The Forsyte saga - Complete
world—unmorality let off its chain, disillusionment on the prowl!
That expression Annette had caught from him: “Je m'en fiche!” A
fatalistic chap! A continental—a cosmopolitan—a product of the
age! If there were condemnation more complete, Soames felt that
he did not know it.
The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into
some distance of their own. One of them uttered a little hiss,
wagged its tail, turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam
away. The other followed. Their white bodies, their stately
necks, passed out of his sight, and he went toward the house.
Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he
thought as he went up-stairs 'Handsome is as handsome does.'
Handsome! Except for remarks about the curtains in the
drawing-room, and the storm, there was practically no
conversation during a meal distinguished by exactitude of
quantity and perfection of quality. Soames drank nothing. He
followed her into the drawing-room afterward, and found her
smoking a cigarette on the sofa between the two French windows.
She was leaning back, almost upright, in a low black frock, with
her knees crossed and her blue eyes half-closed; grey-blue smoke
issued from her red, rather full lips, a fillet bound her
chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk stockings, and shoes
with very high heels showing off her instep. A fine piece in any
room! Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep
into the side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
“I'm going to shut the window; the damp's lifting in.”
He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the
cream-panelled wall close by.
What was she thinking of? He had never understood a woman in his
life—except Fleur—and Fleur not always! His heart beat fast. But
if he meant to do it, now was the moment. Turning from the David
Cox, he took out the torn letter.
“I've had this.”
Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
Soames handed her the letter.
“It's torn, but you can read it.” And he turned back to the David
Cox—a sea-piece, of good tone—but without movement enough. 'I
wonder what that chap's doing at this moment?' he thought. 'I'll
astonish him yet.' Out of the corner of his eye he saw Annette
holding the letter rigidly; her eyes moved from side to side
under her darkened lashes and frowning darkened eyes. She dropped
the letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and said:
“Dirrty!”
“I quite agree,” said Soames; “degrading. Is it true?”
A tooth fastened on her red lower lip. “And what if it were?”
She was brazen!
“Is that all you have to say?”
“No.”
“Well, speak out!”
“What is the good of talking?”
Soames said icily: “So you admit it?”
“I admit nothing. You are a fool to ask. A man like you should
not ask. It is dangerous.”
Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
“Do you remember,” he said, halting in front of her, “what you
were when I married you? Working at accounts in a restaurant.”
“Do you remember that I was not half your age?”
Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back
to the David Cox.
“I am not going to bandy words. I require you to give up
this—friendship. I think of the matter entirely as it affects
Fleur.”
“Ah!—Fleur!”
“Yes,” said Soames stubbornly; “Fleur. She is your child as well
as mine.”
“It is kind to admit that!”
“Are you going to do what I say?”
“I refuse to tell you.”
“Then I must make you.”
Annette smiled.
“No, Soames,” she said. “You are helpless. Do not say things that
you will regret.”
Anger swelled the veins on his forehead. He opened his mouth to
vent that emotion, and could not. Annette went on:
“There shall be no more such letters, I promise you. That is
enough.”
Soames writhed. He had a sense of being treated like a child by
this woman who had deserved he did not know what.
“When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they
had better be quiet about each other. There are things one does
not drag up into the light for people to laugh at. You will be
quiet, then; not for my sake for your own. You are getting old; I
am not, yet. You have made me ver-ry practical”
Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being
choked, repeated dully:
“I require you to give up this friendship.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then—then I will cut you out of my Will.”
Somehow it did not seem to meet the case. Annette laughed.
“You will live a long time, Soames.”
“You—you are a bad woman,” said Soames suddenly.
Annette shrugged her shoulders.
“I do not think so. Living with you has killed things in me, it
is true; but I am not a bad woman. I am sensible—that is all. And
so will you be when you have thought it over.”
“I shall see this man,” said Soames sullenly, “and warn him off.”
“Mon cher, you are funny. You do not want me, you have as much of
me as you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead. I admit
nothing, but I am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you
had better be quiet, I tell you. I myself will make no scandal;
none. Now, I am not saying any more, whatever you do.”
