← catalogue

The Forsyte saga, Volume 3

by John Galsworthy · English · Gutenberg #2596 · 553,509 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Forsyte saga, Volume 3
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Forsyte saga, Volume 3
        Awakening; To let

Author: John Galsworthy


        
Release date: June 14, 2006 [eBook #2596]
                Most recently updated: February 22, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2596

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORSYTE SAGA, VOLUME 3 ***




Produced by David Widger




spines (203K)” src=



subscription (12K)” src=



editon (10K)” src=





FORSYTE SAGA AWAKENING AND TO LET


By John Galsworthy




Contents



AWAKENING


TO LET

PART I

I.—ENCOUNTER

II.—FINE FLEUR FORSYTE

III.—AT ROBIN HILL

IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM

V.—THE NATIVE HEATH

VI.—JON

VII.—FLEUR

VIII.—IDYLL ON GRASS

IX. GOYA

X.—TRIO

XI.—DUET

XII.—CAPRICE


PART II

I.—MOTHER AND SON

II.—FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

III.—MEETINGS

IV.—IN GREEN STREET

V.—PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS

VI.—SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE

VII.—JUNE TAKES A HAND

VIII.—THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH

IX.—THE FAT IN THE FIRE

X.—DECISION

XI.—TIMOTHY PROPHESIES


PART III

I.—OLD JOLYON WALKS

II.—CONFESSION

III.—IRENE

IV.—SOAMES COGITATES

V.—THE FIXED IDEA

VI.—DESPERATE

VII.—EMBASSY

VIII.—THE DARK TUNE

IX.—UNDER THE OAK-TREE

X.—FLEUR'S WEDDING

XI.—THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES






titlepage3 (37K)” src=



frontis3 (120K)” src=



THE FORSYTE SAGA—VOLUME III. By John Galsworthy





AWAKENING


TO CHARLES SCRIBNER





AWAKENING

Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the
July sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway turned;
and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-linen-suited.
His hair was shining, and his eyes, from beneath a frown, for he was
considering how to go downstairs, this last of innumerable times, before
the car brought his father and mother home. Four at a time, and five
at the bottom? Stale! Down the banisters? But in which fashion? On his
face, feet foremost? Very stale. On his stomach, sideways? Paltry! On
his back, with his arms stretched down on both sides? Forbidden! Or on
his face, head foremost, in a manner unknown as yet to any but himself?
Such was the cause of the frown on the illuminated face of little
Jon....

In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to
simplify the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of little
Jon, or they would have claimed him for a disciple. But one can be too
simple in this life, for his real name was Jolyon, and his living father
and dead half-brother had usurped of old the other shortenings, Jo and
Jolly. As a fact little Jon had done his best to conform to convention
and spell himself first Jhon, then John; not till his father had
explained the sheer necessity, had he spelled his name Jon.

Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart by the
groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse “Da,” who wore
the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins in that
private life lived at odd moments even by domestic servants. His mother
had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling delicious,
smoothing his forehead just before he fell asleep, and sometimes docking
his hair, of a golden brown colour. When he cut his head open against
the nursery fender she was there to be bled over; and when he had
nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle his head against her neck.
She was precious but remote, because “Da” was so near, and there is
hardly room for more than one woman at a time in a man's heart. With his
father, too, of course, he had special bonds of union; for little
Jon also meant to be a painter when he grew up—with the one small
difference, that his father painted pictures, and little Jon intended to
paint ceilings and walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders,
in a dirty-white apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash. His father also
took him riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because
it was so-coloured.

Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was rather
curly and large. He had never heard his father or his mother speak in an
angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody else; the groom,
Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other servants, even “Da,” who alone
restrained him in his courses, had special voices when they talked to
him. He was therefore of opinion that the world was a place of perfect
and perpetual gentility and freedom.

A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just
over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing for
the Liberal revival of 1906. Coercion was unpopular, parents had exalted
notions of giving their offspring a good time. They spoiled their rods,
spared their children, and anticipated the results with enthusiasm. In
choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had
already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight,
whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely.
What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little
prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon
could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played
second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his
mother's heart he knew not yet. As for “Auntie” June, his half-sister
(but so old that she had grown out of the relationship) she loved him,
of course, but was too sudden. His devoted “Da,” too, had a Spartan
touch. His bath was cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged
to be sorry for himself. As to the vexed question of his education,
little Jon shared the theory of those who considered that children
should not be forced. He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came for two
hours every morning to teach him her language, together with history,
geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave him
disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune, never
making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that he
remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his
father he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a
highly educated little boy. Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed
in his mouth without spoiling it, though “Da” sometimes said that other
children would do him a “world of good.”

It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held
him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which she did
not approve. This first interference with the free individualism of a
Forsyte drove him almost frantic. There was something appalling in the
utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to whether
it would ever come to an end. Suppose she never let him get up any more!
He suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds. Worse
than anything was his perception that “Da” had taken all that time
to realise the agony of fear he was enduring. Thus, dreadfully, was
revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.

When he was let up he remained convinced that “Da” had done a dreadful
thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had been
compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say: “Mum,
don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again.”

His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
hair—“couleur de feuille morte,” as little Jon had not yet learned to
call it—had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown velvet
tunic, and answered:

“No, darling, I won't.”

She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his
father:

“Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's so devoted to him”;
and his father's answer:

“Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it feels like
to be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it for a minute.”

Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon
was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed where
he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.

Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence. Nothing
much had been revealed to him after that, till one day, having gone down
to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from the cow, after Garratt
had finished milking, he had seen Clover's calf, dead. Inconsolable,
and followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought “Da”; but suddenly
aware that she was not the person he wanted, had rushed away to find his
father, and had run into the arms of his mother.

“Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!”

His mother's clasp, and her:

“Yes, darling, there, there!” had stayed his sobbing. But if Clover's
calf could die, anything could—not only bees, flies, beetles and
chickens—and look soft like that! This was appalling—and soon forgotten!

The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant experience,
which his mother had understood much better than “Da”; and nothing of
vital importance had happened after that till the year turned; when,
following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease composed
of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine oranges.
It was then that the world had flowered. To “Auntie” June he owed that
flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than she came rushing
down from London, bringing with her the books which had nurtured her
own Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of 1869. Aged, and of many
colours, they were stored with the most formidable happenings. Of
these she read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to himself;
whereupon she whisked back to London and left them with him in a heap.
Those books cooked his fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but
midshipmen and dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses,
sharks, battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
extravagant delights. The moment he was suffered to get up, he rigged
his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath across green
seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of its mahogany
drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking tumbler screwed to
his eye, in search of rescuing sails. He made a daily raft out of the
towel stand, the tea tray, and his pillows. He saved the juice from his
French plums, bottled it in an empty medicine bottle, and provisioned
the raft with the rum that it became; also with pemmican made out of
little saved-up bits of chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with
lime juice against scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a
little economised juice. He made a North Pole one morning from the whole
of his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark
canoe (in private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a
polar bear fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up
in “Da's” nightgown. After that, his father, seeking to steady his
imagination, brought him Ivanhoe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur, and
Tom Brown's Schooldays. He read the first, and for three days built,
defended and stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every part in the
piece except those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing cries of: “En
avant, de Bracy!” and similar utterances. After reading the book about
King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir Lamorac de Galis, because,
though there was very little about him, he preferred his name to that of
any other knight; and he rode his old rocking-horse to death, armed
with a long bamboo. Bevis he found tame; besides, it required woods and
animals, of which he had none in his nursery, except his two cats, Fitz
and Puck Forsyte, who permitted no liberties. For Tom Brown he was as
yet too young. There was relief in the house when, after the fourth
week, he was permitted to go down and out.

The month being March the trees were exceptionally like the masts of
ships, and for little Jon that was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard
on his knees, suits, and the patience of “Da,” who had the washing and
reparation of his clothes. Every morning the moment his breakfast was
over, he could be viewed by his mother and father, whose windows looked
out that way, coming from the study, crossing the terrace, climbing the
old oak tree, his face resolute and his hair bright. He began the day
thus because there was not time to go far afield before his lessons. The
old tree's variety never staled; it had mainmast, foremast, top-gallant
mast, and he could always come down by the halyards—or ropes of the
swing. After his lessons, completed by eleven, he would go to
the kitchen for a thin piece of cheese, a biscuit and two French
plums—provision enough for a jolly-boat at least—and eat it in some
imaginative way; then, armed to the teeth with gun, pistols, and sword,
he would begin the serious climbing of the morning, encountering by the
way innumerable slavers, Indians, pirates, leopards, and bears. He was
seldom seen at that hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like
Dick Needham) amid the rapid explosion of copper caps. And many were the
gardeners he brought down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun.
He lived a life of the most violent action.

“Jon,” said his father to his mother, under the oak tree, “is terrible.
I'm afraid he's going to turn out a sailor, or something hopeless. Do
you see any sign of his appreciating beauty?”

“Not the faintest.”

“Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines! I can bear
anything but that. But I wish he'd take more interest in Nature.”

“He's imaginative, Jolyon.”

“Yes, in a sanguinary way. Does he love anyone just now?”

“No; only everyone. There never was anyone born more loving or more
lovable than Jon.”

“Being your boy, Irene.”

At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them, brought
them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged, thick, in his
small gizzard. Loving, lovable, imaginative, sanguinary!

The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always memorable
for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons, and ginger
beer.

Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he stood
in the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several important
things had happened.

“Da,” worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious
instinct which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the
very day after his birthday in floods of tears “to be married”—of
all things—“to a man.” Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was
inconsolable for an afternoon. It ought not to have been kept from him!
Two large boxes of soldiers and some artillery, together with The Young
Buglers, which had been among his birthday presents, cooperated with
his grief in a sort of conversion, and instead of seeking adventures in
person and risking his own life, he began to play imaginative games, in
which he risked the lives of countless tin soldiers, marbles, stones and
beans. Of these forms of “chair a canon” he made collections, and, using
them alternately, fought the Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty
Years, and other wars, about which he had been reading of late in a big
History of Europe which had been his grandfather's. He altered them to
suit his genius, and fought them all over the floor in his day nursery,
so that nobody could come in, for fearing of disturbing Gustavus
Adolphus, King of Sweden, or treading on an army of Austrians. Because
of the sound of the word he was passionately addicted to the Austrians,
and finding there were so few battles in which they were successful
he had to invent them in his games. His favourite generals were
Prince Eugene, the Archduke Charles and Wallenstein. Tilly and Mack
(“music-hall turns” he heard his father call them one day, whatever that
might mean) one really could not love very much, Austrian though they
were. For euphonic reasons, too, he doted on Turenne.

This phase, which caused his parents anxiety, because it kept him
indoors when he ought to have been out, lasted through May and half of
June, till his father killed it by bringing home to him Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn. When he read those books something happened in him,
and he went out of doors again in passionate quest of a river. There
being none on the premises at Robin Hill, he had to make one out of
the pond, which fortunately had water lilies, dragonflies, gnats,
bullrushes, and three small willow trees. On this pond, after his father
and Garratt had ascertained by sounding that it had a reliable bottom
and was nowhere more than two feet deep, he was allowed a little
collapsible canoe, in which he spent hours and hours paddling, and lying
down out of sight of Indian Joe and other enemies. On the shore of the
pond, too, he built himself a wigwam about four feet square, of old
biscuit tins, roofed in by boughs. In this he would make little fires,
and cook the birds he had not shot with his gun, hunting in the coppice
and fields, or the fish he did not catch in the pond because there were
none. This occupied the rest of June and that July, when his father
and mother were away in Ireland. He led a lonely life of “make believe”
during those five weeks of summer weather, with gun, wigwam, water and
canoe; and, however hard his active little brain tried to keep the
sense of beauty away, she did creep in on him for a second now and then,
perching on the wing of a dragon-fly, glistening on the water lilies, or
brushing his eyes with her blue as he lay on his back in ambush.

“Auntie” June, who had been left in charge, had a “grown-up” in the
house, with a cough and a large piece of putty which he was making
into a face; so she hardly ever came down to see him in the pond. Once,
however, she brought with her two other “grown-ups.” Little Jon, who
happened to have painted his naked self bright blue and yellow in
stripes out of his father's water-colour box, and put some duck's
feathers in his hair, saw them coming, and—ambushed himself among the
willows. As he had foreseen, they came at once to his wigwam and knelt
down to look inside, so that with a blood-curdling yell he was able to
take the scalps of “Auntie” June and the woman “grown-up” in an almost
complete manner before they kissed him. The names of the two grown-ups
were “Auntie” Holly and “Uncle” Val, who had a brown face and a little
limp, and laughed at him terribly. He took a fancy to “Auntie” Holly,
who seemed to be a sister too; but they both went away the same
afternoon and he did not see them again. Three days before his father
and mother were to come home “Auntie” June also went off in a great
hurry, taking the “grown-up” who coughed and his piece of putty; and
Mademoiselle said: “Poor man, he was veree ill. I forbid you to go into
his room, Jon.” Little Jon, who rarely did things merely because he was
told not to, refrained from going, though he was bored and lonely. In
truth the day of the pond was past, and he was filled to the brim of
his soul with restlessness and the want of something—not a tree, not a
gun—something soft. Those last two days had seemed months in spite of
Cast Up by the Sea, wherein he was reading about Mother Lee and her
terrible wrecking bonfire. He had gone up and down the stairs perhaps a
hundred times in those two days, and often from the day nursery, where
he slept now, had stolen into his mother's room, looked at everything,
without touching, and on into the dressing-room; and standing on one leg
beside the bath, like Slingsby, had whispered:

“Ho, ho, ho! Dog my cats!” mysteriously, to bring luck. Then, stealing
back, he had opened his mother's wardrobe, and taken a long sniff which
seemed to bring him nearer to—he didn't know what.

He had done this just before he stood in the streak of sunlight,
debating in which of the several ways he should slide down the
banisters. They all seemed silly, and in a sudden languor he began
descending the steps one by one. During that descent he could remember
his father quite distinctly—the short grey beard, the deep eyes
twinkling, the furrow between them, the funny smile, the thin figure
which always seemed so tall to little Jon; but his mother he couldn't
see. All that represented her was something swaying with two dark eyes
looking back at him; and the scent of her wardrobe.

Bella was in the hall, drawing aside the big curtains, and opening the
front door. Little Jon said, wheedling,

“Bella!”

“Yes, Master Jon.”

“Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know they'd like
it best.”

“You mean you'd like it best.”

Little Jon considered.

“No, they would, to please me.”

Bella smiled. “Very well, I'll take it out if you'll stay quiet here and
not get into mischief before they come.”

Little Jon sat down on the bottom step, and nodded. Bella came close,
and looked him over.

“Get up!” she said.

Little Jon got up. She scrutinized him behind; he was not green, and his
knees seemed clean.

“All right!” she said. “My! Aren't you brown? Give me a kiss!”

And little Jon received a peck on his hair.

“What jam?” he asked. “I'm so tired of waiting.”

“Gooseberry and strawberry.”

Num! They were his favourites!

When she was gone he sat still for quite a minute. It was quiet in the
big hall open to its East end so that he could see one of his trees,
a brig sailing very slowly across the upper lawn. In the outer hall
shadows were slanting from the pillars. Little Jon got up, jumped one of
them, and walked round the clump of iris plants which filled the pool
of grey-white marble in the centre. The flowers were pretty, but only
smelled a very little. He stood in the open doorway and looked out.
Suppose!—suppose they didn't come! He had waited so long that he felt he
could not bear that, and his attention slid at once from such finality
to the dust motes in the bluish sunlight coming in: Thrusting his hand
up, he tried to catch some. Bella ought to have dusted that piece of
air! But perhaps they weren't dust—only what sunlight was made of, and
he looked to see whether the sunlight out of doors was the same. It was
not. He had said he would stay quiet in the hall, but he simply couldn't
any more; and crossing the gravel of the drive he lay down on the grass
beyond. Pulling six daisies he named them carefully, Sir Lamorac, Sir
Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Sir Palimedes, Sir Bors, Sir Gawain, and fought
them in couples till only Sir Lamorac, whom he had selected for a
specially stout stalk, had his head on, and even he, after three
encounters, looked worn and waggly. A beetle was moving slowly in the
grass, which almost wanted cutting. Every blade was a small tree,
round whose trunk the beetle had to glide. Little Jon stretched out
Sir Lamorac, feet foremost, and stirred the creature up. It scuttled
painfully. Little Jon laughed, lost interest, and sighed. His heart felt
empty. He turned over and lay on his back. There was a scent of honey
from the lime trees in flower, and in the sky the blue was beautiful,
with a few white clouds which looked and perhaps tasted like lemon ice.
He could hear Bob playing: “Way down upon de Suwannee ribber” on his
concertina, and it made him nice and sad. He turned over again and put
his ear to the ground—Indians could hear things coming ever so far—but
he could hear nothing—only the concertina! And almost instantly he did
hear a grinding sound, a faint toot. Yes! it was a car—coming—coming!
Up he jumped. Should he wait in the porch, or rush upstairs, and as
they came in, shout: “Look!” and slide slowly down the banisters, head
foremost? Should he? The car turned in at the drive. It was too late!
And he only waited, jumping up and down in his excitement. The car came
quickly, whirred, and stopped. His father got out, exactly like life. He
bent down and little Jon bobbed up—they bumped. His father said,

“Bless us! Well, old man, you are brown!” Just as he would; and the
sense of expectation—of something wanted—bubbled unextinguished in
little Jon. Then, with a long, shy look he saw his mother, in a blue
dress, with a blue motor scarf over her cap and hair, smiling. He jumped
as high as ever he could, twined his legs behind her back, and hugged.
He heard her gasp, and felt her hugging back. His eyes, very dark blue
just then, looked into hers, very dark brown, till her lips closed on
his eyebrow, and, squeezing with all his might, he heard her creak and
laugh, and say:

“You are strong, Jon!”

