To Let tfs-5 Read online

  Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered whence she got herself—her red-gold hair, now greyed into a special colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own rather folded and subtilised countenance, her little light figure, when he and most of the Forsytes were tall. And he would dwell on the origin of species, and debate whether she might be Danish or Celtic. Celtic, he thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs. It was not too much to say that he preferred her to the Age with which she was surrounded, youthful though, for the greater part, it was. She took, however, too much interest in his teeth, for he still had some of those natural symptoms. Her dentist at once found “staphylococcus aureus present in pure culture” (which might cause boils, of course) and wanted to take out all the teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of unnatural symptoms. Jolyon’s native tenacity was roused, and in the studio that evening he developed his objections. He had never had any boils, and his own teeth would last his time. Of course—June admitted—they would last his time if he didn’t have them out! But if he had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would be longer. His recalcitrance—she said—was a symptom of his whole attitude; he was taking it lying down. He ought to be fighting. When was he going to see the man who had cured Paul Post? Jolyon was very sorry, but the fact was he was not going to see him. June chafed. Pondridge—she said—the healer, was such a fine man, and he had such difficulty in making two ends meet and getting his theories recognised. It was just such indifference and prejudice as her father manifested which was keeping him back. It would be so splendid for both of them!

  “I perceive,” said Jolyon, “that you are trying to kill two birds with one stone.”

  “To cure, you mean!” cried June.

  “My dear, it’s the same thing.”

  June protested. It was unfair to say that without a trial.

  Jolyon thought he might not have the chance of saying it after.

  “Dad!” cried June, “you’re hopeless.”

  “That,” said Jolyon, “is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as long as possible. I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child. They are quiet at present.”

  “That’s not giving science a chance,” cried June. “You’ve no idea how devoted Pondridge is. He puts his science before everything.”

  “Just,” replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he was reduced, “as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh? Art for Art’s sake—Science for the sake of Science. I know those enthusiastic egomaniac gentry. They vivisect you without blinking. I’m enough of a Forsyte to give them the go-by, June.”

  “Dad,” said June, “if you only knew how old-fashioned that sounds! Nobody can afford to be half-hearted nowadays.”

  “I’m afraid,” murmured Jolyon, with his smile, “that’s the only natural symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me. We are born to be extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though if you’ll forgive my saying so, half the people nowadays who believe they’re extreme are really very moderate. I’m getting on as well as I can expect, and I must leave it at that.”

  June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable character of her father’s amiable obstinacy so far as his own freedom of action was concerned.

  How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain puzzled Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion. After she had brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp discussion, during which he perceived to the full the fundamental opposition between her active temperament and his wife’s passivity. He even gathered that a little soreness still remained from that generation-old struggle between them over the body of Philip Bosinney, in which the passive had so signally triumphed over the active principle.

  According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the past from Jon. Sheer opportunism, she called it.

  “Which,” Jolyon put in mildly, “is the working principle of real life, my dear.”

  “Oh!” cried June, “YOU don’t really defend her for not telling Jon, Dad. If it were left to you, you would.”

  “I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will be worse than if we told him.”

  “Then why DON’T you tell him? It’s just sleeping dogs again.”

  “My dear,” said Jolyon, “I wouldn’t for the world go against Irene’s instinct. He’s her boy.”

  “Yours too,” cried June.

  “What is a man’s instinct compared with a mother’s?”

  “Well, I think it’s very weak of you.”

  “I dare say,” said Jolyon, “I dare say.”

  And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her brain. She could not bear sleeping dogs. And there stirred in her a tortuous impulse to push the matter towards decision. Jon ought to be told, so that either his feeling might be nipped in the bud, or, flowering in spite of the past, come to fruition. And she determined to see Fleur, and judge for herself. When June determined on anything, delicacy became a somewhat minor consideration. After all, she was Soames’ cousin, and they were both interested in pictures. She would go and tell him that he ought to buy a Paul Post, or perhaps a piece of sculpture by Boris Strumolowski, and of course she would say nothing to her father. She went on the following Sunday, looking so determined that she had some difficulty in getting a cab at Reading station. The river country was lovely in those days of her own month, and June ached at its loveliness. She who had passed through this life without knowing what union was had a love of natural beauty which was almost madness. And when she came to that choice spot where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her cab, because, business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water and the woods. She appeared at his front door, therefore, as a mere pedestrian, and sent in her card. It was in June’s character to know that when her nerves were fluttering she was doing something worth while. If one’s nerves did not flutter, she was taking the line of least resistance, and knew that nobleness was not obliging her. She was conducted to a drawing-room, which, though not in her style, showed every mark of fastidious elegance. Thinking: ‘Too much taste—too many knick-knacks,’ she saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the figure of a girl coming in from the verandah. Clothed in white, and holding some white roses in her hand, she had, reflected in that silvery-grey pool of glass, a vision-like appearance, as if a pretty ghost had come out of the green garden.

  “How do you do?” said June, turning round. “I’m a cousin of your father’s.”

  “Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner’s.”

  “With my young stepbrother. Is your father in?”

  “He will be directly. He’s only gone for a little walk.”

  June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided chin.

  “Your name’s Fleur, isn’t it? I’ve heard of you from Holly. What do you think of Jon?”

  The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered calmly:

  “He’s quite a nice boy.”

  “Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?”

  “Not a bit.”

  ‘She’s cool,’ thought June.

  And suddenly the girl said: “I wish you’d tell me why our families don’t get on?”

  Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer, June was silent; either because this girl was trying to get something out of her, or simply because what one would do theoretically is not always what one will do when it comes to the point.

