Chapter LXXX: Part I: I.—encounter (2)

Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt
whether the world had really changed. People said that it was a
new age. With the profundity of one not too long for any age,
Jolyon perceived that under slightly different surfaces the era
was precisely what it had been. Mankind was still divided into
two species: The few who had “speculation” in their souls, and
the many who had none, with a belt of hybrids like himself in the
middle. Jon appeared to have speculation; it seemed to his father
a bad lookout.

With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had
heard the boy say, a fortnight ago: “I should like to try
farming, Dad; if it won't cost you too much. It seems to be about
the only sort of life that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and
of course that's out of the question for me.”

Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:

“All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first
Jolyon in 1760. It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally,
no doubt, you may grow a better turnip than he did.”

A little dashed, Jon had answered:

“But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?”

“'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it,
you'll do more good than most men, which is little enough.”

To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it. I
give him four years. Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'

After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote
to his daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer
near them on the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice.
Holly's answer had been enthusiastic. There was an excellent man
quite close; she and Val would love Jon to live with them.

The boy was due to go to-morrow.

Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the
leaves of the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him
desirable for thirty-two years. The tree beneath which he sat
seemed not a day older! So young, the little leaves of brownish
gold; so old, the whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk. A
tree of memories, which would live on hundreds of years yet,
unless some barbarian cut it down—would see old England out at
the pace things were going! He remembered a night three years
before, when, looking from his window, with his arm close round
Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane hovering, it seemed,
right over the old tree. Next day they had found a bomb hole in a
field on Gage's farm. That was before he knew that he was under
sentence of death. He could almost have wished the bomb had
finished him. It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many
hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach. He had counted on
living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when
Irene would be seventy. As it was, she would miss him. Still
there was Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who
adored his mother.

Under that tree, where old Jolyon—waiting for Irene to come to
him across the lawn—had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered,
whimsically, whether, having put everything in such perfect
order, he had not better close his own eyes and drift away. There
was something undignified in parasitically clinging on to the
effortless close of a life wherein he regretted two things
only—the long division between his father and himself when he was
young, and the lateness of his union with Irene.

From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in
blossom. Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in
blossom; and his heart ached suddenly because he might never see
them flower again. Spring! Decidedly no man ought to have to die
while his heart was still young enough to love beauty! Blackbirds
sang recklessly in the shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the
leaves above him glistened; and over the fields was every
imaginable tint of early foliage, burnished by the level
sunlight, away to where the distant “smoke-bush” blue was trailed
along the horizon. Irene's flowers in their narrow beds had
startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of
gay life. Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps
Leonardo, had known how to get that startling little ego into
each painted flower, and bird, and beast—the ego, yet the sense
of species, the universality of life as well. They were the
fellows! 'I've made nothing that will live!' thought Jolyon;
'I've been an amateur—a mere lover, not a creator. Still, I shall
leave Jon behind me when I go.' What luck that the boy had not
been caught by that ghastly war! He might so easily have been
killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal.
Jon would do something some day—if the Age didn't spoil him—an
imaginative chap! His whim to take up farming was but a bit of
sentiment, and about as likely to last. And just then he saw them
coming up the field: Irene and the boy; walking from the station,
with their arms linked. And getting up, he strolled down through
the new rose garden to meet them....

Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window.
She sat there without speaking till he said:

“What is it, my love?”

“We had an encounter to-day.”

“With whom?”

“Soames.”

Soames! He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two
years; conscious that it was bad for him. And, now, his heart
moved in a disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within
his chest.

Irene went on quietly:

“He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
confectioner's where we had tea.”

Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“How did he look?”

“Grey; but otherwise much the same.”

“And the daughter?”

“Pretty. At least, Jon thought so.”

Jolyon's heart side-slipped again. His wife's face had a strained
and puzzled look.

“You didn't-?” he began.

“No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief
and he picked it up.”

Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance!

“June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?”

“No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it
was.”

Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:

“I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from
him. He'll find out some day.”

“The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard
judgment. When you were nineteen what would you have thought of
your mother if she had done what I have?”

Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of
the tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the
prisoned grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or
passion—knew nothing at all, as yet!

“What have you told him?” he said at last.

“That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had
never cared much for your family, or they for you. I expect he
will be asking you.”

Jolyon smiled. “This promises to take the place of air-raids,” he
said. “After all, one misses them.”

Irene looked up at him.

“We've known it would come some day.”

He answered her with sudden energy:

“I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan't do that,
even in thought. He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's
put to him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets
to know otherwise.”

“Not yet, Jolyon.”

That was like her—she had no foresight, and never went to meet
trouble. Still—who knew?—she might be right. It was ill going
against a mother's instinct. It might be well to let the boy go
on, if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by
which he could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love,
jealousy, longing, had deepened his charity. All the same, one
must take precautions—every precaution possible! And, long after
Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over those precautions.
He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew nothing as yet
of family history. Holly was discreet, she would make sure of her
husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter with him
when he went to-morrow.

And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material
estate died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another
began for Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which
could not be so rounded off and polished....

But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too,
the prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known
it, “love at first sight!” He had felt it beginning in him with
the glint of those dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno—a
conviction that this was his 'dream'. so that what followed had
seemed to him at once natural and miraculous. Fleur! Her name
alone was almost enough for one who was terribly susceptible to
the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when boys and girls
were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was almost
abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill
with boy friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore,
been inoculated against the germs of love by small doses of the
poison. And now in the dark his temperature was mounting fast. He
lay awake, featuring Fleur—as they called it—recalling her words,
especially that “Au revoir!” so soft and sprightly.

He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on
tennis shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept
downstairs and out through the study window. It was just light;
there was a smell of grass. 'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was
mysteriously white out of doors, with nothing awake except the
birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go down into the coppice,'
he thought. He ran down through the fields, reached the pond just
as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice. Bluebells carpeted
the ground there; among the larch-trees there was mystery—the
air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon sniffed
its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening
light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapleduram—a
jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the
atlas presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh!
She must. She had said “Au revoir!” Not good-bye! What luck that
she had dropped her handkerchief! He would never have known her
but for that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the
more amazing his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with
her! Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be joined
together; he was on the verge of a poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then
returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his
bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that
the study window was open, he went down and shut it, first
removing the ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his
feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to mortal
soul-even-to his mother.

IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time,
leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite
the condition of “Timothy's” on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's
soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither
kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and
house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese
pill-box, a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy.
One did not reach him, or so it was reported by members of the
family who, out of old-time habit or absentmindedness, would
drive up once in a blue moon and ask after their surviving uncle.
Such were Francie, now quite emancipated from God (she frankly
avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old Nicholas, and
Winifred Dartie from her “man of the world.” But, after all,
everybody was emancipated now, or said they were—perhaps not
quite the same thing!

When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station
on the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the
expectation of seeing Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a
faint demonstration within him while he stood in full south
sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep of that little house
where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one dwelt on like
a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and out of
which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened
with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the “old people” of
another century, another age.

The sight of Smither—still corseted up to the armpits because the
new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had
never been considered “nice” by Aunts Juley and Hester—brought a
pale friendliness to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully
arranged to old pattern in every detail, an invaluable
servant—none such left—smiling back at him, with the words: “Why!
it's Mr. Soames, after all this time! And how are you, sir? Mr.
Timothy will be so pleased to know you've been.”

“How is he?”

“Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's
a wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last:
It would please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to
see how he relishes a baked apple still. But he's quite deaf. And
a mercy, I always think. For what we should have done with him in
the air-raids, I don't know.”

“Ah!” said Soames. “What did you do with him?”

“We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the
cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would
never have done to let him know there was a war on. As I said to
Cook, 'If Mr. Timothy rings, they may do what they like—I'm going
up. My dear mistresses would have a fit if they could see him
ringing and nobody going to him.' But he slept through them all
beautiful. And the one in the daytime he was having his bath. It
was a mercy, because he might have noticed the people in the
street all looking up—he often looks out of the window.”

