The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(51)

‘But how perfectly Chinese! They do everything we don’t.’

‘Dad – Aubrey Greene. My father’s just brought me this picture, Aubrey – isn’t it a gem?’

The painter stood quite still, his eyes ceased sliding off, his hair ceased slipping back.

‘Phew!’ he said.

Soames rose. He had waited for the flippant; but he recognized in the tone something reverential, if not aghast.

‘By George,’ said Aubrey Greene, ‘those eyes! Where did you pick it up, sir?’

‘It belonged to a cousin of mine – a racing man. It was his only picture.’

‘Good for him! He must have had taste.’

Soames stared. The idea that George should have had taste almost appalled him.

‘No,’ he said, with a flash of inspiration: ‘What he liked about it was that it makes you feel uncomfortable.’

‘Same thing! I don’t know where I’ve seen a more pungent satire on human life.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Soames dryly.

‘Why, it’s a perfect allegory, sir! Eat the fruits of life, scatter the rinds, and get copped doing it. When they’re still, a monkey’s eyes are the human tragedy incarnate. Look at them! He thinks there’s something beyond, and he’s sad or angry because he can’t get at it. That picture ought to be in the British Museum, sir, with the label: “Civilization, caught out.” ’

‘Well, it won’t be,’ said Fleur. ‘It’ll be here, labelled “The White Monkey.”’

‘Same thing.’

‘Cynicism,’ said Soames abruptly, ‘gets you nowhere. If you’d said “Modernity caught out”–’

‘I do, sir; but why be narrow? You don’t seriously suppose this age is worse than any other?’

‘Don’t I?’ said Soames. ‘In my belief the world reached its highest point in the eighties, and will never reach it again.’

The painter stared.

‘That’s frightfully interesting. I wasn’t born, and I suppose you were about my age then, sir. You believed in God and drove in diligences.’

Diligences! The word awakened in Soames a memory which somehow seemed appropriate.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you a story of those days that you can’t match in these. When I was a youngster in Switzerland with my people, two of my sisters had some black cherries. When they’d eaten about half a dozen they discovered that they all had little maggots in them. An English climber there saw how upset they were, and ate the whole of the rest of the cherries – about two pounds – maggots, stones and all, just to show them. That was the sort of men they were then.’

‘Oh! Father!’

‘Gee! He must have been gone on them.’

‘No,’ said Soames, ‘not particularly. His name was Powley; he wore side-whiskers.’

‘Talking of God and diligences: I saw a hansom yesterday.’

‘More to the point if you’d seen God,’ thought Soames, but he did not say so; indeed, the thought surprised him, it was not the sort of thing he had ever seen himself.

‘You mayn’t know it, sir, but there’s more belief now than there was before the war – they’ve discovered that we’re not all body.’

‘Oh!’ said Fleur. ‘That reminds me, Aubrey. Do you know any mediums? Could I get one to come here? On our floor, with Michael outside the door, one would know there couldn’t be any hanky. Do the dark séance people ever go out? – they’re much more thrilling they say.’

‘Spiritualism!’ said Soames. ‘H’mph!’ He could not in half an hour have expressed himself more clearly.

Aubrey Greene’s eyes slid off to Ting-a-ling. ‘I’ll see what I can do, if you’ll lend me your Peke for an hour or so tomorrow afternoon. I’d bring him back on a lead, and give him every luxury.’

‘What do you want him for?’

‘Michael sent me a most topping little model today. But, you see, she can’t smile.’

‘Michael?’

‘Yes. Something quite new; and ‘I’ve got a scheme. Her smile’s like sunlight going off an Italian valley; but when you tell her to, she can’t. I thought your Peke could make her, perhaps.’

‘May I come and see?’ said Fleur.

‘Yes, bring him tomorrow; but, if I can persuade her, it’ll be in the “altogether”.’

‘Oh! Will you get me a séance, if I lend you Ting?’

‘I will.’

‘H’mph!’ said Soames again. Séances, Italian sunlight, the ‘altogether’! It was time he got back to Elderson, and what was to be done now, and left this fiddling while Rome burned.