Coming down the steps of ‘Snooks’ Club, so nicknamed by George Forsyte in the late eighties, on that momentous mid-October afternoon of 1922, Sir Lawrence Mont, ninth baronet, set his fine nose towards the east wind, and moved his thin legs with speed. Political by birth rather than by nature, he reviewed the revolution which had restored his Party to power with a detachment not devoid of humour. Passing the Remove Club, he thought: ‘Some sweating into shoes, there! No more confectioned dishes. A woodcock—without trimmings, for a change!’
The captains and the kings had departed from ‘Snooks’ before he entered it, for he was not of ‘that catch-penny crew, now paid off, no sir; fellows who turned their tails on the land the moment the war was over. Pah!’ But for an hour he had listened to echoes, and his lively twisting mind, embedded in deposits of the past, sceptical of the present and of all political protestations and pronouncements, had recorded with amusement the confusion of patriotism and personalities left behind by the fateful gathering. Like most landowners, he distrusted doctrine. If he had a political belief, it was a tax on wheat; and so far as he could see, he was now alone in it—but then he was not seeking election; in other words, his principle was not in danger of extinction from the votes of those who had to pay for bread. Principles—he mused—au fond were pocket; and he wished the deuce people wouldn’t pretend they weren’t! Pocket, in the deep sense of that word, of course, self-interest as member of a definite community. And how the devil was this definite community, the English nation, to exist, when all its land was going out of cultivation, and all its ships and docks in danger of destruction by aeroplanes? He had listened that hour past for a single mention of the land. Not one! It was not practical politics! Confound the fellows! They had to wear their breeches out—keeping seats or getting them. No connection between posteriors and posterity! No, by George! Thus reminded of posterity, it occurred to him rather suddenly that his son’s wife showed no signs as yet. Two years! Time they were thinking about children. It was dangerous to get into the habit of not having them, when a title and estate depended. A smile twisted his lips and eyebrows which resembled spinneys of dark pothooks. A pretty young creature, most taking; and knew it, too! Whom was she not getting to know? Lions and tigers, monkeys and cats—her house was becoming quite a menagerie of more or less celebrities. There was a certain unreality about that sort of thing! And opposite a British lion in Trafalgar Square Sir Lawrence thought: ‘She’ll be getting these to her house next! She’s got the collecting habit. Michael must look out—in a collector’s house there’s always a lumber room for old junk, and husbands are liable to get into it. That reminds me: I promised her a Chinese Minister. Well, she must wait now till after the General Election.’
Down Whitehall, under the grey easterly sky, the towers of Westminster came for a second into view. ‘A certain unreality in that, too,’ he thought. ‘Michael and his fads! Well, it’s the fashion—Socialistic principles and a rich wife. Sacrifice with safety! Peace with plenty! Nostrums—ten a penny!’
Passing the newspaper hubbub of Charing Cross, frenzied by the political crisis, he turned up to the left towards Danby and Winter, publishers, where his son was junior partner. A new theme for a book had just begun to bend a mind which had already produced a ‘Life of Montrose,’ ‘Far Cathay,’ that work of Eastern travel, and a fanciful conversation between the shades of Gladstone and Disraeli—entitled ‘A Duet.’ With every step taken, from ‘Snooks’ eastward, his erect thin figure in Astrakhan-collared coat, his thin grey-moustached face, and tortoise-shell rimmed monocle under the lively dark eyebrow, had seemed more rare. It became almost a phenomenon in this dingy back street, where carts stuck like winter flies, and persons went by with books under their arms, as if educated.
He had nearly reached the door of Danby’s when he encountered two young men. One of them was clearly his son, better dressed since his marriage, and smoking a cigar—thank goodness—instead of those eternal cigarettes; the other—ah! yes—Michael’s sucking poet and best man, head in air, rather a sleek head under a velour hat! He said:
“Ha, Michael!”
“HALLO, Bart! You know my governor, Wilfrid? Wilfrid Desert. ‘Copper Coin’—some poet, Bart, I tell you. You must read him. We’re going home. Come along!”
Sir Lawrence went along.
“What happened at ‘Snooks’?”
“Le roi est mort. Labour can start lying, Michael—election next month.”
“Bart was brought up, Wilfrid, in days that knew not Demos.”
“Well, Mr. Desert, do you find reality in politics now?”
“Do you find reality in anything, sir?”
“In income tax, perhaps.”
Michael grinned.
“Above knighthood,” he said, “there’s no such thing as simple faith.”
“Suppose your friends came into power, Michael—in some ways not a bad thing, help ’em to grow up—what could they do, eh? Could they raise national taste? Abolish the cinema? Teach English people to cook? Prevent other countries from threatening war? Make us grow our own food? Stop the increase of town life? Would they hang dabblers in poison gas? Could they prevent flying in war-time? Could they weaken the possessive instinct—anywhere? Or do anything, in fact, but alter the incidence of possession a little? All party politics are top dressing. We’re ruled by the inventors, and human nature; and we live in Queer Street, Mr. Desert.”
“Much my sentiments, sir.”
Michael flourished his cigar.
“Bad old men, you two!”
And removing their hats, they passed the Cenotaph.
“Curiously symptomatic—that thing,” said Sir Lawrence; “monument to the dread of swank—most characteristic. And the dread of swank—”
“Go on, Bart,” said Michael.
“The fine, the large, the florid—all off! No far-sighted views, no big schemes, no great principles, no great religion, or great art—aestheticism in cliques and backwaters, small men in small hats.”
“As panteth the heart after Byron, Wilberforce, and the Nelson Monument. My poor old Bart! What about it, Wilfrid?”
“Yes, Mr. Desert—what about it?”
Desert’s dark face contracted.
“It’s an age of paradox,” he said. “We all kick up for freedom, and the only institutions gaining strength are Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church. We’re frightfully self-conscious about art—and the only art development is the cinema. We’re nuts on peace—and all we’re doing about it is to perfect poison gas.”
Sir Lawrence glanced sideways at a young man so bitter.
“And how’s publishing, Michael?”
“Well, ‘Copper Coin’ is selling like hot cakes; and there’s quite a movement in ‘A Duet.’ What about this for a new ad.: ‘A Duet, by Sir Lawrence Mont, Bart. The most distinguished Conversation ever held between the Dead.’ That ought to get the psychic. Wilfrid suggested ‘G.O.M. and Dizzy—broadcasted from Hell.’ Which do you like best?”
They had come, however, to a policeman holding up his hand against the nose of a van horse, so that everything marked time. The engines of the cars whirred idly, their drivers’ faces set towards the space withheld from them; a girl on a bicycle looked vacantly about her, grasping the back of the van, where a youth sat sideways with his legs stretched out towards her. Sir Lawrence glanced again at young Desert. A thin, pale-dark face, good-looking, but a hitch in it, as if not properly timed; nothing outre in dress or manner, and yet socially at large; less vivacious than that lively rascal, his own son, but as anchorless, and more sceptical—might feel things pretty deeply, though! The policeman lowered his arm.
“You were in the war, Mr. Desert?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Air service?”
“And line. Bit of both.”
“Hard on a poet.”
“Not at all. Poetry’s only possible when you may be blown up at any moment, or when you live in Putney.”
Sir Lawrence’s eyebrow rose. “Yes?”
“Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth, Swinburne—they could turn it out; ils vivaient, mais si peu.”
“Is there not a third condition favourable?”
“And that, sir?”
“How shall I express it—a certain cerebral agitation in connection with women?”
Desert’s face twitched, and seemed to darken.
Michael put his latchkey into the lock of his front door.
The house in South Square, Westminster, to which the young Monts had come after their Spanish honeymoon two years before, might have been called ‘emancipated.’ It was the work of an architect whose dream was a new house perfectly old, and an old house perfectly new. It followed, therefore, no recognised style or tradition, and was devoid of structural prejudice; but it soaked up the smuts of the metropolis with such special rapidity that its stone already respectably resembled that of Wren. Its windows and doors had gently rounded tops. The high-sloping roof, of a fine sooty pink, was almost Danish, and two ‘ducky little windows’ looked out of it, giving an impression that very tall servants lived up there. There were rooms on each side of the front door, which was wide and set off by bay trees in black and gold bindings. The house was thick through, and the staircase, of a broad chastity, began at the far end of a hall which had room for quite a number of hats and coats and cards. There were four bathrooms; and not even a cellar underneath. The Forsyte instinct for a house had co-operated in its acquisition. Soames had picked it up for his daughter, undecorated, at that psychological moment when the bubble of inflation was pricked, and the air escaping from the balloon of the world’s trade. Fleur, however, had established immediate contact with the architect—an element which Soames himself had never quite got over—and decided not to have more than three styles in her house: Chinese, Spanish, and her own. The room to the left of the front door, running the breadth of the house, was Chinese, with ivory panels, a copper floor, central heating, and cut glass lustres. It contained four pictures—all Chinese—the only school in which her father had not yet dabbled. The fireplace, wide and open, had Chinese dogs with Chinese tiles for them to stand on. The silk was chiefly of jade green. There were two wonderful old black-tea chests, picked up with Soames’ money at Jobson’s—not a bargain. There was no piano, partly because pianos were too uncompromisingly occidental, and partly because it would have taken up much room. Fleur aimed at space-collecting people rather than furniture or bibelots. The light, admitted by windows at both ends, was unfortunately not Chinese. She would stand sometimes in the centre of this room, thinking—how to ‘bunch’ her guests, how to make her room more Chinese without making it uncomfortable; how to seem to know all about literature and politics; how to accept everything her father gave her, without making him aware that his taste had no sense of the future; how to keep hold of Sibley Swan, the new literary star, and to get hold of Gurdon Minho, the old; of how Wilfrid Desert was getting too fond of her; of what was really her style in dress; of why Michael had such funny ears; and sometimes she stood not thinking at all—just aching a little.
When those three came in she was sitting before a red lacquer tea-table, finishing a very good tea. She always had tea brought in rather early, so that she could have a good quiet preliminary ‘tuck-in’ all by herself, because she was not quite twenty-one, and this was her hour for remembering her youth. By her side Ting-a-ling was standing on his hind feet, his tawny forepaws on a Chinese footstool, his snubbed black and tawny muzzle turned up towards the fruits of his philosophy.
“That’ll do, Ting. No more, ducky! NO MORE!”
The expression of Ting-a-ling answered:
‘Well, then, stop, too! Don’t subject me to torture!’
A year and three months old, he had been bought by Michael out of a Bond Street shop window on Fleur’s twentieth birthday, eleven months ago.
Two years of married life had not lengthened her short dark chestnut hair; had added a little more decision to her quick lips, a little more allurement to her white-lidded, dark-lashed hazel eyes, a little more poise and swing to her carriage, a little more chest and hip measurement; had taken a little from waist and calf measurement, a little colour from cheeks a little less round, and a little sweetness from a voice a little more caressing.
She stood up behind the tray, holding out her white round arm without a word. She avoided unnecessary greetings or farewells. She would have had to say them so often, and their purpose was better served by look, pressure, and slight inclination of head to one side.
With circular movement of her squeezed hand, she said:
“Draw up. Cream, sir? Sugar, Wilfrid? Ting has had too much—don’t feed him! Hand things, Michael. I’ve heard all about the meeting at ‘Snooks.’ You’re not going to canvass for Labour, Michael—canvassing’s so silly. If any one canvassed me, I should vote the other way at once.”
“Yes, darling; but you’re not the average elector.”
Fleur looked at him. Very sweetly put! Conscious of Wilfrid biting his lips, of Sir Lawrence taking that in, of the amount of silk leg she was showing, of her black and cream teacups, she adjusted these matters. A flutter of her white lids—Desert ceased to bite his lips; a movement of her silk legs—Sir Lawrence ceased to look at him. Holding out her cups, she said:
“I suppose I’m not modern enough?”
Desert, moving a bright little spoon round in his magpie cup, said without looking up:
“As much more modern than the moderns, as you are more ancient.”
“‘Ware poetry!” said Michael.
But when he had taken his father to see the new cartoons by Aubrey Greene, she said:
“Kindly tell me what you meant, Wilfrid.”
Desert’s voice seemed to leap from restraint.
“What does it matter? I don’t want to waste time with that.”
“But I want to know. It sounded like a sneer.”
“A sneer? From me? Fleur!”
“Then tell me.”
“I meant that you have all their restlessness and practical get-thereness; but you have what they haven’t, Fleur—power to turn one’s head. And mine is turned. You know it.”
“How would Michael like that—from YOU, his best man?”
Desert moved quickly to the windows.
Fleur took Ting-a-ling on her lap. Such things had been said to her before; but from Wilfrid it was serious. Nice to think she had his heart, of course! Only, where on earth could she put it, where it wouldn’t be seen except by her? He was incalculable—did strange things! She was a little afraid—not of him, but of that quality in him. He came back to the hearth, and said:
“Ugly, isn’t it? Put that dam’ dog down, Fleur; I can’t see your face. If you were really fond of Michael—I swear I wouldn’t; but you’re not, you know.”
Fleur said coldly:
“You know very little; I AM fond of Michael.”
Desert gave his little jerky laugh.
“Oh yes; not the sort that counts.”
Fleur looked up.
“It counts quite enough to make one safe.”
“A flower that I can’t pick.”
Fleur nodded.
“Quite sure, Fleur? Quite, quite sure?”
Fleur stared; her eyes softened a little, her eyelids, so excessively white, drooped over them; she nodded. Desert said slowly:
“The moment I believe that, I shall go East.”
“East?”
“Not so stale as going West, but much the same—you don’t come back.”
Fleur thought: ‘The East? I should love to know the East! Pity one can’t manage that, too. Pity!’
“You won’t keep me in your Zoo, my dear. I shan’t hang around and feed on crumbs. You know what I feel—it means a smash of some sort.”
“It hasn’t been my fault, has it?”
“Yes; you’ve collected me, as you collect everybody that comes near you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Desert bent down, and dragged her hand to his lips.
“Don’t be riled with me; I’m too unhappy.”
Fleur let her hand stay against his hot lips.
“Sorry, Wilfrid.”
“All right, dear. I’ll go.”
“But you’re coming to dinner tomorrow?”
Desert said violently:
“TO-MORROW? Good God—no! What d’you think I’m made of?”
He flung her hand away.
“I don’t like violence, Wilfrid.”
“Well, good-bye; I’d better go.”
The words “And you’d better not come again” trembled up to her lips, but were not spoken. Part from Wilfrid—life would lose a little warmth! She waved her hand. He was gone. She heard the door closing. Poor Wilfrid! – nice to think of a flame at which to warm her hands! Nice but rather dreadful! And suddenly, dropping Ting-a-ling, she got up and began to walk about the room. To-morrow! Second anniversary of her wedding-day! Still an ache when she thought of what it had not been. But there was little time to think—and she made less. What good in thinking? Only one life, full of people, of things to do and have, of things wanted—a life only void of—one thing, and that—well, if people had it, they never had it long! On her lids two tears, which had gathered, dried without falling. Sentimentalism! No! The last thing in the world—the unforgivable offence! Whom should she put next whom tomorrow? And whom should she get in place of Wilfrid, if Wilfrid wouldn’t come—silly boy! One day—one night—what difference? Who should sit on her right, and who on her left? Was Aubrey Greene more distinguished, or Sibley Swan? Were they either as distinguished as Walter Nazing or Charles Upshire? Dinner of twelve, exclusively literary and artistic, except for Michael and Alison Charwell. Ah! Could Alison get her Gurdon Minho—just one writer of the old school, one glass of old wine to mellow effervescence? He didn’t publish with Danby and Winter; but he fed out of Alison’s hand. She went quickly to one of the old tea chests, and opened it. Inside was a telephone.
“Can I speak to Lady Alison—Mrs. Michael Mont… Yes… That you, Alison?… Fleur speaking. Wilfrid has fallen through tomorrow night… Is there any chance of your bringing Gurdon Minho? I don’t know him, of course; but he might be interested. You’ll try?… That’ll be ever so delightful. Isn’t the ‘Snooks’ Club meeting rather exciting? Bart says they’ll eat each other now they’ve split… About Mr. Minho. Could you let me know to-night? Thanks—thanks awfully!… Goodbye!”
Failing Minho, whom? Her mind hovered over the names in her address book. At so late a minute it must be some one who didn’t stand on ceremony; but except Alison, none of Michael’s relations would be safe from Sibley Swan or Nesta Gorse, and their subversive shafts; as to the Forsytes—out of the question; they had their own sub-acid humour (some of them), but they were not modern, not really modern. Besides, she saw as little of them as she could—they dated, belonged to the dramatic period, had no sense of life without beginning or end. No! If Gurdon Minho was a frost, it would have to be a musician, whose works were hieroglyphical with a dash of surgery; or, better, perhaps, a psycho-analyst. Her fingers turned the pages till she came to those two categories. Hugo Solstis? A possibility; but suppose he wanted to play them something recent? There was only Michael’s upright Grand, and that would mean going to his study. Better Gerald Hanks—he and Nesta Gorse would get off together on dreams; still, if they did, there would be no actual loss of life. Yes, failing Gurdon Minho, Gerald Hanks; he would be free—and put him between Alison and Nesta. She closed the book, and, going back to her jade-green settee, sat gazing at Ting-a-ling. The little dog’s prominent round eyes gazed back; bright, black, very old. Fleur thought: ‘I DON’T want Wilfrid to drop off.’ Among all the crowd who came and went, here, there and everywhere, she cared for nobody. Keep up with them, keep up with everything, of course! It was all frightfully amusing, frightfully necessary! Only—only—what?
Voices! Michael and Bart coming back. Bart had noticed Wilfrid. He WAS a noticing old Bart. She was never very comfortable when he was about—lively and twisting, but with something settled and ancestral in him; a little like Ting-a-ling—something judgmatic, ever telling her that she was fluttering and new. He was anchored, could only move to the length of his old-fashioned cord, but he could drop on to things disconcertingly. Still, he admired her, she felt—oh! yes.
Well! What had he thought of the cartoons? Ought Michael to publish them, and with letterpress or without? Didn’t he think that the cubic called ‘Still Life’—of the Government, too frightfully funny—especially the ‘old bean’ representing the Prime? For answer she was conscious of a twisting, rapid noise; Sir Lawrence was telling her of his father’s collection of electioneering cartoons. She did wish Bart would not tell her about his father; he had been so distinguished, and he must have been so dull, paying all his calls on horseback, with trousers strapped under his boots. He and Lord Charles Cariboo and the Marquis of Forfar had been the last three ‘callers’ of that sort. If only they hadn’t, they’d have been clean forgot. She had that dress to try, and fourteen things to see to, and Hugo’s concert began at eight-fifteen! Why did people of the last generation always have so much time? And, suddenly, she looked down. Ting-a-ling was licking the copper floor. She took him up: “Not that, darling; nasty!” Ah! the spell was broken! Bart was going, reminiscent to the last. She waited at the foot of the stairs till Michael shut the door on him, then flew. Reaching her room, she turned on all the lights. Here was her own style—a bed which did not look like one, and many mirrors. The couch of Ting-a-ling occupied a corner, whence he could see himself in three. She put him down, and said: “Keep quiet, now!” His attitude to the other dogs in the room had long become indifferent; though of his own breed and precisely his colouring, they had no smell and no licking power in their tongues—nothing to be done with them, imitative creatures, incredibly unresponsive.
