Since wiping the dust of the city off his feet, after that affair of Elderson and the P.P.R.S., Soames had become almost too countrified for a Forsyte. He had bought the meadows on the far side of the river and several Jersey cows. Not that he was going in for farming or nonsense of that sort, but it gave him an interest to punt himself over and see them milked. He had put up a good deal of glass, too, and was laying down melons. The English melon was superior to any other, and every year’s connexion with a French wife made him more and more inclined to eat what he grew himself. After Michael was returned for Parliament, Fleur had sent him Sir James Foggart’s book, ‘The Parlous State of England’. When it came, he said to Annette:
‘I don’t know what she thinks I want with this great thing!’
‘To read it, Soames, I suppose.’
Soames sniffed, turning the pages.
‘I can’t tell what it’s all about.’
‘I will sell it at my bazaar, Soames. It will do for some good man who can read English.’
From that moment Soames began almost unconsciously to read the book. He found it a peculiar affair, which gave most people some good hard knocks. He began to enjoy them, especially the chapter deprecating the workman’s dislike of parting with his children at a reasonable age. Having never been outside Europe, he had a somewhat sketchy idea of places like South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; but this old fellow Foggart, it appeared, had been there, and knew what he was talking about. What he said about their development seemed quite sensible. Children who went out there put on weight at once, and became owners of property at an age when in England they were still delivering parcels, popping in and out of jobs, hanging about street corners, and qualifying for unemployment and Communism. Get them out of England! There was a startling attraction in the idea for one who was English to a degree. He was in favour, too, of what was said about growing food and making England safe in the air. And then, slowly, he turned against it. The fellow was too much of a Jeremiah altogether. He complained to Fleur that the book dealt with nothing but birds in the bush; it was unpractical. What did ‘Old Mont’ say?
‘He won’t read it; he says he knows Old Foggart.’
‘H’m!’ said Soames, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if there were something in it, then.’ That little-headed baronet was old-fashioned! ‘Anyway, it shows that Michael’s given up those Labour fellows.’
‘Michael says Foggartism will be Labour’s policy when they understand all it means.’
‘How’s that?’
‘He thinks it’s going to do them much more good than anybody else. He says one or two of their leaders are beginning to smell it out, and that the rest of the leaders are bound to follow in time.’
‘In that case,’ said Soames, ‘it’ll never go down with their rank and file.’ And for two minutes he sat in a sort of trance. Had he said something profound, or had he not?
Fleur’s presence at week-ends with the eleventh baronet was extremely agreeable to him. Though at first he had felt a sort of disappointment that his grandchild was not a girl – an eleventh baronet belonged too definitely to the Monts – he began, as the months wore on, to find him ‘an engaging little chap’, and, in any case, to have him down at Mapledurham kept him away from Lippinghall. It tried him at times, of course, to see how the women hung about the baby – there was something very excessive about motherhood. He had noticed it with Annette; he noticed it now with Fleur. French – perhaps! He had not remembered his own mother making such a fuss; indeed, he could not remember anything that happened when he was one. A week-end, when Madame Lamotte, Annette and Fleur were all hanging over his grandson, three generations of maternity concentrated on that pudgy morsel, reduced him to a punt, fishing for what he felt sure nobody would eat.
