The Forsyte Saga, Volume 3(132)

‘Can the leopard change its spots?’



It was the story of a young monk, secretly without faith, sent on a proselytizing expedition. Seized by infidels, and confronted with the choice between death or recantation, he recants and accepts the religion of his captors. The poem was seared with passages of such deep feeling that they hurt her. It had a depth and fervour which took her breath away; it was a paean in praise of contempt for convention faced with the stark reality of the joy in living, yet with a haunting moan of betrayal running through it. It swayed her this way and that; and she put it down with a feeling almost of reverence for one who could so express such a deep and tangled spiritual conflict. With that reverence were mingled a compassion for the stress he must have endured before he could have written this and a feeling, akin to that which mothers feel, of yearning to protect him from his disharmonies and violence.

They had arranged to meet the following day at the National Gallery, and she went there before time, taking the poems with her. He came on her in front of Gentile Bellini’s ‘Mathematician’. They stood for some time looking at it without a word.

‘Truth, quality, and decorative effect. Have you read my stuff?’

‘Yes. Come and sit down, I’ve got them here.’

They sat down, and she gave him the envelope.

‘Well?’ he said; and she saw his lips quivering.

‘Terribly good, I think.’

‘Really?’

‘Even truly. One, of course, is much the finest.’

‘Which?’

Dinny’s smile said: ‘You ask that?’

‘ “The Leopard”?’

‘Yes. It hurt me, here.’

‘Shall I throw it out?’

By intuition she realized that on her answer he would act, and said feebly: ‘You wouldn’t pay attention to what I said, would you?’

‘What you say shall go.’

‘Then of course you can’t throw it out. It’s the finest thing you’ve done.’

‘Inshallah!’

‘What made you doubt?’

‘It’s a naked thing.’

‘Yes,’ said Dinny, ‘naked – but beautiful. When a thing’s naked it must be beautiful.’

‘Hardly the fashionable belief.’

‘Surely a civilized being naturally covers deformities and sores. There’s nothing fine in being a savage that I can see, even in art.’

‘You run the risk of excommunication. Ugliness is a sacred cult now.’

‘Reaction from the chocolate box,’ murmured Dinny.

‘Ah! Whoever invented those lids sinned against the holy ghost – he offended the little ones.’

‘Artists are children, you mean?’

‘Well, aren’t they? or would they carry on as they do?’

‘Yes, they do seem to love toys. What gave you the idea for that poem?’ His face had again that look of deep waters stirred, as when Muskham had spoken to them under the Foch statue.

‘Tell you some day, perhaps. Shall we go on round?’

When they parted, he said: ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday. I shall be seeing you?’

‘If you will.’

‘What about the Zoo?’

‘No, not the Zoo. I hate cages.’

‘Quite right. The Dutch garden near Kensington Palace?’

‘Yes.’

And that made the fifth consecutive day of meeting.

For Dinny it was like a spell of good weather, when every night you go to sleep hoping it will last, and every morning wake up and rub your eyes seeing that it has.

Each day she responded to his: ‘Shall I see you tomorrow?’ with an ‘If you will’; each day she concealed from everybody with care whom she was seeing, and how, and when; and it all seemed to her so unlike herself that she would think: ‘Who is this young woman who goes out stealthily like this, and meets a young man, and comes back feeling as if she had been treading on air? Is it some kind of a long dream I’m having?’ Only, in dreams one didn’t eat cold chicken and drink tea.

The moment most illuminative of her state of mind was when Hubert and Jean walked into the hall at Mount Street, where they were to stay till after Clare’s wedding. This first sight for eighteen months of her beloved brother should surely have caused her to feel tremulous. But she greeted him steady as a rock, even to the power of cool appraisement. He seemed extremely well, brown, and less thin, but more commonplace. She tried to think that was because he was now safe and married and restored to soldiering, but she knew that comparison with Wilfrid had to do with it. She seemed to know suddenly that in Hubert there had never been capacity for any deep spiritual conflict; he was of the type she knew so well, seeing the trodden path and without real question following. Besides, Jean made all the difference! One could never again be to him, or he to her, as before his marriage. Jean was brilliantly alive and glowing. They had come the whole way from Khartoum to Croydon by air with four stops. Dinny was troubled by the inattention which underlay her seeming absorption in their account of life out there, till a mention of Darfur made her prick her ears. Darfur was where something had happened to Wilfrid. There were still followers of the Mahdi there, she gathered. The personality of Jerry Corven was discussed. Hubert was enthusiastic about ‘a job of work’ he had done. Jean filled out the gap. The wife of a Deputy Commissioner had gone off her head about him. It was said that Jerry Corven had behaved badly.