“Quite!” murmured Soames. Smither was getting garrulous! “I just
want to look round and see if there's anything to be done.”

“Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice
in the dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of. It's
funny they should be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy
took to not coming down, just before the War. But they're nasty
little things; you never know where they'll take you next.”

“Does he leave his bed?”—

“Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the
window in the morning, not to risk a change of air. And he's
quite comfortable in himself; has his Will out every day regular.
It's a great consolation to him—that.”

“Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has
anything to say to me.”

Smither coloured up above her corsets.

“It will be an occasion!” she said. “Shall I take you round the
house, sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?”

“No, you go to him,” said Soames. “I can go round the house by
myself.”

One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames
felt that he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms
so saturated with the past. When Smither, creaking with
excitement, had left him, Soames entered the dining-room and
sniffed. In his opinion it wasn't mice, but incipient wood-rot,
and he examined the panelling. Whether it was worth a coat of
paint, at Timothy's age, he was not sure. The room had always
been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile curled
Soames' lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted the
oak dado; a heavy metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling
divided by imitation beams. The pictures had been bought by
Timothy, a bargain, one day at Jobson's sixty years ago—three
Snyder “still lifes,” two faintly coloured drawings of a boy and
a girl, rather charming, which bore the initials “J. R.”—Timothy
had always believed they might turn out to be Joshua Reynolds,
but Soames, who admired them, had discovered that they were only
John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of a white pony being shod.
Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed dark mahogany chairs
with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and a mahogany
dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body
since he was four years old. He looked especially at the two
drawings, and thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'

From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study. He did not
remember ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor
to ceiling with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity.
One wall seemed devoted to educational books, which Timothy's
firm had published two generations back-sometimes as many as
twenty copies of one book. Soames read their titles and
shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as used
to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane, from which
he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone
out together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The
third wall he approached with more excitement. Here, surely,
Timothy's own taste would be found. It was. The books were
dummies. The fourth wall was all heavily curtained window. And
turned toward it was a large chair with a mahogany reading-stand
attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy of The Times,
dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come down, as
if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still. In a
corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by
Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but
England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been
very sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat
off the pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and
Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was always taking things
into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too. Soames
knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least
from one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a
spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing
into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in
latitude 44.

'Mausoleum!' he thought. 'George was right!' And he went out and
up the stairs. On the half-landing he stopped before the case of
stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They
looked not a day older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If
the case were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the
whole thing would crumble, he suspected. It wouldn't be worth
putting that into the sale! And suddenly he was caught by a
memory of Aunt Ann—dear old Aunt Ann—holding him by the hand in
front of that case and saying: “Look, Soamey! Aren't they bright
and pretty, dear little humming-birds!” Soames remembered his own
answer: “They don't hum, Auntie.” He must have been six, in a
black velveteen suit with a light-blue collar-he remembered that
suit well! Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery kind
hands, and her grave old aquiline smile—a fine old lady, Aunt
Ann! He moved on up to the drawing-room door. There on each side
of it were the groups of miniatures. Those he would certainly buy
in! The miniatures of his four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin
adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy. They had all
been painted by a young lady friend of the family at a time,
1830, about, when miniatures were considered very genteel, and
lasting too, painted as they were on ivory. Many a time had he
heard the tale of that young lady: “Very talented, my dear; she
had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went
into a consumption and died: so like Keats—we often spoke of it.”

Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan—quite a small
child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls,
white waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an
eye on heaven. Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always
been rather like that—a wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must
have had talent, and miniatures always had a certain back-watered
cachet of their own, little subject to the currents of
competition on aesthetic Change. Soames opened the drawing-room
door. The room was dusted, the furniture uncovered, the curtains
drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still dwelt there patiently
waiting. And a thought came to him: When Timothy died—why not?
Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this house—like
Carlyle's—and put up a tablet, and show it? “Specimen of
mid-Victorian abode—entrance, one shilling, with catalogue.”
After all, it was the completest thing, and perhaps the deadest
in the London of to-day. Perfect in its special taste and
culture, if, that is, he took down and carried over to his own
collection the four Barbizon pictures he had given them. The
still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned with red
flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the
cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full
of little knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley,
Southey, Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else),
and the Victorian poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie
cabinet lined with dim red plush, full of family relics: Hester's
first fan; the buckles of their mother's father's shoes; three
bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant's tusk, sent home
from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in jute; a
yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it,
recording God knew what! And the pictures crowding on the
walls—all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like
the foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that—pictures
bright and illustrative, “Telling the Bees,” “Hey for the Ferry!”
and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines,
given them by Swithin. Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames
had gazed a thousand times in supercilious fascination; a
marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt frames.

And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically
sealed as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it.
And the gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one
side of the fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann,
and after her Aunt Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light
and bolt upright. And on the other side of the fire the one
really easy chair, back to the light, for Aunt Hester. Soames
screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them sitting there. Ah! and
the atmosphere—even now, of too many stuffs and washed lace
curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be
preserved.' And, by George, they might laugh at it, but for a
standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness
of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day
hollow—to-day with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its
cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down
to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr
within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate,
and their “So longs,” and their “Old Beans,” and their
laughter—girls who gave him the shudders whenever he thought of
Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed, capable, older
women who managed life and gave him the shudders too. No! his old
aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or very much
their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and
reverence for past and future.

With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
upstairs. He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect
order of the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the
walls. At the top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors.
Which of them was Timothy's? And he listened. A sound, as of a
child slowly dragging a hobby-horse about, came to his ears. That
must be Timothy! He tapped, and a door was opened by Smither,
very red in the face.

Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get
him to attend. If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he
could see him through the door.

Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.

The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the
most impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on
his own affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed
and the window, a distance of some twelve feet. The lower part of
his square face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy
beard clipped as short as it could be, and his chin looked as
broad as his brow where the hair was also quite white, while nose
and cheeks and brow were a good yellow. One hand held a stout
stick, and the other grasped the skirt of his Jaeger
dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked
ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers. The expression on
his face was that of a crossed child, intent on something that he
has not got. Each time he turned he stumped the stick, and then
dragged it, as if to show that he could do without it:

“He still looks strong,” said Soames under his breath.

“Oh! yes, sir. You should see him take his bath—it's wonderful;
he does enjoy it so.”

Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight. Timothy had
resumed his babyhood.

“Does he take any interest in things generally?” he said, also
loud.

“Oh! yes, sir; his food and his Will. It's quite a sight to see
him turn it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every
now and then he asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a
slate for him—very large. Of course, I always write the same,
what they were when he last took notice, in 1914. We got the
doctor to forbid him to read the paper when the War broke out.
Oh! he did take on about that at first. But he soon came round,
because he knew it tired him; and he's a wonder to conserve
energy as he used to call it when my dear mistresses were alive,
bless their hearts! How he did go on at them about that; they
were always so active, if you remember, Mr. Soames.”

“What would happen if I were to go in?” asked Soames: “Would he
remember me? I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in
1907.”

“Oh! that, sir,” replied Smither doubtfully, “I couldn't take on
me to say. I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his
age.”

Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn,
said in a loud voice: “Uncle Timothy!”

Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.

“Eh?” he said.

“Soames,” cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out his
hand, “Soames Forsyte!”

“No!” said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the floor,
he continued his walk.

“It doesn't seem to work,” said Soames.

“No, sir,” replied Smither, rather crestfallen; “you see, he
hasn't finished his walk. It always was one thing at a time with
him. I expect he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the
gas, and a pretty job I shall have to make him understand.”

“Do you think he ought to have a man about him?”

Smither held up her hands. “A man! Oh! no. Cook and me can manage
perfectly. A strange man about would send him crazy in no time.
And my mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house.
Besides, we're so—proud of him.”

“I suppose the doctor comes?”

“Every morning. He makes special terms for such a quantity, and
Mr. Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to
put out his tongue.”

