And second thoughts began. Michael, Kit, her father; the solid security of virtue and possessions; the peace of mind into which she had passed of late! All jeopardised for the sake of a smile, and a scent of honeysuckle! No! That account was closed. To reopen it was to tempt Providence. And if to tempt Providence was the practice of Modernity, she wasn’t sure whether she was modern. Besides, who knew whether she COULD reopen that account? And she was seized by a gust of curiosity to see that wife of his—that substitute for herself. Was she in England? Was she dark, like her brother Francis? Fleur took up her list of purchases for the morrow. With so much to do, it was idiotic even to think about such things! The telephone! All day its bell had been ringing; since nine o’clock that morning she had been dancing to its pipe.
“Yes…? Mrs. Mont speaking. What? But I’ve ordered them… Oh! But really I MUST give them bacon and eggs in the morning. They can’t start on cocoa only… How? The Company can’t afford?… Well! Do you want an effective service or not?… Come round to see you about it? I really haven’t time… Yes, yes… now please do be nice to me and tell the manager that they simply must be properly fed. They look so tired. He’ll understand… Yes… Thank you ever so!” She hung up the receiver. “Damn!”
Someone laughed. “Oh! It’s you, Holly! Cheese-paring and red tape as usual! This is the fourth time today. Well, I don’t care—I’m going ahead. Look! Here’s Harridge’s list for tomorrow. It’s terrific, but it’s got to be. Buy it all; I’ll take the risk, if I have to go round and slobber on him.” And beyond the ironic sympathy on Holly’s face she seemed to see Jon’s smile. He should be properly fed—all of them should! And, without looking at her cousin, she said:
“I saw Jon in there. Where has he dropped from?”
“Paris. He’s putting up with us in Green Street.”
Fleur stuck her chin forward, and gave a little laugh.
“Quaint to see him again, all smudgy like that! His wife with him?”
“Not yet,” said Holly; “she’s in Paris still, with his mother.”
“Oh! It’d be fun to see him some time!”
“He’s stoking an engine on the local service—goes out at six, and doesn’t get in till about midnight.”
“Of course; I meant after, if the strike ever ends.”
Holly nodded. “His wife wants to come over and help; would you like her in the canteen?”
“If she’s the right sort.”
“Jon says: Very much so.”
“I don’t see why an American should worry herself. Are they going to live in England?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! Well, we’re both over the measles.”
“If you get them again grown-up, Fleur, they’re pretty bad.”
Fleur laughed. “No fear!” And her eyes, hazel, clear, glancing, met her cousin’s eyes, deep, steady, grey.
“Michael’s waiting for you with the car,” said Holly.
“All right! Can you carry on till they’ve finished? Norah Curfew’s on duty at five tomorrow morning. I shall be round at nine, before you start for Harridge’s. If you think of anything else, stick it on the list—I’ll make them stump up somehow. Good-night, Holly.”
“Good-night, my dear.”
Was there a gleam of pity in those grey eyes? Pity, indeed!
“Give Jon my love. I do wonder how he likes stoking! We must get some more washbasins in.”
Sitting beside Michael, who was driving their car, she saw again, as it were, Jon’s smile in the glass of the wind-screen, and in the dark her lips pouted as if reaching for it. Measles—they spotted you, and raised your temperature! How empty the streets were, now that the taxis were on strike! Michael looked round at her.
“Well, how’s it going?”
“The beetle man was a caution, Michael. He had a face like a ravaged wedge, a wave of black hair, and the eyes of a lost soul; but he was frightfully efficient.”
“Look! There’s a tank; I was told of them. They’re going down to the docks. Rather provocative! Just as well there are no papers for them to get into.”
Fleur laughed.
“Father’ll be at home. He’s come up to protect me. If there really was shooting, I wonder what he’d do—take his umbrella?”
“Instinct. How about you and Kit? It’s the same thing.”
