He was so stiff next morning in arms and ribs, that Annette had to rub him till he said:
“Look out! you’re taking the skin off!”
He had, however, become infected. After destroying some further portions of his lawn, he joined the nearest Golf Club, and began to go round by himself during the luncheon-hour, accompanied by a little boy. He kept at it with characteristic tenacity, till by July he had attained a certain proficiency; and he began to say to Annette that it would do her all the good in the world to take it up, and keep her weight down.
“Merci, Soames,” she would reply; “I have no wish to be the figure of your English Misses, flat as a board before and behind.” She was reactionary, ‘like her nation’; and Soames, who at heart had a certain sympathy with curves, did not seriously press the point. He found that the exercise jogged both his liver and his temper. He began to have colour in his cheeks. The day after his first nine-hole round with Jack Cardigan, who had given him three strokes a hole and beaten him by nine holes, he received a package which, to his dismay, contained a box of cigars. What the fellow was about, he could not imagine! He only discovered when, one evening a few days later, sitting at the window of his picture gallery, he found that he had one in his mouth. Curiously enough, it did not make him sick. It produced rather something of the feeling he used to enjoy after ‘doing Coue’–now comparatively out of fashion, since an American, so his sister Winifred said, had found a shorter cut. A suspicion, however, that the family had set Jack Cardigan on, prevented him from indulging his new sensation anywhere but in his picture gallery; so that cigars gathered the halo of a secret vice. He renewed his store stealthily. Only when he found that Annette, Fleur, and others had known for weeks, did he relax his rule, and say openly that the vice of the present day was cigarettes.
“My dear boy,” said Winifred, when she next saw him, “everybody’s saying you’re a different man!”
Soames raised his eyebrows. He was not conscious of any change.
“That chap Cardigan,” he said, “is a funny fellow!… I’m going to dine and sleep at Fleur’s; they’re just back from Italy. The House sits on Monday.”
“Yes,” said Winifred; “very fussy of them–sitting in the Long Vacation.”
“Ireland!” said Soames, deeply. “A pretty pair of shoes again!” Always had been; always would be!
Chapter III.
MICHAEL TAKES ‘A LUNAR’
Michael had returned from Italy with the longing to ‘get on with it,’ which results from Southern holidays. Countryman by upbringing, still deeply absorbed by the unemployment problem, and committed to Foggartism, as its remedy, he had taken up no other hobby in the House, and was eating the country’s bread, if somewhat unbuttered, and doing nothing for it. He desired, therefore, to know where he stood, and how long he was going to stand there.
Bent on ‘taking this lunar’–as ‘Old Forsyte’ would call it–at his own position, he walked away from the House that same day, after dealing with an accumulated correspondence. He walked towards Pevensey Blythe, in the office of that self-sufficing weekly: The Outpost. Sunburnt from his Italian holiday and thinned by Italian cookery, he moved briskly, and thought of many things. Passing down on to the Embankment, where a number of unemployed birds on a number of trees were also wondering, it seemed, where they stood and how long they were going to stand there, he took a letter from his pocket to read a second time.
“12 SAPPER’S ROW, “CAMDEN TOWN.
HONOURABLE SIR,
“Being young in ‘Who’s Who,’ you will not be hard, I think, to those in suffering. I am an Austrian woman who married a German eleven years ago. He was an actor on the English stage, for his father and mother, who are no more living, brought him to England quite young. Interned he was, and his health broken up. He has the neurasthenie very bad so he cannot be trusted for any work. Before the war he was always in a part, and we had some good money; but this went partly when I was left with my child alone, and the rest was taken by the P. T., and we got very little back, neither of us being English. What we did get has all been to the doctor, and for our debts, and for burying our little child, which died happily, for though I loved it much this life which we have is not fit for a child to live. We live on my needle, and that is not earning much, a pound a week and sometimes nothing. The managers will not look at my husband all these years, because he shakes suddenly, so they think he drinks, but, Sir, he has not the money to buy it. We do not know where to turn, or what to do. So I thought, dear Sir, whether you could do anything for us with the P. T.; they have been quite sympatical; but they say they administrate an order and cannot do more. Or if you could get my husband some work where he will be in open air–the doctor say that is what he want. We have nowhere to go in Germany or in Austria, our well-loved families being no more alive. I think we are like many, but I cannot help asking you, Sir, because we want to keep living if we can, and now we are hardly having any food. Please to forgive me my writing, and to believe your very anxious and humble
“ANNA BERGFELD.”