“Well,” said Soames, turning away, “it's rather sad and painful
to me.”

“Oh! sir,” returned Smither anxiously, “you mustn't think that.
Now that he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life,
really he does. As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man
than he ever was. You see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his
bath, he's eatin', and when he's not eatin', he's sleepin'. and
there it is. There isn't an ache or a care about him anywhere.”

“Well,” said Soames, “there's something in that. I'll go down. By
the way, let me see his Will.”

“I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under
his pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active.”

“I only want to know if it's the one I made,” said Soames; “you
take a look at its date some time, and let me know.”

“Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and Cook
witnessed, you remember, and there's our names on it still, and
we've only done it once.”

“Quite,” said Soames. He did remember. Smither and Jane had been
proper witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they
might have no interest in Timothy's death. It had been—he fully
admitted—an almost improper precaution, but Timothy had wished
it, and, after all, Aunt Hester had provided for them amply.

“Very well,” he said; “good-bye, Smither. Look after him, and if
he should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me
know.”

“Oh! yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that. It's been such a
pleasant change to see you. Cook will be quite excited when I
tell her.”

Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs. He stood for fully
two minutes by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many
times. 'So it all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins
again. Poor old chap!' And he listened, if perchance the sound of
Timothy trailing his hobby-horse might come down the well of the
stairs; or some ghost of an old face show over the bannisters,
and an old voice say: 'Why, it's dear Soames, and we were only
saying that we hadn't seen him for a week!'

Nothing—nothing! Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a
sunbeam through the fanlight over the door. The little old house!
A mausoleum! And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught
his train.

V.—THE NATIVE HEATH
“His foot's upon his native heath, His name's—Val Dartie.”

With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of
his age, set out that same Thursday morning very early from the
old manor-house he had taken on the north side of the Sussex
Downs. His destination was Newmarket, and he had not been there
since the autumn of 1899, when he stole over from Oxford for the
Cambridgeshire. He paused at the door to give his wife a kiss,
and put a flask of port into his pocket.

“Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much.”

With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes
looking into his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe. He should be
moderate; Holly was always right—she had a natural aptitude. It
did not seem so remarkable to him, perhaps, as it might to
others, that—half Dartie as he was—he should have been perfectly
faithful to his young first cousin during the twenty years since
he married her romantically out in the Boer War; and faithful
without any feeling of sacrifice or boredom—she was so quick, so
slyly always a little in front of his mood. Being first cousins
they had decided, rather needlessly, to have no children; and,
though a little sallower, she had kept her looks, her slimness,
and the colour of her dark hair. Val particularly admired the
life of her own she carried on, besides carrying on his, and
riding better every year. She kept up her music, she read an
awful lot—novels, poetry, all sorts of stuff. Out on their farm
in Cape colony she had looked after all the “nigger” babies and
women in a miraculous manner. She was, in fact, clever; yet made
no fuss about it, and had no “side.” Though not remarkable for
humility, Val had come to have the feeling that she was his
superior, and he did not grudge it—a great tribute. It might be
noted that he never looked at Holly without her knowing of it,
but that she looked at him sometimes unawares.

He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so
on the platform, though she was going to the station with him, to
drive the car back. Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and
the wiles inseparable from horses, and handicapped by the leg
which, weakened in the Boer War, had probably saved his life in
the War just past, Val was still much as he had been in the days
of his courtship; his smile as wide and charming, his eyelashes,
if anything, thicker and darker, his eyes screwed up under them,
as bright a grey, his freckles rather deeper, his hair a little
grizzled at the sides. He gave the impression of one who has
lived actively with horses in a sunny climate.

Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:

“When is young Jon coming?”

“To-day.”

“Is there anything you want for him? I could bring it down on
Saturday.”

“No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur—one-forty.”

Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new
country on bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects
heaven at every hole.

“That's a young woman who knows her way about,” he said. “I say,
has it struck you?”

“Yes,” said Holly.

“Uncle Soames and your Dad—bit awkward, isn't it?”

