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To Let

by John Galsworthy · English · Gutenberg #3817 · 514,588 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: To Let

Author: John Galsworthy


        
Release date: March 1, 2003 [eBook #3817]
                Most recently updated: January 9, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TO LET ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Rowe and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.










TO LET


by

John Galsworthy




AUTHOR'S NOTE

With this volume, The Forsyte Saga--that series comprising "The Man of
Property," "Indian Summer of a Forsyte" (from the volume "Five Tales"),
"In Chancery," and "Awakening"--comes to an end. J. G.




CONTENTS

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. 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 FORSYTES




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 favor 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 Labor,
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-five, 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 flabby;
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 towards 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 for ever, 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 gun-grey 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's 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 sere 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 civilisation 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 wisely 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 slug-like 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 filagree figure
from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove
was a large canvas with a great many square tomato-colored 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 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. 'Crazy-looking 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, invested in War Bonds, bought no clothes,
lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he could have
done at his age. Indeed, 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, precisely as if he had been keeping her waiting:

"Hallo, Father! There you are!"

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 color,
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 bad enough, 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, Fleur 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 humor 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 handkerchief!" 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 greatnephews and greatnieces, 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's 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, grey-blue 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 propriety. 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 to-morrow 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 Dortie, 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 afterwards 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 coeducated, 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 down-stairs 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
Mapledurham--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 absent-mindedness, 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's 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's 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
towards 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 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, the 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 knick-knacks; 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 bee's
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
up-stairs. 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 aloud.

"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 sleeping 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 banisters, 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, or rather Holly had, 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 has 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," said Val suddenly, "wants rousing; she doesn't get her hind
legs under her up-hill. 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 flutter. 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 favorable 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
Englishwomen--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," added 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 used to dine with his father
at the Iseeum Club.

"I was a racing pal of your father's," 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' care for it. I'm a yachtin' man. I don' 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 towards 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' 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 grandfather 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--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 flop, 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. By the way, 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 towards 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 aging 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 his 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, subconsciousness, and emanation from the storehouse of
this world can't account for just as well. Wish I could! Wishes father
thoughts but they don't breed evidence."

Holly had pressed her lips again to his forehead with a 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 to 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 nowadays, 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 night-light, 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. From his window he 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 cartwheel. 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 towards historical
research, when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:

"Come along, you two," and he rose, his heart pushing him towards
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
sun-dial 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 for ever. 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 towards 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 towards Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of
far sea came into view, a sparrowhawk 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 o'er 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 with
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 realise 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 for ever,
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 Mapledurham. 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's 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 salved 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 an 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 Americo-phobe, and bought a 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 generalisation,
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 towards 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 towards 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 wreathe 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. Soames 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 scrutinised
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 gallery?"

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 Velasquezes 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
ingle-nook 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 harpon-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 schoolgirl 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 onto the drive, and stood there listening for the car. All
was still and Sunday-fied; 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--he 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
pen-knife and puffed off. He, whose nature was essentially averse to
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 this 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
book-stall 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 bookstall, 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 then. We'll
meet in the National Gallery the day after you get back."

Jon laughed.

"But suppose you've forgotten ME," he muttered into the noise of the
train.

Fleur shook her head.

"Some other beast--" murmured Jon.

Her foot touched his.

"No other beast," she said, lifting the "Lady's Mirror."

The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.

'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at all.'

The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.

"I never let go," she said; "do you?"

Jon shook his head vehemently.

"Never!" he said. "Will you write to me?"

"No; but YOU can--to my club."

She had a Club; she was wonderful!

"Did you pump Holly?" he muttered.

"Yes, but got nothing. I didn't dare pump hard."

"What can it be?" cried Jon.

"I shall find out all right."

A long silence followed till Fleur said: "This is Maidenhead, stand by,
Jon!"

The train stopped. The remaining passenger got out. Fleur drew down her
blind.

"Quick!" she cried. "Hang out! Look as much of a beast as you can."

Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he scowled
like that! An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the handle. It
turned, but the lock would not open. The train moved, the young lady
darted to another carriage.

"What luck!" cried Jon. "It jammed."

