The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(126)

‘If I had my savings.’

‘Yes, Mrs Bergfeld told me about them. I can inquire but I’m afraid –’

‘It’s robbery.’ The chattered sound let Michael at once into the confidence of the many managers who had refused to employ him who uttered it.

‘I know,’ he said, soothingly, ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul. That clause in the Treaty was a bit of rank barbarism, of course, camouflage it as they like. Still, it’s no good to let it prey on your mind, is it?’

But his visitor had risen. ‘To take from civilian to pay civilian! Then why not take civilian life for civilian life? What is the difference? And England does it – the leading nation to respect the individual. It is abominable.’

Michael began to feel that he was overdoing it.

‘You forget,’ he said, ‘that the war made us all into barbarians, for the time being; we haven’t quite got over it yet. And your country dropped the spark into the powder magazine, you know. But what about this poultry stunt?’

Bergfeld seemed to make a violent effort to control himself.

‘For my wife’s sake,’ he said, ‘I will do anything; but unless I get my savings back, how can I start?’

‘I can’t promise; but perhaps I could start you. That hair-dresser below you wants an open-air job, too. What’s his name, by the way?’

‘Swain.’

‘How do you get on with him?’

‘He is an opinionated man, but we are good friends enough.’

Michael got off the table. ‘Well, leave it to me to think it out. We shall be able to do something, I hope;’ and he held out his hand.

Bergfeld took it silently, and his eyes resumed the expression with which they had first looked at Michael.

‘That man,’ thought Michael, ‘will be committing suicide some day, if he doesn’t look out.’ And he showed him to the door. He stood there some minutes gazing after the German actor’s vanishing form with a feeling as if the dusk were formed out of the dark stories of such as he and the hairdresser and the man who had whispered to him to stand and deliver a job. Well, Bart must lend him that bit of land beyond the coppice at Lippinghall. He would buy a war hut if there were any left and some poultry stock, and start a colony – the Bergfelds, the hairdresser, and Henry Boddick. They could cut the timber in the coppice, and put up the fowl-houses for themselves. It would be growing food – a practical experiment in Foggartism! Fleur would laugh at him. But was there anything one could do nowadays that somebody couldn’t laugh at? He turned back into the house. Fleur was in the hall.

‘Francis Wilmot has gone,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘He’s off to Paris.’

‘What was it he overheard last night?’

‘Do you suppose I asked?’

‘Well no,’ said Michael, humbly. ‘Let’s go up and look at Kit, it’s about his bath time.’

The eleventh baronet, indeed, was already in his bath.

‘All right, nurse,’ said Fleur, ‘I’ll finish him.’

‘He’s been in three minutes, ma’am.’

‘Lightly boiled,’ said Michael.

For one aged only fourteen months this naked infant had incredible vigour – from lips to feet he was all sound and motion. He seemed to lend a meaning to life. His vitality was absolute, not relative. His kicks and crows and splashings had the joy of a gnat’s dance, or a jackdaw’s gambols in the air. He gave thanks not for what he was about to receive, but for what he was receiving. White as a turtle-dove, with pink toes, darker in eyes and hair than he would be presently, he grabbed at the soap, at his mother, at the bath-towelling – he seemed only to need a tail. Michael watched him, musing. This manikin, born with all that he could possibly wish for wfrhin his reach – how were they to bring him up? Were they fit to bring him up, they who had been born – like all their generation in the richer classes – emancipated, to parents properly broken-in to worship the fetish – Liberty? Born to everything they wanted, so that they were at wits’ end to invent something they could not get; driven to restive searching by having their own way? The war had deprived one of one’s own way, but the war had overdone it, and left one grasping at licence. And for those, like Fleur, born a little late for the war, the tale of it had only lowered what respect they could have for anything. With veneration killed, and self-denial ‘off’, with atavism buried, sentiment derided, and the future in the air, hardly a wonder that modernity should be a dance of gnats, taking itself damned seriously! Such were the reflections of Michael, sitting there above the steam, and frowning at his progeny. Without faith was one fit to be a parent? Well, people were looking for faith again. Only they were bound to hatch the egg of it so hard that it would be addled long before it was a chicken. ‘Too self-conscious!’ he thought. ‘That’s our trouble?’