Stripping off her dress, Fleur held the new frock under her chin.
“May I kiss you?” said a voice, and there was Michael’s image behind her own reflection in the glass.
“My dear boy, there isn’t time! Help me with this.” She slipped the frock over her head. “Do those three top hooks. How do you like it? Oh! and—Michael! Gurdon Minho may be coming to dinner tomorrow—Wilfrid can’t. Have you read his things? Sit down and tell me something about them. All novels, aren’t they? What sort?”
“Well, he’s always had something to say. And his cats are good. He’s a bit romantic, of course.”
“Oh! Have I made a gaff?”
“Not a bit; jolly good shot. The vice of our lot is, they say it pretty well, but they’ve nothing to say. They won’t last.”
“But that’s just why they will last. They won’t date.”
“Won’t they? My gum!”
“Wilfrid will last.”
“Ah! Wilfrid has emotions, hates, pities, wants; at least, sometimes; when he has, his stuff is jolly good. Otherwise, he just makes a song about nothing—like the rest.”
Fleur tucked in the top of her undergarment.
“But, Michael, if that’s so, we—I’ve got the wrong lot.”
Michael grinned.
“My dear child! The lot of the hour is always right; only you’ve got to watch it, and change it quick enough.”
“But d’you mean to say that Sibley isn’t going to live?”
“Sib? Lord, no!”
“But he’s so perfectly sure that almost everybody else is dead or dying. Surely he has critical genius!”
“If I hadn’t more judgment than Sib, I’d go out of publishing tomorrow.”
“You—more than Sibley Swan?”
“Of course, I’ve more judgment than Sib. Why! Sib’s judgment is just his opinion of Sib—common or garden impatience of any one else. He doesn’t even read them. He’ll read one specimen of every author and say: ‘Oh! that fellow! He’s dull, or he’s moral, or he’s sentimental, or he dates, or he drivels’—I’ve heard him dozens of times. That’s if they’re alive. Of course, if they’re dead, it’s different. He’s always digging up and canonising the dead; that’s how he’s got his name. There’s always a Sib in literature. He’s a standing example of how people can get taken at their own valuation. But as to lasting—of course he won’t; he’s never creative, even by mistake.”
Fleur had lost the thread. Yes! It suited her—quite a nice line! Off with it! Must write those three notes before she dressed.
Michael had begun again.
“Take my tip, Fleur. The really big people don’t talk—and don’t bunch—they paddle their own canoes in what seem backwaters. But it’s the backwaters that make the main stream. By Jove, that’s a mot, or is it a bull; and are bulls mots or mots bulls?”
“Michael, if you were me, would you tell Frederic Wilmer that he’ll be meeting Hubert Marsland at lunch next week? Would it bring him or would it put him off?”
“Marsland’s rather an old duck, Wilmer’s rather an old goose—I don’t know.”
“Oh! do be serious, Michael—you never give me any help in arranging—No! Don’t maul my shoulders please.”
“Well, darling, I DON’T know. I’ve no genius for such things, like you. Marsland paints windmills, cliffs and things—I doubt if he’s heard of the future. He’s almost a Mathew Mans for keeping out of the swim. If you think he’d like to meet a Vertiginist—”
“I didn’t ask you if he’d like to meet Wilmer; I asked you if Wilmer would like to meet him.”
“Wilmer will just say: ‘I like little Mrs. Mont, she gives deuced good grub’—and so you do, ducky. A Vertiginist wants nourishing, you know, or it wouldn’t go to his head.”
Fleur’s pen resumed its swift strokes, already becoming slightly illegible. She murmured:
“I think Wilfrid would help—you won’t be there; one—two—three. What women?”
“For painters—pretty and plump; no intellect.”
Fleur said crossly:
“I can’t get them plump; they don’t go about now.” And her pen flowed on:
“DEAR WILFRID, – Wednesday—lunch; Wilmer, Hubert Marsland, two other women. Do help me live it down.
“Yours ever,
“FLEUR.”
“Michael, your chin is like a bootbrush.”
“Sorry, old thing; your shoulders shouldn’t be so smooth. Bart gave Wilfrid a tip as we were coming along.”
Fleur stopped writing. “Oh!”
“Reminded him that the state of love was a good stunt for poets.”
“A propos of what?”
“Wilfrid was complaining that he couldn’t turn it out now.”
“Nonsense! His last things are his best.”
“Well, that’s what I think. Perhaps he’s forestalled the tip. Has he, d’you know?”
Fleur turned her eyes towards the face behind her shoulder. No, it had its native look—frank, irresponsible, slightly faun-like, with its pointed ears, quick lips, and nostrils.
She said slowly:
“If YOU don’t know, nobody does.”
A snuffle interrupted Michael’s answer. Ting-a-ling, long, low, slightly higher at both ends, was standing between them, with black muzzle upturned. ‘My pedigree is long,’ he seemed to say; ‘but my legs are short—what about it?’
According to a great and guiding principle, Fleur and Michael Mont attended the Hugo Solstis concert, not because they anticipated pleasure, but because they knew Hugo. They felt, besides, that Solstis, an Englishman of Russo–Dutch extraction, was one of those who were restoring English music, giving to it a wide and spacious freedom from melody and rhythm, while investing it with literary and mathematical charms. And one never could go to a concert given by any of this school without using the word ‘interesting’ as one was coming away. To sleep to this restored English music, too, was impossible. Fleur, a sound sleeper, had never even tried. Michael had, and complained afterwards that it had been like a nap in Liege railway station. On this occasion they occupied those gangway seats in the front row of the dress circle of which Fleur had a sort of natural monopoly. There Hugo and the rest could see her taking her place in the English restoration movement. It was easy, too, to escape into the corridor and exchange the word ‘interesting’ with side-whiskered cognoscenti; or, slipping out a cigarette from the little gold case, wedding present of Cousin Imogen Cardigan, get a whiff or two’s repose. To speak quite honestly, Fleur had a natural sense of rhythm which caused her discomfort during those long and ‘interesting’ passages which evidenced, as it were, the composer’s rise and fall from his bed of thorns. She secretly loved a tune, and the impossibility of ever confessing this without losing hold of Solstis, Baff, Birdigal, MacLewis, Clorane, and other English restoration composers, sometimes taxed to its limit a nature which had its Spartan side. Even to Michael she would not ‘confess’; and it was additionally trying when, with his native disrespect of persons, accentuated by life in the trenches and a publisher’s office, he would mutter: “Gad! Get on with it!” or: “Cripes! Ain’t he took bad!” especially as she knew that Michael was really putting up with it better than herself, having a more literary disposition, and a less dancing itch in his toes.
The first movement of the new Solstis composition—‘Phantasmagoria Piemontesque’—to which they had especially come to listen, began with some drawn-out chords. “What oh!” said Michael’s voice in her ear: “Three pieces of furniture moved simultaneously on a parquet floor!”
In Fleur’s involuntary smile was the whole secret of why her marriage had not been intolerable. After all, Michael was a dear! Devotion and mercury—jesting and loyalty—combined, they piqued and touched even a heart given away before it was bestowed on him. ‘Touch’ without ‘pique’ would have bored; ‘pique’ without ‘touch’ would have irritated. At this moment he was at peculiar advantage! Holding on to his knees, with his ears standing up, eyes glassy from loyalty to Hugo, and tongue in cheek, he was listening to that opening in a way which evoked Fleur’s admiration. The piece would be ‘interesting’—she fell into the state of outer observation and inner calculation very usual with her nowadays. Over there was L.S.D., the greater dramatist; she didn’t know him—yet. He looked rather frightening, his hair stood up so straight. And her eye began picturing him on her copper floor against a Chinese picture. And there—yes! Gurdon Minho! Imagine HIS coming to anything so modern! His profile WAS rather Roman—of the Aurelian period! Passing on from that antique, with the pleased thought that by this time tomorrow she might have collected it, she quartered the assembly face by face—she did not want to miss any one important.
“The furniture” had come to a sudden standstill.
“Interesting!” said a voice over her shoulder. Aubrey Greene! Illusive, rather moonlit, with his silky fair hair brushed straight back, and his greenish eyes—his smile always made her feel that he was ‘getting’ at her. But, after all, he was a cartoonist!
“Yes, isn’t it?”
He curled away. He might have stayed a little longer—there wouldn’t be time for any one else before those songs of Birdigal’s! Here came the singer Charles Powls! How stout and efficient he looked, dragging little Birdigal to the piano.
Charming accompaniment—rippling, melodious!
The stout, efficient man began to sing. How different from the accompaniment! The song hit every note just off the solar plexus. It mathematically prevented her from feeling pleasure. Birdigal must have written it in horror of some one calling it ‘vocal.’ Vocal! Fleur knew how catching the word was; it would run like a measle round the ring, and Birdigal would be no more! Poor Birdigal! But this was ‘interesting.’ Only, as Michael was saying: “O, my Gawd!”
Three songs! Powls was wonderful—so loyal! Never one note hit so that it rang out like music! Her mind fluttered off to Wilfrid. To him, of all the younger poets, people accorded the right to say something; it gave him such a position—made him seem to come out of life, instead of literature. Besides, he had done things in the war, was a son of Lord Mullyon, would get the Mercer Prize probably, for ‘Copper Coin.’ If Wilfrid abandoned her, a star would fall from the firmament above her copper floor. He had no right to leave her in the lurch. He must learn not to be violent—not to think physically. No! she couldn’t let Wilfrid slip away; nor could she have any more sob-stuff in her life, searing passions, cul de sacs, aftermaths. She had tasted of that; a dulled ache still warned her.
Birdigal was bowing, Michael saying: “Come out for a whiff! The next thing’s a dud!” Oh! ah! Beethoven. Poor old Beethoven! So out of date—one did RATHER enjoy him!
The corridor, and refectory beyond, were swarming with the restoration movement. Young men and women with faces and heads of lively and distorted character, were exchanging the word ‘interesting.’ Men of more massive type, resembling sedentary matadors, blocked all circulation. Fleur and Michael passed a little way along, stood against the wall, and lighted cigarettes. Fleur smoked hers delicately—a very little one in a tiny amber holder. She had the air of admiring blue smoke rather than of making it; there were spheres to consider beyond this sort of crowd—one never knew who might be about! – the sphere, for instance, in which Alison Charwell moved, politico-literary, catholic in taste, but, as Michael always put it, “Convinced, like a sanitary system, that it’s the only sphere in the world; look at the way they all write books of reminiscence about each other!” They might, she always felt, disapprove of women smoking in public halls. Consorting delicately with iconoclasm, Fleur never forgot that her feet were in two worlds at least. Standing there, observant of all to left and right, she noted against the wall one whose face was screened by his programme. ‘Wilfrid,’ she thought, ‘and doesn’t mean to see me!’ Mortified, as a child from whom a sixpence is filched, she said:
“There’s Wilfrid! Fetch him, Michael!”
Michael crossed, and touched his best man’s sleeve; Desert’s face emerged, frowning. She saw him shrug his shoulders, turn and walk into the throng. Michael came back.
“Wilfrid’s got the hump to-night; says he’s not fit for human society—queer old son!”
How obtuse men were! Because Wilfrid was his pal, Michael did not see; and that was lucky! So Wilfrid really meant to avoid her! Well, she would see! And she said:
“I’m tired, Michael; let’s go home.”
His hand slid round her arm.
“Sorry, old thing; come along!”
They stood a moment in a neglected doorway, watching Woomans, the conductor, launched towards his orchestra.
“Look at him,” said Michael; “guy hung out of an Italian window, legs and arms all stuffed and flying! And look at the Frapka and her piano—that’s a turbulent union!”
There was a strange sound.
“Melody, by George!” said Michael.
An attendant muttered in their ears: “Now, sir, I’m going to shut the door.” Fleur had a fleeting view of L.S.D. sitting upright as his hair, with closed eyes. The door was shut—they were outside in the hall.
“Wait here, darling; I’ll nick a rickshaw.”
Fleur huddled her chin in her fur. It was easterly and cold.
A voice behind her said:
“Well, Fleur, am I going East?”
Wilfrid! His collar up to his ears, a cigarette between his lips, hands in pockets, eyes devouring.
“You’re very silly, Wilfrid!”
“Anything you like; am I going East?”
“No; Sunday morning—eleven o’clock at the Tate. We’ll talk it out.”
“Convenu!” And he was gone.
Alone suddenly, like that, Fleur felt the first shock of reality. Was Wilfrid truly going to be unmanageable? A taxicab ground up; Michael beckoned; Fleur stepped in.
Passing a passionately lighted oasis of young ladies displaying to the interested Londoner the acme of Parisian undress, she felt Michael incline towards her. If she were going to keep Wilfrid, she must be nice to Michael. Only:
“You needn’t kiss me in Piccadilly Circus, Michael!”
“Sorry, duckie! It’s a little previous—I meant to get you opposite the Partheneum.”
Fleur remembered how he had slept on a Spanish sofa for the first fortnight of their honeymoon; how he always insisted that she must not spend anything on him, but must always let him give her what he liked, though she had three thousand a year and he twelve hundred; how jumpy he was when she had a cold—and how he always came home to tea. Yes, he was a dear! But would she break her heart if he went East or West tomorrow?
Snuggled against him, she was surprised at her own cynicism.
A telephone message written out, in the hall, ran: “Please tell Mrs. Mont I’ve got Mr. Gurding Minner. Lady Alisson.”
It was restful. A real antique! She turned on the lights in her room, and stood for a moment admiring it. Truly pretty! A slight snuffle from the corner—Ting-a-ling, tan on a black cushion, lay like a Chinese lion in miniature; pure, remote, fresh from evening communion with the Square railings.
“I see you,” said Fleur.
Ting-a-ling did not stir; his round black eyes watched his mistress undress. When she returned from the bathroom he was curled into a ball. Fleur thought: ‘Queer! How does he know Michael won’t be coming?’ And slipping into her well warmed bed, she too curled herself up and slept.
But in the night, contrary to her custom, she awoke. A cry—long, weird, trailing, from somewhere—the river—the slums at the back—rousing memory—poignant, aching—of her honeymoon—Granada, its roofs below, jet, ivory, gold; the watchman’s cry, the lines in Jon’s letter:
“Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
Spanish City darkened under her white stars.
What says the voice—its clear, lingering anguish?
Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
No! ’Tis one deprived, whose lover’s heart is weeping,
Just his cry: ‘How long?’”
A cry, or had she dreamed it? Jon, Wilfrid, Michael! No use to have a heart!
Lady Alison Charwell, born Heathfield, daughter of the first Earl of Campden, and wife to Lionel Charwell, K.C., Michael’s somewhat young uncle, was a delightful Englishwoman brought up in a set accepted as the soul of society. Full of brains, energy, taste, money, and tinctured in its politico-legal ancestry by blue blood, this set was linked to, but apart from ‘Snooks’ and the duller haunts of birth and privilege. It was gay, charming, free-and-easy, and, according to Michael, “Snobbish, old thing, aesthetically and intellectually, but they’ll never see it. They think they’re the top notch—quick, healthy, up-to-date, well-bred, intelligent; they simply can’t imagine their equals. But you see their imagination is deficient. Their really creative energy would go into a pint pot. Look at their books—they’re always ON something—philosophy, spiritualism, poetry, fishing, themselves; why, even their sonnets dry up before they’re twenty-five. They know everything—except mankind outside their own set. Oh! they work—they run the show—they have to; there’s no one else with their brains, and energy, and taste. But they run it round and round in their own blooming circle. It’s the world to them—and it might be worse. They’ve patented their own golden age; but it’s a trifle flyblown since the war.”
Alison Charwell—in and of this world, so spryly soulful, debonnaire, free, and cosy—lived within a stone’s throw of Fleur, in a house pleasant, architecturally, as any in London. Forty years old, she had three children and considerable beauty, wearing a little fine from mental and bodily activity. Something of an enthusiast, she was fond of Michael, in spite of his strange criticisms, so that his matrimonial venture had piqued her from the start. Fleur was dainty, had quick natural intelligence—this new niece was worth cultivation. But, though adaptable and assimilative, Fleur had remained curiously unassimilated; she continued to whet the curiosity of Lady Alison, accustomed to the close borough of choice spirits, and finding a certain poignancy in contact with the New Age on Fleur’s copper floor. She met with an irreverence there, which, not taken too seriously, flipped her mind. On that floor she almost felt a back number. It was stimulating.
Receiving Fleur’s telephonic enquiry about Gurdon Minho, she had rung up the novelist. She knew him, if not well. Nobody seemed to know him well; amiable, polite, silent, rather dull and austere; but with a disconcerting smile, sometimes ironical, sometimes friendly. His books were now caustic, now sentimental. On both counts it was rather the fashion to run him down, though he still seemed to exist.
She rang him up. Would he come to a dinner tomorrow at her young nephew, Michael Mont’s, and meet the younger generation? His answer came, rather high-pitched:
“Rather! Full fig, or dinner jacket?”
“How awfully nice of you! they’ll be ever so pleased. Full fig, I believe. It’s the second anniversary of their wedding.” She hung up the receiver with the thought: ‘He must be writing a book about them!’
Conscious of responsibility, she arrived early.
It was a grand night at her husband’s Inn, so that she brought nothing with her but the feeling of adventure, pleasant after a day spent in fluttering over the decision at ‘Snooks’. She was received only by Ting-a-ling, who had his back to the fire, and took no notice beyond a stare. Sitting down on the jade green settee, she said:
“Well, you funny little creature, don’t you know me after all this time?”
Ting-a-ling’s black shiny gaze seemed saying: “You recur here, I know; most things recur. There is nothing new about the future.”
Lady Alison fell into a train of thought: The new generation! Did she want her own girls to be of it! She would like to talk to Mr. Minho about that—they had had a very nice talk down at Beechgroves before the war. Nine years ago—Sybil only six, Joan only four then! Time went, things changed! A new generation! And what was the difference? “I think we had more tradition!” she said to herself softly.