Fleur did not answer. And when, after seeing her father, she went up-stairs, she stood at the nursery door. The tune that had excited Soames’ surprise made a whiffling sound in the empty passage. “L’amour est enfant de Boheme; il n’a jamais jamais connu de loi; si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime, et si je t’aime, prends garde a toil!” Spain, and the heartache of her honeymoon! “Voice in the night crying!” Close the shutters, muffle the ears—keep it out! She entered her bedroom and turned up the lights. It had never seemed to her so pretty, with its many mirrors, its lilac and green, its shining silver. She stood looking at her face, into which had come two patches of red, one in each cheek. Why wasn’t she Norah Curfew—dutiful, uncomplicated, selfless, who would give Jon eggs and bacon at half-past five tomorrow morning—Jon with a clean face! Quickly she undressed. Was that wife of his her equal undressed? To which would he award the golden apple if she stood side by side with Anne? And the red spots deepened in her cheeks. Overtired—she knew that feeling! She would not sleep! But the sheets were cool. Yes, she preferred the old smooth Irish linen to that new rough French grass-bleached stuff. Ah! Here was Michael coming in, coming up to her! Well! No use to be unkind to him—poor old Michael! And in his arms, she saw—Jon’s smile.
* * *
That first day spent in stoking an engine had been enough to make anyone smile. An engine-driver almost as youthful, but in private life partner in his own engineering works, had put Jon ‘wise’ to the mystery of getting level combustion. “A tricky job, and very tiring!” Their passengers had behaved well. One had even come up and thanked them. The engine-driver had winked at Jon. There had been some hectic moments. Supping pea soup, Jon thought of them with pleasure. It had been great sport, but his hands and arms felt wrenched. “Oil them tonight,” the engine-driver had said.
A young woman was handing him ‘jacket’ potatoes. She had marvellously clear, brown eyes, something like Anne’s—only Anne’s were like a water nymph’s. He took a potato, thanked her, and returned to a stoker’s dreams. Extraordinary pleasure in being up against it—being in England again, doing something for England! One had to leave one’s country to become conscious of it. Anne had telegraphed that she wanted to come over and join him. If he wired back “No,” she would come all the same. He knew that much after nearly two years of marriage. Well, she would see England at its best. Americans didn’t really know what England was. Her brother had seen nothing but London; he had spoken bitterly—a girl, Jon supposed, though nothing had been said of her. In Francis Wilmot’s history of England the gap accounted for the rest. But everybody ran down England, because she didn’t slop over, or blow her own trumpet.
“Butter?”
“Thanks, awfully. These potatoes are frightfully good.”
“So glad.”
“Who runs this canteen?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Michael Mont mostly; he’s a member of Parliament.”
Jon dropped his potato.
“Mrs. Mont? Gracious! She’s a cousin of mine. Is she here?”
“Was. Just gone, I think.”
Jon’s far-sighted eyes travelled round the large and dingy room. Fleur! How amazing!
“Treacle pudding?”
“No, thanks. Nothing more.”
“There’ll be coffee, tea, or cocoa, and eggs and bacon, tomorrow at 5.45.”
“Splendid! I think it’s wonderful.”
“It is, rather, in the time.”
“Thank you awfully. Good-night!”
Jon sought his coat. Outside were Val and Holly in their car.
“Hallo, young Jon! You’re a nice object.”
“What job have you caught,
Val?”
“Motor lorry—begin tomorrow.”
“Fine!”
“This’ll knock out racing for a bit.”
“But not England.”
“England? Lord—no! What did you think?”
“Abroad they were saying so.”
“Abroad!” growled Val. “They would!”
And there was silence at thirty miles an hour.
From his bedroom door Jon said to his sister:
“They say Fleur runs that canteen. Is she really so old now?”
“Fleur has a very clear head, my dear. She saw you there. No second go of measles, Jon.”
Jon laughed.
“Aunt Winifred,” said Holly, “will be delighted to have Anne here on Friday, she told me to tell you.”
“Splendid! That’s awfully good of her.”
“Well, good-night; bless you. There’s still hot water in the bathroom.”
