“Oh!”
“I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me. Of course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him pretty mad, wouldn’t it?”
Jon thought for a minute. “Not if she loved my father best.”
“But suppose they were engaged?”
“If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I might go cracked, but I shouldn’t grudge it you.”
“I should. You mustn’t ever do that with me, Jon.”
“My God! Not much!”
“I don’t believe that he’s ever really cared for my mother.”
Jon was silent. Val’s words, the two past masters in the Club!
“You see, we don’t know,” went on Fleur; “it may have been a great shock. She may have behaved badly to him. People do.”
“My mother wouldn’t.”
Fleur shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think we know much about our fathers and mothers. We just see them in the light of the way they treat US; but they’ve treated other people, you know, before we were born—plenty, I expect. You see, they’re both old. Look at your father, with three separate families!”
“Isn’t there any place,” cried Jon, “in all this beastly London where we can be alone?”
“Only a taxi.”
“Let’s get one, then.”
When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: “Are you going back to Robin Hill? I should like to see where you live, Jon. I’m staying with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for dinner. I wouldn’t come to the house, of course.”
Jon gazed at her enraptured.
“Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan’t meet anybody. There’s a train at four.”
The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured, official, commercial, or professional, unlike the working classes, still worked their seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth generation travelled down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class carriage, dusty and sun-warmed, of that too early train. They travelled in blissful silence, holding each other’s hands.
At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and honeysuckle.
For Jon—sure of her now, and without separation before him—it was a miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along the river Thames. It was love-ina-mist—one of those illumined pages of Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they gave each other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and flowers and birds scrolled in among the text—a happy communing, without afterthought, which lasted twenty-seven minutes. They reached the coppice at the milking-hour. Jon would not take her as far as the farmyard; only to where she could see the field leading up to the gardens, and the house beyond. They turned in among the larches, and suddenly, at the winding of the path, came on Irene, sitting on an old log seat.
There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves; to moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal dignity. This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his mother. He became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate thing. To have brought Fleur down openly—yes! But to sneak her in like this! Consumed with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his nature would permit.
Fleur was smiling a little defiantly; his mother’s startled face was changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious. It was she who uttered the first words:
“I’m very glad to see you. It was nice of Jon to think of bringing you down to us.”
“We weren’t coming to the house,” Jon blurted out. “I just wanted Fleur to see where I lived.”
His mother said quietly: “Won’t you come up and have tea?”
Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard Fleur answer: “Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner. I met Jon by accident, and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his home.”
How self-possessed she was!
“Of course; but you MUST have tea. We’ll send you down to the station. My husband will enjoy seeing you.”
The expression of his mother’s eyes, resting on him for a moment, cast Jon down level with the ground—a true worm. Then she led on, and Fleur followed her. He felt like a child, trailing after those two, who were talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the house up there beyond the trees and the grassy slope. He watched the fencing of their eyes, taking each other in-the two beings he loved most in the world.
He could see his father sitting under the oak-tree; and suffered in advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant; already he could feel the faint irony which would come into his voice and smile.
“This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the house. Let’s have tea at once—she has to catch a train. Jon, tell them, dear, and telephone to the Dragon for a car.”
To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his mother had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up into the house. Now he would not see Fleur alone again—not for a minute, and they had arranged no further meeting! When he returned under cover of the maids and teapots, there was not a trace of awkwardness beneath the tree; it was all within himself, but not the less for that. They were talking of the Gallery off Cork Street.
“We back-numbers,” his father was saying, “are awfully anxious to find out why we can’t appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must tell us.”
“It’s supposed to be satiric, isn’t it?” said Fleur.
He saw his father’s smile.
“Satiric? Oh! I think it’s more than that. What do you say, Jon?”
“I don’t know at all,” stammered Jon. His father’s face had a sudden grimness.
“The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals. Off with their heads, they say—smash their idols! And let’s get back to—nothing! And, by Jove, they’ve done it! Jon’s a poet. He’ll be going in, too, and stamping on what’s left of us. Property, beauty, sentiment—all smoke. We mustn’t own anything nowadays, not even our feelings. They stand in the way of—Nothing.”
Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father’s words, behind which he felt a meaning that he could not reach. He didn’t want to stamp on anything!
“Nothing’s the god of today,” continued Jolyon; “we’re back where the Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism.”
“No, Dad,” cried Jon suddenly; “we only want to LIVE, and we don’t know how, because of the Past—that’s all!”
“By George!” said Jolyon, “that’s profound, Jon. Is it your own? The Past! Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath. Let’s have cigarettes.”
Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly, as if to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes. He lighted his father’s and Fleur’s, then one for himself. Had he taken the knock that Val had spoken of? The smoke was blue when he had not puffed, grey when he had; he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense of equality it gave him. He was glad no one said: “So you’ve begun!” He felt less young.
Fleur looked at her watch, and rose. His mother went with her into the house. Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.
“See her into the car, old man,” said Jolyon; “and when she’s gone, ask your mother to come back to me.”
Jon went. He waited in the hall. He saw her into the car. There was no chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand. He waited all that evening for something to be said to him. Nothing was said. Nothing might have happened. He went up to bed; and in the mirror on his dressing-table met himself. He did not speak, nor did the image; but both looked as if they thought the more.
Chapter IV.
IN GREEN STREET
Uncertain, whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous sho
uld be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to the remark of Fleur’s: “Isn’t he a great cat? Prowling!” to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: “What’s the use of keepin’ fit?” or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as it was now called. Certain that Annette was looking particularly handsome, and that Soames had sold him a Gauguin and then torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself had said: “I didn’t get that small picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde.”
However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred’s evergreen little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness which no one mistook for naivete; a word hardly applicable to Monsieur Prosper Profond. Winifred still found him “amusing,” and would write him little notes saying: “Come and have a ‘jolly’ with us’—it was breath of life to her to keep up with the phrases of the day.
The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in it—which was unnatural. The English type of disillusionment was familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable circles. It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got something out of it. But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there WAS nothing in anything, was not English; and that which was not English one could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form. It was like having the mood which the war had left, seated—dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent—in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard. It was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it—for the English character at large—“a bit too thick”—for if nothing was really worth getting excited about, there were always games, and one could make it so! Even Winifred, ever a Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of a mood of disillusionment; it really ought not to be there. Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain, in a country which decently veiled such realities.
When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred’s little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of seeing nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with an air of seeing a fire which was not there.
Monsieur Profond came from the window. He was in full fig, with a white waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.
“Well, Miss Forsyde,” he said, “I’m awful pleased to see you. Mr. Forsyde well? I was sayin’ today I want to see him have some pleasure. He worries.”
“You think so?” said Fleur shortly.
“Worries,” repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r’s.
Fleur spun round. “Shall I tell you,” she said, “what would give him pleasure?” But the words: “To hear that you had cleared out” died at the expression on his face. All his fine white teeth were showing.
“I was hearin’ at the Club today, about his old trouble.”
“What do you mean?”
Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimise his statement.
“Before you were born,” he said; “that small business.”
Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share in her father’s worry, Fleur could not withstand a rush of nervous curiosity. “What did you hear?”
“Why!” murmured Monsieur Profond, “you know all that.”
“I expect I do. But I should like to know that you haven’t heard it all wrong.”
“His first wife,” murmured Monsieur Profond.
Choking back the words: “He was never married before”; she said: “Well, what about her?”
“Mr. George Forsyde was tellin’ me about your father’s first wife marryin’ his cousin Jolyon afterwards. It was a small bit unpleasant, I should think. I saw their boy—nice boy!”
Fleur looked up. Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical, before her. That—the reason! With the most heroic effort of her life so far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure. She could not tell whether he had noticed. And just then Winifred came in.
“Oh! here you both are already! Imogen and I have had the most amusing afternoon at the Babies’ bazaar.”
“What babies?” said Fleur mechanically.
“The ‘Save the Babies.’ I got such a bargain, my dear. A piece of old Armenian work—from before the flood. I want your opinion on it, Prosper.”
“Auntie,” whispered Fleur suddenly.
At the tone in the girl’s voice Winifred closed in on her.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”
Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was practically out of hearing.