A slight sound drew her eyes up from contemplation of her feet. Ting-a-ling was moving his tail from side to side on the hearthrug, as if applauding. Fleur’s voice, behind her, said:
“Well, darling, I’m awfully late. It WAS good of you to get me Mr. Minho. I do hope they’ll all behave. He’ll be between you and me, anyway; I’m sticking him at the top, and Michael at the bottom, between Pauline Upshire and Amabel Nazing. You’ll have Sibley on your left, and I’ll have Aubrey on my right, then Nesta Gorse and Walter Nazing; opposite them Linda Frewe and Charles Upshire. Twelve. You know them all. Oh! and you mustn’t mind if the Nazings and Nesta smoke between the courses. Amabel will do it. She comes from Virginia—it’s the reaction. I do hope she’ll have some clothes on; Michael always says it’s a mistake when she has; but having Mr. Minho makes one a little nervous. Did you see Nesta’s skit in ‘The Bouquet’? Oh, too frightfully amusing—clearly meant for L.S.D.! Ting, my Ting, are you going to stay and see all these people? Well, then, get up here or you’ll be trodden on. Isn’t he Chinese? He does so round off the room.”
Ting-a-ling laid his nose on his paws, in the centre of a jade green cushion.
“Mr. Gurding Minner!”
The well-known novelist looked pale and composed. Shaking the two extended hands, he gazed at Ting-a-ling, and said:
“How nice! How are YOU, my little man?”
Ting-a-ling did not stir. “You take me for a common English dog, sir!” his silence seemed to say.
“Mr. and Mrs. Walter Nazon, Miss Lenda Frow.”
Amabel Nazing came first, clear alabaster from her fair hair down to the six inches of gleaming back above her waist-line, shrouded alabaster from four inches below the knee to the gleaming toes of her shoes; the eminent novelist mechanically ceased to commune with Ting-a-ling. Walter Nazing, who followed a long way up above his wife, had a tiny line of collar emergent from swathes of black, and a face, cut a hundred years ago, that slightly resembled Shelley’s. His literary productions were sometimes felt to be like the poetry of that bard, and sometimes like the prose of Marcel Proust. “What oh!” as Michael said.
Linda Frewe, whom Fleur at once introduced to Gurdon Minho, was one about whose work no two people in her drawing-room ever agreed. Her works ‘Trifles’ and ‘The Furious Don’ had quite divided all opinion. Genius according to some, drivel according to others, those books always roused an interesting debate whether a slight madness enhanced or diminished the value of art. She herself paid little attention to criticism—she produced.
“THE Mr. Minho? How interesting! I’ve never read anything of yours.”
Fleur gave a little gasp.
“What—don’t you know Mr. Minho’s cats? But they’re wonderful. Mr. Minho, I do want Mrs. Walter Nazing to know you. Amabel—Mr. Gurdon Minho.”
“Oh! Mr. Minho—how perfectly lovely! I’ve wanted to know you ever since my cradle.”
Fleur heard the novelist say quietly:
“I could wish it had been longer;” and passed on in doubt to greet Nesta Gorse and Sibley Swan, who came in, as if they lived together, quarrelling over L.S.D., Nesta upholding him because of his ‘panache’, Sibley maintaining that wit had died with the Restoration; this fellow was alive!
Michael followed with the Upshires and Aubrey Greene, whom he had encountered in the hall. The party was complete.
Fleur loved perfection, and that evening was something of a nightmare. Was it a success? Minho was so clearly the least brilliant person there; even Alison talked better. And yet he had such a fine skull. She did hope he would not go away early. Some one would be almost sure to say ‘Dug up!’ or ‘Thick and bald!’ before the door closed behind him. He was pathetically agreeable, as if trying to be liked, or, at least, not despised too much. And there must, of course, be more in him than met the sense of hearing. After the crab souffle he did seem to be talking to Alison, and all about youth. Fleur listened with one ear.
“Youth feels… main stream of life… not giving it what it wants. Past and future getting haloes… Quite! Contemporary life no earthly just now… No… Only comfort for us—we’ll be antiquated, some day, like Congreve, Sterne, Defoe… have our chance again… WHY? What IS driving them out of the main current? Oh! Probably surfeit… newspapers… photographs. Don’t see life itself, only reports… reproductions of it; all seems shoddy, lurid, commercial… Youth says ‘Away with it, let’s have the past or the future!’”
He took some salted almonds, and Fleur saw his eyes stray to the upper part of Amabel Nazing. Down there the conversation was like Association football—no one kept the ball for more than one kick. It shot from head to head. And after every set of passes some one would reach out and take a cigarette, and blow a blue cloud across the unclothed refectory table. Fleur enjoyed the glow of her Spanish room—its tiled floor, richly coloured fruits in porcelain, its tooled leather, copper articles, and Soames’ Goya above a Moorish divan. She headed the ball promptly when it came her way, but initiated nothing. Her gift was to be aware of everything at once. “Mrs. Michael Mont presented” the brilliant irrelevancies of Linda Frewe, the pricks and stimulations of Nesta Gorse, the moonlit sliding innuendoes of Aubrey Greene, the upturning strokes of Sibley Swan, Amabel Nazing’s little cool American audacities, Charles Upshire’s curious bits of lore, Walter Nazing’s subversive contradictions, the critical intricacies of Pauline Upshire; Michael’s happy-go-lucky slings and arrows, even Alison’s knowledgeable quickness, and Gurdon Minho’s silences—she presented them all, showed them off, keeping her eyes and ears on the ball of talk lest it should touch earth and rest. Brilliant evening; but—a success?
On the jade green settee, when the last of them had gone and Michael was seeing Alison home, she thought of Minho’s ‘Youth—not getting what it wants.’ No! Things didn’t fit. “They don’t fit, do they, Ting!” But Ting-a-ling was tired, only the tip of one ear quivered. Fleur leaned back and sighed. Ting-a-ling uncurled himself, and putting his forepaws on her thigh, looked up in her face. “Look at me,” he seemed to say, “I’m all right. I get what I want, and I want what I get. At present I want to go to bed.”
“But I don’t,” said Fleur, without moving.
“Just take me up!” said Ting-a-ling.
“Well,” said Fleur, “I suppose—It’s a nice person, but not the right person, Ting.”
Ting-a-ling settled himself on her bare arms.
“It’s all right,” he seemed to say. “There’s a great deal too much sentiment and all that, out of China. Come on!”
The Honourable Wilfrid Desert’s rooms were opposite a picture gallery off Cork Street. The only male member of the aristocracy writing verse that any one would print, he had chosen them for seclusion rather than for comfort. His ‘junk,’ however, was not devoid of the taste and luxury which overflows from the greater houses of England. Furniture from the Hampshire seat of the Cornish nobleman, Lord Mullyon, had oozed into two vans, when Wilfrid settled in. He was seldom to be found, however, in his nest, and was felt to be a rare bird, owing his rather unique position among the younger writers partly to his migratory reputation. He himself hardly, perhaps, knew where he spent his time, or did his work, having a sort of mental claustrophobia, a dread of being hemmed in by people. When the war broke out he had just left Eton; when the war was over he was twenty-three, as old a young man as ever turned a stave. His friendship with Michael, begun in hospital, had languished and renewed itself suddenly, when in 1920 Michael joined Danby and Winter, publishers, of Blake Street, Covent Garden. The scattery enthusiasm of the sucking publisher had been roused by Wilfrid’s verse. Hob-nobbing lunches over the poems of one in need of literary anchorage, had been capped by the firm’s surrender to Michael’s insistence. The mutual intoxication of the first book Wilfrid had written and the first book Michael had sponsored was crowned at Michael’s wedding. Best man! Since then, so far as Desert could be tied to anything, he had been tied to those two; nor, to do him justice, had he realised till a month ago that the attraction was not Michael, but Fleur. Desert never spoke of the war, it was not possible to learn from his own mouth an effect which he might have summed up thus: “I lived so long with horror and death; I saw men so in the raw; I put hope of anything out of my mind so utterly, that I can never more have the faintest respect for theories, promises, conventions, moralities, and principles. I have hated too much the men who wallowed in them while I was wallowing in mud and blood. Illusion is off. No religion and no philosophy will satisfy me—words, all words. I have still my senses—no thanks to them; am still capable—I find—of passion; can still grit my teeth and grin; have still some feeling of trench loyalty, but whether real or just a complex, I don’t yet know. I am dangerous, but not so dangerous as those who trade in words, principles, theories, and all manner of fanatical idiocy to be worked out in the blood and sweat of other men. The war’s done one thing for me—converted life to comedy. Laugh at it—there’s nothing else to do!”
Leaving the concert hall on the Friday night, he had walked straight home to his rooms. And lying down full length on a monk’s seat of the fifteenth century, restored with down cushions and silk of the twentieth, he crossed his hands behind his head and delivered himself to these thoughts: ‘I am not going on like this. She has bewitched me. It doesn’t mean anything to her. But it means hell to me. I’ll finish with it on Sunday—Persia’s a good place. Arabia’s a good place—plenty of blood and sand! She’s incapable of giving anything up. How has she hooked herself into me! By trick of eyes, and hair, by her walk, by the sound of her voice—by trick of warmth, scent, colour. Fling her cap over the windmill—not she! What then? Am I to hang about her Chinese fireside and her little Chinese dog; and have this ache and this fever because I can’t be kissing her? I’d rather be flying again in the middle of Boche whiz-bangs! Sunday! How women like to drag out agonies! It’ll be just this afternoon all over again. “How unkind of you to go, when your friendship is so precious to me! Stay, and be my tame cat, Wilfrid!” No, my dear, for once you’re up against it! And—so am I, by the Lord!…’
When in that gallery which extends asylum to British art, those two young people met so accidentally on Sunday morning in front of Eve smelling at the flowers of the Garden of Eden, there were present also six mechanics in various stages of decomposition, a custodian and a couple from the provinces, none of whom seemed capable of observing anything whatever. And, indeed, that meeting was inexpressive. Two young people, of the disillusioned class, exchanging condemnations of the past. Desert with his off-hand speech, his smile, his well-tailored informality, suggested no aching heart. Of the two Fleur was the paler and more interesting. Desert kept saying to himself: “No melodrama—that’s all it would be!” And Fleur was thinking: ‘If I can keep him ordinary like this, I shan’t lose him, because he’ll never go away without a proper outburst.’
It was not until they found themselves a second time before the Eve, that he said:
“I don’t know why you asked me to come, Fleur. It’s playing the goat for no earthly reason. I quite understand your feeling. I’m a bit of ‘Ming’ that you don’t want to lose. But it’s not good enough, my dear; and that’s all about it.”
“How horrible of you, Wilfrid!”
“Well! Here we part! Give us your flipper.”
His eyes—rather beautiful—looked dark and tragic above the smile on his lips, and she said stammering:
“Wilfrid—I—I don’t know. I want time. I can’t bear you to be unhappy. Don’t go away! Perhaps I—I shall be unhappy, too; I—I don’t know.”
Through Desert passed the bitter thought: ‘She CAN’T let go—she doesn’t know how.’ But he said quite softly: “Cheer up, my child; you’ll be over all that in a fortnight. I’ll send you something to make up. Why shouldn’t I make it China—one place is as good as another? I’ll send you a bit of real ‘Ming,’ of a better period than this.”
Fleur said passionately:
“You’re insulting! Don’t!”
“I beg your pardon. I don’t want to leave you angry.”
“What is it you want of me?”
“Oh! no—come! This is going over it twice. Besides, since Friday I’ve been thinking. I want nothing, Fleur, except a blessing and your hand. Give it me! Come on!”
Fleur put her hand behind her back. It was too mortifying! He took her for a cold-blooded, collecting little cat—clutching and playing with mice that she didn’t want to eat!
“You think I’m made of ice,” she said, and her teeth caught her upper lip: “Well, I’m not!”
Desert looked at her; his eyes were very wretched. “I didn’t mean to play up your pride,” he said. “Let’s drop it, Fleur. It isn’t any good.”
Fleur turned and fixed her eyes on the Eve—rumbustious-looking female, care-free, avid, taking her fill of flower perfume! Why not be care-free, take anything that came along? Not so much love in the world that one could afford to pass, leaving it unsmelled, unplucked. Run away! Go to the East! Of course, she couldn’t do anything extravagant like that! But, perhaps—What did it matter? one man or another, when neither did you really love!
From under her drooped, white, dark-lashed eyelids she saw the expression on his face, and that he was standing stiller than the statues. And suddenly she said: “You will be a fool to go. Wait!” And without another word or look, she walked away, leaving Desert breathless before the avid Eve.
Moving away, in the confusion of her mood, Fleur almost trod on the toes of a too-familiar figure standing before an Alma Tadema with a sort of grey anxiety, as if lost in the mutability of market values.
“Father! YOU up in town? Come along to lunch, I have to get home quick.”
Hooking his arm and keeping between him and Eve, she guided him away, thinking: ‘Did he see us? Could he have seen us?’
“Have you got enough on?” muttered Soames.
“Heaps!”
“That’s what you women always say. East wind, and your neck like that! Well, I don’t know.”
“No, dear, but I do.”
The grey eyes appraised her from head to foot.
“What are you doing here?” he said. And Flour thought: ‘Thank God he didn’t see. He’d never have asked if he had.’ And she answered:
“I take an interest in art, darling, as well as you.”
“Well, I’m staying with your aunt in Green Street. This east wind has touched my liver. How’s your—how’s Michael?”
“Oh, he’s all right—a little cheap. We had a dinner last night.”
Anniversary! The realism of a Forsyte stirred in him, and he looked under her eyes. Thrusting his hand into his overcoat pocket, he said:
“I was bringing you this.”
Fleur saw a flat substance wrapped in pink tissue paper.
“Darling, what is it?”
Soames put it back into his pocket.
“We’ll see later. Anybody to lunch?”
“Only Bart.”
“Old Mont! Oh, Lord!”
“Don’t you like Bart, dear?”
“Like him? He and I have nothing in common.”
“I thought you fraternised rather over the state of things.”
“He’s a reactionary,” said Soames.
“And what are you, ducky?”
“I? What should I be?” With these words he affirmed that policy of non-commitment which, the older he grew, the more he perceived to be the only attitude for a sensible man.
“How is Mother?”
“Looks well. I see nothing of her—she’s got her own mother down—they go gadding about.”
He never alluded to Madame Lamotte as Fleur’s grandmother—the less his daughter had to do with her French side, the better.
“Oh!” said Fleur. “There’s Ting and a cat!” Ting-a-ling, out for a breath of air, and tethered by a lead in the hands of a maid, was snuffling horribly and trying to climb a railing whereon was perched a black cat, all hunch and eyes.
“Give him to me, Ellen. Come with Mother, darling!”
Ting-a-ling came, indeed, but only because he couldn’t go, bristling and snuffling and turning his head back.
“I like to see him natural,” said Fleur.
“Waste of money, a dog like that,” Soames commented. “You should have had a bull-dog and let him sleep in the hall. No end of burglaries. Your aunt had her knocker stolen.”
“I wouldn’t part with Ting for a hundred knockers.”
“One of these days you’ll be having HIM stolen—fashionable breed.”
Fleur opened her front door. “Oh!” she said, “Bart’s here, already!”
A shiny hat was reposing on a marble coffer, present from Soames, intended to hold coats and discourage moth. Placing his hat alongside the other, Soames looked at them. They were too similar for words, tall, high, shiny, and with the same name inside. He had resumed the ‘tall hat’ habit after the failure of the general and coal strikes in 1921, his instinct having told him that revolution would be at a discount for some considerable period.
“About this thing,” he said, taking out the pink parcel, “I don’t know what you’ll do with it, but here it is.”
It was a curiously carved and coloured bit of opal in a ring of tiny brilliants.
“Oh!” Fleur cried: “What a delicious thing!”
“Venus floating on the waves, or something,” murmured Soames. “Uncommon. You want a strong light on it.”
“But it’s lovely. I shall put it on at once.”
Venus! If Dad had known! She put her arms round his neck to disguise her sense of a propos. Soames received the rub of her cheek against his own well-shaved face with his usual stillness. Why demonstrate when they were both aware that his affection was double hers?
“Put it on then,” he said, “and let’s see.”
Fleur pinned it at her neck before an old lacquered mirror.
“It’s a jewel. Thank you, darling! Yes, your tie is straight. I like that white piping. You ought always to wear it with black. Now, come along!” And she drew him into her Chinese room. It was empty.
“Bart must be up with Michael, talking about his new book.”
“Writing at his age?” said Soames.
“Well, ducky, he’s a year younger than you.”
“I don’t write. Not such a fool. Got any more newfangled friends?”
“Just one—Gurdon Minho, the novelist.”
“Another of the new school?”
“Oh, no, dear! Surely you’ve heard of Gurdon Minho; he’s older than the hills.”
“They’re all alike to me,” muttered Soames. “Is he well thought of?”
“I should think his income is larger than yours. He’s almost a classic—only waiting to die.”
“I’ll get one of his books and read it. What name did you say?”
“Get ‘Big and Little Fishes,’ by Gurdon Minho. You can remember that, can’t you? Oh! here they are! Michael, look at what Father’s given me.”
Taking his hand, she put it up to the opal at her neck. ‘Let them both see,’ she thought, ‘what good terms we’re on.’ Though her father had not seen her with Wilfrid in the gallery, her conscience still said: “Strengthen your respectability, you don’t quite know how much support you’ll need for it in future.”
And out of the corner of her eye she watched those two. The meetings between ‘Old Mont’ and ‘Old Forsyte’—as she knew Bart called her father when speaking of him to Michael—always made her want to laugh, but she never quite knew why. Bart knew everything, but his knowledge was beautifully bound, strictly edited by a mind tethered to the ‘eighteenth century.’ Her father only knew what was of advantage to him, but the knowledge was unbound, and subject to no editorship. If he WAS late Victorian, he was not above profiting if necessary by even later periods. ‘Old Mont’ had faith in tradition; ‘Old Forsyte’ none. Fleur’s acuteness had long perceived a difference which favoured her father. Yet ‘Old Mont’s’ talk was so much more up-to-date, rapid, glancing, garrulous, redolent of precise information; and ‘Old Forsyte’s’ was constricted, matter-of-fact. Really impossible to tell which of the two was the better museum specimen; and both so well-preserved!
They did not precisely shake hands; but Soames mentioned the weather. And almost at once they all four sought that Sunday food which by a sustained effort of will Fleur had at last deprived of reference to the British character. They partook, in fact, of lobster cocktails, and a mere risotto of chickens’ livers, an omelette au rhum, and dessert trying to look as Spanish as it could.
“I’ve been in the Tate,” Fleur said; “I do think it’s touching.”
“Touching?” queried Soames with a sniff.
“Fleur means, sir, that to see so much old English art together is like looking at a baby show.”
“I don’t follow,” said Soames stiffly. “There’s some very good work there.”
“But not grown-up, sir.”
“Ah! You young people mistake all this crazy cleverness for maturity.”
“That’s not what Michael means, Father. It’s quite true that English painting has no wisdom teeth. You can see the difference in a moment, between it and any Continental painting.”
“And thank God for it!” broke in Sir Lawrence. “The beauty of this country’s art is its innocence. We’re the oldest country in the world politically, and the youngest aesthetically. What do you say, Forsyte?”
