The Forsyte Saga(360)

This cemetery was full, they said – of people with extraordinary names, buried in extraordinary taste. Still, they had a fine view up here, right over London. Annette had once given him a story to read by that Frenchman, Maupassant – a most lugubrious concern, where all the skeletons emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious inscriptions on the stones were altered to descriptions of their sins. Not a true story at all. He didn’t know about the French, but there was not much real harm in English people except their teeth and their taste, which were certainly deplorable. ‘The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850’. A lot of people had been buried here since then – a lot of English life crumbled to mould and dust! The boom of an airplane passing under the gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift his eyes. The deuce of a lot of expansion had gone on. But it all came back to a cemetery – to a name and a date on a tomb. And he thought with a curious pride that he and his family had done little or nothing to help this feverish expansion. Good solid middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess. ‘Superior Dosset’, indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted in a doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them all had soiled his hands by creating anything – unless you counted Val Dartie and his horse-breeding. Collectors, solicitors, barristers, merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even soldiers – there they had been! The country had expanded, as it were, in spite of them. They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken advantage of the process – and when you considered how ‘Superior Dosset’ had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal descendants already owned what old Gradman estimated at between a million and a million and a half, it was not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as if the family bolt was shot, their possessive instinct dying out. They seemed unable to make money – this fourth generation; they were going into art, literature, farming, or the army; or just living on what was left them – they had no push and no tenacity. They would die if they didn’t take care.

Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze. The air up here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the feeling that mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the crosses and the urns, the angels, the ‘immortelles’, the flowers, gaudy or withering, and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different from anything else up there that he was obliged to walk the few necessary yards and look at it. A sober corner, with a massive queer-shaped cross of grey roughhewn granite, guarded by four dark yew trees. The spot was free from the pressure of the other graves, having a little boxhedged garden on the far side, and in front, a goldening birch tree. This oasis in the desert of conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and he sat down there in the sunshine. Through those trembling gold birch leaves he gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of memory. He thought of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair was rusty golden and her white shoulders his – Irene, the prize of his love-passion, resistant to his ownership. He saw Bosinney’s body lying in that white mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with the eyes of a dying bird. Again he thought of her by the little green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him. His fancy took him on beside his drifting river on the November day when Fleur was to be born, took him to the dead leaves floating on the green-tinged water and the snakeheaded weed for ever swaying and nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered. And on again to the window opened to the cold starry night above Hyde Park, with his father lying dead. His fancy darted to that picture of ‘the future town’, to that boy’s and Fleur’s first meeting; to the bluish trail of Prosper Profond’s cigar, and Fleur in the window pointing down to where the fellow prowled. To the sight of Irene and that dead fellow sitting side by side in the stand at Lord’s. To her and that boy at Robin Hill. To the sofa, where Fleur lay crushed up in the corner; to her lips pressed into his cheek, and her farewell ‘Daddy’. And suddenly he saw again Irene’s grey-gloved hand waving its last gesture of release.

He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to thescut of his possessive instinct, warming himself even with its failures.

‘To Let’ – the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his soul, his investments, and his woman, without check or question. And now the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman had herself, and God knew who had his soul. ‘To Let’ – that sane and simple creed!