Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in. Since the death of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide—the Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames. George, too, he knew, had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the joys of the table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight down, and owning, as he said, “just one or two old screws to give me an interest in life.” He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel up there. George put out a well-kept hand.
“Haven’t seen you since the war,” he said. “How’s your wife?”
“Thanks,” said Soames coldly, “well enough.”
Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George’s fleshy face, and gloated from his eye.
“That Belgian chap, Profond,” he said, “is a member here now. He’s a rum customer.”
“Quite!” muttered Soames. “What did you want to see me about?”
“Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment. I suppose he’s made his will.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look-up—last of the old lot; he’s a hundred, you know. They say he’s like a mummy. Where are you goin’ to put him? He ought to have a pyramid by rights.”
Soames shook his head. “Highgate, the family vault.”
“Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere else. They say he still takes an interest in food. He might last on, you know. Don’t we get anything for the old Forsytes? Ten of them—average age eighty-eight—I worked it out. That ought to be equal to triplets.”
“Is that all?” said Soames, “I must be getting on.”
“You unsociable devil,” George’s eyes seemed to answer. “Yes, that’s all: Look him up in his mausoleum—the old chap might want to prophesy.” The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he added: “Haven’t you attorneys invented a way yet of dodging this damned income tax? It hits the fixed inherited income like the very deuce. I used to have two thousand five hundred a year; now I’ve got a beggarly fifteen hundred, and the price of living doubled.”
“Ah!” murmured Soames, “the turf’s in danger.”
Over George’s face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.
“Well,” he said, “they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in the sear and yellow, getting poorer every day. These Labour chaps mean to have the lot before they’ve done. What are you going to do for a living when it comes? I shall work a six-hour day teaching politicians how to see a joke. Take my tip, Soames; go into Parliament, make sure of your four hundred—and employ me.”
And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.
Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his cousin’s words. He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began, it was he—the worker and the saver—who would be looted! That was the negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could civilization be built on any other? He did not think so. Well, they wouldn’t confiscate his pictures, for they wouldn’t know their worth. But what would they be worth, if these maniacs once began to milk capital? A drug on the market. “I don’t care about myself,” he thought; “I could live on five hundred a year, and never know the difference, at my age.” But Fleur! This fortune, so widely invested, these treasures so carefully chosen and amassed, were all for—her. And if it should turn out that he couldn’t give or leave them to her—well, life had no meaning, and what was the use of going in to look at this crazy, futuristic stuff with the view of seeing whether it had any future?
Arriving at the gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his shilling, picked up a catalogue, and entered. Some ten persons were prowling round. Soames took steps and came on what looked to him like a lamppost bent by collision with a motor omnibus. It was advanced some three paces from the wall, and was described in his catalogue as “Jupiter.” He examined it with curiosity, having recently turned some of his attention to sculpture. “If that’s Jupiter,” he thought, “I wonder what Juno’s like.” And suddenly he saw her, opposite. She appeared to him like nothing so much as a pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow. He was still gazing at her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left. “Épatant!” he heard one say.
“Jargon!” growled Soames to himself.
The other’s boyish voice replied:
“Missed it, old bean; he’s pulling your leg. When Jove and Juno created he them, he was saying: ‘I’ll see how much these fools will swallow.’ And they’ve lapped up the lot.”
“You young duffer! Vospovitch is an innovator. Don’t you see that he’s brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic art, of music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was bound to. People are tired—the bottom’s tumbled out of sentiment.”
“Well, I’m quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty. I was through the war. You’ve dropped your handkerchief, sir.”
Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him. He took it with some natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose. It had the right scent—of distant eau de cologne—and his initials in a corner. Slightly reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man’s face. It had rather fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush growing out of it on each side, and small lively eyes, above a normally dressed appearance.
“Thank you,” he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: “Glad to hear you like beauty; that’s rare, nowadays.”
“I dote on it,” said the young man; “but you and I are the last of the old guard, sir.”
Soames smiled.
