The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 (14 page)

The hall porter came out of his box. A gentleman was waiting.

‘What gentleman?' said Soames, sidelong.

‘I think he's your nephew, sir, Mr Dartie.'

‘Val Dartie! H'm! Where?'

‘In the little room, sir.'

The little room – all the accommodation considered worthy of such as were not Connoisseurs – was at the end of a passage, and in no taste at all, as if the Club were saying: ‘See what it is not to be one of us!' Soames entered it, and saw Val Dartie smoking a cigarette and gazing with absorption at the only object of interest, his own reflection in the glass above the fire.

He never saw his nephew without wondering when he would say: ‘Look here, Uncle Soames, I'm up a stump.' Breeding racehorses! There could only be one end to that!

‘Well?' he said, ‘how are you?'

The face in the glass turned round, and became the back of a clipped sandyish head.

‘Oh! bobbish, thanks!
You
look all right, Uncle Soames. I just wanted to ask you: Must I take these screws of old George Forsyte's? They're dashed bad.'

‘Gift horse in the mouth?' said Soames.

‘Well,' said Val, ‘but they're
so
dashed bad; by the time I've paid legacy duty, boxed them to a sale, and sold them, there won't be a sixpence. One of them falls down when you look at it. And the other two are broken-winded. The poor old boy kept them, because he couldn't get rid of them. They're about five hundred years old.'

‘Thought you were fond of horses,' said Soames. ‘Can't you turn them out?'

‘Yes,' said Val, drily; ‘but I've got my living to make. I haven't told my wife, for fear she should suggest that. I'm afraid I might see them in my dreams if I sold them. They're only fit for the kennels. Can I write to the executors and say I'm not rich enough to take them?'

‘You can,' said Soames, and the words: ‘How's your wife?'
died unspoken on his lips. She was the daughter of his enemy, young Jolyon. That fellow was dead, but the fact remained.

‘I will, then,' said Val. ‘How did his funeral go off?'

‘Very simple affair – I had nothing to do with it.' The days of funerals were over. No flowers, no horses, no plumes – a motor hearse, a couple of cars or so, was all the attention paid nowadays to the dead. Another sign of the times!

‘I'm staying the night at Green Street,' said Val. ‘I suppose you're not there, are you?'

‘No,' said Soames, and did not miss the relief in his nephew's countenance.

‘Oh! by the way, Uncle Soames – do you advise me to buy P.P.R.S. shares?'

‘On the contrary. I'm going to advise your mother to sell. Tell her I'm coming in tomorrow.'

‘Why? I thought–'

‘Never mind my reasons!' said Soames shortly.

‘So long, then!'

Exchanging a chilly hand-shake, he watched his nephew withdraw.

So long! An expression, old as the Boer war, that he had never got used to – meant nothing so far as he could see! He entered the reading-room. A number of Connoisseurs were sitting and standing about, and Soames, least clubbable of men, sought the solitude of an embrasured window. He sat there polishing the nail of one forefinger against the back of the other, and chewing the cud of life. After all, what was the point of anything. There was George! He had had an easy life – never done any work! And here was himself, who had done a lot of work! And sooner or later they would bury him too, with a motor hearse probably! And there was his son-in-law, young Mont, full of talk about goodness knew what – and that thincheeked chap who had sold him the balloons this afternoon. And old Fontenoy, and that waiter over there; and the out-of-works and the in-works; and those chaps in Parliament, and the parsons in their pulpits – what were they all for? There was the old gardener down at Mapledurham pushing his roller over
and over the lawn, week after week, and if he didn't, what would the lawn be like? That was life – gardener rolling lawn! Put it that there was another life – he didn't believe it, but for the sake of argument – that life must be just the same. Rolling lawn – to keep it lawn! What point in lawn? Conscious of pessimism, he rose. He had better be getting back to Fleur's – they dressed for dinner! He supposed there was something in dressing for dinner, but it was like lawn – you came unrolled – undressed again, and so it went on! Over and over and over to keep up to a pitch, that was – ah! what
was
the pitch for?