She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and
opened it. Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his
feelings. The thought of that man was almost making him want her,
and this was a revelation of their relationship, startling to one
little given to introspective philosophy. Without saying another
word he went out and up to the picture-gallery. This came of
marrying a Frenchwoman! And yet, without her there would have
been no Fleur! She had served her purpose.
'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing. I don't even know
that there's anything in it.' The instinct of self-preservation
warned him to batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with
want of air. Unless one believed there was something in a thing,
there wasn't.
That night he went into her room. She received him in the most
matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them.
And he returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace. If
one didn't choose to see, one needn't. And he did not choose—in
future he did not choose. There was nothing to be gained by
it—nothing! Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a
handkerchief, and the framed photograph of Fleur. When he had
looked at it a little he slipped it down, and there was that
other one—that old one of Irene. An owl hooted while he stood in
his window gazing at it. The owl hooted, the red climbing roses
seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom.
God! That had been a different thing! Passion—Memory! Dust!
VII.—JUNE TAKES A HAND
One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York,
an egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June
Forsyte's studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick. On the
evening of July 6, Boris Strumolowski—several of whose works were
on show there because they were as yet too advanced to be on show
anywhere else—had begun well, with that aloof and rather
Christ-like silence which admirably suited his youthful, round,
broad cheek-boned countenance framed in bright hair banged like a
girl's. June had known him three weeks, and he still seemed to
her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of the future; a
sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an unappreciative
West. Until that evening he had conversationally confined himself
to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust he
had just shaken from off his feet—a country, in his opinion, so
barbarous in every way that he had sold practically nothing
there, and become an object of suspicion to the police; a
country, as he said, without a race of its own, without liberty,
equality, or fraternity, without principles, traditions, taste,
without—in a word—a soul. He had left it for his own good, and
come to the only other country where he could live well. June had
dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments, standing before his
creations—frightening, but powerful and symbolic once they had
been explained! That he, haloed by bright hair like an early
Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion of
all else—the only sign of course by which real genius could be
told—should still be a “lame duck” agitated her warm heart almost
to the exclusion of Paul Post. And she had begun to take steps to
clear her Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski
masterpieces. She had at once encountered trouble. Paul Post had
kicked; Vospovitch had stung. With all the emphasis of a genius
which she did not as yet deny them, they had demanded another six
weeks at least of her Gallery. The American stream, still flowing
in, would soon be flowing out. The American stream was their
right, their only hope, their salvation—since nobody in this
“beastly” country cared for Art. June had yielded to the
demonstration. After all Boris would not mind their having the
full benefit of an American stream, which he himself so violently
despised.
This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present,
except Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy
Portugal, editor of the Neo-Artist. She had put it to him with
that sudden confidence which continual contact with the
neo-artistic world had never been able to dry up in her warm and
generous nature. He had not broken his Christ-like silence,
however, for more than two minutes before she began to move her
blue eyes from side to side, as a cat moves its tail. This—he
said—was characteristic of England, the most selfish country in
the world; the country which sucked the blood of other countries;
destroyed the brains and hearts of Irishmen, Hindus, Egyptians,
Boers, and Burmese, all the best races in the world; bullying,
hypocritical England! This was what he had expected, coming to,
such a country, where the climate was all fog, and the people all
tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in profiteering and
the grossest materialism. Conscious that Hannah Hobdey was
murmuring, “Hear, hear!” and Jimmy Portugal sniggering, June grew
crimson, and suddenly rapped out:
“Then why did you ever come? We didn't ask you.”
The remark was so singularly at variance with all she had led him
to expect from her, that Strumolowski stretched out his hand and
took a cigarette.
“England never wants an idealist,” he said.
But in June something primitively English was thoroughly upset;
old Jolyon's sense of justice had risen, as it were, from bed.
“You come and sponge on us,” she said, “and then abuse us. If you
think that's playing the game, I don't.”