The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 (89 page)

But about Fleur? Was he going to take the bull by the horns, or to lie low? Must be one thing or the other. He walked rapidly now, concentrated in face and movement, stalking as it were his own thoughts with a view to finality. He passed at Knightsbridge, and after unseeing scrutiny of two or three small shops where in his time he had picked up many a bargain, for himself or shopman, he edged past Tattcrsall's. That hung on – they still sold horses there, he believed! Horses had never been in his line, but he had not lived in Montpelier Square without knowing the
habitués
of Tattersall's by sight. Like everything else that was crusted, they'd be pulling it down before long, he shouldn't wonder, and putting up some motor place or cinema!

Suppose he talked to Michael? No! Worse than useless. Besides he couldn't talk about Fleur and that boy to anyone – thereby hung too long a tale; and the tale was his own. Montpelier Square! He had turned into the very place, whether by design he hardly knew. It hadn't changed – but was all slicked up since he was last there, soon after the war. Builders and decorators must have done well lately – about the only people who had. He walked along the right side of the narrow square, where he had known turbulence and tragedy. There the house was, looking much as it used to, not quite so neat, and a little more florid. Why had he ever married that woman? What had made him so set on it? Well! She had done her best to deter
him. But – God! – how he had wanted her! To this day he could recognize that. And at first – at first, he had thought, and perhaps she had thought – but who could tell? –
he
never could! And then slowly – or was it quickly? – the end; a ghastly business! He stood still by the square railings, and stared at the doorway that had been his own, as if from its green paint and its brass number he might receive inspiration how to choke love in his own daughter for the son of his own wife – yes, how to choke it before it spread and choked her!

And as, on those days and nights of his first married life, returning home, he had sought in vain for inspiration how to awaken love, so now no inspiration came to tell him how to strangle love. And, doggedly, he turned out of the little square.

In a way it was ridiculous to be fussing about the matter; for, after all, Michael was a good young fellow, and her marriage far from unhappy, so far as he could see. As for young Jon, presumably he had married for love; there hadn't been anything else to marry for, he believed – unless he had been misinformed, the girl and her brother had been museum pieces, two Americans without money to speak of. And yet – there was the moon, and he could not forget how Fleur had always wanted it. A desire to have what she hadn't yet got was her leading characteristic. Impossible, too, to blink his memory of her, six years ago – to forget her body crumpled and crushed into the sofa in the dark night when he came back from Robin Hill and broke the news to her. Perusing with his mind the record since, Soames had an acute and comfortless feeling that she had, as it were, been marking time, that all her fluttering activities, even the production of Kit, had been in the nature of a makeshift. Like the age to which she belonged, she had been lifting her feet up and down without getting anywhere, because she didn't know where she wanted to get. And yet, of late, since she had been round the world, he had seemed to notice something quieter and more solid in her conduct, as if settled purposes were pushing up, and she were coming to terms at last with her daily life. Look, for instance, at the way she had tackled this canteen! And, turning his face homeward, Soames had a vision of a common not far
from Mapledurham, where some fool had started a fire which had burned the gorse, and of the grass pushing up almost impudently green and young, through the charred embers of that conflagration. Rather like things generally, when you thought of it! The war had burned them all out, but things, yes, and people, too – one noticed – were beginning to sprout a bit, as if they felt again it might be worth while. Why, even he himself had regained some of his old connoisseur's desire to have nice things! It all depended on what you saw abead, on whether you could eat and think because tomorrow you didn't die. With this Dawes Settlement and Locarno business and the General Strike broken, there might even be another long calm, like the Victorian, which would make things possible. He was seventy-one, but one could always dwell on Timothy, who had lived to be a hundred, fixed star in shifting skies. And Fleur – only twenty-four – might almost outlive the century if she, or, rather the century, took care and bottled up its unruly passions, its disordered longings, and all that silly rushing along to nowhere in particular. If they steadied down, the age might yet become a golden, or a platinum, age at any rate. Even he might live to see the income tax at half a crown. ‘No,' he thought, confused between his daughter and the age; ‘she mustn't go throwing her cap over the windmill. It's short-sighted!' And, his blood warmed by perambulation, he became convinced that he would not speak to her, but lie low, and trust to that common sense, of which she surely had her share – oh, yes! ‘Just keep my eyes open, and speak to no one,' he thought; ‘least said, soonest mended.'

He had come again to the Artillery Memorial; and for the second time he moved around it. No! A bit of a blot – it seemed to him, now – so literal and heavy! Would that great white thing help Consols to rise? Some thing with wings might, after all, have been preferable. Some encouragement to people to take shares or go into domestic service; help, in fact, to make life liveable, instead of reminding them all the time that they had already once been blown to perdition and might again be. Those Artillery fellows – he had read somewhere – loved their guns,
and wanted to be reminded of them. But did anybody else love their guns, or want reminder? Not those Artillery fellows would look at this every day outside St George's Hospital, but Tom, Dick, Harry, Peter, Gladys, Joan and Marjorie. ‘Mistake!' thought Soames; ‘and a pretty heavy one. Something sedative, statue of Vulcan, or somebody on a horse; that's what's wanted!' And remembering George III on a horse, he smiled grimly. Anyway, there the thing was, and would have to stay! But it was high time artists went back to nymphs and dolphins, and other evidences of a settled life.

When at lunch Fleur suggested that he would want a day's law at Mapledurham before she and Kit came down, he again felt there was something behind; but, relieved enough at getting her, he let ‘the sleeping dog' lie; nor did he mention his visit to Green Street.