Turning into South Square, he cannoned into a young man, whose head was craned back as if looking after someone he had parted from. Uncertain whether to apologize or to wait for an apology, Soames stood still.

The young man said abruptly: ‘Sorry, sir,' and moved on; dark, neat-looking chap with a hungry look obviously unconnected with his stomach. Murmuring: ‘Not at all!' Soames moved forward and rang his daughter's bell. She opened to him herself. She was in hat and furs – just in. The young man recurred to Soames. Had he left her there? What a pretty face it was! He should certainly speak to her. If she once took to gadding about!

He put it off, however, till he was about to say ‘Good night' – Michael having gone to the political meeting of a Labour candidate, as if he couldn't find something better to do!

‘Now you've been married two years, my child, I suppose you'll be looking towards the future. There's a great deal of nonsense talked about children. The whole thing's much simpler. I hope you feel that.'

Fleur was leaning back among the cushions of the settee, swinging her foot. Her eyes became a little restless, but her colour did not change.

‘Of course!' she said; ‘only there's no hurry, Dad.'

‘Well, I don't know,' Soames murmured. ‘The French and the royal family have a very sound habit of getting it over early. There's many a slip and it keeps them out of mischief. You're
very attractive, my child – I don't want to see you take too much to gad-about ways. You've got all sorts of friends.'

‘Yes,' said Fleur.

‘You get on well with Michael, don't you?'

‘Oh! yes.'

‘Well, then, why not? You must remember that your son will be a what-you-call-it.'

In those words he compromised with his instinctive dislike of titles and flummery of that nature.

‘It mightn't be a son,' said Fleur.

‘At your age that's easily remedied.'

‘Oh, I don't want a lot, Dad. One, perhaps, or two.'

‘Well,' said Soames, ‘I should almost prefer a daughter, something like – well, something like you.'

Her softened eyes flew, restive, from his face to her foot, to the dog, all over the room.

‘I don't know, it's a tie – like digging your own grave in a way.'

‘I shouldn't put it as high as that,' murmured Soames, persuasively.

‘No man would, Dad.'

‘Your mother wouldn't have got on at all without you,' and recollection of how near her mother had been to not getting on at all with her – of how, but for him, she would have made a mess of it, reduced him to silent contemplation of the restive foot.

‘Well,' he said, at last, ‘I thought I'd mention it. I – I've got your happiness at heart.'

Fleur rose and kissed his forehead.

‘I know, Dad,' she said, ‘I'm a selfish pig. I'll think about it. In fact, I – I have thought about it.'

‘That's right,' said Soames; ‘that's right! You've a good head on you – it's a great consolation to me. Good night, my dear!'

And he went up to his bed. If there was point in anything, it was in perpetuation of oneself, though, of course, that begged the question. ‘Wonder,' he thought, ‘if I ought to have asked her whether that young man –!' But young people were best
left alone. The fact was, he didn't understand them. His eye lighted on the paper bag containing those – those things he had bought. He had brought them up from his overcoat to get rid of them – but how? Put into the fire, they would make a smell. He stood at his dressing-table, took one up and looked at it. Good Lord! And, suddenly, rubbing the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, he began to blow the thing up. He blew until his cheeks were tired, and then, nipping the aperture, took a bit of the dental cotton he used on his teeth every night and tied it up. There the thing was! With a pettish gesture he batted the balloon. Off it flew – purple and extravagant, alighting on his bed. H'm! He took up the other, and did the same to it. Purple and green! The deuce! If anyone came in and saw! He threw up the window, batted them, balloon after balloon, into the night, and shut the window down. There they'd be in the dark, floating about. His lips contracted in a nervous grin. People would see them in the morning. Well! What else could you do with things like that?

TENTERHOOKS

M
ICHAEL
had gone to the Labour candidate's meeting partly because he wanted to, and partly out of fellow feeling for ‘old Forsyte', whom he was always conscious of having robbed. His father-in-law had been very decent about Fleur, and he liked the ‘old man' to have her to himself when he could.

