“Brilliancy of mood, Mr. Mont? Do you think?”
“No. But what am I to say? ‘All the pangs and pessimism?’”
“Oh, no! But possibly: ‘All the brilliancy of diction, the strangeness and variety of mood.’”
“Good. But it’ll cost more. Say: ‘All the brilliant strangeness’; that’ll ring their bells in once. We’re nuts on ‘the strange,’ but we’re not getting it—the outre, yes, but not the strange.”
“Surely Mr. Desert gets—”
“Yes, sometimes; but hardly any one else. To be strange, you’ve got to have guts, if you’ll excuse the phrase, Miss Perren.”
“Certainly, Mr. Mont. That young man Bicket is waiting to see you.”
“He is, is he?” said Michael, taking out a cigarette. “Give me time to tighten my belt, Miss Perren, and ask him up.”
‘The lie benevolent,’ he thought; ‘now for it!’
The entrance of Bicket into a room where his last appearance had been so painful, was accomplished with a certain stolidity. Michael stood, back to the hearth, smoking; Bicket, back to a pile of modern novels, with the words “This great new novel” on it. Michael nodded.
“Hallo, Bicket!”
Bicket nodded.
“Hope you’re keeping well, sir?”
“Frightfully well, thank you.” And there was silence.
“Well,” said Michael, at last, “I suppose you’ve come about that little advance to your wife. It’s quite all right; no hurry whatever.”
While saying this he had become conscious that the ‘little snipe’ was dreadfully disturbed. His eyes had a most peculiar look, those large, shrimp-like eyes which seemed, as it were, in advance of the rest of him. He hastened on:
“I believe in Australia myself. I think you’re perfectly right, Bicket, and the sooner you go, the better. She doesn’t look too strong.”
Bicket swallowed.
“Sir,” he said, “you’ve been a gent to me, and it’s hard to say things.”
“Then don’t.”
Bicket’s cheeks became suffused with blood: queer effect in that pale, haggard face.
“It isn’t what you think,” he said: “I’ve come to ask you to tell me the truth.” Suddenly he whipped from his pocket what Michael perceived to be a crumpled novel-wrapper.
“I took this from a book on the counter as I came by, downstairs. There! Is that my wife?” He stretched it out.
Michael beheld with consternation the wrapper of Storbert’s novel. One thing to tell the lie benevolent already determined on—quite another to deny this!
Bicket gave him little time.
“I see it is, from your fyce,” he said. “What’s it all mean? I want the truth—I must ‘ave it! I’m gettin’ wild over all this. If that’s ‘er fyce there, then that’s ‘er body in the Gallery—Aubrey Greene; it’s the syme nyme. What’s it all mean?” His face had become almost formidable; his cockney accent very broad. “What gyme ‘as she been plyin’? You gotta tell me before I go aht of ’ere.”
Michael’s heels came together. He said quietly.
“Steady, Bicket.”
“Steady! You’d be steady if YOUR wife—! All that money! YOU never advanced it—you never give it ‘er—never! Don’t tell me you did!”
Michael had taken his line. No lies!
“I lent her ten pounds to make a round sum of it—that’s all; the rest she earned—honourably; and you ought to be proud of her.”
Bicket’s mouth fell open.
“Proud? And how’s she earned it? Proud! My Gawd!”
Michael said coldly:
“As a model. I myself gave her the introduction to my friend, Mr. Greene, the day you had lunch with me. You’ve heard of models, I suppose?”
Bicket’s hands tore the wrapper, and the pieces fell to the floor. “Models!” he said: “Pynters—yes, I’ve ‘eard of ’em—Swines!”
“No more swine than you are, Bicket. Be kind enough not to insult my friend. Pull yourself together, man, and take a cigarette.”
Bicket dashed the proffered case aside.
“I—I—was stuck on her,” he said passionately, “and she’s put this up on me!” A sort of sob came out of his lungs.
“You were stuck on her,” said Michael; his voice had sting in it. “And when she does her best for you, you turn her down—is that it? Do you suppose she liked it?”
Bicket covered his face suddenly.