“Turner is old and wise enough for me,” said Soames curtly. “Are you coming to the P.P.R.S. Board on Tuesday?”
“Tuesday? We were going to shoot the spinneys, weren’t we, Michael?”
Soames grunted. “I should let them wait,” he said. “We settle the report.”
It was through ‘Old Mont’s’ influence that he had received a seat on the Board of that flourishing concern, the Providential Premium Reassurance Society, and, truth to tell, he was not sitting very easily in it. Though the law of averages was, perhaps, the most reliable thing in the world, there were circumstances which had begun to cause him disquietude. He looked round his nose. Light weight, this narrow-headed, twisting-eyebrowed baronet of a chap—like his son before him! And he added suddenly: “I’m not easy. If I’d realised how that chap Elderson ruled the roost, I doubt if I should have come on to that Board.”
One side of ‘Old Mont’s’ face seemed to try to leave the other.
“Elderson!” he said. “His grandfather was my grandfather’s parliamentary agent at the time of the Reform Bill; he put him through the most corrupt election ever fought—bought every vote—used to kiss all the farmer’s wives. Great days, Forsyte, great days!”
“And over,” said Soames. “I don’t believe in trusting a man’s judgment as far as we trust Elderson’s; I don’t like this foreign insurance.”
“My dear Forsyte—first-rate head, Elderson; I’ve known him all my life, we were at Winchester together.”
Soames uttered a deep sound. In that answer of ‘Old Mont’s’ lay much of the reason for his disquietude. On the Board they had all, as it were, been at Winchester together! It was the very deuce! They were all so honourable that they dared not scrutinise each other, or even their own collective policy. Worse than their dread of mistake or fraud was their dread of seeming to distrust each other. And this was natural, for to distrust each other was an immediate evil. And, as Soames knew, immediate evils are those which one avoids. Indeed, only that tendency, inherited from his father, James, to lie awake between the hours of two and four, when the chrysalis of faint misgiving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic, had developed his uneasiness. The P.P.R.S. was so imposing a concern, and he had been connected with it so short a time, that it seemed presumptuous to smell a rat; especially as he would have to leave the Board and the thousand a year he earned on it if he raised smell of rat without rat or reason. But what if there were a rat? That was the trouble! And here sat ‘Old Mont’ talking of his spinneys and his grandfather. The fellow’s head was too small! And visited by the cheerless thought: ‘There’s nobody here, not even my own daughter, capable of taking a thing seriously,’ he kept silence. A sound at his elbow roused him. That marmoset of a dog, on a chair between him and his daughter, was sitting up! Did it expect him to give it something? Its eyes would drop out one of these days. And he said: “Well, what do YOU want?” The way the little beast stared with those boot-buttons! “Here,” he said, offering it a salted almond. “You don’t eat these.”
Ting-a-ling did.
“He has a passion for them, Dad. Haven’t you, darling?”
Ting-a-ling turned his eyes up at Soames, through whom a queer sensation passed. ‘Believe the little brute likes me,’ he thought, ‘he’s always looking at me.’ He touched the dog’s nose with the tip of his finger. Ting-a-ling gave it a slight lick with his curly blackish tongue.
“Poor fellow!” muttered Soames involuntarily, and turned to ‘Old Mont.’
“Don’t mention what I said.”
“My dear Forsyte, what was that?”
Good Heavens! And he was on a Board with a man like this! What had made him come on, when he didn’t want the money, or any more worries—goodness knew. As soon as he had become a director, Winifred and others of his family had begun to acquire shares to neutralise their income tax—seven per cent, preference—nine per cent, ordinary—instead of the steady five they ought to be content with. There it was, he couldn’t move without people following him. He had always been so safe, so perfect a guide in the money maze! To be worried at his time of life! His eyes sought comfort from the opal at his daughter’s neck—pretty thing, pretty neck! Well! She seemed happy enough—had forgotten her infatuation of two years ago! That was something to be thankful for. What she wanted now was a child to steady her in all this modern scrimmage of twopenny-ha’penny writers and painters and musicians. A loose lot, but she had a good little head on her. If she had a child, he would put another twenty thousand into her settlement. That was one thing about her mother—steady in money matters, good French method. And Fleur—so far as he knew—cut her coat according to her cloth. What was that? The word ‘Goya’ had caught his ear. New life of him coming out? H’m! That confirmed his slowly growing conviction that Goya had reached top point again.
“Think I shall part with that,” he said, pointing to the picture. “There’s an Argentine over here.”
“Sell your Goya, sir?” It was Michael speaking. “Think of the envy with which you’re now regarded!”
“One can’t have everything,” said Soames.
“That reproduction we’ve got for ‘The New Life’ has turned out first-rate. ‘Property of Soames Forsyte, Esquire.’ Let’s get the book out first, sir, anyway.”
“Shadow or substance, eh, Forsyte?”
Narrow-headed baronet chap—was he mocking?
“I’VE no family place,” he said.
“No, but we have, sir,” murmured Michael; “you could leave it to Fleur, you know.”
“Well,” said Soames, “we shall see if that’s worth while.” And he looked at his daughter.
Fleur seldom blushed, but she picked up Ting-a-ling and rose from the Spanish table. Michael followed suit. “Coffee in the other room,” he said. ‘Old Forsyte’ and ‘Old Mont’ stood up, wiping their moustaches.
The offices of the P.P.R.S. were not far from the College of Arms. Soames, who knew that ‘three dexter buckles on a sable ground gules’ and a ‘pheasant proper’ had been obtained there at some expense by his Uncle Swithin in the ‘sixties of the last century, had always pooh-poohed the building, until, about a year ago, he had been struck by the name Golding in a book which he had absently taken up at the Connoisseurs’ Club. The affair purported to prove that William Shakespeare was really Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The mother of the earl was a Golding—so was the mother of Soames! The coincidence struck him; and he went on reading. The tome left him with judgment suspended over the main issue, but a distinct curiosity as to whether he was not of the same blood as Shakespeare. Even if the earl were not the bard, he felt that the connection could only be creditable, though, so far as he could make out, Oxford was a shady fellow. Recently appointed on the Board of the P.P.R.S., so that he passed the college every other Tuesday, he had thought: ‘Shan’t go spending a lot of money on it, but might look in one day.’ Having looked in, it was astonishing how taken he had been by the whole thing. Tracing his mother had been quite like a criminal investigation, nearly as ramified and fully as expensive. Having begun, the tenacity of a Forsyte could hardly bear to leave him short of the mother of Shakespeare de Vere, even though she would be collateral; unfortunately, he could not get past a certain William Gouldyng, Ingerer—whatever that might be, and he was almost afraid to enquire—of the time of Oliver Cromwell. There were still four generations to be unravelled, and he was losing money and the hope of getting anything for it. This it was which caused him to gaze askance at the retired building while passing it on his way to the Board on the Tuesday after the lunch at Fleur’s. Two more wakeful early mornings had screwed him to the pitch of bringing his doubts to a head and knowing where he stood in the matter of the P.P.R.S.; and this sudden reminder that he was spending money here, there and everywhere, when there was a possibility, however remote, of financial liability somewhere else, sharpened the edge of a nerve already stropped by misgivings. Neglecting the lift and walking slowly up the two flights of stairs, he ‘went over’ his fellow-directors for the fifteenth time. Old Lord Fontenoy was there for his name, of course; seldom attended, and was what they called ‘a dud’—h’m! – nowadays; the chairman, Sir Luke Sharman, seemed always to be occupied in not being taken for a Jew. His nose was straight, but his eyelids gave cause for doubt. His surname was impeccable, but his Christian dubious; his voice was reassuringly roughened, but his clothes had a suspicious tendency towards gloss. Altogether a man who, though shrewd, could not be trusted—Soames felt—to be giving his whole mind to other business. As for ‘Old Mont’—what was the good of a ninth baronet on a Board? Guy Meyricke, King’s Counsel, last of the three who had been ‘together,’ was a good man in court, no doubt, but with no time for business and no real sense of it! Remained that converted Quaker, old Cuthbert Mothergill—whose family name had been a by-word for successful integrity throughout the last century, so that people still put Mothergills on to boards almost mechanically—rather deaf, nice clean old chap, and quite bland, but nothing more. A perfectly honest lot, no doubt, but perfunctory. None of them really giving their minds to the thing! In Elderson’s pocket, too, except perhaps Sharman, and he on the wobble. And Elderson himself—clever chap, bit of an artist, perhaps; managing director from the start, with everything at his finger-tips! Yes! That was the mischief! Prestige of superior knowledge, and years of success—they all kowtowed to him, and no wonder! Trouble with a man like that was that if he once admitted to having made a mistake he destroyed the legend of his infallibility. Soames had enough infallibility of his own to realise how powerful was its impetus towards admitting nothing. Ten months ago, when he had come on to the Board, everything had seemed in full sail; exchanges had reached bottom, so they all thought—the ‘reassurance of foreign contracts’ policy, which Elderson had initiated about a year before, had seemed, with rising exchanges, perhaps the brightest feather in the cap of possibility. And now, a twelvemonth later, Soames suspected darkly that they did not know where they were—and the general meeting only six weeks off! Probably not even Elderson knew; or, if he did, he was keeping knowledge which ought to belong to the whole directorate severely to himself.
He entered the board room without a smile. All there—even Lord Fontenoy and ‘Old Mont’—given up his spinneys, had he! Soames took his seat at the end on the fireside. Staring at Elderson, he saw, with sudden clearness, the strength of the fellow’s position; and, with equal clearness, the weakness of the P.P.R.S. With this rising and falling currency, they could never know exactly their liability—they were just gambling. Listening to the minutes and other routine business, with his chin clasped in his hand, he let his eyes move from face to face—old Mothergill, Elderson, Mont opposite; Sharman at the head; Fontenoy, Meyricke, back to himself—decisive board of the year. He could not, must not, be placed in any dubious position! At his first general meeting on this concern, he must not face the shareholders without knowing exactly where he stood. He looked again at Elderson—sweetish face, bald head rather like Julius Caesar’s, nothing to suggest irregularity or excessive optimism—in fact, somewhat resembling that of old Uncle Nicholas Forsyte, whose affairs had been such an example to the last generation but one. The managing director having completed his exposition, Soames directed his gaze at the pink face of dosey old Mothergill, and said:
“I’m not satisfied that these accounts disclose our true position. I want the Board adjourned to this day week, Mr. Chairman, and during the week I want every member of the Board furnished with exact details of the foreign contract commitments which do NOT mature during the present financial year. I notice that those are lumped under a general estimate of liability. I am not satisfied with that. They ought to be separately treated.” Shifting his gaze past Elderson to the face of ‘Old Mont,’ he went on: “Unless there’s a material change for the better on the Continent, which I don’t anticipate (quite the contrary), I fully expect those commitments will put us in Queer Street next year.”
The scraping of feet, shifting of legs, clearing of throats which accompany a slight sense of outrage greeted the words ‘Queer Street’; and a sort of satisfaction swelled in Soames; he had rattled their complacency, made them feel a touch of the misgiving from which he himself was suffering.
“We have always treated our commitments under one general estimate, Mr. Forsyte.”
Plausible chap!
“And to my mind wrongly. This foreign contract business is a new policy. For all I can tell, instead of paying a dividend, we ought to be setting this year’s profits against a certain loss next year.”
Again that scrape and rustle.
“My dear sir, absurd!”
The bulldog in Soames snuffled.
“So you say!” he said. “Am I to have those details?”
“The Board can have what details it likes, of course. But permit me to remark on the general question that it CAN only be a matter of estimate. A conservative basis has always been adopted.”
“That is a matter of opinion,” said Soames; “and in my view it should be the Board’s opinion after very careful discussion of the actual figures.”
‘Old Mont’ was speaking.
“My dear Forsyte, to go into every contract would take us a week, and then get us no further; we can but average it out.”
“What we have not got in these accounts,” said Soames, “is the relative proportion of foreign risk to home risk—in the present state of things a vital matter.”
The Chairman spoke.
“There will be no difficulty about that, I imagine, Elderson! But in any case, Mr. Forsyte, we should hardly be justified in penalising the present year for the sake of eventualities which we hope will not arise.”
“I don’t know,” said Soames. “We are here to decide policy according to our common sense, and we must have the fullest opportunity of exercising it. That is my point. We have not enough information.”
That ‘plausible chap’ was speaking again:
“Mr. Forsyte seems to be indicating a lack of confidence in the management.” Taking the bull by the horns—was he?
“Am I to have that information?”
The voice of old Mothergill rose cosy in the silence.
“The Board could be adjourned, perhaps, Mr. Chairman; I could come up myself at a pinch. Possibly we could all attend. The times are very peculiar—we mustn’t take any unnecessary risks. The policy of foreign contracts is undoubtedly somewhat new to us. We have no reason so far to complain of the results. And I am sure we have the utmost confidence in the judgment of our managing director. Still, as Mr. Forsyte has asked for this information, I think perhaps we ought to have it. What do you say, my lord?”
“I can’t come up next week. I agree with the chairman that on these accounts we couldn’t burke this year’s dividend. No good getting the wind up before we must. When do the accounts go out, Elderson?”
“Normally at the end of this week.”
“These are not normal times,” said Soames. “To be quite plain, unless I have that information I must tender my resignation.” He saw very well what was passing in their minds. A newcomer making himself a nuisance—they would take his resignation readily—only it would look awkward just before a general meeting unless they could announce “wife’s ill-health” or something satisfactory, which he would take very good care they didn’t.
The chairman said coldly:
“Well, we will adjourn the Board to this day week; you will be able to get us those figures, Elderson?”
“Certainly.”
Into Soames’ mind flashed the thought: ‘Ought to ask for an independent scrutiny.’ But he looked round. Going too far—perhaps—if he intended to remain on the Board—and he had no wish to resign—after all, it was a big thing, and a thousand a year! No! Mustn’t overdo it!
Walking away, he savoured his triumph doubtfully, by no means sure that he had done any good. His attitude had only closed the ‘all together’ attitude round Elderson. The weakness of his position was that he had nothing to go on, save an uneasiness, which when examined was found to be simply a feeling that he hadn’t enough control himself. And yet, there couldn’t be two managers—you must trust your manager!
A voice behind him tittupped: “Well, Forsyte, you gave us quite a shock with your alternative. First time I remember anything of the sort on that Board.”
“Sleepy hollow,” said Soames.
“Yes, I generally have a nap. It gets very hot in there. Wish I’d stuck to my spinneys. They come high, even as early as this.”
Incurably frivolous, this tittupping baronet!
“By the way, Forsyte, I wanted to say: With all this modern birth control and the rest of it, one gets uneasy. We’re not the royal family; but don’t you feel with me it’s time there was a movement in heirs?”
Soames did, but he was not going to confess to anything so indelicate about his own daughter.
“Plenty of time,” he muttered.
“I don’t like that dog, Forsyte.”
Soames stared.
“Dog!” he said. “What’s that to do with it?”
“I like a baby to come before a dog. Dogs and poets distract young women. My grandmother had five babies before she was twenty-seven. She was a Montjoy; wonderful breeders, you remember them—the seven Montjoy sisters—all pretty. Old Montjoy had forty-seven grandchildren. You don’t get it nowadays, Forsyte.”
“Country’s over-populated,” said Soames grimly.
“By the wrong sort—less of them, more of ourselves. It’s almost a matter for legislation.”
“Talk to your son,” said Soames.
“Ah! but they think us fogeys, you know. If we could only point to a reason for existence. But it’s difficult, Forsyte, it’s difficult.”
“They’ve got everything they want,” said Soames.
“Not enough, my dear Forsyte, not enough; the condition of the world is on the nerves of the young. England’s dished, they say, Europe’s dished. Heaven’s dished, and so is Hell! No future in anything but the air. You can’t breed in the air; at least, I doubt it—the difficulties are considerable.”
Soames sniffed.
“If only the journalists would hold their confounded pens,” he said; for, more and more of late, with the decrescendo of scare in the daily Press, he was regaining the old sound Forsyte feeling of security. “We’ve only to keep clear of Europe,” he added.
“Keep clear and keep the ring! Forsyte, I believe you’ve hit it. Good friendly terms with Scandinavia, Holland, Spain, Italy, Turkey—all the outlying countries that we can get at by sea. And let the others dree their weirds. It’s an idea!” How the chap rattled on!
“I’m no politician,” said Soames.
“Keep the ring! The new formula. It’s what we’ve been coming to unconsciously! And as to trade—to say we can’t do without trading with this country or with that—bunkum, my dear Forsyte. The world’s large—we can.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Soames. “I only know we must drop this foreign contract assurance.”
“Why not confine it to the ring countries? Instead of ‘balance of power,’ ‘keep the ring’! Really, it’s an inspiration!”
Thus charged with inspiration, Soames said hastily:
“I leave you here, I’m going to my daughter’s.”
“Ah! I’m going to my son’s. Look at these poor devils!”
Down by the Embankment at Blackfriars a band of unemployed were trailing dismally with money-boxes.
“Revolution in the bud! There’s one thing that’s always forgotten, Forsyte, it’s a great pity.”
“What’s that?” said Soames, with gloom. The fellow would tittup all the way to Fleur’s!
“Wash the working-class, put them in clean, pleasant-coloured jeans, teach ’em to speak like you and me, and there’d be an end of class feeling. It’s all a matter of the senses. Wouldn’t you rather share a bedroom with a clean, neat-clothed plumber’s assistant who spoke and smelled like you than with a profiteer who dropped his aitches and reeked of opoponax? Of course you would.”
“Never tried,” said Soames, “so don’t know.”
“Pragmatist! But believe me, Forsyte—if the working class would concentrate on baths and accent instead of on their political and economic tosh, equality would be here in no time.”
“I don’t want equality,” said Soames, taking his ticket to Westminster.
The ‘tittupping’ voice pursued him entering the tube lift.
“Aesthetic equality, Forsyte, if we had it, would remove the wish for any other. Did you ever catch an impecunious professor wishing he was the King?”
“No,” said Soames, opening his paper.
Beneath its veneer of cheerful irresponsibility, the character of Michael Mont had deepened during two years of anchorage and continuity. He had been obliged to think of others; and his time was occupied. Conscious, from the fall of the flag, that he was on sufferance with Fleur, admitting as whole the half-truth: ‘Il y a toujours un qui baise, et l’autre qui tend la joue,’ he had developed real powers of domestic consideration; and yet he did not seem to redress the balance in his public or publishing existence. He found the human side of his business too strong for the monetary. Danby and Winter, however, were bearing up against him, and showed, so far, no signs of the bankruptcy prophesied for them by Soames on being told of the principles which his son-inlaw intended to introduce. No more in publishing than in any other walk of life was Michael finding it possible to work too much on principle. The field of action was so strewn with facts—human, vegetable and mineral.