"Yes," said Fleur; "I was holding it."

The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.

"Look out for the corridor," she whispered; "and--quick!"

Her lips met his. And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten seconds
Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond that, when he was again
sitting opposite that demure figure, he was pale as death. He heard her
sigh, and the sound seemed to him the most precious he had ever
heard--an exquisite declaration that he meant something to her.

"Six weeks isn't really long," she said; "and you can easily make it
six if you keep your head out there, and never seem to think of me."

Jon gasped.

"This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't you
see? If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop being
ridiculous about it. Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain; there's a girl in
a Goya picture at Madrid who's like me, Father says. Only she
isn't--we've got a copy of her."

It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog. "I'll make
it Spain," he said, "Mother won't mind; she's never been there. And my
father thinks a lot of Goya."

"Oh! yes, he's a painter--isn't he?"

"Only water-colour," said Jon, with honesty.

"When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to Caversham
lock and wait for me. I'll send the car home and we'll walk by the
towing-path."

Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the world
well lost, and one eye on the corridor. But the train seemed to run
twice as fast now, and its sound was almost lost in that of Jon's
sighing.

"We're getting near," said Fleur; "the towing-path's awfully exposed.
One more! Oh! Jon, don't forget me."

Jon answered with his kiss. And very soon, a flushed,
distracted-looking youth could have been seen--as they say--leaping
from the train and hurrying along the platform, searching his pockets
for his ticket.

When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond
Caversham lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure of
equanimity. If they had to part, he would not make a scene! A breeze by
the bright river threw the white side of the willow leaves up into the
sunlight, and followed those two with its faint rustle.

"I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy," said Fleur. "Did you
look pretty natural as you went out?" "I don't know. What is natural?"

"It's natural to you to look seriously happy. When I first saw you I
thought you weren't a bit like other people."

"Exactly what I thought when I saw you. I knew at once I should never
love anybody else."

Fleur laughed.

"We're absurdly young. And love's young dream is out of date, Jon.
Besides, it's awfully wasteful. Think of all the fun you might have.
You haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really. And there's me. I
wonder!"

Confusion came on Jon's spirit. How could she say such things just as
they were going to part?

"If you feel like that," he said, "I can't go. I shall tell Mother that
I ought to try and work. There's always the condition of the world!"

"The condition of the world!"

Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"But there is," he said; "think of the people starving!"

Fleur shook her head. "No, no, I never, never will make myself
miserable for nothing."

"Nothing! But there's an awful state of things, and of course one ought
to help."

"Oh! yes, I know all that. But you can't help people, Jon; they're
hopeless. When you pull them out of a hole they only get into another.
Look at them, still fighting and plotting and struggling, though
they're dying in heaps all the time. Idiots!"

"Aren't you sorry for them?"

"Oh! sorry--yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy about it;
that's no good."

And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each other's
natures.

"I think people are brutes and idiots," said Fleur stubbornly.

"I think they're poor wretches," said Jon. It was as if they had
quarrelled--and at this supreme and awful moment, with parting visible
out there in that last gap of the willows!

"Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me."

Jon stood still. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs
trembled. Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.

"I MUST believe in things," said Jon with a sort of agony; "we're all
meant to enjoy life."

Fleur laughed: "Yes; and that's what you won't do, if you don't take
care. But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself wretched.
There are lots of people like that, of course."

She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned. Was it Fleur
thus staring at the water? Jon had an unreal feeling as if he were
passing through the scene in a book where the lover has to choose
between love and duty. But just then she looked round at him. Never was
anything so intoxicating as that vivacious look. It acted on him
exactly as the tug of a chain acts on a dog--brought him up to her with
his tail wagging and his tongue out.

"Don't let's be silly," she said, "time's too short. Look, Jon, you can
just see where I've got to cross the river. There, round the bend,
where the woods begin."

Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the
trees--and felt his heart sink.

"I mustn't dawdle any more. It's no good going beyond the next hedge,
it gets all open. Let's get on to it and say good-bye."

They went side by side, hand in hand, silently towards the hedge, where
the mayflower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.

"My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street, Piccadilly. Letters there
will be quite safe, and I'm almost always up once a week."

