The Forsyte saga - Complete
performance, and how his father had put his foot down with
unwonted decision. What did she want with that peacocking—wasting
time and money; there was nothing in it!
The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the
chief power in the State, a feeling that their own world was good
enough and a little better than any other because it was their
world, had kept the old Forsytes singularly free of “flummery,”
as Nicholas had been wont to call it when he had the gout.
Soames' generation, more self-conscious and ironical, had been
saved by a sense of Swithin in knee-breeches. While the third and
the fourth generation, as it seemed to him, laughed at
everything.
However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a
title and estate—a thing one couldn't help. He entered quietly,
as Mont missed his shot. He noted the young man's eyes, fixed on
Fleur bending over in her turn; and the adoration in them almost
touched him.
She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand,
and shook her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
“I shall never do it.”
“'Nothing venture.'”
“All right.” The cue struck, the ball rolled. “There!”
“Bad luck! Never mind!”
Then they saw him, and Soames said:
“I'll mark for you.”
He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and
tired, furtively studying those two young faces. When the game
was over Mont came up to him.
“I've started in, sir. Rum game, business, isn't it? I suppose
you saw a lot of human nature as a solicitor.”
“I did.”
“Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the
wrong tack in offering less than they can afford to give; they
ought to offer more, and work backward.”
Soames raised his eyebrows.
“Suppose the more is accepted?”
“That doesn't matter a little bit,” said Mont; “it's much more
paying to abate a price than to increase it. For instance, say we
offer an author good terms—he naturally takes them. Then we go
into it, find we can't publish at a decent profit and tell him
so. He's got confidence in us because we've been generous to him,
and he comes down like a lamb, and bears us no malice. But if we
offer him poor terms at the start, he doesn't take them, so we
have to advance them to get him, and he thinks us damned screws
into the bargain.
“Try buying pictures on that system,” said Soames; “an offer
accepted is a contract—haven't you learned that?”
Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the
window.
“No,” he said, “I wish I had. Then there's another thing. Always
let a man off a bargain if he wants to be let off.”
“As advertisement?” said Soames dryly.
“Of course it is; but I meant on principle.”
“Does your firm work on those lines?”
“Not yet,” said Mont, “but it'll come.”
“And they will go.”
“No, really, sir. I'm making any number of observations, and they
all confirm my theory. Human nature is consistently underrated in
business, people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure
and profit by that. Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and
open, but that's easy if you feel it. The more human and generous
you are the better chance you've got in business.”
Soames rose.
“Are you a partner?”
“Not for six months, yet.”
“The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire.”
Mont laughed.
“You'll see,” he said. “There's going to be a big change. The
possessive principle has got its shutters up.”
“What?” said Soames.
“The house is to let! Good-bye, sir; I'm off now.”
Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the
squeeze it received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as
he passed out. Then she came from the window, trailing her finger
along the mahogany edge of the billiard-table. Watching her,
Soames knew that she was going to ask him something. Her finger
felt round the last pocket, and she looked up.
“Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?”
Soames shook his head.
“You haven't seen, then?” he said. “His father died just a week
ago to-day.”
“Oh!”
In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to
apprehend what this would mean.
“Poor Jon! Why didn't you tell me, Father?”
“I never know!” said Soames slowly; “you don't confide in me.”
“I would, if you'd help me, dear.”
“Perhaps I shall.”
Fleur clasped her hands. “Oh! darling—when one wants a thing
fearfully, one doesn't think of other people. Don't be angry with
me.”
Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
“I'm cogitating,” he said. What on earth had made him use a word
like that! “Has young Mont been bothering you again?”
Fleur smiled. “Oh! Michael! He's always bothering; but he's such
a good sort—I don't mind him.”
“Well,” said Soames, “I'm tired; I shall go and have a nap before
dinner.”
He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there,
and closed his eyes. A terrible responsibility this girl of
his—whose mother was—ah! what was she? A terrible responsibility!
Help her—how could he help her? He could not alter the fact that
he was her father. Or that Irene—! What was it young Mont had
said—some nonsense about the possessive instinct—shutters up—To
let? Silly!