On this same Tuesday afternoon, having long tussled with the price of those vegetable facts, paper and linen, he was listening with his pointed ears to the plaint of a packer discovered with five copies of ‘Copper Coin’ in his overcoat pocket, and the too obvious intention of converting them to his own use.
Mr. Danby had ‘given him the sack’—he didn’t deny that he was going to sell them, but what would Mr. Mont have done? He owed rent—and his wife wanted nourishing after pneumonia—wanted it bad. ‘Dash it!’ thought Michael, ‘I’d snoop an edition to nourish Fleur after pneumonia!’
“And I can’t live on my wages with prices what they are. I can’t, Mr. Mont, so help me!”
Michael swivelled. “But look here, Bicket, if we let you snoop copies, all the packers will snoop copies; and if they do, where are Danby and Winter? In the cart. And, if they’re in the cart, where are all of you? In the street. It’s better that one of you should be in the street than that all of you should, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, I quite see your point—it’s reason; but I can’t live on reason, the least thing knocks you out, when you’re on the bread line. Ask Mr. Danby to give me another chance.”
“Mr. Danby always says that a packer’s work is particularly confidential, because it’s almost impossible to keep a check on it.”
“Yes, sir, I should feel that in future; but with all this unemployment and no reference, I’ll never get another job. What about my wife?”
To Michael it was as if he had said “What about Fleur?” He began to pace the room; and the young man Bicket looked at him with large dolorous eyes. Presently he came to a standstill, with his hands deep plunged into his pockets and his shoulders hunched.
“I’ll ask him,” he said; “but I don’t believe he will; he’ll say it isn’t fair on the others. You had five copies; it’s pretty stiff, you know—means you’ve had ’em before, doesn’t it? What?”
“Well, Mr. Mont, anything that’ll give me a chance, I don’t mind confessin’. I have ‘ad a few previous, and it’s just about kept my wife alive. You’ve no idea what that pneumonia’s like for poor people.”
Michael pushed his fingers through his hair.
“How old’s your wife?”
“Only a girl—twenty.”
Twenty! Just Fleur’s age!
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bicket; I’ll put it up to Mr. Desert; if he speaks for you, perhaps it may move Mr. Danby.”
“Well, Mr. Mont, thank you—you’re a gentleman, we all sy that.”
“Oh! hang it! But look here, Bicket, you were reckoning on those five copies. Take this to make up, and get your wife what’s necessary. Only for goodness’ sake don’t tell Mr. Danby.”
“Mr. Mont, I wouldn’t deceive you for the world—I won’t sy a word, sir. And my wife—well!”
A sniff, a shuffle—Michael was alone, with his hands plunged deeper, his shoulders hunched higher. And suddenly he laughed. Pity! Pity was pop! It was all dam’ funny. Here he was rewarding Bicket for snooping ‘Copper Coin!’ A sudden longing possessed him to follow the little packer and see what he did with the two pounds—see whether ‘the pneumonia’ was real or a figment of the brain behind those dolorous eyes. Impossible, though! Instead he must ring up Wilfrid and ask him to put in a word with old Danby. His own word was no earthly. He had put it in too often! Bicket! Little one knew of anybody, life was deep and dark, and upside down! What was honesty? Pressure of life versus power of resistance—the result of that fight, when the latter won, was honesty! But why resist? Love thy neighbour as thyself—but not more! And wasn’t it a darned sight harder for Bicket on two pounds a week to love him, than for him on twenty-four pounds a week to love Bicket?…
“Hallo!… That you, Wilfrid?… Michael speaking… One of our packers has been sneaking copies of ‘Copper Coin.’ He’s ‘got the sack’—poor devil! I wondered if you’d mind putting in a word for him—old Dan won’t listen to me… yes, got a wife—Fleur’s age; pneumonia, so he says. Won’t do it again with yours anyway, insurance by common gratitude—what!… Thanks, old man, awfully good of you—will you bob in, then? We can go round home together… Oh! Well! You’ll bob in anyway. Aurev!”
Good chap, old Wilfrid! Real good chap—underneath! Underneath—what?
Replacing the receiver, Michael saw a sudden great cloud of sights and scents and sounds, so foreign to the principles of his firm that he was in the habit of rejecting instantaneously every manuscript which dealt with them. The war might be ‘off ‘; but it was still ‘on’ within Wilfrid, and himself. Taking up a tube, he spoke:
“Mr. Danby in his room? Right! If he shows any signs of flitting, let me know at once.”…
Between Michael and his senior partner a gulf was fixed, not less deep than that between two epochs, though partially filled in by Winter’s middle-age and accommodating temperament. Michael had almost nothing against Mr. Danby except that he was always right—Philip Norman Danby, of Sky House, Campden Hill, a man of sixty and some family, with a tall forehead, a preponderance of body to leg, and an expression both steady and reflective. His eyes were perhaps rather close together, and his nose rather thin, but he looked a handsome piece in his well-proportioned room. He glanced up from the formation of a correct judgment on a matter of advertisement when Wilfrid Desert came in.
“Well, Mr. Desert, what can I do for you? Sit down!”
Desert did not sit down, but looked at the engravings, at his fingers, at Mr. Danby, and said:
“Fact is, I want you to let that packer chap off, Mr. Danby.”
“Packer chap. Oh! Ah! Bicket. Mont told you, I suppose?”
“Yes; he’s got a young wife down with pneumonia.”
“They all go to our friend Mont with some tale or other, Mr. Desert—he has a very soft heart. But I’m afraid I can’t keep this man. It’s a most insidious thing. We’ve been trying to trace a leak for some time.”
Desert leaned against the mantelpiece and stared into the fire.
“Well, Mr. Danby,” he said, “your generation may like the soft in literature, but you’re precious hard in life. Ours won’t look at softness in literature, but we’re a deuced sight less hard in life.”
“I don’t think it’s hard,” said Mr. Danby, “only just.”
“Are you a judge of justice?”
“I hope so.”
“Try four years’ hell, and have another go.”
“I really don’t see the connection. The experience you’ve been through, Mr. Desert, was bound to be warping.”
Wilfrid turned and stared at him.
“Forgive my saying so, but sitting here and being just is much more warping. Life is pretty good purgatory, to all except about thirty per cent. of grown-up people.”
Mr. Danby smiled.
“We simply couldn’t conduct our business, my dear young man, without scrupulous honesty in everybody. To make no distinction between honesty and dishonesty would be quite unfair. You know that perfectly well.”
“I don’t know anything perfectly well, Mr. Danby; and I mistrust those who say they do.”
“Well, let us put it that there are rules of the game which must be observed, if society is to function at all.”
Desert smiled, too: “Oh! hang rules! Do it as a favour to me. I wrote the rotten book.”
No trace of struggle showed in Mr. Danby’s face; but his deep-set, close-together eyes shone a little.
“I should be only too glad, but it’s a matter—well, of conscience, if you like. I’m not prosecuting the man. He must leave—that’s all.”
Desert shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, good-bye!” and he went out.
On the mat was Michael in two minds.
“Well?”
“No go. The old blighter’s too just.”
Michael stivered his hair.
“Wait in my room five minutes while I let the poor beggar know, then I’ll come along.”
“No,” said Desert, “I’m going the other way.”
Not the fact that Wilfrid was going the other way—he almost always was—but something in the tone of his voice and the look on his face obsessed Michael’s imagination while he went downstairs to seek Bicket. Wilfrid was a rum chap—he went “dark” so suddenly!
In the nether regions he asked:
“Bicket gone?”
“No, sir, there he is.”
There he was, in his shabby overcoat, with his pale narrow face, and his disproportionately large eyes, and his sloping shoulders.
“Sorry, Bicket, Mr. Desert has been in, but it’s no go.”
“No, sir?”
“Keep your pecker up, you’ll get something.”
“I’m afryde not, sir. Well, I thank you very ‘eartily; and I thank Mr. Desert. Good-night, sir; and good-bye!”
Michael watched him down the corridor, saw him waver into the dusky street.
“Jolly!” he said, and laughed…
The natural suspicions of Michael and his senior partner that a tale was being pitched were not in fact justified. Neither the wife nor the pneumonia had been exaggerated; and wavering away in the direction of Blackfriars Bridge, Bicket thought not of his turpitude nor of how just Mr. Danby had been, but of what he should say to her. He should not, of course, tell her that he had been detected in stealing; he must say he had ‘got the sack for cheeking the foreman’; but what would she think of him for doing that, when everything as it were depended on his not cheeking the foreman? This was one of those melancholy cases of such affection that he had been coming to his work day after day feeling as if he had ‘left half his guts’ behind him in the room where she lay, and when at last the doctor said to him:
“She’ll get on now, but it’s left her very run down—you must feed her up,” his anxiety had hardened into a resolution to have no more. In the next three weeks he had ‘pinched’ eighteen ‘Copper Coins,’ including the five found in his overcoat. He had only ‘pitched on’ Mr. Desert’s book because it was ‘easy sold,’ and he was sorry now that he hadn’t pitched on some one else’s. Mr. Desert had been very decent. He stopped at the corner of the Strand, and went over his money. With the two pounds given him by Michael and his wages he had seventy-five shillings in the world, and going into the Stores he bought a meat jelly and a tin of Benger’s food that could be made with water. With pockets bulging he took a ‘bus, which dropped him at the corner of his little street on the Surrey side. His wife and he occupied the two ground floor rooms, at eight shillings a week, and he owed for three weeks. ‘Py that!’ he thought, ‘and have a roof until she’s well.’ It would help him over the news, too, to show her a receipt for the rent and some good food. How lucky they had been careful to have no baby! He sought the basement. His landlady was doing the week’s washing. She paused, in sheer surprise at such full and voluntary payment, and inquired after his wife.
“Doing nicely, thank you.”
“Well, I’m glad of that, it must be a relief to your mind.”
“It is,” said Bicket.
The landlady thought: ‘He’s a thread-paper—reminds me of a shrimp before you bile it, with those eyes.’
“Here’s your receipt, and thank you. Sorry to ‘ave seemed nervous about it, but times are ‘ard.”
“They are,” said Bicket. “So long!”
With the receipt and the meat jelly in his left hand, he opened the door of his front room.
His wife was sitting before a very little fire. Her bobbed black hair, crinkly towards the ends, had grown during her illness; it shook when she turned her head and smiled. To Bicket—not for the first time—that smile seemed queer, ‘pathetic-like,’ mysterious—as if she saw things that one didn’t see oneself. Her name was Victorine, and he said: “Well, Vic.? This jelly’s a bit of all right, and I’ve pyde the rent.” He sat on the arm of the chair and she put her hand on his knee—her thin arm emerging blue-white from the dark dressing-gown.
“Well, Tony?”
Her face—thin and pale with those large dark eyes and beautifully formed eyebrows—was one that “looked at you from somewhere; and when it looked at you—well! it got you right inside!”
It got him now and he said: “How’ve you been breathin’?”
“All right—much better. I’ll soon be out now.”
Bicket twisted himself round and joined his lips to hers. The kiss lasted some time, because all the feelings which he had not been able to express during the past three weeks to her or to anybody, got into it. He sat up again, “sort of exhausted,” staring at the fire, and said: “News isn’t bright—lost my job, Vic.”
“Oh! Tony! Why?”
Bicket swallowed.
“Fact is, things are slack, and they’re reducin’.”
There had surged into his mind the certainty that sooner than tell her the truth he would put his head under the gas!
“Oh! dear! What shall we do, then?”
Bicket’s voice hardened.
“Don’t you worry—I’ll get something”; and he whistled.
“But you liked that job.”
“Did I? I liked some o’ the fellers; but as for the job—why, what was it? Wrappin’ books up in a bysement all dy long. Let’s have something to eat and get to bed early—I feel as if I could sleep for a week, now I’m shut of it.”
Getting their supper ready with her help, he carefully did not look at her face for fear it might “get him agyne inside!” They had only been married a year, having made acquaintance on a tram, and Bicket often wondered what had made her take to him, eight years her senior and C3 during the war! And yet she must be fond of him, or she’d never look at him as she did.
“Sit down and try this jelly.”
He himself ate bread and margarine and drank cocoa, he seldom had any particular appetite.
“Shall I tell you what I’d like?” he said; “I’d like Central Austrylia. We had a book in there about it; they sy there’s quite a movement. I’d like some sun. I believe if we ‘ad sun we’d both be twice the size we are. I’d like to see colour in your cheeks, Vic.”
“How much does it cost to get out there?”
“A lot more than we can ly hands on, that’s the trouble. But I’ve been thinkin’. England’s about done. There’s too many like me.”
“No,” said Victorine; “there aren’t enough.”
Bicket looked at her face, then quickly at his plate.
“What myde you take a fancy to me?”
“Because you don’t think first of yourself, that’s why.”
“Used to before I knew you. But I’d do anything for you, Vic.”
“Have some of this jelly, then, it’s awful good.”
Bicket shook his head.
“If we could wyke up in Central Austrylia,” he said. “But there’s only one thing certain, we’ll wyke up in this blighted little room. Never mind, I’ll get a job and earn the money yet.”
“Could we win it on a race?”
“Well, I’ve only got forty-seven bob all told, and if we lose it, where’ll you be? You’ve got to feed up, you know. No, I must get a job.”
“They’ll give you a good recommend, won’t they?”
Bicket rose and stacked his plate and cup.
“They would, but that job’s off—overstocked.”
Tell her the truth? Never! So help him!
In their bed, one of those just too wide for one and just not wide enough for two, he lay, with her hair almost in his mouth, thinking what to say to his Union, and how to go to work to get a job. And in his thoughts as the hours drew on he burned his boats. To draw his unemployment money he would have to tell his Union what the trouble was. Blow the Union! He wasn’t going to be accountable to them! HE knew why he’d pinched the books; but it was nobody else’s business, nobody else could understand his feelings, watching her so breathless, pale and thin. Strike out for himself! And a million and a half out o’ work! Well, he had a fortnight’s keep, and something would turn up—and he might risk a bob or two and win some money, you never knew. She turned in her sleep. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘I’d do it agyne…’
Next day, after some hours on foot, he stood under the grey easterly sky in the grey street, before a plate-glass window protecting an assortment of fruits and sheaves of corn, lumps of metal, and brilliant blue butterflies, in the carefully golden light of advertised Australia. To Bicket, who had never been out of England, not often out of London, it was like standing outside Paradise. The atmosphere within the office itself was not so golden, and the money required considerable; but it brought Paradise nearer to take away pamphlets which almost burned his hands, they were so warm.
Later, he and she, sitting in the one armchair—advantage of being thin—pored over these alchemised pages and inhaled their glamour.
“D’you think it’s true, Tony?”
“If it’s thirty per cent. true it’s good enough for me. We just must get there somehow. Kiss me.”
From around the corner in the main road the rumbling of the trams and carts, and the rattling of their window-pane in the draughty dry easterly wind increased their feeling of escape into a gas-lit Paradise.
Two hours behind Bicket, Michael wavered towards home. Old Danby was right as usual—if you couldn’t trust your packers, you might shut up shop! Away from Bicket’s eyes, he doubted. Perhaps the chap hadn’t a wife at all! Then Wilfrid’s manner usurped the place of Bicket’s morals. Old Wilfrid had been abrupt and queer the last three times of meeting. Was he boiling-up for verse?
He found Ting-a-ling at the foot of the stairs in a conservative attitude. “I am not going up,” he seemed saying, “until some one carries me—at the same time it is later than usual!”
“Where’s your mistress, you heraldic little beast?”
Ting-a-ling snuffled. “I could put up with it,” he implied, “if YOU carried me—these stairs are laborious!”
Michael took him up. “Let’s go and find her.”
Squeezed under an arm harder than his mistress’, Ting-a-ling stared as if with black-glass eyes; and the plume of his emergent tail quivered.
In the bedroom Michael dropped him so absent-mindedly that he went to his corner plume pendent, and couched there in dudgeon.
Nearly dinner time and Fleur not in! Michael went over his sketchy recollection of her plans. To-day she had been having Hubert Marsland and that Vertiginist—what was his name? – to lunch. There would have been fumes to clear off. Vertiginists—like milk—made carbonic acid gas in the lungs! Still! Half-past seven! What was happening to-night? Weren’t they going to that play of L.S.D.‘s? No—that was tomorrow! Was there conceivably nothing? If so, of course she would shorten her unoccupied time as much as possible. He made that reflection humbly. Michael had no illusions, he knew himself to be commonplace, with only a certain redeeming liveliness, and, of course, his affection for her. He even recognised that his affection was a weakness, tempting him to fussy anxieties, which on principle he restrained. To enquire, for instance, of Coaker or Philps—their man and their maid—when she had gone out, would be thoroughly against that principle. The condition of the world was such that Michael constantly wondered if his own affairs were worth paying attention to; but then the condition of the world was also such that sometimes one’s own affairs seemed all that were worth paying attention to. And yet his affairs were, practically speaking, Fleur; and if he paid too much attention to them, he was afraid of annoying her.
He went into his dressing-room and undid his waistcoat.
‘But no!’ he thought; ‘if she finds me “dressed” already, it’ll put too much point on it.’ So he did up his waistcoat and went downstairs again. Coaker was in the hall.
“Mr. Forsyte and Sir Lawrence looked in about six, sir. Mrs. Mont was out. What time shall I serve dinner?”
“Oh! about a quarter past eight. I don’t think we’re going out.”
He went into the drawing-room and passing down its Chinese emptiness, drew aside the curtain. The square looked cold and dark and draughty; and he thought: ‘Bicket—pneumonia—I hope she’s got her fur coat.’ He took out a cigarette and put it back. If she saw him at the window she would think him fussy; and he went up again to see if she had put on her fur!
Ting-a-ling, still couchant, greeted him plume dansetti arrested as at disappointment. Michael opened a wardrobe. She had! Good! He was taking a sniff round, when Ting-a-ling passed him trottant, and her voice said: “Well, my darling!” Wishing that he was, Michael emerged from behind the wardrobe door. Heaven! She looked pretty, coloured by the wind! He stood rather wistfully silent.
“Hallo, Michael! I’m rather late. Been to the Club and walked home.”
Michael had a quite unaccountable feeling that there was suppression in that statement. He also suppressed, and said: “I was just looking to see that you’d got your fur, it’s beastly cold. Your dad and Bart have been and went away fasting.”
Fleur shed her coat and dropped into a chair. “I’m tired. Your ears are sticking up so nicely to-night, Michael.”
Michael went on his knees and joined his hands behind her waist. Her eyes had a strange look, a scrutiny which held him in suspense, a little startled.
“If YOU got pneumonia,” he said, “I should go clean out of curl.”
“Why on earth should I?”
“You don’t know the connection—never mind, it wouldn’t interest you. We’re not going out, are we?”
“Of course we are. It’s Alison’s monthly.”