Jon nodded. His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared straight
before him.

"To-day's the twenty-third of May," said Fleur; "on the ninth of July I
shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne' at three o'clock; will
you?"

"I will."

"If you feel as bad as I it's all right. Let those people pass!"

A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday
fashion.

The last of them passed the wicket gate.

"Domesticity!" said Fleur, and blotted herself against the hawthorn
hedge. The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink cluster
brushed her cheek. Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.

"Good-bye, Jon!" For a second they stood with hands hard clasped. Then
their lips met for the third time, and when they parted Fleur broke
away and fled through the wicket gate. Jon stood where she had left
him, with his forehead against that pink cluster. Gone! For an
eternity--for seven weeks all but two days! And here he was, wasting
the last sight of her! He rushed to the gate. She was walking swiftly
on the heels of the straggling children. She turned her head, he saw
her hand make a little flitting gesture; then she sped on, and the
trailing family blotted her out from his view.

The words of a comic song--

    "Paddington groan--worst ever known--
    He gave a sepulchral Paddington groan--"

came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading station.
All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with "The Heart of
the Trail" open on his knee, knitting in his head a poem so full of
feeling that it would not rhyme.




XII

CAPRICE


Fleur sped on. She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and wanted
all her wits about her when she got in. She passed the islands, the
station, and hotel, and was about to take the ferry, when she saw a
skiff with a young man standing up in it, and holding to the bushes.

"Miss Forsyte," he said; "let me put you across. I've come on purpose."

She looked at him in blank amazement.

"It's all right, I've been having tea with your people. I thought I'd
save you the last bit. It's on my way, I'm just off back to Pangbourne.
My name's Mont. I saw you at the picture-gallery--you remember--when
your father invited me to see his pictures."

"Oh!" said Fleur; "yes--the handkerchief."

To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped down
into the skiff. Still emotional, and a little out of breath, she sat
silent; not so the young man. She had never heard any one say so much
in so short a time. He told her his age, twenty-four, his weight, ten
stone eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his
sensations under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticised
the Juno, mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on
the Goya copy, said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in
rapidly the condition of England; spoke of Monsieur Profond--or
whatever his name was--as "an awful sport"; thought her father had some
ripping pictures and some rather "dug-up"; hoped he might row down
again and take her on the river because he was quite trustworthy;
inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go
to the Russian ballet together some time--considered the name Fleur
Forsyte simply topping; cursed his people for giving him the name of
Michael on the top of Mont; outlined his father, and said that if she
wanted a good book she should read "Job"; his father was rather like
Job while Job still had land.

"But Job didn't have land," Fleur murmured; "he only had flocks and
herds and moved on."

"Ah!" answered Michael Mont, "I wish my gov'nor would move on. Not that
I want his land. Land's an awful bore in these days, don't you think?"

"We never have it in my family," said Fleur. "We have everything else.
I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental farm in Dorset,
because we came from there originally, but it cost him more than it
made him happy."

"Did he sell it?"

"No; he kept it."

"Why?"

"Because nobody would buy it."

"Good for the old boy!"

"No, it wasn't good for him. Father says it soured him. His name was
Swithin."

"What a corking name!"

"Do you know," said Fleur, "that we're getting farther off, not nearer?
This river flows."

"Splendid!" cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; "it's good to meet
a girl who's got wit."

"But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural."

Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.

"Look out!" cried Fleur. "Your scull!"

"All right! It's thick enough to bear a scratch."

"Do you mind sculling?" said Fleur severely, "I want to get in."

"Ah! but when you get in, you see, I shan't see you any more to-day.
Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on her bed after saying
her prayers. Don't you bless the day that gave you a French mother, and
a name like yours?"

"I like my name, but Father gave it me. Mother wanted me called
Marguerite."

"Which is absurd. Do you mind calling me M. M. and letting me call you
F. F.? It's in the spirit of the age."

"I don't mind anything, so long as I get in." Mont caught a little
crab, and answered: "That was a nasty one!"

"Please row."