“What should I know?” he muttered from behind his hands.
A wave of pity flooded up in Michael. Pity! Blurb!
He said drily: “When you’ve quite done, Bicket. D’you happen to remember what YOU did for HER?”
Bicket uncovered his face and stared wildly.
“You’ve never told her that?”
“No; but I jolly well will if you don’t pull yourself together.”
“What do I care if you do, now—lyin’ like that, for all the men in the world! Sixty pound! Honourably! D’you think I believe that?” His voice had desolation in it.
“Ah!” said Michael. “You don’t believe simply because you’re ignorant, as ignorant as the swine you talk of. A girl can do what she did and be perfectly honest, as I haven’t the faintest doubt she is. You’ve only to look at her, and hear the way she speaks of it. She did it because she couldn’t bear to see you selling those balloons. She did it to get you out of the gutter, and give you both a chance. And now you’ve got the chance, you kick up like this. Dash it all, Bicket, be a sport! Suppose I tell her what you did for her—d’you think she’s going to squirm and squeal? Not she! It was damned human of you, and it was damned human of her; and don’t you forget it!”
Bicket swallowed violently again.
“It’s all very well,” he said, sullenly; “it ‘asn’t ‘appened to you.”
Michael was afflicted at once. No! It hadn’t happened to him! And all his doubts of Fleur in the days of Wilfrid came hitting him.
“Look here, Bicket,” he said, “do you doubt your wife’s affection? The whole thing is there. I’ve only seen her twice, but I don’t see how you can. If she weren’t fond of you, why should she want to go to Australia, when she knows she can make good money here, and enjoy herself if she wants? I can vouch for my friend Greene. He’s dashed decent, and I KNOW he’s played cricket.”
But, searching Bicket’s face, he wondered: Were all the others she had sat to as dashed decent?
“Look here, Bicket! We all get up against it sometimes; and that’s the test of us. You’ve just GOT to believe in her; there’s nothing else to it.”
“To myke a show of herself for all the world to see!” The words seemed to struggle from the skinny throat. “I saw that picture bought yesterday by a ruddy alderman.”
Michael could not conceal a grin at this description of ‘Old Forsyte.’
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “it was bought by my own father-inlaw as a present to us, to hang in our house. And, mind you, Bicket, it’s a fine thing.”
“Ah!” cried Bicket, “it IS a fine thing! Money! It’s money bought her. Money’ll buy anything. It’ll buy the ’eart out of your chest.”
And Michael thought: ‘I can’t get away with it a bit! What price emancipation? He’s never heard of the Greeks! And if he had, they’d seem to him a lot of loose-living foreigners. I must quit.’ And, suddenly, he saw tears come out of those shrimp’s eyes, and trickle down the hollowed cheeks.
Very disturbed, he said hastily:
“When you get out there, you’ll never think of it again. Hang it all, Bicket, be a man! She did it for the best. If I were you, I’d never let on to her that I knew. That’s what she’d do if I told her how you snooped those ‘Copper Coins.’”
Bicket clenched his fists—the action went curiously with the tears; then, without a word, he turned and shuffled out.
‘Well,’ thought Michael, ‘giving advice is clearly not my stunt! Poor little snipe!’
Chapter VI.
&nb
sp; QUITTANCE
Bicket stumbled, half-blind, along the Strand. Naturally good-tempered, such a nerve-storm made him feel ill, and bruised in the brain. Sunlight and motion slowly restored some power of thought. He had got the truth. But was it the whole and nothing but the truth? Could she have made all that money without—? If he could believe that, then, perhaps—out of this country where people could see her naked for a shilling—he might forget. But—all that money! And even if all earned ‘honourable,’ as Mr. Mont had put it, in how many days, exposed to the eyes of how many men? He groaned aloud in the street. The thought of going home to her—of a scene, of what he might learn if there WERE a scene, was just about unbearable. And yet—must do it, he supposed. He could have borne it better under St. Paul’s, standing in the gutter, offering his balloons. A man of leisure for the first time in his life, a blooming ‘alderman’ with nothing to do but step in and take a ticket to the ruddy butterflies! And he owed that leisure to what a man with nothing to take his thoughts off simply could not bear! He would rather have snaffled the money out of a shop till. Better that on his soul, than the jab of this dark fiendish sexual jealousy. ‘Be a man!’ Easy said! ‘Pull yourself together! She did it for you!’ He would a hundred times rather she had not. Blackfriars Bridge! A dive, and an end in the mud down there? But you had to rise three times; they would fish you out alive, and run you in for it—and nothing gained—not even the pleasure of thinking that Vic would see what she had done, when she came to identify the body. Dead was dead, anyway, and he would never know what she felt post-mortem! He trudged across the bridge, keeping his eyes before him. Little Ditch Street—how he used to scuttle down it, back to her, when she had pneumonia! Would he never feel like that again? He strode past the window, and went in.
