The Forsyte saga - Complete
pied cattle on the farther side stood in the shade lazily
swishing their tails. It was an afternoon to dream. And she took
out Jon's letters—not flowery effusions, but haunted in their
recital of things seen and done by a longing very agreeable to
her, and all ending “Your devoted J.” Fleur was not sentimental,
her desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but what poetry
there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly in
those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon. They
all belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She
enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The
stars could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the
centre of the map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy
cobwebs, the hazy sparkle and promise of the day down in the
garden, were Jon personified to her.
Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his
letters, followed by their brood of six young swans in a line,
with just so much water between each tail and head, a flotilla of
grey destroyers. Fleur thrust her letters back, got out her
sculls, and pulled up to the landing-stage. Crossing the lawn,
she wondered whether she should tell her father of June's visit.
If he learned of it from the butler, he might think it odd if she
did not. It gave her, too, another chance to startle out of him
the reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the road to meet
him.
Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with
weak lungs. Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part
in local affairs, content to pay the rates which were always
going up. He could not, however, remain indifferent to this new
and dangerous scheme. The site was not half a mile from his own
house. He was quite of opinion that the country should stamp out
tuberculosis; but this was not the place. It should be done
farther away. He took, indeed, an attitude common to all true
Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other people was not his
affair, and the State should do its business without prejudicing
in any way the natural advantages which he had acquired or
inherited. Francie, the most free-spirited Forsyte of his
generation (except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had once asked him
in her malicious way: “Did you ever see the name Forsyte in a
subscription list, Soames?” That was as it might be, but a
Sanatorium would depreciate the neighbourhood, and he should
certainly sign the petition which was being got up against it.
Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw Fleur
coming.
She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time
down here with her in this summer weather had been making him
feel quite young; Annette was always running up to Town for one
thing or another, so that he had Fleur to himself almost as much
as he could wish. To be sure, young Mont had formed a habit of
appearing on his motor-cycle almost every other day. Thank
goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his half-toothbrushes,
and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl friend of
Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth or
so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music
of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted,
with a surprised shine on its expressive surface. Annette, even,
now and then passed gracefully up and down in the arms of one or
other of the young men. And Soames, coming to the drawing-room
door, would lift his nose a little sideways, and watch them,
waiting to catch a smile from Fleur; then move back to his chair
by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The Times or some other
collector's price list. To his ever-anxious eyes Fleur showed no
signs of remembering that caprice of hers.
When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand
within her arm.
“Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad? She couldn't wait!
Guess!”
“I never guess,” said Soames uneasily. “Who?”
“Your cousin, June Forsyte.”
Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm. “What did she want?”
“I don't know. But it was rather breaking through the feud,
wasn't it?”
“Feud? What feud?”
“The one that exists in your imagination, dear.”
Soames dropped her arm. Was she mocking, or trying to draw him
on?
“I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture,” he said at last.
“I don't think so. Perhaps it was just family affection.”
“She's only a first cousin once removed,” muttered Soames.
“And the daughter of your enemy.”
“What d'you mean by that?”
“I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was.”
“Enemy!” repeated Soames. “It's ancient history. I don't know
where you get your notions.”
“From June Forsyte.”
It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew,
or were on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.
Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and
tenacity.
“If you know,” he said coldly, “why do you plague me?”
Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.
“I don't want to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to
know more? Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery—Je
m'en fiche, as Profond says?”
“That chap!” said Soames profoundly.
That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this
summer—for he had not turned up again. Ever since the Sunday when
Fleur had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had
thought of him a good deal, and always in connection with
Annette, for no reason, except that she was looking handsomer
than for some time past. His possessive instinct, subtle, less
formal, more elastic since the War, kept all misgiving
underground. As one looks on some American river, quiet and
pleasant, knowing that an alligator perhaps is lying in the mud
with his snout just raised and indistinguishable from a snag of
wood—so Soames looked on the river of his own existence,
subconscious of Monsieur Profond, refusing to see more than the
suspicion of his snout. He had at this epoch in his life
practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy as his nature
would permit. His senses were at rest; his affections found all
the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well
known, his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a
touch of liver now and again; he had not yet begun to worry
seriously about what would happen after death, inclining to think
that nothing would happen. He resembled one of his own gilt-edged
securities, and to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could
avoid seeing would be, he felt instinctively, perverse and
retrogressive. Those two crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice
and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level away if he lay on them
industriously.
That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the
best-invested Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father
came down to dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to
blow his nose.
“I'll get you one, dear,” she had said, and ran upstairs. In the
sachet where she sought for it—an old sachet of very faded
silk—there were two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the
other was buttoned, and contained something flat and hard. By
some childish impulse Fleur unbuttoned it. There was a frame and
in it a photograph of herself as a little girl. She gazed at it,
fascinated, as one is by one's own presentment. It slipped under
her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that another photograph was
behind. She pressed her own down further, and perceived a face,
which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very good-looking, in
a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own photograph up
over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down. Only on
the stairs did she identify that face. Surely—surely Jon's
mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a
flurry of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the
woman her father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her,
perhaps. Then, afraid of showing by her manner that she had
lighted on his secret, she refused to think further, and, shaking
out the silk handkerchief, entered the dining-room.
“I chose the softest, Father.”
“H'm!” said Soames; “I only use those after a cold. Never mind!”
That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together;
recalling the look on her father's face in the confectioner's
shop—a look strange and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must
have loved that woman very much to have kept her photograph all
this time, in spite of having lost her. Unsparing and
matter-of-fact, her mind darted to his relations with her own
mother. Had he ever really loved her? She thought not. Jon was
the son of the woman he had really loved. Surely, then, he ought
not to mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used
to. And a sigh of sheer relief was caught in the folds of her
nightgown slipping over her head.
III.—MEETINGS
Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had
never really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain.
The face of the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a
shock—it looked so wan and old. His father's mask had been forced
awry by the emotion of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly
realised how much he must have felt their absence. He summoned to
his aid the thought: 'Well, I didn't want to go!' It was out of
date for Youth to defer to Age. But Jon was by no means typically
modern. His father had always been “so jolly” to him, and to feel
that one meant to begin again at once the conduct which his
father had suffered six weeks' loneliness to cure was not
agreeable.
At the question, “Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike
you?” his conscience pricked him badly. The great Goya only
existed because he had created a face which resembled Fleur's.
On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction;
but awoke full of anticipation. It was only the fifth of July,
and no meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth. He was to
have three days at home before going back to farm. Somehow he
must contrive to see her!
In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for
trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny. On the second
day, therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his
conscience by ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street,
turned his face toward Piccadilly. Stratton Street, where her
Club was, adjoined Devonshire House. It would be the merest
chance that she should be at her Club. But he dawdled down Bond
Street with a beating heart, noticing the superiority of all