“She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be said, of
course. It's only for five days, Val.”

“Stable secret! Righto!” If Holly thought it safe, it was.
Glancing slyly round at him, she said: “Did you notice how
beautifully she asked herself?”

“No!”

“Well, she did. What do you think of her, Val?”

“Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she
got her monkey up, I should say.”

“I'm wondering,” Holly murmured, “whether she is the modern young
woman. One feels at sea coming home into all this.”

“You? You get the hang of things so quick.”

Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.

“You keep one in the know,” said Val encouraged. “What do you
think of that Belgian fellow, Profond?”

“I think he's rather 'a good devil.'”

Val grinned.

“He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family. In fact,
our family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying
a Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first. Our
grandfathers would have had fits!”

“So would anybody's, my dear.”

“This car,” Val said suddenly, “wants rousing; she doesn't get
her hind legs under her uphill. I shall have to give her her head
on the slope if I'm to catch that train.”

There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever
really sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under
his guidance compared with its running under that of Holly was
always noticeable. He caught the train.

“Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can.
Good-bye, darling.”

“Good-bye,” called Holly, and kissed her hand.

In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between
thoughts of Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day,
and his dim memory of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of
a small square book, all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes
about the make and shape of horses. The Forsyte in him was bent
on the acquisition of a certain strain of blood, and he was
subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie hankering for a Nutter. On
getting back to England, after the profitable sale of his South
African farm and stud, and observing that the sun seldom shone,
Val had said to himself: “I've absolutely got to have an interest
in life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting's not
enough, I'll breed and I'll train.” With just that extra pinch of
shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new
country, Val had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They
were all hypnotised by fashion and high price. He should buy for
looks, and let names go hang! And here he was already, hypnotised
by the prestige of a certain strain of blood! Half-consciously,
he thought: 'There's something in this damned climate which makes
one go round in a ring. All the same, I must have a strain of
Mayfly blood.'

In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of
those quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into
horses, rather than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung
to the paddock. His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him
of the dandyism in which he had been bred, had left him the
essential neatness of the horseman, and given him a queer and
rather blighting eye over what he called “the silly haw-haw” of
some Englishmen, the “flapping cockatoory” of some
English-women—Holly had none of that and Holly was his model.
Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of
a transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the
heart of a Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:

“Mr. Val Dartie? How's Mrs. Val Dartie? She's well, I hope.” And
he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.

“Prosper Profond—I met you at lunch,” said the voice.

“How are you?” murmured Val.

“I'm very well,” replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
inimitable slowness. “A good devil,” Holly had called him. Well!
He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed
beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes,
unexpectedly intelligent.

“Here's a gentleman wants to know you—cousin of yours—Mr. George
Forsyde.”

Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a
little lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey
eye; he remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with
his father at the Iseeum Club.

“I used to go racing with your father,” George was saying: “How's
the stud? Like to buy one of my screws?”

Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had
fallen out of breeding. They believed in nothing over here, not
even in horses. George Forsyte, Prosper Profond! The devil
himself was not more disillusioned than those two.

“Didn't know you were a racing man,” he said to Monsieur Profond.

“I'm not. I don't care for it. I'm a yachtin' man. I don't care
for yachtin' either, but I like to see my friends. I've got some
lunch, Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you'd like to 'ave
some; not much—just a small one—in my car.”

“Thanks,” said Val; “very good of you. I'll come along in about
quarter of an hour.”

“Over there. Mr. Forsyde's comin',” and Monsieur Profond
“poinded” with a yellow-gloved finger; “small car, with a small
lunch”; he moved on, groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte
following, neat, huge, and with his jesting air.

Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly. George Forsyte, of
course, was an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own
age; Val felt extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy
at which those two had laughed. The animal had lost reality.

“That 'small' mare”—he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur
Profond—“what do you see in her?—we must all die!”

And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still! The Mayfly
strain—was it any better than any other? He might just as well
have a flutter with his money instead.

“No, by gum!” he muttered suddenly, “if it's no good breeding
horses, it's no good doing anything. What did I come for? I'll
buy her.”