In a constituency which had much casual and no trades-union labour to speak of, the meeting would be one of those which enabled the intellectuals of the Party to get it ‘off their chests'. Sentiment being ‘slop', and championship mere condescension, one might look for sound economic speeches which left out discredited factors, such as human nature. Michael was accustomed
to hearing people disparaged for deprecating change because human nature was constant; he was accustomed to hearing people despised for feeling compassion; he knew that one ought to be purely economic. And anyway that kind of speech was preferable to the tub-thumpings of the North or of the Park, which provoked a nasty underlying class spirit in himself.

The meeting was in full swing when he arrived, the candidate pitilessly exposing the fallacies of a capitalism which, in his view, had brought on the war. For fear that it should bring on another, it must be changed for a system which would ensure that nations should not want anything too much. The individual – said the candidate – was in every respect superior to the nation of which he formed a part; and the problem before them was to secure an economic condition which would enable the individual to function freely in his native superiority. In that way alone, he said, would they lose those mass movements and emotions which imperilled the sanity of the world. He spoke well. Michael listened, purring almost audibly, till he found that he was thinking of himself, Wilfrid and Fleur. Would he ever function so freely in a native superiority that he did not want Fleur too much? And did he wish to? He did not. That seemed to introduce human nature into the speaker's argument. Didn't everybody want something too much? Wasn't it natural? And if so, wouldn't there always be a collective wanting too much – pooling of primary desire, such as the desire of keeping your own head above water? The candidate's argument seemed to him suddenly to leave out heat, to omit friction, to be that of a man in an armchair after a poor lunch. He looked attentively at the speaker's shrewd, dry, doubting face. ‘No juice!' he thought. And when ‘the chap' sat down, he got up and left the hall.

This Wilfrid business had upset him horribly. Try as he had to put it out of his mind, try as he would to laugh it off, it continued to eat into his sense of security and happiness. Wife and best friend! A hundred times a day he assured himself that he trusted Fleur. Only, Wilfrid was so much more attractive than himself, and Fleur deserved the best of everything. Besides,
Wilfrid was going through torture, and it was not a pleasant thought! How end the thing, restore peace of mind to himself, to him, to her? She had told him nothing; and it simply was impossible to ask. No way even of showing his anxiety! The whole thing was just ‘dark', and, so far as he could see, would have to stay so; nothing to be done but screw the lid on tighter, be as nice as he could to her, try not to feel bitter about him. Hades!

He turned down Chelsea Embankment. Here the sky was dark and wide and streaming with stars. The river wide, dark and gleaming with oily rays from the Embankment lamps. The width of it all gave him relief. Dash the dumps! A jolly, queer, muddled, sweet and bitter world; an immensely intriguing game of chance, no matter how the cards were falling at the moment! In the trenches he had thought: ‘Get out of this, and I'll never mind anything again!' How seldom now he remembered thinking that! The human body renewed itself – they said – in seven years. In three years' time his body would not be the body of the trenches, but a whole-time peace body with a fading complex. If only Fleur would tell him quite openly what she felt, what she was doing about Wilfrid, for she must be doing something! And Wilfrid's verse? Would his confounded passion – as Bart suggested – flow in poetry? And if so, who would publish it? A miserable business! Well the night was beautiful, and the great thing not to be a pig. Beauty and not being a pig! Nothing much else to it – except laughter – the comic side! Keep one's sense of humour, anyway! And Michael searched, while he strode beneath plane trees half-stripped of leaves and plume-like in the dark, for the fun in his position. He failed to find it. There seemed absolutely nothing funny about love. Possibly he might fall out of love again some day, but not so long as she kept him on her tenterhooks. Did she do it on purpose? Never! Fleur simply could not be like those women who kept their husbands hungry and fed them when they wanted dresses, furs, jewels. Revolting!