“Oh! Lord! If you’re tired we could cut that.”
“My dear! Impos.! She’s got all sorts of people coming.”
Stifling a disparagement, he sighed out: “Right-o! War-paint?”
“Yes, white waistcoat. I like you in white waistcoats.”
Cunning little wretch? He squeezed her waist and rose. Fleur laid a light stroke on his hand, and he went into his dressing-room comforted…
But Fleur sat still for at least five minutes—not precisely ‘a prey to conflicting emotions,’ but the victim of very considerable confusion. TWO men within the last hour had done this thing—knelt at her knees and joined their fingers behind her waist. Undoubtedly she had been rash to go to Wilfrid’s rooms. The moment she got there she had perceived how entirely unprepared she really was to commit herself to what was physical. True he had done no more than Michael. But—Goodness! – she had seen the fire she was playing with, realised what torment he was in. She had strictly forbidden him to say a word to Michael, but intuitively she knew that in his struggle between loyalties she could rely on nothing. Confused, startled, touched, she could not help a pleasant warmth in being so much loved by two men at once, nor an itch of curiosity about the upshot. And she sighed. She had added to her collection of experiences—but how to add further without breaking up the collection, and even perhaps the collector, she could not see.
After her words to Wilfrid before the Eve: “You will be a fool to go—wait!” she had known he would expect something before long. Often he had asked her to come and pass judgment on his ‘junk.’ A month, even a week, ago she would have gone without thinking more than twice about it, and discussed his ‘junk’ with Michael afterwards! But now she thought it over many times, and but for the fumes of lunch, and the feeling, engendered by the society of the ‘Vertiginist,’ of Amabel Nazing, of Linda Frewe, that scruples of any kind were ‘stuffy,’ sensations of all sorts ‘the thing,’ she would probably still have been thinking it over now. When they departed, she had taken a deep breath and her telephone receiver from the Chinese tea chest.
If Wilfrid were going to be in at half-past five, she would come and see his ‘junk.’
His answer: “My God! Will you?” almost gave her pause. But dismissing hesitation with the thought: ‘I WILL be Parisian—Proust!’ she had started for her Club. Three-quarters of an hour, with no more stimulant than three cups of China tea, three back numbers of the ‘Glass of Fashion,’ three back views of country members ‘dead in chairs,’ had sent her forth a careful quarter of an hour behind her time.
On the top floor Wilfrid was standing in his open doorway, pale as a soul in purgatory. He took her hand gently, and drew her in. Fleur thought with a little thrill: ‘Is this what it’s like? Du cote de chez Swann!’ Freeing her hand, she began at once to flutter round the ‘junk,’ clinging to it piece by piece.
Old English ‘junk’ rather manorial, with here and there an eastern or First Empire bit, collected by some bygone Desert, nomadic, or attached to the French court. She was afraid to sit down, for fear that he might begin to follow the authorities; nor did she want to resume the intense talk of the Tate Gallery. ‘Junk’ was safe, and she only looked at him in those brief intervals when he was not looking at her. She knew she was not playing the game according to ‘La Garconne’ and Amabel Nazing; that, indeed, she was in danger of going away without having added to her sensations. And she couldn’t help being sorry for Wilfrid; his eyes yearned after her, his lips were bitter to look at. When at last from sheer exhaustion of ‘junk’ she sat down, he had flung himself at her feet. Half hypnotised, with her knees against his chest, as safe as she could hope for, she really felt the tragedy of it—his horror of himself, his passion for herself. It was painful, deep; it did not fit in with what she had been led to expect; it was not in the period, and how—how was she to get away without more pain to him and to herself? When she HAD got away, with one kiss received but not answered, she realised that she had passed through a quarter of an hour of real life, and was not at all sure that she liked it… But now, safe in her own room, undressing for Alison’s monthly, she felt curious as to what she would have been feeling if things had gone as far as was proper according to the authorities. Surely she had not experienced one-tenth of the thoughts or sensations that would have been assigned to her in any advanced piece of literature! It had been disillusioning, or else she was deficient, and Fleur, could not bear to feel deficient. And, lightly powdering her shoulders, she bent her thoughts towards Alison’s monthly.
Though Lady Alison enjoyed an occasional encounter with the younger generation, the Aubrey Greenes and Linda Frewes of this life were not conspicuous by their presence at her gatherings. Nesta Gorse, indeed, had once attended, but one legal and two literary politicos who had been in contact with her, had complained of it afterwards. She had, it seemed, rent little spiked holes in the garments of their self-esteem. Sibley Swan would have been welcome, for his championship of the past, but he seemed, so far, to have turned up his nose and looked down it. So it was not the intelligentsia, but just intellectual society, which was gathered there when Fleur and Michael entered, and the conversation had all the sparkle and all the ‘savoir faire’ incidental to talk about art and letters by those who—as Michael put it—“fortunately had not to faire”
“All the same, these are the guys,” he muttered in Fleur’s ear, “who make the names of artists and writers. What’s the stunt, to-night?”
It appeared to be the London debut of a lady who sang Balkan folk songs. But in a refuge to the right were four tables set out for bridge. They were already filled. Among those who still stood listening, were, here and there, a Gurdon Minho, a society painter and his wife, a sculptor looking for a job. Fleur, wedged between Lady Feynte, the painter’s wife, and Gurdon Minho himself, began planning an evasion. There—yes, there was Mr. Chalfont! At Lady Alison’s, Fleur, an excellent judge of ‘milieu’ never wasted her time on artists and writers—she could meet THEM anywhere. Here she intuitively picked out the biggest ‘bug,’ politico-literary, and waited to pin him. Absorbed in the idea of pinning Mr. Chalfont, she overlooked a piece of drama passing without.
Michael had clung to the top of the stairway, in no mood for talk and skirmish; and, leaning against the balustrade, wasp-thin in his long white waistcoat, with hands deep thrust into his trousers’ pockets, he watched the turns and twists of Fleur’s white neck, and listened to the Balkan songs, with a sort of blankness in his brain. The word: “Mont!” startled him. Wilfrid was standing just below. Mont? He had not been that to Wilfrid for two years!
“Come down here.”
On that half-landing was a bust of Lionel Charwell, K.C., by Boris Strumolowski, in the genre he had cynically adopted when June Forsyte gave up supporting his authentic but unrewarded genius. It had been almost indistinguishable from any of the other busts in that year’s Academy, and was used by the young Charwells to chalk moustaches on.
Beside this object Desert leaned against the wall with his eyes closed. His face was a study to Michael.
“What’s wrong, Wilfrid?”
Desert did not move. “You’ve got to know—I’m in love with Fleur.”
“What!”
“I’m not going to play the snake. You’re up against me. Sorry, but there it is! You can let fly!” His face was death-pale, and its muscles twitched. In Michael, it was the mind, the heart that twitched. What a very horrible, strange, “too beastly” moment! His best friend—his best man! Instinctively he dived for his cigarette case—instinctively handed it to Desert. Instinctively they both took cigarettes, and lighted each other’s. Then Michael said:
“Fleur—knows?”
Desert nodded: “She doesn’t know I’m telling you—wouldn’t have let me. You’ve nothing against her—yet.” And, still with closed eyes, he added: “I couldn’t help it.”
It was Michael’s own subconscious thought! Natural! Natural! Fool not to see how natural! Then something shut-to within him, and he said: “Decent of you to tell me; but—aren’t you going to clear out?”
Desert’s shoulders writhed against the wall.
“I thought so; but it seems not.”
“Seems? I don’t understand.”
“If I knew for certain I’d no chance—but I don’t,” and he suddenly looked at Michael: “Look here, it’s no good keeping gloves on. I’m desperate, and I’ll take her from you if I can.”
“Good God!” said Michael. “It’s the limit!”
“Yes! Rub it in! But, I tell you, when I think of you going home with her, and of myself,” he gave a dreadful little laugh, “I advise you NOT to rub it in.”
“Well,” said Michael, “as this isn’t a Dostoievsky novel, I suppose there’s no more to be said.”
Desert moved from the wall and laid his hand on the bust of Lionel Charwell.
“You realise, at least, that I’ve gone out of my way—perhaps dished myself—by telling you. I’ve not bombed without declaring war.”
“No,” said Michael dully.
“You can chuck my books over to some other publisher.” Michael shrugged.
“Good-night, then,” said Desert. “Sorry for being so primitive.”
Michael looked straight into his ‘best man’s’ face. There was no mistaking its expression of bitter despair. He made a half-movement with his hand, uttered half the word “Wilfrid,” and, as Desert went down, he went upstairs.
Back in his place against the balustrade, he tried to realise that life was a laughing matter, and couldn’t. His position required a serpent’s cunning, a lion’s courage, a dove’s gentleness: he was not conscious of possessing such proverbial qualities. If Fleur had loved him as he loved her, he would have had for Wilfrid a real compassion. It was so natural to fall in love with Fleur! But she didn’t—oh! no, she didn’t! Michael had one virtue—if virtue it be—a moderate opinion of himself, a disposition to think highly of his friends. He had thought highly of Desert; and—odd! – he still did not think lowly of him. Here was his friend trying to do him mortal injury, to alienate the affection—more honestly, the toleration—of his wife; and yet he did not think him a cad. Such leniency, he knew, was hopeless; but the doctrines of free-will, and free contract, were not to him mere literary conceptions, they were part of his nature. To apply duress, however desirable, would not be on his cards. And something like despair ravaged the heart of him, watching Fleur’s ingratiating little tricks with the great Gerald Chalfont. If she left him for Wilfrid! But surely—no—her father, her house, her dog, her friends, her—her collection of—of—she would not—could not give THEM up? But suppose she kept everything, Wilfrid included! No, no! She wouldn’t! Only for a second did that possibility blur the natural loyalty of his mind.
Well, what to do? Tell her—talk the thing out? Or wait and watch? For what? Without deliberate spying, he could not watch. Desert would come to their house no more. No! Either complete frankness; or complete ignoring—and that meant living with the sword of Damocles above his head! No! Complete frankness! And not do anything that seemed like laying a trap! He passed his hand across a forehead that was wet. If only they were at home, away from that squalling and these cultivated jackanapes! Could he go in and hook her out? Impossible without some reason! Only his brain-storm for a reason! He must just bite on it. The singing ceased. Fleur was looking round. Now she would beckon! On the contrary, she came towards him. He could not help the cynical thought: ‘She’s hooked old Chalfont!’ He loved her, but he knew her little weaknesses. She came up and took hold of his sleeve.
“I’ve had enough, Michael, let’s slip off; d’you mind?”
“Quick!” he said, “before they spot us!”
In the cold air outside he thought: ‘Now? Or in her room?’
“I think,” said Fleur, “that Mr. Chalfont is overrated—he’s nothing but a mental yawn. He’s coming to lunch tomorrow week.”
Not now—in her room!
“Whom do you think to meet him, besides Alison?”
“Nothing jazzy.”
“Of course not; but it must be somebody intriguing, Michael. Bother! sometimes I think it isn’t worth it.”
Michael’s heart stood still. Was that a portent—sign of ‘the primitive’ rising within his adored practitioner of social arts? An hour ago he would have said:
“You’re right, my child; it jolly well isn’t!” But now—any sign of change was ominous! He slipped his arm in hers.
“Don’t worry, we’ll snare the just-right cuckoos, somehow.”
“A Chinese Minister would be perfect,” mused Fleur, “with Minho and Bart—four men—two women—cosy. I’ll talk to Bart.”
Michael had opened their front door. She passed him; he lingered to see the stars, the plane trees, a man’s figure motionless, collared to the eyes, hatted down to them. ‘Wilfrid!’ he thought: ‘Spain! Why Spain? And all poor devils who are in distress—the heart—oh! darn the heart!’ He closed the door.
But soon he had another to open, and never with less enthusiasm. Fleur was sitting on the arm of a chair, in the dim lavender pyjamas she sometimes wore just to keep in with things, staring at the fire. Michael stood, looking at her and at his own reflection beyond in one of the five mirrors—white and black, the pierrot pyjamas she had bought him. ‘Figures in a play,’ he thought, ‘figures in a play! Is it real?’ He moved forward and sat on the chair’s other arm.
“Hang it!” he muttered. “Wish I were Antinous!” And he slipped from the arm into the chair, to be behind her face, if she wanted to hide it from him.
“Wilfrid’s been telling me,” he said, quietly.
Off his chest! What now? He saw the blood come flushing into her neck and cheek.
“Oh! What business—how do you mean ‘telling you’?”
“Just that he’s in love with you—nothing more—there’s nothing more to tell, is there?” And drawing his feet up on to the chair, he clasped his hands hard round his knees. Already—already he had asked a question! Bite on it! Bite on it! And he shut his eyes.
“Of course,” said Fleur, very slowly, “there’s nothing more. If Wilfrid chooses to be so silly.”
Chooses! The word seemed unjust to one whose own ‘silliness’ was so recent—so enduring! And—curious! his heart wouldn’t bound. Surely it ought to have bounded at her words!
“Is that the end of Wilfrid, then?”
“The end? I don’t know.”
Ah! Who knew anything—when passion was about?
“Well,” he said, holding himself hard together, “don’t forget I love you awfully!”
He saw her eyelids flicker, her shoulders shrugging.
“Am I likely to?”
Bitter, cordial, simple—which? Suddenly her hands came round and took him by the ears. Holding them fast she looked down at him, and laughed. And again his heart WOULD not bound. If she did not lead him by the nose, she—! But he clutched her to him in the chair. Lavender and white and black confused—she returned his kiss. But from the heart? Who knew? Not Michael.
Soames, disappointed of his daughter, said: “I’ll wait,” and took his seat in the centre of the jade green settee, oblivious of Ting-a-ling before the fire, sleeping off the attentions of Amabel Nazing, who had found him ‘just too cunning.’ Grey and composed, with one knee over the other, and a line between his eyes, he thought of Elderson and the condition of the world, and of how there was always something. And the more he thought, the more he wondered why he had ever been such a flat as to go on to a Board which had anything to do with foreign contracts. All the old wisdom that in the nineteenth century had consolidated British wealth, all the Forsyte philosophy of attending to one’s own business, and taking no risks, the close-fibred national individualism which refused to commit the country to chasing this wild goose or that, held within him silent demonstration. Britain was on the wrong tack politically to try and influence the Continent, and the P.P.R.S. on the wrong tack monetarily to insure business outside Britain. The special instinct of his breed yearned for resumption of the straight and private path. Never meddle with what you couldn’t control! ‘Old Mont’ had said: “Keep the ring!” Nothing of the sort: Mind one’s own business! That was the real ‘formula.’ He became conscious of his calf—Ting-a-ling was sniffing at his trousers.
“Oh!” said Soames. “It’s you!”
Placing his forepaws against the settee, Ting-a-ling licked the air.
“Pick you up?” said Soames. “You’re too long.” And again he felt that faint warmth of being liked.
‘There’s something about me that appeals to him,’ he thought, taking him by the scruff and lifting him on to a cushion. “You and I,” the little dog seemed saying with his stare—Chinese little object! The Chinese knew what they were about, they had minded their own business for five thousand years!
‘I shall resign,’ thought Soames. But what about Winifred, and Imogen, and some of the Rogers and Nicholases who had been putting money into this thing because he was a director? He wished they wouldn’t follow him like a lot of sheep! He rose from the settee. It was no good waiting, he would walk on to Green Street and talk to Winifred at once. She would have to sell again, though the shares had dropped a bit. And without taking leave of Ting-a-ling, he went out.
All this last year he had almost enjoyed life. Having somewhere to come and sit and receive a certain sympathy once at least a week, as in old days at Timothy’s, was of incalculable advantage to his spirit. In going from home Fleur had taken most of his heart with her; but Soames had found it almost an advantage to visit his heart once a week rather than to have it always about. There were other reasons conducing to light-heartedness. That diabolical foreign chap, Prosper Profond, had long been gone he didn’t know where, and his wife had been decidedly less restive and sarcastic ever since. She had taken up a thing they called Coue, and grown stouter. She used the car a great deal. Altogether she was more domestic. Then, too, he had become reconciled to Gauguin—a little slump in that painter had convinced him that he was still worth attention, and he had bought three more. Gauguin would rise again! Soames almost regretted his intuition of that second coming, for he had quite taken to the chap. His colour, once you got used to it, was very attractive. One picture, especially, which meant nothing so far as he could see, had a way of making you keep your eyes on it. He even felt uneasy when he thought of having to part with the thing at an enhanced price. But, most of all, he had been feeling so well, enjoying a recrudescence of youth in regard to Annette, taking more pleasure in what he ate, while his mind dwelt almost complacently on the state of money. The pound going up in value; Labour quiet! And now they had got rid of that Jack-o’-lantern, they might look for some years of solid Conservative administration. And to think, as he did, stepping across St. James’ Park towards Green Street, that he had gone and put his foot into a concern which he could not control, made him feel—well, as if the devil had been in it!
In Piccadilly he moused along on the Park side, taking his customary look up at the ‘Iseeum’ Club. The curtains were drawn, and chinks of light glowed, long and cosy. And that reminded him—some one had said George Forsyte was ill. Certainly he had not seen him in the bay window for months past. Well, George had always eaten and drunk too much. He crossed over and passed beneath the Club; and a sudden feeling—he didn’t know what—a longing for his own past, a sort of nostalgia—made him stop and mount the steps.
“Mr. George Forsyte in the Club?”
The janitor stared, a grey-haired, long-faced chap, whom he had known from away back in the ‘eighties.
“Mr. Forsyte, sir,” he said, “is very ill indeed. They say he won’t recover, sir.”
“What?” said Soames. “Nobody told me that.”
“He’s very bad—VERY bad indeed. It’s the heart.”
“The heart! Where is he?”
“At his rooms, sir; just round the corner. They say the doctors have given him up. He WILL be missed here. Forty years I’ve known him. One of the old school, and a wonderful judge of wine and horses. We none of us last for ever, they say, but I never thought to see HIM out. Bit too full-blooded, sir, and that’s a fact.”
With a slight shock Soames realised that he had never known where George lived, so utterly anchored had he seemed to that bay window above.
“Just give me the number of his rooms,” he said.
“Belville Row—No. 11, sir; I’m sure I hope you’ll find him better. I shall miss his jokes—I shall, indeed.”
Turning the corner into Belville Row, Soames made a rapid calculation. George was sixty-six, only one year younger than himself! If George was really in extremis it would be quite unnatural! ‘Comes of not leading a careful life,’ he thought; ‘always rackety—George! When was it I made his will?’ So far as he remembered, George had left his money to his brothers and sisters—no one else to leave it to. The feeling of kinship stirred in Soames, the instinct of family adjustment. George and he had never got on—opposite poles of temperament—still he would have to be buried, and who would see to it if not Soames, who had seen to so many Forsyte burials in his time? He recalled the nickname George had once given him, ‘the undertaker!’ H’m! Here was poetical justice! Belville Row! Ah! No. 11—regular bachelor-looking place! And putting his hand up to the bell, he thought: ‘Women!’ What had George done about women all his life?