In his bath Jon lay luxuriously still. Sixty hours away from his young wife, he was already looking forward with impatience to her appearance on Friday. And so Fleur ran that canteen! A fashionable young woman with a clear and, no doubt, shingled head—he felt a great curiosity to see her again, but nothing more. Second go of measles! Not much! He had suffered too severely from the first. Besides, he was too glad to be back—result of long, half-acknowledged homesickness. His mother had been home-sick for Europe; but HE had felt no assuagement in Italy and France. It was England he had wanted. Something in the way people walked and talked; in the smell and the look of everything; some good-humoured, slow, ironic essence in the air, after the tension of America, the shrillness of Italy, the clarity of Paris. For the first time in five years his nerves felt coated. Even those features of his native land which offended the aesthetic soul, were comforting. The approaches to London, the countless awful little houses of brick and slate which his own great-grandfather, ‘Superior Dosset’ Forsyte, had helped, so his father had once told him, to build; the many little new houses, rather better, but still bent on compromise; the total absence of symmetry or plan; the ugly railway stations; the cockney voices, the lack of colour, taste, or pride in people’s dress—all seemed comfortable, a guarantee that England would always be England.
And so Fleur was running that canteen! He would be seeing her! He would like to see her! Oh, yes!
Chapter VI.
SNUFFBOX
In the next room Val was saying to Holly:
“Had a chap I knew at college to see me today. Wanted me to lend him money. I once did, when I was jolly hard up myself, and never got it back. He used to impress me frightfully—such an awfully good-looking, languid beggar. I thought him top notch as a ‘blood.’ You should see him now!”
“I did. I was coming in as he was going out; I wondered who he was. I never saw a more bitterly contemptuous expression on a face. Did you lend him money?”
“Only a fiver.”
“Well, don’t lend him any more.”
“Hardly. D’you know what he’s done? Gone off with that Louis Quinze snuffbox of Mother’s that’s worth about two hundred. There’s been nobody else in that room.”
“Good heavens!”
“Yes, it’s pretty thick. He had the reputation of being the fastest man up at the ‘Varsity in my time—in with the gambling set. Since I went out to the Boer war I’ve never heard of him.”
“Isn’t your mother very annoyed, Val?”
“She wants to prosecute—it belonged to my granddad. But how can we—a college pal!… Besides, we shouldn’t get the box back.”
Holly ceased to brush her hair.
“It’s rather a comfort to me—this,” she said.
“What is?”
“Why, everybody says the standard of honesty’s gone down. It’s nice to find someone belonging to our generation that had it even less.”
“Rum comfort!”
“Human nature doesn’t alter, Val. I believe in the young generation. We don’t understand them—brought up in too settled times.”
“That may be. My own dad wasn’t too particular. But what am I to do about this?”
“Do you know his address?”
“He said the Brummell Club would find him—pretty queer haunt, if I remember. To come to sneaking things like that! It’s upset me fright-fully.”
Holly looked at him lying on his back in bed. Catching her eyes on him, he said:
“But for you, old girl, I might have gone a holy mucker myself.”
“Oh, no, Val! You’re too open-air. It’s the indoor people who go really wrong.”
Val grinned.
“Something in that—the only exercise I ever saw that fellow take was in a punt. He used to bet like anything, but he didn’t know a horse from a hedge-hog. Well, Mother must put up with it, I can’t do anything.”
Holly came up to his bed.
“Turn over, and I’ll tuck you up.”
