The stillness, enclosed in the far, inexorable roar of the town, was alive with the myriad passions, hopes, and loves of multitudes of struggling human atoms; for in spite of the disapproval of that great body of Forsytes, the Municipal Council – to whom Love had long been considered, next to the Sewage Question, the gravest danger to the community – a process was going on that night in the Park, and in a hundred other parks, without which the thousand factories, churches, shops, taxes, and drains, of which they were custodians, were as arteries without blood, a man without a heart.
The instincts of self-forgetfulness, of passion, and of love, hiding under the trees, away from the trustees of their remorseless enemy, the ‘sense of property’, were holding a stealthy revel, and Soames, returning from Bayswater – for he had been alone to dine at Timothy’s – walking home along the water, with his mind upon that coming lawsuit, had the blood driven from his heart by a low laugh and the sound of kisses. He thought of writing to The Times the next morning, to draw the attention of the Editor to the condition of our parks. He did not, however, for he had a horror of seeing his name in print.
But starved as he was, the whispered sounds in the stillness, the half-seen forms in the dark, acted on him like some morbid stimulant. He left the path along the water and stole under the trees, along the deep shadow of little plantations, where the boughs of chestnut-trees hung their great leaves low, and there was blacker refuge, shaping his course in circles that had for their object a stealthy inspection of chairs side by side against tree-trunks, of enlaced lovers, who stirred at his approach.
Now he stood still on the rise overlooking the Serpentine, where, in full lamplight, black against the silver water, sat a couple who never moved, the woman’s face buried on the man’s neck – a single form, like a carved emblem of passion, silent and unashamed.
And, stung by the sight, Soames hurried on deeper into the shadow of the trees.
In this search, who knows what he thought and what he sought? Bread for hunger – light in darkness? Who knows what he expected to find – impersonal knowledge of the human heart – the end of his private subterranean tragedy – for, again, who knew but that each dark couple, unnamed, unnameable, might not be he and she?
But it could not be such knowledge as this that he was seeking – the wife of Soames Forsyte sitting in the Park like a common wench! Such thoughts were inconceivable; and from tree to tree, with his noiseless step, he passed.
Once he was sworn at; once a whisper, ‘If only it could always be like this!’ sent the blood flying again from his heart, and he waited there, patient and dogged, for the two to move. But it was only a poor thin slip of a shopgirl in her draggled blouse that passed him, clinging to her lover’s arm.
A hundred other lovers too whispered that hope in the stillness of the trees, a hundred other lovers clung to each other.
But shaking himself with sudden disgust, Soames returned to the path, and left that seeking for he knew not what.
Chapter Three
MEETING AT THE BOTANICAL
YOUNG JOLYON, whose circumstances were not those of a Forsyte, found at times a difficulty in sparing the money needful for those country jaunts and researches into Nature, without having prosecuted which no watercolour artist ever puts brush to paper.
He was frequently, in fact, obliged to take his colour-box into the Botanical Gardens, and there, on his stool, in the shade of a monkey-puzzle or in the lee of some india-rubber plant, he would spend long hours sketching.
An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had delivered himself as follows:
‘In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of them certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see, they’re so scattered; you’ll never get the public to look at them. Now, if you’d taken a definite subject, such as “London by Night”, or “The Crystal Palace in the Spring”, and made a regular series, the public would have known at once what they were looking at. I can’t lay too much stress upon that. All the men who are making great names in Art, like Crum Stone or Bleeder, are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by specializing and putting their works all in the same pigeon-hole, so that the public know at once where to go. And this stands to reason, for if a man’s a collector he doesn’t want people to smell at the canvas to find out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say at once, “A capital Forsyte!” It is all the more important for you to be careful to choose a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since there’s no very marked originality in your style.’