The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(316)
‘With all this modern taste the nation mayn’t want them; in that case I don’t know. Dumetrius might take them off your hands; he’s had a good deal out of most of them already. If you chose the right moment, clear of strikes and things, they ought to fetch money in a good sale. They stand me in at well over seventy thousand pounds – they ought to make a hundred thousand at least.’
She seemed to be listening, but he couldn’t tell.
‘In my belief,’ he went on desperately, ‘there’ll be none of this modern painting in ten years’ time – they can’t go on for ever juggling in the air. They’ll be sick of experiments by then, unless we have another war.’
‘It wasn’t the war.’
‘How d’you mean – not the war? The war brought in ugliness, and put everyone into a hurry. You don’t remember before the war.’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I won’t say,’ continued Soames, ‘that it hadn’t begun before. I remember the first shows in London of those post-impressionists and early Cubist chaps. But they ran riot with the war, catching at things they couldn’t get.’
He stopped. It was exactly what she –!
‘I think I’ll go to bed, Dad.’
‘Ah!’ said Soames. ‘And take some aspirin. Don’t you play about with a chill.’
A chill! If only it were! He himself went again to the open window and stood watching thee moonlight. From the staff’s quarters came the strain of a gramophone. How they loved to turn on that caterwauling, or the loud-speaker! He didn’t know which he disliked most.
Moving to the edge of the veranda, he held out his palm. No dew! Dry as ever – remarkable weather! A dog began howling from over the river. Some people would take that for a banshee, he shouldn’t wonder! The more he saw of people the more weak-minded they seemed; for ever looking for the sensational, or covering up their eyes and ears. The garden was looking pretty in the moonlight – pretty and unreal. That border of sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies and the late roses in the little round beds, and the low wall of very old brick – he’d had a lot of trouble to get that brick! – even the grass – the moonlight gave them all a stage-like quality. Only the poplars queered the dream-like values, dark and sharply outlined by the moon behind them. Soames moved out on to the lawn. The face of the house, white and creepered, with a light in her bedroom, looked unreal, too, and as if powdered. Thirty-two years he’d been here. One had got attached to the place, especially since he’d bought the land over the river, so that no one could ever build and overlook him. To be overlooked, body or soul – on on the whole he’d avoided that in life – at least, he hoped so.
He finished his cigar out there and threw the butt away. He would have liked to see her light go out before he went to bed –to feel that she was sleeping as when, a little thing, she went to bed with tooth-ache. But he was very tired. Motoring was hard on the liver. Well! He’d go in and shut up. After all, he couldn’t do any good by staying down, couldn’t do any good in any way. The old couldn’t help the young – nobody could help anyone, if it came to that, at least where the heart was concerned. Queer arrangement – the heart! And to think that everybody had one. There ought to be some comfort in that, and yet there wasn’t. No comfort to him, when he’d suffered, night in, day out, over that boy’s mother, that she had suffered, too! No satisfaction to Fleur now, that the young man and his wife, too, very likely, were suffering as well! And, closing the window, Soames went up. He listened at her door, but could hear nothing; and, having undressed, took up Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, and, propped against his pillows, began to read. Two pages of that book always sent him to sleep, and generally the same two, for he knew them so well that he never remembered where he had left off.
He was awakened presently by he couldn’t tell what, and lay listening. It seemed that there was movement in the house. But if he got up to see he would certainly begin to worry again, and he didn’t want to. Besides, in seeing to whether Fleur was asleep he might wake her up. Turning over, he dozed off, but again he woke, and lay drowsily thinking: ‘I’m not sleeping well – I want exercise.’ Moonlight was coming through the curtains not quite drawn. And, suddenly, his nostrils twitched. Surely a smell of burning! He sat up, sniffing. It was! Had there been a short circuit, or was the thatch of the pigeon-house on fire? Getting out of bed, he put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and went to the window.