"I am." And he did for several strokes, looking at her with rueful
eagerness. "Of course, you know," he ejaculated, pausing, "that I came
to see you, not your father's pictures."

Fleur rose.

"If you don't row, I shall get out and swim."

"Really and truly? Then I could come in after you."

"Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once."

When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and
grasping his hair with both hands, looked at her.

Fleur smiled.

"Don't!" cried the irrepressible Mont. "I know you're going to say:
'Out, damned hair!'"

Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand. "Good-bye, Mr. M.
M.!" she called, and was gone among the rose-trees. She looked at her
wrist-watch and the windows of the house. It struck her as curiously
uninhabited. Past six! The pigeons were just gathering to roost, and
sunlight slanted on the dove-cot, on their snowy feathers, and beyond
in a shower on the top boughs of the woods. The click of billiard-balls
came from the ingle-nook--Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a faint rustling,
too, from an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in this old English
garden. She reached the verandah, and was passing in, but stopped at
the sound of voices from the drawing-room to her left. Mother! Profond!
From behind the verandah screen which fenced the ingle-nook she heard
these words!

"I don't, Annette."

Did Father know that he called her mother "Annette"? Always on the side
of her father--as children are ever on one side or the other in houses
where relations are a little strained--she stood, uncertain. Her mother
was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly metallic voice--one word
she caught: "Demain." And Profond's answer: "All right." Fleur frowned.
A little sound came out into the stillness. Then Profond's voice: "I'm
takin' a small stroll."

Fleur darted through the window into the morning room. There he
came--from the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn; and
the click of billiard-balls which, in listening for other sounds, she
had ceased to hear, began again. She shook herself, passed into the
hall, and opened the drawing-room door. Her mother was sitting on the
sofa between the windows, her knees crossed, her head resting on a
cushion, her lips half parted, her eyes half closed. She looked
extraordinarily handsome.

"Ah! Here you are, Fleur! Your father is beginning to fuss."

"Where is he?"

"In the picture-gallery. Go up!"

"What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?"

"To-morrow? I go up to London with your aunt. Why?"

"I thought you might be. Will you get me a quite plain parasol?"

"What color?"

"Green. They're all going back, I suppose."

"Yes, all; you will console your father. Kiss me, then."

Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead, and
went out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in the other
corner. She ran up-stairs.

Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the
regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard
imposed on herself. She claimed to regulate her own life, not those of
others; besides, an unerring instinct for what was likely to advantage
her own case was already at work. In a disturbed domestic atmosphere
the heart she had set on Jon would have a better chance. None the less
was she offended, as a flower by a crisping wind. If that man had
really been kissing her mother it was--serious, and her father ought to
know.

"Demain!" "All right!" And her mother going up to Town! She turned in
to her bedroom and hung out of the window to cool her face, which had
suddenly grown very hot. Jon must be at the station by now! What did
her father know about Jon! Probably everything--pretty nearly!

She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time,
and ran up to the gallery.

Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens--the
picture he loved best. He did not turn at the sound of the door, but
she knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt. She came up softly
behind him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his
shoulder, till her cheek lay against his. It was an advance which had
never yet failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst.

"Well," he said stonily, "so you've come!"

"Is that all," murmured Fleur, "from a bad parent?" and rubbed her
cheek against his.

Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.

"Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and off?"

"Darling, it was very harmless."

"Harmless! Much you know what's harmless and what isn't."

Fleur dropped her arms.

"Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it."

And she went over to the window-seat.

Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet. He
looked very grey. 'He has nice small feet,' she thought, catching his
eye, at once averted from her.

"You're my only comfort," said Soames suddenly, "and you go on like
this."

Fleur's heart began to beat.

"Like what, dear?"

Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it, might
have been called furtive.

"You know what I told you," he said. "I don't choose to have anything
to do with that branch of our family."

"Yes, ducky, but I don't know why _I_ shouldn't."

Soames turned on his heel.

"I'm not going into the reasons," he said; "you ought to trust me,
Fleur!"

The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon,
and was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot. Unconsciously
she had assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of
the other, with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her
chest, and its hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her that
was not involuted, and yet--in spite of all--she retained a certain
grace.

