The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(208)
7 Michael Has Qualms
8 Secret
9 Rencounter
10 After Lunch
11 Perambulation
12 Private Feelings
13 Soames in Waiting
PART TWO
1 Son of Sleeping Dove
2 Soames Goes Racing
3 The Two-year-olds
4 In the Meads
5 Measles
6 Forming a Committee
7 Two visits
8 The Jolly Accident
9 But – Jon!
10 That Thing and This Thing
11 Converting the Slums
12 Delicious Night
13 ‘Always!’
PART THREE
1 Soames Gives Advice
2 Occupying the Mind
3 Possessing the Soul
4 Talk in a Car
5 More Talk in a Car
6 Soames has Brain-waves
7 Tomorrow
8 Forbidden Fruit
9 Aftermath
10 Bitter Apple
11 ‘Great Forsyte’
12 Driving On
13 Fires
14 Hush
15 Soames Takes the Ferry
16 Full Close
TO
F. N. Doubleday
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest.
PART ONE
Chapter One
INITIATION OF THE CANTEEN
IN modern Society, one thing after another, this spice on that, ensures a kind of memoristic vacuum, and Fleur Mont’s passage of arms with Marjorie Ferrar was, by the spring of 1926, well-nigh forgotten. Moreover, she gave Society’s memory no encouragement, for after her tour round the world, she was interested in the Empire – a bent so out of fashion as to have all the flavour and excitement of novelty with a sort of impersonality guaranteed.
Colonials, Americans, and Indian students, people whom nobody could suspect of being lions, now encountered each other in the ‘bimetallic parlour’, and were found by Fleur ‘very interesting’, especially the Indian students, so supple and enigmatic, that she could never tell whether she were ‘using’ them or they were ‘using’ her.
Perceiving the extraordinary uphill nature of Foggartism, she had been looking for a second string to Michael’s Parliamentary bow, and, with her knowledge of India, where she had spent six weeks of her tour, she believed that she had found it in the idea of free entrance for the Indians into Kenya. In her talks with these Indian students, she learned that it was impossible to walk in a direction unless you knew what it was. These young men might be complicated and unpractical, meditative and secret, but at least they appeared to be convinced that the molecules in an organism mattered less than the organism itself – that they, in fact, mattered less than India. Fleur, it seemed, had encountered faith – a new and ‘intriguing’ experience. She mentioned the fact to Michael.
‘It’s all very well,’ he answered, ‘but our Indian friends didn’t live four years in the trenches, or the fear thereof, for the sake of their faith. If they had, they couldn’t possibly have the feeling that it matters as much as they think it does. They might want to, but their feelers would be blunted. That’s what the war really did to all of us in Europe who were in the war.’
‘That doesn’t make “faith” any less interesting,’ said Fleur, dryly.
‘Well, my dear, the prophets abuse us for being at loose ends, but can you have faith in a life force so darned extravagant that it makes mincemeat of you by the million? Take it from me, Victorian times fostered a lot of very cheap and easy faith, and our Indian friends are in the same case – their India has lain doggo since the Mutiny, and that was only a surface upheaval. So you needn’t take ’em too seriously.’
‘I don’t; but I like the way they believe they’re serving India.’
And at his smile she frowned, seeing that he thought she was only increasing her collection.
Her father-in-law, who had really made some study of Orientalism, lifted his eyebrow over these new acquaintances.
‘My oldest friend,’ he said, on the first of May, ‘is a judge in India. He’s been there forty years. When he’d been there two, he wrote to me that he was beginning to know something about the Indians. When he’d been there ten, he wrote that he knew all about them. I had a letter from him yesterday, and he says that after forty years he knows nothing about them. And they know as little about us. East and West – the circulation of the blood is different.’
‘Hasn’t forty years altered the circulation of your friend’s blood?’
‘Not a jot,’ replied Sir Lawrence. ‘It takes forty generations. Give me another cup of your nice Turkish coffee, my dear. What does Michael say about the general strike?’
‘That the Government won’t budge unless the T.U.C. with-draw the notice unreservedly.’
‘Exactly! And but for the circulation of English blood there’d be “a pretty mess”, as old Forsyte would say.’