“If you really care for pictures,” he said, “here’s my card. I can show you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you’re down the river and care to look in.”
“Awfully nice of you, sir. I’ll drop in like a bird. My name’s Mont-Michael.” And he took off his hat.
Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in response, with a downward look at the young man’s companion, who had a purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look—as if he were a poet!
It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went and sat down in an alcove. What had possessed him to give his card to a rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that? And Fleur, always at the back of his thoughts, started out like a filigree figure from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove was a large canvas with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat. He looked at his catalogue: “No. 32 The Future Town—Paul Post.” “I suppose that’s satiric too,” he thought. “What a thing!” But his second impulse was more cautious. It did not do to condemn hurriedly. There had been those stripey, streaky creations of Monet’s, which had turned out such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed at. During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur’s life, indeed, he had marked so many “movements,” seen the tides of taste and technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion. This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till someone passing said: “He’s got the airplanes wonderfully, don’t you think!” Below the tomato blobs was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could assign no meaning whatever, till someone else came by, murmuring: “What expression he gets with his foreground!” Expressi
on? Of what? Soames went back to his seat. The thing was “rich,” as his father would have said, and he wouldn’t give a damn for it. Expression! Ah! they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent. So it was coming here too, was it? He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887—or ’8—hatched in China, so they said. He wondered where this—this Expressionism had been hatched. The thing was a regular disease!
He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and the Future Town. Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed through the slit between. No mistaking that back, elegant as ever though the hair above had gone grey. Irene! His divorced wife—Irene! And this, no doubt, was—her son—by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte—their boy, six months older than his own girl! And mumbling over in his mind the bitter days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat down again. She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor of them, had never seen them smile. Grudgingly he admitted her still beautiful and in figure almost as young as ever. And how that boy smiled back at her! Emotion squeezed Soames’s heart. The sight infringed his sense of justice. He grudged her that boy’s smile—it went beyond what Fleur gave him, and it was undeserved. Their son might have been his son; Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight! He lowered his catalogue. If she saw him, all the better! A reminder of her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing of it, would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis which surely must soon or late visit her! Then, half-conscious that such a thought was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took out his watch. Past four! Fleur was late. She had gone to his niece Imogen Cardigan’s, and there they would keep her smoking cigarettes and gossiping, and that. He heard the boy laugh, and say eagerly: “I say, Mum, is this by one of Auntie June’s lame ducks?”
“Paul Post—I believe it is, darling.”
The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her use it. And then she saw him. His eyes must have had in them something of George Forsyte’s sardonic look; for her gloved hand crisped the folds of her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went stony. She moved on.
“It is a caution,” said the boy, catching her arm again.
Soames stared after them. That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte chin, and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a glass of old sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair. Better than they deserved—those two! They passed from his view into the next room, and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but saw it not. A little smile snarled up his lips. He was despising the vehemence of his own feelings after all these years. Ghosts! And yet as one grew old—was there anything but what was ghost-like left? Yes, there was Fleur! He fixed his eyes on the entrance. She was due; but she would keep him waiting, of course! And suddenly he became aware of a sort of human breeze—a short, slight form clad in a sea-green djibbah with a metal belt and a fillet binding unruly red-gold hair all streaked with grey. She was talking to the gallery attendants, and something familiar riveted his gaze—in her eyes, her chin, her hair, her spirit—something which suggested a thin Skye terrier just before its dinner. Surely June Forsyte! His cousin June—and coming straight to his recess! She sat down beside him, deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil note. Soames sat unmoving. A confounded thing, cousinship! “Disgusting!” he heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of an overhearing stranger, she looked at him. The worst had happened.
“Soames!”
Soames turned his head a very little.
“How are you?” he said. “Haven’t seen you for twenty years.”
“No. Whatever made you come here?”
“My sins,” said Soames. “What stuff!”
“Stuff? Oh, yes—of course; it hasn’t arrived yet.”
“It never will,” said Soames; “it must be making a dead loss.”
“Of course it is.”
“How d’you know?”
