“I shan’t mention it,” he said, “unless he does. What more can this young woman do? She’s in a set, I suppose?”
“The Panjoys—”
“Panjoys!”
“Yes, sir; out for a good time at any cost—they don’t really count, of course. But Marjorie Ferrar is frightfully in the limelight. She paints a bit; she’s got some standing with the Press; she dances; she hunts; she’s something of an actress; she goes everywhere week-ending. It’s the week-ends that matter, where people have nothing to do but talk. Were you ever at a weekend party, sir?”
“I?” said Soames: “Good Lord—no!”
Michael smiled—incongruity, indeed, could go no farther.
“We must get one up for you at Lippinghall.”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re right, sir; nothing more boring. But they’re the coulisses of politics. Fleur thinks they’re good for me. And Marjorie Ferrar knows all the people we know, and lots more. It IS awkward.”
“I should go on as if nothing had happened,” said Soames: “But about that paper? They ought to be warned that this woman is venomous.”
Michael regarded his father-inlaw quizzically.
On entering, they found the man-servant in the hall.
“There’s a man to see you, sir, by the name of Bugfill.”
“Oh! Ah! Where have you put him, Coaker?”
“Well, I didn’t know what to make of him, sir, he shakes all over. I’ve stood him in the dining-room.”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Michael.
Soames passed into the ‘parlour,’ where he found his daughter and Francis Wilmot.
“Mr. Wilmot is leaving us, Father. You’re just in time to say good-bye.”
If there were moments when Soames felt cordial, they were such as these. He had nothing against the young man; indeed, he rather liked the look of him; but to see the last of almost anybody was in a sense a relief; besides, there was this question of what he had overheard, and to have him about the place without knowing would be a continual temptation to compromise with one’s dignity and ask him what it was.
“Good-bye, Mr. Wilmot,” he said; “if you’re interested in pictures—” he paused, and, holding out, his hand, added, “you should look in at the British Museum.”
Francis Wilmot shook the hand deferentially.
“I will. It’s been a privilege to know you, sir.” Soames was wondering why, when the young man turned to Fleur.
“I’ll be writing to Jon from Paris, and I’ll surely send your love. You’ve been perfectly wonderful to me. I’ll be glad to have you and Michael visit me at any time you come across to the States; and if you bring the little dog, why—I’ll just be honoured to let him bite me again.”
He bowed over Fleur’s hand and was gone, leaving Soames staring at the back of his daughter’s neck.
“That’s rather sudden,” he said, when the door was closed; “anything upset him?”
She turned on him, and said coldly:
“Why did you make that fuss last night, Father?”
The injustice of her attack was so palpable, that Soames bit his moustache in silence. As if he could help himself, when she was insulted in his hearing!
“What good do you think you’ve done?”
Soames, who had no notion, made no attempt to enlighten her. He only felt sore inside.
“You’ve made me feel as if I couldn’t look anybody in the face. But I’m going to, all the same. If I’m a lion-hunter and a snob, I’ll do it thoroughly. Only I do wish you wouldn’t go on thinking I’m a child and can’t defend myself.”
And still Soames was silent, sore to the soles of his boots.
Fleur flashed a look at him, and said:
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help it; everything’s queered;” and she too went out of the room.
Soames moved blindly to the window and stood looking out. He saw a cab with luggage drive away; saw some pigeons alight, peck at the pavement, and fly off again; he saw a man kissing a woman in the dusk; a policeman light his pipe and go off duty. He saw many human and interesting things; he heard Big Ben chime. Nothing in it all! He was staring at a silver spoon. He himself had put it in her mouth at birth.
Chapter IX.
POULTRY AND CATS
He who had been stood in the dining-room, under the name of Bugfill, was still upright. Rather older than Michael, with an inclination to side-whisker, darkish hair, and a pale face stamped with that look of schooled quickness common to so many actors but unfamiliar to Michael, he was grasping the edge of the dining-table with one hand, and a wide-brimmed black hat with the other. The expression of his large, dark-circled eyes was such that Michael smiled and said:
“It’s all right, Mr. Bergfeld, I’m not a Manager. Do sit down, and smoke.”
