The Forsyte Saga, Volume III. Awakening. To Let

“Don’t you worry; he’s not so miserable as he looks. He’ll never show he’s enjoying anything – they might try and take it from him. Old Soames! Once bit, twice shy!”

“Well, Jon,” said Val, hastily, “if you’ve finished, we’ll go and have coffee.”

“Who were those?” Jon asked, on the stairs. “I didn’t quite – ”

“Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father’s and of my Uncle Soames. He’s always been here. The other chap, Profond, is a queer fish. I think he’s hanging round Soames’ wife, if you ask me!”

Jon looked at him, startled. “But that’s awful,” he said: “I mean – for Fleur.”

“Don’t suppose Fleur cares very much; she’s very up-to-date.”

“Her mother!”

“You’re very green, Jon.”

Jon grew red. “Mothers,” he stammered angrily, “are different.”

“You’re right,” said Val suddenly; “but things aren’t what they were when I was your age. There’s a ‘To-morrow we die’ feeling. That’s what old George meant about my Uncle Soames. He doesn’t mean to die to-morrow.”

Jon said, quickly: “What’s the matter between him and my father?”

“Stable secret, Jon. Take my advice, and bottle up. You’ll do no good by knowing. Have a liqueur?”

Jon shook his head.

“I hate the way people keep things from one,” he muttered, “and then sneer at one for being green.”

“Well, you can ask Holly. If she won’t tell you, you’ll believe it’s for your own good, I suppose.”

Jon got up. “I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch.”

Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused. The boy looked so upset.

“All right! See you on Friday.”

“I don’t know,” murmured Jon.

And he did not. This conspiracy of silence made him desperate. It was humiliating to be treated like a child! He retraced his moody steps to Stratton Street. But he would go to her Club now, and find out the worst! To his enquiry the reply was that Miss Forsyte was not in the Club. She might be in perhaps later. She was often in on Monday – they could not say. Jon said he would call again, and, crossing into the Green Park, flung himself down under a tree. The sun was bright, and a breeze fluttered the leaves of the young lime-tree beneath which he lay; but his heart ached. Such darkness seemed gathered round his happiness. He heard Big Ben chime “Three” above the traffic. The sound moved something in him, and, taking out a piece of paper, he began to scribble on it with a pencil. He had jotted a stanza, and was searching the grass for another verse, when something hard touched his shoulder-a green parasol. There above him stood Fleur!

“They told me you’d been, and were coming back. So I thought you might be out here; and you are – it’s rather wonderful!”

“Oh, Fleur! I thought you’d have forgotten me.”

“When I told you that I shouldn’t!”

Jon seized her arm.

“It’s too much luck! Let’s get away from this side.” He almost dragged her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to find some cover where they could sit and hold each other’s hands.

“Hasn’t anybody cut in?” he said, gazing round at her lashes, in suspense above her cheeks.

“There is a young idiot, but he doesn’t count.”

Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.

“You know I’ve had sunstroke; I didn’t tell you.”

“Really! Was it interesting?”

“No. Mother was an angel. Has anything happened to you?”

“Nothing. Except that I think I’ve found out what’s wrong between our families, Jon.”

His heart began beating very fast.

“I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father got her instead.”

“Oh!”

“I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me. Of course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him pretty mad, wouldn’t it?”

Jon thought for a minute. “Not if she loved my father best.”

“But suppose they were engaged?”

“If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I might go cracked, but I shouldn’t grudge it you.”

“I should. You mustn’t ever do that with me, Jon.

“My God! Not much!”

“I don’t believe that he’s ever really cared for my mother.”

Jon was silent. Val’s words – the two past masters in the Club!

“You see, we don’t know,” went on Fleur; “it may have been a great shock. She may have behaved badly to him. People do.”

“My mother wouldn’t.”

Fleur shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think we know much about our fathers and mothers. We just see them in the light of the way they treat us; but they’ve treated other people, you know, before we were born-plenty, I expect. You see, they’re both old. Look at your father, with three separate families!”

“Isn’t there any place,” cried Jon, “in all this beastly London where we can be alone?”

“Only a taxi.”

“Let’s get one, then.”

When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: “Are you going back to Robin Hill? I should like to see where you live, Jon. I’m staying with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for dinner. I wouldn’t come to the house, of course.”

Jon gazed at her enraptured.

“Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan’t meet anybody. There’s a train at four.”

The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured, official, commercial, or professional, like the working classes, still worked their seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth generation travelled down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class carriage, dusty and sun-warmed, of that too early train. They travelled in blissful silence, holding each other’s hands.