His ring was answered by a man in a black cut-away coat with a certain speechless reticence.
“My cousin, Mr. George Forsyte? How is he?”
The man compressed his lips.
“Not expected to last the night, sir.”
Soames felt a little clutch beneath his Jaeger vest.
“Conscious?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could you show him my card? He might possibly like to see me.”
“Will you wait in here, sir?” Soames passed into a low room panelled up to the level of a man’s chest, and above that line decorated with prints. George—a collector! Soames had never supposed he had it in him! On those walls, wherever the eye roved, were prints coloured and uncoloured, old and new, depicting the sports of racing and prize-fighting! Hardly an inch of the red wall space visible! About to examine them for marks of value, Soames saw that he was not alone. A woman—age uncertain in the shaded light—was sitting in a very high-backed chair before the fire with her elbow on the arm of it, and a handkerchief held to her face. Soames looked at her, and his nostrils moved in a stealthy sniff. ‘Not a lady,’ he thought. ‘Ten to one but there’ll be complications.’ The muffled voice of the cut-away man said:
“I’m to take you in, sir.” Soames passed his hand over his face and followed.
The bedroom he now entered was in curious contrast. The whole of one wall was occupied by an immense piece of furniture, all cupboards and drawers. Otherwise there was nothing in the room but a dressing-table with silver accoutrements, an electric radiator alight in the fireplace, and a bed opposite. Over the fireplace was a single picture, at which Soames glanced mechanically. What! Chinese! A large whitish sidelong monkey, holding the rind of a squeezed fruit in its outstretched paw. Its whiskered face looked back at him with brown, almost human eyes. What on earth had made his inartistic cousin buy a thing like that and put it up to face his bed? He turned and looked at the bed’s occupant. “The only sportsman of the lot,” as Montague Dartie in his prime had called him, lay with his swollen form outlined beneath a thin quilt. It gave Soames quite a turn to see that familiar beef-coloured face pale and puffy as a moon, with dark corrugated circles round eyes which still had their japing stare. A voice, hoarse and subdued, but with the old Forsyte timbre, said:
“Hallo, Soames! Come to measure me for my coffin?”
Soames put the suggestion away with a movement of his hand; he felt queer looking at that travesty of George. They had never got on, but—!
And in his flat, unemotional voice he said:
“Well, George! You’ll pick up yet. You’re no age. Is there anything I can do for you?”
A grin twitched George’s pallid lips.
“Make me a codicil. You’ll find paper in the dressing table drawer.”
Soames took out a sheet of ‘Iseeum’ Club notepaper. Standing at the table, he inscribed the opening words of a codicil with his stylographic pen, and looked round at George. The words came with a hoarse relish.
“My three screws to young Val Dartie, because he’s the only Forsyte that knows a horse from a donkey.” A throaty chuckle sounded ghastly in the ears of Soames. “What have you said?”
Soames read: “I hereby leave my three racehorses to my kinsman, Valerius Dartie, of Wansdon, Sussex, because he has special knowledge of horses.”
Again the throaty chuckle. “You’re a dry file, Soames. Go on. To Milly Moyle, of 12, Claremont Grove, twelve thousand pounds, free of legacy duty.”
Soames paused on the verge of a whistle.
The woman in the next room!
The japing in George’s eyes had turned to brooding gloom.
“It’s a lot of money,” Soames could not help saying.
George made a faint choleric sound.
“Write it down, or I’ll leave her the lot.”
Soames wrote. “Is that all?”
“Yes. Read it!”
Soames read. Again he heard that throaty chuckle. “That’s a pill. You won’t let THAT into the papers. Get that chap in, and you and he can witness.”
Before Soames reached the door, it was opened and the man himself came in.
“The—er—vicar, sir,” he said in a deprecating voice, “has called. He wants to know if you would like to see him.”
George turned his face, his fleshy grey eyes rolled.
“Give him my compliments,” he said, “and say I’ll see him at the funeral.”
With a bow the man went out, and there was silence.
“Now,” said George, “get him in again. I don’t know when the flag’ll fall.”
Soames beckoned the man in. When the codicil was signed and the man gone, George spoke:
“Take it, and see she gets it. I can trust you, that’s one thing about you, Soames.”
Soames pocketed the codicil with a very queer sensation.
“Would you like to see her again?” he said.
George stared up at him a long time before he answered.
“No. What’s the good? Give me a cigar from that drawer.”
Soames opened the drawer.
“Ought you?” he said.
George grinned. “Never in my life done what I ought; not going to begin now. Cut it for me.”
Soames nipped the end of the cigar. ‘Shan’t give him a match,’ he thought. ‘Can’t take the responsibility.’ But George did not ask for a match. He lay quite still, the unlighted cigar between his pale lips, the curved lids down over his eyes.
“Good-bye,” he said, “I’m going to have a snooze.”
“Good-bye,” said Soames. “I—I hope—you—you’ll soon—”
George reopened his eyes—fixed, sad, jesting, they seemed to quench the shams of hope and consolation. Soames turned hastily and went out. He felt bad, and almost unconsciously turned again into the sitting-room. The woman was still in the same attitude; the same florid scent was in the air. Soames took up the umbrella he had left there, and went out.
“This is my telephone number,” he said to the servant waiting in the corridor; “let me know.”
The man bowed.
Soames turned out of Belville Row. Never had he left George’s presence without the sense of being laughed at. Had he been laughed at now? Was that codicil George’s last joke? If he had not gone in this afternoon, would George ever have made it, leaving a third of his property away from his family to that florid woman in the high-backed chair? Soames was beset by a sense of mystery. How could a man joke at death’s door? It was, in a way, heroic. Where would he be buried? Somebody would know—Francie or Eustace. And what would they think when they came to know about that woman in the chair—twelve thousand pounds! ‘If I can get hold of that white monkey, I will,’ he thought suddenly. ‘It’s a good thing.’ The monkey’s eyes, the squeezed-out fruit—was life all a bitter jest and George deeper than himself? He rang the Green Street bell.
Mrs. Dartie was very sorry, but Mrs. Cardigan had called for her to dine and make a fourth at the play.
Soames went in to dinner alone. At the polished board below which Montague Dartie had now and again slipped, if not quite slept, he dined and brooded. “I can trust you, that’s one thing about you, Soames.” The words flattered and yet stung him. The depths of that sardonic joke! To give him a family shock and trust him to carry the shock out! George had never cared twelve thousand pounds for a woman who smelled of patchouli. No! It was a final gibe at his family, the Forsytes, at Soames himself! Well! one by one those who had injured or gibed at him—Irene, Bosinney, old and young Jolyon, and now George, had met their fates. Dead, dying, or in British Columbia! He saw again his cousin’s eyes above that unlighted cigar, fixed, sad, jesting—poor devil! He got up from the table, and nervously drew aside the curtains. The night was fine and cold. What happened to one—after? George used to say that he had been Charles the Second’s cook in a former existence! But reincarnation was all nonsense, weak-minded theorising! Still, one would be glad to hold on if one could, after one was gone. Hold on, and be near Fleur! What noise was that? Gramophone going in the kitchen! When the cat was away, the mice—! People were all alike—take what they could get, and give as little as they could for it. Well! he would smoke a cigarette. Lighting it at a candle—Winifred dined by candle-light, it was the ‘mode’ again—he thought: ‘Has he still got that cigar between his teeth?’ A funny fellow, George—all his days a funny fellow! He watched a ring of smoke he had made without intending to—very blue, he never inhaled! Yes! George had lived too fast, or he would not have been dying twenty years before his lime—too fast! Well, there it was, and he wished he had a cat to talk to! He took a little monster off the mantelboard. Picked up by his nephew Benedict in an Eastern bazaar the year after the War, it had green eyes—‘Not emeralds,’ thought Soames, ‘some cheap stone!’
“The telephone for you, sir.”
He went into the hall and took up the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Forsyte has passed away, sir—in his sleep, the doctor says.”
“Oh!” said Soames: “Had he a cig—? Many thanks.” He hung up the receiver.
Passed away! And, with a nervous movement, he felt for the codicil in his breast pocket.
For a week Bicket had seen ‘the job,’ slippery as an eel, evasive as a swallow, for ever passing out of reach. A pound for keep, and three shillings invested on a horse, and he was down to twenty-four bob. The weather had turned sou’-westerly and Victorine had gone out for the first time. That was something off his mind, but the cramp of the unemployed sensation, that fearful craving for the means of mere existence, a protesting, agonising anxiety, was biting into the very flesh of his spirit. If he didn’t get a job within a week or two, there would be nothing for it but the workhouse, or the gas. ‘The gas,’ thought Bicket, ‘if she will, I will. I’m fed up. After all, what is it? In her arms I wouldn’t mind.’ Instinct, however, that it was not so easy as all that to put one’s head under the gas, gave him a brainwave that Monday night. Balloons—that chap in Oxford Street today! Why not? He still had the capital for a flutter in them, and no hawker’s licence needed. His brain, working like a squirrel in the small hours, grasped the great, the incalculable advantage of coloured balloons over all other forms of commerce. You couldn’t miss the man who sold them—there he was for every eye to see, with his many radiant circumferences dangling in front of him! Not much profit in them, he had gathered—a penny on a sixpenny globe of coloured air, a penny on every three small twopenny globes; still their salesman was alive, and probably had pitched him a poor tale for fear of making his profession seem too attractive. Over the Bridge, just where the traffic—no, up by St. Paul’s! He knew a passage where he could stand back a yard or two, like that chap in Oxford Street! But to the girl sleeping beside him he said nothing. No word to her till he had thrown the die. It meant gambling with his last penny. For a bare living he would have to sell—why, three dozen big and four dozen small balloons a day would only be twenty-six shillings a week profit, unless that chap was kidding. Not much towards ‘Austrylia’ out of that! And not a career—Victorine would have a shock! But it was neck or nothing now—he must try it, and in off hours go on looking for a job.
Our thin capitalist, then, with four dozen big and seven dozen small on a tray, two shillings in his pocket, and little in his stomach, took his stand off St. Paul’s at two o’clock next day. Slowly he blew up and tied the necks of two large and three small, magenta, green and blue, till they dangled before him. Then with the smell of rubber in his nostrils, and protruding eyes, he stood back on the kerb and watched the stream go by. It gratified him to see that most people turned to look at him. But the first person to address him was a policeman, with:
“I’m not sure you can stand there.”
Bicket did not answer, his throat felt too dry. He had heard of the police. Had he gone the wrong way to work? Suddenly he gulped, and said: “Give us a chance, constable; I’m right on my bones. If I’m in the way, I’ll stand anywhere you like. This is new to me, and two bob’s all I’ve got left in the world besides a wife.”
The constable, a big man, looked him up and down. “Well, we’ll see. I shan’t make trouble for you if no one objects.”
Bicket’s gaze deepened thankfully.
“I’m much obliged,” he said; “tyke one for your little girl—to please me.”
“I’ll buy one,” said the policeman, “and give you a start. I go off duty in an hour, you ‘ave it ready—a big one, magenta.”
He moved away. Bicket could see him watching. Edging into the gutter, he stood quite still; his large eyes clung to every face that passed; and, now and then, his thin fingers nervously touched his wares. If Victorine could see him! All the spirit within him mounted. By Golly! he would get out of this somehow into the sun, into a life that was a life!
He had been standing there nearly two hours, shifting from foot to unaccustomed foot, and had sold four big and five small—sixpenny worth of profit—when Soames, who had changed his route to spite those fellows who couldn’t get past William Gouldyng Ingerer, came by on his way to the P.P.R.S. board. Startled by a timid murmur: “Balloon, sir, best quality,” he looked round from that contemplation of St. Paul’s which had been his lifelong habit, and stopped in sheer surprise.
“Balloon!” he said. “What should I want with a balloon?”
Bicket smiled. Between those green and blue and orange globes and Soames’ grey self-containment there was incongruity which even he could appreciate.
“Children like ’em—no weight, sir, waistcoat pocket.”
“I daresay,” said Soames, “but I’ve no children.”
“Grandchildren, sir.”
“Nor any grandchildren.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Soames gave him one of those rapid glances with which he was accustomed to gauge the character of the impecunious. ‘A poor, harmless little rat!’ he thought “Here, give me two—how much?”
“A shilling, sir, and much obliged.”
“You can keep the change,” said Soames hurriedly, and passed on, astonished. Why on earth he had bought the things, and for more than double their price, he could not conceive. He did not recollect such a thing having happened to him before. Extremely peculiar! And suddenly he realised why. The fellow had been humble, mild—to be encouraged, in these days of Communistic bravura. After all, the little chap was—was on the side of Capital, had invested in those balloons! Trade! And, raising his eyes towards St. Paul’s again, he stuffed the nasty-feeling things down into his overcoat pocket. Somebody would be taking them out, and wondering what was the matter with him! Well, he had other things to think of!…
Bicket, however, stared after him, elated. Two hundred and fifty odd per cent. profit on those two—that was something like. The feeling, that not enough women were passing him here, became less poignant—after all, women knew the value of money, no extra shillings out of them! If only some more of these shiny-hatted old millionaires would come along!
At six o’clock, with a profit of three and eightpence, to which Soames had contributed just half, he began to add the sighs of deflating balloons to his own; untying them with passionate care he watched his coloured hopes one by one collapse, and stored them in the drawer of his tray. Taking it under his arm, he moved his tired legs in the direction of the Bridge. In a full day he might make four to five shillings—Well, it would just keep them alive, and something might turn up! He was his own master, anyway, accountable neither to employer nor to union. That knowledge gave him a curious lightness inside, together with the fact that he had eaten nothing since breakfast.
‘Wonder if he was an alderman,’ he thought; ‘they say those aldermen live on turtle soup.’ Nearing home, he considered nervously what to do with the tray? How prevent Victorine from knowing that he had joined the ranks of Capital, and spent his day in the gutter? Ill luck! She was at the window! He must put a good face on it. And he went in whistling.
“What’s that, Tony?” she said, pointing to the tray.
“Ah! ha! Great stunt—this! Look ’ere!”
Taking a balloon out from the tray, he blew. He blew with a desperation he had not yet put into the process. They said the things would swell to five feet in circumference. He felt somehow that if he could get it to attain those proportions, it would soften everything. Under his breath the thing blotted out Victorine, and the room, till there was just the globe of coloured air. Nipping its neck between thumb and finger, he held it up, and said:
“There you are; not bad value for sixpence, old girl!” and he peered round it. Lord, she was crying! He let the ‘blymed’ thing go; it floated down, the air slowly evaporating till a little crinkled wreck rested on the dingy carpet. Clasping her heaving shoulders, he said desperately:
“Cheerio, my dear, don’t quarrel with bread and butter. I shall get a job, this is just to tide us over. I’d do a lot worse than that for you. Come on, and get my tea, I’m hungry, blowin’ up those things.”
She stopped crying, looked up, said nothing—mysterious with those big eyes! You’d say she had thoughts! But what they were Bicket could not tell. Under the stimulus of tea, he achieved a certain bravado about his new profession. To be your own master! Go out when you liked, come home when you liked—lie in bed with Vic if he jolly well pleased. A lot in that! And there rose in Bicket something truly national, something free and happy-go-lucky, resenting regular work, enjoying a spurt, and a laze-off, craving independence—something that accounted for the national life, the crowds of little shops, of middlemen, casual workers, tramps, owning their own souls in their own good time, and damning the consequences—something inherent in the land, the race, before the Saxons and their conscience and their industry came in-something that believed in swelling and collapsing coloured air, demanded pickles and high flavours without nourishment—yes, all that something exulted above Bicket’s kipper and his tea, good and strong. He would rather sell balloons than be a packer any day, and don’t let Vic forget it! And when she was able to take a job, they would get on fine, and not be long before they’d saved enough to get out of it to where those blue butterflies came from. And he spoke of Soames. A few more aldermen without children—say two a day, fifteen bob a week outside legitimate trade. Why, in under a year they’d have the money! And once away, Vic would blow out like one of those balloons; she’d be twice the size, and a colour in her cheeks to lay over that orange and magenta. Bicket became full of air. And the girl, his wife, watched with her large eyes and spoke little; but she did not cry again, or, indeed, throw any water, warm or cold, on him who sold balloons.
With the exception of old Fontenoy—in absence as in presence ornamental—the Board was again full; Soames, conscious of special ingratiation in the manner of ‘that chap’ Elderson, prepared himself for the worst. The figures were before them; a somewhat colourless show, appearing to disclose a state of things which would pass muster, if within the next six months there were no further violent disturbances of currency exchange. The proportion of foreign business to home business was duly expressed in terms of two to seven; German business, which constituted the bulk of the foreign, had been lumped—Soames noted—in the middle section, of countries only half bankrupt, and taken at what might be called a conservative estimate.
During the silence which reigned while each member of the Board digested the figures, Soames perceived more clearly than ever the quandary he was in. Certainly, these figures would hardly justify the foregoing of the dividend earned on the past year’s business. But suppose there were another Continental crash and they became liable on the great bulk of their foreign business, it might swamp all profits on home business next year, and more besides. And then his uneasiness about Elderson himself—founded he could not tell on what, intuitive, perhaps silly.
“Well, Mr. Forsyte,” the chairman was speaking; “there are the figures. Are you satisfied?”
Soames looked up; he had taken a resolution.
“I will agree to this year’s dividend on condition that we drop this foreign business in future, lock, stock and barrel.” The manager’s eyes hard and bright, met his, then turned towards the chairman.
“That appears to savour of the panicky,” he said; “the foreign business is responsible for a good third of our profit this year.”
The chairman seemed to garner the expressions of his fellow-directors, before he said:
“There is nothing in the foreign situation at the moment, Mr. Forsyte, which gives particular cause for alarm. I admit that we should watch it closely—”
“You can’t,” interjected Soames. “Here we are four years from the Armistice, and we know no more where we stand than we did then. If I’d realised our commitment to this policy, I should never have come on the Board. We must drop it.”
“Rather an extreme view. And hardly a matter we can decide in a moment.”
The murmur of assent, the expression, faintly ironical, of ‘that chap’s’ lips, jolted the tenacity in Soames.
“Very well! Unless you’re prepared to tell the shareholders in the report that we are dropping foreign business, you drop me. I must be free to raise the question myself at the general meeting.” He did not miss the shift and blink in the manager’s eyes. That shot had gone home!
The Chairman said:
“You put a pistol to our heads.”
“I am responsible to the shareholders,” said Soames, “and I shall do my duty by them.”
“So we all are, Mr. Forsyte; and I hope we shall all do our duty.”
“Why not confine the foreign business to the small countries—their currency is safe enough?”