He slid down at that, and rushed into the hall, dragging her by the
hand.

While he was eating his jam beneath the oak tree, he noticed things
about his mother that he had never seemed to see before, her cheeks for
instance were creamy, there were silver threads in her dark goldy hair,
her throat had no knob in it like Bella's, and she went in and out
softly. He noticed, too, some little lines running away from the corners
of her eyes, and a nice darkness under them. She was ever so beautiful,
more beautiful than “Da” or Mademoiselle, or “Auntie” June or even
“Auntie” Holly, to whom he had taken a fancy; even more beautiful than
Bella, who had pink cheeks and came out too suddenly in places. This new
beautifulness of his mother had a kind of particular importance, and he
ate less than he had expected to.

When tea was over his father wanted him to walk round the gardens.
He had a long conversation with his father about things in general,
avoiding his private life—Sir Lamorac, the Austrians, and the emptiness
he had felt these last three days, now so suddenly filled up. His father
told him of a place called Glensofantrim, where he and his mother had
been; and of the little people who came out of the ground there when it
was very quiet. Little Jon came to a halt, with his heels apart.

“Do you really believe they do, Daddy?” “No, Jon, but I thought you
might.”

“Why?”

“You're younger than I; and they're fairies.” Little Jon squared the
dimple in his chin.

“I don't believe in fairies. I never see any.” “Ha!” said his father.

“Does Mum?”

His father smiled his funny smile.

“No; she only sees Pan.”

“What's Pan?”

“The Goaty God who skips about in wild and beautiful places.”

“Was he in Glensofantrim?”

“Mum said so.”

Little Jon took his heels up, and led on.

“Did you see him?”

“No; I only saw Venus Anadyomene.”

Little Jon reflected; Venus was in his book about the Greeks and
Trojans. Then Anna was her Christian and Dyomene her surname?

But it appeared, on inquiry, that it was one word, which meant rising
from the foam.

“Did she rise from the foam in Glensofantrim?”

“Yes; every day.”

“What is she like, Daddy?”

“Like Mum.”

“Oh! Then she must be...” but he stopped at that, rushed at a wall,
scrambled up, and promptly scrambled down again. The discovery that his
mother was beautiful was one which he felt must absolutely be kept to
himself. His father's cigar, however, took so long to smoke, that at
last he was compelled to say:

“I want to see what Mum's brought home. Do you mind, Daddy?”

He pitched the motive low, to absolve him from unmanliness, and was a
little disconcerted when his father looked at him right through, heaved
an important sigh, and answered:

“All right, old man, you go and love her.”

He went, with a pretence of slowness, and then rushed, to make up. He
entered her bedroom from his own, the door being open. She was still
kneeling before a trunk, and he stood close to her, quite still.

She knelt up straight, and said:

“Well, Jon?”

“I thought I'd just come and see.”

Having given and received another hug, he mounted the window-seat, and
tucking his legs up under him watched her unpack. He derived a pleasure
from the operation such as he had not yet known, partly because she was
taking out things which looked suspicious, and partly because he liked
to look at her. She moved differently from anybody else, especially from
Bella; she was certainly the refinedest-looking person he had ever seen.
She finished the trunk at last, and knelt down in front of him.

“Have you missed us, Jon?”

Little Jon nodded, and having thus admitted his feelings, continued to
nod.

“But you had 'Auntie' June?”

“Oh! she had a man with a cough.”

His mother's face changed, and looked almost angry. He added hastily:

“He was a poor man, Mum; he coughed awfully; I—I liked him.”

His mother put her hands behind his waist.

“You like everybody, Jon?”

Little Jon considered.

“Up to a point,” he said: “Auntie June took me to church one Sunday.”

“To church? Oh!”

“She wanted to see how it would affect me.” “And did it?”

“Yes. I came over all funny, so she took me home again very quick. I
wasn't sick after all. I went to bed and had hot brandy and water, and
read The Boys of Beechwood. It was scrumptious.”

His mother bit her lip.

“When was that?”

“Oh! about—a long time ago—I wanted her to take me again, but she
wouldn't. You and Daddy never go to church, do you?”

“No, we don't.”

“Why don't you?”

His mother smiled.

“Well, dear, we both of us went when we were little. Perhaps we went
when we were too little.”

“I see,” said little Jon, “it's dangerous.”

“You shall judge for yourself about all those things as you grow up.”

Little Jon replied in a calculating manner:

“I don't want to grow up, much. I don't want to go to school.” A sudden
overwhelming desire to say something more, to say what he really felt,
turned him red. “I—I want to stay with you, and be your lover, Mum.”

Then with an instinct to improve the situation, he added quickly “I
don't want to go to bed to-night, either. I'm simply tired of going to
bed, every night.”

“Have you had any more nightmares?”

“Only about one. May I leave the door open into your room to-night,
Mum?”

“Yes, just a little.” Little Jon heaved a sigh of satisfaction.

“What did you see in Glensofantrim?”

“Nothing but beauty, darling.”

“What exactly is beauty?”

“What exactly is—Oh! Jon, that's a poser.”

“Can I see it, for instance?” His mother got up, and sat beside him.
“You do, every day. The sky is beautiful, the stars, and moonlit nights,
and then the birds, the flowers, the trees—they're all beautiful. Look
out of the window—there's beauty for you, Jon.”

“Oh! yes, that's the view. Is that all?”

“All? no. The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with their
foam flying back.”

“Did you rise from it every day, Mum?”

His mother smiled. “Well, we bathed.”

Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.

“I know,” he said mysteriously, “you're it, really, and all the rest is
make-believe.”

She sighed, laughed, said: “Oh! Jon!”

Little Jon said critically:

“Do you think Bella beautiful, for instance? I hardly do.”

“Bella is young; that's something.”

“But you look younger, Mum. If you bump against Bella she hurts.”

“I don't believe 'Da' was beautiful, when I come to think of it; and
Mademoiselle's almost ugly.”

“Mademoiselle has a very nice face.” “Oh! yes; nice. I love your little
rays, Mum.”

“Rays?”

Little Jon put his finger to the outer corner of her eye.

“Oh! Those? But they're a sign of age.”

“They come when you smile.”

“But they usen't to.”

“Oh! well, I like them. Do you love me, Mum?”

“I do—I do love you, darling.”

“Ever so?”

“Ever so!”

“More than I thought you did?”

“Much—much more.”

“Well, so do I; so that makes it even.”

Conscious that he had never in his life so given himself away, he felt
a sudden reaction to the manliness of Sir Lamorac, Dick Needham, Huck
Finn, and other heroes.

“Shall I show you a thing or two?” he said; and slipping out of her
arms, he stood on his head. Then, fired by her obvious admiration, he
mounted the bed, and threw himself head foremost from his feet on to
his back, without touching anything with his hands. He did this several
times.

That evening, having inspected what they had brought, he stayed up to
dinner, sitting between them at the little round table they used when
they were alone. He was extremely excited. His mother wore a French-grey
dress, with creamy lace made out of little scriggly roses, round her
neck, which was browner than the lace. He kept looking at her, till at
last his father's funny smile made him suddenly attentive to his slice
of pineapple. It was later than he had ever stayed up, when he went to
bed. His mother went up with him, and he undressed very slowly so as to
keep her there. When at last he had nothing on but his pyjamas, he said:

“Promise you won't go while I say my prayers!”

“I promise.”

Kneeling down and plunging his face into the bed, little Jon hurried
up, under his breath, opening one eye now and then, to see her standing
perfectly still with a smile on her face. “Our Father”—so went his last
prayer, “which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mum, thy Kingdom Mum—on
Earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily Mum and forgive us
our trespasses on earth as it is in heaven and trespass against us, for
thine is the evil the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amum! Look
out!” He sprang, and for a long minute remained in her arms. Once in
bed, he continued to hold her hand.

“You won't shut the door any more than that, will you? Are you going to
be long, Mum?”

“I must go down and play to Daddy.”

“Oh! well, I shall hear you.”

“I hope not; you must go to sleep.”

“I can sleep any night.”

“Well, this is just a night like any other.”

“Oh! no—it's extra special.”

“On extra special nights one always sleeps soundest.”

“But if I go to sleep, Mum, I shan't hear you come up.”

“Well, when I do, I'll come in and give you a kiss, then if you're awake
you'll know, and if you're not you'll still know you've had one.”

Little Jon sighed, “All right!” he said: “I suppose I must put up with
that. Mum?”

“Yes?”

“What was her name that Daddy believes in? Venus Anna Diomedes?”

“Oh! my angel! Anadyomene.”

“Yes! but I like my name for you much better.”

“What is yours, Jon?”

Little Jon answered shyly:

“Guinevere! it's out of the Round Table—I've only just thought of it,
only of course her hair was down.”

His mother's eyes, looking past him, seemed to float.

“You won't forget to come, Mum?”

“Not if you'll go to sleep.”

“That's a bargain, then.” And little Jon screwed up his eyes.

He felt her lips on his forehead, heard her footsteps; opened his eyes
to see her gliding through the doorway, and, sighing, screwed them up
again.

Then Time began.

For some ten minutes of it he tried loyally to sleep, counting a great
number of thistles in a row, “Da's” old recipe for bringing slumber. He
seemed to have been hours counting. It must, he thought, be nearly time
for her to come up now. He threw the bedclothes back. “I'm hot!” he
said, and his voice sounded funny in the darkness, like someone else's.
Why didn't she come? He sat up. He must look! He got out of bed, went to
the window and pulled the curtain a slice aside. It wasn't dark, but he
couldn't tell whether because of daylight or the moon, which was very
big. It had a funny, wicked face, as if laughing at him, and he did not
want to look at it. Then, remembering that his mother had said moonlit
nights were beautiful, he continued to stare out in a general way. The
trees threw thick shadows, the lawn looked like spilt milk, and a long,
long way he could see; oh! very far; right over the world, and it all
looked different and swimmy. There was a lovely smell, too, in his open
window.

'I wish I had a dove like Noah!' he thought.

“The moony moon was round and bright, It shone and shone and made it
light.”

After that rhyme, which came into his head all at once, he became
conscious of music, very soft-lovely! Mum playing! He bethought himself
of a macaroon he had, laid up in his chest of drawers, and, getting it,
came back to the window. He leaned out, now munching, now holding his
jaws to hear the music better. “Da” used to say that angels played on
harps in heaven; but it wasn't half so lovely as Mum playing in the
moony night, with him eating a macaroon. A cockchafer buzzed by, a moth
flew in his face, the music stopped, and little Jon drew his head in.
She must be coming! He didn't want to be found awake. He got back into
bed and pulled the clothes nearly over his head; but he had left a
streak of moonlight coming in. It fell across the floor, near the foot
of the bed, and he watched it moving ever so slowly towards him, as if
it were alive. The music began again, but he could only just hear it
now; sleepy music, pretty—sleepy—music—sleepy—slee.....

And time slipped by, the music rose, fell, ceased; the moonbeam crept
towards his face. Little Jon turned in his sleep till he lay on his
back, with one brown fist still grasping the bedclothes. The corners of
his eyes twitched—he had begun to dream. He dreamed he was drinking milk
out of a pan that was the moon, opposite a great black cat which watched
him with a funny smile like his father's. He heard it whisper: “Don't
drink too much!” It was the cat's milk, of course, and he put out his
hand amicably to stroke the creature; but it was no longer there; the
pan had become a bed, in which he was lying, and when he tried to get
out he couldn't find the edge; he couldn't find it—he—he—couldn't get
out! It was dreadful!

He whimpered in his sleep. The bed had begun to go round too; it was
outside him and inside him; going round and round, and getting fiery,
and Mother Lee out of Cast up by the Sea was stirring it! Oh! so
horrible she looked! Faster and faster!—till he and the bed and Mother
Lee and the moon and the cat were all one wheel going round and round
and up and up—awful—awful—awful!

He shrieked.

A voice saying: “Darling, darling!” got through the wheel, and he awoke,
standing on his bed, with his eyes wide open.

There was his mother, with her hair like Guinevere's, and, clutching
her, he buried his face in it.

“Oh! oh!”

“It's all right, treasure. You're awake now. There! There! It's
nothing!”

But little Jon continued to say: “Oh! oh!”

Her voice went on, velvety in his ear:

“It was the moonlight, sweetheart, coming on your face.”

Little Jon burbled into her nightgown

“You said it was beautiful. Oh!”

“Not to sleep in, Jon. Who let it in? Did you draw the curtains?”

“I wanted to see the time; I—I looked out, I—I heard you playing, Mum;
I—I ate my macaroon.” But he was growing slowly comforted; and the
instinct to excuse his fear revived within him.

“Mother Lee went round in me and got all fiery,” he mumbled.

“Well, Jon, what can you expect if you eat macaroons after you've gone
to bed?”

“Only one, Mum; it made the music ever so more beautiful. I was waiting
for you—I nearly thought it was to-morrow.”

“My ducky, it's only just eleven now.”

Little Jon was silent, rubbing his nose on her neck.

“Mum, is Daddy in your room?”

“Not to-night.”

“Can I come?”

“If you wish, my precious.”

Half himself again, little Jon drew back.

“You look different, Mum; ever so younger.”

“It's my hair, darling.”

Little Jon laid hold of it, thick, dark gold, with a few silver threads.

“I like it,” he said: “I like you best of all like this.”

Taking her hand, he had begun dragging her towards the door. He shut it
as they passed, with a sigh of relief.

“Which side of the bed do you like, Mum?”

“The left side.”

“All right.”

Wasting no time, giving her no chance to change her mind, little Jon got
into the bed, which seemed much softer than his own. He heaved another
sigh, screwed his head into the pillow and lay examining the battle of
chariots and swords and spears which always went on outside blankets,
where the little hairs stood up against the light.

“It wasn't anything, really, was it?” he said.

From before her glass his mother answered:

“Nothing but the moon and your imagination heated up. You mustn't get so
excited, Jon.”

But, still not quite in possession of his nerves, little Jon answered
boastfully:

“I wasn't afraid, really, of course!” And again he lay watching the
spears and chariots. It all seemed very long.

“Oh! Mum, do hurry up!”

“Darling, I have to plait my hair.”

“Oh! not to-night. You'll only have to unplait it again to-morrow. I'm
sleepy now; if you don't come, I shan't be sleepy soon.”

His mother stood up white and flowey before the winged mirror: he could
see three of her, with her neck turned and her hair bright under the
light, and her dark eyes smiling. It was unnecessary, and he said:

“Do come, Mum; I'm waiting.”

“Very well, my love, I'll come.”

Little Jon closed his eyes. Everything was turning out most
satisfactory, only she must hurry up! He felt the bed shake, she was
getting in. And, still with his eyes closed, he said sleepily: “It's
nice, isn't it?”

He heard her voice say something, felt her lips touching his nose, and,
snuggling up beside her who lay awake and loved him with her thoughts,
he fell into the dreamless sleep, which rounded off his past.





TO LET

“From out the fatal loins of those two foes A pair of star-crossed
lovers take their life.” —Romeo and Juliet.

TO CHARLES SCRIBNER




PART I





I.—ENCOUNTER

Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was
staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the intention
of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and
looking into the Future. He walked. Since the War he never took a cab
if he could help it. Their drivers were, in his view, an uncivil lot,
though now that the War was over and supply beginning to exceed demand
again, getting more civil in accordance with the custom of human nature.
Still, he had not forgiven them, deeply identifying them with gloomy
memories, and now, dimly, like all members, of their class, with
revolution. The considerable anxiety he had passed through during the
War, and the more considerable anxiety he had since undergone in the
Peace, had produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature.
He had, mentally, so frequently experienced ruin, that he had ceased to
believe in its material probability. Paying away four thousand a year in
income and super tax, one could not very well be worse off! A fortune of
a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a wife and one daughter, and
very diversely invested, afforded substantial guarantee even against
that “wildcat notion” a levy on capital. And as to confiscation of war
profits, he was entirely in favour of it, for he had none, and “serve
the beggars right!” The price of pictures, moreover, had, if anything,
gone up, and he had done better with his collection since the War began
than ever before. Air-raids, also, had acted beneficially on a spirit
congenitally cautious, and hardened a character already dogged. To be in
danger of being entirely dispersed inclined one to be less apprehensive
of the more partial dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while
the habit of condemning the impudence of the Germans had led naturally
to condemning that of Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of
his soul.