By the time he had finished Sir James Foggart’s book, the disagreeable summer of 1924 was over, and a more disagreeable September had set in. The mellow golden days that glow up out of a haze which stars with dewdrops every cobweb on a gate, simply did not come. It rained, and the river was so unnaturally full, that the newspapers were at first unnaturally empty – there was literally no news of drought; they filled up again slowly with reports of the wettest summer ‘for thirty years’. Calm, greenish with weed and tree shadow, the river flowed unendingly between Soames’s damp lawn and his damp meadows. There were no mushrooms. Blackberries tasted of rain. Soames made a point of eating one every year, and, by the flavour, could tell what sort of year it had been. There was a good deal of ‘old-man’s-beard’. In spite of all this, however, he was more cheerful than he had been for ages. Labour had been ‘in’, if not in real power, for months, and the heavens had only lowered. Forced by Labour-in-office to take some notice of politics, he would utter prophecies at the breakfast-table. They varied somewhat, according to the news; and, since he always forgot those which did not come true, he was constantly able to tell Annette that he had told her so. She took no interest, however, occupied, ‘like a woman, with her bazaars and jam-making, running about in the car, shopping in London, attending garden-parties’; and, in spite of her tendency to put on flesh, still remarkably handsome. Jack Cardigan, his niece Imogen’s husband, had made him a sixty-ninth-birthday present of a set of golf-clubs. This was more puzzling to Soames than anything that had ever happened to him. What on earth was he to do with them? Annette, with that French quickness which often annoyed him, suggested that he should use them. She was uncomfortable! At his age –! And then, one week-end in May the fellow himself had come down with Imogen and, teeing a ball up on half a molehill, had driven it across the river.
‘I’ll bet you a box of cigars, Uncle Soames, that you don’t do that before we leave on Monday.’
‘I never bet,’ said Soames, ‘and I don’t smoke.’
‘Time you began both. Look here, we’ll spend tomorrow learning to knock the ball!’
‘Absurd!’ said Soames.
But in his room that night he had stood in his pyjamas swinging his arms in imitation of Jack Cardigan. The next day he sent the women out in the car with their lunch; he was not going to have them grinning at him. He had seldom spent more annoying hours than those which followed. They culminated in a moment when at last he hit the ball, and it fell into the river three yards from the near bank. He was so stiff next morning in arms and ribs, that Annette had to rub him till he said:
‘Look out! you’re taking the skin off!’
He had, however, become infected. After destroying some further portions of his lawn, he joined the nearest golf club, and began to go round by himself during the luncheon-hour, accompanied by a little boy. He kept at it with characteristic tenacity, till by July he had attained a certain proficiency; and he began to say to Annette that it would do her all the good in the world to take it up, and keep her weight down.
‘Merci, Soames,’ she would reply; ‘I have no wish to be the figure of your English Misses, flat as a board before and behind.’ She was reactionary, ‘like her nation’; and Soames, who at heart had a certain sympathy with curves, did not seriously press the point. He found that the exercise jogged both his liver and his temper. He began to have colour in his cheeks. The day after his first nine-hole round with Jack Cardigan, who had given him three strokes a hole and beaten him by nine holes, he received a package which, to his dismay, contained a box of cigars. What the fellow was about, he could not imagine! He only discovered when, one evening a few days later, sitting at the window of his picture gallery, he found that he had one in his mouth. Curiously enough, it did not make him sick. It produced rather something of the feeling he used to enjoy after ‘doing Coué’ – now comparatively out of fashion, since an American, so his sister Winifred said, had found a shorter cut. A suspicion, however, that the family had set Jack Cardigan on, prevented him from indulging his new sensation anywhere but in his private gallery; so that cigars gathered the halo of a secret vice. He renewed his store stealthily. Only when he found that Annette, Fleur, and others had known for
weeks, did he relax his rule, and say openly that the vice of the present day was cigarettes.
‘My dear boy,’ said Winifred, when she next saw him, ‘everybody’s saying you’re a different man!’
Soames raised his eyebrows. He was not conscious of any change.
‘That chap Cardigan,’ he said, ‘is a funny fellow!… I’m going to dine and sleep at Fleur’s; they’re just back from Italy. The House sits on Monday.’
‘Yes,’ said Winifred; ‘very fussy of them – sitting in the Long Vacation.’
‘Ireland!’ said Soames deeply. ‘A pretty pair of shoes again!’ Always had been; always would be!
Chapter Three
MICHAEL TAKES ‘A LUNAR’
MICHAEL had returned from Italy with the longing to ‘get on with it’, which results from Southern holidays. Countryman by up-bringing, still deeply absorbed by the unemployment problem and committed to Foggartism, as its remedy, he had taken up no other hobby in the House, and was eating the country’s bread, if somewhat unbuttered, and doing nothing for it. He desired, therefore, to know where he stood, and how long he was going to stand there.
