The Forsyte saga - Complete
dark tan; whether to keep them on or not he could not decide.
They arrived soon after ten. It was his first visit to the Law
Courts, and the building struck him at once.
“By Jove!” he said as they passed into the hall, “this’d make
four or five jolly good racket courts.”
Soames was awaiting them at the foot of some stairs.
“Here you are!” he said, without shaking hands, as if the event
had made them too familiar for such formalities. “It’s Happerly
Browne, Court I. We shall be on first.”
A sensation such as he had known when going in to bat was playing
now in the top of Val’s chest, but he followed his mother and
uncle doggedly, looking at no more than he could help, and
thinking that the place smelled “fuggy.” People seemed to be
lurking everywhere, and he plucked Soames by the sleeve.
“I say, Uncle, you’re not going to let those beastly papers in,
are you?”
Soames gave him the sideway look which had reduced many to
silence in its time.
“In here,” he said. “You needn’t take off your furs, Winifred.”
Val entered behind them, nettled and with his head up. In this
confounded hole everybody—and there were a good many of
them—seemed sitting on everybody else’s knee, though really
divided from each other by pews; and Val had a feeling that they
might all slip down together into the well. This, however, was
but a momentary vision—of mahogany, and black gowns, and white
blobs of wigs and faces and papers, all rather secret and
whispery—before he was sitting next his mother in the front row,
with his back to it all, glad of her violette de Parme, and
taking off his gloves for the last time. His mother was looking
at him; he was suddenly conscious that she had really wanted him
there next to her, and that he counted for something in this
business.
All right! He would show them! Squaring his shoulders, he crossed
his legs and gazed inscrutably at his spats. But just then an
“old Johnny” in a gown and long wig, looking awfully like a funny
raddled woman, came through a door into the high pew opposite,
and he had to uncross his legs hastily, and stand up with
everybody else.
“Dartie _versus_ Dartie!”
It seemed to Val unspeakably disgusting to have one’s name called
out like this in public! And, suddenly conscious that someone
nearly behind him had begun talking about his family, he screwed
his face round to see an old be-wigged buffer, who spoke as if he
were eating his own words—queer-looking old cuss, the sort of man
he had seen once or twice dining at Park Lane and punishing the
port; he knew now where they “dug them up.” All the same he found
the old buffer quite fascinating, and would have continued to
stare if his mother had not touched his arm. Reduced to gazing
before him, he fixed his eyes on the Judge’s face instead. Why
should that old “sportsman” with his sarcastic mouth and his
quick-moving eyes have the power to meddle with their private
affairs—hadn’t he affairs of his own, just as many, and probably
just as nasty? And there moved in Val, like an illness, all the
deep-seated individualism of his breed. The voice behind him
droned along: “Differences about money matters—extravagance of
the respondent” (What a word! Was that his father?)—“strained
situation—frequent absences on the part of Mr. Dartie. My client,
very rightly, your Ludship will agree, was anxious to check a
course—but lead to ruin—remonstrated—gambling at cards and on the
racecourse—” (“That’s right!” thought Val, “pile it on!”) “Crisis
early in October, when the respondent wrote her this letter from
his Club.” Val sat up and his ears burned. “I propose to read it
with the emendations necessary to the epistle of a gentleman who
has been—shall we say dining, me Lud?”
“Old brute!” thought Val, flushing deeper; “you’re not paid to
make jokes!”
“‘You will not get the chance to insult me again in my own house.
I am leaving the country to-morrow. It’s played out’—an
expression, your Ludship, not unknown in the mouths of those who
have not met with conspicuous success.”
“Sniggering owls!” thought Val, and his flush deepened.
“‘I am tired of being insulted by you.’ My client will tell your
Ludship that these so-called insults consisted in her calling him
‘the limit’,—a very mild expression, I venture to suggest, in all
the circumstances.”
Val glanced sideways at his mother’s impassive face, it had a
hunted look in the eyes. “Poor mother,” he thought, and touched
her arm with his own. The voice behind droned on.
“‘I am going to live a new life. M. D.’”
“And next day, me Lud, the respondent left by the steamship
_Tuscarora_ for Buenos Aires. Since then we have nothing from him
but a cabled refusal in answer to the letter which my client
wrote the following day in great distress, begging him to return
to her. With your Ludship’s permission. I shall now put Mrs.
Dartie in the box.”
When his mother rose, Val had a tremendous impulse to rise too
and say: “Look here! I’m going to see you jolly well treat her
decently.” He subdued it, however; heard her saying, “the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and looked up. She
made a rich figure of it, in her furs and large hat, with a
slight flush on her cheek-bones, calm, matter-of-fact; and he
felt proud of her thus confronting all these “confounded
lawyers.” The examination began. Knowing that this was only the
preliminary to divorce, Val followed with a certain glee the
questions framed so as to give the impression that she really
wanted his father back. It seemed to him that they were “foxing
Old Bagwigs finely.”