The visitor silently took the proffered chair and cigarette with an attempt at a fixed smile. Michael sat on the table.
“I gather from Mrs. Bergfeld that you’re on the rocks.”
“Fast,” said the shaking lips.
“Your health, and your name, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“You want an open-air job, I believe? I haven’t been able to think of anything very gaudy, but an idea did strike me last night in the stilly watches. How about raising poultry—everybody’s doing it.”
“If I had my savings.”
“Yes, Mrs. Bergfeld told me about them. I can inquire, but I’m afraid—”
“It’s robbery.” The chattered sound let Michael at once into the confidence of the many Managers who had refused to employ him who uttered it.
“I know,” he said, soothingly, “robbing Peter to pay Paul. That clause in the Treaty was a bit of rank barbarism, of course, camouflage it as they like. Still, it’s no good to let it prey on your mind, is it?”
But his visitor had risen. “To take from civilian to pay civilian! Then why not take civilian life for civilian life? What is the difference? And England does it—the leading nation to respect the individual. It is abominable.”
Michael began to feel that he was overdoing it.
“You forget,” he said, “that the war made us all into barbarians, for the time being; we haven’t quite got over it yet. And your country dropped the spark into the powder magazine, you know. But what about this poultry stunt?”
Bergfeld seemed to make a violent effort to control himself.
“For my wife’s sake,” he said, “I will do anything; but unless I get my savings back, how can I start?”
“I can’t promise; but perhaps I could start you. That hair-dresser below you wants an open-air job, too. What’s his name, by the way?”
“Swain.”
“How do you get on with him?”
“He is an opinionated man, but we are good friends enough.”
Michael got off the table. “Well, leave it to me to think it out. We shall be able to do something, I hope;” and he held out his hand.
Bergfeld took it silently, and his eyes resumed the expression with which they had first looked at Michael.
‘That man,’ thought Michael, ‘will be committing suicide some day, if he doesn’t look out.’ And he showed him to the door. He stood there some minutes gazing after the German actor’s vanishing form, with a feeling as if the dusk were formed out of the dark stories of such as he and the hair-dresser and the man who had whispered to him to stand and deliver a job. Well, Bart must lend him that bit of land beyond the coppice at Lippinghall. He would buy a War hut if there were any left and some poultry stock, and start a colony—the Bergfelds, the hair-dresser, and Henry Boddick. They could cut the timber in the coppice, and put up the fowl-houses for themselves. It would be growing food—a practical experiment in Foggartism! Fleur would laugh at him. But was there anything one could do nowadays that somebody couldn’t laugh at? He turned back into the house. Fleur was in the hall.
“Francis Wilmot has gone,” she said.
“Why?”
; “He’s off to Paris.”
“What was it he overheard last night?”
“Do you suppose I asked?”
“Well, no,” said Michael, humbly. “Let’s go up and look at Kit, it’s about his bath time.”
The eleventh baronet, indeed, was already in his bath.
“All right, nurse,” said Fleur, “I’ll finish him.”
“He’s been in three minutes, ma’am.”
“Lightly boiled,” said Michael.