Bent on ‘taking this lunar’ – as ‘Old Forsyte’ would call it – at his own position, he walked away from the House that same day, after dealing with an accumulated correspondence. He walked towards Pevensey Blythe, in the office of that self-sufficing weekly: The Outpost. Sunburnt from his Italian holiday and thinned by Italian cookery, he moved briskly, and thought of many things. Passing down on to the Embankment, where a number of unemployed birds on a number of trees were also wondering, it seemed, where they stood and how long they were going to stand there, he took a letter from his pocket to read a second time.
12 Sapper’s Row,
Camden Town.
HONOURABLE SIR,
Being young in ‘Who’s Who’, you will not be hard, I think, to those in suffering. I am an Austrian woman who married a German eleven years ago. He was an actor on the English stage, for his father and mother, who are no more living, brought him to England quite young. Interned he was, and his health broken up. He has the neurasthenie very bad so he cannot be trusted for any work. Before the war he was always in a part, and we had some good money; but this went partly when I was left with my child alone, and the rest was taken by the P.T., and we got very little back, neither of us being English. What we did get has all been to the doctor, and for our debts, and for burying our little child, which died happily, for though I loved it much this life which we have is not fit for a child to live. We live on my needle, and that is not earning much, a pound a week and sometimes nothing. The managers will not look at my husband all these years, because he shakes suddenly, so they think he thinks, but, Sir, he has not the money to buy it. We do not know where to turn, or what to do. So I thought, dear Sir, whether you could do anything for us with the P.T.; they have been quite sympatical; but they say they administrate an order and cannot do more. Or if you could get my husband some work where he will be in open air – the doctor say that is what he want. We have nowhere to go in Germany or in Austria, our well-beloved families being no more alive. I think we are like many, but I cannot help asking you, Sir, because we want to keep living if we can, and now we are hardly having any food. Please to forgive me my writing, and to believe your very anxious and humble
ANNA BERGFELD.
‘God help them!’ thought Michael, under a plane tree close to Cleopatra’s Needle, but without conviction. For in his view God was not so much interested in the fate of individual aliens as the Governor of the Bank of England in the fate of a pound of sugar bought with the fraction of a Bradbury; He would not arbitrarily interfere with a ripple of the tides set loose by His arrangement of the Spheres. God, to Michael, was a monarch strictly limited by His own Constitution. He restored the letter to his pocket. Poor creatures! But really, with 1,200,000 and more English unemployed, mostly due to that confounded Kaiser and his Navy stunt –! If that fellow and his gang had not started their naval rivalry in 1899, England would have been out of the whole mess, or, perhaps, there never would have been a mess!
He turned up from the Temple station towards the offices of The Outpost. He had ‘taken’ that weekly for some years now. It knew everything, and managed to convey a slight impression that nobody else knew anything; so that it seemed more weighty than any other weekly. Having no particular Party to patronize, it could patronize the lot. Without Imperial bias, it professed a special knowledge of the Empire. Not literary, it made a point of reducing the heads of literary men – Michael, in his publishing days, had enjoyed every opportunity of noticing that. Professing respect for Church and the Law, it was an adept at giving them ‘what-for’. It fancied itself on Drama, striking a somewhat Irish attitude towards it. But, perhaps above all, it excelled in neat detraction from political reputations, keeping them in their place, and that place a little lower than The Outpost’s. Moreover, from its editorials emanated that ‘holy ghost’ of inspired knowledge in periods just a little beyond average comprehension, without which no such periodical had real importance.
Michael went up the stairs two at a time, and entered a large square room, where Mr Blythe, back to the door, was pointing with a ruler to a circle drawn on a map.
‘This is a bee map,’ said Mr Blythe to himself. ‘Quite the bee-est map I ever saw.’