‘God help them!’ thought Michael, under a plane-tree close to Cleopatra’s Needle, but without conviction. For in his view God was not so much interested in the fate of individual aliens as the Governor of the Bank of England in the fate of a pound of sugar bought with the fraction of a Bradbury; He would not arbitrarily interfere with a ripple of the tides set loose by His arrangement of the Spheres. God, to Michael, was a monarch strictly limited by His own Constitution. He restored the letter to his pocket. Poor creatures! But really, with 1 200 000 and more English unemployed, mostly due to that confounded Kaiser and his Navy stunt–! If that fellow and his gang had not started their Naval rivalry in 1899, England would have been out of the whole mess, or, perhaps, there never would have been a mess!
He turned up from the Temple station towards the offices of The Outpost. He had ‘taken’ that Weekly for some years now. It knew everything, and managed to convey a slight impression that nobody else knew anything; so that it seemed more weighty than any other Weekly. Having no particular Party to patronise, it could patronise the lot. Without Imperial bias, it professed a special knowledge of the Empire. Not literary, it made a point of reducing the heads of literary men–Michael, in his publishing days, had enjoyed every opportunity of noticing that. Professing respect for Church and the Law, it was an adept at giving them ‘what-for.’ It fancied itself on Drama, striking a somewhat Irish attitude towards it. But, perhaps above all, it excelled in neat detraction from political reputations, keeping them in their place, and that place a little lower than The Outpost’s. Moreover, from its editorials emanated that ‘holy ghost’ of inspired knowledge in periods just a little beyond average comprehension, without which no such periodical had real importance.
Michael went up the stairs two at a time, and entered a large square room, where Mr. Blythe, back to the door, was pointing with a ruler to a circle drawn on a map.
“This is a bee map,” said Mr. Blythe to himself. “Quite the bee-est map I ever saw.”
Michael could not contain a gurgle, and the eyes of Mr. Blythe came round, prominent, epileptic, richly encircled by pouches.
“Hallo!” he said defiantly: “You? The Colonial Office prepared this map specially to show the best spots for Settlement schemes. And they’ve left out Baggersfontein–the very hub.”
Michael seated himself on the table.
“I’ve come in to ask what you think of the situation? My wife says Labour will be out in no time.”
“Our charming little lady!” said Mr. Blythe; “Labour will survive Ireland; they will survive Russia; they will linger on in their precarious way. One hesitates to predict their decease. Fear of their Budget may bring them down in February. After the smell of Russian fat has died away–say in November, Mont–one may make a start.”
“This first speech,” said Michael, “is a nightmare to me. How, exactly, am I to start Foggartism?”
“One will have achieved the impression of a body of opinion before then.”
“But will there be one?”
“No,” said Mr. Blythe.
“Oh!” said Michael. “And, by the way, what about Free Trade?”
“One will profess Free Trade, and put on duties.”
“God and Mammon.”
“Necessary in England, before any new departure, Mont. Witness Liberal–Unionism, Tory–Socialism, and–”
“Other ramps,” said Michael, gently.
“One will glide, deprecate Protection till there is more Protection than Free Trade, then deprecate Free Trade. Foggartism is an end, not a means; Free Trade and Protection are means, not the ends politicians have made them.”
Roused by the word politician, Michael got off the table; he was coming to have a certain sympathy with those poor devils. They were supposed to have no feeling for the country, and to be wise only after the event. But, really, who could tell what was good for the country, among the mists of talk? Not even old Foggart, Michael sometimes thought.
“You know, Blythe,” he said, “that we politicians don’t think ahead, simply because we know it’s no earthly. Every elector thinks his own immediate good is the good of the country. Only their own shoes pinching will change electors’ views. If Foggartism means adding to the price of living now, and taking wage-earning children away from workmen’s families for the sake of benefit–ten or twenty years hence–who’s going to stand for it?”
