan. They said it had been jungle, heath and marsh not fifteen hundred years ago. What would it be fifteen hundred years hence? Jungle, heath and marsh again, or one large suburb—who could say? He had read somewhere that people would live underground, and come up to take the air in their flying machines on Sundays. He thought it was unlikely. The English would still want their windows down and a thorough draught, and so far as he could see, it would always be stuffy to play with a ball underground, and impossible to play with a ball up in the air. Those fellows who wrote prophetic articles and books, were always forgetting that people had passions. He would make a bet that the passions of the English in 3400 A.D. would still be: playing golf, cursing the weather, sitting in draughts, and revising the prayer-book.
And that reminded him that old Gradman was getting very old; he must look out for somebody who could take his place. There was nothing to do in the family trusts now—the only essential was perfect honesty. And where was he going to find it? Even if there was some about, it could only be tested by prolonged experiment. Must be a youngish man, too, because he himself couldn’t last very much longer. And, moving at forty miles an hour along the road to Billingshurst, he recalled being fetched by old Gradman at six miles an hour from Paddington Station to Park Lane in a growler with wet straw on the floor—over sixty years ago—when old Gradman himself was only a boy of twenty, trying to grow side-whiskers and writing round-hand all day. “Five Oaks” on a signpost; he couldn’t see the oaks! What a pace that chap Riggs was going! One of these days he would bring the whole thing to grief, and be sorry for it. But it was somehow infra dig. to pull him up for speed when there wasn’t a woman in the car; and Soames sat the stiller, with a slightly contemptuous expression as a kind of insurance against his own sensations. Through Pulborough, down a twisting hill, across a little bridge, a little river, into a different kind of country—something new to him—flat meadows all along, that would be marsh in the winter, he would wager, with large, dark red cattle, and black-and-white, and strawberry roan cattle; and over away to the south, high rising downs of a singularly cool green, as if they were white inside. Chalk—out-cropping here and there, and sheep up on those downs, no doubt—his father had always sworn by Southdown mutton. A very pretty light, a silvery look, a nice prospect altogether, that made you feel thinner at once and lighter in the head! So this was the sort of country his nephew had got hold of, and that young fellow Jon Forsyte. Well! It might have been worse—very individual; he didn’t remember anything just like it. And a sort of grudging fairness, latent in Soames’ nature, applauded slightly. How that chap Riggs was banging the car up this hill—the deuce of a hill, too, past chalk-pits and gravel-pits, and grassy down and dipping spurs of covert, past the lodge of a park, into a great beech-wood. Very pretty—very still—no life but trees, spreading trees, very cool, very green! Past a monstrous great church thing, now, and a lot of high walls and towers—Arundel Castle, he supposed; huge, great place; would look better, no doubt, the further you got from it; then over another river and up another hill, banging along into this Nettlefold and the hotel, and the sea in front of you!
Soames got out.
“What time’s dinner?”
“Dinner is on, sir.”
“Do they dress?”
“Yes, sir. There’s a fancy dress dance, sir, this evening, before Goodwood.”
“What a thing to have! Get me a table; I’ll be down directly.”
He had once read in a Victorian novel that the mark of a gentleman was being able to dress for dinner in ten minutes, tying his own tie. He had never forgotten it. He was down in twelve. Most people had nearly finished, but there was no one in fancy dress. Soames ate leisurely, contemplating a garden with the sea beyond. He had not, like Fleur, an objection to the sea—had he not once lived at Brighton for seven years, going up and down to his work in town? That was the epoch when he had been living down the disgrace of being deserted by his first wife. Curious how the injured party was always the one in disgrace! People admired immorality, however much they said they didn’t. The deserted husband, the deserted wife, were looked on as poor things. Was it due to some thing still wild in human nature, or merely to reaction against the salaried morality of judges and parsons, and so forth? Morality you might respect, but salaried morality—no! He had seen it in people’s eyes after his own trouble; he had seen it in the Marjorie Ferrar case. The fact was, people took the protection of the law and secretly disliked it because it was protective. The same thing with taxes—you couldn’t do without them, but you avoided paying them when you could.
