The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(110)

‘I don’t know what she thinks I want with this great thing!’

‘To read it, Soames, I suppose.’

Soames sniffed, turning the pages.

‘I can’t tell what it’s all about.’

‘I will sell it at my bazaar, Soames. It will do for some good man who can read English.’

From that moment Soames began almost unconsciously to read the book. He found it a peculiar affair, which gave most people some good hard knocks. He began to enjoy them, especially the chapter deprecating the workman’s dislike of parting with his children at a reasonable age. Having never been outside Europe, he had a somewhat sketchy idea of places like South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; but this old fellow Foggart, it appeared, had been there, and knew what he was talking about. What he said about their development seemed quite sensible. Children who went out there put on weight at once, and became owners of property at an age when in England they were still delivering parcels, popping in and out of jobs, hanging about street corners, and qualifying for unemployment and Communism. Get them out of England! There was a startling attraction in the idea for one who was English to a degree. He was in favour, too, of what was said about growing food and making England safe in the air. And then, slowly, he turned against it. The fellow was too much of a Jeremiah altogether. He complained to Fleur that the book dealt with nothing but birds in the bush; it was unpractical. What did ‘Old Mont’ say?

‘He won’t read it; he says he knows Old Foggart.’

‘H’m!’ said Soames, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if there were something in it, then.’ That little-headed baronet was old-fashioned! ‘Anyway, it shows that Michael’s given up those Labour fellows.’

‘Michael says Foggartism will be Labour’s policy when they understand all it means.’

‘How’s that?’

‘He thinks it’s going to do them much more good than anybody else. He says one or two of their leaders are beginning to smell it out, and that the rest of the leaders are bound to follow in time.’

‘In that case,’ said Soames, ‘it’ll never go down with their rank and file.’ And for two minutes he sat in a sort of trance. Had he said something profound, or had he not?

Fleur’s presence at week-ends with the eleventh baronet was extremely agreeable to him. Though at first he had felt a sort of disappointment that his grandchild was not a girl – an eleventh baronet belonged too definitely to the Monts – he began, as the months wore on, to find him ‘an engaging little chap’, and, in any case, to have him down at Mapledurham kept him away from Lippinghall. It tried him at times, of course, to see how the women hung about the baby – there was something very excessive about motherhood. He had noticed it with Annette; he noticed it now with Fleur. French – perhaps! He had not remembered his own mother making such a fuss; indeed, he could not remember anything that happened when he was one. A week-end, when Madame Lamotte, Annette and Fleur were all hanging over his grandson, three generations of maternity concentrated on that pudgy morsel, reduced him to a punt, fishing for what he felt sure nobody would eat.

By the time he had finished Sir James Foggart’s book, the disagreeable summer of 1924 was over, and a more disagreeable September had set in. The mellow golden days that glow up out of a haze which stars with dewdrops every cobweb on a gate, simply did not come. It rained, and the river was so unnaturally full, that the newspapers were at first unnaturally empty – there was literally no news of drought; they filled up again slowly with reports of the wettest summer ‘for thirty years’. Calm, greenish with weed and tree shadow, the river flowed unendingly between Soames’s damp lawn and his damp meadows. There were no mushrooms. Blackberries tasted of rain. Soames made a point of eating one every year, and, by the flavour, could tell what sort of year it had been. There was a good deal of ‘old-man’s-beard’. In spite of all this, however, he was more cheerful than he had been for ages. Labour had been ‘in’, if not in real power, for months, and the heavens had only lowered. Forced by Labour-in-office to take some notice of politics, he would utter prophecies at the breakfast-table. They varied somewhat, according to the news; and, since he always forgot those which did not come true, he was constantly able to tell Annette that he had told her so. She took no interest, however, occupied, ‘like a woman, with her bazaars and jam-making, running about in the car, shopping in London, attending garden-parties’; and, in spite of her tendency to put on flesh, still remarkably handsome. Jack Cardigan, his niece Imogen’s husband, had made him a sixty-ninth-birthday present of a set of golf-clubs. This was more puzzling to Soames than anything that had ever happened to him. What on earth was he to do with them? Annette, with that French quickness which often annoyed him, suggested that he should use them. She was uncomfortable! At his age –! And then, one week-end in May the fellow himself had come down with Imogen and, teeing a ball up on half a molehill, had driven it across the river.