"You knew my wishes," Soames went on, "and yet you stayed on there four
days. And I suppose that boy came with you to-day."

Fleur kept her eyes on him.

"I don't ask you anything," said Soames; "I make no inquisition where
you're concerned."

Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on her
hands. The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched, quite
still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-balls
mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack Cardigan had
turned the light up.

"Will it make you any happier," she said suddenly, "if I promise you
not to see him for say--the next six weeks?" She was not prepared for a
sort of tremble in the blankness of his voice.

"Six weeks? Six years--sixty years more like. Don't delude yourself,
Fleur; don't delude yourself!"

Fleur turned in alarm.

"Father, what is it?"

Soames came close enough to see her face.

"Don't tell me," he said, "that you're foolish enough to have any
feeling beyond caprice. That would be too much!" And he laughed.

Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it IS
deep! Oh! what is it?' And putting her hand through his arm she said
lightly:

"No, of course; caprice. Only, I like my caprices and I don't like
yours, dear."

"Mine!" said Soames bitterly, and turned away.

The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the
river. The trees had lost all gaiety of colour. She felt a sudden
hunger for Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again on
hers. And pressing her arms tight across her breast she forced out a
little light laugh.

"O la! la! What a small fuss! as Profond would say. Father, I don't
like that man."

She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.

"You don't?" he said. "Why?"

"Nothing," murmured Fleur; "just caprice!"

"No," said Soames; "not caprice!" And he tore what was in his hands
across. "You're right. _I_ don't like him either!"

"Look!" said Fleur softly. "There he goes! I hate his shoes; they don't
make any noise."

Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his side
pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced up at
the sky, as if saying: "I don't think much of that small moon."

Fleur drew back. "Isn't he a great cat?" she whispered; and the sharp
click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had capped the
cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: "In off the red!"

Monsieur Profond had resumed his strolling, to a teasing little tune in
his beard. What was it? Oh! yes, from "Rigoletto": "Donna e mobile."
Just what he would think! She squeezed her father's arm.

"Prowling!" she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house. It was
past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and night--still
and lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent clinging on
the riverside air. A blackbird suddenly burst out. Jon would be in
London by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the Serpentine, thinking
of her! A little sound beside her made her turn her eyes; her father
was again tearing the paper in his hands. Fleur saw it was a cheque.

"I shan't sell him my Gauguin," he said. "I don't know what your aunt
and Imogen see in him."

"Or Mother."

"Your mother!" said Soames.

'Poor Father!' she thought. 'He never looks happy--not really happy. I
don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have to, when Jon
comes back. Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'

"I'm going to dress," she said.

In her room she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress. It was of gold
tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the
ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes, and
a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold bells,
especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she pealed.
When she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could not see her;
it even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man Michael Mont would
not have a view. But the gong had sounded, and she went down.

She made a sensation in the drawing-room. Winifred thought it "Most
amusing." Imogen was enraptured. Jack Cardigan called it "stunning,"
"ripping," "topping," and "corking." Monsieur Profond, smiling with his
eyes, said: "That's a nice small dress!" Her mother, very handsome in
black, sat looking at her, and said nothing. It remained for her father
to apply the test of common sense. "What did you put on that thing for?
You're not going to dance."

Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.

"Caprice!"

Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred. Jack
Cardigan took her mother. Prosper Profond took Imogen. Fleur went in by
herself, with her bells jingling....

The "small" moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft
and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the
billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and
women. Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white shoulder,
fit as a flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for anything but
baby's slumber. For so many lay awake, or dreamed, teased by the
crisscross of the world.

The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see;
and the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones. Pheasants in the tall
trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the
gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the
sparrows of Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the
lack of wind. The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters,
scraped at her straw a little; and the few night-flitting things--bats,
moths, owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night
lay in the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still. Men and
women, alone, riding the hobbyhorses of anxiety or love, burned their
wavering tapers of dream and thought into the lonely hours.

Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime
of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can
put a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world
which had once suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not
these sounds, her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing
from railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious
of his forbidden image, and the sound of his voice which was taboo. And
she crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of the riverside
night that moment when his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her
cheek. Long she leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings
at life's candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their
pilgrimage to the lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a
Forsyte's house there is no open flame. But at last even she felt
sleepy, and, forgetting her bells, drew quickly in.

Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken from
stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear such
sounds.

'Caprice!' he thought. 'I can't tell. She's wilful. What shall I do?
Fleur!'

And long into the "small" night he brooded.




PART II


I

MOTHER AND SON


To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly
would scarcely have been adequate. He went as a well-natured dog goes
for a walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on the lawn.
He went looking back at it. Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are
wont to sulk. But Jon had little sulkiness in his composition. He
adored his mother, and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy
by his simply saying: "I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to
Italy so many times; I'd like it new to both of us."

The fellow was subtle besides being naif. He never forgot that he was
going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
therefore show no sign of wishing to do so. For one with so enticing a
mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food,
and thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most travelled
Englishman. Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound,
for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could
concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the
priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus
hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains,
singing birds in tiny cages, water-sellers, sunsets, melons, mules,
great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a
fascinating land.

It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
Jon, who, so far as he knew, had blood in him which was not English,
was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen. He
felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view of
things than himself. He confided to his mother that he must be an
unsociable beast--it was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk
about the things people did talk about. To which Irene had replied
simply: "Yes, Jon, I know."

In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating
what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's love.
Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly
sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type
of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but
which he now perceived to be no such thing. Her beauty was neither
English, French, Spanish, nor Italian--it was special! He appreciated,
too, as never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not
tell, for instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya
picture, "La Vendimia," or whether she knew that he had slipped back
there after lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half
an hour, a second and third time. It was not Fleur, of course, but like
enough to give him heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her
standing at the foot of his bed with her hand held above her head. To
keep a postcard reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it
out to look at became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or
late disclose themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy.
And his mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly
caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented
garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at
the view. His mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks
between the polled acacias, when her voice said:

"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"

He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school
to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."

"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol.'
Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when
he was in Spain in '92."

In '92--nine years before he had been born! What had been the previous
existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to share
in his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He looked
up at her. But something in her face--a look of life hard-lived, the
mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering--seemed with
its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
she was so beautiful, and so--so--but he could not frame what he felt
about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
deep, remote--his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the west,
which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
Phoenicians had dwelt--a dark, strange, secret race, above the land!
His mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician
past was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children
played and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that
she should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she
loved him and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance--he
had not even had the advantage of the war, like nearly everybody
else!--made him small in his own eyes.

That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof
of the town--as if inlaid with honey-comb of jet, ivory, and gold; and,
long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the
hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:

    "Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
    Spanish city darkened under her white stars!
    What says the voice--its clear--lingering anguish?

    Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
    Just a roadman, flinging to the moon his song?
    No! 'Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping.
    Just his cry: 'How long?'"

The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but bereaved
was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-long came to
him, which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart is weeping."
It was past two by the time he had finished it, and past three before
he went to sleep, having said it over to himself at least twenty-four
times. Next day he wrote it out and enclosed it in one of those letters
to Fleur, which he always finished before he went down, so as to have
his mind free and companionable.

About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he felt
a sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in the
eyes, and sickness. The sun had touched him too affectionately. The
next three days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled, aching
indifference to all except the feel of ice on his forehead and his
mother's smile. She never moved from his room, never relaxed her
noiseless vigilance, which seemed to Jon angelic. But there were
moments when he was extremely sorry for himself, and wished terribly
that Fleur could see him. Several times he took a poignant imaginary
leave of her and of the earth, tears oozing out of his eyes. He even
prepared the message he would send to her by his mother--who would
regret to her dying day that she had ever sought to separate them--his
poor mother! He was not slow, however, in perceiving that he had now
his excuse for going home.

Towards half past six each evening came a "gasgacha" of bells--a
cascade of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling
back chime on chime. After listening to them on the fourth day he said
suddenly:

"I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot."

"Very well, darling. As soon as you're fit to travel." And at once he
felt better, and--meaner.