Having finished dinner, he sat with his cigar in a somewhat deserted lounge, turning over weekly papers full of ladies with children or dogs, ladies with clothes in striking attitudes, ladies with no clothes in still more striking attitudes; men with titles, men in aeroplanes, statesmen in trouble, racehorses; large houses prefaced with rows of people with the names printed clearly for each, and other evidences of the millennium. He supposed his fellow-guests were “dolling up” (as young Michael would put it) for this ball—fancy dressing up at their age! But people WERE weak-minded—no question of that! – Fleur would be surprised when he dropped in on her tomorrow early. Soon she would be coming down to him on the river—its best time of year—and perhaps he could take her for a motor trip into the west somewhere; it might divert her thoughts from this part of the country and that young man. He had often promised himself a visit to where the old Forsytes came from; only he didn’t suppose she would care to look at anything so rustic as genuine farmland. The magazine dropped from his fingers, and he sat staring out of the large windows at the flowers about to sleep. He hadn’t so many more years before him now, he supposed. They said that people lived longer than they used to, but how he was going to outlive the old Forsytes, he didn’t know—the ten of them had averaged eighty-seven years—a monstrous age! And yet he didn’t feel it would be natural to die in another sixteen years, with the flowers growing like that out there, and his grandson coming along nicely. With age one suffered from the feeling that one might have enjoyed things more. Cows, for instance, and rooks, and good smells. Curious how the country grew on you as you got older! But he didn’t know that it would ever grow on Fleur—she wanted people about her; still she might lose that when she found out once for all that there was so little in them. The light faded on the garden and his reverie. There were lots of people out on the sea front, and a band had begun to play. A band was playing behind him, too, in the hotel somewhere. They must be dancing! He might have a look at that before he went up. On his trip round the world with Fleur he had often put his nose out and watched the dancing on deck—funny business nowadays, shimmying, bunnyhugging, didn’t they call it? – dreadful! He remembered the academy of dancing where he had been instructed as a small boy in the polka, the mazurka, deportment and calisthenics. And a pale grin spread over his chaps—that little old Miss Shears, who had taught him and Winifred, what wouldn’t she have died of if she had lived to see these modern dances! People despised the old dances, and when he came to think of it, he had despised them himself, but compared with this modern walking about and shaking at the knees, they had been dances, after all. Look at the Highland schottische, where you spun round and howled, and the old galop to the tune “D’ye ken John Peel”—some stingo in them; and you had to change your collar. No changing collars nowadays—they just dawdled. For an age that prided itself on enjoying life, they had a funny idea of it. He remembered once, before his first marriage, going—by accident—to one of those old dancing clubs, the Athenians, and seeing George Forsyte and his cronies waltzing and swinging the girls round and round clean off their feet. The girls at those clubs, then, were all professional lights-o’-love. Very different now, he was told; but there it was—people posed nowadays, they posed as viveurs, and all the rest of it, but they didn’t vive; they thought too much about how to.
The music—all jazz—died behind him and rose again, and he, too, rose. He would just have a squint and go to bed.
The ball-room was somewhat detached, and Soames went down a corridor. At its end he came on a twirl of sound and colour. They were hard at it, “dolled up” to the nines—Mephistopheleses, ladies of Spain, Italian peasants, Pierrots. His bewildered eyes with difficulty took in the strutting, wheeling mass; his bewildered ears decided that the tune was trying to be a waltz. He remembered that the waltz was in three-time, remembered the waltz of olden days—too well—that dance at Roger’s, and Irene, his own wife, waltzing in the arms of young Bosinney; to this day remembered the look on her face, the rise and fall of her breast, the scent of the gardenias she was wearing, and that fellow’s face when she raised to his her dark eyes—lost to all but themselves and their guilty enjoyment; remembered the balcony on which he had refuged from that sight, and the policeman down below him on the strip of red carpet from house to street.
“‘Always’—good tune!” said someone behind his ears.
Not bad, certainly—a sort of sweetness in it. His eyes, from behind the neck of a large lady who seemed trying to be a fairy, roved again among the dancers. What! Over there! Fleur! Fleur in her Goya dress, grape-coloured—“La Vendimia—the Vintage”—floating out from her knees, with her face close to the face of a sheik, and his face close to hers. Fleur! And that sheik, that Moor in a dress all white and flowing! In Soames a groan was converted to a cough. THOSE TWO! So close—so—so lost—it seemed to him! As Irene with Bosinney, so she with that young Jon! They passed, not seeing him behind the fairy’s competent bulk. Soames’ eyes tracked them through the shifting, yawing throng. Round again they came—her eyes so nearly closed that he hardly knew them; and young Jon’s over her fichued shoulder, deep-set and staring. Where was the fellow’s wife? And just then Soames caught sight of her, dancing, too, but looking back at them—a nymph all trailing green, the eyes surprised, and jealous. No wonder, since under her very gaze was Fleur’s swinging skirt, the rise and falling of her breast, the languor in her eyes! “Always!” Would they never stop that cursed tune, stop those two, who with every bar seemed to cling closer and closer! And, fearful lest he should be seen, Soames turned away and mounted slowly to his room. He had had his squint. It was enough!
The band had ceased to play on the sea front, people were deserting, lights going out; by the sound out there, the tide must be rising. Soames touched himself where he was sore, beneath his starched shirt, and stood still. “Always!” Incalculable consequences welled in on his consciousness, like the murmuring tide of that sea. Daughter exiled, grandson lost to him; memories deflowered; hopes in the dust! “Always!” Forsooth! Not if he knew it—not for Joe! And all that grim power of self-containment which but twice or three times in his life had failed him, and always with disastrous consequence, again for a moment failed him, so that to any living thing present in the dim and austere hotel bedroom, he would have seemed like one demented. The paroxysm passed. No use to rave! Worse than no use—far; would only make him ill, and he would want all his strength. For what? For sitting still; for doing nothing; for waiting to see! Venus! Touch not the goddess—the hot, the jealous one with the lost dark eyes! He had touched her in the past, and she had answered with a blow. Touch her not! Possess his sore and anxious heart! Nothing to do but wait and see!