For one aged only fourteen months this naked infant had incredible vigour—from lips to feet he was all sound and motion. He seemed to lend a meaning to life. His vitality was absolute, not relative. His kicks and crows and splashings had the joy of a gnat’s dance, or a jackdaw’s gambols in the air. They gave thanks not for what he was about to receive, but for what he was receiving. White as a turtle-dove, with pink toes, darker in eyes and hair than he would be presently, he grabbed at the soap, at his mother, at the bath-towelling—he seemed only to need a tail. Michael watched him, musing. This manikin, born with all that he could possibly wish for within his reach—how were they to bring him up? Were they fit to bring him up, they who had been born—like all their generation in the richer classes—emancipated, to parents properly broken-in to worship the fetich—Liberty? Born to everything they wanted, so that they were at wits’ end to invent something they could not get; driven to restive searching by having their own way? The war had deprived one of one’s own way, but the war had overdone it, and left one grasping at license. And for those, like Fleur, born a little late for the war, the tale of it had only lowered what respect they could have for anything. With veneration killed, and self-denial ‘off,’ with atavism buried, sentiment derided, and the future in the air, hardly a wonder that modernity should be a dance of gnats, taking itself damned seriously! Such were the reflections of Michael, sitting there above the steam, and frowning at his progeny. Without faith was one fit to be a parent? Well, people were looking for faith again. Only they were bound to hatch the egg of it so hard that it would be addled long before it was a chicken. ‘Too self-conscious!’ he thought. ‘That’s our trouble!’
Fleur had finished drying the eleventh baronet, and was dabbing powder over him; her eyes seemed penetrating his skin, as if to gauge the state of health behind it. He watched her take the feet and hands one by one and examine each nail, lost in her scrutiny, unselfconscious in her momentary devotion! And oppressed by the difficulty, as a Member of Parliament, of being devoted, Michael snapped his fingers at the baby and left the nursery. He went to his study and took down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica containing the word Poultry. He read about Leghorns, Orpingtons, White Sussex, Bramaputras, and was little the wiser. He remembered that if you drew a chalk-line to the beak of a hen, the hen thought it was tied up. He wished somebody would draw a chalk-line to his beak. Was Foggartism a chalk-line? A voice said:
“Tell Fleur I’m going to her aunt’s.”
“Leaving us, sir?”
“Yes, I’m not wanted.”
What had happened?
“You’ll see her before you go, sir?”
“No,” said Soames.
Had somebody rubbed out the chalk-line to Old Forsyte’s nose?
“Is there any money in poultry-farming, sir?”
“There’s no money in anything nowadays.”
“And yet the Income Tax returns continue to rise.”
“Yes,” said Soames; “there’s something wrong there.”
“You don’t think people make their incomes out more than they are?”
Soames blinked. Pessimistic though he felt at the moment, he could not take quite that low view of human nature.
“You’d better see that Fleur doesn’t go about abusing that red-haired baggage,” he said. “She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth; she thinks she can do what she likes.” And he shut Michael in again.
Silver spoon in her mouth! How apropos!…
After putting her baby into its cot Fleur had gone to the marqueterie bureau in the little sanctuary that would have been called a boudoir in old days. She sat there brooding. How could her father have made it all glaringly public? Couldn’t he have seen that it was nothing so long as it was not public, but everything the moment it was? She longed to pour out her heart, and tell people her opinion of Marjorie Ferrar.
She wrote three letters—one to Lady Alison, and two to women in the group who had overheard it all last night. She concluded her third letter with the words: “A woman like that, who pretends to be a friend and sneaks into one’s house to sting one behind one’s back, is a snake of the first water. How Society can stick her, I can’t think; she hasn’t a moral about her nor a decent impulse. As for her charm—Good Lord!” Yes! And there was Francis Wilmot! She had not said all she wanted to say to him.
“MY DEAR FRANCIS,” she wrote:
“I am so sorry you have to run away like this. I wanted to thank you for standing up for me last night. Marjorie Ferrar is just about the limit. But in London society one doesn’t pay attention to backbiting. It has been so jolly to know you. Don’t forget us; and do come and see me again when you come back from Paris.
“Your very good friend,
“FLEUR MONT.”