The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river
and roses, closed on his senses, drowsing them.
V.—THE FIXED IDEA
“The fixed idea,” which has outrun more constables than any other
form of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than
when it takes the avid guise of love. To hedges and ditches, and
doors, to humans without ideas fixed or otherwise, to
perambulators and the contents sucking their fixed ideas, even to
the other sufferers from this fast malady—the fixed idea of love
pays no attention. It runs with eyes turned inward to its own
light, oblivious of all other stars. Those with the fixed ideas
that human happiness depends on their art, on vivisecting dogs,
on hating foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers,
on making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours from
being divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church
dogma, paradox and superiority to everybody else, with other
forms of ego-mania—all are unstable compared with him or her
whose fixed idea is the possession of some her or him. And though
Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the scattered life of a
little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and whose business is
pleasure, she was—as Winifred would have said in the latest
fashion of speech—“honest to God” indifferent to it all. She
wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies above
the river or the Green Park when she went to Town. She even kept
Jon's letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which
in days when corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and
chests so out of fashion, there could, perhaps, have been no
greater proof of the fixity of her idea.
After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and
received his answer three days later on her return from a river
picnic. It was his first letter since their meeting at June's.
She opened it with misgiving, and read it with dismay.
“Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past. I won't
tell it you—I think you knew when we met at June's. She says you
did. If you did, Fleur, you ought to have told me. I expect you
only heard your father's side of it. I have heard my mother's.
It's dreadful. Now that she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt
her more. Of course, I long for you all day, but I don't believe
now that we shall ever come together—there's something too strong
pulling us apart.”
So! Her deception had found her out. But Jon—she felt—had
forgiven that. It was what he said of his mother which caused the
guttering in her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
Her first impulse was to reply—her second, not to reply. These
impulses were constantly renewed in the days which followed,
while desperation grew within her. She was not her father's child
for nothing. The tenacity which had at once made and undone
Soames was her backbone, too, frilled and embroidered by French
grace and quickness. Instinctively she conjugated the verb “to
have” always with the pronoun “I.” She concealed, however, all
signs of her growing desperation, and pursued such river
pleasures as the winds and rain of a disagreeable July permitted,
as if she had no care in the world; nor did any “sucking baronet”
ever neglect the business of a publisher more consistently than
her attendant spirit, Michael Mont.
To Soames she was a puzzle. He was almost deceived by this
careless gaiety. Almost—because he did not fail to mark her eyes
often fixed on nothing, and the film of light shining from her
bedroom window late at night. What was she thinking and brooding
over into small hours when she ought to have been asleep? But he
dared not ask what was in her mind; and, since that one little
talk in the billiard-room, she said nothing to him.
In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred
invited them to lunch and to go afterward to “a most amusing
little play, 'The Beggar's Opera'” and would they bring a man to
make four? Soames, whose attitude toward theatres was to go to
nothing, accepted, because Fleur's attitude was to go to
everything. They motored up, taking Michael Mont, who, being in
his seventh heaven, was found by Winifred “very amusing.” “The
Beggar's Opera” puzzled Soames. The people were very unpleasant,
the whole thing very cynical. Winifred was “intrigued”—by the
dresses. The music, too, did not displease her. At the Opera, the
night before, she had arrived too early for the Russian Ballet,
and found the stage occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or
apoplectic from terror lest by some dreadful inadvertence they
might drop into a tune. Michael Mont was enraptured with the
whole thing. And all three wondered what Fleur was thinking of
it. But Fleur was not thinking of it. Her fixed idea stood on the
stage and sang with Polly Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced with
Jenny Diver, postured with Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and
cuddled with Macheath. Her lips might smile, her hands applaud,
but the comic old masterpiece made no more impression on her than
if it had been pathetic, like a modern “Revue.” When they
embarked in the car to return, she ached because Jon was not
sitting next her instead of Michael Mont. When, at some jolt, the
young man's arm touched hers as if by accident, she only thought:
'If that were Jon's arm!' When his cheerful voice, tempered by
her proximity, murmured above the sound of the car's progress,