The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(55)

‘I don’t know,’ he thought, ‘I don’t know what I shall do when I see her – I simply don’t know.’ Steel-blue of the fallen evening, bare plane trees, wide river, frosty air! He turned towards home. He opened his front door, trembling, and trembling, went into the drawing-room.…

When Fleur had gone upstairs and left him with Ting-a-ling he didn’t know whether he believed her or not. If she had kept that other thing from him all this time, she could keep anything! Had she understood his words: ‘You must do as you like, that’s only fair’? He had said them almost mechanically, but they were reasonable. If she had never loved him, even a little, he had never had any right to expect anything; he had been all the time in the position of one to whom she was giving alms. Nothing compelled a person to go on giving alms. And nothing compelled one to go on taking them – except – the ache of want, the ache, the ache!

‘You little Djinn! You lucky little toad! Give me some of your complacency – you Chinese atom!’ Ting-a-ling turned up his boot-buttons. ‘When you have been civilized as long as I,’ they seemed to say: ‘In the meantime, scratch my chest.’

And scrattling in that yellow fur Michael thought: ‘Pull yourself together! Man at the South Pole with the first blizzard doesn’t sing “Want to go home! Want to go home!” – he sticks it. Come, get going!’ He placed Ting-a-ling on the floor, and made for his study. Here were manuscripts, of which the readers to Danby and Winter had already said: ‘No money in this, but a genuine piece of work meriting consideration.’ It was Michael’s business to give the consideration; Danby’s to turn the affair down with the words: ‘Write him (or her) a civil letter, say we were greatly interested, regret we do not see our way – hope to have the privilege of considering next effort, and so forth. What!’

He turned up his reading-lamp and pulled out a manuscript he had already begun.

‘No retreat, no retreat; they must conquer or the who have no retreat;

No retreat, no retreat; they must conquer or the who have no retreat!’

The black footmen’s refrain from Polly was all that happened in his mind. Dash it! He must read the thing! Somehow he finished the chapter. He remembered now. The manuscript was all about a man who, when he was a boy, had been so greatly impressed by the sight of a maidservant changing her clothes in a room over the way, that his married life was a continual struggle not to be unfaithful with his wife’s maids. They had just discovered his complex, and he was going to have it out. The rest of the manuscript no doubt would show how that was done. It went most conscientiously into all those precise bodily details which it was now so timorous and Victorian to leave out. Genuine piece of work, and waste of time to go on with it! Old Danby – Freud bored him stiff; and for once Michael did not mind old Danby being in the right. He put the thing back into the drawer. Seven o’clock! Tell Fleur what he had been told about that cousin? Why? Nothing could mend that! If only she were speaking the truth about Wilfrid! He went to the window – stars above, and stripes below, stripes of courtyard and back garden. ‘No retreat, no retreat; they must conquer or die who have no retreat!’

A voice said:

‘When will your father be up?’

Old Forsyte! Lord! Lord!

‘Tomorrow, I believe, sir. Come in! You don’t know my den, I think.’

‘No,’ said Soames. ‘Snug! Caricatures. You go in for them – poor stuff!’

‘But not modern, sir – a revived art.’

‘Queering your neighbours – I never cared for them. They only flourish when the world’s in a mess and people have given up looking straight before them.’

‘By Jove!’ said Michael; ‘that’s good. Won’t you sit down, sir?’

Soames sat down, crossing his knees in his accustomed manner. Slim, grey, close – a sealed book, neatly bound! What was his complex? Whatever it was, he had never had it out. One could not even imagine the operation.

‘I shan’t take away my Goya,’ he said very unexpectedly; ‘consider it Fleur’s. In fact, if I only knew you were interested in the future, I should make more provision. In my opinion death duties will be prohibitive in a few years’ time.’

Michael frowned. ‘I’d like you to know, sir, once for all, that what you do for Fleur, you do for Fleur. I can be Epicurus whenever I like – bread, and on feast days a little bit of cheese.’

Soames looked up with shrewdness in his glance. ‘I know that,’ he said, ‘I always knew it.’