“My dear young man,” said Mr. Blythe, “conversion is our job. At present our trade-unionists despise the outside world. They’ve never seen it. Their philosophy is bounded by their smoky little streets. But five million pounds spent on the organised travel of a hundred thousand working men would do the trick in five years. It would infect the working class with a feverish desire for a place in the sun. The world is their children’s for the taking. But who can blame them, when they know nothing of it?”
“Some thought!” said Michael: “Only–what Government will think it? Can I take those maps?… By the way,” he said at the door, “there are Societies, you know, for sending out children.”
Mr. Blythe grunted. “Yes. Excellent little affairs! A few hundred children doing well–concrete example of what might be. Multiply it a hundredfold, and you’ve got a beginning. You can’t fill pails with a teaspoon. Good-bye!”
Out on the Embankment Michael wondered if one could love one’s country with a passion for getting people to leave it. But this over-bloated town condition, with its blight and smoky ugliness; the children without a chance from birth; these swarms of poor devils without work, who dragged about and hadn’t an earthly, and never would, on present lines; this unbalanced, hand-to-mouth, dependent state of things–surely that wasn’t to be for ever the state of the country one loved! He stared at the towers of Westminster, with the setting sun behind them. And there started up before him the thousand familiars of his past–trees, fields and streams, towers, churches, bridges; the English breeds of beasts, the singing birds, the owls, the jays and rooks at Lippinghall, the little differences from foreign sorts in shrub, flower, lichen, and winged life; the English scents, the English haze, the English grass; the eggs and bacon; the slow good humour, the moderation and the pluck; the smell of rain; the apple-blossom, the heather, and the sea. His country, and his breed–unspoilable at heart! He passed the Clock Tower. The House looked lacy and imposing, more beautiful than fashion granted. Did they spin the web of England’s future in that House? Or were they painting camouflage–a screen, over old England?
A familiar voice said: “This is a monstrous great thing!”
And Michael saw his father-inlaw staring up at the Lincoln statue. “What did they want to put it here for?” said Soames. “It’s not English.” He walked along at Michael’s side. “Fleur well?”
“Splendid. Italy suited her like everything.”
Soames sniffed. “They’re a theatrical lot,” he said. “Did you see Milan cathedral!”
“Yes, sir. It’s about the only thing we didn’t take to.”
“H’m! Their cooking gave me the collywobbles in ‘79. I dare say it’s better now. How’s the boy?”
“A1, sir.”
Soames made a sound of gratification, and they turned the corner into South Square.
“What’s this?” said Soames.
Outside the front door were two battered-looking trunks, a young man, grasping a bag, and ringing the bell, and a taxicab turning away.
“I can’t tell you, sir,” murmured Michael. “Unless it’s the angel Gabriel.”
“He’s got the wrong house,” said Soames, moving forward.
But just then the young man disappeared within.
Soames walked up to the trunks. “Francis Wilmot,” he read out. “‘S. S. Amphibian.’ There’s some mistake!”
Chapter IV.
MERE CONVERSATION
When they came in, Fleur was returning down-stairs from showing the young man to his room. Already fully dressed for the evening, she had but little on, and her hair was shingled…
“My dear girl,” Michael had said, when shingling came in, “to please me, don’t! Your nuque will be too bristly for kisses.”
“My dear boy,” she had answered, “as if one could help it! You’re always the same with any new fashion!”
She had been one of the first twelve to shingle, and was just feeling that without care she would miss being one of the first twelve to grow some hair again. Marjorie Ferrar, ‘the Pet of the Panjoys,’ as Michael called her, already had more than an inch. Somehow, one hated being distanced by Marjorie Ferrar…
Advancing to her father, she said:
“I’ve asked a young American to stay, Dad; Jon Forsyte has married his sister, out there. You’re quite brown, darling. How’s mother?”
Soames only gazed at her.
And Fleur passed through one of those shamed moments, when the dumb quality of his love for her seemed accusing the glib quality of her love for him. It was not fair–she felt–that he should look at her like that; as if she had not suffered in that old business with Jon more than he; if she could take it lightly now, surely he could! As for Michael–not a word! – not even a joke! She bit her lips, shook her shingled head, and passed into the ‘bimetallic parlour.’
Dinner began with soup and Soames deprecating his own cows for not being Herefords. He supposed that in America they had plenty of Herefords?