At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and honeysuckle.

For Jon – sure of her now, and without separation before him – it was a miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along the river Thames. It was love-in-a-mist – one of those illumined pages of Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they gave each other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and flowers and birds scrolled in among the text – a happy communing, without afterthought, which lasted thirty-seven minutes. They reached the coppice at the milking hour. Jon would not take her as far as the farmyard; only to where she could see the field leading up to the gardens, and the house beyond. They turned in among the larches, and suddenly, at the winding of the path, came on Irene, sitting on an old log seat.

There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves; to moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal dignity. This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his mother. He became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate thing. To have brought Fleur down openly – yes! But to sneak her in like this! Consumed with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his nature would permit.

Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother’s startled face was changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious. It was she who uttered the first words:

“I’m very glad to see you. It was nice of Jon to think of bringing you down to us.”

“We weren’t coming to the house,” Jon blurted out. “I just wanted Fleur to see where I lived.”

His mother said quietly:

“Won’t you come up and have tea?”

Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard Fleur answer:

“Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner. I met Jon by accident, and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his home.”

How self-possessed she was!

“Of course; but you must have tea. We’ll send you down to the station. My husband will enjoy seeing you.”

The expression of his mother’s eyes, resting on him for a moment, cast Jon down level with the ground – a true worm. Then she led on, and Fleur followed her. He felt like a child, trailing after those two, who were talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the house up there beyond the trees and the grassy slope. He watched the fencing of their eyes, taking each other in – the two beings he loved most in the world.

He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered in advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant; already he could feel the faint irony which would come into his voice and smile.

“This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the house. Let’s have tea at once – she has to catch a train. Jon, tell them, dear, and telephone to the Dragon for a car.”

To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his mother had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up into the house. Now he would not see Fleur alone again – not for a minute, and they had arranged no further meeting! When he returned under cover of the maids and teapots, there was not a trace of awkwardness beneath the tree; it was all within himself, but not the less for that. They were talking of the Gallery off Cork Street.

“We back numbers,” his father was saying, “are awfully anxious to find out why we can’t appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must tell us.”

“It’s supposed to be satiric, isn’t it?” said Fleur.

He saw his father’s smile.

“Satiric? Oh! I think it’s more than that. What do you say, Jon?”

“I don’t know at all,” stammered Jon. His father’s face had a sudden grimness.

“The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals. Off with their heads, they say – smash their idols! And let’s get back to-nothing! And, by Jove, they’ve done it! Jon’s a poet. He’ll be going in, too, and stamping on what’s left of us. Property, beauty, sentiment – all smoke. We mustn’t own anything nowadays, not even our feelings. They stand in the way of – Nothing.”

Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father’s words, behind which he felt a meaning that he could not reach. He didn’t want to stamp on anything!

“Nothing’s the god of to-day,” continued Jolyon; “we’re back where the Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism.”

“No, Dad,” cried Jon suddenly, “we only want to live, and we don’t know how, because of the Past – that’s all!”

“By George!” said Jolyon, “that’s profound, Jon. Is it your own? The Past! Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath. Let’s have cigarettes.”

Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly, as if to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes. He lighted his father’s and Fleur’s, then one for himself. Had he taken the knock that Val had spoken of? The smoke was blue when he had not puffed, grey when he had; he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense of equality it gave him. He was glad no one said: “So you’ve begun!” He felt less young.

Fleur looked at her watch, and rose. His mother went with her into the house. Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.

“See her into the car, old man,” said Jolyon; “and when she’s gone, ask your mother to come back to me.”

Jon went. He waited in the hall. He saw her into the car. There was no chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand. He waited all that evening for something to be said to him. Nothing was said. Nothing might have happened. He went up to bed, and in the mirror on his dressing-table met himself. He did not speak, nor did the image; but both looked as if they thought the more.

IV. – IN GREEN STREET

Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a remark of Fleur’s: “He’s like the hosts of Midian – he prowls and prowls around”; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: “What’s the use of keepin’ fit?” or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as it was now called. Certain, that Annette was looking particularly handsome, and that Soames – had sold him a Gauguin and then torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself had said: “I didn’t get that small picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde.”

However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred’s evergreen little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness which no one mistook for naivete, a word hardly applicable to Monsieur Prosper Profond. Winifred still found him “amusing,” and would write him little notes saying: “Come and have a ‘jolly’ with us” – it was breath of life to her to keep up with the phrases of the day.