He walked. There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet him
at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past two.
It was good for him to walk—his liver was a little constricted, and his
nerves rather on edge. His wife was always out when she was in Town, and
his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all over the place like most young
women since the War. Still, he must be thankful that she had been too
young to do anything in that War itself. Not, of course, that he had
not supported the War from its inception, with all his soul, but between
that and supporting it with the bodies of his wife and daughter,
there had been a gap fixed by something old-fashioned within him which
abhorred emotional extravagance. He had, for instance, strongly objected
to Annette, so attractive, and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her
native France, her “chere patrie” as, under the stimulus of war, she had
begun to call it, to nurse her “braves poilus,” forsooth! Ruining
her health and her looks! As if she were really a nurse! He had put a
stopper on it. Let her do needlework for them at home, or knit! She had
not gone, therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since. A
bad tendency of hers to mock at him, not openly, but in continual little
ways, had grown. As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed problem
whether or not she should go to school. She was better away from her
mother in her war mood, from the chance of air-raids, and the impetus to
do extravagant things; so he had placed her in a seminary as far West
as had seemed to him compatible with excellence, and had missed her
horribly. Fleur! He had never regretted the somewhat outlandish name
by which at her birth he had decided so suddenly to call her—marked
concession though it had been to the French. Fleur! A pretty name—a
pretty child! But restless—too restless; and wilful! Knowing her power
too over her father! Soames often reflected on the mistake it was to
dote on his daughter. To get old and dote! Sixty-five! He was getting
on; but he didn't feel it, for, fortunately perhaps, considering
Annette's youth and good looks, his second marriage had turned out a
cool affair. He had known but one real passion in his life—for that
first wife of his—Irene. Yes, and that fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who
had gone off with her, was looking very shaky, they said. No wonder, at
seventy-two, after twenty years of a third marriage!

Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the
Row. A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house in
Park Lane which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and the
little house in Montpellier Square where thirty-five years ago he had
enjoyed his first edition of matrimony. Now, after twenty years of
his second edition, that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous
existence—which had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he had
hoped for. For many years he had ceased regretting, even vaguely, the
son who had not been born; Fleur filled the bill in his heart. After
all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward at all to the
time when she would change it. Indeed, if he ever thought of such a
calamity, it was seasoned by the vague feeling that he could make her
rich enough to purchase perhaps and extinguish the name of the fellow
who married her—why not, since, as it seemed, women were equal to men
nowadays? And Soames, secretly convinced that they were not, passed his
curved hand over his face vigorously, till it reached the comfort of his
chin. Thanks to abstemious habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his
nose was pale and thin, his grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight
unimpaired. A slight stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to
his face by the heightening of his forehead in the recession of his
grey hair. Little change had Time wrought in the “warmest” of the young
Forsytes, as the last of the old Forsytes—Timothy-now in his hundred and
first year, would have phrased it.

The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had
given up top hats—it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days
like these. Plane-trees! His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid—the
Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that Goya
picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his
spot. The fellow had impressed him—great range, real genius! Highly as
the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with
him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first;
oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had—as never
before—commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called “La Vendimia,”
wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded
him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and
rather poor it was—you couldn't copy Goya. He would still look at it,
however, if his daughter were not there, for the sake of something
irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the
width between the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.
Curious that Fleur should have dark eyes, when his own were grey—no
pure Forsyte had brown eyes—and her mother's blue! But of course her
grandmother Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!

He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner. No greater change
in all England than in the Row! Born almost within hail of it, he
could remember it from 1860 on. Brought there as a child between the
crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with
a cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top
hats; the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in
a long red waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs
on several strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles
spaniels, Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline—you never
saw them now. You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working
people sitting in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young
bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials
charging up and down on dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there,
little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their livers, or an
orderly trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no
grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no gossip—nothing; only the trees
the same—the trees indifferent to the generations and declensions of
mankind. A democratic England—dishevelled, hurried, noisy, and seemingly
without an apex. And that something fastidious in the soul of Soames
turned over within him. Gone forever, the close borough of rank and
polish! Wealth there was—oh, yes! wealth—he himself was a richer man
than his father had ever been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone,
engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.
Little half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and
there, dispersed and chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever
again firm and coherent to look up to. And into this new hurly-burly of
bad manners and loose morals his daughter—flower of his life—was flung!
And when those Labour chaps got power—if they ever did—the worst was yet
to come.

He passed out under the archway, at last no longer—thank
goodness!—disfigured by the gungrey of its search-light. 'They'd better
put a search-light on to where they're all going,' he thought, 'and
light up their precious democracy!' And he directed his steps along the
Club fronts of Piccadilly. George Forsyte, of course, would be sitting
in the bay window of the Iseeum. The chap was so big now that he was
there nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic, humorous
eye noting the decline of men and things. And Soames hurried, ever
constitutionally uneasy beneath his cousin's glance. George, who, as he
had heard, had written a letter signed “Patriot” in the middle of the
War, complaining of the Government's hysteria in docking the oats of
race-horses. Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous, neat, clean-shaven,
with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of the best
hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand. Well, he didn't change! And
for perhaps the first time in his life Soames felt a kind of sympathy
tapping in his waistcoat for that sardonic kinsman. With his weight, his
perfectly parted hair, and bull-like gaze, he was a guarantee that the
old order would take some shifting yet. He saw George move the pink
paper as if inviting him to ascend—the chap must want to ask something
about his property. It was still under Soames' control; for in the
adoption of a sleeping partnership at that painful period twenty
years back when he had divorced Irene, Soames had found himself almost
insensibly retaining control of all purely Forsyte affairs.

Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in. Since the death
of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite
known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide—the
Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames. George, too, he knew,
had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the
joys of the table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight
down, and owning, as he said, “just one or two old screws to give me an
interest in life.” He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window
without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel
up there. George put out a well-kept hand.

“Haven't seen you since the War,” he said. “How's your wife?”

“Thanks,” said Soames coldly, “well enough.”

Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George's fleshy face, and gloated
from his eye.

“That Belgian chap, Profond,” he said, “is a member here now. He's a rum
customer.”

“Quite!” muttered Soames. “What did you want to see me about?”

“Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment. I suppose he's
made his Will.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up—last of the old lot;
he's a hundred, you know. They say he's like a mummy. Where are you
goin' to put him? He ought to have a pyramid by rights.”

Soames shook his head. “Highgate, the family vault.”

“Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere else.
They say he still takes an interest in food. He might last on, you know.
Don't we get anything for the old Forsytes? Ten of them—average age
eighty-eight—I worked it out. That ought to be equal to triplets.”

“Is that all?” said Soames, “I must be getting on.”

'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer. “Yes, that's
all: Look him up in his mausoleum—the old chap might want to prophesy.”
The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he added: “Haven't you
attorneys invented a way yet of dodging this damned income tax? It
hits the fixed inherited income like the very deuce. I used to have two
thousand five hundred a year; now I've got a beggarly fifteen hundred,
and the price of living doubled.”

“Ah!” murmured Soames, “the turf's in danger.”

Over George's face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.

“Well,” he said, “they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in the
sear and yellow, getting poorer every day. These Labour chaps mean to
have the lot before they've done. What are you going to do for a living
when it comes? I shall work a six-hour day teaching politicians how to
see a joke. Take my tip, Soames; go into Parliament, make sure of your
four hundred—and employ me.”

And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.

Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his
cousin's words. He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George
always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began,
it was he—the worker and the saver—who would be looted! That was the
negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could
civilization be built on any other? He did not think so. Well, they
wouldn't confiscate his pictures, for they wouldn't know their worth.
But what would they be worth, if these maniacs once began to milk
capital? A drug on the market. 'I don't care about myself,' he thought;
'I could live on five hundred a year, and never know the difference, at
my age.' But Fleur! This fortune, so widely invested, these treasures
so carefully chosen and amassed, were all for—her. And if it should
turn out that he couldn't give or leave them to her—well, life had
no meaning, and what was the use of going in to look at this crazy,
futuristic stuff with the view of seeing whether it had any future?

Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his shilling,
picked up a catalogue, and entered. Some ten persons were prowling
round. Soames took steps and came on what looked to him like a lamp-post
bent by collision with a motor omnibus. It was advanced some three
paces from the wall, and was described in his catalogue as “Jupiter.” He
examined it with curiosity, having recently turned some of his attention
to sculpture. 'If that's Jupiter,' he thought, 'I wonder what Juno's
like.' And suddenly he saw her, opposite. She appeared to him like
nothing so much as a pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow. He
was still gazing at her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left.
“Epatant!” he heard one say.

“Jargon!” growled Soames to himself.

The other's boyish voice replied

“Missed it, old bean; he's pulling your leg. When Jove and Juno created
he them, he was saying: 'I'll see how much these fools will swallow.'
And they've lapped up the lot.”

“You young duffer! Vospovitch is an innovator. Don't you see that he's
brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic art, of music,
painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was bound to.
People are tired—the bottom's tumbled out of sentiment.”

“Well, I'm quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty. I was
through the War. You've dropped your handkerchief, sir.”

Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him. He took it with
some natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose. It had the right
scent—of distant Eau de Cologne—and his initials in a corner. Slightly
reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man's face. It had rather
fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush growing out
of it on each side, and small lively eyes, above a normally dressed
appearance.

“Thank you,” he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: “Glad to
hear you like beauty; that's rare, nowadays.”

“I dote on it,” said the young man; “but you and I are the last of the
old guard, sir.”

Soames smiled.

“If you really care for pictures,” he said, “here's my card. I can show
you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you're down the river and care
to look in.”

“Awfully nice of you, sir. I'll drop in like a bird. My name's
Mont-Michael.” And he took off his hat.

Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in
response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had a
purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look—as if
he were a poet!

It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went
and sat down in an alcove. What had possessed him to give his card to a
rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that? And Fleur,
always at the back of his thoughts, started out like a filigree figure
from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove
was a large canvas with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on
it, and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat.
He looked at his catalogue: “No. 32 'The Future Town'—Paul Post.” 'I
suppose that's satiric too,' he thought. 'What a thing!' But his second
impulse was more cautious. It did not do to condemn hurriedly. There had
been those stripey, streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out
such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since
the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be
sneezed at. During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life,
indeed, he had marked so many “movements,” seen the tides of taste and
technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything
except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion.
This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial
instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture,
trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato
blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said: “He's
got the airplanes wonderfully, don't you think!” Below the tomato blobs
was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could
assign no meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring: “What
expression he gets with his foreground!” Expression? Of what? Soames
went back to his seat. The thing was “rich,” as his father would have
said, and he wouldn't give a damn for it. Expression! Ah! they were all
Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent. So it was coming
here too, was it? He remembered the first wave of influenza in
1887—or '8—hatched in China, so they said. He wondered where this—this
Expressionism had been hatched. The thing was a regular disease!

He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and
the “Future Town.” Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames
put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed
through the slit between. No mistaking that back, elegant as ever though
the hair above had gone grey. Irene! His divorced wife—Irene! And this,
no doubt, was—her son—by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte—their boy, six
months older than his own girl! And mumbling over in his mind the bitter
days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat down
again. She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was
still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if
fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor
of them, had never seen them smile. Grudgingly he admitted her still
beautiful and in figure almost as young as ever. And how that boy smiled
back at her! Emotion squeezed Soames' heart. The sight infringed his
sense of justice. He grudged her that boy's smile—it went beyond what
Fleur gave him, and it was undeserved. Their son might have been his
son; Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight! He
lowered his catalogue. If she saw him, all the better! A reminder of
her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing of it,
would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis which surely
must soon or late visit her! Then, half-conscious that such a thought
was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took out his watch.
Past four! Fleur was late. She had gone to his niece Imogen Cardigan's,
and there they would keep her smoking cigarettes and gossiping, and
that. He heard the boy laugh, and say eagerly: “I say, Mum, is this by
one of Auntie June's lame ducks?”

“Paul Post—I believe it is, darling.”

The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her use
it. And then she saw him. His eyes must have had in them something of
George Forsyte's sardonic look; for her gloved hand crisped the folds of
her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went stony. She moved on.

“It is a caution,” said the boy, catching her arm again.

Soames stared after them. That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte
chin, and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a
glass of old sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair.
Better than they deserved—those two! They passed from his view into the
next room, and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but saw it
not. A little smile snarled up his lips. He was despising the vehemence
of his own feelings after all these years. Ghosts! And yet as one grew
old—was there anything but what was ghost-like left? Yes, there was
Fleur! He fixed his eyes on the entrance. She was due; but she would
keep him waiting, of course! And suddenly he became aware of a sort of
human breeze—a short, slight form clad in a sea-green djibbah with a
metal belt and a fillet binding unruly red-gold hair all streaked with
grey. She was talking to the Gallery attendants, and something familiar
riveted his gaze—in her eyes, her chin, her hair, her spirit—something
which suggested a thin Skye terrier just before its dinner. Surely June
Forsyte! His cousin June—and coming straight to his recess! She sat down
beside him, deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil note.
Soames sat unmoving. A confounded thing, cousinship! “Disgusting!” he
heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of an overhearing
stranger, she looked at him. The worst had happened.

“Soames!”

Soames turned his head a very little.

“How are you?” he said. “Haven't seen you for twenty years.”

“No. Whatever made you come here?”

“My sins,” said Soames. “What stuff!”

“Stuff? Oh, yes—of course; it hasn't arrived yet.

“It never will,” said Soames; “it must be making a dead loss.”

“Of course it is.”

“How d'you know?”

“It's my Gallery.”

Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.

“Yours? What on earth makes you run a show like this?”

“I don't treat Art as if it were grocery.”

Soames pointed to the Future Town. “Look at that! Who's going to live in
a town like that, or with it on his walls?”

June contemplated the picture for a moment.

“It's a vision,” she said.

“The deuce!”

There was silence, then June rose. 'Crazylooking creature!' he thought.

“Well,” he said, “you'll find your young stepbrother here with a woman I
used to know. If you take my advice, you'll close this exhibition.”

June looked back at him. “Oh! You Forsyte!” she said, and moved on.
About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a look
of dangerous decisions. Forsyte! Of course, he was a Forsyte! And so was
she! But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought Bosinney into
his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June and never
would! And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a Gallery!... And
suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of his own family.
The old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many years; there was
no clearing-house for news. What had they all done in the War? Young
Roger's boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's second son killed; young
Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or whatever they gave them.
They had all joined up somehow, he believed. That boy of Jolyon's and
Irene's, he supposed, had been too young; his own generation, of course,
too old, though Giles Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross—and
Jesse Hayman been a special constable—those “Dromios” had always been
of a sporting type! As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read
the papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought
no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he
could have done at his age. Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him that
he and his family had taken this war very differently to that affair
with the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the resources of
the Empire. In that old war, of course, his nephew Val Dartie had
been wounded, that fellow Jolyon's first son had died of enteric, “the
Dromios” had gone out on horses, and June had been a nurse; but all that
had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in this war everybody had
done “their bit,” so far as he could make out, as a matter of course. It
seemed to show the growth of something or other—or perhaps the decline
of something else. Had the Forsytes become less individual, or
more Imperial, or less provincial? Or was it simply that one hated
Germans?... Why didn't Fleur come, so that he could get away? He saw
those three return together from the other room and pass back along the
far side of the screen. The boy was standing before the Juno now.
And, suddenly, on the other side of her, Soames saw—his daughter, with
eyebrows raised, as well they might be. He could see her eyes glint
sideways at the boy, and the boy look back at her. Then Irene slipped
her hand through his arm, and drew him on. Soames saw him glancing
round, and Fleur looking after them as the three went out.

A voice said cheerfully: “Bit thick, isn't it, sir?”

The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing.
Soames nodded.

“I don't know what we're coming to.”

“Oh! That's all right, sir,” answered the young man cheerfully; “they
don't either.”

Fleur's voice said: “Hallo, Father! Here you are!” precisely as if he
had been keeping her waiting.

The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.

“Well,” said Soames, looking her up and down, “you're a punctual sort of
young woman!”

This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and colour,
with short, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes were set in
whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and yet in repose
were almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids, held over them
in a sort of suspense. She had a charming profile, and nothing of her
father in her face save a decided chin. Aware that his expression
was softening as he looked at her, Soames frowned to preserve the
unemotionalism proper to a Forsyte. He knew she was only too inclined to
take advantage of his weakness.

Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:

“Who was that?”

“He picked up my handkerchief. We talked about the pictures.”

“You're not going to buy that, Father?”

“No,” said Soames grimly; “nor that Juno you've been looking at.”

Fleur dragged at his arm. “Oh! Let's go! It's a ghastly show.”

In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner.
But Soames had hung out a board marked “Trespassers will be prosecuted,”
and he barely acknowledged the young fellow's salute.

“Well,” he said in the street, “whom did you meet at Imogen's?”

“Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond.”

“Oh!” muttered Soames; “that chap! What does your aunt see in him?”

“I don't know. He looks pretty deep—mother says she likes him.”

Soames grunted.

“Cousin Val and his wife were there, too.”

“What!” said Soames. “I thought they were back in South Africa.”

“Oh, no! They've sold their farm. Cousin Val is going to train
race-horses on the Sussex Downs. They've got a jolly old manor-house;
they asked me down there.”

Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him. “What's his wife like
now?”

“Very quiet, but nice, I think.”

Soames coughed again. “He's a rackety chap, your Cousin Val.”

“Oh! no, Father; they're awfully devoted. I promised to go—Saturday to
Wednesday next.”

“Training race-horses!” said Soames. It was extravagant, but not the
reason for his distaste. Why the deuce couldn't his nephew have stayed
out in South Africa? His own divorce had been bad enough, without his
nephew's marriage to the daughter of the co-respondent; a half-sister
too of June, and of that boy whom Fleur had just been looking at from
under the pump-handle. If he didn't look out, she would come to know
all about that old disgrace! Unpleasant things! They were round him this
afternoon like a swarm of bees!