Francis Wilmot believed that they were going in for Holsteins now.
“Holsteins!” repeated Soames. “They’re new since my young days. What’s their colour?”
“Parti-coloured,” said Francis Wilmot. “The English grass is just wonderful.”
“Too damp, with us,” said Soames. “We’re on the river.”
“The river Thames? What size will that be, where it hasn’t a tide?”
“Just there–not more than a hundred yards.”
“Will it have fish?”
“Plenty.”
“And it’ll run clear–not red; our Southern rivers have a red colour. And your trees will be willows, and poplars, and elms.”
Soames was a good deal puzzled. He had never been in America. The inhabitants were human, of course, but peculiar and all alike, with more face than feature, heads fastened upright on their backs, and shoulders too square to be real. Their voices clanged in their mouths; they pronounced the words ‘very’ and ‘America’ in a way that he had tried to imitate without success; their dollar was too high, and they all had motor-cars; they despised Europe, came over in great quantities, and took back all they could; they talked all the time, and were not allowed to drink. This young man cut across all these preconceptions. He drank sherry and only spoke when he was spoken to. His shoulders looked natural; he had more feature than face; and his voice was soft. Perhaps, at least, he despised Europe.
“I suppose,” he said, “you find England very small.”
“No, sir. I find London very large; and you certainly have the loveliest kind of a countryside.”
Soames looked down one side of his nose. “Pretty enough!” he said.
Then came turbot and a silence, broken, low down, behind his chair.
“That dog!” said Soames, impaling a morsel of fish he had set aside as uneatable.
“No, no, Dad! He just wants to know you’ve seen him!”
Soames stretched down a finger, and the Dandie fell on his side.
“He never eats,” said Fleur; “but he has to be noticed.”
A small covey of partridges came in, cooked.
“Is there any particular thing you want to see over here, Mr. Wilmot?” said Michael. “There’s nothing very unAmerican left. You’re just too late for Regent Street.”
“I want to see the Beefeaters; and Cruft’s Dog Show; and your blood horses; and the Derby.”
“Darby!” Soames corrected. “You can’t stay for that–it’s not till next June.”
“My cousin Val will show you race-horses,” said Fleur. “He married Jon’s sister, you know.”
A ‘bombe’ appeared. “You have more of this in America, I believe,” said Soames.
“We don’t have much ice-cream in the South, sir; but we have special cooking–very tasty.”
“I’ve heard of terrapin.”
“Well, I don’t get frills like that. I live away back, and have to work pretty hard. My place is kind of homey; but I’ve got some mighty nice darkies that can cook fine–old folk that knew my grannies. The old-time darky is getting scarce, but he’s the real thing.”
A Southerner!
Soames had been told that the Southerner was a gentleman. He remembered the ‘Alabama,’ too; and his father, James, saying: “I told you so” when the Government ate humble pie over that business.
In the savoury silence that accompanied soft roes on toast, the patter of the Dandie’s feet on the parquet floor could be plainly heard.
“This is the only thing he likes,” said Fleur, “Dan! go to your master. Give him a little bit, Michael.” And she stole a look at Michael, but he did not answer it.
On their Italian holiday, with Fleur in the throes of novelty, sun and wine warmed, disposed to junketing, amenable to his caresses, he had been having his real honeymoon, enjoying, for the first time since his marriage, a sense of being the chosen companion of his adored. And now had come this stranger, bringing reminder that one played but second fiddle to that young second cousin and first lover; and he couldn’t help feeling the cup withdrawn again from his lips. She had invited this young man because he came from that past of hers whose tune one could not play. And, without looking up, he fed the Dandie with tid-bits of his favourite edible.
Soames broke the silence.
“Take some nutmeg, Mr. Wilmot. Melon without nutmeg–beats ginger hollow.”
When Fleur rose, Soames followed her to the drawing-room; while Michael led the young American to his study.
“You knew Jon?” said Francis Wilmot.
“No; I never met him.”
“He’s a great little fellow; and some poet. He’s growing dandy peaches.”
“Is he going on with that, now he’s married?”
“Surely.”
“Not coming to England?”
“Not this year. They have a nice home–horses and dogs. They have some hunting there, too. Perhaps he’ll bring my sister over for a trip, next fall.”