He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward
the stand. Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers
looking as if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in
their lives; tall, flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced
women; young men with an air as if trying to take it
seriously—two or three of them with only one arm.

'Life over here's a game!' thought Val. 'Muffin bell rings,
horses run, money changes hands; ring again, run again, money
changes back.'

But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate
to watch the Mayfly filly canter down. She moved well; and he
made his way over to the “small” car. The “small” lunch was the
sort a man dreams of but seldom gets; and when it was concluded
Monsieur Profond walked back with him to the paddock.

“Your wife's a nice woman,” was his surprising remark.

“Nicest woman I know,” returned Val dryly.

“Yes,” said Monsieur Profond; “she has a nice face. I admire nice
women.”

Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct
in the heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the
moment.

“Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small
cruise.”

“Thanks,” said Val, in arms again, “she hates the sea.”

“So do I,” said Monsieur Profond.

“Then why do you yacht?”

The Belgian's eyes smiled. “Oh! I don't know. I've done
everything; it's the last thing I'm doin'.”

“It must be d-d expensive. I should want more reason than that.”

Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a
heavy lower lip.

“I'm an easy-goin' man,” he said.

“Were you in the War?” asked Val.

“Ye-es. I've done that too. I was gassed; it was a small bit
unpleasant.” He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity,
as if he had caught it from his name.

Whether his saying “small” when he ought to have said “little”
was genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the
fellow was evidently capable of anything.

Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her
race, Monsieur Profond said:

“You goin' to bid?”

Val nodded. With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need
of faith. Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by
the forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand
a year to which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly
by her grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could
touch, having spent most of what he had realised from his South
African farm on his establishment in Sussex. And very soon he was
thinking: 'Dash it! she's going beyond me!' His limit-six
hundred-was exceeded; he dropped out of the bidding. The Mayfly
filly passed under the hammer at seven hundred and fifty guineas.
He was turning away vexed when the slow voice of Monsieur Profond
said in his ear:

“Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you
take her and give her to your wife.”

Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good
humour in his eyes was such that he really could not take
offence.

“I made a small lot of money in the War,” began Monsieur Profond
in answer to that look. “I 'ad armament shares. I like to give it
away. I'm always makin' money. I want very small lot myself. I
like my friends to 'ave it.”

“I'll buy her of you at the price you gave,” said Val with sudden
resolution.

“No,” said Monsieur Profond. “You take her. I don' want her.”

“Hang it! one doesn't—”

“Why not?” smiled Monsieur Profond. “I'm a friend of your
family.”

“Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars,” said
Val impatiently.

“All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you
like with her.”

“So long as she's yours,” said Val. “I don't mind that.”

“That's all right,” murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.

Val watched; he might be “a good devil,” but then again he might
not. He saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no
more.

He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
Street.

Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved,
considering the three-and-thirty years during which she had put
up with Montague Dartie, till almost happily released by a French
staircase. It was to her a vehement satisfaction to have her
favourite son back from South Africa after all this time, to feel
him so little changed, and to have taken a fancy to his wife.
Winifred, who in the late seventies, before her marriage, had
been in the vanguard of freedom, pleasure, and fashion, confessed
her youth outclassed by the donzellas of the day. They seemed,
for instance, to regard marriage as an incident, and Winifred
sometimes regretted that she had not done the same; a second,
third, fourth incident might have secured her a partner of less
dazzling inebriety; though, after all, he had left her Val,
Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a colonel and unharmed by the
War)—none of whom had been divorced as yet. The steadiness of her
children often amazed one who remembered their father; but, as
she was fond of believing, they were really all Forsytes,
favouring herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen. Her
brother's “little girl” Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred. The child
was as restless as any of these modern young women—“She's a small
flame in a draught,” Prosper Profond had said one day after
dinner—but she did not flap, or talk at the top of her voice. The
steady Forsyteism in Winifred's own character instinctively
resented the feeling in the air, the modern girl's habits and her
motto: “All's much of a muchness! Spend, to-morrow we shall be
poor!” She found it a saving grace in Fleur that, having set her
heart on a thing, she had no change of heart until she got
it—though—what happened after, Fleur was, of course, too young to
have made evident. The child was a “very pretty little thing,”
too, and quite a credit to take about, with her mother's French
taste and gift for wearing clothes; everybody turned to look at
Fleur—great consideration to Winifred, a lover of the style and
distinction which had so cruelly deceived her in the case of
Montague Dartie.