‘Old Mont,’ and his precious ‘ring!’
“No,” said Soames, “we must go back to safety.”
“Splendid isolation, Forsyte?”
“Meddling was all very well in the war, but in peace—politics or business—this half-and-half interference is no good. We can’t control the foreign situation.”
He looked around him, and was instantly conscious that with those words he had struck a chord. ‘I’m going through with this!’ he thought.
“I should be glad, Mr. Chairman”—the manager was speaking—“if I might say a word. The policy was of my initiation, and I think I may claim that it has been of substantial benefit to the Society so far. When, however, a member of the Board takes so strong a view against its continuance, I certainly don’t press the Board to continue it. The times ARE uncertain, and a risk, of course, is involved, however conservative our estimates.”
‘Now why?’ thought Soames: ‘What’s he ratting for?’
“That’s very handsome of you, Elderson; Mr. Chairman, I think we may say that is very handsome of our manager.”
Old Dosey Cosey! Handsome! The old woman!
The Chairman’s rather harsh voice broke a silence.
“This is a very serious point of policy. I should have been glad to have Lord Fontenoy present.”
“If I am to endorse the report,” said Soames shortly, “it must be decided today. I have made up my mind. But please yourselves.”
He threw in those last three words from a sort of fellow feeling—it was unpleasant to be dragooned! A moment’s silence, and then discussion assumed that random volubility which softens a decision already forced on one. A quarter of an hour thus passed before the Chairman said:
“We are agreed then, gentlemen, that the report shall contain the announcement that, in view of Continental uncertainty, we are abandoning foreign risks for the present.”
Soames had won. Relieved and puzzled, he walked away alone.
He had shown character; their respect for him had gone up, he could see; their liking for him down, if they’d ever had any—he didn’t know! But why had Elderson veered round? He recalled the shift and blink of the fellow’s steely eyes at the idea of the question being raised at the general meeting.
That had done it! But why? Were the figures faked? Surely not! That would be too difficult, in the face of the accountants. If Soames had faith, it was in chartered accountants. Sandis and Jevon were tip-top people. It couldn’t be that! He glanced up from the pavement. The dome of St. Paul’s was dim already in evening sky—nothing to be had out of it! He felt badly in need of some one to talk to; but there was nobody; and he quickened his pace among the hurrying crowd. His hand, driven deep into his overcoat pocket, came into sudden contact with some foreign sticky substance. ‘Gracious!’ he thought: ‘those things!’ Should he drop them in the gutter? If only there were a child he could take them home to! He must get Annette to speak to Fleur. He knew what came of bad habits from his own experience of long ago. Why shouldn’t he speak to her himself? He was staying the night there! But there came on him a helpless sense of ignorance. These young people! What did they really think and feel? Was old Mont right? Had they given up interest in everything except the moment, abandoned all belief in continuity, and progress? True enough that Europe was in Queer Street. But look at the state of things after the Napoleonic Wars. He couldn’t remember his grandfather ‘Superior Dosset,’ the old chap had died five years before he was born, but he perfectly remembered how Aunt Ann, born in 1799, used to talk about “that dreadful Bonaparte—we used to call him Boney, my dear;” of how her father could get eight or ten per cent. for his money; and of what an impression ‘those Chartists’ had made on Aunts Juley and Hester, and that was long afterwards. Yet, in spite of all that, look at the Victorian era—a golden age, things worth collecting, children worth having! Why not again! Consols had risen almost continuously since Timothy died. Even if Heaven and Hell had gone, they couldn’t be the reason; none of his uncles had believed in either, and yet had all made fortunes, and all had families, except Timothy and Swithin. No! It couldn’t be the want of Heaven and Hell! What, then, was the reason of the change—if change there really were? And suddenly it was revealed to Soames. They talked too much—too much and too fast! They got to the end of interest in this and that and the other. They ate life and threw away the rind, and—and—. By the way, he must buy that picture of George’s!… Had these young folk more mind than his own generation? And if so—why? Was it diet? That lobster cocktail Fleur had given him the Sunday before last. He had eaten the thing—very nasty! But it hadn’t made him want to talk. No! He didn’t think it could be diet. Besides—Mind! Where were the minds now that equalled the Victorians—Darwin, Huxley, Dickens, Disraeli, even old Gladstone? Why, he remembered judges and advocates who seemed giants compared with those of the present day, just as he remembered that the judges of James his father’s youth had seemed giants to James compared with those of Soames’ prime. According to that, mind was steadily declining. It must be something else. There was a thing they called psycho-analysis, which so far as he could understand attributed people’s action not to what they ate at breakfast, or the leg they got out of bed with, as in the good old days, but to some shock they had received in the remote past and entirely forgotten. The subconscious mind! Fads! Fads and microbes! The fact was this generation had no digestion. His father and his uncles had all complained of liver, but they had never had anything the matter with them—no need of any of these vitamins, false teeth, mental healing, newspapers, psycho-analysis, spiritualism, birth control, osteopathy, broadcasting, and what not. ‘Machines!’ thought Soames. ‘That’s it—I shouldn’t wonder!’ How could you believe in anything when everything was going round so fast? When you couldn’t count your chickens—they ran about so? But Fleur had got a good little head on her! ‘Yes,’ he mused, ‘and French teeth, she can digest anything. Two years! I’ll speak to her before she gets the habit confirmed. Her mother was quick enough about it!’ And perceiving the Connoisseurs’ Club in front of him, he went in.
The hall porter came out of his box. A gentleman was waiting.
“What gentleman?” said Soames, sidelong.
“I think he’s your nephew, sir, Mr. Dartie.”
“Val Dartie! H’m! Where?”
“In the little room, sir.”
The little room—all the accommodation considered worthy of such as were not Connoisseurs—was at the end of a passage, and in no taste at all, as if the Club were saying: “See what it is not to be one of us!” Soames entered it, and saw Val Dartie smoking a cigarette and gazing with absorption at the only object of interest, his own reflection in the glass above the fire.
He never saw his nephew without wondering when he would say: “Look here, Uncle Soames, I’m up a stump.” Breeding race horses! There could only be one end to that!
“Well?” he said, “how are YOU?”
The face in the glass turned round, and became the back of a clipped sandyish head.
“Oh! bobbish, thanks! YOU look all right, Uncle Soames. I just wanted to ask you: Must I take these screws of old George Forsyte’s? They’re dashed bad.”
“Gift horse in the mouth?” said Soames.
“Well,” said Val, “but they’re SO dashed bad; by the time I’ve paid legacy duty, boxed them to a sale, and sold them, there won’t be a sixpence. One of them falls down when you look at it. And the other two are broken-winded. The poor old boy kept them, because he couldn’t get rid of them. They’re about five hundred years old.”
“Thought you were fond of horses,” said Soames. “Can’t you turn them out?”
“Yes,” said Val, drily; “but I’ve got my living to make. I haven’t told my wife, for fear she should suggest that. I’m afraid I might see them in my dreams if I sold them. They’re only fit for the kennels. Can I write to the executors and say I’m not rich enough to take them?”
“You can,” said Soames, and the words: “How’s your wife?” died unspoken on his lips. She was the daughter of his enemy, young Jolyon. That fellow was dead, but the fact remained.
“I will, then,” said Val. “How did his funeral go off?”
“Very simple affair—I had nothing to do with it.” The days of funerals were over. No flowers, no horses, no plumes—a motor hearse, a couple of cars or so, was all the attention paid nowadays to the dead. Another sign of the times!
“I’m staying the night at Green Street,” said Val. “I suppose you’re not there, are you?”
“No,” said Soames, and did not miss the relief in his nephew’s countenance.
“Oh! by the way, Uncle Soames—do you advise me to buy P.P.R.S. shares?”
“On the contrary. I’m going to advise your mother to sell. Tell her I’m coming in tomorrow.”
“Why? I thought—”
“Never mind my reasons!” said Soames shortly.
“So long, then!”
Exchanging a chilly hand-shake, he watched his nephew withdraw.
So long! An expression, old as the Boer war, that he had never got used to—meant nothing so far as he could see! He entered the reading-room. A number of Connoisseurs were sitting and standing about, and Soames, least clubbable of men, sought the solitude of an embrasured window. He sat there polishing the nail of one forefinger against the back of the other, and chewing the cud of life. After all, what was the point of anything. There was George! He had had an easy life—never done any work! And here was himself, who had done a lot of work! And sooner or later they would bury him too, with a motor hearse probably! And there was his son-inlaw, young Mont, full of talk about goodness knew what—and that thin-cheeked chap who had sold him the balloons this afternoon. And old Fontenoy, and that waiter over there; and the out-of-works and the inworks; and those chaps in Parliament, and the parsons in their pulpits—what were they all for? There was the old gardener down at Mapledurham pushing his roller over and over the lawn, week after week, and if he didn’t, what would the lawn be like? That was life—gardener rolling lawn! Put it that there was another life—he didn’t believe it, but for the sake of argument—that life must be just the same. Rolling lawn—to keep it lawn! What point in lawn? Conscious of pessimism, he rose. He had better be getting back to Fleur’s—they dressed for dinner! He supposed there was something in dressing for dinner, but it was like lawn—you came unrolled—undressed again, and so it went on! Over and over and over to keep up to a pitch, that was—ah! what WAS the pitch for?
Turning into South Square, he cannoned into a young man, whose head was craned back as if looking after some one he had parted from. Uncertain whether to apologise or to wait for an apology, Soames stood still.
The young man said abruptly: “Sorry, sir,” and moved on; dark, neat-looking chap with a hungry look obviously unconnected with his stomach. Murmuring: “Not at all!” Soames moved forward and rang his daughter’s bell. She opened to him herself. She was in hat and furs—just in. The young man recurred to Soames. Had he left her there? What a pretty face it was! He should certainly speak to her. If she once took to gadding about!
He put it off, however, till he was about to say “Goodnight”—Michael having gone to the political meeting of a Labour candidate, as if he couldn’t find something better to do!
“Now you’ve been married two years, my child, I suppose you’ll be looking towards the future. There’s a great deal of nonsense talked about children. The whole thing’s much simpler. I hope you feel that.”
Flour was leaning back among the cushions of the settee, swinging her foot. Her eyes became a little restless, but her colour did not change.
“Of course!” she said; “only there’s no hurry, Dad.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Soames murmured. “The French and the royal family have a very sound habit of getting it over early. There’s many a slip and it keeps them out of mischief. You’re very attractive, my child—I don’t want to see you take too much to gad-about ways. You’ve got all sorts of friends.”
“Yes,” said Fleur.
“You get on well with Michael, don’t you?”
“Oh! yes.”
“Well, then, why not? You must remember that your son will be a what-you-call-it.”
In those words he compromised with his instinctive dislike of titles and flummery of that nature.
“It mightn’t be a son,” said Fleur.
“At your age that’s easily remedied.”
“Oh, I don’t want a lot, Dad. One, perhaps, or two.”
“Well,” said Soames, “I should almost prefer a daughter, something like—well, something like you.”
Her softened eyes flew, restive, from his face to her foot, to the dog, all over the room.
“I don’t know, it’s a tie—like digging your own grave in a way.”
“I shouldn’t put it as high as that,” murmured Soames, persuasively.
“No man would, Dad.”
“Your mother wouldn’t have got on at all without you,” and recollection of how near her mother had been to not getting on at all with her—of how, but for him, she would have made a mess of it, reduced him to silent contemplation of the restive foot.
“Well,” he said, at last, “I thought I’d mention it. I—I’ve got your happiness at heart.”
Fleur rose and kissed his forehead.
“I know, Dad,” she said: “I’m a selfish pig. I’ll think about it. In fact, I—I have thought about it.”
“That’s right,” said Soames; “that’s right! You’ve a good head on you—it’s a great consolation to me. Goodnight, my dear!”
And he went up to his bed. If there was point in anything, it was in perpetuation of oneself, though, of course, that begged the question. ‘Wonder,’ he thought, ‘if I ought to have asked her whether that young man—!’ But young people were best left alone. The fact was, he didn’t understand them. His eye lighted on the paper bag containing those—those things he had bought. He had brought them up from his overcoat to get rid of them—but how? Put into the fire, they would make a smell. He stood at his dressing-table, took one up and looked at it. Good Lord! And, suddenly, rubbing the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, he began to blow the thing up. He blew until his cheeks were tired, and then, nipping the aperture, took a bit of the dental cotton he used on his teeth every night and tied it up. There the thing was! With a pettish gesture he batted the balloon. Off it flew—purple and extravagant, alighting on his bed. H’m! He took up the other, and did the same to it. Purple and green! The deuce! If any one came in and saw! He threw up the window, batted them, balloon after balloon, into the night, and shut the window down. There they’d be in the dark, floating about. His lips contracted in a nervous grin. People would see them in the morning. Well! What else could you do with things like that?
Michael had gone to the Labour candidate’s meeting partly because he wanted to, and partly out of fellow feeling for ‘old Forsyte,’ whom he was always conscious of having robbed. His father-inlaw had been very decent about Fleur, and he liked the ‘old man’ to have her to himself when he could.
In a constituency which had much casual and no trades-union labour to speak of, the meeting would be one of those which enabled the intellectuals of the Party to get it ‘off their chests.’ Sentiment being ‘slop,’ and championship mere condescension, one might look for sound economic speeches which left out discredited factors, such as human nature. Michael was accustomed to hearing people disparaged for deprecating change because human nature was constant; he was accustomed to hearing people despised for feeling compassion; he knew that one ought to be purely economic. And anyway that kind of speech was preferable to the tub-thumpings of the North or of the Park, which provoked a nasty underlying class spirit in himself.
The meeting was in full swing when he arrived, the candidate pitilessly exposing the fallacies of a capitalism which, in his view, had brought on the war. For fear that it should bring on another, it must be changed for a system which would ensure that nations should not want anything too much. The individual—said the candidate—was in every respect superior to the nation of which he formed a part; and the problem before them was to secure an economic condition which would enable the individual to function freely in his native superiority. In that way alone, he said, would they lose those mass movements and emotions which imperilled the sanity of the world. He spoke well. Michael listened, purring almost audibly, till he found that he was thinking of himself, Wilfrid and Fleur. Would he ever function so freely in a native superiority that he did not want Fleur too much? And did he wish to? He did not. That seemed to introduce human nature into the speaker’s argument. Didn’t everybody want something too much? Wasn’t it natural? And if so, wouldn’t there always be a collective wanting too much—poolings of primary desire, such as the desire of keeping your own head above water? The candidate’s argument seemed to him suddenly to leave out heat, to omit friction, to be that of a man in an armchair after a poor lunch. He looked attentively at the speaker’s shrewd, dry, doubting face. ‘No juice!’ he thought. And when ‘the chap’ sat down, he got up and left the hall.
This Wilfrid business had upset him horribly. Try as he had to put it out of his mind, try as he would to laugh it off, it continued to eat into his sense of security and happiness. Wife and best friend! A hundred times a day he assured himself that he trusted Fleur. Only, Wilfrid was so much more attractive than himself, and Fleur deserved the best of everything. Besides, Wilfrid was going through torture, and it was not a pleasant thought! How end the thing, restore peace of mind to himself, to him, to her? She had told him nothing; and it simply was impossible to ask. No way even of showing his anxiety! The whole thing was just ‘dark,’ and, so far as he could see, would have to stay so; nothing to be done but screw the lid on tighter, be as nice as he could to her, try not to feel bitter about him. Hades!
He turned down Chelsea Embankment. Here the sky was dark and wide and streaming with stars. The river wide, dark and gleaming with oily rays from the Embankment lamps. The width of it all gave him relief. Dash the dumps! A jolly, queer, muddled, sweet and bitter world; an immensely intriguing game of chance, no matter how the cards were falling at the moment! In the trenches he had thought: ‘Get out of this, and I’ll never mind anything again!’ How seldom now he remembered thinking that! The human body renewed itself—they said—in seven years. In three years’ time his body would not be the body of the trenches, but a whole-time peace body with a fading complex. If only Fleur would tell him quite openly what she felt, what she was doing about Wilfrid, for she must be doing something! And Wilfrid’s verse? Would his confounded passion—as Bart suggested—flow in poetry? And if so, who would publish it? A miserable business! Well the night was beautiful, and the great thing not to be a pig. Beauty and not being a pig! Nothing much else to it—except laughter—the comic side! Keep one’s sense of humour, anyway! And Michael searched, while he strode beneath plane trees half-stripped of leaves and plume-like in the dark, for the fun in his position. He failed to find it. There seemed absolutely nothing funny about love. Possibly he might fall out of love again some day, but not so long as she kept him on her tenterhooks. Did she do it on purpose? Never! Fleur simply could not be like those women who kept their husbands hungry and fed them when they wanted dresses, furs, jewels. Revolting!
He came in sight of Westminster. Only half-past ten! Suppose he took a cab to Wilfrid’s rooms, and tried to have it out with him. It would be like trying to make the hands of a clock move backwards to its ticking. What use in saying: “You love Fleur—well, don’t!” or in Wilfrid saying it to him. ‘After all, I was first with Fleur,’ he thought. Pure chance, perhaps, but fact! Ah! And wasn’t that just the danger? He was no longer a novelty to her—nothing unexpected about him now! And he and she had agreed times without number that novelty was the salt of life, the essence of interest and drama. Novelty now lay with Wilfrid! Lord! Lord! Possession appeared far from being nine points of the law! He rounded-in from the Embankment towards home—jolly part of London, jolly Square; everything jolly except just this infernal complication. Something, soft as a large leaf, tapped twice against his ear. He turned, astonished; he was in empty space, no tree near. Floating in the darkness, a round thing—he grabbed, it bobbed. What? A child’s balloon! He secured it between his hands, took it beneath a lamp-post—green, he judged. Queer! He looked up. Two windows lighted, one of them Fleur’s! Was this the bubble of his own happiness expelled? Morbid! Silly ass! Some gust of wind—a child’s plaything lodged and loosened! He held the balloon gingerly. He would take it in and show it to her. He put his latch-key in the door. Dark in the hall—gone up! He mounted, swinging the balloon on his finger. Fleur was standing before a mirror.
“What on earth’s that?” she said.
The blood returned to Michael’s heart. Curious how he had dreaded its having anything to do with her!
“Don’t know, darling; fell on my hat—must belong to heaven.” And he batted it.
The balloon floated, dropped, bounded twice, wobbled and came to rest.
“You ARE a baby, Michael. I believe you bought it.”
Michael came closer, and stood quite still.
“My hat! What a misfortune to be in love!”
“You think so!”
“Il y a toujours un qui baise, et l’autre qui ne tend pas la joue.”
“But I do.”
“Fleur!”
Fleur smiled.
“Baise away.”
Embracing her, Michael thought: ‘She holds me—does with me what she likes; I know nothing of her!’
And there arose a small sound—from Ting-a-ling smelling the balloon.