“I don't like it!” he said.

“I want to see the race-horses,” murmured Fleur; “and they've promised
I shall ride. Cousin Val can't walk much, you know; but he can ride
perfectly. He's going to show me their gallops.”

“Racing!” said Soames. “It's a pity the War didn't knock that on the
head. He's taking after his father, I'm afraid.”

“I don't know anything about his father.”

“No,” said Soames, grimly. “He took an interest in horses and broke his
neck in Paris, walking down-stairs. Good riddance for your aunt.”
He frowned, recollecting the inquiry into those stairs which he had
attended in Paris six years ago, because Montague Dartie could not
attend it himself—perfectly normal stairs in a house where they played
baccarat. Either his winnings or the way he had celebrated them had gone
to his brother-in-law's head. The French procedure had been very loose;
he had had a lot of trouble with it.

A sound from Fleur distracted his attention. “Look! The people who were
in the Gallery with us.”

“What people?” muttered Soames, who knew perfectly well.

“I think that woman's beautiful.”

“Come into this pastry-cook's,” said Soames abruptly, and tightening
his grip on her arm he turned into a confectioner's. It was—for him—a
surprising thing to do, and he said rather anxiously: “What will you
have?”

“Oh! I don't want anything. I had a cocktail and a tremendous lunch.”

“We must have something now we're here,” muttered Soames, keeping hold
of her arm.

“Two teas,” he said; “and two of those nougat things.”

But no sooner was his body seated than his soul sprang up. Those
three—those three were coming in! He heard Irene say something to her
boy, and his answer:

“Oh! no, Mum; this place is all right. My stunt.” And the three sat
down.

At that moment, most awkward of his existence, crowded with ghosts and
shadows from his past, in presence of the only two women he had ever
loved—his divorced wife and his daughter by her successor—Soames was not
so much afraid of them as of his cousin June. She might make a scene—she
might introduce those two children—she was capable of anything. He bit
too hastily at the nougat, and it stuck to his plate. Working at it with
his finger, he glanced at Fleur. She was masticating dreamily, but her
eyes were on the boy. The Forsyte in him said: “Think, feel, and you're
done for!” And he wiggled his finger desperately. Plate! Did Jolyon wear
a plate? Did that woman wear a plate? Time had been when he had seen her
wearing nothing! That was something, anyway, which had never been
stolen from him. And she knew it, though she might sit there calm
and self-possessed, as if she had never been his wife. An acid humour
stirred in his Forsyte blood; a subtle pain divided by hair's breadth
from pleasure. If only June did not suddenly bring her hornets about his
ears! The boy was talking.

“Of course, Auntie June”—so he called his half-sister “Auntie,” did
he?—well, she must be fifty, if she was a day!—“it's jolly good of you
to encourage them. Only—hang it all!” Soames stole a glance. Irene's
startled eyes were bent watchfully on her boy. She—she had these
devotions—for Bosinney—for that boy's father—for this boy! He touched
Fleur's arm, and said:

“Well, have you had enough?”

“One more, Father, please.”

She would be sick! He went to the counter to pay. When he turned round
again he saw Fleur standing near the door, holding a handkerchief which
the boy had evidently just handed to her.

“F. F.,” he heard her say. “Fleur Forsyte—it's mine all right. Thank you
ever so.”

Good God! She had caught the trick from what he'd told her in the
Gallery—monkey!

“Forsyte? Why—that's my name too. Perhaps we're cousins.”

“Really! We must be. There aren't any others. I live at Mapledurham;
where do you?”

“Robin Hill.”

Question and answer had been so rapid that all was over before he could
lift a finger. He saw Irene's face alive with startled feeling, gave the
slightest shake of his head, and slipped his arm through Fleur's.

“Come along!” he said.

She did not move.

“Didn't you hear, Father? Isn't it queer—our name's the same. Are we
cousins?”

“What's that?” he said. “Forsyte? Distant, perhaps.”

“My name's Jolyon, sir. Jon, for short.”

“Oh! Ah!” said Soames. “Yes. Distant. How are you? Very good of you.
Good-bye!”

He moved on.

“Thanks awfully,” Fleur was saying. “Au revoir!”

“Au revoir!” he heard the boy reply.





II.—FINE FLEUR FORSYTE

Emerging from the “pastry-cook's,” Soames' first impulse was to vent
his nerves by saying to his daughter: 'Dropping your hand-kerchief!' to
which her reply might well be: 'I picked that up from you!' His second
impulse therefore was to let sleeping dogs lie. But she would surely
question him. He gave her a sidelong look, and found she was giving him
the same. She said softly:

“Why don't you like those cousins, Father?” Soames lifted the corner of
his lip.

“What made you think that?”

“Cela se voit.”

'That sees itself!' What a way of putting it! After twenty years of
a French wife Soames had still little sympathy with her language; a
theatrical affair and connected in his mind with all the refinements of
domestic irony.

“How?” he asked.

“You must know them; and you didn't make a sign. I saw them looking at
you.”

“I've never seen the boy in my life,” replied Soames with perfect truth.

“No; but you've seen the others, dear.”

Soames gave her another look. What had she picked up? Had her Aunt
Winifred, or Imogen, or Val Dartie and his wife, been talking? Every
breath of the old scandal had been carefully kept from her at home, and
Winifred warned many times that he wouldn't have a whisper of it reach
her for the world. So far as she ought to know, he had never been
married before. But her dark eyes, whose southern glint and clearness
often almost frightened him, met his with perfect innocence.

“Well,” he said, “your grandfather and his brother had a quarrel. The
two families don't know each other.”

“How romantic!”

'Now, what does she mean by that?' he thought. The word was to him
extravagant and dangerous—it was as if she had said: “How jolly!”

“And they'll continue not to know each, other,” he added, but instantly
regretted the challenge in those words. Fleur was smiling. In this age,
when young people prided themselves on going their own ways and paying
no attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had said the very thing
to excite her wilfulness. Then, recollecting the expression on Irene's
face, he breathed again.

“What sort of a quarrel?” he heard Fleur say.

“About a house. It's ancient history for you. Your grandfather died the
day you were born. He was ninety.”

“Ninety? Are there many Forsytes besides those in the Red Book?”

“I don't know,” said Soames. “They're all dispersed now. The old ones
are dead, except Timothy.”

Fleur clasped her hands.

“Timothy? Isn't that delicious?”

“Not at all,” said Soames. It offended him that she should think
“Timothy” delicious—a kind of insult to his breed. This new generation
mocked at anything solid and tenacious. “You go and see the old boy. He
might want to prophesy.” Ah! If Timothy could see the disquiet England
of his great-nephews and great-nieces, he would certainly give tongue.
And involuntarily he glanced up at the Iseeum; yes—George was still in
the window, with the same pink paper in his hand.

“Where is Robin Hill, Father?”

Robin Hill! Robin Hill, round which all that tragedy had centred! What
did she want to know for?

“In Surrey,” he muttered; “not far from Richmond. Why?”

“Is the house there?”

“What house?”

“That they quarrelled about.”

“Yes. But what's all that to do with you? We're going home
to-morrow—you'd better be thinking about your frocks.”

“Bless you! They're all thought about. A family feud? It's like the
Bible, or Mark Twain—awfully exciting. What did you do in the feud,
Father?”

“Never you mind.”

“Oh! But if I'm to keep it up?”

“Who said you were to keep it up?”

“You, darling.”

“I? I said it had nothing to do with you.”

“Just what I think, you know; so that's all right.”

She was too sharp for him; fine, as Annette sometimes called her.
Nothing for it but to distract her attention.

“There's a bit of rosaline point in here,” he said, stopping before a
shop, “that I thought you might like.”

When he had paid for it and they had resumed their progress, Fleur said:

“Don't you think that boy's mother is the most beautiful woman of her
age you've ever seen?”

Soames shivered. Uncanny, the way she stuck to it!

“I don't know that I noticed her.”

“Dear, I saw the corner of your eye.”

“You see everything—and a great deal more, it seems to me!”

“What's her husband like? He must be your first cousin, if your fathers
were brothers.”

“Dead, for all I know,” said Soames, with sudden vehemence. “I haven't
seen him for twenty years.”

“What was he?”

“A painter.”

“That's quite jolly.”

The words: “If you want to please me you'll put those people out of your
head,” sprang to Soames' lips, but he choked them back—he must not let
her see his feelings.

“He once insulted me,” he said.

Her quick eyes rested on his face.

“I see! You didn't avenge it, and it rankles. Poor Father! You let me
have a go!”

It was really like lying in the dark with a mosquito hovering above his
face. Such pertinacity in Fleur was new to him, and, as they reached the
hotel, he said grimly:

“I did my best. And that's enough about these people. I'm going up till
dinner.”

“I shall sit here.”

With a parting look at her extended in a chair—a look half-resentful,
half-adoring—Soames moved into the lift and was transported to their
suite on the fourth floor. He stood by the window of the sitting-room
which gave view over Hyde Park, and drummed a finger on its pane. His
feelings were confused, tetchy, troubled. The throb of that old wound,
scarred over by Time and new interests, was mingled with displeasure
and anxiety, and a slight pain in his chest where that nougat stuff had
disagreed. Had Annette come in? Not that she was any good to him in such
a difficulty. Whenever she had questioned him about his first marriage,
he had always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it had
been the great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself
but domestic makeshift. She had always kept the grudge of that up her
sleeve, as it were, and used it commercially. He listened. A sound—the
vague murmur of a woman's movements—was coming through the door. She was
in. He tapped.

“Who?”

“I,” said Soames.

She had been changing her frock, and was still imperfectly clothed; a
striking figure before her glass. There was a certain magnificence about
her arms, shoulders, hair, which had darkened since he first knew
her, about the turn of her neck, the silkiness of her garments, her
dark-lashed, greyblue eyes—she was certainly as handsome at forty as she
had ever been. A fine possession, an excellent housekeeper, a sensible
and affectionate enough mother. If only she weren't always so frankly
cynical about the relations between them! Soames, who had no more real
affection for her than she had for him, suffered from a kind of English
grievance in that she had never dropped even the thinnest veil of
sentiment over their partnership. Like most of his countrymen and women,
he held the view that marriage should be based on mutual love, but that
when from a marriage love had disappeared, or, been found never to have
really existed—so that it was manifestly not based on love—you must not
admit it. There it was, and the love was not—but there you were, and
must continue to be! Thus you had it both ways, and were not tarred
with cynicism, realism, and immorality like the French. Moreover, it was
necessary in the interests of property. He knew that she knew that they
both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not
to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand
what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English. He said:

“Whom have you got at 'The Shelter' next week?”

Annette went on touching her lips delicately with salve—he always wished
she wouldn't do that.

“Your sister Winifred, and the Car-r-digans”—she took up a tiny stick of
black—“and Prosper Profond.”

“That Belgian chap? Why him?”

Annette turned her neck lazily, touched one eyelash, and said:

“He amuses Winifred.”

“I want some one to amuse Fleur; she's restive.”

“R-restive?” repeated Annette. “Is it the first time you see that, my
friend? She was born r-restive, as you call it.”

Would she never get that affected roll out of her r's?

He touched the dress she had taken off, and asked:

“What have you been doing?”

Annette looked at him, reflected in her glass. Her just-brightened lips
smiled, rather full, rather ironical.

“Enjoying myself,” she said.

“Oh!” answered Soames glumly. “Ribbandry, I suppose.”

It was his word for all that incomprehensible running in and out of
shops that women went in for. “Has Fleur got her summer dresses?”

“You don't ask if I have mine.”

“You don't care whether I do or not.”

“Quite right. Well, she has; and I have mine—terribly expensive.”

“H'm!” said Soames. “What does that chap Profond do in England?”

Annette raised the eyebrows she had just finished.

“He yachts.”

“Ah!” said Soames; “he's a sleepy chap.”

“Sometimes,” answered Annette, and her face had a sort of quiet
enjoyment. “But sometimes very amusing.”

“He's got a touch of the tar-brush about him.”

Annette stretched herself.

“Tar-brush?” she said. “What is that? His mother was Armenienne.”

“That's it, then,” muttered Soames. “Does he know anything about
pictures?”

“He knows about everything—a man of the world.”

“Well, get some one for Fleur. I want to distract her. She's going off
on Saturday to Val Dartie and his wife; I don't like it.”

“Why not?”

Since the reason could not be explained without going into family
history, Soames merely answered:

“Racketing about. There's too much of it.”

“I like that little Mrs. Val; she is very quiet and clever.”

“I know nothing of her except—This thing's new.” And Soames took up a
creation from the bed.

Annette received it from him.

“Would you hook me?” she said.

Soames hooked. Glancing once over her shoulder into the glass, he saw
the expression on her face, faintly amused, faintly contemptuous, as
much as to say: “Thanks! You will never learn!” No, thank God, he wasn't
a Frenchman! He finished with a jerk, and the words: “It's too low
here.” And he went to the door, with the wish to get away from her and
go down to Fleur again.

Annette stayed a powder-puff, and said with startling suddenness

“Que tu es grossier!”

He knew the expression—he had reason to. The first time she had used
it he had thought it meant “What a grocer you are!” and had not known
whether to be relieved or not when better informed. He resented the
word—he was not coarse! If he was coarse, what was that chap in the
room beyond his, who made those horrible noises in the morning when
he cleared his throat, or those people in the Lounge who thought it
well-bred to say nothing but what the whole world could hear at the top
of their voices—quacking inanity! Coarse, because he had said her dress
was low! Well, so it was! He went out without reply.

Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where he
had left her. She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot in
silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming. Her eyes
showed it too—they went off like that sometimes. And then, in a moment,
she would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a monkey. And
she knew so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen. What was that
odious word? Flapper! Dreadful young creatures—squealing and squawking
and showing their legs! The worst of them bad dreams, the best of them
powdered angels! Fleur was not a flapper, not one of those slangy,
ill-bred young females. And yet she was frighteningly self-willed, and
full of life, and determined to enjoy it. Enjoy! The word brought
no puritan terror to Soames; but it brought the terror suited to his
temperament. He had always been afraid to enjoy to-day for fear he
might not enjoy tomorrow so much. And it was terrifying to feel that his
daughter was divested of that safeguard. The very way she sat in that
chair showed it—lost in her dream. He had never been lost in a dream
himself—there was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it from
he did not know! Certainly not from Annette! And yet Annette, as a young
girl, when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look. Well,
she had lost it now!

Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down at
a writing-table. Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to write as
if she had not time to breathe before she got her letter written. And
suddenly she saw him. The air of desperate absorption vanished, she
smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were a little puzzled
and a little bored.

Ah! She was “fine”—“fine!”





III.—AT ROBIN HILL

Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill,
quietly going into his affairs. He did everything quietly now, because
his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked the
idea of dying. He had never realised how much till one day, two years
ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms, and been told:

“At any moment, on any overstrain.”

He had taken it with a smile—the natural Forsyte reaction against an
unpleasant truth. But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the
way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over him.
To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work—though he did little enough
work now! To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable
state, for such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind
stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.
Of such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he
never could, and must still hover on the hope that he might see again
those he loved! To realise this was to endure very poignant spiritual
anguish. Before he reached home that day he had determined to keep it
from Irene. He would have to be more careful than man had ever been, for
the least thing would give it away and make her as wretched as himself,
almost. His doctor had passed him sound in other respects, and seventy
was nothing of an age—he would last a long time yet, if he could.

Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the
full the subtler side of character. Naturally not abrupt, except when
nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate. The sad patience
of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a smile which
his lips preserved even in private. He devised continually all manner of
cover to conceal his enforced lack of exertion.

Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the Simple
Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no
coffee in it. In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in
his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony. Secure from
discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had spent the
fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow
without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final polish to his
terrestrial state. Having docketed and enclosed it in his father's
old Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words
outside: “Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the exact
state of me, J. F.,” and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be
always about him, in case of accident. Then, ringing for tea, he went
out to have it under the old oak-tree.

All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little
more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought
habitually, like other people, of other things. He thought of his son
now.

Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his dead
half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed to
avoid the evil and contain the good of the Public School system, may
or may not contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in April
perfectly ignorant of what he wanted to become. The War, which had
promised to go on for ever, had ended just as he was about to join the
Army, six months before his time. It had taken him ever since to get
used to the idea that he could now choose for himself. He had held with
his father several discussions, from which, under a cheery show of being
ready for anything—except, of course, the Church, Army, Law, Stage,
Stock Exchange, Medicine, Business, and Engineering—Jolyon had gathered
rather clearly that Jon wanted to go in for nothing. He himself had felt
exactly like that at the same age. With him that pleasant vacuity had
soon been ended by an early marriage, and its unhappy consequences.
Forced to become an underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity
before his artistic talent had outcropped. But having—as the simple
say—“learned” his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that
Jon would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his
aversion from everything else meant that he was going to be a writer.
Holding, however, the view that experience was necessary even for that
profession, there seemed to Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for Jon, but
University, travel, and perhaps the eating of dinners for the Bar. After
that one would see, or more probably one would not. In face of these
proffered allurements, however, Jon had remained undecided.

Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether
the world had really changed. People said that it was a new age. With
the profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived that
under slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it had
been. Mankind was still divided into two species: The few who had
“speculation” in their souls, and the many who had none, with a belt of
hybrids like himself in the middle. Jon appeared to have speculation; it
seemed to his father a bad lookout.