“Oh!” said Michael. “And are you staying long, yourself?”
“Why! I’ll go back for Christmas. I’d like to see Rome and Seville; and I want to visit the old home of my people, down in Worcestershire.”
“When did they go over?”
“William and Mary. Catholics–they were. Is it a nice part, Worcestershire?”
“Very; especially in the Spring. It grows a lot of fruit.”
“Oh! You still grow things in this country?”
“Not many.”
“I thought that was so, coming on the cars, from Liverpool. I saw a lot of grass and one or two sheep, but I didn’t see anybody working. The people all live in the towns, then?”
“Except a few unconsidered trifles. You must come down to my father’s; they still grow a turnip or two thereabouts.”
“It’s sad,” said Francis Wilmot.
“It is. We began to grow wheat again in the war; but they’ve let it all slip back–and worse.”
“Why was that?”
Michael shrugged his shoulders: “No accounting for statesmanship. It lets the Land go to blazes when in office; and beats the drum of it when in opposition. At the end of the war we had the best air force in the world, and agriculture was well on its way to recovery. And what did they do? Dropped them both like hot potatoes. It was tragic. What do you grow in Carolina?”
“Just cotton, on my place. But it’s mighty hard to make cotton pay nowadays. Labour’s high.”
“High with you, too?”
“Yes, sir. Do they let strangers into your Parliament?”
“Rather. Would you like to hear the Irish debate? I can get you a seat in the Distinguished Strangers’ gallery.”
“I thought the English were stiff; but it’s wonderful the way you make me feel at home. Is that your father-inlaw–the old gentleman?”
“Yes.”
“He seems kind of rarefied. Is he a banker?”
“No. But now you mention it–he ought to be.”
Francis Wilmot’s eyes roved round the room and came to rest on “The White Monkey.”
“Well, now,” he said, softly, “that, surely, is a wonderful picture. Could I get a picture painted by that man, for Jon and my sister?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Michael. “You see, he was a Chink–not quite of the best period; but he must have gone West five hundred years ago at least.”
“Ah! Well, he had a great sense of animals.”
“We think he had a great sense of human beings.”
Francis Wilmot stared.
There was something, Michael decided, in this young man unresponsive to satire.
“So you want to see Cruft’s Dog Show?” he said. “You’re keen on dogs, then?”
“I’ll be taking a bloodhound back for Jon, and two for myself. I want to raise bloodhounds.”
Michael leaned back, and blew out smoke. To Francis Wilmot, he felt, the world was young, and life running on good tires to some desirable destination. In England–!
“What is it you Americans want out of life?” he said abruptly.
“Well, I suppose you might say we want success–in the North at all events.”
“WE wanted that in 1824,” said Michael.
“Oh! And nowadays?”
“We’ve had success, and now we’re wondering whether it hasn’t cooked our goose.”
“Well,” said Francis Wilmot, “we’re sort of thinly populated, compared with you.”
“That’s it,” said Michael. “Every seat here is booked in advance; and a good many sit on their own knees. Will you have another cigar, or shall we join the lady?”
Chapter V.
SIDE-SLIPS
If Providence was completely satisfied with Sapper’s Row, Camden Town, Michael was not. What could justify those twin dismal rows of three-storied houses, so begrimed that they might have been collars washed in Italy? What possible attention to business could make these little ground-floor shops do anything but lose money? From the thronged and tram-lined thoroughfare so pregnantly scented with fried fish, petrol and old clothes, who would turn into this small back water for sweetness or for profit? Even the children, made with heroic constancy on its second and third floors, sought the sweets of life outside its precincts; for in Sapper’s Row they could neither be run over nor stare at the outside of Cinemas. Hand-carts, bicycles, light vans which had lost their nerve and taxicabs which had lost their way, provided all the traffic; potted geraniums and spotted cats supplied all the beauty. Sapper’s Row drooped and dithered.
Michael entered from its west end, and against his principles. Here was overcrowded England, at its most dismal, and here was he, who advocated a reduction of its population, about to visit some broken-down aliens with the view of keeping them alive. He looked into three of the little shops. Not a soul! Which was worst? Such little shops frequented, or–deserted? He came to No. 12, and, looking up, saw a face looking down.
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