‘The weather looks settled,' he said. ‘You want some sun after that canteen. They talk about these ultra-violet rays. Plain sunshine used to be good enough. The doctors'll be finding something extra-pink before long. If they'd only let things alone!'

‘Darling, it amuses them.'

‘Re-discovering what our grandmothers knew so well that we've forgotten 'em, and calling 'em by fresh names! A thing isn't any more wholesome to eat for instance, because they've invented the word “vitamin”. Why, your grandfather ate an orange every day of his life, because his old doctor told him to, at the beginning of the last century. Vitamins! Don't you let Kit get faddy about his food. It's a long time before he'll go to school – that's one comfort. School feeding!'

‘Did they feed you so badly, Dad?'

‘Badly! How we grew up, I don't know. We ate our principal meal in twenty minutes, and were playing football ten minutes after. But nobody thought about digestion, then.'

‘Isn't that an argument for thinking of it now?'

‘A good digestion,' said Soames, ‘is the whole secret of life.' And he looked at his daughter. Thank God!
She
wasn't peaky. So far as he knew, her digestion was excellent. She might fancy
herself in love, or out of it; but so long as she was unconscious of her digestion, she would come through. ‘The thing is to walk as much as you can, in these days of cars,' he added.

‘Yes,' said Fleur, ‘I had a nice walk this morning.'

Was she challenging him over her apple charlotte? If so, he wasn't going to rise.

‘So did I,' he said. ‘I went all about. We'll have some golf down there.'

She looked at him for a second, then said a surprising thing:

‘Yes, I believe I'm getting middle-aged enough for golf.'

Now what did she mean by that?

PRIVATE FEELINGS

O
N
the day of the lunch party and the drive to Robin Hill, Michael really had a Committee, but he also had his private feelings and wanted to get on terms with them. There are natures in which discovery of what threatens happiness perverts to prejudice all judgement of the disturbing object. Michael's was not such. He had taken a fancy to the young Englishman met at the home of that old American George Washington, partly, indeed, because he
was
English; and, seeing him now seated next to Fleur, second cousin and first love – he was unable to revise the verdict. The boy had a nice face, and was better-looking than himself; he had attractive hair, a strong chin, straight eyes, and a modest bearing; there was no sense in blinking facts like those. The Free Trade in love, which obtained amongst pleasant people, forbade Michael to apply the cruder principles of Protection even in thoughts. Fortunately, the boy was married to this slim and attractive girl, who looked at one – as Mrs Val had put it to him – like a guaranteed-pure water-nymph! Michael's private feelings were therefore more concerned with Fleur than
with the young man himself. But hers was a difficult face to read, a twisting brain to follow, a heart hard to get at; and – was Jon Forsyte the reason why? He remembered how in Cork Street this boy's elderly half-sister – that fly-away little lady, June Forsyte – had blurted out to him that Fleur ought to have married her young brother – first he had ever heard of it. How painfully it had affected him with its intimation that he played but second fiddle in the life of his beloved! He remembered, too, some cautious and cautionary allusions by ‘old Forsyte'. Coming from that model of secrecy and suppressed feelings, they, too, had made on Michael a deep and lasting impression reinforced by his own failure to get at the bottom of Fleur's heart. He went to his Committee with but half his mind on public matters. What had nipped that early love affair in the bud and given him his chance? Not sudden dislike, lack of health, or lack of money – not relationship, for Mrs Val Dartie had married her second cousin apparently with everyone's consent. Michael, it will be seen, had remained quite ignorant of the skeleton in Soames's cupboard. Such Forsytes as he had met, reticent about family affairs, had never mentioned it; and Fleur had never spoken of her first love, much less of the reason why it had come to naught Yet, there must have been some reason; and it was idle to try and understand her present feelings without knowing what it was!

His Committee was on birth control in connexion with the Ministry of Health; and, while listening to arguments why he should not support for other people what he practised himself, he was visited by an idea. Why not go and ask June Forsyte? He could find her in the telephone book – there could be but one with such a name.

‘What do
you
say, Mont?'

‘Well, sir, if we won't export children to the Colonies or speed up emigration somehow, there's nothing for it but birth control. In the upper and middle classes we're doing it all the time, and blinking the moral side, if there is one; and I really don't see how we can insist on a moral side for those who haven't a quarter of our excuse for having lots of children.'

‘My dear Mont,' said the chairman, with a grin, ‘aren't you cutting there at the basis of all privilege?'

‘Very probably,' said Michael, with an answering grin. ‘I think, of course, that child emigration is much better, but nobody else does, apparently.'

Everybody knew that ‘young Mont' had a ‘bee in his bonnet' about child emigration, and there was little disposition to encourage it to buzz. And, since no one was more aware than Michael of being that crank in politics, one who thought you could not eat your cake and have it, he said no more. Presently, feeling that they would go round and round the mulberry bush for some time yet, and sit on the fence after, he excused himself and went away.

He found the address he wanted: ‘Miss June Forsyte, Poplar House, Chiswick', and mounted a Hammersmith bus.

How fast things seemed coming back to the normal! Extraordinarily difficult to upset anything so vast, intricate, and elastic as a nation's life. The bus swung along among countless vehicles and pedestrian myriads, and Michael realized how firm were those two elements of stability in the modern state, the common need for eating, drinking, and getting about; and the fact that so many people could drive cars. ‘Revolution?' he thought. ‘There never was a time when it had less chance. Machinery's dead agin it.' Machinery belonged to the settled state of things, and every day saw its reinforcement. The unskilled multitude and the Communistic visionaries, their leaders, only had a chance now where machinery and means of communication were still undeveloped, as in Russia. Brains, ability and technical skill, were by nature on the side of capital and individual enterprise, and were gaining even more power.