With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard
the boy say, a fortnight ago: “I should like to try farming, Dad; if it
won't cost you too much. It seems to be about the only sort of life
that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and of course that's out of the
question for me.”

Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:

“All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first Jolyon
in 1760. It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no doubt, you
may grow a better turnip than he did.”

A little dashed, Jon had answered:

“But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?”

“'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it, you'll do
more good than most men, which is little enough.”

To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it. I give him
four years. Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'

After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to his
daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near them on
the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice. Holly's answer had been
enthusiastic. There was an excellent man quite close; she and Val would
love Jon to live with them.

The boy was due to go to-morrow.

Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of
the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
thirty-two years. The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day
older! So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the
whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk. A tree of memories, which
would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut it
down—would see old England out at the pace things were going! He
remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree. Next day they had found a
bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm. That was before he knew that he
was under sentence of death. He could almost have wished the bomb had
finished him. It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours
of cold fear in the pit of his stomach. He had counted on living to the
normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.
As it was, she would miss him. Still there was Jon, more important in
her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.

Under that tree, where old Jolyon—waiting for Irene to come to him
across the lawn—had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better
close his own eyes and drift away. There was something undignified in
parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein
he regretted two things only—the long division between his father and
himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union with Irene.

From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and
his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.
Spring! Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was
still young enough to love beauty! Blackbirds sang recklessly in the
shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened;
and over the fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage,
burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the distant “smoke-bush”
blue was trailed along the horizon. Irene's flowers in their narrow beds
had startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of
gay life. Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had
known how to get that startling little ego into each painted flower, and
bird, and beast—the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of
life as well. They were the fellows! 'I've made nothing that will live!'
thought Jolyon; 'I've been an amateur—a mere lover, not a creator.
Still, I shall leave Jon behind me when I go.' What luck that the boy
had not been caught by that ghastly war! He might so easily have been
killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal. Jon would
do something some day—if the Age didn't spoil him—an imaginative chap!
His whim to take up farming was but a bit of sentiment, and about as
likely to last. And just then he saw them coming up the field: Irene and
the boy; walking from the station, with their arms linked. And getting
up, he strolled down through the new rose garden to meet them....

Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window. She sat
there without speaking till he said:

“What is it, my love?”

“We had an encounter to-day.”

“With whom?”

“Soames.”

Soames! He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two years;
conscious that it was bad for him. And, now, his heart moved in a
disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within his chest.

Irene went on quietly:

“He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
confectioner's where we had tea.”

Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“How did he look?”

“Grey; but otherwise much the same.”

“And the daughter?”

“Pretty. At least, Jon thought so.”

Jolyon's heart side-slipped again. His wife's face had a strained and
puzzled look.

“You didn't-?” he began.

“No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief and he
picked it up.”

Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance!

“June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?”

“No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it was.”

Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:

“I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from him. He'll
find out some day.”

“The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard judgment.
When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your mother if she
had done what I have?”

Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of the
tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the prisoned
grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or passion—knew
nothing at all, as yet!

“What have you told him?” he said at last.

“That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had never
cared much for your family, or they for you. I expect he will be asking
you.”

Jolyon smiled. “This promises to take the place of air-raids,” he said.
“After all, one misses them.”

Irene looked up at him.

“We've known it would come some day.”

He answered her with sudden energy:

“I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan't do that, even in
thought. He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's put to
him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
otherwise.”

“Not yet, Jolyon.”

That was like her—she had no foresight, and never went to meet trouble.
Still—who knew?—she might be right. It was ill going against a mother's
instinct. It might be well to let the boy go on, if possible, till
experience had given him some touchstone by which he could judge the
values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing, had deepened
his charity. All the same, one must take precautions—every precaution
possible! And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over
those precautions. He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew
nothing as yet of family history. Holly was discreet, she would make
sure of her husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter with
him when he went to-morrow.

And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate
died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for
Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so
rounded off and polished....

But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the
prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, “love at
first sight!” He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of those
dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno—a conviction that this was
his 'dream'. so that what followed had seemed to him at once natural
and miraculous. Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for one who was
terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when
boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was
almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy
friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore, been inoculated
against the germs of love by small doses of the poison. And now in the
dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay awake, featuring Fleur—as
they called it—recalling her words, especially that “Au revoir!” so soft
and sprightly.

He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out
through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass.
'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously white out of doors,
with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go
down into the coppice,' he thought. He ran down through the fields,
reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice.
Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was
mystery—the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon
sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening
light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapleduram—a jolly
name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas
presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh! She must.
She had said “Au revoir!” Not good-bye! What luck that she had dropped
her handkerchief! He would never have known her but for that. And the
more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.
Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged his head; words
jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned
to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out
of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open,
he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate
all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to
mortal soul-even-to his mother.





IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving
their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of
“Timothy's” on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot
in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging,
of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air
it twice a day.

To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box,
a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy. One did not reach
him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of old-time
habit or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon and ask
after their surviving uncle. Such were Francie, now quite emancipated
from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old
Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her “man of the world.” But, after
all, everybody was emancipated now, or said they were—perhaps not quite
the same thing!

When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on
the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of
seeing Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a faint demonstration within
him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep
of that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one
dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and
out of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened
with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the “old people” of another
century, another age.

The sight of Smither—still corseted up to the armpits because the new
fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been
considered “nice” by Aunts Juley and Hester—brought a pale friendliness
to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to old pattern in
every detail, an invaluable servant—none such left—smiling back at him,
with the words: “Why! it's Mr. Soames, after all this time! And how are
you, sir? Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to know you've been.”

“How is he?”

“Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's a
wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It
would please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how he
relishes a baked apple still. But he's quite deaf. And a mercy, I always
think. For what we should have done with him in the air-raids, I don't
know.”

“Ah!” said Soames. “What did you do with him?”

“We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the cellar,
so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would never have done
to let him know there was a war on. As I said to Cook, 'If Mr. Timothy
rings, they may do what they like—I'm going up. My dear mistresses would
have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody going to him.' But
he slept through them all beautiful. And the one in the daytime he
was having his bath. It was a mercy, because he might have noticed the
people in the street all looking up—he often looks out of the window.”

“Quite!” murmured Soames. Smither was getting garrulous! “I just want to
look round and see if there's anything to be done.”

“Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice in the
dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of. It's funny they should
be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not coming down,
just before the War. But they're nasty little things; you never know
where they'll take you next.”

“Does he leave his bed?”—

“Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window in
the morning, not to risk a change of air. And he's quite comfortable in
himself; has his Will out every day regular. It's a great consolation to
him—that.”

“Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything to
say to me.”

Smither coloured up above her corsets.

“It will be an occasion!” she said. “Shall I take you round the house,
sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?”

“No, you go to him,” said Soames. “I can go round the house by myself.”

One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt that
he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so saturated
with the past. When Smither, creaking with excitement, had left him,
Soames entered the dining-room and sniffed. In his opinion it wasn't
mice, but incipient wood-rot, and he examined the panelling. Whether it
was worth a coat of paint, at Timothy's age, he was not sure. The room
had always been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile
curled Soames' lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted
the oak dado; a heavy metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling
divided by imitation beams. The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a
bargain, one day at Jobson's sixty years ago—three Snyder “still lifes,”
two faintly coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather charming,
which bore the initials “J. R.”—Timothy had always believed they might
turn out to be Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who admired them, had
discovered that they were only John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of
a white pony being shod. Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed
dark mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and
a mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body since
he was four years old. He looked especially at the two drawings, and
thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'

From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study. He did not remember
ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor to ceiling with
volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity. One wall seemed devoted
to educational books, which Timothy's firm had published two generations
back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book. Soames read their
titles and shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as
used to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane, from which
he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out
together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The third wall
he approached with more excitement. Here, surely, Timothy's own taste
would be found. It was. The books were dummies. The fourth wall was all
heavily curtained window. And turned toward it was a large chair with a
mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy
of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come
down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still.
In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy,
deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and
permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday
afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with
Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who
was always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had
been sick too. Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty
times at least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe,
and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch,
bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in
latitude 44.

'Mausoleum!' he thought. 'George was right!' And he went out and up
the stairs. On the half-landing he stopped before the case of stuffed
humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They looked not a day
older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If the case were opened
the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing would crumble, he
suspected. It wouldn't be worth putting that into the sale! And suddenly
he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann—dear old Aunt Ann—holding him by
the hand in front of that case and saying: “Look, Soamey! Aren't they
bright and pretty, dear little humming-birds!” Soames remembered his
own answer: “They don't hum, Auntie.” He must have been six, in a black
velveteen suit with a light-blue collar-he remembered that suit well!
Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave
old aquiline smile—a fine old lady, Aunt Ann! He moved on up to
the drawing-room door. There on each side of it were the groups of
miniatures. Those he would certainly buy in! The miniatures of his
four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and one of his Uncle
Nicholas as a boy. They had all been painted by a young lady friend of
the family at a time, 1830, about, when miniatures were considered very
genteel, and lasting too, painted as they were on ivory. Many a time had
he heard the tale of that young lady: “Very talented, my dear; she
had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went into a
consumption and died: so like Keats—we often spoke of it.”

Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan—quite a small
child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on heaven.
Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been rather like
that—a wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must have had talent, and
miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet of their own, little
subject to the currents of competition on aesthetic Change. Soames
opened the drawing-room door. The room was dusted, the furniture
uncovered, the curtains drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still
dwelt there patiently waiting. And a thought came to him: When Timothy
died—why not? Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this house—like
Carlyle's—and put up a tablet, and show it? “Specimen of mid-Victorian
abode—entrance, one shilling, with catalogue.” After all, it was the
completest thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of to-day.
Perfect in its special taste and culture, if, that is, he took down and
carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon pictures he had
given them. The still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned
with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the
cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of
little knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey,
Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian
poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red
plush, full of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their
mother's father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow
elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who
had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery
writing on it, recording God knew what! And the pictures crowding on
the walls—all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like the
foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that—pictures bright and
illustrative, “Telling the Bees,” “Hey for the Ferry!” and two in the
style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin.
Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed a thousand times in
supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt
frames.

And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed
as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it. And the
gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one side of the
fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on
the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light,
for Aunt Hester. Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them
sitting there. Ah! and the atmosphere—even now, of too many stuffs and
washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.' And,
by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life
never departed from, for fastidiousness of skin and eye and nose and
feeling, it beat to-day hollow—to-day with its Tubes and cars, its
perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the
knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the
satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and
their “So longs,” and their “Old Beans,” and their laughter—girls who
gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them;
and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him
the shudders too. No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds,
their eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a
standard, and reverence for past and future.

With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
upstairs. He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order of
the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls. At the
top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors. Which of them was
Timothy's? And he listened. A sound, as of a child slowly dragging a
hobby-horse about, came to his ears. That must be Timothy! He tapped,
and a door was opened by Smither, very red in the face.

Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him
to attend. If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see him
through the door.

Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.

The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the
window, a distance of some twelve feet. The lower part of his square
face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as
short as it could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where the
hair was also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a good
yellow. One hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the skirt of
his Jaeger dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked
ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers. The expression on his face
was that of a crossed child, intent on something that he has not got.
Each time he turned he stumped the stick, and then dragged it, as if to
show that he could do without it:

“He still looks strong,” said Soames under his breath.

“Oh! yes, sir. You should see him take his bath—it's wonderful; he does
enjoy it so.”

Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight. Timothy had resumed his
babyhood.

“Does he take any interest in things generally?” he said, also loud.

“Oh! yes, sir; his food and his Will. It's quite a sight to see him turn
it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every now and then he
asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a slate for him—very large.
Of course, I always write the same, what they were when he last took
notice, in 1914. We got the doctor to forbid him to read the paper when
the War broke out. Oh! he did take on about that at first. But he soon
came round, because he knew it tired him; and he's a wonder to conserve
energy as he used to call it when my dear mistresses were alive, bless
their hearts! How he did go on at them about that; they were always so
active, if you remember, Mr. Soames.”

“What would happen if I were to go in?” asked Soames: “Would he remember
me? I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in 1907.”

“Oh! that, sir,” replied Smither doubtfully, “I couldn't take on me to
say. I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his age.”

Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn, said in
a loud voice: “Uncle Timothy!”

Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.

“Eh?” he said.

“Soames,” cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out his hand,
“Soames Forsyte!”

“No!” said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the floor, he
continued his walk.

“It doesn't seem to work,” said Soames.

“No, sir,” replied Smither, rather crestfallen; “you see, he hasn't
finished his walk. It always was one thing at a time with him. I expect
he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the gas, and a pretty job
I shall have to make him understand.”

“Do you think he ought to have a man about him?”

Smither held up her hands. “A man! Oh! no. Cook and me can manage
perfectly. A strange man about would send him crazy in no time. And my
mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house. Besides, we're
so—proud of him.”

“I suppose the doctor comes?”

“Every morning. He makes special terms for such a quantity, and Mr.
Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to put out
his tongue.”

“Well,” said Soames, turning away, “it's rather sad and painful to me.”

“Oh! sir,” returned Smither anxiously, “you mustn't think that. Now that
he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life, really he does.
As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man than he ever was. You
see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his bath, he's eatin', and when
he's not eatin', he's sleepin'. and there it is. There isn't an ache or
a care about him anywhere.”

“Well,” said Soames, “there's something in that. I'll go down. By the
way, let me see his Will.”

“I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under his
pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active.”

“I only want to know if it's the one I made,” said Soames; “you take a
look at its date some time, and let me know.”

“Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and Cook witnessed,
you remember, and there's our names on it still, and we've only done it
once.”

“Quite,” said Soames. He did remember. Smither and Jane had been proper
witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they might have
no interest in Timothy's death. It had been—he fully admitted—an almost
improper precaution, but Timothy had wished it, and, after all, Aunt
Hester had provided for them amply.

“Very well,” he said; “good-bye, Smither. Look after him, and if he
should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me know.”

“Oh! yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that. It's been such a pleasant
change to see you. Cook will be quite excited when I tell her.”

Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs. He stood for fully two
minutes by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many times.
'So it all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins again. Poor old
chap!' And he listened, if perchance the sound of Timothy trailing his
hobby-horse might come down the well of the stairs; or some ghost of an
old face show over the bannisters, and an old voice say: 'Why, it's dear
Soames, and we were only saying that we hadn't seen him for a week!'

Nothing—nothing! Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a sunbeam
through the fanlight over the door. The little old house! A mausoleum!
And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his train.





V.—THE NATIVE HEATH

“His foot's upon his native heath, His name's—Val Dartie.”


With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his age,
set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old manor-house
he had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs. His destination was
Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn of 1899, when he
stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire. He paused at the door to
give his wife a kiss, and put a flask of port into his pocket.

“Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much.”

With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes looking
into his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe. He should be moderate;
Holly was always right—she had a natural aptitude. It did not seem so
remarkable to him, perhaps, as it might to others, that—half Dartie as
he was—he should have been perfectly faithful to his young first cousin
during the twenty years since he married her romantically out in the
Boer War; and faithful without any feeling of sacrifice or boredom—she
was so quick, so slyly always a little in front of his mood. Being first
cousins they had decided, rather needlessly, to have no children; and,
though a little sallower, she had kept her looks, her slimness, and the
colour of her dark hair. Val particularly admired the life of her own
she carried on, besides carrying on his, and riding better every year.
She kept up her music, she read an awful lot—novels, poetry, all sorts
of stuff. Out on their farm in Cape colony she had looked after all
the “nigger” babies and women in a miraculous manner. She was, in
fact, clever; yet made no fuss about it, and had no “side.” Though not
remarkable for humility, Val had come to have the feeling that she was
his superior, and he did not grudge it—a great tribute. It might be
noted that he never looked at Holly without her knowing of it, but that
she looked at him sometimes unawares.

He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so on the
platform, though she was going to the station with him, to drive the car
back. Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles inseparable
from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened in the Boer War,
had probably saved his life in the War just past, Val was still much
as he had been in the days of his courtship; his smile as wide and
charming, his eyelashes, if anything, thicker and darker, his eyes
screwed up under them, as bright a grey, his freckles rather deeper, his
hair a little grizzled at the sides. He gave the impression of one who
has lived actively with horses in a sunny climate.

Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:

“When is young Jon coming?”

“To-day.”

“Is there anything you want for him? I could bring it down on Saturday.”

“No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur—one-forty.”

Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new country
on bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects heaven at every
hole.

“That's a young woman who knows her way about,” he said. “I say, has it
struck you?”

“Yes,” said Holly.

“Uncle Soames and your Dad—bit awkward, isn't it?”

“She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be said, of course.
It's only for five days, Val.”

“Stable secret! Righto!” If Holly thought it safe, it was. Glancing
slyly round at him, she said: “Did you notice how beautifully she asked
herself?”

“No!”

“Well, she did. What do you think of her, Val?”

“Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she got her
monkey up, I should say.”

“I'm wondering,” Holly murmured, “whether she is the modern young woman.
One feels at sea coming home into all this.”

“You? You get the hang of things so quick.”

Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.

“You keep one in the know,” said Val encouraged. “What do you think of
that Belgian fellow, Profond?”

“I think he's rather 'a good devil.'”

Val grinned.