The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in it – which was unnatural. The English type of disillusionment was familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable circles. It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got something out of it. But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there was nothing in anything, was not English; and that which was not English one could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form. It was like having the mood which the War had left, seated – dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent – in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard. It was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it – for the English character at large – “a bit too thick” – for if nothing was really worth getting excited about, there were always games, and one could make it so! Even Winifred, ever a Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of such a mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be there. Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country which decently veiled such realities.

When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred’s little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of seeing nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with an air of seeing a fire which was not there.

Monsieur Profond came from the window. He was in full fig, with a white waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.

“Well, Miss Forsyde,” he said, “I’m awful pleased to see you. Mr. Forsyde well? I was sayin’ to-day I want to see him have some pleasure. He worries.”

“You think so?” said Fleur shortly.

“Worries,” repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r’s.

Fleur spun round. “Shall I tell you,” she said, “what would give him pleasure?” But the words, “To hear that you had cleared out,” died at the expression on his face. All his fine white teeth were showing.

“I was hearin’ at the Club to-day about his old trouble.” Fleur opened her eyes. “What do you mean?”

Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his statement.

“Before you were born,” he said; “that small business.”

Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share in her father’s worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush of nervous curiosity. “Tell me what you heard.”

“Why!” murmured Monsieur Profond, “you know all that.”

“I expect I do. But I should like to know that you haven’t heard it all wrong.”

“His first wife,” murmured Monsieur Profond.

Choking back the words, “He was never married before,” she said: “Well, what about her?”

“Mr. George Forsyde was tellin’ me about your father’s first wife marryin’ his cousin Jolyon afterward. It was a small bit unpleasant, I should think. I saw their boy – nice boy!”

Fleur looked up. Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical, before her. That – the reason! With the most heroic effort of her life so far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure. She could not tell whether he had noticed. And just then Winifred came in.

“Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most amusing afternoon at the Babies’ bazaar.”

“What babies?” said Fleur mechanically.

“The ‘Save the Babies.’ I got such a bargain, my dear. A piece of old Armenian work – from before the Flood. I want your opinion on it, Prosper.”

“Auntie,” whispered Fleur suddenly.

At the tone in the girl’s voice Winifred closed in on her.’

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”

Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was practically out of hearing.

“Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before. Is it true that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte’s father?”

Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had Winifred felt more seriously embarrassed. Her niece’s face was so pale, her eyes so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.

“Your father didn’t wish you to hear,” she said, with all the aplomb she could muster. “These things will happen. I’ve often told him he ought to let you know.”

“Oh!” said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her shoulder – a firm little shoulder, nice and white! She never could help an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who would have to be married, of course – though not to that boy Jon.

“We’ve forgotten all about it years and years ago,” she said comfortably. “Come and have dinner!”

“No, Auntie. I don’t feel very well. May I go upstairs?”

“My dear!” murmured Winifred, concerned, “you’re not taking this to heart? Why, you haven’t properly come out yet! That boy’s a child!”

“What boy? I’ve only got a headache. But I can’t stand that man to-night.”

“Well, well,” said Winifred, “go and lie down. I’ll send you some bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond. What business had he to gossip? Though I must say I think it’s much better you should know.”

Fleur smiled. “Yes,” she said, and slipped from the room.

She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a guttered frightened feeling in her breast. Never in her life as yet had she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what she had set her heart on. The sensations of the afternoon had been full and poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of them had really made her head ache. No wonder her father had hidden that photograph, so secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept it! But could he hate Jon’s mother and yet keep her photograph? She pressed her hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly. Had they told Jon – had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell him? Everything now turned on that! She knew, they all knew, except – perhaps – Jon!

She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard. Jon loved his mother. If they had told him, what would he do? She could not tell. But if they had not told him, should she not – could she not get him for herself – get married to him, before he knew? She searched her memories of Robin Hill. His mother’s face so passive – with its dark eyes and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile – baffled her; and his father’s – kindly, sunken, ironic. Instinctively she felt they would shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from hurting him – for of course it would hurt him awfully to know!

Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew. So long as neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still a chance – freedom to cover one’s tracks, and get what her heart was set on. But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation. Every one’s hand was against her – every one’s! It was as Jon had said – he and she just wanted to live and the past was in their way, a past they hadn’t shared in, and didn’t understand! Oh! What a shame! And suddenly she thought of June. Would she help them? For somehow June had left on her the impression that she would be sympathetic with their love, impatient of obstacle. Then, instinctively, she thought: ‘I won’t give anything away, though, even to her. I daren’t. I mean to have Jon; against them all.’

Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred’s pet headache cachets. She swallowed both. Then Winifred herself appeared. Fleur opened her campaign with the words:

“You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn’t think I’m in love with that boy. Why, I’ve hardly seen him!”

Winifred, though experienced, was not “fine.” She accepted the remark with considerable relief. Of course, it was not pleasant for the girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to minimise the matter, a task for which she was eminently qualified, “raised” fashionably under a comfortable mother and a father whose nerves might not be shaken, and for many years the wife of Montague Dartie. Her description was a masterpiece of understatement. Fleur’s father’s first wife had been very foolish. There had been a young man who had got run over, and she had left Fleur’s father. Then, years after, when it might all have come – right again, she had taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce. Nobody remembered anything of it now, except just the family. And, perhaps, it had all turned out for the best; her father had Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had been quite happy, they said, and their boy was a nice boy. “Val having Holly, too, is a sort of plaster, don’t you know?” With these soothing words, Winifred patted her niece’s shoulder; thought: ‘She’s a nice, plump little thing!’ and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite of his indiscretion, was very “amusing” this evening.

For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under influence of bromide material and spiritual. But then reality came back. Her aunt had left out all that mattered – all the feeling, the hate, the love, the unforgivingness of passionate hearts. She, who knew so little of life, and had touched only the fringe of love, was yet aware by instinct that words have as little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread it buys. ‘Poor Father!’ she thought. ‘Poor me! Poor Jon! But I don’t care, I mean to have him!’ From the window of her darkened room she saw “that man” issue from the door below and “prowl” away. If he and her mother – how would that affect her chance? Surely it must make her father cling to her more closely, so that he would consent in the end to anything she wanted, or become reconciled the sooner to what she did without his knowledge.

She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with all her might flung it after that disappearing figure. It fell short, but the action did her good.

And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of petrol, not sweet.

V. – PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS

Soames, coming up to the City, with the intention of calling in at Green Street at the end of his day and taking Fleur back home with him, suffered from rumination. Sleeping partner that he was, he seldom visited the City now, but he still had a room of his own at Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte’s, and one special clerk and a half assigned to the management of purely Forsyte affairs. They were somewhat in flux just now – an auspicious moment for the disposal of house property. And Soames was unloading the estates of his father and Uncle Roger, and to some extent of his Uncle Nicholas. His shrewd and matter-of-course probity in all money concerns had made him something of an autocrat in connection with these trusts. If Soames thought this or thought that, one had better save oneself the bother of thinking too. He guaranteed, as it were, irresponsibility to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth generations. His fellow trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas, his cousins-in-law Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely’s husband, all trusted him; he signed first, and where he signed first they signed after, and nobody was a penny the worse. Just now they were all a good many pennies the better, and Soames was beginning to see the close of certain trusts, except for distribution of the income from securities as gilt-edged as was compatible with the period.

Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect backwater in London, he ruminated. Money was extraordinarily tight; and morality extraordinarily loose! The War had done it. Banks were not lending; people breaking contracts all over the place. There was a feeling in the air and a look on faces that he did not like. The country seemed in for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies. There was satisfaction in the thought that neither he nor his trusts had an investment which could be affected by anything less maniacal than national repudiation or a levy on capital. If Soames had faith, it was in what he called “English common sense” – or the power to have things, if not one way then another. He might – like his father James before him – say he didn’t know what things were coming to, but he never in his heart believed they were. If it rested with him, they wouldn’t – and, after all, he was only an Englishman like any other, so quietly tenacious of what he had that he knew he would never really part with it without something more or less equivalent in exchange. His mind was essentially equilibristic in material matters, and his way of putting the national situation difficult to refute in a world composed of human beings. Take his own case, for example! He was well off. Did that do anybody harm? He did not eat ten meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much as, a poor man. He spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no more water to speak of than the mechanic or the porter. He certainly had pretty things about him, but they had given employment in the making, and somebody must use them. He bought pictures, but Art must be encouraged. He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which money flowed, employing labour. What was there objectionable in that? In his charge money was in quicker and more useful flux than it would be in charge of the State and a lot of slow-fly money-sucking officials. And as to what he saved each year – it was just as much in flux as what he didn’t save, going into Water Board or Council Stocks, or something sound and useful. The State paid him no salary for being trustee of his own or other people’s money he did all that for nothing. Therein lay the whole case against nationalisation – owners of private property were unpaid, and yet had every incentive to quicken up the flux. Under nationalisation – just the opposite! In a country smarting from officialism he felt that he had a strong case.