In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning,
Winifred dwelt on the family skeleton.

“That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene,
Val—it's old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing
about it—making a fuss. Your Uncle Soames is very particular
about that. So you'll be careful.”

“Yes! But it's dashed awkward—Holly's young half-brother is
coming to live with us while he learns farming. He's there
already.”

“Oh!” said Winifred. “That is a gaff! What is he like?”

“Only saw him once—at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909; he
was naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes—a jolly little
chap.”

Winifred thought that “rather nice,” and added comfortably:
“Well, Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with it. I
shan't tell your uncle. It'll only bother him. It's a great
comfort to have you back, my dear boy, now that I'm getting on.”

“Getting on! Why! you're as young as ever. That chap Profond,
Mother, is he all right?”

“Prosper Profond! Oh! the most amusing man I know.”

Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.

“That's so like him,” murmured Winifred. “He does all sorts of
things.”

“Well,” said Val shrewdly, “our family haven't been too lucky
with that kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted for us.”

It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute
before she answered:

“Oh! well! He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances.”

“All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow.”

And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and
left her for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria
station.

VI.—JON

Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen
deeply in love, fortunately with something of her own, for the
object of her passion was the prospect in front of her windows,
the cool clear light on the green Downs. It was England again, at
last! England more beautiful than she had dreamed. Chance had, in
fact, guided the Val Darties to a spot where the South Downs had
real charm when the sun shone. Holly had enough of her father's
eye to apprehend the rare quality of their outlines and chalky
radiance; to go up there by the ravine-like lane and wander along
toward Chanctonbury or Amberley, was still a delight which she
hardly attempted to share with Val, whose admiration of Nature
was confused by a Forsyte's instinct for getting something out of
it, such as the condition of the turf for his horses' exercise.

Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she
promised herself that the first use she would make of Jon would
be to take him up there, and show him “the view” under this
May-day sky.

She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a
motherliness not exhausted by Val. A three-day visit to Robin
Hill, soon after their arrival home, had yielded no sight of
him—he was still at school; so that her recollection, like Val's,
was of a little sunny-haired boy, striped blue and yellow, down
by the pond.

Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad,
embarrassing. Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's
courtship; the ageing of her father, not seen for twenty years,
something funereal in his ironic gentleness which did not escape
one who had much subtle instinct; above all, the presence of her
stepmother, whom she could still vaguely remember as the “lady in
grey” of days when she was little and grandfather alive and
Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because that intruder gave her music
lessons—all these confused and tantalised a spirit which had
longed to find Robin Hill untroubled. But Holly was adept at
keeping things to herself, and all had seemed to go quite well.

Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she
was sure had trembled.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has
it? If only you could have brought Jolly back with you! I say,
can you stand this spiritualistic racket? When the oak-tree dies,
it dies, I'm afraid.”

From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had
let the cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.

“Spiritualism—queer word, when the more they manifest the more
they prove that they've got hold of matter.”

“How?” said Holly.

“Why! Look at their photographs of auric presences. You must have
something material for light and shade to fall on before you can
take a photograph. No, it'll end in our calling all matter
spirit, or all spirit matter—I don't know which.”

“But don't you believe in survival, Dad?”

Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face
impressed her deeply.

“Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death. I've
been looking into it a bit. But for the life of me I can't find
anything that telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from
the storehouse of this world can't account for just as well. Wish
I could! Wishes father thought but they don't breed evidence.”
Holly had pressed her lips again to his forehead with the feeling
that it confirmed his theory that all matter was becoming
spirit—his brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.