“He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family. In fact,
our family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying a
Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first. Our grandfathers
would have had fits!”

“So would anybody's, my dear.”

“This car,” Val said suddenly, “wants rousing; she doesn't get her hind
legs under her uphill. I shall have to give her her head on the slope if
I'm to catch that train.”

There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really
sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his guidance
compared with its running under that of Holly was always noticeable. He
caught the train.

“Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can. Good-bye,
darling.”

“Good-bye,” called Holly, and kissed her hand.

In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between thoughts of
Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim memory
of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square book,
all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and shape
of horses. The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a certain
strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie
hankering for a Nutter. On getting back to England, after the profitable
sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun
seldom shone, Val had said to himself: “I've absolutely got to have an
interest in life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting's
not enough, I'll breed and I'll train.” With just that extra pinch of
shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val
had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They were all hypnotised by
fashion and high price. He should buy for looks, and let names go hang!
And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain
of blood! Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in this
damned climate which makes one go round in a ring. All the same, I must
have a strain of Mayfly blood.'

In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of those
quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather
than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His
twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he
had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman,
and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called “the
silly haw-haw” of some Englishmen, the “flapping cockatoory” of some
English-women—Holly had none of that and Holly was his model. Observant,
quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a transaction, a
horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a Mayfly filly,
when a slow voice said at his elbow:

“Mr. Val Dartie? How's Mrs. Val Dartie? She's well, I hope.” And he saw
beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.

“Prosper Profond—I met you at lunch,” said the voice.

“How are you?” murmured Val.

“I'm very well,” replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
inimitable slowness. “A good devil,” Holly had called him. Well! He
looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard;
a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly
intelligent.

“Here's a gentleman wants to know you—cousin of yours—Mr. George
Forsyde.”

Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at
the Iseeum Club.

“I used to go racing with your father,” George was saying: “How's the
stud? Like to buy one of my screws?”

Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen out
of breeding. They believed in nothing over here, not even in horses.
George Forsyte, Prosper Profond! The devil himself was not more
disillusioned than those two.

“Didn't know you were a racing man,” he said to Monsieur Profond.

“I'm not. I don't care for it. I'm a yachtin' man. I don't care for
yachtin' either, but I like to see my friends. I've got some lunch,
Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you'd like to 'ave some; not
much—just a small one—in my car.”

“Thanks,” said Val; “very good of you. I'll come along in about quarter
of an hour.”

“Over there. Mr. Forsyde's comin',” and Monsieur Profond “poinded” with
a yellow-gloved finger; “small car, with a small lunch”; he moved on,
groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte following, neat, huge, and
with his jesting air.

Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly. George Forsyte, of course,
was an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val felt
extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which those two
had laughed. The animal had lost reality.

“That 'small' mare”—he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur
Profond—“what do you see in her?—we must all die!”

And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still! The Mayfly
strain—was it any better than any other? He might just as well have a
flutter with his money instead.

“No, by gum!” he muttered suddenly, “if it's no good breeding horses,
it's no good doing anything. What did I come for? I'll buy her.”

He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the
stand. Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers looking
as if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their lives; tall,
flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women; young men with an
air as if trying to take it seriously—two or three of them with only one
arm.

'Life over here's a game!' thought Val. 'Muffin bell rings, horses run,
money changes hands; ring again, run again, money changes back.'

But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to watch
the Mayfly filly canter down. She moved well; and he made his way over
to the “small” car. The “small” lunch was the sort a man dreams of but
seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond walked back with
him to the paddock.

“Your wife's a nice woman,” was his surprising remark.

“Nicest woman I know,” returned Val dryly.

“Yes,” said Monsieur Profond; “she has a nice face. I admire nice
women.”

Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct in the
heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the moment.

“Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small cruise.”

“Thanks,” said Val, in arms again, “she hates the sea.”

“So do I,” said Monsieur Profond.

“Then why do you yacht?”

The Belgian's eyes smiled. “Oh! I don't know. I've done everything; it's
the last thing I'm doin'.”

“It must be d-d expensive. I should want more reason than that.”

Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a heavy
lower lip.

“I'm an easy-goin' man,” he said.

“Were you in the War?” asked Val.

“Ye-es. I've done that too. I was gassed; it was a small bit
unpleasant.” He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity, as if
he had caught it from his name.

Whether his saying “small” when he ought to have said “little” was
genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
evidently capable of anything.

Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
Monsieur Profond said:

“You goin' to bid?”

Val nodded. With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of
faith. Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the
forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year
to which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her
grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could touch, having
spent most of what he had realised from his South African farm on his
establishment in Sussex. And very soon he was thinking: 'Dash it! she's
going beyond me!' His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he dropped out of
the bidding. The Mayfly filly passed under the hammer at seven hundred
and fifty guineas. He was turning away vexed when the slow voice of
Monsieur Profond said in his ear:

“Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you take her
and give her to your wife.”

Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour in
his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.

“I made a small lot of money in the War,” began Monsieur Profond in
answer to that look. “I 'ad armament shares. I like to give it away. I'm
always makin' money. I want very small lot myself. I like my friends to
'ave it.”

“I'll buy her of you at the price you gave,” said Val with sudden
resolution.

“No,” said Monsieur Profond. “You take her. I don' want her.”

“Hang it! one doesn't—”

“Why not?” smiled Monsieur Profond. “I'm a friend of your family.”

“Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars,” said Val
impatiently.

“All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you like
with her.”

“So long as she's yours,” said Val. “I don't mind that.”

“That's all right,” murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.

Val watched; he might be “a good devil,” but then again he might not. He
saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no more.

He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
Street.

Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering the
three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague Dartie,
till almost happily released by a French staircase. It was to her a
vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from South Africa
after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and to have taken
a fancy to his wife. Winifred, who in the late seventies, before her
marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom, pleasure, and fashion,
confessed her youth outclassed by the donzellas of the day. They seemed,
for instance, to regard marriage as an incident, and Winifred sometimes
regretted that she had not done the same; a second, third, fourth
incident might have secured her a partner of less dazzling inebriety;
though, after all, he had left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a
colonel and unharmed by the War)—none of whom had been divorced as yet.
The steadiness of her children often amazed one who remembered their
father; but, as she was fond of believing, they were really all
Forsytes, favouring herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen. Her
brother's “little girl” Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred. The child was
as restless as any of these modern young women—“She's a small flame in a
draught,” Prosper Profond had said one day after dinner—but she did
not flap, or talk at the top of her voice. The steady Forsyteism in
Winifred's own character instinctively resented the feeling in the
air, the modern girl's habits and her motto: “All's much of a muchness!
Spend, to-morrow we shall be poor!” She found it a saving grace in Fleur
that, having set her heart on a thing, she had no change of heart until
she got it—though—what happened after, Fleur was, of course, too young
to have made evident. The child was a “very pretty little thing,” too,
and quite a credit to take about, with her mother's French taste and
gift for wearing clothes; everybody turned to look at Fleur—great
consideration to Winifred, a lover of the style and distinction which
had so cruelly deceived her in the case of Montague Dartie.

In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning, Winifred
dwelt on the family skeleton.

“That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene, Val—it's
old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing about it—making
a fuss. Your Uncle Soames is very particular about that. So you'll be
careful.”

“Yes! But it's dashed awkward—Holly's young half-brother is coming to
live with us while he learns farming. He's there already.”

“Oh!” said Winifred. “That is a gaff! What is he like?”

“Only saw him once—at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909; he was
naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes—a jolly little chap.”

Winifred thought that “rather nice,” and added comfortably: “Well,
Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with it. I shan't tell your
uncle. It'll only bother him. It's a great comfort to have you back, my
dear boy, now that I'm getting on.”

“Getting on! Why! you're as young as ever. That chap Profond, Mother, is
he all right?”

“Prosper Profond! Oh! the most amusing man I know.”

Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.

“That's so like him,” murmured Winifred. “He does all sorts of things.”

“Well,” said Val shrewdly, “our family haven't been too lucky with that
kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted for us.”

It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute before she
answered:

“Oh! well! He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances.”

“All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow.”

And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and left her
for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria station.





VI.—JON

Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen deeply
in love, fortunately with something of her own, for the object of her
passion was the prospect in front of her windows, the cool clear
light on the green Downs. It was England again, at last! England more
beautiful than she had dreamed. Chance had, in fact, guided the Val
Darties to a spot where the South Downs had real charm when the sun
shone. Holly had enough of her father's eye to apprehend the rare
quality of their outlines and chalky radiance; to go up there by the
ravine-like lane and wander along toward Chanctonbury or Amberley, was
still a delight which she hardly attempted to share with Val, whose
admiration of Nature was confused by a Forsyte's instinct for getting
something out of it, such as the condition of the turf for his horses'
exercise.

Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she promised
herself that the first use she would make of Jon would be to take him up
there, and show him “the view” under this May-day sky.

She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a motherliness
not exhausted by Val. A three-day visit to Robin Hill, soon after their
arrival home, had yielded no sight of him—he was still at school; so
that her recollection, like Val's, was of a little sunny-haired boy,
striped blue and yellow, down by the pond.

Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad, embarrassing.
Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's courtship; the ageing of
her father, not seen for twenty years, something funereal in his ironic
gentleness which did not escape one who had much subtle instinct;
above all, the presence of her stepmother, whom she could still
vaguely remember as the “lady in grey” of days when she was little and
grandfather alive and Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because that intruder
gave her music lessons—all these confused and tantalised a spirit which
had longed to find Robin Hill untroubled. But Holly was adept at keeping
things to herself, and all had seemed to go quite well.

Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she was
sure had trembled.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has it?
If only you could have brought Jolly back with you! I say, can you
stand this spiritualistic racket? When the oak-tree dies, it dies, I'm
afraid.”

From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had let the
cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.

“Spiritualism—queer word, when the more they manifest the more they
prove that they've got hold of matter.”

“How?” said Holly.

“Why! Look at their photographs of auric presences. You must have
something material for light and shade to fall on before you can take
a photograph. No, it'll end in our calling all matter spirit, or all
spirit matter—I don't know which.”

“But don't you believe in survival, Dad?”

Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face impressed
her deeply.

“Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death. I've been
looking into it a bit. But for the life of me I can't find anything that
telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from the storehouse of
this world can't account for just as well. Wish I could! Wishes father
thought but they don't breed evidence.” Holly had pressed her lips again
to his forehead with the feeling that it confirmed his theory that all
matter was becoming spirit—his brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.

But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been watching,
unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter from Jon. It
was—she decided—the prettiest sight she had ever seen. Irene, lost as it
were in the letter of her boy, stood at a window where the light fell on
her face and her fine grey hair; her lips were moving, smiling, her dark
eyes laughing, dancing, and the hand which did not hold the letter was
pressed against her breast. Holly withdrew as from a vision of perfect
love, convinced that Jon must be nice.

When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in either
hand, she was confirmed in her predisposition. He was a little like
Jolly, that long-lost idol of her childhood, but eager-looking and less
formal, with deeper eyes and brighter-coloured hair, for he wore no hat;
altogether a very interesting “little” brother!

His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance in
the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him home,
instead of his driving her. Shouldn't he have a shot? They hadn't a car
at Robin Hill since the War, of course, and he had only driven once, and
landed up a bank, so she oughtn't to mind his trying. His laugh, soft
and infectious, was very attractive, though that word, she had heard,
was now quite old-fashioned. When they reached the house he pulled out
a crumpled letter which she read while he was washing—a quite short
letter, which must have cost her father many a pang to write.

“MY DEAR,

“You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of family
history. His mother and I think he is too young at present. The boy is
very dear, and the apple of her eye. Verbum sapientibus,

“Your loving father,

“J. F.”

That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur was
coming.

After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up the
hill. They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit grown over
with brambles and goosepenny. Milkwort and liverwort starred the green
slope, the larks sang, and thrushes in the brake, and now and then a
gull flighting inland would wheel very white against the paling sky,
where the vague moon was coming up. Delicious fragrance came to them, as
if little invisible creatures were running and treading scent out of the
blades of grass.

Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:

“I say, this is wonderful! There's no fat on it at all. Gull's flight
and sheep-bells.”

“'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'. You're a poet, my dear!”

Jon sighed.

“Oh, Golly! No go!”

“Try! I used to at your age.”

“Did you? Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so rotten. Have you any of
yours for me to see?”

“My dear,” Holly murmured, “I've been married nineteen years. I only
wrote verses when I wanted to be.”

“Oh!” said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she could see
was a charming colour. Was Jon “touched in the wind,” then, as Val would
have called it? Already? But, if so, all the better, he would take no
notice of young Fleur. Besides, on Monday he would begin his farming.
And she smiled. Was it Burns who followed the plough, or only Piers
Plowman? Nearly every young man and most young women seemed to be poets
now, judging from the number of their books she had read out in South
Africa, importing them from Hatchus and Bumphards; and quite good—oh!
quite; much better than she had been herself! But then poetry had only
really come in since her day—with motor-cars. Another long talk after
dinner over a wood fire in the low hall, and there seemed little left to
know about Jon except anything of real importance. Holly parted from him
at his bedroom door, having seen twice over that he had everything, with
the conviction that she would love him, and Val would like him. He
was eager, but did not gush; he was a splendid listener, sympathetic,
reticent about himself. He evidently loved their father, and adored his
mother. He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games. He saved
moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them out of doors
in screws of paper sooner than kill them. In a word, he was amiable. She
went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer horribly if anybody hurt
him; but who would hurt him?

Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of paper and
a pencil, writing his first “real poem” by the light of a candle because
there was not enough moon to see by, only enough to make the night seem
fluttery and as if engraved on silver. Just the night for Fleur to walk,
and turn her eyes, and lead on-over the hills and far away. And Jon,
deeply furrowed in his ingenuous brow, made marks on the paper and
rubbed them out and wrote them in again, and did all that was necessary
for the completion of a work of art; and he had a feeling such as the
winds of Spring must have, trying their first songs among the coming
blossom. Jon was one of those boys (not many) in whom a home-trained
love of beauty had survived school life. He had had to keep it to
himself, of course, so that not even the drawing-master knew of it; but
it was there, fastidious and clear within him. And his poem seemed to
him as lame and stilted as the night was winged. But he kept it, all the
same. It was a “beast,” but better than nothing as an expression of the
inexpressible. And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be
able to show it to Mother.' He slept terribly well, when he did sleep,
overwhelmed by novelty.





VII.—FLEUR

To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered, all
that had been told Jon was:

“There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end.”

For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: “We've got a
youngster staying with us.”

The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore in
a manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired. They were
thus introduced by Holly:

“This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon.”

Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong sunlight,
was so confounded by the providential nature of this miracle, that he
had time to hear Fleur say calmly: “Oh, how do you do?” as if he had
never seen her, and to understand dimly from the quickest imaginable
little movement of her head that he never had seen her. He bowed
therefore over her hand in an intoxicated manner, and became more silent
than the grave. He knew better than to speak. Once in his early life,
surprised reading by a nightlight, he had said fatuously “I was just
turning over the leaves, Mum,” and his mother had replied: “Jon, never
tell stories, because of your face nobody will ever believe them.”

The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
success of spoken untruth. He listened therefore to Fleur's swift and
rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with scones and
jam, and got away as soon as might be. They say that in delirium tremens
you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which suddenly changes shape
and position. Jon saw the fixed object; it had dark eyes and passably
dark hair, and changed its position, but never its shape. The
knowledge that between him and that object there was already a secret
understanding (however impossible to understand) thrilled him so that
he waited feverishly, and began to copy out his poem—which of course he
would never dare to—show her—till the sound of horses' hoofs roused him,
and, leaning from his window, he saw her riding forth with Val. It was
clear that she wasted no time, but the sight filled him with grief. He
wasted his. If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy, he might
have been asked to go too. And from his window he sat and watched them
disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge
once more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down. 'Silly brute!'
he thought; 'I always miss my chances.'

Why couldn't he be self-confident and ready? And, leaning his chin on
his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her. A week-end
was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it. Did he know any
one except himself who would have been such a flat? He did not.

He dressed for dinner early, and was first down. He would miss no more.
But he missed Fleur, who came down last. He sat opposite her at dinner,
and it was terrible—impossible to say anything for fear of saying
the wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her in the only
natural way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one with whom in fancy
he had already been over the hills and far away; conscious, too, all the
time, that he must seem to her, to all of them, a dumb gawk. Yes, it was
terrible! And she was talking so well—swooping with swift wing this
way and that. Wonderful how she had learned an art which he found so
disgustingly difficult. She must think him hopeless indeed!

His sister's eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged him
at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and eager,
seeming to say, “Oh! for goodness' sake!” obliged him to look at Val,
where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet—that, at least, had no
eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.

“Jon is going to be a farmer,” he heard Holly say; “a farmer and a
poet.”

He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow just
like their father's, laughed, and felt better.

Val recounted the incident of Monsieur Prosper Profond; nothing could
have been more favourable, for, in relating it, he regarded Holly, who
in turn regarded him, while Fleur seemed to be regarding with a slight
frown some thought of her own, and Jon was really free to look at her at
last. She had on a white frock, very simple and well made; her arms were
bare, and her hair had a white rose in it. In just that swift moment of
free vision, after such intense discomfort, Jon saw her sublimated, as
one sees in the dark a slender white fruit-tree; caught her like a verse
of poetry flashed before the eyes of the mind, or a tune which floats
out in the distance and dies. He wondered giddily how old she was—she
seemed so much more self-possessed and experienced than himself. Why
mustn't he say they had met? He remembered suddenly his mother's face;
puzzled, hurt-looking, when she answered: “Yes, they're relations,
but we don't know them.” Impossible that his mother, who loved beauty,
should not admire Fleur if she did know her.