Victorine was still bending over the brown tin trunk. She straightened herself, and on her face came a cold, tired look.
“Well,” she said, “I see you know.”
Bicket had but two steps to take in that small room. He took them, and put his hands on her shoulders. His face was close, his eyes, so large and strained, searched hers.
“I know you’ve myde a show of yerself for all London to see; what I want to know is—the rest!”
Victorine stared back at him.
“The rest!” she said—it was not a question, just a repetition, in a voice that seemed to mean nothing.
“Ah!” said Bicket hoarsely; “The rest—Well?”
“If you think there’s a ‘rest,’ that’s enough.”
Bicket jerked his hands away.
“Aoh! for the land’s sake, daon’t be mysterious. I’m ‘alf orf me nut!”
“I see that,” said Victorine; “and I see this: You aren’t what I thought you. D’you think I liked doing it?” She raised her dress and took out the notes. “There you are! You can go to Australia without me.”
Bicket cried hoarsely: “And leave you to the blasted pynters?”
“And leave me to meself. Take them!”
But Bicket recoiled against the door, staring at the notes with horror. “Not me!”
“Well, I can’t keep ’em. I earned them to get you out of this.”
There was a long silence, while the notes lay between them on the table, still crisp if a little greasy—the long-desired, the dreamed-of means of release, of happiness together in the sunshine. There they lay; neither would take them! What then?
“Vic,” said Bicket at last, in a hoarse whisper, “swear you never let ’em touch you!”
“Yes, I can swear that.”
And she could smile, too, saying it—that smile of hers! How believe her—living all these months, keeping it from him, telling him a lie about it in the end! He sank into a chair by the table and laid his head on his arms.
Victorine turned and began pulling an old cord round the trunk. He raised his head at the tiny sound. Then she really meant to go away! He saw his life devastated, empty as a cocoanut on Hampstead Heath; and all defence ran melted out of his cockney spirit. Tears rolled from his eyes.
“When you were ill,” he said, “I stole for you. I got the sack for it.”
She spun round. “Tony—you never told me! What did you steal?”
“Books. All your extra feedin’ was books.”
For a long minute she stood looking at him, then stretched out her hands without a word. Bicket seized them.
“I don’t care about anything,” he gasped, “so ‘elp me, so long as you’re fond of me, Vic!”
“And I don’t neither. Oh! let’s get out of this, Tony! this awful little room, this awful country. Let’s get out of it all!”
“Yes,” said Bicket; and put her hands to his eyes.
Chapter VII.
LOOKING INTO ELDERSON
Soames had left Danby and Winter divided in thought between Elderson and the White Monkey. As Fleur surmised, he had never forgotten Aubrey Greene’s words concerning that bit of salvage from the wreck of George Forsyte. “Eat the fruits of life, scatter the rinds, and get copped doing it.” His application of them tended towards the field of business.