Michael could not contain a gurgle, and the eyes of Mr Blythe came round, prominent, epileptic, richly encircled by pouches.
‘Hallo!’ he said defiantly. ‘You? The Colonial Office prepared this map specially to show the best spots for Settlement schemes. And they’ve left out Baggersfontein – the very hub.’
Michael seated himself on the table.
‘I’ve come in to ask what you think of the situation? My wife says Labour will be out in no time.’
‘Our charming little lady!’ said Mr Blythe; ‘Labour will survive Ireland; they will survive Russia; they will linger on in their precarious way. One hesitates to predict their decease. Fear of their Budget may bring them down in February. After the smell of Russian fat has died away – say in November, Mont – one may make a start.’
‘This first speech,’ said Michael, ‘is a nightmare to me. How, exactly, am I to start Foggartism?’
‘One will have achieved the impression of a body of opinion before then.’
‘But will there be one?’
‘No,’ said Mr Blythe.
‘Oh!’ said Michael. ‘And, by the way, what about Free Trade?’
‘One will profess Free Trade, and put on duties.’
‘God and Mammon.’
‘Necessary in England, before any new departure, Mont. Witness Liberal-Unionism, Tory-Socialism, and –’
‘Other ramps,’ said Michael gently.
‘One will glide, deprecate Protection till there is more Protection than Free Trade, then deprecate Free Trade. Foggartism is an end, not a means; Free Trade and Protection are means, not the ends politicians have made them.’
Roused by the word ‘politician’, Michael got off the table; he was coming to have a certain sympathy with those poor devils. They were supposed to have no feeling for the country, and to be wise only after the event. But, really, who could tell what was good for the country, among the mists of talk? Not even old Foggart, Michael sometimes thought.
‘You know, Blythe,’ he said, ‘that we politicians don’t think ahead, simply because we know it’s no earthly. Every elector thinks his own immediate good is the good of the country. Only their own shoes pinching will change elector’s views. If Foggartism means adding to the price of living now, and taking wage-earning children away from workmen’s families for the sake of benefit – ten or twenty years hence – who’s going to stand for it?’
‘My dear young man,’ said Mr Blythe, ‘conversion is our job. At present our trade-unionists despise the outside world. They’ve never seen it. Their philosophy is bounded by their smoky little streets. But five million pounds spent on the orga
nized travel of a hundred thousand working men would do the trick in five years. It would infect the working class with a feverish desire for a place in the sun. The world is their children’s for the taking. But who can blame them, when they know nothing of it?’
‘Some thought!’ said Michael. ‘Only – what Government will think it? Can I take those maps?… By the way,’ he said at the door, ‘there are Societies, you know, for sending out children.’
Mr Blythe grunted. ‘Yes. Excellent little affairs! A few hundred children doing well – concrete example of what might be. Multiply it a hundredfold, and you’ve got a beginning. You can’t fill pails with a teaspoon. Good-bye!’
Out on the Embankment Michael wondered if one could love one’s country with a passion for getting people to leave it. But this over-bloated town condition, with its blight and smoky ugliness; the children without a chance from birth; these swarms of poor devils without work, who dragged about and hadn’t an earthly, and never would, on present lines; this unbalanced, hand-to-mouth, dependent state of things – surely that wasn’t to be for ever the state of the country one loved! He stared at the towers of Westminster, with the setting sun behind them. And there started up before him the thousand familiars of his past – trees, fields and streams, towers, churches, bridges; the English breeds of beasts, the singing birds, the owls, the jays and rooks at Lippinghall, the little differences from foreign sorts in shrub, flower, lichen, and winged life; the English scents, the English haze, the English grass; the eggs and bacon; the slow good humour, the moderation and the pluck; the smell of rain; the apple-blossom, the heather, and the sea. His country, and his breed – unspoilable at heart! He passed the Clock Tower. The House looked lacey and imposing, more beautiful than fashion granted. Did they spin the web of England’s future in that House? Or were they painting camouflage – a screen over old England?
The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 Page 31
