The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(221)

And so Fleur was running that canteen! He would be seeing her! He would like to see her! Oh!, yes!





Chapter Six



SNUFF-BOX



IN the next room Val was saying to Holly:

‘Had a chap! knew at college to see me today. Wanted me to lend him money. I once did, when I was jolly hard up myself, and never got it back. He used to impress me frightfully – such an awfully good-looking, languid beggar. I thought him top notch as a “blood”. You should see him now!’

‘I did. I was coming in as he was going out; I wondered who he was. I never saw a more bitterly contemptuous expression on a face. Did you lend him money?’

‘Only a fiver.’

‘Well, don’t lend him any more.’

‘Hardly. D’you know what he’s done? Gone off with that Louis Quinze snuff-box of mother’s that’s worth about two hundred. There’s been nobody else in that room.’

‘Good heavens!’

‘Yes, it’s pretty thick. He had the reputation of being the fastest man up at the ‘Varsity in my time – in with the gambling set. Since I went out to the Boer war I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Isn’t your mother very annoyed, Val?’

‘She wants to prosecute – it belonged to my granddad. But how can we – a college pal! Besides, we shouldn’t get the box back.’

Holly ceased to brush her hair.

‘It’s rather a comfort to me – this,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘Why, everybody says the standard of honesty’s gone down. It’s nice to find someone belonging to our generation that had it even less.’

‘Rum comfort!’

‘Human nature doesn’t alter, Val. I believe in the younger generation. We don’t understand them – brought up in too settled times.’

‘That may be. My own dad wasn’t too particular. But what am I to do about this?’

‘Do you know his address?’

‘He said the Brummell Club would find him – pretty queer haunt, if I remember. To come to sneaking things like that! It’s upset me frightfully.’

Holly looked at him lying on his back in bed. Catching her eyes on him, he said:

‘But for you, old girl, I might have gone a holy mucker myself.’

‘Oh, no, Val! You’re too open-air. It’s the indoor people who go really wrong.’

Val grinned.

‘Something in that – the only exercise I ever saw that fellow take was in a punt. He used to bet like anything, but he didn’t know a horse from a hedgehog. Well, Mother must put up with it, I can’t do anything.’

Holly came up to his bed.

‘Turn over, and I’ll tuck you up.’

Getting into bed herself, she lay awake, thinking of the man who had gone a holy mucker, and the contempt on his face – lined, dark, well-featured, with prematurely greying hair, and prematurely faded rings round the irises of the eyes; of his clothes, too, so preternaturally preserved, and the worn, careful school tie. She felt she knew him. No moral sense, and ingrained contempt for those who had. Poor Val! He hadn’t so much moral sense that he need be despised for it! And yet –! With a good many risky male instincts, Val had been a loyal comrade all these years. If in philosophic reach or aesthetic taste he was not advanced, if he knew more of the horses than of poetry, was he any the worse? She sometimes thought he was the better. The horse didn’t change shape or colour every five years and start reviling its predecessor. The horse was a constant, kept you from going too fast, and had a nose to stroke – more than you could say of a poet. They had, indeed, only one thing in common – a liking for sugar. Since the publication of her novel Holly had become member of the 1930 Club. Fleur had put her up, and whenever she came to town, she studied modernity there. Modernity was nothing but speed I People who blamed it might as well blame telephone, wireless, flying machine, and quick lunch counter. Beneath that top-dressing of speed, modernity was old. Women had worn fewer clothes when Jane Austen began to write. Drawers – the historians said – were only nineteenth-century productions. And take modern talk I After South Africa the speed of it certainly took one’s wind away; but the thoughts expressed were much her own thoughts as a girl, cut into breathless lengths, by car and telephone bell. The modern courtships! They resulted in the same thing as under George the Second, but took longer to reach it, owing to the motor-cycle and the standing lunch. Take modern philosophy! People had no less real philosophy than Martin Tupper or Izaak Walton; only, unlike those celebrated ancients, they had no time to formulate it. As to a future life – modernity lived in hope, and not too much of that, as everyone had done, from immemorial time. In fact, as a novelist naturally would, Holly jumped to conclusions. Scratch – she thought – the best of modern youth, and you would find Charles James Fox and Perdita in golf sweaters! A steady sound retrieved her thoughts. Val was asleep. How long and dark his eyelashes still were, but his mouth was open!