The country was still living on its capital. With the collapse of the carrying trade and European markets, they were importing food they couldn’t afford to pay for. In his opinion they would get copped doing it, and that before long. British credit was all very well, the wonder of the world and that, but you couldn’t live indefinitely on wonder. With shipping idle, concerns making a loss all over the place, and the unemployed in swarms, it was a pretty pair of shoes! Even insurance must suffer before long. Perhaps that chap Elderson had foreseen this already, and was simply feathering his nest in time. If one was to be copped in any case, why bother to be honest? This was cynicism so patent, that all the Forsyte in Soames rejected it; and yet it would keep coming back. In a general bankruptcy, why trouble with thrift, far-sightedness, integrity? Even the Conservatives were refusing to call themselves Conservatives again, as if there were something ridiculous about the word, and they knew there was really nothing left to conserve. “Eat the fruit, scatter the rinds, and get copped doing it.” That young painter had said a clever thing—yes, and his picture was clever, though Dumetrius had done one over the price—as usual! Where would Fleur hang it? In the hall, he shouldn’t be surprised—good light there; and the sort of people they knew wouldn’t jib at the nude. Curious—where all the nudes went to! You never saw a nude—no more than you saw the proverbial dead donkey! Soames had a momentary vision of dying donkeys laden with pictures of the nude, stepping off the edge of the world. Refusing its extravagance, he raised his eyes, just in time to see St. Paul’s, as large as life. That little beggar with his balloons wasn’t there today! Well—he’d nothing for him! At a tangent his thoughts turned towards the object of his pilgrimage—the P. P. R. S. and its half-year’s accounts. At his suggestion, they were writing off that German business wholesale—a dead loss of two hundred and thirty thousand pounds. There would be no interim dividend, and even then they would be carrying forward a debit towards the next half-year. Well! better have a rotten tooth out at once and done with; the shareholders would have six months to get used to the gap before the general meeting. He himself had got used to it already, and so would they in time. Shareholders were seldom nasty unless startled—a long-suffering lot!
In the board room the old clerk was still filling his inkpots from the magnum.
“Manager in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Say I’m here, will you?”
The old clerk withdrew. Soames looked at the clock. Twelve! A little shaft of sunlight slanted down the wainscotting and floor. There was nothing else alive in the room save a bluebottle and the tick of the clock; not even a daily paper. Soames watched the bluebottle. He remembered how, as a boy, he had preferred bluebottles and green-bottles to the ordinary fly, because of their bright colour. It was a lesson. The showy things, the brilliant people, were the dangerous. Witness the Kaiser, and that precious Italian poet—what was his
name! And this Jack-o’-lantern of their own! He shouldn’t be surprised if Elderson were brilliant in private life. Why didn’t the chap come? Was that encounter with young Butterfield giving him pause? The bluebottle crawled up the pane, buzzed down, crawled up again; the sunlight stole inward along the floor. All was vacuous in the board room, as though embodying the principle of insurance: “Keep things as they are.”
‘Can’t kick my heels here for ever,’ thought Soames, and moved to the window. In that wide street leading to the river, sunshine illumined a few pedestrians and a brewer’s dray, but along the main artery at the end the traffic streamed and rattled. London! A monstrous place! And all insured! ‘What’ll it be like thirty years hence?’ he thought. To think that there would be London, without himself to see it! He felt sorry for the place, sorry for himself. Even old Gradman would be gone. He supposed the insurance societies would look after it, but he didn’t know. And suddenly he became aware of Elderson. The fellow looked quite jaunty, in a suit of dittoes and a carnation.
“Contemplating the future, Mr. Forsyte?”
“No,” said Soames. How had the fellow guessed his thoughts?
“I’m glad you’ve come in. It gives me a chance to say how grateful I am for the interest you take in the concern. It’s rare. A manager has a lonely job.”
Was he mocking? He seemed altogether very spry and uppish. Light-heartedness always made Soames suspicious—there was generally some reason for it.
“If every director were as conscientious as you, one would sleep in one’s bed. I don’t mind telling you that the amount of help I got from the Board before you came on it was—well—negligible.”
Flattery! The fellow must be leading up to something!
Elderson went on:
“I can say to you what I couldn’t say to any of the others: I’m not at all happy about business, Mr. Forsyte. England is just about to discover the state she’s really in.”
Faced with this startling confirmation of his own thoughts, Soames reacted.
“No good crying out before we’re hurt,” he said; “the pound’s still high. We’re good stayers.”
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