The Forsyte saga - Complete
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