The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(111)

‘I’ll bet you a box of cigars, Uncle Soames, that you don’t do that before we leave on Monday.’

‘I never bet,’ said Soames, ‘and I don’t smoke.’

‘Time you began both. Look here, we’ll spend tomorrow learning to knock the ball!’

‘Absurd!’ said Soames.

But in his room that night he had stood in his pyjamas swinging his arms in imitation of Jack Cardigan. The next day he sent the women out in the car with their lunch; he was not going to have them grinning at him. He had seldom spent more annoying hours than those which followed. They culminated in a moment when at last he hit the ball, and it fell into the river three yards from the near bank. 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 Coué’ – 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 private 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 Three



MICHAEL TAKES ‘A LUNAR’



MICHAEL had returned from Italy with the longing to ‘get on with it’, which results from Southern holidays. Countryman by up-bringing, 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 thinks, 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-beloved 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