‘Mr Michael Mont, Soames. You invited him to see your pictures.’
There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!
‘Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne. Jolly day, isn’t it?’
Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his visitor. The young man’s mouth was excessively large and curly – he seemed always grinning. Why didn’t he grow the rest of those idiotic little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon? What on earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with these tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers? Ugh! Affected young idiots! In other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very clean.
‘Happy to see you!’ he said.
The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became transfixed. ‘I say!’ he said, ‘“some” picture!’
Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to the Goya copy.
‘Yes,’ he said dryly, ‘that’s not a Goya. It’s a copy. I had it painted because it reminded me of my daughter.’
‘By Jove! I thought I knew the face, sir. Is she here?’
The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.
‘She’ll be in after tea,’ he said. ‘Shall we go round the pictures?’
And Soames began that round which never tired him. He had not anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an original, but as they passed from section to section, period to period, he was startled by the young man’s frank and relevant remarks. Natively shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his mask, Soames had not spent thirty-eight years over his one hobby without knowing something more about pictures than their market values. He was, as it were, the missing link between artist and the commercial public. Art for art’s sake and all that, of course, was cant. But aesthetics and good taste were necessary. This appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what gave a work of art its permanent market value, or in other words made it ‘a work of art’. There was no real cleavage. And he was sufficiently accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by one who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: ‘Good old haystacks!’ or of James Maris: ‘Didn’t he just paint and paper ‘em! Mathew was the real swell, sir; you could dig into his surfaces!’ It was after the young man had whistled before a Whistler, with the words, ‘D’you think he ever really saw a naked woman, sir?’ that Soames remarked:
‘What are you, Mr Mont, if I may ask?’
‘I, sir? I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that. Then in the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock Exchange, snug and warm and just noisy enough. But the Peace knocked that; shares seem off, don’t they? I’ve only been demobbed about a year. What do you recommend, sir?’
‘Have you got money?’
‘Well,’ answered the young man, ‘I’ve got a father; I kept him alive during the War, so he’s bound to keep me alive now. Though, of course, there’s the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang on to his property. What do you think about that, sir?’
Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.
‘The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet. He’s got land, you know; it’s a fatal disease.’
‘This is my real Goya,’ said Soames dryly.
‘By George! He was a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled me middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace. He made no compromise with the public taste. That old boy was “some” explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day. Couldn’t he just paint! He makes Velasquez stiff, don’t you think?’
‘I have no Velasquez,’ said Soames.
The young man stared. ‘No,’ he said; ‘only nations or profiteers can afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn’t all the bankrupt nations sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers by force, and then pass a law that anyone who holds a picture by an Old Master – see schedule – must hang it in a public gallery! There seems something in that.’
‘Shall we go down to tea?’ said Soames.
The young man’s ears seemed to droop on his skull. ‘He’s not dense,’ thought Soames, following him off the premises.
Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original ‘line’, and the daring of light and shade, could have reproduced to admiration the group assembled round Annette’s tea-tray in the ingle-nook below. He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice to the sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea; justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that rare type; to Winifred’s grey-haired, corseted solidity; to Soames, of a certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the vivacious Michael Mont, pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance, growing a little stout; to Prosper Profond, with his expression as who would say, ‘Well, Mr Goya, what’s the use of paintin’ this small party?’ finally, to Jack Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity betraying the moving principle: ‘I’m English, and I live to be fit.’
Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly one day at Timothy’s that she would never marry a good man – they were so dull – should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so destroyed all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to rest with ten thousand other Englishmen without knowing the difference from the one she had chosen to repose beside. ‘Oh!’ she would say of him, in her ‘amusing’ way, ‘Jack keeps himself so fearfully fit; he’s never had a day’s illness in his life. He went right through the War without a finger-ache. You really can’t imagine how fit he is!’ Indeed, he was so ‘fit’ that he couldn’t see when she was flirting, which was such a comfort in a way. All the same she was quite fond of him, so far as one could be of a sports-machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after his pattern. Her eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with Prosper Profond. There was no ‘small’ sport or game which Monsieur Profond had not played at too, it seemed, from skittles to tarpon-fishing, and worn out every one. Imogen would sometimes wish that they had worn out Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them with the simple zeal of a schoolgirl learning hockey; at the age of Great-uncle Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing carpet-golf in her bedroom, and ‘wiping somebody’s eye’.
He was telling them now how he had ‘pipped the pro – a charmin’ fellow, playin’ a very good game,’ at the last hole this morning; and how he had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying to incite Prosper Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea – do him good – ‘keep him fit’.
‘But what’s the use of keepin’ fit?’ said Monsieur Profond.
‘Yes, sir,’ murmured Michael Mont, ‘what do you keep fit for?’
‘Jack,’ cried Imogen, enchanted, ‘what do you keep fit for?’
Jack Cardigan stared with all his health. The questions were like the buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away. During the War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that it was over he either did not know, or shrank in delicacy from explanation of his moving principle.
‘But he’s right,’ said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, ‘there’s nothin’ left but keepin’ fit.’
The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed unanswered, but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.
‘Good!’ he cried. ‘That’s the great discovery of the War. We all thought we were progressing – now we know we’re only changing.’
‘For the worse,’ said Monsieur Profond genially.
‘How you are cheerful, Prosper!’ murmured Annette.
‘You come and play tennis!’ said Jack Cardigan; ‘you’ve got the hump. We’ll soon take that down. D’you play, Mr Mont?’
‘I
hit the ball about, sir.’
At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of preparation for the future which guided his existence.
‘When Fleur comes –’ he heard Jack Cardigan say.