Alone with Val after dinner, he sipped port deferentially and answered
the advances of this new-found brother-in-law. As to riding (always the
first consideration with Val) he could have the young chestnut, saddle
and unsaddle it himself, and generally look after it when he brought it
in. Jon said he was accustomed to all that at home, and saw that he had
gone up one in his host's estimation.

“Fleur,” said Val, “can't ride much yet, but she's keen. Of course, her
father doesn't know a horse from a cart-wheel. Does your Dad ride?”

“He used to; but now he's—you know, he's—” He stopped, so hating the
word “old.” His father was old, and yet not old; no—never!

“Quite,” muttered Val. “I used to know your brother up at Oxford, ages
ago, the one who died in the Boer War. We had a fight in New College
Gardens. That was a queer business,” he added, musing; “a good deal came
out of it.”

Jon's eyes opened wide; all was pushing him toward historical research,
when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:

“Come along, you two,” and he rose, his heart pushing him toward
something far more modern.

Fleur having declared that it was “simply too wonderful to stay
indoors,” they all went out. Moonlight was frosting the dew, and an old
sundial threw a long shadow. Two box hedges at right angles, dark
and square, barred off the orchard. Fleur turned through that angled
opening.

“Come on!” she called. Jon glanced at the others, and followed. She was
running among the trees like a ghost. All was lovely and foamlike above
her, and there was a scent of old trunks, and of nettles. She vanished.
He thought he had lost her, then almost ran into her standing quite
still.

“Isn't it jolly?” she cried, and Jon answered:

“Rather!”

She reached up, twisted off a blossom and, twirling it in her fingers,
said:

“I suppose I can call you Jon?”

“I should think so just.”

“All right! But you know there's a feud between our families?”

Jon stammered: “Feud? Why?”

“It's ever so romantic and silly. That's why I pretended we hadn't
met. Shall we get up early to-morrow morning and go for a walk before
breakfast and have it out? I hate being slow about things, don't you?”

Jon murmured a rapturous assent.

“Six o'clock, then. I think your mother's beautiful”

Jon said fervently: “Yes, she is.”

“I love all kinds of beauty,” went on Fleur, “when it's exciting. I
don't like Greek things a bit.”

“What! Not Euripides?”

“Euripides? Oh! no, I can't bear Greek plays; they're so long. I think
beauty's always swift. I like to look at one picture, for instance, and
then run off. I can't bear a lot of things together. Look!” She held
up her blossom in the moonlight. “That's better than all the orchard, I
think.”

And, suddenly, with her other hand she caught Jon's.

“Of all things in the world, don't you think caution's the most awful?
Smell the moonlight!”

She thrust the blossom against his face; Jon agreed giddily that of all
things in the world caution was the worst, and bending over, kissed the
hand which held his.

“That's nice and old-fashioned,” said Fleur calmly. “You're frightfully
silent, Jon. Still I like silence when it's swift.” She let go his hand.
“Did you think I dropped my handkerchief on purpose?”

“No!” cried Jon, intensely shocked.

“Well, I did, of course. Let's get back, or they'll think we're doing
this on purpose too.” And again she ran like a ghost among the trees.
Jon followed, with love in his heart, Spring in his heart, and over all
the moonlit white unearthly blossom. They came out where they had gone
in, Fleur walking demurely.

“It's quite wonderful in there,” she said dreamily to Holly.

Jon preserved silence, hoping against hope that she might be thinking it
swift.

She bade him a casual and demure good-night, which made him think he had
been dreaming....

In her bedroom Fleur had flung off her gown, and, wrapped in a shapeless
garment, with the white flower still in her hair, she looked like a
mousme, sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing by candlelight.

“DEAREST CHERRY,

“I believe I'm in love. I've got it in the neck, only the feeling is
really lower down. He's a second cousin-such a child, about six months
older and ten years younger than I am. Boys always fall in love with
their seniors, and girls with their juniors or with old men of forty.
Don't laugh, but his eyes are the truest things I ever saw; and he's
quite divinely silent! We had a most romantic first meeting in London
under the Vospovitch Juno. And now he's sleeping in the next room and
the moonlight's on the blossom; and to-morrow morning, before anybody's
awake, we're going to walk off into Down fairyland. There's a feud
between our families, which makes it really exciting. Yes! and I may
have to use subterfuge and come on you for invitations—if so, you'll
know why! My father doesn't want us to know each other, but I can't help
that. Life's too short. He's got the most beautiful mother, with lovely
silvery hair and a young face with dark eyes. I'm staying with his
sister—who married my cousin; it's all mixed up, but I mean to pump
her to-morrow. We've often talked about love being a spoil-sport; well,
that's all tosh, it's the beginning of sport, and the sooner you feel
it, my dear, the better for you.

“Jon (not simplified spelling, but short for Jolyon, which is a name in
my family, they say) is the sort that lights up and goes out; about five
feet ten, still growing, and I believe he's going to be a poet. If
you laugh at me I've done with you forever. I perceive all sorts of
difficulties, but you know when I really want a thing I get it. One of
the chief effects of love is that you see the air sort of inhabited,
like seeing a face in the moon; and you feel—you feel dancey and soft
at the same time, with a funny sensation—like a continual first sniff of
orange—blossom—Just above your stays. This is my first, and I feel as if
it were going to be my last, which is absurd, of course, by all the laws
of Nature and morality. If you mock me I will smite you, and if you tell
anybody I will never forgive you. So much so, that I almost don't think
I'll send this letter. Anyway, I'll sleep over it. So good-night, my
Cherry—oh!

“Your,

“FLEUR.”




VIII.—IDYLL ON GRASS

When those two young Forsytes emerged from the chine lane, and set their
faces east toward the sun, there was not a cloud in heaven, and the
Downs were dewy. They had come at a good bat up the slope and were a
little out of breath; if they had anything to say they did not say it,
but marched in the early awkwardness of unbreakfasted morning under the
songs of the larks. The stealing out had been fun, but with the freedom
of the tops the sense of conspiracy ceased, and gave place to dumbness.

“We've made one blooming error,” said Fleur, when they had gone half a
mile. “I'm hungry.”

Jon produced a stick of chocolate. They shared it and their tongues
were loosened. They discussed the nature of their homes and previous
existences, which had a kind of fascinating unreality up on that lonely
height. There remained but one thing solid in Jon's past—his mother; but
one thing solid in Fleur's—her father; and of these figures, as though
seen in the distance with disapproving faces, they spoke little.

The Down dipped and rose again toward Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of
far sea came into view, a sparrow-hawk hovered in the sun's eye so that
the blood-nourished brown of his wings gleamed nearly red. Jon had a
passion for birds, and an aptitude for sitting very still to watch them;
keen-sighted, and with a memory for what interested him, on birds he was
almost worth listening to. But in Chanctonbury Ring there were none—its
great beech temple was empty of life, and almost chilly at this early
hour; they came out willingly again into the sun on the far side. It was
Fleur's turn now. She spoke of dogs, and the way people treated them. It
was wicked to keep them on chains! She would like to flog people who did
that. Jon was astonished to find her so humanitarian. She knew a dog,
it seemed, which some farmer near her home kept chained up at the end of
his chicken run, in all weathers, till it had almost lost its voice from
barking!

“And the misery is,” she said vehemently, “that if the poor thing didn't
bark at every one who passes it wouldn't be kept there. I do think men
are cunning brutes. I've let it go twice, on the sly; it's nearly bitten
me both times, and then it goes simply mad with joy; but it always runs
back home at last, and they chain it up again. If I had my way, I'd
chain that man up.” Jon saw her teeth and her eyes gleam. “I'd brand him
on his forehead with the word 'Brute'. that would teach him!”

Jon agreed that it would be a good remedy.

“It's their sense of property,” he said, “which makes people chain
things. The last generation thought of nothing but property; and that's
why there was the War.”

“Oh!” said Fleur, “I never thought of that. Your people and mine
quarrelled about property. And anyway we've all got it—at least, I
suppose your people have.”

“Oh! yes, luckily; I don't suppose I shall be any good at making money.”

“If you were, I don't believe I should like you.”

Jon slipped his hand tremulously under her arm. Fleur looked straight
before her and chanted:

“Jon, Jon, the farmer's son, Stole a pig, and away he run!”

Jon's arm crept round her waist.

“This is rather sudden,” said Fleur calmly; “do you often do it?”

Jon dropped his arm. But when she laughed his arm stole back again; and
Fleur began to sing:

“O who will oer the downs so free, O who will with me ride? O who will
up and follow me—-”

“Sing, Jon!”

Jon sang. The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning church
far away over in Steyning. They went on from tune to tune, till Fleur
said:

“My God! I am hungry now!”

“Oh! I am sorry!”

She looked round into his face.

“Jon, you're rather a darling.”

And she pressed his hand against her waist. Jon almost reeled from
happiness. A yellow-and-white dog coursing a hare startled them apart.
They watched the two vanish down the slope, till Fleur said with a sigh:
“He'll never catch it, thank goodness! What's the time? Mine's stopped.
I never wound it.”

Jon looked at his watch. “By Jove!” he said, “mine's stopped; too.”

They walked on again, but only hand in hand.

“If the grass is dry,” said Fleur, “let's sit down for half a minute.”

Jon took off his coat, and they shared it.

“Smell! Actually wild thyme!”

With his arm round her waist again, they sat some minutes in silence.

“We are goats!” cried Fleur, jumping up; “we shall be most fearfully
late, and look so silly, and put them on their guard. Look here, Jon We
only came out to get an appetite for breakfast, and lost our way. See?”

“Yes,” said Jon.

“It's serious; there'll be a stopper put on us. Are you a good liar?”

“I believe not very; but I can try.”

Fleur frowned.

“You know,” she said, “I realize that they don't mean us to be friends.”

“Why not?”

“I told you why.”

“But that's silly.”

“Yes; but you don't know my father!”

“I suppose he's fearfully fond of you.”

“You see, I'm an only child. And so are you—of your mother. Isn't it
a bore? There's so much expected of one. By the time they've done
expecting, one's as good as dead.”

“Yes,” muttered Jon, “life's beastly short. One wants to live forever,
and know everything.”

“And love everybody?”

“No,” cried Jon; “I only want to love once—you.”

“Indeed! You're coming on! Oh! Look! There's the chalk-pit; we can't be
very far now. Let's run.”

Jon followed, wondering fearfully if he had offended her.

The chalk-pit was full of sunshine and the murmuration of bees. Fleur
flung back her hair.

“Well,” she said, “in case of accidents, you may give me one kiss, Jon,”
and she pushed her cheek forward. With ecstasy he kissed that hot soft
cheek.

“Now, remember! We lost our way; and leave it to me as much as you can.
I'm going to be rather beastly to you; it's safer; try and be beastly to
me!”

Jon shook his head. “That's impossible.”

“Just to please me; till five o'clock, at all events.”

“Anybody will be able to see through it,” said Jon gloomily.

“Well, do your best. Look! There they are! Wave your hat! Oh! you
haven't got one. Well, I'll cooee! Get a little away from me, and look
sulky.”

Five minutes later, entering the house and doing his utmost to look
sulky, Jon heard her clear voice in the dining-room:

“Oh! I'm simply ravenous! He's going to be a farmer—and he loses his
way! The boy's an idiot!”





IX. GOYA

Lunch was over and Soames mounted to the picture-gallery in his house
near Mapleduram. He had what Annette called “a grief.” Fleur was not
yet home. She had been expected on Wednesday; had wired that it would be
Friday; and again on Friday that it would be Sunday afternoon; and here
were her aunt, and her cousins the Cardigans, and this fellow Profond,
and everything flat as a pancake for the want of her. He stood before
his Gauguin—sorest point of his collection. He had bought the ugly great
thing with two early Matisses before the War, because there was such
a fuss about those Post-Impressionist chaps. He was wondering whether
Profond would take them off his hands—the fellow seemed not to know
what to do with his money—when he heard his sister's voice say: “I think
that's a horrid thing, Soames,” and saw that Winifred had followed him
up.

“Oh! you do?” he said dryly; “I gave five hundred for it.”

“Fancy! Women aren't made like that even if they are black.”

Soames uttered a glum laugh. “You didn't come up to tell me that.”

“No. Do you know that Jolyon's boy is staying with Val and his wife?”

Soames spun round.

“What?”

“Yes,” drawled Winifred; “he's gone to live with them there while he
learns farming.”

Soames had turned away, but her voice pursued him as he walked up and
down. “I warned Val that neither of them was to be spoken to about old
matters.”

“Why didn't you tell me before?”

Winifred shrugged her substantial shoulders.

“Fleur does what she likes. You've always spoiled her. Besides, my dear
boy, what's the harm?”

“The harm!” muttered Soames. “Why, she—” he checked himself. The Juno,
the handkerchief, Fleur's eyes, her questions, and now this delay in
her return—the symptoms seemed to him so sinister that, faithful to his
nature, he could not part with them.

“I think you take too much care,” said Winifred. “If I were you, I
should tell her of that old matter. It's no good thinking that girls in
these days are as they used to be. Where they pick up their knowledge I
can't tell, but they seem to know everything.”

Over Soames' face, closely composed, passed a sort of spasm, and
Winifred added hastily:

“If you don't like to speak of it, I could for you.”

Soames shook his head. Unless there was absolute necessity the thought
that his adored daughter should learn of that old scandal hurt his pride
too much.

“No,” he said, “not yet. Never if I can help it.

“Nonsense, my dear. Think what people are!”

“Twenty years is a long time,” muttered Soames. “Outside our family,
who's likely to remember?”

Winifred was silenced. She inclined more and more to that peace and
quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in her youth. And,
since pictures always depressed her, she soon went down again.

Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya
and the copy of the fresco “La Vendimia.” His acquisition of the real
Goya rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested interests and
passions which mesh the bright-winged fly of human life. The real
Goya's noble owner's ancestor had come into possession of it during
some Spanish war—it was in a word loot. The noble owner had remained
in ignorance of its value until in the nineties an enterprising critic
discovered that a Spanish painter named Goya was a genius. It was only
a fair Goya, but almost unique in England, and the noble owner became a
marked man. Having many possessions and that aristocratic culture
which, independent of mere sensuous enjoyment, is founded on the sounder
principle that one must know everything and be fearfully interested in
life, he had fully intended to keep an article which contributed to his
reputation while he was alive, and to leave it to the nation after
he was dead. Fortunately for Soames, the House of Lords was violently
attacked in 1909, and the noble owner became alarmed and angry. 'If,'
he said to himself, 'they think they can have it both ways they are very
much mistaken. So long as they leave me in quiet enjoyment the nation
can have some of my pictures at my death. But if the nation is going to
bait me, and rob me like this, I'm damned if I won't sell the lot. They
can't have my private property and my public spirit-both.' He brooded
in this fashion for several months till one morning, after reading the
speech of a certain statesman, he telegraphed to his agent to come
down and bring Bodkin. On going over the collection Bodkin, than whose
opinion on market values none was more sought, pronounced that with a
free hand to sell to America, Germany, and other places where there was
an interest in art, a lot more money could be made than by selling in
England. The noble owner's public spirit—he said—was well known but the
pictures were unique. The noble owner put this opinion in his pipe and
smoked it for a year. At the end of that time he read another speech by
the same statesman, and telegraphed to his agents: “Give Bodkin a free
hand.” It was at this juncture that Bodkin conceived the idea which
saved the Goya and two other unique pictures for the native country
of the noble owner. With one hand Bodkin proffered the pictures to
the foreign market, with the other he formed a list of private British
collectors. Having obtained what he considered the highest possible
bids from across the seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the private
British collectors, and invited them, of their public spirit, to
outbid. In three instances (including the Goya) out of twenty-one he was
successful. And why? One of the private collectors made buttons—he
had made so many that he desired that his wife should be called Lady
“Buttons.” He therefore bought a unique picture at great cost, and
gave it to the nation. It was “part,” his friends said, “of his general
game.” The second of the private collectors was an Americophobe, and
bought an unique picture to “spite the damned Yanks.” The third of
the private collectors was Soames, who—more sober than either of the,
others—bought after a visit to Madrid, because he was certain that Goya
was still on the up grade. Goya was not booming at the moment, but he
would come again; and, looking at that portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque
in its directness, but with its own queer sharp beauty of paint, he was
perfectly satisfied still that he had made no error, heavy though the
price had been—heaviest he had ever paid. And next to it was hanging the
copy of “La Vendimia.” There she was—the little wretch—looking back at
him in her dreamy mood, the mood he loved best because he felt so much
safer when she looked like that.

He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his nostrils,
and a voice said:

“Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?”

That Belgian chap, whose mother—as if Flemish blood were not enough—had
been Armenian! Subduing a natural irritation, he said:

“Are you a judge of pictures?”

“Well, I've got a few myself.”

“Any Post-Impressionists?”

“Ye-es, I rather like them.”

“What do you think of this?” said Soames, pointing to the Gauguin.

Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard.

“Rather fine, I think,” he said; “do you want to sell it?”

Soames checked his instinctive “Not particularly”—he would not chaffer
with this alien.