They had been out five weeks when they turned towards home. Jon's head
was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a hat
lined by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk, and he
still walked from choice in the shade. As the long struggle of
discretion between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more
whether she could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had
brought him away from. Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a day
in Madrid between their trains, it was but natural to go again to the
Prado. Jon was elaborately casual this time before his Goya girl. Now
that he was going back to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny. It
was his mother who lingered before the picture, saying:

"The face and figure of the girl are exquisite."

Jon heard her uneasily. Did she understand? But he felt once more that
he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety. She could, in
some supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret, feel the pulse
of his thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped and feared and
wished. It made him terribly uncomfortable and guilty, having, beyond
most boys, a conscience. He wished she would be frank with him; he
almost hoped for an open struggle. But none came, and steadily,
silently, they travelled north. Thus did he first learn how much better
than men women play a waiting game. In Paris they had again to pause
for a day. Jon was grieved because it lasted two, owing to certain
matters in connection with a dressmaker; as if his mother, who looked
beautiful in anything, had any need of dresses! The happiest moment of
his travel was that when he stepped on to the Folkestone boat.

Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said:

"I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon. But you've been very
sweet to me."

Jon squeezed her arm.

"Oh! yes, I've enjoyed it awfully--except for my head lately."

And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of glamour
over the past weeks--a kind of painful pleasure, such as he had tried
to screw into those lines about the voice in the night crying; a
feeling such as he had known as a small boy listening avidly to Chopin,
yet wanting to cry. And he wondered why it was that he couldn't say to
her quite simply what she had said to him:

"You were very sweet to me." Odd--one never could be nice and natural
like that! He substituted the words: "I expect we shall be sick."

They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six
weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had
hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.




II

FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS


Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found the
solitude at Robin Hill intolerable. A philosopher when he has all that
he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not. Accustomed,
however, to the idea, if not to the reality of resignation, he would
perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter June. He was a "lame
duck" now, and on her conscience. Having achieved--momentarily--the
rescue of an etcher in low circumstances, which she happened to have in
hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had
gone. The little lady was living now in a tiny house with a big studio
at Chiswick. A Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of
responsibility was concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a
reduced income in a manner satisfactory to herself and her father. The
rent of the Gallery off Cork Street which he had bought for her, and
her increased income tax happening to balance, it had been quite
simple--she no longer paid him the rent. The Gallery might be expected
now at any time, after eighteen years of barren usufruct, to pay its
way, so that she was sure her father would not feel it. Through this
device she still had twelve hundred a year, and by reducing what she
ate, and, in place of two Belgians in a poor way, employing one
Austrian in a poorer, practically the same surplus for the relief of
genius. After three days at Robin Hill she carried her father back with
her to Town. In those three days she had stumbled on the secret he had
kept for two years, and had instantly decided to cure him. She knew, in
fact, the very man. He had done wonders with Paul Post--that painter a
little in advance of Futurism; and she was impatient with her father
because his eyebrows would go up, and because he had heard of neither.
Of course, if he hadn't "faith" he would never get well! It was absurd
not to have faith in the man who had healed Paul Post so that he had
only just relapsed, from having overworked, or overlived, himself
again. The great thing about this healer was that he relied on Nature.
He had made a special study of the symptoms of Nature--when his patient
failed in any natural symptom he supplied the poison which caused
it--and there you were! She was extremely hopeful. Her father had
clearly not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and she intended
to provide the symptoms. He was--she felt--out of touch with the times,
which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating. In the little
Chiswick house she and the Austrian--a grateful soul, so devoted to
June for rescuing her that she was in danger of decease from
overwork--stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him for his
cure. But they could not keep his eyebrows down; as--for example--when
the Austrian woke him at eight o'clock just as he was going to sleep or
June took The Times away from him, because it was unnatural to read
"that stuff" when he ought to be taking an interest in "life." He never
failed, indeed, to be astonished at her resource, especially in the
evenings. For his benefit, as she declared, though he suspected that
she also got something out of it, she assembled the Age so far as it
was satellite to genius; and with some solemnity it would move up and
down the studio before him in the Fox-trot, and that more mental form
of dancing--the One-step--which so pulled against the music, that
Jolyon's eyebrows would be a

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