Ah! and why didn’t she come? He passed through drawingroom, hall, and porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car. All was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the air. There were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by the sunlight. Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had waited in such agony with her life and her mother’s balanced in his hands, came to him sharply. He had saved her then, to be the flower of his life. And now! Was she going to give him trouble – pain – give him trouble? He did not like the look of things! A blackbird broke in on his reverie with an evening song – a great big fellow up in that acacia tree. Soames had taken quite an interest in his birds of late years: he and Fleur would walk round and watch them; her eyes were sharp as needles, and she knew every nest. He saw her dog, a retriever, lying on the drive in a patch of sunlight, and called to him. ‘Hallo, old fellow – waiting for her too?’ The dog came slowly with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid a pat on his head. The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur for him; no more, no less. ‘Too fond of her!’ he thought, ‘too fond!’ He was like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea. Uninsured again – as in that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and jealous in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman – his first wife – the mother of this infernal boy. Ah! There was the car at last! It drew up, it had luggage, but no Fleur.
‘Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path.’
Walking all those miles? Soames stared. The man’s face had the beginning of a smile on it. What was he grinning at? And very quickly he turned saying, ‘All right, Sims!’ and went into the house. He mounted to the picture-gallery once more. He had from there a view of the river bank and stood with his eyes fixed on it, oblivious of the fact that it would be an hour at least before her figure showed there. Walking up! And that fellow’s grin. The boy –! He turned abruptly from the window. He couldn’t spy on her. If she wanted to keep things from him – she must; he could not spy on her. His heart felt empty, and bitterness mounted from it into his very mouth. The staccato shouts of Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball, the laugh of young Mont rose in the stillness and came in. He hoped they were making that chap Profond run. And the girl in La Vendimia stood with her arm akimbo and her dreamy eyes looking past him. ‘I’ve done all I could for you,’ he thought, ‘since you were no higher than my knee. You aren’t going to – to – hurt me, are you?’
But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to tone down. ‘There’s no real life in it,’ thought Soames. ‘Why doesn’t she come?’
Chapter Ten
TRIO
AMONG those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a weekend prolonged into the ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to snapping-point. Never had Fleur been so ‘fine’, Holly so watchful, Val so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed. What he learned of farming in that week might have been balanced on the point of a penknife and puffed off. He, whose nature was essentially averse from intrigue, and whose adoration of Fleur disposed to think that any need for concealing it was ‘skittles’, chafed and fretted, yet obeyed, taking what relief he could in the few moments when they were alone. On Thursday, while they were standing in the bay window of the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:
‘Jon, I’m going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Padding-ton; if you were to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me down, and just get back here by the last train, after. You were going home anyway, weren’t you?’
Jon nodded.
‘Anything to be with you,’ he said; ‘only why need I pretend –’
Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:
‘You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me. It’s serious about our people. We’ve simply got to be secret at present, if we want to be together.’ The door was opened, and she added loudly: ‘You are a duffer, Jon.’
Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge about a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.
On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning out of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of Paddington station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger nail tapping on his door. He rushed to it and listened. Again the sound. It was a nail. He opened. Oh! What a lovely thing came in!
‘I wanted to show you my fancy dress,’ it said, and struck an attitude at the foot of the bed.
Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door. The apparition wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist. It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a fan which touched its head.
‘This ought to be a basket of grapes,’ it whispered, ‘but I haven’t got it here. It’s my Goya dress. And this is the attitude in the picture. Do you like it?’
‘It’s a dream.’
The apparition pirouetted. ‘Touch it, and see.’
Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.
‘Grape colour,’ came the whisper, ‘all grapes – La Vendimia – the vintage.’
Jon’s fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up, with adoring eyes.
‘Oh, Jon!’ it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again, and, gliding out, was gone.
Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed. How long he stayed like that he did not know. The little noises of the tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling – as in a dream – went on about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled and whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air. And his forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place between the brows, like the imprint of a flower. Love filled his soul, that love of boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory – a searing passion – a humdrum mateship – or, once in many times, vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.
Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to show what long marches lay between him and his great-great-grandfather, the first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea. Jon was sensitive as a girl, more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the day; imaginative as one of his half-sister June’s ‘lame duck’ painters; affectionate as a son of his father and his mother naturally would be. And yet, in his inner tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to know when he was beaten. Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark, and been but normally unhappy there. Only with his mother had he, up till then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home to Robin Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said that he must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never yet kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met again, unless he found that she knew already. So intolerable did this seem to him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in London. And the first thing his mother said to him was:
‘So you’ve had our little friend of the confectioner’s there, Jon. What is she like on second thoughts?’
With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:
‘Oh! awfully jolly, Mum.’
Her arm pressed his.
Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to falsify Fleur’s fears and to release his soul. He turned to look at her, but something in her smiling face – something which only he perhaps would have caught – stopped the words b
ubbling up in him. Could fear go with a smile? If so, there was fear in her face. And out of Jon tumbled quite other words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs. Talking fast, he waited for her to come back to Fleur. But she did not. Nor did his father mention her, though of course, he too, must know. What deprivation, and killing of reality was in this silence about Fleur – when he was so full of her; when his mother was so full of Jon, and his father so full of his mother! And so the trio spent the evening of that Saturday.
After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up where his fingers had run through it. He gazed at his mother while she played, but he saw Fleur – Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering, stooping, kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was Dad looking like that for? The expression on his face was so sad and puzzling. It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and went and sat on the arm of his father’s chair. From there he could not see his face; and again he saw Fleur – in his mother’s hands, slim and white on the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair; and down the long room in the open window where the May night walked outside.
When he went up to bed his mother came into his room. She stood at the window, and said:
‘Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done wonderfully. I always think they look beautiful under a dropping moon. I wish you had known your grandfather, Jon.’
‘Were you married to Father when he was alive?’ asked Jon suddenly.
The Forsyte Saga, Volume 1 Page 79