“Auntie, he told me that father has been married before. Is it true that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte’s father?”
Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had Winifred felt more seriously embarrassed. Her niece’s face was so pale, her eyes so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.
“Your Father didn’t wish you to hear,” she said, with all the aplomb she could muster. “These things will happen. I’ve often told him he ought to let you know.”
“Oh!” said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her shoulder—a firm little shoulder, nice and white! She never could help an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who would have to be married, of course—though not to that boy Jon.
“We’ve forgotten all about it years and years ago,” she said comfortably. “Come and have dinner!”
“No, Auntie. I don’t feel very well. May I go upstairs?”
“My dear!” murmured Winifred, concerned; “you’re not taking this to heart? Why, you haven’t properly come out yet! That boy’s a child!”
“What boy? I’ve only got a headache. But I can’t stand that man to-night.”
“Well, well,” said Winifred; “go and lie down. I’ll send you some bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond. What business had he to gossip? Though I must say I think it’s much better you should know.”
Fleur smiled. “Yes,” she said, and slipped from the room.
She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a fluttered, frightened feeling in her breast. Never in her life as yet had she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what she had set her heart on. The sensations of the afternoon had been full, and poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of them had really made her head ache. No wonder her father had hidden that photograph so secretly behind her own—ashamed of having kept it! But could he hate Jon’s mother and yet keep her photograph? She pressed her hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly. Had they told Jon—had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell him? Everything now turned on that! She knew, they all knew, except—perhaps—Jon!
She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard. Jon loved his mother. If they had told him, what would he do? She could not tell. But if they had not told him, should she not—could she not get him for herself—get married to him, before he knew? She searched her memories of Robin Hill. His mother’s face so passive—with its dark eyes and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile—baffled her; and his father’s—kindly, sunken, ironic. Instinctively she felt they would shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from hurting him—for of course it would hurt him awfully to know!
Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew. So long as neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still a chance—freedom to cover one’s tracks, and get what her heart was set on. But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation. Every one’s hand was against her—every one’s! It was as Jon had said—he and she just wanted to live and the past was in their way, a past they hadn’t shared in, and didn’t understand! Oh! What a shame! And suddenly she thought of June. Would she help them? For somehow June had left on her the impression that she would be sympathetic w
ith their love, impatient of obstacle. Then, instinctively, she thought: ‘I won’t give anything away, though, even to her. I daren’t! I mean to have Jon; in spite of them all.’
Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred’s pet headache cachets. She swallowed both. Then Winifred herself appeared. Fleur opened her campaign with the words:
“You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn’t think I’m in love with that boy. Why, I’ve hardly seen him!”
Winifred, though experienced, was not ‘fine’. She accepted the remark with considerable relief. Of course, it was not pleasant for the girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to minimise the matter, a task for which she was eminently qualified, raised fashionably under a comfortable mother and a father whose nerves might not be shaken, and for many years the wife of Montague Dartie. Her description was a masterpiece of understatement. Fleur’s father’s first wife had been very foolish. There had been a young man who had got run over, and she had left Fleur’s father. Then, years after, when it might all have come right again, she had taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce. Nobody remembered anything of it now, except just the family. And, perhaps, it had all turned out for the best; her father had Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had been quite happy, they said, and their boy was a nice boy. “Val having Holly, too, is a sort of plaster, don’t you know?” With these soothing words, Winifred patted her niece’s shoulder, thought: “She’s a nice, plump little thing!” and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite of his indiscretion, was very “amusing” this evening.
For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under influence of bromide material and spiritual. But then reality came back. Her aunt had left out all that mattered—all the feeling, the hate, the love, the unforgivingness of passionate hearts. She, who knew so little of life, and had touched only the fringe of love, was yet aware by instinct that words have as little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread it buys. ‘Poor Father!’ she thought. ‘Poor me! Poor Jon! But I don’t care, I mean to have him!’ From the window of her darkened room she saw “that man” issue from the door below and “prowl” away. If he and her mother—how would that affect her chance? Surely it must make her father cling to her more closely, so that he would consent in the end to anything she wanted, or become reconciled the sooner to what she did without his knowledge.
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