And he received a most unpleasant jar when the Judge said
suddenly:
“Now, why did your husband leave you—not because you called him
‘the limit,’ you know?”
Val saw his uncle lift his eyes to the witness box, without
moving his face; heard a shuffle of papers behind him; and
instinct told him that the issue was in peril. Had Uncle Soames
and the old buffer behind made a mess of it? His mother was
speaking with a slight drawl.
“No, my Lord, but it had gone on a long time.”
“What had gone on?”
“Our differences about money.”
“But you supplied the money. Do you suggest that he left you to
better his position?”
“The brute! The old brute, and nothing but the brute!” thought
Val suddenly. “He smells a rat he’s trying to get at the pastry!”
And his heart stood still. If—if he did, then, of course, he
would know that his mother didn’t really want his father back.
His mother spoke again, a thought more fashionably.
“No, my Lord, but you see I had refused to give him any more
money. It took him a long time to believe that, but he did at
last—and when he did....”
“I see, you had refused. But you’ve sent him some since.”
“My Lord, I wanted him back.”
“And you thought that would bring him?”
“I don’t know, my Lord, I acted on my father’s advice.”
Something in the Judge’s face, in the sound of the papers behind
him, in the sudden crossing of his uncle’s legs, told Val that
she had made just the right answer. “Crafty!” he thought; “by
Jove, what humbug it all is!”
The Judge was speaking:
“Just one more question, Mrs. Dartie. Are you still fond of your
husband?”
Val’s hands, slack behind him, became fists. What business had
that Judge to make things human suddenly? To make his mother
speak out of her heart, and say what, perhaps, she didn’t know
herself, before all these people! It wasn’t decent. His mother
answered, rather low: “Yes, my Lord.” Val saw the Judge nod.
“Wish I could take a cock-shy at your head!” he thought
irreverently, as his mother came back to her seat beside him.
Witnesses to his father’s departure and continued absence
followed—one of their own maids even, which struck Val as
particularly beastly; there was more talking, all humbug; and
then the Judge pronounced the decree for restitution, and they
got up to go. Val walked out behind his mother, chin squared,
eyelids drooped, doing his level best to despise everybody. His
mother’s voice in the corridor roused him from an angry trance.
“You behaved beautifully, dear. It was such a comfort to have
you. Your uncle and I are going to lunch.”
“All right,” said Val; “I shall have time to go and see that
fellow.” And, parting from them abruptly, he ran down the stairs
and out into the air. He bolted into a hansom, and drove to the
Goat’s Club. His thoughts were on Holly and what he must do
before her brother showed her this thing in to-morrow’s paper.
When Val had left them Soames and Winifred made their way to the
Cheshire Cheese. He had suggested it as a meeting place with Mr.
Bellby. At that early hour of noon they would have it to
themselves, and Winifred had thought it would be “amusing” to see
this far-famed hostelry. Having ordered a light repast, to the
consternation of the waiter, they awaited its arrival together
with that of Mr. Bellby, in silent reaction after the hour and a
half’s suspense on the tenterhooks of publicity. Mr. Bellby
entered presently, preceded by his nose, as cheerful as they were
glum. Well! they had got the decree of restitution, and what was
the matter with that!
“Quite,” said Soames in a suitably low voice, “but we shall have
to begin again to get evidence. He’ll probably try the divorce—it
will look fishy if it comes out that we knew of misconduct from
the start. His questions showed well enough that he doesn’t like
this restitution dodge.”
“Pho!” said Mr. Bellby cheerily, “he’ll forget! Why, man, he’ll
have tried a hundred cases between now and then. Besides, he’s
bound by precedent to give ye your divorce, if the evidence is
satisfactory. We won’t let um know that Mrs. Dartie had knowledge
of the facts. Dreamer did it very nicely—he’s got a fatherly
touch about um!”
Soames nodded.
“And I compliment ye, Mrs. Dartie,” went on Mr. Bellby; “ye’ve a
natural gift for giving evidence. Steady as a rock.”
Here the waiter arrived with three plates balanced on one arm,
and the remark: “I ’urried up the pudden, sir. You’ll find plenty
o’ lark in it to-day.”
Mr. Bellby applauded his forethought with a dip of his nose. But
Soames and Winifred looked with dismay at their light lunch of
gravified brown masses, touching them gingerly with their forks
in the hope of distinguishing the bodies of the tasty little
song-givers. Having begun, however, they found they were hungrier
than they thought, and finished the lot, with a glass of port
apiece. Conversation turned on the war. Soames thought Ladysmith
would fall, and it might last a year. Bellby thought it would be
over by the summer. Both agreed that they wanted more men. There
was nothing for it but complete victory, since it was now a