Getting into bed herself, she lay awake, thinking of the man who had gone a holy mucker, and the contempt on his face—lined, dark, well-featured, with prematurely greying hair, and prematurely faded rings round the irises of the eyes; of his clothes, too, so preternaturally preserved, and the worn, careful school tie. She felt she knew him. No moral sense, and ingrained contempt for those who had. Poor Val! HE hadn’t so much moral sense that he need be despised for it! And yet—! With a good many risky male instincts, Val had been a loyal comrade all these years. If in philosophic reach or aesthetic taste he was not advanced, if he knew more of horses than of poetry, was he any the worse? She sometimes thought he was the better. The horse didn’t change shape or colour every five years and start reviling its predecessor. The horse was a constant, kept you from going too fast, and had a nose to stroke—more than you could say of a poet. They had, indeed, only one thing in common—a liking for sugar. Since the publication of her novel Holly had become member of the 1930 Club. Fleur had put her up, and whenever she came to town, she studied modernity there. Modernity was nothing but speed! People who blamed it might as well blame telephone, wireless, flying machine, and quick lunch counter. Beneath that top-dressing of speed, modernity was old. Women had worn fewer clothes when Jane Austen began to write. Drawers—the historians said—were only nineteenth-century productions. And take modern talk! After South Africa the speed of it certainly took one’s wind away; but the thoughts expressed were much her own thoughts as a girl, cut into breathless lengths, by car and telephone bell. Take modern courtships! They resulted in the same thing as under George the Second, but took longer to reach it, owing to the motor-cycle and the standing lunch. Take modern philosophy! People had no less real philosophy than Martin Tupper or Izaak Walton; only, unlike those celebrated ancients, they had no time to formulate it. As to a future life—modernity lived in hope, and not too much of that, as everyone had, from immemorial time. In fact, as a novelist naturally would, Holly jumped to conclusions. Scratch—she thought—the best of modern youth, and you would find Charles James Fox and Perdita in golf sweaters! A steady sound retrieved her thoughts. Val was asleep. How long and dark his eyelashes still were, but his mouth was open!
“Val,” she said, very softly; “Val! Don’t snore, dear!”
* * *
A snuffbox may be precious, not so much for its enamel, its period, and its little brilliants, as because it has belonged to one’s father. Winifred, though her sense of property had been well proved by her retention of Montague Dartie ‘for poorer,’ throughout so many years, did not possess her brother Soames’ collecting instinct, nor, indeed, his taste in objects which George Forsyte had been the first to call ‘of bigotry and virtue.’ But the further Time removed her father James—a quarter of a century by now—the more she revered his memory. As some ancient general or philosopher, secured by age from competition, is acclaimed year by year a greater genius, so with James! His objection to change, his perfect domesticity, his power of saving money for his children, and his dread of not being told anything, were haloed for her mor
e and more with every year that he spent underground. Her fashionable aspirations waning with the increase of adipose, the past waxed and became a very constellation of shining memories. The removal of this snuffbox—so tangible a reminder of James and Emily—tried her considerable equanimity more than anything that had happened to her for years. The thought that she had succumbed to the distinction of a voice on the telephone, caused her positive discomfort. With all her experience of distinction, she ought to have known better! She was, however, one of those women who, when a thing is done, admit the fact with a view to having it undone as soon as possible; and, having failed with Val, who merely said, “Awfully sorry, Mother, but there it is—jolly bad luck!” she summoned her brother.
Soames was little less than appalled. He remembered seeing James buy the box at Jobson’s for hardly more than one-tenth of what it would fetch now. Everything seemed futile if, in such a way, one could lose what had been nursed for forty years into so really magnificent a state of unearned increment. And the fellow who had taken it was of quite good family, or so his nephew said! Whether the honesty of the old Forsytes, in the atmosphere of which he had been brought up and turned out into the world, had been inherited or acquired—derived from their blood or their Banks—he had never considered. It had been in their systems just as the proverb “Honesty is the best policy” was in that of the private banking which then obtained. A slight reverie on banking was no uncommon affection of the mind in one who could recall the repercussion of “Understart and Darnett’s” failure, and the disappearance one by one of all the little, old Banks with legendary names. These great modern affairs were good for credit and bad for novelists—run on a Bank—there had been no better reading! Such monster concerns couldn’t ‘go broke,’ no matter what their clients did; but whether they made for honesty in the individual, Soames couldn’t tell. The snuffbox was gone, however; and if Winifred didn’t take care, she wouldn’t get it back. How, precisely, she was to take care he could not at present see; but he should advise her to put it into the hands of somebody at once.
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