“Yes,” he said.

“What do you want for it?”

“What I gave.”

“All right,” said Monsieur Profond. “I'll be glad to take that small
picture. Post-Impressionists—they're awful dead, but they're amusin'. I
don' care for pictures much, but I've got some, just a small lot.”

“What do you care for?”

Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders.

“Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty nuts.”

“You're young,” said Soames. If the fellow must make a generalization,
he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked solidity!

“I don' worry,” replied Monsieur Profond smiling; “we're born, and we
die. Half the world's starvin'. I feed a small lot of babies out in my
mother's country; but what's the use? Might as well throw my money in
the river.”

Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya. He didn't know
what the fellow wanted.

“What shall I make my cheque for?” pursued Monsieur Profond.

“Five hundred,” said Soames shortly; “but I don't want you to take it if
you don't care for it more than that.”

“That's all right,” said Monsieur Profond; “I'll be 'appy to 'ave that
picture.”

He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold. Soames
watched the process uneasily. How on earth had the fellow known that he
wanted to sell that picture? Monsieur Profond held out the cheque.

“The English are awful funny about pictures,” he said. “So are the
French, so are my people. They're all awful funny.”

“I don't understand you,” said Soames stiffly.

“It's like hats,” said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, “small or large,
turnin' up or down—just the fashion. Awful funny.” And, smiling, he
drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the smoke of his
excellent cigar.

Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
ownership had been called in question. 'He's a cosmopolitan,' he
thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette,
and saunter down the lawn toward the river. What his wife saw in the
fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak her language;
and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have called a
“small doubt” whether Annette was not too handsome to be walking with
any one so “cosmopolitan.” Even at that distance he could see the blue
fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet sunlight; and his
grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat—the fellow was a dandy! And he
could see the quick turn of his wife's head, so very straight on her
desirable neck and shoulders. That turn of her neck always seemed to him
a little too showy, and in the “Queen of all I survey” manner—not quite
distinguished. He watched them walk along the path at the bottom of the
garden. A young man in flannels joined them down there—a Sunday caller
no doubt, from up the river. He went back to his Goya. He was still
staring at that replica of Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news,
when his wife's voice said:

“Mr. Michael Mont, Soames. You invited him to see your pictures.”

There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!

“Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne. Jolly
day, isn't it?”

Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his
visitor. The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly—he seemed
always grinning. Why didn't he grow the rest of those idiotic little
moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon? What on
earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with these
tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers? Ugh! Affected young idiots! In
other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very clean.

“Happy to see you!” he said.

The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became
transfixed. “I say!” he said, “'some' picture!”

Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to
the Goya copy.

“Yes,” he said dryly, “that's not a Goya. It's a copy. I had it painted
because it reminded me of my daughter.”

“By Jove! I thought I knew the face, sir. Is she here?”

The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.

“She'll be in after tea,” he said. “Shall we go round the pictures?”

And Soames began that round which never tired him. He had not
anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an
original, but as they passed from section to section, period to period,
he was startled by the young man's frank and relevant remarks. Natively
shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his mask, Soames had not spent
thirty-eight years over his one hobby without knowing something more
about pictures than their market values. He was, as it were, the missing
link between the artist and the commercial public. Art for art's sake
and all that, of course, was cant. But aesthetics and good taste were
necessary. The appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what
gave a work of art its permanent market value, or in other words made
it “a work of art.” There was no real cleavage. And he was sufficiently
accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by one
who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: “Good old haystacks!” or of James
Maris: “Didn't he just paint and paper 'em! Mathew was the real swell,
sir; you could dig into his surfaces!” It was after the young man had
whistled before a Whistler, with the words, “D'you think he ever really
saw a naked woman, sir?” that Soames remarked:

“What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?”

“I, sir? I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that. Then in
the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock Exchange, snug and
warm and just noisy enough. But the Peace knocked that, shares seem off,
don't they? I've only been demobbed about a year. What do you recommend,
sir?”

“Have you got money?”

“Well,” answered the young man, “I've got a father; I kept him alive
during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now. Though, of course,
there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang on to his
property. What do you think about that, sir?”

Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.

“The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet. He's got
land, you know; it's a fatal disease.”

“This is my real Goya,” said Soames dryly.

“By George! He was a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled me
middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace.
He made no compromise with the public taste. That old boy was 'some'
explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day.
Couldn't he just paint! He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you think?”

“I have no Velasquez,” said Soames.

The young man stared. “No,” he said; “only nations or profiteers can
afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations
sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers by
force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an
Old Master—see schedule—must hang it in a public gallery? There seems
something in that.”

“Shall we go down to tea?” said Soames.

The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull. 'He's not dense,'
thought Soames, following him off the premises.

Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original “line,”
and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to
admiration the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the inglenook
below. He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice to the
sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of
brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea;
justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the
fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that
rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired, corseted solidity; to Soames, of
a certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the vivacious Michael
Mont, pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance,
growing a little stout; to Prosper Profond, with his expression as
who should say, “Well, Mr. Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small
party?” finally, to Jack Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned
sanguinity betraying the moving principle: “I'm English, and I live to
be fit.”

Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly
one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man—they were so
dull—should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so destroyed
all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to rest with ten
thousand other Englishmen without knowing the difference from the one
she had chosen to repose beside. “Oh!” she would say of him, in her
“amusing” way, “Jack keeps himself so fearfully fit; he's never had
a day's illness in his life. He went right through the War without a
finger-ache. You really can't imagine how fit he is!” Indeed, he was
so “fit” that he couldn't see when she was flirting, which was such a
comfort in a way. All the same she was quite fond of him, so far as one
could be of a sports-machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after
his pattern. Her eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with
Prosper Profond. There was no “small” sport or game which Monsieur
Profond had not played at too, it seemed, from skittles to
tarpon-fishing, and worn out every one. Imogen would sometimes wish that
they had worn out Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them
with the simple zeal of a school-girl learning hockey; at the age of
Great-uncle Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing carpet golf
in her bedroom, and “wiping somebody's eye.”

He was telling them now how he had “pipped the pro—a charmin' fellow,
playin' a very good game,” at the last hole this morning; and how he
had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying to incite Prosper
Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea—do him good—“keep him fit.

“But what's the use of keepin' fit?” said Monsieur Profond.

“Yes, sir,” murmured Michael Mont, “what do you keep fit for?”

“Jack,” cried Imogen, enchanted, “what do you keep fit for?”

Jack Cardigan stared with all his health. The questions were like the
buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away. During the
War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that it was over
he either did not know, or shrank in delicacy from explanation of his
moving principle.

“But he's right,” said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, “there's nothin'
left but keepin' fit.”

The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed unanswered,
but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.

“Good!” he cried. “That's the great discovery of the War. We all thought
we were progressing—now we know we're only changing.”

“For the worse,” said Monsieur Profond genially.

“How you are cheerful, Prosper!” murmured Annette.

“You come and play tennis!” said Jack Cardigan; “you've got the hump.
We'll soon take that down. D'you play, Mr. Mont?”

“I hit the ball about, sir.”

At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of
preparation for the future which guided his existence.

“When Fleur comes—” he heard Jack Cardigan say.

Ah! and why didn't she come? He passed through drawing-room, hall, and
porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car. All
was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the air.
There were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by the
sunlight. Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had waited in
such agony with her life and her mother's balanced in his hands, came
to him sharply. He had saved her then, to be the flower of his life. And
now! was she going to give him trouble—pain—give him trouble? He did
not like the look of things! A blackbird broke in on his reverie with an
evening song—a great big fellow up in that acacia-tree. Soames had taken
quite an interest in his birds of late years; he and Fleur would walk
round and watch them; her eyes were sharp as needles, and she knew every
nest. He saw her dog, a retriever, lying on the drive in a patch of
sunlight, and called to him. “Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!”
The dog came slowly with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid
a pat on his head. The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur
for him; no more, no less. 'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too fond!' He
was like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea. Uninsured again—as in
that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and jealous
in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman—his first wife—the
mother of this infernal boy. Ah! There was the car at last! It drew up,
it had luggage, but no Fleur.

“Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path.”

Walking all those miles? Soames stared. The man's face had the beginning
of a smile on it. What was he grinning at? And very quickly he turned,
saying, “All right, Sims!” and went into the house. He mounted to the
picture-gallery once more. He had from there a view of the river bank,
and stood with his eyes fixed on it, oblivious of the fact that it would
be an hour at least before her figure showed there. Walking up! And that
fellow's grin! The boy—! He turned abruptly from the window. He couldn't
spy on her. If she wanted to keep things from him—she must; he could not
spy on her. His heart felt empty, and bitterness mounted from it into
his very mouth. The staccato shouts of Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball,
the laugh of young Mont rose in the stillness and came in. He hoped they
were making that chap Profond run. And the girl in “La Vendimia” stood
with her arm akimbo and her dreamy eyes looking past him. 'I've done all
I could for you,' he thought, 'since you were no higher than my knee.
You aren't going to—to—hurt me, are you?'

But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to
tone down. 'There's no real life in it,' thought Soames. 'Why doesn't
she come?'





X.—TRIO

Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth
generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end prolonged unto the
ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to
snapping-point. Never had Fleur been so “fine,” Holly so watchful, Val
so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed. What he learned of
farming in that week might have been balanced on the point of a penknife
and puffed off. He, whose nature was essentially averse from intrigue,
and whose adoration of Fleur disposed him to think that any need for
concealing it was “skittles,” chafed and fretted, yet obeyed, taking
what relief he could in the few moments when they were alone.
On Thursday, while they were standing in the bay window of the
drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:

“Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if you were
to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me down, and
just get back here by the last train, after. You were going home anyway,
weren't you?”

Jon nodded.

“Anything to be with you,” he said; “only why need I pretend—”

Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:

“You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me. It's serious
about our people. We've simply got to be secret at present, if we want
to be together.” The door was opened, and she added loudly: “You are a
duffer, Jon.”

Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge
about a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.

On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning out
of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of Paddington
station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger-nail tapping on his
door. He rushed to it and listened. Again the sound. It was a nail. He
opened. Oh! What a lovely thing came in!

“I wanted to show you my fancy dress,” it said, and struck an attitude
at the foot of his bed.

Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door. The apparition
wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a
wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist.

It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a
fan which touched its head.

“This ought to be a basket of grapes,” it whispered, “but I haven't got
it here. It's my Goya dress. And this is the attitude in the picture. Do
you like it?”

“It's a dream.”

The apparition pirouetted. “Touch it, and see.”

Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.

“Grape colour,” came the whisper, “all grapes—La Vendimia—the vintage.”

Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up,
with adoring eyes.

“Oh! Jon,” it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again,
and, gliding out, was gone.

Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed.
How long he stayed like that he did not know. The little noises—of the
tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling—as in a dream—went on
about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled and
whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air. And his
forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place between the
brows, like the imprint of a flower. Love filled his soul, that love of
boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the
down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory—a
searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or, once in many times, vintage full
and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.

Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to show
what long marches lay between him and his great-great-grandfather, the
first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea. Jon was sensitive as a girl,
more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the day; imaginative as one
of his half-sister June's “lame duck” painters; affectionate as a son
of his father and his mother naturally would be. And yet, in his inner
tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret
tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not
to know when he was beaten. Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys
get a bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature
dark, and been but normally unhappy there. Only with his mother had he,
up till then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home
to Robin Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said
that he must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never
yet kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met again,
unless he found that she knew already. So intolerable did this seem to
him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in
London. And the first thing his mother said to him was:

“So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon. What
is she like on second thoughts?”

With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:

“Oh! awfully jolly, Mum.”

Her arm pressed his.

Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to
falsify Fleur's fears and to release his soul. He turned to look at her,
but something in her smiling face—something which only he perhaps would
have caught—stopped the words bubbling up in him. Could fear go with a
smile? If so, there was fear in her face. And out of Jon tumbled quite
other words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs. Talking fast, he
waited for her to come back to Fleur. But she did not. Nor did
his father mention her, though of course he, too, must know. What
deprivation, and killing of reality was in his silence about Fleur—when
he was so full of her; when his mother was so full of Jon, and his
father so full of his mother! And so the trio spent the evening of that
Saturday.

After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up
where his fingers had run through it. He gazed at his mother while she
played, but he saw Fleur—Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the
sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering,
stooping, kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot
himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was
Dad looking like that for? The expression on his face was so sad and
puzzling. It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and
went and sat on the arm of his father's chair. From there he could not
see his face; and again he saw Fleur—in his mother's hands, slim and
white on the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair;
and down the long room in the open window where the May night walked
outside.

When he went up to bed his mother came into his room. She stood at the
window, and said:

“Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
wonderfully. I always think they look beautiful under a dropping moon. I
wish you had known your grandfather, Jon.”

“Were you married to father when he was alive?” asked Jon suddenly.

“No, dear; he died in '92—very old—eighty-five, I think.”

“Is Father like him?”

“A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid.”

“I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?”

“One of June's 'lame ducks.' But it's quite good.”

Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm. “Tell me about the family
quarrel, Mum.”

He felt her arm quivering. “No, dear; that's for your Father some day,
if he thinks fit.”

“Then it was serious,” said Jon, with a catch in his breath.

“Yes.” And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether the
arm or the hand within it were quivering most.

“Some people,” said Irene softly, “think the moon on her back is evil;
to me she's always lovely. Look at those cypress shadows! Jon, Father
says we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months. Would you like?”

Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp and
so confused. Italy with his mother! A fortnight ago it would have been
perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that the sudden
suggestion had to do with Fleur. He stammered out:

“Oh! yes; only—I don't know. Ought I—now I've just begun? I'd like to
think it over.”

Her voice answered, cool and gentle:

“Yes, dear; think it over. But better now than when you've begun farming
seriously. Italy with you! It would be nice!”

Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.

“Do you think you ought to leave Father?” he said feebly, feeling very
mean.

“Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least before
you settle down to anything.”

The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes—he knew—that his father
and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he himself. They
wanted to keep him from Fleur. His heart hardened. And, as if she felt
that process going on, his mother said:

“Good-night, darling. Have a good sleep and think it over. But it would
be lovely!”

She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face. Jon
stood feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty little boy;
sore because he was not loving, and because he was justified in his own
eyes.

But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed through
the dressing-room between it and her husband's.

“Well?”

“He will think it over, Jolyon.”

Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said quietly:

“You had better let me tell him, and have done with it. After all, Jon
has the instincts of a gentleman. He has only to understand—”

“Only! He can't understand; that's impossible.”

“I believe I could have at his age.”

Irene caught his hand. “You were always more of a realist than Jon; and
never so innocent.”

“That's true,” said Jolyon. “It's queer, isn't it? You and I would tell
our stories to the world without a particle of shame; but our own boy
stumps us.”

“We've never cared whether the world approves or not.”

“Jon would not disapprove of us!”

“Oh! Jolyon, yes. He's in love, I feel he's in love. And he'd say: 'My
mother once married without love! How could she have!' It'll seem to him
a crime! And so it was!”

Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:

“Ah! why on earth are we born young? Now, if only we were born old and
grew younger year by year, we should understand how things happen, and
drop all our cursed intolerance. But you know if the boy is really
in love, he won't forget, even if he goes to Italy. We're a tenacious
breed; and he'll know by instinct why he's being sent. Nothing will
really cure him but the shock of being told.”

“Let me try, anyway.”

Jolyon stood a moment without speaking. Between this devil and this deep
sea—the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of losing his wife
for two months—he secretly hoped for the devil; yet if she wished for
the deep sea he must put up with it. After all, it would be training for
that departure from which there would be no return. And, taking her in
his arms, he kissed her eyes, and said:

“As you will, my love.”





XI.—DUET

That “small” emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with
extinction. Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his time
and a full week after, as it seemed to him. He stood at the appointed
bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris tweed suit
exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart. He read the
names of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at last, to avoid
being regarded with suspicion by the book-stall clerk. It was called
“The Heart of the Trail!” which must mean something, though it did not
seem to. He also bought “The Lady's Mirror” and “The Landsman.” Every
minute was an hour long, and full of horrid imaginings. After nineteen
had passed, he saw her with a bag and a porter wheeling her luggage. She
came swiftly; she came cool. She greeted him as if he were a brother.

“First class,” she said to the porter, “corner seats; opposite.”

Jon admired her frightful self-possession.

“Can't we get a carriage to ourselves,” he whispered.

“No good; it's a stopping train. After Maidenhead perhaps. Look natural,
Jon.”

Jon screwed his features into a scowl. They got in—with two other
beasts!—oh! heaven! He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his confusion.
The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there, and looking as if
he knew all about it into the bargain.

Fleur hid herself behind “The Lady's Mirror.” Jon imitated her behind
“The Landsman.” The train started. Fleur let “The Lady's Mirror” fall
and leaned forward.

“Well?” she said.

“It's seemed about fifteen days.”

She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.

“Look natural,” murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of laughter.
It hurt him. How could he look natural with Italy hanging over him? He
had meant to break it to her gently, but now he blurted it out.

“They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months.”

Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her lips. “Oh!”
she said. It was all, but it was much.

That “Oh!” was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing ready for
riposte. It came.

“You must go!”

“Go?” said Jon in a strangled voice.

“Of course.”

“But—two months—it's ghastly.”

“No,” said Fleur, “six weeks. You'll have forgotten me by t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2596