“It’s my gallery.”
Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
“Yours? What on earth makes you run a show like this?”
“I don’t treat Art as if it were grocery.”
Soames pointed to the Future Town. “Look at that! Who’s going to live in a town like that, or with it on his walls?”
June contemplated the picture for a moment.
“It’s a vision,” she said.
“The deuce!”
There was silence, then June rose. “Crazy-looking creature!” he thought.
“Well,” he said, “you’ll find your young stepbrother here with a woman I used to know. If you take my advice, you’ll close this exhibition.”
June looked back at him. “Oh! You Forsyte!” she said, and moved on. About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a look of dangerous decisions. Forsyte! Of course, he was a Forsyte! And so was she! But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought Bosinney into his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June and never would! And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a gallery! . . . And suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of his own family. The old aunts at Timothy’s had been dead so many years; there was no clearinghouse for news. What had they all done in the war? Young Roger’s boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman’s second son killed; young Nicholas’s eldest had got an O. B. E., or whatever they gave them. They had all joined up somehow, he believed. That boy of Jolyon’s and Irene’s, he supposed, had been too young; his own generation, of course, too old, though Giles Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross—and Jesse Hayman been a special constable—those “Dromios” had always been of a sporting type! As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read the papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn’t know what more he could have done at his age. Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him that he and his family had taken this war very differently to that affair with the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the resources of the Empire. In that old war, of course, his nephew Val Dartie had been wounded, that fellow Jolyon’s first son had died of enteric, “the Dromios” had gone out on horses, and June had been a nurse; but all that had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in this war everybody had done “their bit,” so far as he could make out, as a matter of course. It seemed to show the growth of something or other—or perhaps the decline of something else. Had the Forsytes become less individual, or more imperial, or less provincial? Or was it simply that one hated Germans? . . . Why didn’t Fleur come, so that he could get away? He saw those three return together from the other room and pass back along the far side of the screen. The boy was standing before the Juno now. And, suddenly, on the other side of her, Soames saw—his daughter, with eyebrows raised, as well they might be. He could see her eyes glint sideways at the boy, and the boy look back at her. Then Irene slipped her hand through his arm, and drew him on. Soames saw him glancing round, and Fleur looking after them as the three went out.
A voice said cheerfully: “Bit thick, isn’t it, sir?”
The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing. Soames nodded.
“I don’t know what we’re coming to.”
“Oh! That’s all right, sir,” answered the young man cheerfully; “they don’t either.”
Fleur’s voice said: “Hallo, Father! Here you are!” precisely as if he had been keeping her waiting.
The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.
“Well,” said Soames, looking her up and down, “you’re a punctual sort of young woman!”
This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and colour, with sh
ort, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes were set in whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and yet in repose were almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids, held over them in a sort of suspense. She had a charming profile, and nothing of her father in her face save a decided chin. Aware that his expression was softening as he looked at her, Soames frowned to preserve the unemotionalism proper to a Forsyte. He knew she was only too inclined to take advantage of his weakness.
Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:
“Who was that?”
“He picked up my handkerchief. We talked about the pictures.”
“You’re not going to buy that, Father?”
“No,” said Soames grimly; “nor that Juno you’ve been looking at.”
Fleur dragged at his arm. “Oh! Let’s go! It’s a ghastly show.”
In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner. But Soames had hung out a board marked “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” and he barely acknowledged the young fellow’s salute.
“Well,” he said in the street, “whom did you meet at Imogen’s?”
“Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond.”
“Oh!” muttered Soames; “that chap! What does your aunt see in him?”
“I don’t know. He looks pretty deep—mother says she likes him.”
Soames grunted.
“Cousin Val and his wife were there, too.”
“What!” said Soames. “I thought they were back in South Africa.”
“Oh, no! They’ve sold their farm. Cousin Val is going to train racehorses on the Sussex Downs. They’ve got a jolly old manor house; they asked me down there.”
Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him. “What’s his wife like now?”
The Forsyte Saga Page 73