In future she would have nothing but men at her evenings! But would they come if there were no women? And men like Philip Quinsey were just as snakelike. Besides, it would look as if she were really hurt. No! She would have to go on as before, just dropping people who were ‘catty.’ But who wasn’t? Except Alison, and heavyweights like Mr. Blythe, the minor Ambassadors, and three or four earnest politicians, she couldn’t be sure about any of them. It was the thing to be ‘catty.’ They all scratched other people’s backs, and their faces too when they weren’t looking. Who in Society was exempt from scratches, and who didn’t scratch? Not to scratch a little was so dreadfully dull. She could not imagine a scratchless life except perhaps in Italy. Those Fra Angelico frescoes in the San Marco monastery! THERE was a man who did not scratch. St. Francis, too, talking to his birds, among his little flowers, with the sun and the moon and the stars for near relations. Ste. Claire! Ste. Fleur—little sister of St. Francis! To be unworldly and quite good! To be one who lived to make other people happy! How new! How exciting, even—for about a week; and how dull afterwards! She drew aside the curtains and looked out into the Square. Two cats were standing in the light of a lamp—narrow, marvellously graceful, with their heads turned towards each other. Suddenly they began uttering horrible noises, and became all claws. Fleur dropped the curtain.
Chapter X.
FRANCIS WILMOT REVERSES
About that moment Francis Wilmot sat down in the lounge of the Cosmopolis Hotel, and as suddenly sat up. In the middle of the parquet floor, sliding and lunging, backing and filling, twisting and turning in the arms of a man with a face like a mask, was she, to avoid whom, out of loyalty to Fleur and Michael, he had decided to go to Paris. Fate! For he could hardly know that she came there most afternoons during the dancing hours. She and her partner were easily the show couple; and, fond of dancing, Francis Wilmot knew he was looking at something special. When they stopped, quite close to him, he said in his soft drawl:
“That was beautiful.”
“How do you do, Mr. Wilmot?”
Why! She knew his name! This was the moment to exhibit loyalty! But she had sunk into a chair next his.
“And so you thought me a traitress last night?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I heard you call your hostess a snob.”
Marjorie Ferrar uttered an amused sound.
“My dear young man, if one never called one’s friends anything worse than that—! I didn’t mean you to hear, or that poptious old person with the chin!”
“He was her father,” said Francis Wilmot, gravely. “It hurt him.”
“Well! I’m sorry!”
A hand without a glove, warm but dry, was pu
t into his. When it was withdrawn the whole of his hand and arm were tingling.
“Do you dance?”
“Yes, indeed, but I wouldn’t presume to dance with you.”
“Oh! but you must.”
Francis Wilmot’s head went round, and his body began going round too.
“You dance better than an Englishman, unless he’s professional,” said her lips six inches from his own.
“I’m proud to hear you say so, ma’am.”
“Don’t you know my name? or do you always call women ma’am? It’s ever so pretty.”
“Certainly I know your name and where you live. I wasn’t six yards from you this morning at four o’clock.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I just thought I’d like to be near you.”
Marjorie Ferrar said, as if to herself:
“The prettiest speech I ever heard. Come and have tea with me there tomorrow.”
Reversing, side-stepping, doing all he knew, Francis Wilmot said, slowly:
“I have to be in Paris.”
“Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.”
“I’m not afraid, but—”
“Well, I shall expect you.” And, transferring herself again to her mask-faced partner, she looked back at him over her shoulder.
Francis Wilmot wiped his brow. An astonishing experience, another blow to his preconception of a stiff and formal race! If he had not known she was the daughter of a lord, he would have thought her an American. Would she ask him to dance with her again? But she left the lounge without another glance.
An up-to-date young man, a typical young man, would have felt the more jaunty. But he was neither. Six months’ training for the Air Service in 1918, one visit to New York, and a few trips to Charleston and Savannah, had left him still a countryman, with a tradition of good manners, work, and simple living. Women, of whom he had known few, were to him worthy of considerable respect. He judged them by his sister, or by the friends of his dead mother, in Savannah, who were all of a certain age. A Northern lady on the boat had told him that Southern girls measured life by the number of men they could attract; she had given him an amusing take-off of a Southern girl. It had been a surprise to this young Southerner. Anne was not like that; she had never had the chance to be, anyway, having married at nineteen the first young man who had asked her!
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