The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

J >> John Galsworthy >> The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy


She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time, and
ran up to the gallery.

Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens--the
picture he loved best. He did not turn at the sound of the door, but she
knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt. She came up softly behind
him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his shoulder
till her cheek lay against his. It was an advance which had never yet
failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst. "Well," he said
stonily, "so you've come!"

"Is that all," murmured Fleur, "from a bad parent?" And she rubbed her
cheek against his.

Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.

"Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and off?"

"Darling, it was very harmless."

"Harmless! Much you know what's harmless and what isn't."

Fleur dropped her arms.

"Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it."

And she went over to the window-seat.

Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet. He
looked very grey. 'He has nice small feet,' she thought, catching his
eye, at once averted from her.

"You're my only comfort," said Soames suddenly, "and you go on like
this."

Fleur's heart began to beat.

"Like what, dear?"

Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it, might
have been called furtive.

"You know what I told you," he said. "I don't choose to have anything to
do with that branch of our family."

"Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't."

Soames turned on his heel.

"I'm not going into the reasons," he said; "you ought to trust me,
Fleur!"

The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon, and
was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot. Unconsciously she had
assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of the other,
with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her chest, and its
hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her that was not
involuted, and yet--in spite of all--she retained a certain grace.

"You knew my wishes," Soames went on, "and yet you stayed on there four
days. And I suppose that boy came with you to-day."

Fleur kept her eyes on him.

"I don't ask you anything," said Soames; "I make no inquisition where
you're concerned."

Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on her
hands. The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched, quite
still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-balls
mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack Cardigan had
turned the light up.

"Will it make you any happier," she said suddenly, "if I promise you not
to see him for say--the next six weeks?" She was not prepared for a sort
of tremble in the blankness of his voice.

"Six weeks? Six years--sixty years more like. Don't delude yourself,
Fleur; don't delude yourself!"

Fleur turned in alarm.

"Father, what is it?"

Soames came close enough to see her face.

"Don't tell me," he said, "that you're foolish enough to have any feeling
beyond caprice. That would be too much!" And he laughed.

Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it is
deep! Oh! what is it?' And putting her hand through his arm she said
lightly:

"No, of course; caprice. Only, I like my caprices and I don't like
yours, dear."

"Mine!" said Soames bitterly, and turned away.

The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the river.
The trees had lost all gaiety of colour. She felt a sudden hunger for
Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again on hers. And
pressing her arms tight across her breast she forced out a little light
laugh.

"O la! la! What a small fuss! as Profond would say. Father, I don't
like that man."

She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.

"You don't?" he said. "Why?"

"Nothing," murmured Fleur; "just caprice!"

"No," said Soames; "not caprice!" And he tore what was in his hands
across. "You're right. I don't like him either!"

"Look!" said Fleur softly. "There he goes! I hate his shoes; they don't
make any noise."

Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his side
pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced up at the
sky, as if saying: "I don't think much of that small moon."

Fleur drew back. "Isn't he a great cat?" she whispered; and the sharp
click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had capped the cat,
the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: "In off the red!"

Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in his
beard. What was it? Oh! yes, from "Rigoletto": "Donna a mobile." Just
what he would think! She squeezed her father's arm.

"Prowling!" she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house. It was
past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and night-still and
lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent clinging on the
riverside air. A blackbird suddenly burst out. Jon would be in London
by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the Serpentine, thinking of her! A
little sound beside her made her turn her eyes; her father was again
tearing the paper in his hands. Fleur saw it was a cheque.

"I shan't sell him my Gauguin," he said. "I don't know what your aunt
and Imogen see in him."

"Or Mother."

"Your mother!" said Soames.

'Poor Father!' she thought. 'He never looks happy--not really happy. I
don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have to, when Jon
comes back. Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'

"I'm going to dress," she said.

In her room she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress. It was of gold
tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the ankles,
a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes, and a
gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold bells,
especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she pealed. When
she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could not see her; it
even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man Michael Mont would not
have a view. But the gong had sounded, and she went down.

She made a sensation in the drawing-room. Winifred thought it "Most
amusing." Imogen was enraptured. Jack Cardigan called it "stunning,"
"ripping," "topping," and "corking."

Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: "That's a nice small
dress!" Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at her, and said
nothing. It remained for her father to apply the test of common sense.
"What did you put on that thing for? You're not going to dance."

Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.

"Caprice!"

Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred. Jack
Cardigan took her mother. Prosper Profond took Imogen. Fleur went in by
herself, with her bells jingling....

The "small" moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft and
warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the billion
caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and women.
Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white shoulder, fit as a
flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for anything but baby's
slumber. For so many lay awake, or dreamed, teased by the criss-cross of
the world.

The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see; and
the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones. Pheasants in the tall trees
of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the gravel-pit
at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the sparrows of
Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind.
The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters, scraped at her
straw a little; and the few night-flitting things--bats, moths,
owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night lay in
the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still. Men and women,
alone, riding the hobby-horses of anxiety or love, burned their wavering
tapers of dream and thought into the lonely hours.

Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime of
twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can put
a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world
which had once suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not these
sounds; her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing from
railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious of his
forbidden image, and the sound of his voice, which was taboo. And she
crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of the riverside night
that moment when his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her cheek.
Long she leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings at life's
candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the
lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there is
no open flame. But at last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting her
bells, drew quickly in.

Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames, wakeful
too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken from stars, or
the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear such sounds.

'Caprice!' he thought. 'I can't tell. She's wilful. What shall I do?
Fleur!'

And long into the "small" night he brooded.




PART II
I
MOTHER AND SON

To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly would
scarcely have been adequate. He went as a well-natured dog goes for a
walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on the lawn. He
went looking back at it. Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are
wont to sulk. But Jon had little sulkiness in his composition. He
adored his mother, and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy by
his simply saying: "I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to Italy so
many times; I'd like it new to both of us."

The fellow was subtle besides being naive. He never forgot that he was
going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
therefore show no sign of wishing to do so. For one with so enticing a
mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food, and
thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most travelled
Englishman. Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for
he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could
concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the
priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros,
cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening
plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons,
mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a
fascinating land.

It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not English,
was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen. He
felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view of
things than himself. He confided to his mother that he must be an
unsociable beast--it was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk
about the things people did talk about. To which Irene had replied
simply:

"Yes, Jon, I know."

In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating what
few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's love.
Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly
sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type
of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which
he now perceived to be no such thing. Her beauty was neither English,
French, Spanish, nor Italian--it was special! He appreciated, too, as
never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not tell, for
instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya picture,
"La Vendimia," or whether she knew that he had slipped back there after
lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half an hour, a
second and third time. It was not Fleur, of course, but like enough to
give him heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her standing at the
foot of his bed with her hand held above her head. To keep a postcard
reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at
became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy. And his
mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly caught,
sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented garden on
the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at the view. His
mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks between the
polled acacias, when her voice said:

"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"

He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to
conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."

"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol' Your
father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when he was
in Spain in '92."

In '92--nine years before he had been born! What had been the previous
existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to share in
his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He looked up
at her. But something in her face--a look of life hard-lived, the
mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering-seemed, with
its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
she was so beautiful, and so--so--but he could not frame what he felt
about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
deep, remote--his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the West,
which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
Phoenicians had dwelt--a dark, strange, secret race, above the land! His
mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past
was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played
and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that she
should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved
him and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance--he had not
even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody else!--made him
small in his own eyes.

That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof of
the town--as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and, long
after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the hours
struck, and forming in his head these lines:

"Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
Spanish city darkened under her white stars!

"What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?

"No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
Just his cry: 'How long?'"

The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but "bereaved"
was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-long came to him,
which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart is weeping." It was
past two by the time he had finished it, and past three before he went to
sleep, having said it over to himself at least twenty-four times. Next
day he wrote it out and enclosed it in one of those letters to Fleur
which he always finished before he went down, so as to have his mind free
and companionable.

About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he felt a
sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in the eyes,
and sickness. The sun had touched him too affectionately. The next three
days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled, aching indifference to
all except the feel of ice on his forehead and his mother's smile. She
never moved from his room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance, which
seemed to Jon angelic. But there were moments when he was extremely
sorry for himself, and wished terribly that Fleur could see him. Several
times he took a poignant imaginary leave of her and of the earth, tears
oozing out of his eyes. He even prepared the message he would send to
her by his mother--who would regret to her dying day that she had ever
sought to separate them--his poor mother! He was not slow, however, in
perceiving that he had now his excuse for going home.

Toward half-past six each evening came a "gasgacha" of bells--a cascade
of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling back chime
on chime. After listening to them on the fourth day he said suddenly:

"I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot."

"Very well, darling. As soon as you're fit to travel" And at once he
felt better, and--meaner.

They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home. Jon's head
was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a hat lined
by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk and he still
walked from choice in the shade. As the long struggle of discretion
between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more whether she
could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had brought him
away from. Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a day in Madrid
between their trains, it was but natural to go again to the Prado. Jon
was elaborately casual this time before his Goya girl. Now that he was
going back to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny. It was his mother
who lingered before the picture, saying:

"The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite."

Jon heard her uneasily. Did she understand? But he felt once more that
he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety. She could, in some
supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret, feel the pulse of his
thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped and feared and wished. It
made him terribly uncomfortable and guilty, having, beyond most boys, a
conscience. He wished she would be frank with him, he almost hoped for
an open struggle. But none came, and steadily, silently, they travelled
north. Thus did he first learn how much better than men women play a
waiting game. In Paris they had again to pause for a day. Jon was
grieved because it lasted two, owing to certain matters in connection
with a dressmaker; as if his mother, who looked beautiful in anything,
had any need of dresses! The happiest moment of his travel was that when
he stepped on to the Folkestone boat.

Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said

"I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon. But you've been very sweet
to me."

Jon squeezed her arm.

"Oh I yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately."

And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of glamour
over the past weeks--a kind of painful pleasure, such as he had tried to
screw into those lines about the voice in the night crying; a feeling
such as he had known as a small boy listening avidly to Chopin, yet
wanting to cry. And he wondered why it was that he couldn't say to her
quite simply what she had said to him:

"You were very sweet to me." Odd--one never could be nice and natural
like that! He substituted the words: "I expect we shall be sick."

They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six
weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had
hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.




II

FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found the
solitude at Robin Hill intolerable. A philosopher when he has all that
he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not. Accustomed,
however, to the idea, if not to the reality of resignation, he would
perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter June. He was a "lame
duck" now, and on her conscience. Having achieved--momentarily--the
rescue of an etcher in low circumstances, which she happened to have in
hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had
gone. June was living now in a tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick.
A Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of responsibility was
concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a
manner satisfactory to herself and her father. The rent of the Gallery
off Cork Street which he had bought for her and her increased income tax
happening to balance, it had been quite simpl--she no longer paid him the
rent. The Gallery might be expected now at any time, after eighteen years
of barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her father would
not feel it. Through this device she still had twelve hundred a year,
and by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians in a poor
way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically the same surplus for
the relief of genius. After three days at Robin Hill she carried her
father back with her to Town. In those three days she had stumbled on
the secret he had kept for two years, and had instantly decided to cure
him. She knew, in fact, the very man. He had done wonders with. Paul
Post--that painter a little in advance of Futurism; and she was impatient
with her father because his eyebrows would go up, and because he had
heard of neither. Of course, if he hadn't "faith" he would never get
well! It was absurd not to have faith in the man who had healed Paul
Post so that he had only just relapsed, from having overworked, or
overlived, himself again. The great thing about this healer was that he
relied on Nature. He had made a special study of the symptoms of
Nature--when his patient failed in any natural symptom he supplied the
poison which caused it--and there you were! She was extremely hopeful.
Her father had clearly not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and
she intended to provide the symptoms. He was--she felt--out of touch
with the times, which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating. In
the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian--a grateful soul, so
devoted to June for rescuing her that she was in danger of decease from
overwork--stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him for his
cure. But they could not keep his eyebrows down; as, for example, when
the Austrian woke him at eight o'clock just as he was going to sleep, or
June took The Times away from him, because it was unnatural to read "that
stuff" when he ought to be taking an interest in "life." He never
failed, indeed, to be astonished at her resource, especially in the
evenings. For his benefit, as she declared, though he suspected that she
also got something out of it, she assembled the Age so far as it was
satellite to genius; and with some solemnity it would move up and down
the studio before him in the Fox-trot, and that more mental form of
dancing--the One-step--which so pulled against the music, that Jolyon's
eyebrows would be almost lost in his hair from wonder at the strain it
must impose on the dancer's will-power. Aware that, hung on the line in
the Water Colour Society, he was a back number to those with any
pretension to be called artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he
could find, and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he had been
raised. And when June brought some girl or young man up to him, he would
rise humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and think: 'Dear
me! This is very dull for them!' Having his father's perennial sympathy
with Youth, he used to get very tired from entering into their points of
view. But it was all stimulating, and he never failed in admiration of
his daughter's indomitable spirit. Even genius itself attended these
gatherings now and then, with its nose on one side; and June always
introduced it to her father. This, she felt, was exceptionally good for
him, for genius was a natural symptom he had never had--fond as she was
of him.

Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered
whence she got herself--her red-gold hair, now greyed into a special
colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own rather
folded and subtilised countenance, her little lithe figure, when he and
most of the Forsytes were tall. And he would dwell on the origin of
species, and debate whether she might be Danish or Celtic. Celtic, he
thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs. It
was not too much to say that he preferred her to the Age with which she
was surrounded, youthful though, for the greater part, it was. She took,
however, too much interest in his teeth, for he still had some of those
natural symptoms. Her dentist at once found "Staphylococcus aureus
present in pure culture" (which might cause boils, of course), and wanted
to take out all the teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of
unnatural symptoms. Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in the
studio that evening he developed his objections. He had never had any
boils, and his own teeth would last his time. Of course--June
admitted--they would last his time if he didn't have them out! But if he
had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would be longer.
His recalcitrance--she said--was a symptom of his whole attitude; he was
taking it lying down. He ought to be fighting. When was he going to see
the man who had cured Paul Post? Jolyon was very sorry, but the fact was
he was not going to see him. June chafed. Pondridge--she said--the
healer, was such a fine man, and he had such difficulty in making two
ends meet, and getting his theories recognised. It was just such
indifference and prejudice as her father manifested which was keeping him
back. It would be so splendid for both of them!