  “You know,” said the girl, “the surest way to make people find out the worst is to keep them ignorant. My father’s told me it was a quarrel about property. But I don’t believe it; we’ve both got heaps. They wouldn’t have been so bourgeois as all that.”

  June flushed. The word applied to her grandfather and father offended her.

  “My grandfather,” she said, “was very generous, and my father is, too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois.”

  “Well, wh
at was it then?” repeated the girl. Conscious that this young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined to prevent her, and to get something for herself instead.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  The girl smelled at her roses. “I only want to know because they won’t tell me.”

  “Well, it WAS about property, but there’s more than one kind.”

  “That makes it worse. Now I really MUST know.”

  June’s small and resolute face quivered. She was wearing a round cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it. She looked quite young at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.

  “You know,” she said, “I saw you drop your handkerchief. Is there anything between you and Jon? Because, if so, you’d better drop that too.”

  The girl grew paler, but she smiled.

  “If there were, that isn’t the way to make me.”

  At the gallantry of that reply June held out her hand.

  “I like you; but I don’t like your father; I never have. We may as well be frank.”

  “Did you come down to tell him that?”

  June laughed. “No; I came down to see YOU.”

  “How delightful of you!”

  This girl could fence.

  “I’m two-and-a-half times your age,” said June, “but I quite sympathise. It’s horrid not to have one’s own way.”

  The girl smiled again. “I really think you MIGHT tell me.”

  How the child stuck to her point!

  “It’s not my secret. But I’ll see what I can do, because I think both you and Jon OUGHT to be told. And now I’ll say good-bye.”

  “Won’t you wait and see Father?”

  June shook her head. “How can I get over to the other side?”

  “I’ll row you across.”

  “Look!” said June impulsively, “next time you’re in London, come and see me. This is where I live. I generally have young people in the evening. But I shouldn’t tell your father that you’re coming.”

  The girl nodded.

  Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: ‘She’s awfully pretty and well made. I never thought Soames would have a daughter as pretty as this. She and Jon would make a lovely couple.’

  The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at work in June. She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took her hand off a scull to wave farewell; and June walked languidly on between the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart. Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through. Her youth! So long ago—when Phil and she—! And since? Nothing—no one had been quite what she had wanted. And so she had missed it all. But what a coil was round those two young things, if they really were in love, as Holly would have it—as her father, and Irene, and Soames himself seemed to dread. What a coil, and what a barrier! And the itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast, which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever believed that what one wanted was more important than what other people did not want. From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer stillness, she watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the fishes rising; sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how she could force everybody to be happy. Jon and Fleur! Two little lame ducks—charming callow yellow little ducks! A great pity! Surely something could be done! One must not take such situations lying down. She walked on, and reached a station, hot and cross.

  That evening, faithful to the impulse towards direct action, which made many people avoid her, she said to her father:

  “Dad, I’ve been down to see young Fleur. I think she’s very attractive. It’s no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?”

  The startled Jolyon set down his barley water, and began crumbling his bread.

  “It’s what you appear to be doing,” he said: “Do you realise whose daughter she is?”

  “Can’t the dead past bury its dead?”

  Jolyon rose.

  “Certain things can never be buried.”

  “I disagree,” said June. “It’s that which stands in the way of all happiness and progress. You don’t understand the Age, Dad. It’s got no use for outgrown things. Why do you think it matters so terribly that Jon should know about his mother? Who pays any attention to that sort of thing now? The marriage laws are just as they were when Soames and Irene couldn’t get a divorce, and you had to come in. We’ve moved, and they haven’t. So nobody cares. Marriage without a decent chance of relief is only a sort of slave-owning; people oughtn’t to own each other. Everybody sees that now. If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?”

  “It’s not for me to disagree there,” said Jolyon; “but that’s all quite beside the mark. This is a matter of human feeling.”

  “Of course, it is,” cried June, “the human feeling of those two young things.”

  “My dear,” said Jolyon with gentle exasperation, “you’re talking nonsense.”

  “I’m not. If they prove to be really fond of each other, why should they be made unhappy because of the past?”

  “YOU haven’t lived that past. I have—through the feelings of my wife; through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is devoted can.”

  June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.

  “If,” she said suddenly, “she were the daughter of Phil Bosinney, I could understand you better. Irene loved him, she never loved Soames.”

  Jolyon uttered a deep sound—the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid no attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.

  “That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I know him, would mind a love-past. It’s the brutality of a union without love. This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon’s mother as a negro-slave was owned. You can’t lay that ghost; don’t try to, June! It’s asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and blood of the man who possessed Jon’s mother against her will. It’s no good mincing words; I want it clear once for all. And now I mustn’t talk any more, or I shall have to sit up with this all night.” And, putting his hand over his heart, Jolyon turned his back on his daughter and stood looking at the river Thames.

  June, who by nature never saw a hornets’ nest until she had put her head into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her arm through his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, and said nothing.

  After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The peaceful beauty of the afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and poetic. In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of hay. She watched the grass cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination—it looked so green and fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true river song. Alongside, in the grey-green water, weeds like yellow snakes were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It was an afternoon to dream. And she took out Jon’s letters—not flowery effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a longing very agreeable to her, and all ending “Your devoted J.” Fleur was not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but what poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly in those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon. They all belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of the map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy sparkle and promise of the day d
own in the garden, were Jon personified to her.

  Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his letters, followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with just so much space between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey destroyers. Fleur thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and pulled up to the landing-stage. Crossing the lawn, she wondered whether she should tell her father of June’s visit. If he learned of it from the butler, he might think it odd if she did not. It gave her, too, another chance to startle out of him the reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the road to meet him.